Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
Page 1
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series
Series Editors
Richard DraytonDepartment of History, King’s College London, London, UK
Saul DubowMagdalene 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, comparative 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.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13937
EditorsPhilip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck
Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
Editors
Philip DwyerCentre for the History of Violence, University of Newcastle Australia, Callaghan, NSW, Australia
Amanda NettelbeckSchool of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series
ISBN 978-3-319-62922-3e-ISBN 978-3-319-62923-0
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62923-0
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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Acknowledgements
The contributions to this volume are the result of a conference held in July 2017 at the British Academy in London. Funding was provided by the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The editors would like to thank the participants for their generous support and for their patience in the editing process. We would also like to thank the team at Palgrave and in particular Molly Beck and Oliver Dyer for facilitating this project.
Contents
‘Savage Wars of Peace’: Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck
Part I Colonial Violence and ‘Ways of Seeing’
The Psychology of Colonial Violence
Richard N. Price
Colonial Violence and the Picturesque
Elizabeth Mjelde
Categories of Conquest and Colonial Control: The French in Tonkin, 1884–1914
James R. Lehning
Part II Colonial Authority and the Violence of Law
Martial Law in the British Empire
Lyndall Ryan
Flogging as Judicial Violence: The Colonial Rationale of Corporal Punishment
Amanda Nettelbeck
Seeing like a Policeman: Everyday Violence in British India, c. 1900–1950
Radha Kumar
Part III Dynamics of Colonial Warfare
The Dynamics of British Colonial Violence
Michelle Gordon
Disciplining Native Masculinities: Colonial Violence in Malaya, ‘Land of the Pirate and the Amok’
Jialin Christina Wu
Fascist Violence and the ‘Ethnic Reconstruction’ of Cyrenaica (Libya), 1922–1934
Michael R. Ebner
Part IV Repression and Resistance
Contesting Colonial Violence in New Caledonia
Adrian Muckle
From Liberation to Elimination: Violence and Resistance in Japan’s Southeast Asia, 1942–1945
Kelly Maddox
Nothing to Report? Challenging Dutch Discourse on Colonial Counterinsurgency in Indonesia, 1945–1949
Bart Luttikhuis and C. H. C. Harinck
Index
List of Figures
Colonial Violence and the Picturesque
Fig. 1 William Lyttleton The Summit of the Balani Mountain.
Fig. 2 Colin Mackenzie Distant View of Savan - Droog in Mysore from the East Side.
Fig. 3 William Gilpin “An illustration of that wild kind of country…as we entered Cumberland,” from Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty.
Fig. 4 William Byrne after Robert Home View of Shevagurry from the top of Ramgaree.
Fig. 5 Samuel Daniell View of the Harbour of Trincomalee: Taken from the Fort Ostenburg.
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Philip Dwyer
is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Amanda Nettelbeck
is Professor of History at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
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 doctrine 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.
Bart Luttikhuis
is a historian at KITLV (The Netherlands), working on the colonial history and decolonization of Indonesia. He recently started a research project on vi
gilantism in Indonesian politics, 1943–1955.
Kelly Maddox
received her Ph.D. on the radicalisation of violence in the Japanese Empire from Lancaster University. She is currently undertaking intensive Japanese language training, funded by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.
Elizabeth Mjelde
co-chairs the art history programme at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, where she also teaches women’s studies. She currently writes about intersections between art and colonialism.
Adrian Muckle
is a Senior Lecturer in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington and has published widely on the dynamics of colonial violence in New Caledonia.
Richard N. Price
is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Lyndall Ryan
is Conjoint Research Professor at the Centre for the History of Violence, University of Newcastle, Australia.
Jialin Christina Wu
is a FNRS Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Her forthcoming book on British Malayan Scouting is under contract with the Presses de Sciences Po.
© The Author(s) 2018
Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds.)Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern WorldCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62923-0_1
‘Savage Wars of Peace’: Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
Philip Dwyer1 and Amanda Nettelbeck2
(1)University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia
(2)University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
Philip Dwyer (Corresponding author)
Email: philip.dwyer@newcastle.edu.au
Amanda Nettelbeck
Email: amanda.nettelbeck@adelaide.edu.au
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, asymmetrical and repressive power structures, governed by authoritarian powers 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 has noted that our contemporary understanding of violence as an essential element of all modern empires has produced a sense that imperialism and violence are virtual synonyms, yet insufficiently understood are the complex ways in which the boundaries and definitions of that violence evolved over time and across colonial settings, in line with shifting political orthodoxies. 4 Colonial violence was diffuse, multi-layered and enormously variable. And while violence is far from unique to colonial practices, it was always embedded in the social, legal, economic and gendered foundations on which colonial relations were built.
Exploring the shared and varied expressions of imperial and colonial violence is the object of this collection. Such a project carries with it the reminder that violence is a fundamentally ambiguous concept, whose meanings had a different cast across different practices and settings of colonialism . In this respect, violence can only be viewed as a process that is always historically contingent, not as a singular outcome or event. 5 While it is often conventionally recognised as some form of physical harm—expressed for instance in acts of killing, rape or corporal punishment—violence has also always had an institutionalised dimension that disguises its presence in ordinary social relations. 6 Its forms include psychological harm and trauma, as well as what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as symbolic violence . 7 In the colonial context, the symbolic dimensions of violence encompass a range of strategies that legitimated the political marginalisation and social disempowerment of colonised peoples. These were perpetuated through imposed legal norms, religious institutions, education, surveillance and policing systems, as well as through sheer brute force.
Although the foundational role of violence in the process of empire -building is now widely accepted, we still need closer attention to the structural relationship between colonialism , empire and violence beyond spectacular moments in imperial history. 8 This need has become all the more pressing because of recent attempts to revise histories of empire by political conservatives in Europe, as well as in former colonial nations. Niall Ferguson, for instance, has argued that the British Empire had more positive than negative outcomes as an engine of modernity and progress, while Keith Windshuttle has argued that state violence committed against Australian Indigenous people in the course of colonization constituted no more than the lawful policing of criminality. 9 In 2005, the French ruling conservative party passed a law stating that high school teachers were to teach the history of colonisation in a positive light, especially that concerning North Africa. 10 The Mekachera law, as it was known, named after the former harki and Minister delegate for Veterans Affairs, Hamlaoui Mekachera, was intended to be a means of recognising 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 colonisation 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 struggles that arose from within colonies. Over the past two decades, scholars 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 of the chapters in this collection. With a somewhat different aim, this chapter identifies some of the shared expressions of violence within a comparative framework in assessing its place as an ever-present feature of modern colonial history. From the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, technologies , ideologies and conditions have radically changed, but the deployment or the threat of violence still remained at the
core of colonial relations. Indeed, from the first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples through to decolonisation processes in the twentieth century, violence was so prevalent that its legacies continue to structure cross-cultural relationships in post-colonial societies of the twenty-first century.
Colonial Conquest and (Cultural) Elimination
Both physical and symbolic forms of violence were common features of colonial societies across time and across empires, but the purposes and outcomes of that violence varied across different kinds of colonial setting. Scholars of colonisation and empire have sought to better understand those variations and their aftermaths by drawing a broad distinction between exploitative colonialism and settler colonialism . 18 Exploitative forms of colonialism were predicated upon an objective to build economic wealth by extracting primary resources and labour from colonised territories for the benefit of the imperial centre. Settler colonialism , on the other hand, was predicated upon an objective to take possession of new territories and to transport the sovereignty of empire to them. While exploitative models of colonisation could potentially be exhausted by finite supplies of resources and labour, settler colonialism was and is a structure that never ends, for it entailed the alienation of Indigenous rights to land, polities and social traditions. 19 Although different in purpose and outcomes, however, both models of colonization enabled colonisers to imagine the nature of colonised peoples and territories through the filter of an imperial lens. 20 In Elizabeth Mjelde’s chapter in this collection (Chap. 3), for example, we see how environment and landscape were appropriated by empire in more than a literal sense; at a deeper level, the traces of violence that scarred colonial landscapes could be obscured and smoothed away by the perspective of an imperial worldview. In this sense, supposedly ‘new’ worlds were rendered ‘civilised’ by a range of violent strategies that could be as much symbolic as they were material.