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Cambridge Imperial & Post-Colonial Studies Series
VIOLENCE,
COLONIALISM AND
EMPIRE IN THE
MODERN WORLD
Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History
King’s College London
London, UK
Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection
of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures
which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, compar-
ative and connective studies, and studies which address where particular
regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the
series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current
incarnation there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of
the world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome
the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies
by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong
thematic focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture,
literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most
exciting new scholarship on world history with an imperial theme.
Violence, Colonialism
and Empire in the
Modern World
Editors
Philip Dwyer Amanda Nettelbeck
Centre for the History of Violence School of Humanities
University of Newcastle Australia University of Adelaide
Callaghan, NSW, Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index 287
Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Michael R. Ebner is associate professor of history at the Maxwell School
of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He is the author of
Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge, 2011).
Michelle Gordon recently completed her Ph.D. thesis, ‘British Colonial
Violence in Perak, Sierra Leone and the Sudan’ at Royal Holloway,
University of London.
C. H. C. Harinck is undertaking a Ph.D. at KITLV (The Netherlands).
His research is on the management of violence in Dutch military doc-
trine and practice during the Indonesian war of Independence.
Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University,
NY, and specialises in colonial and postcolonial South Asian history.
James R. Lehning is Professor of History at the University of Utah in
Salt Lake City, Utah.
ix
x Editors and Contributors
xi
‘Savage Wars of Peace’: Violence,
Colonialism and Empire in the Modern
World
Violence has always been central to the long, complex history of empire
and colonialism that stretches back over four centuries of the ‘modern
era’. While the concept of empire has varied in its definitions, all empires
shared a number of common features: they were multi-ethnic, asym-
metrical and repressive power structures, governed by authoritarian pow-
ers that could be linked together by common (racial) ideologies.1 The
notion of empire is necessarily intertwined with that of colonialism: the
first is expansionist in form; the other is a relationship in which foreign
rulers—often European but also Asian—impose their authority, law and
culture on peoples over whom they exert political, social and military
control.2 Most importantly, empires maintained a position of dominance
through the constant threat or exercise of violence.3 Jock McCulloch
P. Dwyer (*)
University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia
e-mail: philip.dwyer@newcastle.edu.au
A. Nettelbeck
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
e-mail: amanda.nettelbeck@adelaide.edu.au
known, named after the former harki and Minister delegate for Veterans
Affairs, Hamlaoui Mekachera, was intended to be a means of recognis-
ing the contribution made by all those non-French who had fought on
behalf of France in Indochina and North Africa, but its effect was to
bring back an emphasis on the so-called advances brought to colonised
peoples.11 The law appears to have remained largely ignored by French
high school teachers, but the emergence of modern-day proponents of
empire underlines the difficulties historians face in conceptualising the
violence at the heart of the colonial project.
The best-known theorists of the structural relationship between colo-
nisation and violence in the post-Second World War era, both of them
from the island of Martinique, are Frantz Fanon and Aimé Cesaire.12
Both argued that violence was central to the creation and maintenance
of colonialism, as well as to the independence and decolonisation strug-
gles that arose from within colonies. Over the past two decades, schol-
ars have begun to analyse the systemic features of violence in greater
depth—whether those features were physical, symbolic, institutional,
legal or cultural—as a generative force that supported the making of
empires, indeed the making of all civilizations.13 As a social force that has
helped to build the modern world as we know it, the legacies of colonial
violence can become invisible, sanctioned in law and normalised as an
aspect of everyday life.14 As scholars have argued and as Michael Ebner
demonstrates in this volume (Chap. 10), colonial ideals of progress and
political maturation not only facilitated the acceptability of violence as
an inherent aspect of colonial cultures but more than this, legitimated its
apparent necessity.15
Recent analyses of the relationship between violence, colonialism and
empire have not been without controversy, attracting some suggestions
that the historical pendulum has swung the other way. Just as there is a
desire in some quarters to whitewash or to gloss over the violence of the
colonial project, some scholars have been accused of skewing the debates
by focusing on the most spectacular aspects of colonial violence, or of
oversimplifying the racism or the ‘civilising mission’ that underpinned
it.16 Despite such criticisms, a considerable body of scholarship has
emerged in recent years with the aim of building a nuanced picture of
the role of violence, repression and atrocity in the colonial world, as well
as of its enduring place in forms of representation and social memory.17
A good part of this scholarship analyses particular practices of violence as
a tool of empire within clearly define geo-political spaces, as do a number
4 P. Dwyer and A. Nettelbeck
fighters who fought serial wars on the eastern Cape frontier, for instance,
Richard Price shows that their resistance to colonial intrusion ‘stretched
the local capacity of the British army almost to breaking point’.25
Likewise, James Belich has demonstrated that in spite of numerical odds
against them, the resistance strategies of Māori forces through the cycli-
cal New Zealand wars were strikingly successful, honed through skills of
strong leadership, formidable battle tactics and impenetrable field fortifi-
cations. Their organised capacity to resist was indicated by the huge scale
on which British troops were mobilised to repress them. In the biggest
campaign of the New Zealand wars, for instance, some 18,000 troops
were enlisted to oppose a Māori population that numbered little more
than 60,000 men, women and children.26 Even in smaller-scale colo-
nial wars, such as took place on Australia’s nineteenth-century frontiers,
Indigenous tactics of guerrilla warfare were highly effective in intimidat-
ing and deflecting colonial settlers, and in stretching the capacity of colo-
nial troops or police.27
A tipping point in the capacity of Indigenous peoples to resist coloni-
sation came with technological advances in modern warfare, which gave
European colonisers the upper hand.28 Repeating rifles, maxim guns,
dumb-dumb bullets and cannon meant that casualties, with rare excep-
tions, were always much higher among Indigenous forces. In his recent
book Replenishing the Earth, Belich also suggests that another kind of
tipping point arrived during the early to mid-nineteenth century when
an exponential growth in the expansion of European empires profoundly
undermined the capacity of Indigenous peoples to absorb the impacts of
colonial invasion. The sheer pace of what he calls ‘explosive colonisation’
was such, he argues, that it changed ‘the nature of the problem facing
indigenous peoples from a scale that they could often handle to a scale
that they could not’.29
There were some occasions on which European troops were bested—
the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 during the Anglo-Zulu Wars or the
Fall of Khartoum in January 1885 are examples—but typically, resist-
ance invited excessive retaliation. The Battle of Rorke’s Drift, lionised by
Victorians and made famous by the 1964 film Zulu, is a case in point.
An archaeological dig has only recently uncovered that Rorke’s Drift was
also the scene of an atrocity. In the hours after the battle, hundreds of
wounded Zulu left on the field of battle were bayoneted, hanged and
buried alive in mass graves. More Zulus are estimated to have died in this
way than in the battle, but the executions were covered up to preserve
‘SAVAGE WARS OF PEACE’: VIOLENCE, COLONIALISM AND EMPIRE … 7
the image of Rorke’s Drift as a bloody but honourable fight between two
forces that respected each other’s courage.30 This type of punitive action
was not rare in the modern history of empire. Similar scenes took place,
as Michelle Gordon shows in her chapter (Chap. 8), during the Anglo-
Egyptian War in the Sudan from 1896–1899. It also occured in China
during the brutal repression that followed the Boxer War in 1900–1901.
The Hague Convention of 1899 only applied to conflict conducted
between ‘civilised nationals’; and since the Chinese were not considered
‘civilised’, no humanity was shown to them.31 The same attitude was
reflected in other modern empires in the process of suppressing resist-
ance to colonial rule.
This is not to suggest that local or Indigenous responses to colonial-
ism were defined only by open rebellion or armed resistance. In India,
for example, communities dissented in different ways, from mass migra-
tion to suicide (or the threat of it).32 Protest was also expressed through
diplomatic strategies such as petitioning, or alternatively through refusal
to engage with colonial officials or institutions.33 Importantly, too, colo-
nised peoples also accommodated themselves to new colonial orders and
economies in ways that enabled them to adapt and survive: the history
of colonial relations is replete with examples of co-existence, exchange
and collaboration.34 In this respect, colonised peoples were not always
and not solely victims of the violence of empire, for they were also adept
negotiators in turning colonial systems to their own purposes, although
with ambivalent outcomes.
This point can be illustrated by the degree to which many Indigenous
peoples across the colonial world actively participated in police or par-
amilitary forces. So-called ‘native corps’ were often established by
European colonial powers because they constituted a cheaper labour
force than European police or military personnel, and because when
deployed in their own countries, they brought a deep local knowledge
that proved an advantage in opening up new territories as well as in
controlling the empire. While this placed them firmly within the very
structures of colonial control, scholars have begun to appreciate that
their motivations were not necessarily aligned with those of their colo-
nial employers. Strategic alliance with the systems of colonialism might
be motivated by a desire to extend cultural or social authority in their
own communities, to open up new avenues of resources, or to estab-
lish relationships with colonial authorities in ways that required some
reciprocity.35
8 P. Dwyer and A. Nettelbeck
188. Die Karawane auf dem Eise des Lu-tschuentsa-Baches. (S. 17.)
189. Sanddünen in der mittelsten Gobi. (S. 22.)
190. Terrasse nördlich von der Oase vom 1. Februar. (S. 22.)
191. Tränkung der Kamele am Brunnen im Lager Nr. 138. (S. 22.)
Die Steigung fährt fort, obgleich nur mit 0,644 Meter auf 11250
Meter. In dem heutigen Lager befanden wir uns also um 0,754 Meter
über dem Ausgangpunkte. Dies schien des Guten zuviel zu werden;
der Kara-koschun konnte doch nicht höher liegen als Lôu-lan! Alle
meine Gedanken und Grübeleien drehten sich um diese interessante
Nivellierungslinie. Die folgenden Tage, deren Verlauf ich mit
Spannung entgegensah, würden zeigen, ob wir nicht eine flache
Protuberanz oder Wasserscheide zwischen dem früheren und dem
jetzigen Seebecken zu passieren hatten.
15. März. Schor, den ganzen Tag Schor, tödlich einförmig! Kein
Gegenstand, auf den man das Fernrohr richten könnte, nichts, was
lockt, als die Sehnsucht, aus dieser langweiligen Wüste
herauszukommen!
Das Wetter jedoch war herrlich, und um 1 Uhr stieg die
Temperatur nur auf +11 Grad. Aber unsere Lage war insofern