Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  A narrative explanation of colonial violence was, therefore, constructed in the public discourse of the early nineteenth century at the same time that it was silenced in the private discourse. But by the late nineteenth century the ordering of this regime of silence was reversed. Now it was settler culture that was prepared to admit violence and imperial culture that denied it. By 1870s, the settler generation wanted to leave their stories to posterity, and a developing nationalism demanded foundational narratives. In this context, silence about violence at the local level (and I am speaking now mainly of Australia, but I think it also applies to South Africa) was replaced by narratives that sought to integrate it into a wider narrative about national identity that pitted the hardy pastoralist settler against the harsh and challenging environment of the bush. Violence was sanitized in this process; it could not be denied, but it could be coded and re-contextualized as the product of the rough and difficult circumstances of the frontier. In the process many false arguments were created that are still being swatted down. One of the most audacious claims that began to be heard in this literature, and which still frames much historical discussion, was how policies designed to “protect” indigenous people were themselves responsible for the violence and did more harm than good. Even a governor like George Grey came in for condemnation for his “weak policy” of trying to restrain and contain settler violence! 37

  But if this was true at the local level, in imperial culture more generally a silence descended in the late nineteenth century to supplant the more open acknowledgements of 50 years before. Although the story of the Tasmanian Aborigines was not forgotten—thanks to a few local historians who strangely continued to foster the spirit of early nineteenth century humanitarianism—it was fitted into dominant narratives such as the “vanishing races”. 38 Of course, this was a way of avoiding facing the violence that produced the vanishing. And these stories are to be found in the works of late nineteenth century writers such as Charles Dilke and Anthony Trollope as they circulated the empire writing official narratives for a popular audience. Nor of course did the continuing violence of the frontier in Australia get more than an occasional notice in the halls of power in London. So when Aimé Césaire and other early post-colonial thinkers announced the inherent violence of colonialism in 1950, it was in a way a re-discovery.

  And so we return to where I began in this chapter. Until the recent past British culture learnt to treat this kind of colonial violence as aberrational, as something that was essentially out of the ordinary. Naturally, as Caroline Elkins and others have recently reminded us, those who made policy had a more sanguine view of the uses of violence. But the founding generations of imperial historians did not treat violence as of much account. Nor for that matter have more recent general histories. There is no supplementary volume on violence in the Oxford History of the British Empire, for example. 39 But if it has tended to get erased from the imperial historiography, violence has sprung to prominence in the local historiographies of Australia in particular—as the various works cited in this chapter testify.

  This is a lead worth pursuing. And not only to put the historical record straight, but also because it provides a way to enter into the history of emotions that was engaged in empire. It suggests that making empire was full of anxiety , fear and doubt and it reveals the fragilities that were part of the empire project. It is useful also as a way of teasing apart, in close detail, how it was that liberal society coped with and explained the violence that was integral to its engagement with empire. And this, of course, is a problem that is with us still.

  Notes

  1.A start has been made to put violence into the narrative of empire by Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Kim Wagner, ‘Going Native: Colonial Informants and Contentious Intimacies’, North American Conference on British Studies. Little Rock, November 2015. Richard Price, Making Empire. Colonial Encounters and Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  2. 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); Henry Reynolds , The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1982); and Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987) were two of the earliest studies to document the extent of frontier violence. P.D. Gardener, Gippsland Massacres. The Destruction of the Kurnai Tribes 1800–1860 (Warragul, Vic.: West Gippsland and Latrobe Valley Community Education Centre, 1983). More recently, Henry Reynolds, Forgotten Wars (Sydney, N.S.W.: NewSouth Publishing, 2013). For other characteristic examples see the following pieces by Lyndall Ryan , ‘Settler massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851’, Journal of Australian Studies, 34:3 (September 2010), 257–273, ‘Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania 1823–34: a case study of the Meander River Region, June 1827’, Journal of Genocide Research, 10:4 (December 2008), 479–499, “Settler Massacre on the Australian Colonial Frontier 1836–1851,” Philip Dwyer, and Lyndall Ryan (eds), Theatres of Violence. Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 94–109. Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence. Queensland’s Frontier Killing-Time (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2013).

  3.Raymond Evans, ‘The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars’, and Lyndall Ryan , ‘“Hard Evidence”: the debate about massacre in the Black War in Tasmania’, in Francis Peters-Little, Anne Curthoys, and John Docker (eds), Passionate Histories myth, memory and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU E Press, Aboriginal History Monograph 21, 2010). Tom Griffith, ‘The Language of Conflict’, in Frontier Conflict. The Australian Experience, Bain Attwood and G.S. Foster (eds) (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 135–149. Keith Windshuttle’s major challenge to the extent of frontier violence was The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002).

  4.Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Genocide on Settler Frontiers. When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2014), has important essays on South Africa and also Tasmania, Canada and the United States. For South Africa see also Nigel Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), and Susan Newton King, Masters and Servants on the Cape’s Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For India, see Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For Burma see Jonathan Saha, ‘A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, The Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta, c. 1890–1910’, Past and Present, 217 (November 2012), 187–212. For the United States see, Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land. Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2006) and Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide. The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). James Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986); Vincent O’Malley, ‘Inglorious Dastards: Rangiaowhia raid and the ‘great war for New Zealand’, The Listener (New Zealand), 25 February 2017.

  5.Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, 1–2, 9.

  6.And this is not to take account of the cultural impact, which I will not address here. For discussions of the difficulties of making accurate counts of the violence see Richard Broome, “The Statistics of Frontier Conflict,” in Attwood and Foster, Frontier Conflict, 88–98 and Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen, ‘“I cannot say the numbers that were killed”: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier’, Paper Presented to the Australian Historical Association,
33rd Annual Conference, University of Queensland, 7–11 July 2015 https://​papers.​ssrn.​com/​sol3/​papers.​cfm?​abstract_​id=​2467836, accessed 27 February 2017. Henry Reynolds , in Forgotten War (Sydney, 2013) 133–134. See also the very important work of Ian D. Clark, Scars in the Landscape. A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, 1995) who has uncovered 103 separate killing sites in Victoria most of which occurred between 1838 and 1842; Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence. History and Memory of South Australia’s Frontier Wars (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2012); Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence; Ryan, ‘Settler Massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851’.

  7.The relationship of the law to this type of violence is another big question that I shall not address here. There is a large and growing literature by legal scholars relevant to these points. But of particular relevance to this argument are Julie Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is the Law. The Settler Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 30 (2009), 3–22; Evans, ‘Colonialism and the Rule of Law: The Case of South Australia’, in Barry Dunstall and Godfrey Graeme, Empire and Crime 1840–1940 (Cullompton, Devon: Willan, 2005), 57–77; Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne (eds), Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

  8. Aimé Cesairé , Discourse on Colonialism (New York, 2000), 35; Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, CBE1/111, Committee for the Care of Captured Aborigines. Minutes of Meetings. 17 February 1830–18 September 1832, 9 March 1830, 24–25. It was a common practice to sever the heads of aborigine prisoners, especially perhaps those who had led an effective guerrilla war against the settlers. For an example see, George Fletcher Moore , Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia (London: M. Walbrook, 1884), 206. For Maori heads sold in Sydney, see, British Parliamentary Papers, Select Committee on Aborigines, 1837, Report, 16 along with other gory details. For Hintsa, see Premish Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa. Post Apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009), 31, 55–58, 131–132. For the collection of skulls, see Andrew Bank, ‘Of “Native Skulls” and “Noble Caucasians”: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 22:3 (Sept 1996): 387–403; Tom Lawson, The Last Man. A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 165–171.

  9.For colonial violence as genocide, see, Lawson, The Last Man; Colin Tatz, ‘Colonial Genocide in Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 1:3 (1999), 315–352; A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in Genocide. Critical Studies in Historical Concepts. Volume III. Colonial and Imperial Genocides, A. Dirk Moses (ed.)(London: Routledge, 2012), 140–181. Adhikari (ed.), Genocide on Settler Frontiers. When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash. And for a good discussion of this issue see Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, 138–158.

  10.The complicated relationship between humanitarianism and violence is addressed in Penny Edmonds and Anna Johnston (eds), ‘Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 17:1 (Spring 2016).

  11.Kolsky, Colonial Justice, 9: ‘white violence vividly revealed the disorder and terror brought through colonial contact’; Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, 75–84. For the Trugannini story see, Hon. Mr. Justice Crawford, et al., The Diaries of John Helder Wedge 1824–1835 (Hobart: The Royal Society of Tasmania, 1962), xliii.

  12. Hannah Arendt , On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1969), 56; Thomas Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Being a Series of Papers on the Early Occupation of the Colony, the Aborigines Etc. Addressed by Victorian Pioneers to His Excellence Charles Joseph LaTrobe (London: Heinemann, 1969), 219; Reynolds , Frontier, Aborigines, Settlers and Land, 3–31, 174; James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne, Victoria: Black Inc., 2008), 38, 194–197, 284, 289. On fear more generally as an element of social violence see, Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy. The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 6, 42, 225; Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, Volume I. The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 119–126, 146; Kim Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny” Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past and Present, 218 (February 2013), 159–197. For an example of settler fear in the French colony of New Caledonia see, Adrian Muckle, ‘Killing the “Fantôme Canaque”: Evoking and Invoking the Possibility of Settler Revolt in New Caledonia 1853–1915’, Journal of Pacific History, 37:1 (2002), 25–44.

  13.Edward M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria Then Called the Port Phillip District from 1841 to 1851 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1883), 51–54; Edward John Eyre [Edited with introduction by Jill Waterhouse], Autobiographical Narrative of Residence and Exploration in Australia 1832–1839 (London: Caliban Books, 1984), 136–137; N.J.B. Plomley, Friendly Mission. The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Association, 1966), 174, 524, 537, 865–867 for representative examples. Schwarz, Memories of Empire, 119 for a nice example from Queensland.

  14.See, CO 209/309 New South Wales. Original Correspondence Despatches, April–June 1841, ff. 70–95. There are many accounts of the Risdon Cove massacre, at which up to 50 Indigenous people were killed. See Henry Reynolds , Fate of a Free People (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1995), 76–77; Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 37–41. For the Myall Creek massacre see M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86 (Sydney, 1979), 46–47; R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists. Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1974), 34–40; Michael Sturma, ‘Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder’, Journal of Australian Studies, 9:16 (1985), 62–70.

  15.Barry Morris, “Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror.” Journal of Australian Studies, 16, no. 35 (2009): 72–87; Sturma, “Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder.”

  16.‘Shooting An Elephant’, http://​www.​online-literature.​com/​orwell/​887/​ accessed 6 June 2012; Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, 23 (Spring, 1997), 482–493.

  17.Plomley, Friendly Mission, 865–66, ‘They could not believe it…[the man was watched and on] his departure…[the natives] concealed themselves from the party and murdered him on his return.’ Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 194.

  18.Marie Fels, ‘Culture Contact in the County of Buckinghamshire, Van Diemen’s Land 1801–11,’ Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, 29:2 (1982), 47–79, on the generally peaceful relations of the first decade or so of contact. Moore, Ten Years of Eventful Life, 199–200, 211–218, 226–228, 380, 385, for representative examples. The experience parallels the missionaries’ inability to read the signs recounted in my Making Empire, Chaps. 4 and 5. The importance of rumour as a means of political communication is another aspect of the ignorance of this phase of colonial relations. I do not have space to deal with that here.

  19.For this very interesting incident, see Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Mythologizing Frontier Violence: Narrative Versions of the Rufus River Conflict, 1841–1899’, Journal of Australian Studies 23.61 (1999), 75–82. And for just one example of how cultural mis-readings could lead to violence see, Charles Bonny, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Proceedings 1901–1902, 5, 89.

  20.Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves (Port Melbourne, 1991), 50–55; see also Moore, Ten Years of Eventful Life, 120, 198–200, 211–216, 343.

  21.See Making Empire, Chap. 11. For Myall Creek see, Michael Sturma, “Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder.” See Stanley Cohen, States of Denial . Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), for how knowledge about atrocities is processed and suppressed. This is a general feature of colonial society that has been (uns
urprisingly) noticed more by those subject to its rule and culture than the perpetrators themselves. See, for example, O Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban. The Psychology of Colon Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1983).