Seeking to understand the character of colonial rule and violence, historians have regularly turned to George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, which describes the life of Ellis, a fictional white policeman in British Burma in the interwar period. In one often-cited passage from the novel, Ellis speaks to himself in a rage after the murder of a white man:
Why did we make these cursed kid-glove laws? Why did we take everything lying down? Just suppose this had happened in a German colony, before the War! The good old Germans! They knew how to treat the niggers. Reprisals! Rhinoceros hide whips! Raid their villages, kill their cattle, burn their crops, decimate them, blow them from the guns.Footnote 1
The passage is obviously ironic in that it shows a Briton lusting for the same sort of colonial brutality the British had customarily ascribed to the Germans. Ever since the German Kaiserreich had become a formal colonial power in the 1880s, a public discourse had arisen in Britain that contrasted the supposedly exceptional colonial brutality of the Germans with the reputed restraint of the British. As early as 1891, at the beginning of the British colonisation of MaShonaland in southern Africa, Lord Grey had urged Cecil Rhodes, the man behind the endeavour, to avoid ‘objectionable German methods’ in the new territory.Footnote 2 While stories of the exceptional brutality of German colonisers were often associated with flogging, they also pertained to German colonial wars, as during the German–Herero War.Footnote 3 Such views came much more prominently to the fore after the First World War, when they proved politically opportune to legitimise the takeover of German colonies by the victorious powers through the claim that the Germans had been unfit as colonisers. The famous ‘Blue Book’, published by the British Government in 1918, not only provided extensive documentation of atrocities committed against native populations under German colonial rule; it also sought to construct contrasting identities for ‘German’ and ‘British’.Footnote 4
Yet, there are further layers of irony in the passage from the novel, which Orwell’s readers, or even Orwell himself, were probably not aware of. The imagined ‘German’ scene might just as well have described British conduct in Ellis’s own colony of Burma before the Great War. One need only read British reports of the operations in the long aftermath of the Third Anglo–Burmese War (1886) or the account of a Dutch military observer who accompanied British troops there in 1887 to find mentions of reprisals that included raiding villages, burning homes, carrying off cattle and crops, and the flogging, or even ‘decimation’, of their populations.Footnote 5 Even more ironically, ‘blowing men from the guns’ as a punishment has never been attested for German colonialism, but it has been for British India, especially, as is well known, during the Indian Uprising of 1857.Footnote 6
Whether Orwell intended his readers to note the double irony or not, it seems the idea of colonial exceptionalism – that is, the notion that some imperial powers were inherently either more or less violent in their colonies – is something we have not yet shaken off. In 2021, the British historian William Dalrymple was still lamenting in a newspaper interview that ‘There’s a whole generation of people who are very happy to believe that the German empire was terrible, that the Belgians were awful and cut the hands of everyone, but somehow the British empire was different, that it was all about tea parties and smiley maharajahs and lawns with ladies in crinoline, and not at all about exploitation like all the other empires.’Footnote 7 Such national-exceptionalist thinking also leaves little space for considerable connections between different empires when it comes to colonial violence, connections that can be seen above already in the fact that a Dutch officer accompanied British troops in Burma. This book presents an argument against both exceptionalism and isolationism, with a temporal focus on the time ‘before the War’ – that is, roughly between 1890 and 1914.
Historiographically, this work engages with newer forms of colonial exceptionalism that have emerged in scholarship over the past decades. Most famously perhaps, this concerns German colonial violence. Since the early 2000s, the genocide committed by German soldiers in present-day Namibia at the beginning of the twentieth century has been the subject of increasing interest, which has brought forth a host of publications that have interpreted the events there as precursors to National Socialist racial policy, mass murder and destruction in Europe between 1939 and 1945. These arguments, often referred to as the ‘Windhoek to Auschwitz’, ‘colonial Sonderweg’ or ‘continuity’ thesis, have been advanced most forcefully by Jürgen Zimmerer.Footnote 8 Zimmerer not only squarely labelled the war against the Herero and Nama as genocide but also saw it as an expression of a specifically German development, linking racial segregation in German South West Africa (GSWA) to Nazi racial policy and the Herero and Nama genocide to the Holocaust.Footnote 9
Another, rather different, theory of German particularity that has proven influential in the literature has been Isabel Hull’s 2005 book Absolute Destruction. In this book, Hull sought to explain the genocidal outcome of the German colonial war against the Herero and Nama as the result of a specific ‘military culture’ in the Prussian-German army.Footnote 10 Although Hull at times states that the military culture she identifies prevailed more generally in Western armies at the time,Footnote 11 the overall argument still reads (and has generally been read) as another case of German exceptionalism.
This German feature has been mirrored and reinforced by the simultaneous existence of the historical myth of a special British ‘way of war’, supposedly marked by notable restraint, cultural sensitivity and ‘minimum force’. This theory of national particularity has been defended primarily by Thomas Mockaitis and Rod Thornton.Footnote 12 In these cases, favourable comparisons with supposedly more brutal fellow imperial powers often constitute an explicit or implicit part of the myth.Footnote 13 In the Dutch case as well, there has long been a tendency, albeit a less outspoken one, to assume that the Dutch military had not been quite as bad as the others.Footnote 14
Many of these theories of particularity, with the important exception of the one advanced mainly by Zimmerer, reveal another underlying problem: They have approached colonial wars primarily as a military problem, which has focused attention almost of necessity on two typical concerns – armies and doctrines. Both, certainly during the time period under consideration here, were understood to be national institutions. The corollary has been that the manner in which colonial wars were waged has frequently been assumed to be an outcome of such institutions. Military historians in particular have been keen to find some elaborate and formalised doctrine of war in the colonies specific to a particular state, or, if that could not be found, at least some national ‘way of war’, ‘military culture’, ‘school’ or ‘approach’. This goes not only for a German ‘military culture’ or a British doctrine of ‘minimum force’. There are numerous other examples such as a ‘Dutch approach’, a ‘French colonial school’ (that of Gallieni and Lyautey) and a ‘Portuguese Way of War’.Footnote 15 Colonial war has thus been presented as something fought largely along national lines.
The search for national military doctrines, however, has not been the only problem. National-exceptionalist myths have certainly also responded to the demands of the politics of national identity. That the violence of empire has for decades been, and continues to be, silenced or downplayed in historiography, in what has been characterised as an ‘empire whitewash’, cannot but be read as an attempt to preserve some of the lustre of the former empire and its positive connotations in national remembrance.Footnote 16 Silence on the brutality of empire reigned in all three former imperial metropoles after decolonisation, though arguably in Germany not primarily in order to preserve a positive image of empire (even if those tendencies were not absent either),Footnote 17 but rather because historiography was mainly occupied with the history of Nazism and the Holocaust. In Britain and in the Netherlands, a large-scale silence can be said to have persisted into the early 2000s, though occasionally punctuated by more critical voices.Footnote 18 This despite the fact that there has long existed a body of literature made up mostly of monograph case studies which has laid out the full extent of violence, not least in contributions written by the formerly colonised themselves.Footnote 19 For those imperial historians who actually chose to write on violence, one strategy for downplaying it was to portray it as somehow ‘restrained’, somehow ‘better’ than that committed by other empires, thus claiming an exceptional position for one’s own national group – as seen particularly in the British case. Thus, the propagation of notions of national doctrines or ‘ways of war’ should certainly also be seen in this context.
Luckily, there now exists a larger body of scholarship challenging these exceptionalist assumptions. The German colonial Sonderweg has met with convincing criticism.Footnote 20 Studies on colonies other than GSWA have been unable to find a uniquely German genocidal trait to its colonial warfare.Footnote 21 In the United Kingdom, research carried out in the first decade of this millennium on the crushing of the Mau Mau has done much to debunk the ‘minimum force’ argument.Footnote 22 Other scholars have done the same on a more general level or for other time periods.Footnote 23 Historians of the former British settler colonies such as Australia and South Africa have long been aware of the horrifying violence of British colonial wars, though these histories have somehow become detached from larger British imperial history.Footnote 24 Finally, in the Netherlands, Henk Schulte Nordholt’s assertion, in 2000, that the Dutch East Indies had been a ‘state of violence’ met with few objections in Dutch academia, and since 2014, following the rise of more sustained public attention to Dutch colonial violence during the Indonesian War of Independence, significant studies on the subject have appeared.Footnote 25
This book builds on that body of scholarship but also seeks to remedy one of its major shortcomings: The works just mentioned refute national exceptionality largely from within a national framework. They base their arguments on research covering one single empire. While they reject certain supposedly unique characteristics of that empire’s approach, that in itself cannot strictly be considered as saying anything about the comparability of that particular empire to the others. The national fragmentation of research on colonial violence thus remains largely in place. Most of these scholars are obviously not blind to the wider imperial context, but their remarks on the transimperiality of such violence are generally brief and mostly limited to the conclusion.Footnote 26 Where studies place the violence they describe within the larger imperial frame, they offer only a rudimentary empirical fleshing-out.Footnote 27 Mads Bomholt Nielsen has recently published a more detailed study on Britain, Germany and colonial violence in South West Africa, but its main focus is on British perceptions and actions vis-à-vis German violence.Footnote 28 Edited volumes that touch on several empires are often juxtapositions of individual studies that leave comparative observations largely to the reader, while comparative studies of settler colonialism have generally restricted themselves to comparing the British-descended settler colonies.Footnote 29
A ‘Western Way of War’ in the Colonies
The argument of this book, therefore, is, first, that we need to move away for good from the prevalent national exceptionalisms; and, second, that we need to do so within an explicitly transimperial framework. If we are to understand why levels of violence were extraordinarily high in all Western empires, the many theories about national ‘ways of war’ would seem to be the wrong place to look. In their place, this study posits a colonial way of war that was marked, across the different empires and both in theory and practice, more by commonality than divergence. This concept encompasses two main arguments: first, it positions extreme violence as an inherent part of this way of war, and thus a shared phenomenon among all Western colonial powers independently of national particularities; second, it holds that colonial ideology and racialised ideas explain an important part of this extreme violence.
In the following chapters, the existence of a colonial way of war is shown within a transimperial framework and on a broad empirical base. The book places three different empires at the centre of analysis through a selection of case studies, and by looking at both the practice and the theory of colonial warmaking. This is an important step in establishing the transimperial commonalities in colonial warfare. Anyone reading the different case studies reproduced at some length in Chapter 2 will not fail to notice the essential comparability in practices of violence across them. Yet, that alone is not sufficient. To note that all empires employed similar practices does not tell us everything. We must also attempt to explain why that was the case. Factors such as practices, organisational culture, local conditions and military strategy and tactics can provide a useful base of comparison among colonial wars, and they have figured prominently in some of the handbooks on the subject.Footnote 30 However, we need to conceptualise what constitutes comparability in colonial warfare across imperial borders through ideas as well. What, we should ask, was the body of knowledge informing such practices of violence?
Recent studies have hinted at the existence of a shared body of thought on colonial warfare,Footnote 31 and this book lays out the contents of this thought in more detail for the first time. It identifies precisely which aspects it was of the thinking, language and practice of the European practitioners of colonial violence that made them comparable. The answer lies in the intense processes of racial othering that marked nineteenth-century colonial conflict. These produced what were perceived as five ‘basic imperatives’ of colonial warfare: those of ‘moral effect’, of the offensive and ‘bold initiative’, of ‘force must be felt first’, of ‘punishment’ and of a high death toll (the ‘big bag’). It was these imperatives that played an important, though not an exclusive part in determining the extreme violence which marks all fin-de-siècle colonial wars.
Racialisation and racial othering are thus key in thinking about colonial warfare. Racialised views of the opponent were crucial in shaping a body of knowledge on how to conduct colonial warfare; the role of racism in such wars thus went far beyond a situational and individually variable influence in the shape of racist contempt and hatred experienced by individuals. I agree here with Kim Wagner that ‘What became known as “savage warfare” was not simply shaped by the tactical necessities of asymmetric fighting against irregular enemies but was based on deeply encoded assumptions concerning the inherent difference of local opponents.’Footnote 32 Racism was central to this definition of inherent difference. Even if a number of prominent treatments of colonial warfare tend to downplay its importance, with Dierk Walter claiming, for instance, that extreme violence was ‘overdetermined anyway’ by the structural logics of colonial conflict, our transimperial look at the thought behind the violence of colonial warfare will reinforce its significance.Footnote 33
This importance of racial thought is apparent in two recent strands of interpretation of colonial violence and warfare that have deeply influenced my thinking about the ideational content of the colonial way of war. The first strand, represented by scholars such as Kim Wagner, Gavin Rand, William Gallois, James Hevia and Elizabeth Kolsky, emphasises that such violence always had important communicative and performative aspects: The practitioners of colonial war employed certain modes of violence in order to convey and perform a certain message to what they generally thought of as the ‘native mind’.Footnote 34 While my approach differs somewhat from the aforementioned scholars, I share the belief that in committing such acts of violence the practitioners were very much concerned with the effect their violence would have on the ‘natives’ – however distorted their comprehension of that supposed ‘native mind’ was. As Wagner has noted, ‘It was precisely because of the perceived need for a culturally specific ‘translation’ of violence that colonial punishment and military campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were so demonstratively brutal.’Footnote 35 Such notions of ‘cultural warfare’ inform my understanding of the ‘basic imperatives’. Its colonial practitioners frequently viewed brutal violence as a way of exerting a particular effect on the ‘native mind’ and thus conveying a message that would supposedly be understood by their interlocutors.
‘Cultural warfare’ generally also found expression in the ‘spectacular atrocities’ that accompanied most colonial wars and were so clearly predicated on racial alterity. In Aceh, for instance, many in the colonial army believed that decapitating killed Acehnese had a particularly deterrent effect, as it would supposedly deny Muslims entry into heaven.Footnote 36 Other recurring atrocities of this type included the mutilation of enemy bodies, the public display or parading of severed body parts, or blithe posing next to the piles of bodies resulting from colonial massacres. (Cultural warfare was, however, not the only rationale for collecting body parts; it was, for instance, also pursued by Western scientists for the sake of an emerging ‘racial science’.Footnote 37) Atrocities of this sort, though not foremost in this book, are another central characteristic that distinguishes colonial violence, as several scholars have shown.Footnote 38 The desecration of the body of the racial Other, whether dead or alive, reflects with particular severity a view of the opponent as less than human, as an object of contempt and racial hatred.Footnote 39
A second influence on my analysis is the recent scholarship on ‘empire and anxiety’, which has demonstrated the extent to which the agents of empire were moved by feelings of anxiety, fear and panic. Contrary to common assumptions that empires represent power and domination, and to the very real fact that empires were generally capable of hitting out with massive force when in crisis, these studies point out that the imperial actors themselves frequently felt vulnerable and weak.Footnote 40 As I will show, many of the ‘basic imperatives’ I identify rest on these sensations and on the strategies adopted to camouflage them.
Initially, many of these specifically colonial, racialised notions might have had their origins to some degree in the structural constraints of warfare in certain overseas theatres. Undeniably, these theatres often presented structural conditions that were conducive to unhinged violence. One factor often mentioned in this context is the absence of a legal framework to restrain violence. In colonial wars, the two sides generally did not have mutually recognised legal norms, meaning such wars were fought in a space that was lawless from the start.Footnote 41 It must be said, however, that the decision to withhold legal protection from the colonial opponent was one informed by European racism, as was the quite deliberate step, very frequent in colonial conflict, to criminalise armed resistance as ‘rebellion’ or even ‘banditry’.Footnote 42 Colonial states also made frequent use of martial law or states of exception in order to suspend rights and protections accorded under regular legal provisions.Footnote 43 Another structural aspect worth mentioning here is extreme numerical asymmetry. As colonies were mostly run on a shoestring by the metropole, their armies were normally extremely small.Footnote 44 Thus, they were never able to build up a dense territorial presence and control. Overwhelming force and terror had to stand in for this inability. This principle also informed collective punishment and reprisal, two other mainstays of colonial war.Footnote 45 Another way that colonial armies tried to compensate for their numerical disadvantage was through the employment of superior technology. After 1850, European superiority in weaponry over colonial opponents became more and more overwhelming.Footnote 46 Rapid technological progress had made Western firearms and artillery extremely powerful and lethal and increased their capacity to inflict massive casualties from afar; often the power of such weaponry no longer bore any relation to the armament and defences possessed by the opponent. However, technological supremacy was not in all cases decisive, nor was it always even an advantage.Footnote 47 Nevertheless, technologies such as the Maxim machine gun often proved essential to colonial conquest. On the battlefield, it allowed horrendous casualties to be inflicted on the enemy for trifling losses of one’s own. This asymmetry in combat dead is another recurring feature of colonial warfare; even into the twentieth century: Europeans generally lost more men to disease than to combat in such conflicts.Footnote 48
The technological gap was one of the reasons why non-European combatants often resorted to guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla wars, however, have several inherently escalatory properties.Footnote 49 First, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants gets blurred in such conflicts. Guerrilla fighters generally do not wear uniforms and ‘blend’ into the population. In such cases, society as a whole tends to become the object of massive violence and terror, not only because it is (perceived to be) supporting the guerrilla forces but also because, in the absence of a regular enemy army, it often represents the only conceivable target. Assaults on villages and (occasionally) strongholds often came to represent the only instances where ‘battle’ could be joined by the colonial army. Taking place among the population, such assaults frequently resulted in massacres, often quite deliberately, as argued in Chapter 3.Footnote 50 Secondly, the raids and ambushes that were so typical of both guerrilla and also counter-guerrilla operations at times created situations where the taking of prisoners was impractical or close to impossible.Footnote 51 What is more, where an enemy is invisible most of the time and can always strike unexpectedly, those fighting the guerrilla enemy frequently operate in constant fear. Coupled with natural environments that are conducive to heightening the sense of anxiety, such as in jungle warfare, feelings of stress, helplessness, exhaustion and frustration are bound to follow and to make those involved prone not only to see an enemy in anyone they encounter but also to break out into acts of excessive brutality if a supposed enemy is finally captured.Footnote 52
In such situations that pushed towards uninhibited violence, certain racialised notions may initially have served a mainly legitimising function and as a means of camouflaging European impotence when confronted with diverging ways of warfare. However, the process of knowledge accumulation, constant rearticulation and finally codification meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, the legitimising and prescriptive functions of such notions had long grown so entangled that they had become inextricably linked and largely unquestioned assumptions among the practitioners of colonial warfare. Ideas of racial difference had sedimented into the very bedrock of what colonial warfare was believed to be. What once might have been post facto justifications of extreme violence now preceded the event: these ideas had become commonly accepted knowledge and co-determined how actors fought a colonial war right from the outset. A process of escalation was no longer needed; practitioners of colonial warfare generally knew, or at least thought they knew, how to fight such a war. The use of extreme violence had become linked not so much to the structural circumstances of the theatre of war but to the colonial opponent’s race.
Thus, by the fin de siècle, colonial warfare had been interpreted and couched in terms of racial difference for so long that it was the resulting racialised body of knowledge on how to conduct such wars, rather more than situational constraints, which dictated certain extremely violent practices. It was in racialised categories that one thought about the ‘native mind’, and thus also about the forms that colonial violence had to take. Colonial war and its specific levels of violence were a much more knowledge-based endeavour than is generally acknowledged, and if brutality was ‘overdetermined’ in it, to use Walter’s words, this was certainly due at least as much to this body of knowledge. Another important argument connected to the concept of the colonial way of war, therefore, is that these racialising processes were not only fundamental to how fin-de-siècle colonial warfare was conducted but also set it apart from warfare in non-colonial contexts.
A Transimperial History of Colonial Violence
In several aspects, this study is a comparative history of colonial warfare. However, it also goes much further. An argument that throws the underlying similarity between empires into relief cannot fail to ask about possible connections between these empires as well. For colonial warfare, and especially its extreme violence, a history of connections does not yet exist. Transimperial connections and learning processes in the colonial counter-insurgencies that took place after 1945 have been scrutinised by scholars.Footnote 53 For colonial warfare before 1914, however, the only substantive work done so far has been on the specific topic of concentration camps.Footnote 54
Writing a transimperial history of fin-de-siècle colonial warfare means asking what transfers occurred between empires. Originally conceived as a tool of transnational history, a history of transfers starts from the premise that cultures and societies are always profoundly shaped by mutual influences, exchanges, imitation, appropriation and hybridisation. Rather than merely comparing two units, a history of transfers studies precisely these processes of interaction. It is thus also better suited to enquiring after the origins of any commonalities found.Footnote 55
Studying the history of the connections, transfers and border crossings between different empires is still a relatively recent phenomenon, and has increasingly come to be referred to as transimperial history.Footnote 56 Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé were the first to attempt to define this field, seeing it as ‘first and foremost a methodological approach, one which always works within a multiperspective framework’. It seeks to overcome the dichotomous understanding of empires being either in competition or cooperation with each other, instead seeing the two processes as entangled rather than mutually exclusive.Footnote 57 Such an understanding opens a new empirical field, constituted by the interplay of competition, cooperation and connectivity. It is the identification of the density and variety of the connections between empires that transimperial history ought especially to pursue, thereby underscoring that European colonial expansion was a shared project.Footnote 58 It is on this basis that I here trace the manifold connections between empires in the field of colonial warfare, a field which I also understand as a shared European project.
As far as extreme violence in colonial warfare is concerned, one will not find transimperial cooperation and transfer as straightforward a given as it was in, say, tropical medicine.Footnote 59 Such a history must tackle a number of problems. To start with, extreme violence, unlike specific military doctrines, is a particularly difficult subject area in which to study transfers: first, because of the taboos and silences that have always clung to the topic; and, second, because this aspect of ‘small wars’ was generally not what their practitioners were most keen to learn about from others. This last, however, does not mean that reading or hearing about or witnessing such extreme violence could not influence these individuals and lead to transfers.
A second problem is that while the comparability of extreme colonial violence in discourse and forms across empires is clear in many cases, it is much more difficult to distinguish the extent to which this was the result of transfers of knowledge between actors and even between empires. One scholar holds that it was primarily ‘the similarity of circumstances, the military logic of the situation on the periphery’ which explains the observable consistency of colonial warfare.Footnote 60 Jonas Kreienbaum and Aidan Forth have pointed out in studying colonial concentration camps that it is frequently difficult to tell whether observable similarities are due to previous transfers or simply to comparable structural circumstances leading to similar approaches being adopted. They add to these structural similarities the basic commonalities in Western attitudes and assumptions about race, violence and forced labour, which could also lead to similar modes of reasoning being adopted in different empires. They believe, however, that these factors alone do not suffice as explanations; experience was also ‘shared amongst different empires in direct and conscious ways’.Footnote 61 This book develops this argument further and, crucially, extends it beyond the thematic focus on concentration camps alone.Footnote 62
As has generally been noted for transfers, these were rarely straightforward or inevitable. A certain degree of compatibility appears to have been necessary for them to take place. Where practitioners across empires shared roughly the same ‘basic imperatives’, mutual intelligibility was, however, often a given. In the words of Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan, ‘cross-imperial scrutiny shares recognition of the portability of practices and ideas’.Footnote 63 Although there were differences in degree, curiosity about the wars fought by other colonial powers and a willingness to learn from them can be discerned in all empires treated here. What stood behind this was not only the objective of improving how one waged ‘small wars’ but also the shared European aim of maintaining white superiority and colonial rule over indigenous peoples in colonial possessions.Footnote 64 And even if, in many cases, this did not discernibly lead to transfer, studying such mutual observation is instructive for another reason: It reveals that the practitioners of colonial war rarely saw anything conspicuous in the violence of other imperial powers.Footnote 65 They were regularly more in agreement with their fellow practitioners than with trends in their home societies. French and German officials and media might have regularly criticised the British use of expanding ‘dum-dum’ bullets in colonial war, but Adolf von Tiedemann, the German officer with his own colonial track record who accompanied the Anglo-Egyptian Army to Omdurman in 1898, readily defended their use.Footnote 66 Again, this gives the lie to any exceptionalist narratives. Most Europeans who had engaged in colonial violence themselves apparently did not notice any great difference between their own levels of violence and those in other empires; it was mainly the metropolitan public and, later, historiography that wanted to see such differences.
Knowledge Transfer and Transimperial Spaces
A history of the transfer of knowledge concerning colonial violence reveals four key points. The first is about the role of non-European actors in the transfer process. Although this book is not primarily about those actors, and the role they played often left fewer traces in the archival record than that played by Westerners, I offer some shorter but significant general observations on these individuals in Chapter 4, emphasising the fact that, generally speaking, there was no neat delimitation between precolonial, supposedly ‘native’ modes of waging war and colonial ones.
The second is that it has human actors and their mobility at its centre and not, as in so many transimperial histories, written publications, conferences and formal exchanges – all of which played only a subordinate role in comparison with knowledge transfer via informal human-to-human contact. It was knowledge acquired through personal, practical experience (or at least by drawing on that of peers) that was central to the practice of colonial warmaking.
The emphasis on human actors also reveals something else. Better than any other perspective, it brings to light that colonies were often highly transnational arenas.Footnote 67 Especially in settler colonies, but also beyond, many colonists did not hail from the country that claimed to rule the colony in question, and this was generally also reflected in the make-up of the forces fighting colonial wars. This fact alone often makes the description of colonial violence as specifically ‘British’, ‘German’ or ‘Dutch’ appear misguided – given that not only the knowledge guiding colonial war but also its manpower was frequently transnational or transimperial.
Third, most of the action took place not in exchanges between metropole and colony, but rather in colony-to-colony movement. This dovetails with some of the newer approaches in imperial history. This kind of movement could also regularly pass into the transimperial, as shown for instance in the manifold links between Rhodesia and the Boer Republics.
Finally, a history of transfers points to knowledge exchanges of differing intensity. Though a global process, the imperial mobility on which much of the transferring depended was certainly much more frequent in the British Empire than in the German or Dutch, and some colonies (like Rhodesia) were decidedly more transimperial than others. Even within empires, intensities differed enormously; I identify here several ‘frontier regions’ within which most of the mobility of knowledge on colonial violence took place.
It may already be apparent that such a history will be one of ‘scale shifts’ (Jacques Revel), of interactions between different, mutually constitutive scales.Footnote 68 It is precisely through such an interplay of scales that ‘global historians are able to negotiate various levels of social practice, and to address global interactions without having to treat the whole world as their unit of analysis’, thus enabling us to write a history of what was arguably a ‘global phenomenon’.Footnote 69 Finally, I concur with Simon Potter and Jonathan Saha’s point about the need to acknowledge the ‘varied experiences of particular regions within different empires and within different colonies’, in our case particularly the importance of the aforementioned ‘frontier regions’.Footnote 70 There were always different levels on which information moved – the local, the regional, the intra-imperial and the transimperial – and there was always interplay between them.
What connected different scales was mobility – the mobility of information, in most cases carried in the experiences and memories of individuals. Mobility was higher in the nineteenth century than ever before and was a key feature of the making of the ‘modern’ world.Footnote 71 As such, movement was constitutive for empires as well; Stoler and McGranahan characterise imperial formations as ‘polities of dislocation, dependent on refiguring spaces and populations, … on a redistribution of peoples and resources in territories’.Footnote 72 Rather than territorially, Doreen Massey has even defined imperial space as ‘the sphere of a multiplicity of trajectories’.Footnote 73
Focusing on colonial warfare and the mobility of its actors forces us to rethink the image we have of this ‘multiplicity of trajectories’. Imperial historians have come up with a number of metaphors to picture imperial movements. Tony Ballantyne has conceived of them as a web, with horizontal filaments between colonies as well as vertical ones between metropole and colony. This model overcomes the old conception of an empire with a metropole as a central ‘hub’ connected to the different colonies.Footnote 74 The web-like shape, if extended and thought of transimperially, would also be suitable for our purposes. But how should we envision the different filaments of the web? Virtually all scholars in the field speak of them as ‘networks‘, but, given the ubiquity of the term, the lack of systematic reflection on what constitutes a network is striking.Footnote 75 It is clear, however, that many understand them as connections between people through which information, ideas and goods were exchanged; in other words, a regular ‘back and forth’ (notwithstanding the probable imbalances in such relations).Footnote 76 The equally widespread notions of ‘circulation’ or ‘circuits’ have a comparable thrust in that in their original meaning they refer to circular movement, within a closed system.Footnote 77 But both images seem ill-suited for describing the transfer of knowledge on colonial warfare, which occurred mainly through its practitioners moving from one theatre of war to the next – more of an ongoing forward movement than a regular back and forth.
I therefore prefer to speak here of routes of violence. The pun on ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ (following James Clifford) is intended to underline that colonial violence, rather than solely the product of local circumstances, often had roots in experiences of such violence elsewhere.Footnote 78 As the practitioners of colonial warfare moved along these routes (which regularly led them from one colonial frontier to the next), knowledge was transferred between different colonial contexts but also from person to person, generally in oral conversation.Footnote 79
I understand these routes of violence as equally forming part of the ‘webs of empire’ identified by Ballantyne. Rather than a simple flow of knowledge between colony and metropole, there were many nodes in the imperial web in which knowledge was drawn together and from which it could be further diffused. Such nodal points could be central in some respects and peripheral in others.Footnote 80 This connects to the particularly decentred viewpoint that has been identified as another characteristic of transimperial history: Such a history does not approach the relations between colonial empires exclusively (or even primarily) from the point of view of the respective metropoles.Footnote 81 This is especially pertinent to expertise in colonial campaigning, which frequently took place in (frontier) zones that were (still) considered peripheral to the wider colonial world. Aceh, for instance, was peripheral to the Dutch East Indies in most aspects but absolutely central for the making of the Dutch experience of colonial warfare and its later diffusion to other parts of the archipelago. In South Africa, it was not cities such as Cape Town – which, for most purposes, would have constituted an important node in the imperial web – but rather the shifting frontier zones of the Eastern Cape, Basutoland and Zululand, and the Boer Republics which formed nodal points when it came to drawing together and then re-diffusing the knowledge we are concerned with here. The routes of violence, therefore, mostly connected colony with colony, sometimes crossing the borders of empires. Though most of the publications on colonial warfare appeared in the metropole, the most important transfers had already taken place before, when their authors and their colleagues moved from one imperial setting to another.
A Knowledge Reservoir
This book also connects to recent attempts to conceptualise colonial reservoirs of knowledge.Footnote 82 After all, to be able to move, knowledge also needs storage sites. More than a decade ago, Gerwarth and Malinowski spoke, in the context of colonial violence and war, of a shared ‘colonial archive’ of ‘common knowledge on the treatment, exploitation, and extermination of “sub-humans” accumulated by the Western powers over the course of colonial history’. They did not, however, elaborate on its form and workings.Footnote 83 Later, Christoph Kamissek and Jonas Kreienbaum developed the idea of a colonial reservoir of knowledge further in the shape of the ‘imperial cloud’, which, deliberately playing on associations with the digital ‘cloud’, the authors defined as ‘a shared reservoir of knowledge, which was not bound to a single empire, but had a multi-local existence and was accessible to agents of different empires, both from the peripheries and the metropoles’. The ‘imperial cloud’ was explicitly transimperial, and access to it was not under the control of one single empire, although power relations were certainly at work determining who could access it and, particularly, who could contribute to it.Footnote 84
Fundamentally, the imperial cloud concept accounts for the ‘often unplanned and unsystematic spread of imperial knowledge and the constant transformation it underwent’. It also acknowledges that imperial knowledge transfers are in many cases undetectable or untraceable by historians, and that actors regularly stayed silent on these processes.Footnote 85 These aspects are vital to keep in mind when studying how knowledge of colonial violence moved. Knowledge gathering on this subject occurred frequently with reference to other empires, and the carriers of this knowledge were often highly mobile. The exact spread of influence and lines of transmission between sender and recipient are, however, rarely clear.
Nevertheless, we can at times go beyond the imperial cloud and tease out some of these lines. The body of knowledge that made up the imperial cloud was stored in many different media, as Kamissek and Kreienbaum note: ‘in the myriads of manuals and reports, articles, travelogues and pictures, which were accessible to all empires and, of course, also to the heads of people’.Footnote 86 Printed material such as manuals and articles certainly stored knowledge on colonial warfare and its violence. However, by considering the ‘heads of people’ as a storage medium and not merely as consumers of knowledge, one can sometimes disinter those lines of transmission that otherwise might have remained concealed. In fact, I argue that the ‘heads of people’ who moved within and between empires were far and away the most important medium of storage and transfer.
Violence
This book is preoccupied mainly with ‘extreme’ or ‘transgressive’ violence. What exactly constitutes extreme or transgressive violence (and what not) is difficult to define. Certainly, there are no objective criteria. Definition is always a question of moral norms, and such classifications also vary depending on the time period and (sub)culture. So, when this book focuses on specific forms of violence, it is also informed by the concerns of the time and place in which the author currently belongs. However, some of the origins of these current norms are in fact to be found in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ever since the ravages of the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there had been attempts on the European continent to adopt shared customs that sought to limit and regulate the conduct of war. That warfare in these centuries increasingly took the form of ‘cabinet wars’ facilitated the observation of these customs of war, though it would be wrong to think that these wars did not inflict considerable suffering on civilians.Footnote 87 With the Enlightenment and the rise of the middle classes, humanising war also became part of the bourgeois project of transforming society. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this led to the foundation of such organisations as the Red Cross in 1864; it also prompted attempts to codify into international law the already existing European customs of war, which at the time were believed to rest on such principles as (the Christian) religion, military ‘honour’, ‘civilisation’, ‘humanity’ and ‘morality’. These attempts found some recognition with the Geneva (1864) and The Hague (1899/1907) Conventions on the laws of war, signed by all major Western powers.Footnote 88 Even though these treaties still allowed the belligerent parties remarkable latitude in their employment of force, and limitations were far from undisputed, they were significant in that they created knowledge about illegitimate violence.Footnote 89 The observation of such limitations in a war against fellow Europeans was also considered a hallmark of ‘being civilised’.Footnote 90
Thus, most actors involved in colonial warfare at the end of the nineteenth century and beyond had a certain sense of what forms of violence were to be considered transgressive.Footnote 91 For example, no one among them felt the need for special justification or differentiation when it came to conducting a regular firefight, even though that, obviously, is also a form of violence. Yet, they were aware that other modes of violence that occurred in colonial warfare did indeed transgress the norms of European warfare. Take, for instance, the following two comments on the conduct of colonial war, one by Charles Callwell, author of the most famous British treatise on the subject, and one by Lothar von Trotha, commander in GSWA 1904–1905 and architect of the genocide there. Callwell, in his definition of colonial or ‘small’ wars,Footnote 92 noted that one of the main points of difference from ‘regular wars’ was that in the former ‘operations are sometimes limited to committing havoc which the laws of regular warfare do not sanction’.Footnote 93 Trotha, in a 1909 newspaper article defending his course of action in GSWA, wrote laconically: ‘That a war in Africa cannot be waged exclusively according to the Geneva Conventions, is self-evident.’Footnote 94 These comments are highly telling. Both display a clear awareness that colonial warfare incorporated certain forms of violence that clearly violated the laws or conventions of European warfare, but to both men it was equally self-evident that such acts of violence were legitimate in colonial wars. This was an opinion widely shared in the West at the time, which even found clear expression in the very laws of war that were being codified in these decades: Those laws explicitly stated that their provisions were not applicable in wars against ‘uncivilised nations’.Footnote 95
This is the decisive point and the one that historians of colonial violence have to analyse and explain. It is for this reason that my definition of ‘extreme’ or ‘transgressive’ violence focuses on those forms of violence that were already considered as such by contemporary European actors. The two terms are used for want of a better one. It is important to realise at all times that the use of these adjectives does not in any way downplay other forms of violence that occurred. Nor does it suggest that, being ‘extreme’, such violence must have been the exception; rather, it was the colonial norm.
Indeed, as will be evident at many points in this book, colonial wars generally inflicted massive, devastating and gruesome violence on non-European populations. White troops or settler militias, or white officers in conjunction with the African or Asian soldiers they commanded, would virtually as a rule engage in a great number of violent practices that were forbidden or increasingly censured by the customs or laws of war. They destroyed villages, stores and fields, generally with the intention of creating starvation. They abducted women and children and killed male prisoners. In other instances they even refused to take prisoners, or used the firepower of their weapons to perpetrate massacres that went far beyond anything supposedly needed to ‘break the enemy’s will’. These massacres could extend to civilian populations irrespective of age and sex. The bodies of the killed could also suffer further violence, being subjected to mutilation, decapitation or other forms of desecration. In the most extreme case, killings could even become exterminatory. It is with the European perpetrators of these forms of extreme violence that were already at the time considered by Europeans to be transgressive or extreme when employed in warfare among Western nations that this book is primarily concerned.
The emphasis on the brutality of colonial wars does not mean to imply that brutality was absent in the European wars of the time. In the long nineteenth century, the West still witnessed a number of devastating and brutal conflicts. The brutality of the guerrilla conflicts of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which heralded the nineteenth century, was often horrific. Between 1793 and 1796, in the Vendée region of France, a largely Catholic-royalist peasant uprising against the French revolutionary state was marked by the extreme reaction of the revolutionary troops, with General Turreau’s 1794 campaign of systematically rounding up villages and killing all inhabitants irrespective of age and sex likely to amount to genocide in modern terms.Footnote 96 Large parts of the Vendée were also laid waste. None of this, however, subdued the revolt. The conflict only ended with the more moderate policy pursued by General Hoche, who ended the indiscriminate killing and destruction, allowed refugees to return, offered a number of concessions and amnesties, and focused military operations solely on the armed bands, who were isolated and hunted down through a line of fixed posts and mobile detachments that covered the territory.Footnote 97
More than a decade later, occupation by Napoleonic troops also set off various vicious guerrilla wars, the largest in Spain, but also occurring in Calabria and Tyrol. They were marked by the summary execution of captured supposed guerrillas, reprisals against the population, and increasing control over locals and their food supply; the French managed to suppress resistance in Calabria and Tyrol by these means but failed to do so in Spain.Footnote 98 In Europe, these conflicts later became known as deterrent examples of bloody ‘people’s wars’, though the more conciliatory policy of Hoche in the Vendée also remained in memory, as shown in Chapter 3. After 1815, however, Western Europe was largely spared such brutal warfare for almost a century (it was different in South-Eastern Europe). The large-scale wars involving Western powers that did occur, the Crimean War and the Italian and German wars of unification, were still highly costly in terms of lives lost, but the laws of war were largely observed. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), prisoners of war were generally treated well, and German reprisals were often monetary in nature.Footnote 99 Nevertheless, when the French government called for popular mobilisation against the German invaders and the latter saw themselves confronted with instances of irregular warfare, their reaction was more brutal at times. Houses (whole villages were rare) could be burnt as reprisal, and hostages were sometimes taken to be ensure the payment of fines or safety of German troops. While the latter was still permitted by the laws of war, the Germans also placed hostages on train transports, which violated those laws. Captured irregulars could be executed on the spot, even if this was relatively rare (despite the sometimes gruesome rhetoric of the German High Command).Footnote 100 What remained after the war in German military consciousness, however, was a legacy of exaggerated fear of the irregular French Franc-tireurs.Footnote 101
In the West, it was outside the European continent that the most brutal war in this age was fought, the American Civil War. While initially largely fought by conventional means, the war witnessed brutal guerrilla conflict in the more peripheral theatres, even if a number of limitations often continued to be observed among the partisans, not least because both sides generally shared a common racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural heritage.Footnote 102 Union policy vis-à-vis civilians in occupied territories shifted from a highly ‘conciliatory’ phase (based on the premise that the local population could be won over) to a harsher ‘pragmatic’ one and, in the last two years of the war, to a ‘hard war’ one.Footnote 103 In the latter phase, the regular army conducted a number of campaigns of massive destruction of property in order to destroy the economic base of the enemy war effort, most famously in General Sherman’s ‘March to the sea’ through Georgia and General Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign. Despite the suffering they inflicted, these campaigns still showed clear limits and were primarily aimed at destroying surplus production for an enemy army, not the sustenance of the local population, as newer studies argue.Footnote 104
The massive destruction of property by a regular army also marked the later phase of a more ambiguously ‘European’ war of the fin de siècle: the South African War of 1899–1902. It has been argued that this war stands somewhere between a regular European and a colonial war.Footnote 105 It took place in a colonial realm and was part of the British drive for imperial domination of the whole of South Africa. And it witnessed practices that during the nineteenth century were mostly reserved for colonial wars. Though initially fought as a conventional war and even glorified as a ‘gentlemen’s’ or ‘white men’s war’, the Boers’ turn to guerrilla war after their conventional defeat in the field changed this. The British gradually escalated their reaction to Boer irregular warfare towards a policy of ‘clearing the veld’, destroying the means of livelihood and dwellings in the countryside and interning Afrikaner women and children in concentration camps. British neglect of these camps led to shocking mortality and suffering: more than 20,000 civilians died there.Footnote 106 With the war dragging on, racial othering of the Boers also became ever stronger. Drawing on a simultaneously existing tradition of a century of British denigration of the Boers, the latter were portrayed as ‘semi-civilised’, ‘degenerated’, or ‘half-caste’.Footnote 107
This was not successful in all sectors of British society. News of the suffering in the concentration camps still sparked outrage in the metropole and generated a humanitarian campaign that eventually managed to pressure the British Army into improving the internment conditions. This dramatically reduced mortality.Footnote 108 However, there was never a comparable campaign for the 120,000 Black Africans equally interned by the British.Footnote 109 In the end, as Simon Popple argues, the real ‘other’ always remained the South African native population.Footnote 110
The violence of the European wars of the long nineteenth century is bracketed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the ‘German atrocities’, the massacres of the first weeks of the war in Belgium and northern France, which killed an estimated 6,500 civilians. The reasons and extent of this outburst of violence within an otherwise conventionally fought war remain disputed. According to the most authoritative account, however, the massacres perpetrated in this period should be understood as an event of collective self-delusion or ‘Great Fear’ in the German Army for a number of weeks, brought about by the fear of a large-scale Franc-tireur war and the enormous pressure to advance rapidly in the west in order to stick to the timetables of the invasion plans.Footnote 111
Brutal violence was thus certainly not absent in European wars of the period under consideration here. And yet, as has already been indicated several times, it is the argument of this book that important differences remained. Violence in colonial wars frequently took distinctive forms; these were more readily considered self-evident and occurred more frequently than in European conflicts. Racial otherness was accepted as a given in colonial conflict, while for white opponents it generally had to be constructed.Footnote 112 Furthermore, the justifications given for extreme violence could also be very different. Therefore, some of the cases described above, such as the war in the Vendée and the devastation wrought in the American Civil War and the South African War, will still be touched on in later chapters, and some differences drawn out there in more detail.
It should be clear from this introduction that the focus of this book is decidedly on physical violence, directed against humans and objects. This is not to deny that colonialism entailed multiple significant non-physical forms of violence. Physical violence, however, was the most immediate way harm was inflicted on indigenous populations and attempts were made to curtail or extinguish their independence. Even in mature colonial states, it always remained an inherent part of rule, as many studies have shown.Footnote 113 Importantly, physical violence was a mode of violence that was recognised, reflected upon, and discussed by contemporaries, allowing historians to trace contemporary thinking on the subject, as this work sets out to do too.
While extreme physical violence is thus at the centre of this work, not all its forms will feature here to an equal degree. Colonial violence, as Benjamin Brower has noted, had a ‘multiple logic’, and not all of its logics can be explored to the same extent here.Footnote 114 As I place knowledge on extreme violence at the centre of this study, it is obvious that the focus is on those logics and forms of violence that also figured in knowledge production. Consequently, the above-mentioned ‘spectacular atrocities’ of colonial war play only a minor role, as does violence born of more individual psychological motivations, like feelings of fear, hate, frustration, vengefulness, physical suffering, or simply because soldiers thought such violence ‘fun’.Footnote 115 For the same reason, sexual violence is underrepresented – this is a topic of which fin-de-siècle sources rarely speak and of which we still know little.Footnote 116 Even so, the different case studies still touch on all these phenomena. Nor can these forms of violence be seen as separate from the body of knowledge on colonial warfare and the way it rested on racialised conceptions of difference, something which is borne out, for instance, by my discussion of revenge in the context of colonial violence.
Knowledge
This book conceives of the shared thought about the aims and forms of extreme violence in colonial warfare as a ‘body of knowledge’. This brings together two closely interlinked aspects. The first centres on the ‘basic imperatives’ and mainly concerns knowledge of what colonial warfare ought to do in the view of its practitioners, and why heavy violence was held to be central to these objectives. This part builds directly on the larger imperial discourse of the time and the ways it structured perceived racial otherness. The second concerns the different forms of extreme violence that were typical in colonial warfare, including ‘practical’ knowledge as to their execution. Although the first aspect can be considered in part a discourse in the Foucauldian sense, I consciously chose not to define it as such, as doing so would omit the other aspects mentioned earlier. It would, furthermore, lose sight of the accumulation of knowledge over time, something that also interests me here.
Knowledge is, first, a resource in various social, economic and political contexts, in which it is perceived as a way to cope with challenges or problems.Footnote 117 It is, second, a form of communicative action, with the movement of knowledge as a constitutive feature.Footnote 118 Colonial knowledge has several specific, additional characteristics. First, colonisers understood knowledge(-gathering) as an instrument of more effective colonial rule. As their knowledge of indigenous societies was, however, always incomplete at best, this led to regular ‘information panics’ (C. A. Bayly).Footnote 119 In fact, structural anxieties themselves were baked into colonial knowledge, regardless of the amount of information available.Footnote 120 Second, the multidirectional, networked and dispersed character of colonial knowledge production has been stressed.Footnote 121 Knowledge was often co-produced on the colonial frontiers by indigenous actors or specific middlemen. This gave colonial knowledge special forms: ‘hybridity’, ‘interpenetration’ and ‘syncretism’ are keywords here.
Accordingly, knowledge of colonial warfare was not carried straight from Europe to the colonies; it arose rather in local processes of interaction and transfer, even though the later European interpretation of these events through the lens of racial ideology (which itself was also a product of multidirectional transfers) was extremely important.Footnote 122 The resulting knowledge was then often carried, as mentioned before, from one colonial setting to the next. Though modified at every step, it was also through this last process that a somewhat more unified body of knowledge on the making of colonial war emerged.
When it comes to the exact relationship between knowledge and colonial warfare, three types of knowledge should be distinguished.Footnote 123 One is facilitative knowledge – knowledge that served to facilitate the application of colonial violence rather than knowledge of that violence itself.Footnote 124 In most cases, this concerned information about indigenous opponents or their lands – what in the military would generally be called ‘intelligence’.Footnote 125 A second category of knowledge concerns the acquisition of cultural knowledge about the Other so that this knowledge can be weaponised, as when colonisers employed specific forms of punishment or violence that they thought would have a particularly terrorising effect in view of the cultural perception of the victims.Footnote 126 A third category, finally, concerns knowledge of the violence itself that is being practised on the basis of other forms of colonial knowledge. This includes information about its aims (what it is considered imperative that such violence should do), about concrete forms of violence and finally practical or even technical knowledge relating to its execution.Footnote 127
It is with the second and especially the third categories that I am concerned. As I describe in the next chapter, this body of knowledge was obviously not of a kind comparable to the scientific information much of the history of colonial knowledge is concerned with. Though sometimes remarkably frank, it was just as often interspersed with euphemisms, silences and taboos, especially when written down. This is one reason why it largely remained a knowledge carried and transferred by people and their oral exchanges. So, in the end, this work is primarily concerned with those who committed the violence rather than discourse or debate in the metropole. Here, Paul Bijl is right in his claim that what was self-evident in the circle of military practitioners could become contested in other social frames.Footnote 128
Sources
This book rests on a double source base. First, it uses as case studies five large-scale colonial wars that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century: the Ndebele–Shona War in Rhodesia 1896–1897, the so-called Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone 1898, the Herero and Nama War in GSWA 1904–1908, the Maji Maji War in German East Africa (GEA) 1905–1907, and finally the Aceh War in the Netherlands East Indies. The latter started in 1873 but its end date is contested, though often placed around 1914. The accounts given of these wars are based on a critical reading of official sources, diaries, letters, published memoirs and secondary literature. All these cases are representative of the same specific phase in European colonial expansion and share many characteristics, even if one certainly could also have chosen others. For the purposes of this book, it makes a lot of sense to include first two larger empires (British and German), which have often been seen as contrasts, and then the supposedly ‘small’ Dutch Empire, which generally did not even consider itself an empire and has frequently been ignored by imperial history.Footnote 129
My second source base consists of a corpus of manuals of colonial warfare, published in the above-mentioned empires between 1859 and 1920, though mostly in the 1890s and 1900s. As a corpus, manuals of colonial warfare have rarely been the object of historical research. Scholars writing on colonial warfare in the fin de siècle have so far focused almost exclusively on Charles Callwell’s manual Small Wars (first edition 1896; further editions 1899 and 1906).Footnote 130 Small Wars was certainly the most widely read and systematic manual of the time. As such, the book also features prominently in this study. However, Callwell’s publication was only one in a longer sequence of earlier and later manuals on the same topic to appear in this age – a sequence that was not confined to Britain, and which this study explores in its near entirety for the British, German and Dutch cases.Footnote 131
The different manuals used, their main characteristics and the contexts in which they were published are discussed in the next chapter; here I want to remark briefly on their usefulness for my research. I adopt a more extended definition of ‘manual’ using the term in the sense of a text of instruction, which might on occasions be an individual article or essay. Manuals are different from campaign narratives or ethnographic-geographical descriptions of individual colonies, which primarily aim to recount or present an event or region (though obviously with their own agendas). As the distinction was not always sharp, however, I include as manuals a small number of works from the latter categories which cannot strictly be considered manuals but which were explicitly recommended or read as such by contemporaries.Footnote 132
I primarily draw on the corpus of manuals to dissect the transimperial body of knowledge on colonial warfare and identify its main strands. Contrary to colonial war memoirs, for instance, this is a corpus which is still manageable in size and offers the practitioners’ thinking on colonial warfare in a more concentrated form. Written for the most part by men with a long experience of such warfare and directed towards (future) fellow soldiers or practitioners, these publications certainly reflect the knowledge these men considered important to transmit. Undoubtedly, the fact that the authors of manuals needed to take far less account of the expectations and tastes of a civilian metropolitan public meant that they could generally be more open and explicit on the topic of colonial violence. Nevertheless, the manuals were always prescriptions and also served the important aim of imperial self-assurance. Thus, they were often far from representing reality. Some aspects of colonial violence also stood outside their realm of more formalised knowledge production. While not offering a complete picture of the extreme violence of colonial wars (for which the empirical case studies offer a better image), they nevertheless offer a sense of the basic notions informing the practitioners, notions often too self-evident to appear in their personal documents, and equally little visible in military journals and newspaper reports with their focus on strategy and tactics or ‘heroic’ deeds. The handbooks also reveal which practices were viewed and codified as standard procedures, and possible changes in knowledge over time. Finally, the corpus offers a window on whether and which foreign examples were being looked at and when.
Periodisation and Perspective
This study is centred on the years 1890–1914. It aims to fill a chronological lacuna, at least for the British and Dutch cases. As is evident in the historiography discussed earlier, much of the debate on the violence of the colonial past has focused on the period of decolonisation. Doubtless, the fin de siècle represents only a very small window on the history of centuries of colonial war accompanying European expansion, settlement and rule in the outside world, a history which may be said to have started in the fifteenth century and progressed far into the twentieth. Nevertheless, there are important grounds for selecting such a narrow time frame. The period corresponds roughly to the age of ‘new imperialism’, the time when European expansion accelerated markedly and much of the non-Western world was divided between several European powers. This was significant in that it generated an ever-increasing number of smaller and larger colonial wars and a growing number of European participants.
What is more, this ‘new imperialism’ overlapped with the age that has sometimes been referred to as the First Globalisation (c. 1870–1914). Indeed, it both emerged out of and contributed to those globalisation processes. The field of global history has demonstrated over recent decades how the nineteenth century saw many parts of the world become increasingly interconnected. More information, ideas, goods and people moved or were moved around the globe than ever before. An ever-expanding network of ports, shipping lines, railways and telegraph lines provided the infrastructure for this development.Footnote 133 The years 1890–1914 marked the ‘great acceleration’ of these processes.Footnote 134 This development provides the backdrop for many of the transimperial connections documented in this book. The general surge in global connectivity, the large migratory movements of this age and the fact that markedly more European states were now involved in colonisation than in the first half of the century (now often also in geographical proximity to each other) allowed for something like a transimperial body of knowledge on colonial warfare to develop in a form that had not existed before.Footnote 135 It was in the 1890s and 1900s that this body of knowledge was codified on a larger scale for the first time, as evidenced by the small boom in manuals of colonial warfare in these decades.
Other factors also contributed to imparting a new quality to colonial warfare in this age, a quality that provides a further warrant for studying this period separately. One factor was the development of European racism over the nineteenth century, described in more detail in Chapter 1.Footnote 136 Another was that the face of colonial warfare changed because of two separate developments. First, European superiority in weaponry over their opponents leapt, as mentioned earlier; and second, colonial war was now waged with the intention of establishing rule over large tracts of territory and enacting wide-ranging transformations of the occupied societies.Footnote 137
All these are good reasons to consider the period between c. 1890 and 1914 as a separate object of study. Nevertheless, these temporal boundaries are not hard and fast ones. The roots of many of the practices and ideas expounded in this book reached much further back, and in tracing these, this book will regularly move into the decades before 1890. Equally, many of these ideas and practices continued to inform colonial warfare after 1914, though there were certainly also some new developments. That, however, is the subject of a different study.
There is one last question of focus to remark on here. This study is concerned with war, a particular form of the colonial encounter. This encounter, naturally, always had two sides. If the majority of this book is about how Europeans acted in, and wrote about, that encounter, this is not because the other side, which has historically received less attention, is less important. It is because the author believes research on the involvement of Europeans in colonial violence continues to be an urgent endeavour for the discussions that European societies need to have about their own pasts, and because that involvement is still denied, downplayed, or even justified in some sections of these societies.
Nevertheless, my historical overviews of the different case studies purposefully incorporate voices and instances of agency of those resisting colonialism. It is my hope this will make them appear not exclusively as passive victims of European violence. Importantly, as mentioned before, I also consider the role of non-European actors and mediators in processes of knowledge formation and transfer. More can certainly be done on this in the future, probably in the form of oral history.
Chapter Overview
This book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 provides some general background. It describes the rise of racism in the nineteenth century and how it came to racialise wars against non-Europeans; outlines some of the overarching structural characteristics of the phenomenon of colonial war; and finally offers some general thoughts on how knowledge came to be produced on colonial warfare (touching also on the specifics of manuals and giving a short overview of the corpus).
Chapter 2 then sets the stage, providing overviews of the five different case studies of this book. Apart from offering the necessary historical background, the case studies give an impression of the face of these wars and, importantly, demonstrate the principal commonalities in discourse and practice that will be explored in the following chapters.
Chapter 3 delves into the transimperial body of knowledge that informed the colonial way of war. It discusses how this knowledge rested on processes of racial othering and created a permissive ideology for extreme violence. It then analyses in depth the main components of this thought in the shape of the five ‘basic imperatives’.
Chapter 4 explores the extent to which this body of knowledge can be considered a product of transimperial transfer. It first considers texts as a medium of transfer and then moves on to the mobility of individuals as a second and more influential medium. It discusses the roles played by indigenous actors, intermediaries, European military observers, and itinerant European soldiers, settlers and adventurers.
The last chapter draws further on the case studies and zooms in on two different practices of violence. Both sections of the chapter demonstrate how such practices recurred in each empire on the basis of the same ‘basic imperatives’, and how these practices were part of colonial knowledge. The first section identifies devastation and hunger war as one of the most common and most central practices of the colonial way of war. The second and more extensive one presents a discussion of the question of extermination in colonial warfare. I argue that if we think in terms of exterminatory practices rather than applying the concept of genocide in a blanket fashion, we will grasp better what place extermination had in fin-de-siècle colonial warfare and in which contexts it could occur. This section obviously also engages with ideas of German particularity; in a second step the German actions and motivations that led to the genocide in GSWA are placed in broader colonial and transimperial contexts. The book then concludes with a discussion that serves to summarise its findings and offer an outlook for further research.
