Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
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30.Michael Lieven, ‘“Butchering the Brutes All Over the Place”: Total War and Massacre in Zululand, 1879’, History, 18 (1999), 614–632.
31.Susanne Kuss, ‘Co-operation between German and French troops during the Boxer War in China, 1900/1901: The Punitive Expedition to Baoding’, in Barth and Cvetkovski (eds), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 202.
32.Denis Vidal, Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
33.See for instance Ravi De Costa, ‘Identity, Authority and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:3 (2006), 669–698.
34.See for instance Lynette Russell, ed. Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European encounters in settler societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Leena Ghandi, Affective Communities. Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
35.For case studies analysed in particular settings see for instance Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army 1860–1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Richard Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier: The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and Racial Control in New Zealand, 1767–1867 (Wellington: V.R. Ward, 1986); Marie Fels, Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1847–1853 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988); K. I. Watson, ‘African Seypoys: The Black Police on the Eastern Cape Frontier 1835–1850’, African Historical Review, 1. 28 (1996): 62–78.
36.Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–20’‚ Past and Present, 131 (1991): 130–164.
37.Saul David, The Indian Mutiny: 1857 (London: Penguin, 2003), which is eerily quite about anti-Indian atrocities.
38.Charles Dickens, Letters from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1841–1865 (London: Cape, 1953), 350–351 (4 October 1857).
39.On the nature and effect of the razzia as a French military strategy in Algeria, see Thomas Rid, ‘Razzia: a turning point in modern strategy’, Terrorism and Political Violence 21 (2009), 617–635.
40.Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer, 7–8; Cheryl Welch, ‘Out of Africa: Tocqueville’s Imperial Voyages’, Review of Middle East Studies, 45:1 (2011), 53–61.
41.See Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 364–365.
42.Lower estimates are around 200,000 dead. See, Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 335–338.
43.See, for example, Matthew Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39’, English Historical Review, CXXIV (507) (2009), 313–354.
44.Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–1975 (London: Hodder Education, 2008), 414.
45.Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates Over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial Studies, 4.3 (2003); Robert Foster, ‘“Don’t Mention the War”: frontier violence and the language of concealment’, History Australia, 6: 3 (2009), 68.1–68.15.
46.Tony Roberts, ‘The Brutal Truth: What Happened in the Gulf Country’, The Monthly, November 2009, 42–51, here 44.
47.Tom Griffiths, ‘Past Silences: Aborigines and convicts in our history’ in Penny Russell and Richard White (eds), Pastiche I: Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 7–26; Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2013).
48.There is now a considerable literature on the relationship between colonialism and genocide. Among others see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn, 2005); Jürgen Zimmerer and Dominik J. Schaller (eds), Settlers—Imperialism—Genocide (London: Routledge, 2009); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
49.Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42:2 (2009), 279–300; and Michelle Gordon, ‘Colonial violence and Holocaust studies’, Holocaust Studies, 21:4 (2015), 272–291.
50.Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, 387.
51.Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Edmund Jephcott (ed., trans.) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiograpical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 295.
52.Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 23–24; Hensley, Forms of Empire, 9.
53.See for instance Mitchel Roth, ‘Mounted Police Forces: A Comparative History’, Policing: International Journal of Police Strategies and Management 21: 4 (1998); David Anderson and David Killingray, eds, Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Bankole Cole, “Post-Colonial Systems” in Policing Across the World: Issues for the Twenty-First Century (London: UCL Press, 1999); Barry Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall, eds., Crime and Empire: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, 1840–1940 (Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2005).
54.David Anderson and David Killingray, ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire’ in Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1840, eds. David Anderson and David Killingray (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1991), 6.
55.Maureen Cain, ‘Some Go Backward, Some Go Forward: police work in comparative perspective’, Contemporary Sociology, 22:3 (1993), 321.
56.Richard Hill, ‘Māori Police Personnel and the Rangatiratanga Discourse’ in Crime and Empire 1840–1940, ed. Barry Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall (Collumpton UK, Willan Publishing, 2005), 176.
57.Mark Finnane and John McGuire, ‘The Uses of Punishment and Exile: Aborigines in Colonial Australia’, Punishment and Society, 3:2 (2001), 280.
58.Russell Hogg, ‘Penality and Modes of Regulating Indigenous Peoples in Australia’, Punishment and Society 3: 3 (2001), 358; Hugh Shewell, Enough to Keep them Alive: Indian Welfare in Canada 1873–1965 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2004).
59.Benjamin Madley, ‘Patterns of Frontier Genocide 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6:2 (2004), 167–192.
60.See, Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘Deadly learning?: concentration camps in colonial wars around 1900’, in Barth and Cvetkovski (eds), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 219–235; Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
61.A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock, eds. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008).
62.Douglas Hay and Paul Craven eds., Masters, Servants & Magistrates in Britain & the Empire (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
63.Brij Lal, Doug Munro, and Edward D. Beechert, (eds), Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993); Adrian Muckle, Specters of Violence in a Colonial Context: New Caledonia (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2012).
64.Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and colonial dialogue: the Australian-Pacific indentured labor trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
65.Cited in Jock McCulloch, ‘Empire and Violence, 1900–1939’, in Levine (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, 226.
66.Stephen Pete and Annie Devenish, ‘Flogging, Fear and Food: Punishment and Race in Colonial Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31:1 (2005), 12.
67.Pete and Devenish, �
�Flogging, Fear and Food’, 5.
68.Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
69.See for instance Randall McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment: the end of public execution in England’, Journal of British Studies, 33:3 (1994), 257–282.
70.Our thanks to Pieter Spierenburg for this. See also John McGuire, ‘Judicial Violence and the “Civilising Process”: race and the transition from public to private executions in colonial Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 29:111 (1998), 187–209.
71.Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and The Intimate in Colonial Rule (California: University of California Press, 2002), 42.
72.Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 42.
73.Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century’ in Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
74.Woollacott, ‘Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood’; Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (London: Palgrave, 2006).
75.For instance, Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Ann McGrath, ‘Black Velvet’: Aboriginal women and their relations with white men in the NT 1910–40’, in Kay Daniels (ed.), So Much Hard Work: Women and Prostitution in Australia (Sydney: Fontana, 1984).
76.Larissa Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo)Colonial Society: Aboriginal Women as Sexual and Legal “Other,”’ Australian Feminist Studies, 15:33 (2000), 355.
77.Liz Conor, ‘“Black Velvet” and “Purple Indignation”: Print responses to Japanese “Poaching” of Aboriginal Women’, Aboriginal History, 37 (2013), 70.
78.For instance, Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 58–59.
79.For instance, Hensley, Forms of Empire, 2.
80.Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
81.See for instance Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
82.Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000), 343.
Part I
Colonial Violence and ‘Ways of Seeing’
© 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_2
The Psychology of Colonial Violence
Richard N. Price1
(1)University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Richard N. Price
Email: rnp@umd.edu
This paper has benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of Philip Dwyer, Amanda Nettelbeck and Lyndall Ryan.
Colonial Violence
It is an odd but telling fact that until very recently the question of colonial violence has not figured much in the narratives of the British Empire. Surely no imperial historian would deny that violence was part of empire history. But I think it true to say that most commonly the issue of imperial violence has been safely confined to the categories of war, or an occasional “scandal” of empire ignited by an over-enthusiastic use of force. Yet, as I discovered (to my surprise, I must admit) in the Cape Colony archives whilst researching the British-Xhosa encounter in the nineteenth century, the presence of violence in empire cannot be reduced to the margins of its history. In those archives it was impossible to ignore the atrocities and the everyday violence that accompanied the expansion of British rule over the Eastern Cape . This was often “unofficial” violence; it was the violence of settlers against Indigenous peoples. And it was baked into the everyday experience of empire, at least in the early stages of settler colonial states, and often for much longer. When I turned my own research gaze away from the Cape and towards the other settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand during the same period of the early nineteenth century, it was impossible to ignore the presence of the same kind of violence I had glimpsed in the Cape. 1
If it is true that imperial historians have not typically highlighted settler violence as central to the experience of making empire, local historians of empire have long been aware of the phenomenon. What Elizabeth Elbourne referred to some years ago—adopting the phraseology of the humanitarian discourse of the 1830s—as “the sin of the settler” was familiar to those who worked in the colonial archives. This is particularly true in the case of Australia. Many years of official and unofficial silence, when histories of Australia carefully avoided or sanitized the degree of violence in its past, were broken in the early 1980s as national historians such as Henry Reynolds , and local researchers such as P.D. Gardener and Lyndall Ryan carefully documented the extent of settler violence. 2
But once this happened, a storm of political and academic controversy—what became known as the “history wars ”—broke over the findings of this research. In a sense, this was hardly surprising. The evidence of a deeply embedded tradition of violence against indigenous peoples sharply contradicted the dominant Australian sense of a benign national identity. The idea that the country had “another past”, in the words of Raymond Evans, was hard to take, and the fires of controversy were stoked when the would-be historian Keith Windshuttle mounted an extensive assault on scholarly integrity of those who had presented evidence of the violence. This set off a long and bitter controversy that became a national political issue in which historians who pointed to this aspect of Australia’s past were tagged as “black armband” purveyors of a disloyal past. Thankfully, it is unnecessary for an outsider such as myself to venture into that particular political and historical morass. Now that the dust has settled down, the claims of scholarly deception about frontier conflict have been effectively dismissed, and the presence and the scale of settler violence have been amply documented as an undeniable fixture in Australian history. 3
Whether the extent of the violence was the same in other parts of the British empire is not clear. And what determines its local differences is also unclear. It may be particularly sharp, for example, where pastoralist settlers compete for land with hunter gatherers. What is evident, however, is the intimate association of violence with the making of empire wherever it is experienced. And significant studies of frontier violence are beginning to appear for other areas of the British world. Major studies of frontier violence in South Africa have appeared, for example. It is a topic that is now attracting some attention in the largest settler colony of them all—the United States. The everyday violence of the State in colonies like Burma and India has been delineated. In New Zealand, where the degree of casual violence was, perhaps, less common than it was elsewhere, it has still proved necessary to rescue the brutality of the various frontier wars from the hush of posterity. 4
Let me first define the key features of this violence, as I treat it here. First, it was quotidian, almost everyday in character, and personal. It was outside of the big-event violence like the Indian uprising of 1857 . It was the kind of violence Elizabeth Kolsky has documented for India as being “an intrinsic feature of imperial rule” but which has also been “one of the empire’s most closely guarded secrets”. Evidence of such incidents can be found in official and unofficial records; in newspapers, and in published memoirs. This violence was primarily driven by the settler community, and it possessed a personal quality even when conducted by collective groups. Violent episodes ranged from set-piece battles between settler posses and indigenes, to informal parties of settlers going off hunting native people, to the individual murder of settler or aborigine in their isolated, lonely homestead. 5
Second, its demographic impact on the Indigenous populations could be profound. The greatest efforts to delineate this have been in Australia. But reliable statistical measures have p
roved difficult to achieve and controversial. Estimates of the base indigenous population which suffered the violence are, of course, largely guess work; the records of violent incidents themselves are scanty and often unreliable. It has taken considerable ingenuity on the part of historians to come up with reasonable figures even for a region such as Queensland which was universally acknowledged to be a killing ground in the nineteenth century. But to give an idea of how the numbers have proved difficult to comprehend, in 1972 Henry Reynolds estimated a toll of 5000 indigenous people killed in Queensland. By the early 1980s this estimate had doubled, and the most recent total, after careful reconstruction of available records, is about 60,000—which is twice the number that Reynolds had thought was the total of indigenous peoples killed in all of Australia between 1788 and 1900. Looking at another area of Australia, one authority has estimated that such violence killed 11% of the indigenous population in the Port Phillip (Melbourne) district in 1836 alone. In the case of Tasmania where the Indigenous population in 1800 was about 5000, it is estimated that about 1000 were killed by settler vigilante groups mainly between 1823 and 1831. And this dismal catalogue could be continued. 6