by Philip Dwyer
At the same time, the role of material violence cannot be underestimated: it buttressed the imperial enterprise wherever it went and was often used with astonishing brutality. By its very nature, colonisation involved the subjection of peoples and their lands, cultures and laws. To the degree that this process of subjugation required physical force, violence was enlisted in the cause of what Rudyard Kipling famously referred to as ‘savage wars of peace’. 21 For example, Nathan Hensley has assessed that during the period of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901, at least 228 known armed conflicts took place across the British Empire . Counted among these are major wars such as the Crimean War and the Boer War, but many of the remainder constituted punitive colonial campaigns, of varying levels of intensity, that were designed to put down rebellions and unrest. 22 The degree to which war and punitive force were used in the suppression of resistance is virtually impossible to reconcile with the belief that took root during the Victorian age that the British Empire was at its height of civilised progression. This disjuncture between imperial self-image and colonial realities reflects the ‘fundamental paradox of the liberal empire ’. 23
While Hensley’s count of armed conflicts during the Victorian era is used to illustrate the extensive deployment of violence , it still vastly underestimates the number of private battles and forms of guerrilla warfare that were fought on colonial frontiers. Over the same era, for example, potentially hundreds of skirmishes were fought on the Australian and South African frontiers alone, some of them recorded only obliquely and many of them unrecorded. No one to date has attempted to count the number of clashes that took place across the British, let alone the French, Belgian, Italian or German colonial possessions. What is evident, however, is a disconnect between the rhetoric of a liberal empire , which included wide-spread expressions of humanitarian concern for Indigenous peoples, and the colonial violence that took place on the ground. Colonial wars were necessarily bloody, but as James Lehning argues in this collection (Chap. 4), they also performed cultural tasks central to the colonial project—they created imperial identities and ideologies; they created colonial worlds. 24
Invariably, Indigenous populations responded to the processes of colonisation with attempts to defend their lands, cultures and communities. Political or armed resistance was met in turn with state-sanctioned violence . Nonetheless, in cases where Indigenous forces were organised, armed resistance was often highly effective and it absorbed vast imperial resources to suppress. In assessing the effectiveness of the Xhosa guerrilla 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 cyclical New Zealand wars were strikingly successful, honed through skills of strong leadership, formidable battle tactics and impenetrable field fortifications. 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 colonial wars, such as took place on Australia’s nineteenth-century frontiers, Indigenous tactics of guerrilla warfare were highly effective in intimidating and deflecting colonial settlers, and in stretching the capacity of colonial troops or police. 27
A tipping point in the capacity of Indigenous peoples to resist colonisation 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 exceptions, 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, resistance 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 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 resistance to colonial rule.
This is not to suggest that local or Indigenous responses to colonialism were defined only by open rebellion or armed resistance. In India, for example, communities dissented in different ways, from mass migration 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, colonised 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 paramilitary 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 colonial 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 establish relationships with colonial authorities in ways that required some reciprocity. 35
But although many Indigenous people adapted to the colonial project, the frequency of colonial reprisals and massacres increased through the nineteenth century with the intensification of empires’ territorial ambitions. Colonial massacres often occurred on a small scale that could be hidden from metropolitan oversight, but some of these events occurred on a disturbingly large scale, and were openly sanctioned by the colonial state. Such was the case, for instance, in the Amristar (Jallianwalla Bagh) massacre of 1919, in which the British Indian Army fired upon a crowd of peaceful protesters, resulting in casualties thought to be in the range of 1000–1500. 36 Britain was also respo
nsible for the reprisal killings that took place after the First Uprising in India (the Mutiny) in 1857, which may have resulted in as many as 100,000 deaths. 37 While the killing of colonised subjects was legitimated as an unavoidable outcome of the state’s responsibility to suppress disorder, the deaths of British civilians who became caught up in colonial uprisings produced moral outrage, accompanied by calls to respond with overwhelming force. When Sepoy forces captured and killed around 120 British women and children at Cawnpore during the Indian rebellion of 1857, the reaction in Britain was such that Dickens wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: ‘I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India…I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.’ 38
Similar calls for demonstrations of power and force were characteristic of the French Empire . French colonisation of Algeria during the 1830s was marred by systemic violence . Like the British, however, contemporary commentators reconciled this violence to a concept of a liberal empire , on grounds that force was the only means by which the security and progress of the empire could be protected. For instance, the liberal diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, often associated in the English-speaking world with his book Democracy in America, supported the French military’s use of razzias, a tactic of swift and brutal raids conducted against recalcitrant Algerian communities in order to repress all resistance. 39 As a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville delivered a speech in 1828 in which he described the French army’s behaviour of killing, burning crops and villages, destroying towns, and abducting women and children as an ‘unfortunate necessity’ (nécessité fâcheuse). 40 We do not know how many Algerians died in the nineteenth-century wars of conquest, but scholars have offered the likely figure as being somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million out of an estimated 3 million Algerians. 41
It is interesting that historians have made much more of the war for Independence that raged between 1954 and 1962, in which far fewer Algerians died. 42 Certainly, all of the British and French wars of decolonisation were violent, although the French wars were always bloodier than those of the British. All were guerrilla-type conflicts, and all involved far higher casualties of civilians than was true of European combatants. All involved atrocities that included torture, the killing of prisoners and the massacre of civilians. Such atrocities were committed—whether the imperial power was Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, British, American, Japanese or Soviet—wherever imperial forces came into contact with independence or insurgency movements. 43 Counter-insurgency, born out of the repressive violence against independence movements, was a military strategy used to protect imperial interests in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In the process, imperial powers singled out particular ethnicities or particular groups of people—those supposedly characterised by a ‘warlike temperament’—and used them in their struggle against ‘freedom fighters’. 44
Strategies of conquest and the suppression of resistance were by no means unique to European empires. Kelly Maddox examines (in Chap. 12) how as the Imperial Japanese Army launched its war of conquest, it systematically committed atrocities against local populations both before the outbreak of the Second World War and during the war. The Nanjing Massacre of 1937 is possibly the most infamous of these incidents, but was by no means an isolated event. The ‘Three Alls’ policy adopted in China—‘kill all, burn all, loot all’—was widely applied throughout the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
While some of the most violent colonial campaigns were undertaken by imperial forces and colonial governments, others occurred in the context of privatised violence committed by colonial settlers, beyond the view or sanction of the state. As Richard Price discusses in this volume (Chap. 2), private violence committed by settlers did not mirror the kind of large-scale state reprisals that followed open rebellions. Instead, it tended to be episodic, opportunistic and often intimate in nature. It was also endemic, particularly in regions where the oversight of law and government was limited. Reflecting what Elizabeth Elbourne has referred to as ‘the sin of the settler’, this kind of everyday violence became a normalised aspect of colonial cultures—it was a quotidian event, even as it was concealed from open view. 45 A full history of such covert violence is difficult to recover because of the silences in which it was shrouded, but glimpses can always be found in euphemistic references to having ‘a picnic with the natives’ or teaching them ‘a lesson that they never forgot’. 46 Unsanctioned forms of settler violence against Indigenous people were as much a product of ‘fear and distain’ as they were a localised means of asserting power and control. 47 Wherever there was settler colonialism there was fear and anxiety, on both sides of the racial-cultural divide. At the same time, as Adrian Muckle reminds us in this volume (Chap. 11), colonial violence cannot be regarded only in terms of the relationship between coloniser and colonised; colonial states were complex social structures that involved multiple actors.
Whether authorised by colonial states or committed covertly, violence had become such an extensive strategy of conquest by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that some recent scholarship links the colonial project to the elimination of Indigenous peoples. 48 This line of enquiry has also produced some controversial debate about the purported genocidal nature of colonialism and its links to the Nazi Holocaust. 49 There is no need to reprise that debate here, except to say that the kinds of everyday violence that many of the authors in the following chapters detail is qualitatively different to genocide.
However, as Patrick Wolfe has famously argued, not all strategies geared towards ‘the elimination of the native’ required the use of physical force. Resisting a simplified assessment that colonialism , and most specifically settler colonialism , was inherently genocidal, Wolfe outlines how an array of other forms of institutional violence and cultural coercion were directed towards the ‘dissolution’ of Indigenous societies. Among others, these coercive strategies included officially encouraged miscegenation, which authorities around the colonial world believed would lead to the disappearance of Indigenous bloodlines; programmes of religious conversion and social re-education; the removal of Indigenous children from their families for placement in mission or training schools; prohibitions against speaking their own language; and a range of other assimilative programmes designed to eliminate all signs of ‘nativeness’ and ultimately absorb Indigenous people into the colonial body politic. 50 In effect, the eliminative impulse of colonial violence took multiple shapes, all of which contributed to a longer-term purpose to eradicate Indigenous difference.
Strategies of Colonial Control
The social and legal order of the colonial state was built and managed through a variety of strategies and institutional tools that enabled colonial governments to manage and control their colonial subjects. Alongside pure force, these formed an adaptable system of colonial practices that maintained the fundamental imbalance of power structuring colonial relations. One of the most pervasive of these tools was law. Colonial legal regimes played a vital role in remaking the subjectivity of colonial subjects: colonial law not only negated their pre-existing laws but also criminalised their transgressions against colonial authority. ‘Law-making is power-making’, noted Walter Benjamin, ‘and to that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence ’. 51 Over time and across colonial settings, the legitimate scope of state violence available to regulate recalcitrant subjects was subject to legal definition and redefinition. Martial law represented one of the most flexible expressions of this process, enabling colonial governments to enlist force as an extraordinary measure to repress insurgency or resistance. As Lyndall Ryan discusses in this volume (Chap. 5), colonial governors invoked martial law to order unruly frontiers that could not be brought to order through ordinary legal means; such was the cas
e for instance when Governor George Arthur proclaimed a state of martial law against Indigenous Tasmanians in 1828. From the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of colonial self-government, martial law took on more clearly draconian roles to repress insurgency, to control Indigenous subjects or to contain settler demands. In 1865, for example, Jamaica’s governor Edward John Eyre used the authority of martial law to put to death 439 Indigenous insurgents during the Morant Bay Rebellion. 52 Although this event outraged liberals in the Metropole, who attempted to have him convicted of murder on three separate occasions, Eyre was acquitted three times. While imperial metropoles debated the legalities of extraordinary force, such debates had few reverberations in the colonies: martial law was an exceptional legal device used throughout the British Empire , as well as in the French Empire where it was referred to as an état de siège, literally ‘state of siege’. In suspending the ordinary rule of law, it had many uses that ranged from the re-assertion of sovereignty against Indigenous threats to the repression of political threats from within the settler colonial state.
