Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  22.For such a protector see Geoffrey Grainger, ‘Matthew Moorhouse and the South Australian Aborigines, c. 1836–1856’, (BA Honours Thesis, Flinders University, 1980). CO 201/309, New South Wales. Original Correspondence Despatches April–June 1841, ff. 63.

  23.For a good example of this process, see Michael Taussig, ‘Culture of Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (1984), 494–495; Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 33–34, for the same theme in Queensland.

  24.For Wybalenna see N.J.B. Plomley, Weep In Silence. A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement (Sandy Bay, Tas.: Blubber Head Press, 1987). For the concept of blindsight, see Cohen, States of Denial, 6.

  25.We have only just begun to de-construct this period and the complicated and multi-faceted phenomenon of humanitarianism . The policies and work of colonial governors such as Grey and Arthur have to be seen in the light of their humanitarian sensibilities. For this see, Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance. See also, Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire. Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954 (Oxford, 2013); Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler’; and Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘“We Should Take Each Other by the Hand”: Conciliation and Diplomacy in Colonial Australia and North West Canada’, in Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds (eds), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers. Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (New York: Routledge, 2015), 36–53. For the recognition of the violence of colonial dispossession at the time see Saxe Bannister, Humane Policy; or Justice to the Aborigines or New Settlements (London: T. & G. Underwood, 1830).

  26.Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain. The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1989).

  27.Ben Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror. John Graham and the Cape’s Eastern Frontier (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians; or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London: Low, 1870), 76. Salutary terror was not used only against indigenes, of course. Arthur used it in Tasmania as part of the strict disciplinary regime of his convict policy. See Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 168–169, for Arthur’s judicial reign of terror in the mid-1820s. There are many examples of salutary terror as the justification for State led violence, such as the Pinjarra expedition in Western Australia. See Reynolds, Forgotten Wars, 55–56; and Pamela Statham, ‘James Stirling and the Pinjarra’, Studies in Western Australian History, 23 (2003), 167–194. The hopes that salutary terror would effect reformation were always doomed to be disappointed as some people realized this at the time, see J.E. Calder’s comments on Arthur’s use of it in Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits Etc., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania. (Hobart, 1875), 45. On Sir George Grey and the Maori convicts see Maori Convicts, ‘Documents 1846–1847’, Turnbull Library, MS 0714; Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Mythologizing Frontier Violence: Narrative Versions of the Rufus River Conflict, 1841–1899’, Journal of Australian Studies, 23.61 (1999), 75–82; and Plomley, Friendly Mission, 178, for the combination of conciliation and terror as a strategy.

  28.Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, 198–206; and John Wraithall Bull, Early Experiences of Life in South Australia (Adelaide: E.S. Wigg & Son, 1884 [reprint 1972]), 127, 309, are examples of the normalization of salutary terror as part of the civilizing process—how it was necessary to create dread in the minds of the aborigines in order to establish a safe place for the lives and property of the settlers.

  29.On the Netherlands see, Paul Bul, ‘Colonial Memory and Forgetting in the Netherlands and Indonesia’, in Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses (eds), Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence. The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 261–281. For the complicated issue of silence and its relationship to emotions and historical experience see, William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52–53, 132–134.

  30.Alexander Buchanan, ‘Diary of a Journey Overland from Sydney to Adelaide with Sheep, July–December 1839’, Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Proceedings, 1921–1922 (Adelaide, 1922), 72–76. For the way regimes of silence were reflected in the various phases of the historiography of the Tasmanian tragedy, see Lyndall Ryan, ‘“Hard Evidence”: the debate about massacre in the Black War in Tasmania’, in Peters-Little et al., Passionate Histories, 39–50.

  31.The play was, Van Diemen’s Land. An Operatic Drama in Three Parts; F.J. Meyrick, Life in the Bush (1840–1847). A Memoir of Henry Howard Meyrick (London: Nelson, 1939), 136. This code of silence has a history, too, of course. After the Myall Creek massacre of June 1838 for which seven white settlers were convicted and hanged, the code of silence became much tighter. See P.G. Gardner, Through Foreign Eyes. European Perceptions of the Kurnai Tribes of Gippsland (Churchill, Vic.: Centre for Gippsland Studies, 1988), 31. This code of silence was not peculiar to the antipodes. Arthur had encountered it in Honduras when he tried to bring the white settlers there to brook for their brutality against the slaves. See Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 51.

  32.See Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 74 et al. for an intelligent discussion of this.

  33.In fact, the Bass Straits sealers do not seem to have been an inherently violent community. See Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre. The blending of two cultures at the colonial sea frontier (Launceston, Tas.: Fullers Bookshop, 2011). To humanitarians, however, they were a disordered community without law or religion that was all too symptomatic of the frontier-like quality of the Empire in the southern seas at this point in time.

  34.Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, Aborigines Committee, Report 19 March 1830 CSO1/1/332/7578 Vol. 17, 54–56, 70–74. See Lawson, The Last Man, 122 for the way this narrative goes into British culture and re-appears whenever Tasmanian Aborigines are discussed.

  35.Such narratives were also developed, of course, for specific events. In the case of the Myall Creek Massacre, this happened immediately through the reporting of the trials of the 11 men accused of the massacre in the Sydney Herald. See Rebecca Wood, ‘Frontier Violence and the bush legend. The Sydney Herald’s response to the Myall creek massacre trials and the creation of colonial identity’, History Australia, 6:3 (2009), 1–19. And for the psychological dynamic involved in this kind of displacement, see Harris, Lasana T. and Susan T. Fiske, ‘Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide’, Journal of Psychology, 219:3 (2010), 175–181.

  36.CO 280/30, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches (September–December 1831), 25 October 1831 Arthur to Goderich for an extremely interesting dispatch in which the Lt. Governor establishes this also as the official narrative of his administration’s Aborigine policy. Reynolds, Forgotten War, 9–13; James Erskine Calder, Papers Re the Aborigines of Tasmania, Mitchell Library, A597, ‘Report on the Deaths of Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker’; Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 289. It was now felt that ‘there could be no safety for the British while any Aborigine remained on Van Diemen’s Land ’.

  37.For a very good example of this see Bull, Early Experiences of Life in Australia, 69–72, 74–75; and also the essays in Thomas Francis, edited by C.E. Sayers 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 (reprint Melbourne, Vic.: Heinemann, 1969). For a full discussion of this issue see Foster and Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, Chaps. 5 and 9; Gardener, Gippsland Massacres. The Destruction of the Kurnai Tribes 1800–1860, 95–96; Gardener, Through Foreign Eyes, 20–21, 105–107. And for the way violence was normalized in the discourse of the State and politics in the later nineteenth century, see Banivanua-Mar
, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 121–123, 130–132.

  38.Thus, see Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, which is a quite remarkable account, sympathetic towards the Aborigines and clear-eyed about British violence, but which also repeats the official narrative that the violence was largely a product of degenerated Britons. And for the vanishing races, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings. Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

  39.There is however an essay by Jock McCulloch on ‘Empire and Violence, 1900–1939’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  © 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_3

  Colonial Violence and the Picturesque

  Elizabeth Mjelde1

  (1)De Anza College, Cupertino, California, USA

  Elizabeth Mjelde

  Email: elizabeth_mjelde@yahoo.com

  In 1819, Lieutenant William Lyttleton of the 73rd Regiment of Foot published A Set of Views in the Island of Ceylon, a collection of six large aquatints. 1 Lyttleton , an amateur artist, participated in Britain’s second campaign against Kandy , Sri Lanka’s inland kingdom, in 1815. The colonial government treated the occupation of the capital as a decisive victory, crucial not only to dominance of the island but also to Britain’s larger imperial goals in and around the Indian Ocean. The military nature of Lyttleton ’s activities in Sri Lanka are apparent in these aquatints. Two of the six views were depicted from the vantage point of fortresses, while a third, The Summit of the Balani Mountain (Fig. 1), depicts the remnant of a fort which, as reported in the caption, had recently been the site of a Kandyan battery overlooking ‘the only pass’ to the inland capital. The aquatint signified a moment of conquest, since Kandy had been deemed unattainable by earlier Portuguese and Dutch colonial governments but was now accessible to the British. ‘The road’, Lyttleton pointed out, ‘which winds the brow of the hill, terminating in a delightful valley, is now rendered passable for conveyances with the greatest facility, presenting no longer an almost insurmountable barrier to the Kandyan capital’. 2

  Fig. 1 William Lyttleton The Summit of the Balani Mountain. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Shelfmark XX/58

  A Set of Views in the Island of Ceylon was informed by picturesque discourse, a form of representation that coincided with, aided, and served as a form of colonial violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Decades before Lyttleton published these views, the picturesque had been, and to some degree continued to be, a popular way of representing the domestic landscape of Great Britain. Practitioners of the discourse depicted actual places by means of aesthetic guidelines designed to turn local sites into views that resembled seventeenth-century Continental landscape paintings. In doing so, they referenced work by Italian, French, and Dutch artists admired and collected by British elites. With the spread of picturesque practice to the colonies, artists transformed localities from the West Indies to Asia into visually uniform, familiar, and peaceful landscapes. Since many of those who produced such images were military officers like Lyttleton , an investigation of the relationship between epistemic and material violence resulting from colonial warfare is undertaken here, for the purpose of contextualizing picturesque imagery vis-à-vis the goals and activities of empire builders.

  To present the Kandyan landscape in a manner that would appeal to viewers in the metropole, Lyttleton reimagined a place otherwise foreign to British eyes as one that would seem familiar. He chose a vantage point that opened to receding planes, and in which trees framed and contained the scene from both sides, aspects of picturesque composition that strong-armed viewers into associating the island’s landscape with the types of scenes they searched for, sketchbooks in hand, while boating or walking in Scotland, Wales, or England. Moreover, Lyttleton eliminated local inhabitants from the picture plane or portrayed them as unidentifiable, passive figures.

  Delocalizing Sri Lankan land and people in these ways amounts to profound misrepresentation, which is categorized here as a ‘micro-action’ of violence. I borrow this term from postcolonial theorist, Achille Mbembe , who conceptualizes colonial violence as marked by small actions—violence ‘in what might be called the details’. 3 I have examined descriptions of hundreds of incidents of violence in early colonial Sri Lanka, gleaned from unpublished letters and documents exchanged by government officials, to published government gazettes, to the memoirs of military officers, clergymen, gentlemen, civil servants, artists, and others who travelled to the island during the period of British conquest. Each act of violence described therein violated a body, or the bodies, of Asians, Africans, or Europeans, or elements of the natural environment. Because the picturesque advanced knowledge about colonized people and land in ways that altered, negated, or otherwise violated local realities, such images must be discussed as micro-actions of violence in British Sri Lanka.

  To lay a groundwork for understanding how and why military officers and other picturesque practitioners, including professional artists, misrepresented land and people in the midst or aftermath of colonial warfare, I offer examples of the discourse from two battle spaces: Mysore, India in the midst of the Anglo-Mysore Wars of the late eighteenth century, and Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the first and second campaigns undertaken by the British against Kandy, from 1803 through 1805 and again in 1815. The images explored here are landscape views that bear evidence of colonial violence based on artists’ inclusion of forts, remnants of forts, or weaponry at the sites depicted. Colonial artists skilfully enfolded military accoutrements into the landscape, subordinating and naturalizing evidence of conflict. These landscape views were pervasive ideologically as well as practical. They codified imperial values, particularly in the matter of colonial contestation of land, while passing as documentation of military action.

  Warscapes of ‘the Carnatic’

  Distant View of Savan-Droog in Mysore from the East Side (Fig. 2), a wash drawing made in the early 1790s by Colonel Colin Mackenzie , an officer (eventually as an engineer) in the Madras Army, reveals a great deal about the spread of metropolitan picturesque practice into the colonial battle spaces of South India in the late eighteenth century. 4 Mackenzie reduced nature’s colours to a monochromatic scheme, and included in his drawing only as much of the landscape as would fill a Claude glass, an oval-shaped, blackened mirror used to convey the light and dark values of a scene while sketching it. Use of this tool required Mackenzie to stand with his back to the view and sketch instead its dark reflection. The officer framed the distant, elevated fortress with nearer hills, and attended to a minimum of local detail, just a few scattered trees. Regarding the terrain itself the drawing reveals little except Savandurga’s steep peaks. The British soldiers who took the fort of Savandurga would recognize it as the site of one of Tipu Sultan ’s prisons, extremely difficult to reach and from which it was deemed impossible to escape. But the image would not likely invite questions about colonial conflict from non-military viewers in the metropole.

  Fig. 2 Colin Mackenzie Distant View of Savan-Droog in Mysore from the East Side. ©British Library Board, London, Shelfmark WD573

  With no discernible reference to violence in the landscape, one less familiar with the distinctive silhouette of Savandurga might take the scene for a hilly region in Britain. A comparable image (Fig. 3) may be found in Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty of 1786 by the Reverend William Gilpin , a singularly popular writer about the picturesque in England. Gilpin , who did not shy away from sites of ruined forts or otherwise difficult to access hilltop places in Britain, described this view as ‘An illustration of that kind of wild country, of which we saw several instances, as we entered Cumberland.’ 5 Gilpin ’s aquatint and Mackenzie ’s drawing reveal the visual
priorities shared by both artists: inclusion of a variety of shapes on land and in the sky, a recession of carefully framed spatial planes, and reliance upon a Claude glass to assist in the discernment of light and dark values as well as the reduction of local detail. At the spot Gilpin bound this print into the first volume of Observations, his text urged prospective artists to consider the importance of choosing the correct time of day to make a landscape sketch of mountains:

  Fig. 3 William Gilpin “An illustration of that wild kind of country…as we entered Cumberland,” from Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

  In every representation, truly picturesque, the shade should greatly overbalance the light. The face of nature, under the glow of noon, has rarely this beautiful appearance. The artist therefore generally courts her charms in a morning, or an evening hour, when the shadows are deep, and extended; and when the sloping sun-beam affords rather a catching, than a glaring light. 6