Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  Another exceptional device of regulation that was enlisted by colonial governments was paramilitary policing, which had especially punitive application to Indigenous peoples. Paramilitary police forces, which included the widespread use of ‘native’ forces, stretched the legal limits of state-sanctioned violence , enabling colonial governments to extend their control over resistant Indigenous populations in ways that civil policing could not. In this sense, while paramilitary police forces varied in composition across different colonial settings, they shared a fundamental role to build and to protect the economic and political goals of empire . 53 Civil rather than military-style policing may have been the ultimate goal of colonial governments, but this goal was dependent upon first bringing unsettled colonial territories to order. To the degree that Indigenous populations remained beyond the effective reach of civil policing, they were consistently subject to what David Anderson and David Killingray refer to as ‘special forms of administration’. 54 But even in their non-paramilitary forms, colonial police forces were essential to the development and protection of empires. 55 Strategies of colonial policing ranged along a spectrum from the ‘benignly hegemonic’ to the overtly coercive, but their purpose was always to enforce the laws of the ruling colonial power. 56 As Rhada Kumar demonstrates in her chapter on policing in the southern provinces of India (Chap. 7), policing was not only essential to the maintenance of imperial rule but was often its most visible symbol.

  Historians have made the point that over the nineteenth century, practices of paramilitary policing and opportunistic settler violence on colonial frontiers gradually transitioned into the spread of courts and prisons, in what Mark Finnane and John McGuire call a ‘new locus of regulation’. 57 As the century progressed, this trend from forceful strategies to carceral ones was accompanied by other non-carceral means of coercion, like controlled management of food supplies. 58 This is not to say, however, that incarceration was a non-violent means of maintaining colonial authority; in the colonies ‘ethnic gulags’ were sometimes used to an extreme, and sometimes to complete the destruction of Indigenous peoples already begun. This was the case in Australia, California and Namibia. 59 Spain was the first European power to practice the large-scale ‘concentration’ of prisoners in Cuba. Britain followed with ‘concentration camps’ in South Africa during the Boer War, Americans with ‘zones of concentration’ in the Philippines and Germans with their Konzentrationslager in South West Africa. 60 Incarceration as an institutionalised aspect of colonial oppression was entrenched and impossible to dislodge, despite the nineteenth-century rhetoric of carceral reform.

  Other aspects of colonial criminal justice systems allowed governments to manage the movement and rights of colonised labour forces. For instance, vagrancy laws were widely applied in racialised ways in colonial settings to control Indigenous labourers, to maintain surveillance over their presence in urban spaces, and to regulate their relations with white settlers. 61 Master and Servants laws protected the power of colonial masters by enabling absconding Indigenous workers to be arrested and incarcerated on breaches of contract. 62 In theory, colonised labour forces were usually provided with some legal protection, including under Master and Servants legislation, but in practice, the law rarely offered any redress for those who were subject to the forced or indentured labour practices that existed in most colonial and settler colonial countries. From the corvée in India to the use of workers in factories, pastoral stations, plantations, fisheries and mines around the colonial world, Indigenous and other colonised peoples who were drawn into colonial economies were either poorly paid or not paid at all. 63 Kidnapping of Indigenous labour was also endemic across the Pacific, and although illegal, such practices were subject to little legal control. 64

  Another strategy of management that had special application to colonised people was corporal punishment. As scholars have argued and as Amanda Nettelbeck examines in this collection (Chap. 6), the flogging of Indigenous peoples remained a normative aspect of many colonial societies, despite humanitarian reforms over the nineteenth century that saw its use decline for other subjects of empire . In South Africa, for example, about 4000 men were sentenced to receive cuts or lashes between 1911 and 1914 alone. 65 Elsewhere around the British Empire , colonial authorities awarded floggings on Indigenous transgressors as a spectacular demonstration of summary justice, effectively creating what Stephen Pete and Annie Devenish refer to as ‘a penal discourse bifurcated along racial lines, combining elements of the pre-modern and the modern’. 66 Beyond the sanction of colonial law, settlers also frequently drew upon corporal punishment as a means to control colonised labourers. Sometimes the recipients of these discretionary punishments were flogged to death, but although such cases produced moral outrage at the metropole, they had little impact in reining in the behaviour of settlers who considered it their right to control their workers as they saw fit. 67 More widely, corporal punishment took some extreme forms in the colonies. In King Leopold’s Congo, for instance, where the line between private and state sanctioned violence was blurred, the amputation of workers’ hands and limbs was practised as a form of punishment. The whole country may have been the personal property of the Belgian king, but the violence was committed at the local level with the complicity of government authorities. 68

  As a means and a method of colonial control, corporal punishment was intimately tied to colonial ideologies about race and masculinity. While the imposition of physical suffering came to be regarded as barbaric and ‘unmanly’ when applied to Europeans, this moral sensibility did not apply to ‘natives’ who, like children, were considered to require basic physical ‘correction’. Christine Wu’s chapter (Chap. 9) shows that the tendency of colonial rulers to infantilise colonised peoples was widespread and pervasive. A similar double standard applied to public executions, which became subject to reform across Europe over the nineteenth century on grounds that such practices belied the values of civilised societies. 69 Yet in a paradox of colonial thought, Indigenous peoples remained subject to public executions well after the turn to private execution for others on the grounds that the impression of such spectacular punishment would serve both as a deterrent to wrongdoing and as a reminder of colonial authority. 70

  As scholars have explored in more detail over the past two decades, the racialised violence of empire was also strongly gendered. In all colonial settings, Laura Ann Stoler has famously argued, ‘imperial authority and racial distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms’. 71 Supported by a belief in imperial values of ‘patriotic manhood and racial virility’, gender inequality was embedded in the very structures ‘of colonial racism and imperial authority’. 72 The gendered dimension of colonial violence formed more than a set of acts or assumptions about the availability of colonised women as a sexual and labour resource for colonial men. More fundamentally, it shaped the relations of power that sustained the political and cultural institutions of colonialism itself. 73 Angela Woollacott, for instance, has explored how violence became normalised in settler colonies as an appropriate expression of colonial manhood, indeed how an ideology of masculine authority and political empowerment ‘saturated’ the colonial worldview. 74

  The sexual and economic exploitation of Indigenous women was unquestionably endemic to colonial societies. At the same time, scholars have pointed out that intimate interracial relations were not only coercive, but also involved strategic negotiation by indigenous communities as means to develop economic exchange and security in a cross-cultural world. 75 Yet as Larissa Behrendt reminds us, such relationships, even when consensual, ‘took place against a background of colonial frontier and sexual violence ’. 76 Gendered violence extended to the abduction or kidnapping of Indigenous women, and was perpetuated by a colonial ideology that positioned Indigenous women themselves as being ‘naturally’ subject to ‘unregulated promiscuity’. 77 Although colonial authorities were often aware that the stealing or abuse of women was a direct cause of cross-c
ultural conflict on settler frontiers, they had little power or will to address it through means of the law. 78

  Ultimately, the violence that underpinned strategies of colonial control—whether that was exerted through physical force or through institutionalised systems, forms of law, economic structures or gendered relations—does not solely account for the longevity of imperial rule over colonial possessions, but it does go a long way in explaining the dynamics of the colonial project. As scholars have pointed out, there is an unmistakable disconnect between the language of Enlightenment, liberalism and humanitarianism and the violence that pervaded the colonial project. 79 This raises again the question of what is distinctive about colonial violence compared to violence carried out in times of war or, indeed, times of peace. Although its individual expressions were many and varied, Fanon has suggested that colonial violence was made distinctive both by its purposes and by its effects. It was used to extend sovereignty over other peoples, and then to maintain a state of dominance over them. It held a clear subjugating role that was supported by an ideological belief in cultural and racial superiority. The effects and impacts of this violence were not only physical but also epistemic. 80 The question that remains is: how can we reconcile the rhetoric of modernity with the many forms of violence that took place in its name?

  In the Aftermaths of Colonial Violence

  During the decades that followed the Second World War, the quest for independence from colonial rule led in turn to violent and often protracted conflicts, marking the decolonisation process with a new set of ‘small wars’. As Bart Luttikhuis and Christiaan Harinck discuss here (Chap. 13), the violence of decolonisation also opened onto vexed questions about the status of former colonial subjects as ‘enemies’. The aftermaths of colonial violence , as well as of decolonising struggles, continue to reverberate around the world as modern democracies come to terms with the histories of violence on which they were built. A fuller record of colonial atrocities is still coming to light, continuing to challenge a once-orthodox understanding of imperial progress and the improving impulse of ‘civilisation’. Movements to redress historical injustices with efforts of restorative justice have been initiated both by Indigenous peoples of former colonial nations and by contemporary governments, expressed for instance in Native Tribal tribunals, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and national apologies. 81

  Reconciling with the colonial past is a process that is important not only to the Indigenous and other colonised peoples who continue to carry the burden of its legacies but also to the descendants of colonising powers who have inherited their wealth. Still, such efforts remain incomplete and often controversial. In The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices, for instance, Elazar Barkan warns that even when formal processes of reconciliation lead to apology or restitution, there is the risk that the underlying structures of colonial domination remain unaddressed, closed off by a procedural understanding that moral resolution has now been reached. 82 Until there is fuller engagement with understanding the scale and nature of the relationship between empire , colonialism and violence , its impacts will continue to echo in the present. We hope that this comparative collection on the nature of violence across colonial empires will contribute to the ongoing process of that engagement.

  Notes

  1.Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 419–420; Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski, ‘Introduction: Encounters of empires: methodological approaches’, in Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (eds), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 4.

  2.Barth and Cvetkovski, ‘Encounters of empires’, 6.

  3.Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the concept of state monopoly on violence and the legitimated use of force, see the work of Max Weber in Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society, ed. and trans. Tony and Dagmar Waters (London: Palgrave, 2015).

  4.Jock McCulloch, ‘Empire and Violence, 1900–1939’, in Philippa Levine, ed. Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 220.

  5.Aisha Karim and Bruce B. Lawrence, On Violence: A Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

  6.See, for instance, Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent in the Ordinary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

  7.Pierre Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 239–243.

  8.For an example of recent comparative work see A. Dirk Moses, ed. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008).

  9.Niall Ferguson, Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Keith Windshuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002).

  10.On the context leading to the Mekachera law and the reactions it elicited see, Robert Aldrich, ‘Colonial past, post-colonial present: history wars French-style’, History Australia, 3 (2006), 14.1–14.10.

  11.‘Harki’ is the term used to describe Algerian Muslims who had fought for France during the Algerian War.

  12.Frantz Fanon, The wretched of the earth, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1955). On the structural relationship between violence and power more widely see, Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970).

  13.See for instance Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Elias Norbert (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1997); Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, eds., States of Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

  14.On the visibility and invisibility of violence as a social force, see for instance Roderick Campbell, ed. Violence and Civilization: Studies of Social Violence in History and Prehistory (Oxford UK: Oxbow Books/Joukowsky Institute, 2013); Veena Das and Arthur Kleinmann, eds. Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  15.Angela Woollacott, ‘Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood’, History Australia, 6.1 (2009)‚ 11.1–11.15.

  16.Two controversial works that have provoked considerable criticism and considerable public debate are Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer: sur la guerre et l’état colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005); and Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2005). See the review article by Stephen Howe, ‘Colonising and exterminating? Memories of imperial violence in Britain and France’, Histoire@Politique. Politique, culture, société, 11 (2010), https://​www.​histoire-politique.​fr.

  17.For the latter see, for example, Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  18.For instance, Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, Publishers, 1997), 10–11; Mary Gilmartin, ‘Colonialism/Imperialism’ in Carolyn Gallaher, et al, Key Concepts in Political Geography (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2009), 115–123.

  19.Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 387; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  20.Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999), 2–3.

  21.Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899).

  22.Nathan K. Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2; Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011).

  23.Hensley, Forms of Empire, 2.

  24.Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 1
1.

  25.Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3.

  26.James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), 316; 15.

  27.Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981; rpt. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006); Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014).

  28.For instance, John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002).

  29.James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and The Rise of the Angloworld, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 182.