Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  31.McNair, Perak and the Malays, 407–408.

  32.Jervois to Carnarvon, 14 January 1876, C.1505, 268; Parkinson, British Intervention in Malaya, 296–297.

  33.Ross to Garforth, 2 January 1876, The National Archives (hereafter: TNA) CO882/3; Enclosure: Maxwell to Colonial Secretary, 1 March 1876, CO882/3; Maxwell to Colonial Secretary, 5 June 1876, CO882/3.

  34.See William Francis Patrick Napier, ‘The Malays: and A Few Words Regarding Perak and Salangore’, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection, (1876), 22–23.

  35.Hinxmann, 9 December 1875, TNA CO276/6. See also H.B. Rich, ‘The Campaign in the Malay Peninsula: November 1875–February 1876’, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection, (1876), 17.

  36.See for example: Dunlop’s Report, 16 November 1875, CO276/6.

  37.Jervois to Carnarvon, 12 November 1875, C.1505, 24.

  38.W. David McIntyre, The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, 1865–75: A Study of British Colonial Policy in West Africa, Malaya and the South Pacific in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (London: Macmillan, 1967), 316.

  39.Sadka, Protected Malay States, 92.

  40.Sadka, Protected Malay States, 92.

  41.Sadka, Protected Malay States, 93. See Enquiry as to Complicity of Chiefs into the Perak Outrages: Précis of Evidence, (Singapore, 1876).

  42.Originally described as a house tax, ‘hut tax’ was a pejorative term created by the Freetown press to express their disdain for direct taxation: Arthur Abraham, Mende Government and Politics under Colonial Rule: A Historical Study of Political Change in Sierra Leone 1890–1937 (Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1978), 133.

  43.See Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 541.

  44.See J. D. Hargreaves, ‘The Establishment of the Sierra Leone Protectorate and the Insurrection of 1898’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 12:1 (1956), 65.

  45.See Abraham, Mende Government; T. J. Alldridge, The Sherbro and its Hinterland (London: Macmillan, 1901); C. Braithwaite Wallis, The Advance of Our West African Empire (London: Unwin, 1903).

  46.For further explanation see Hargreaves, ‘Sierra Leone Protectorate’, 56.

  47.Kenneth C. Wylie, The Political Kingdoms of the Temne: Temne Government in Sierra Leone 1825–1910 (New York: Africana Publishing, 1977), 160.

  48.Cited in Abraham, Mende Government, 132.

  49.Zubairu Wai, Epistemologies of African Conflicts: Violence, Evolutionism, and the War in Sierra Leone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Kindle edition.

  50.Hargreaves, ‘Sierra Leone Protectorate’, 63.

  51.After the chiefs had waited in Freetown for two months to speak to him: as summarised by David Chalmers in his report. Chalmers was commissioned to conduct an enquiry into the reasons for the outbreak of the war, see Sierra Leone: Report by Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Correspondence on the Subject of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate 1898: Part I, Report and Correspondence, C.9388 (1899) [hereafter: Chalmers Report Part I], 22–23.

  52.Cardew to Chamberlain, 24 December 1897, TNA CO879/55.

  53.Chalmers Report Part I, 32.

  54. Sierra Leone Report by Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Correspondence on the Subject of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate 1898 Part II, Evidence and Documents, C.9391 (1899) [hereafter Chalmers Report Part II], 215.

  55.Chalmers Report Part II, 214.

  56.Chalmers Report Part II, 216.

  57.For Sharpe’s account of these events see Chalmers Report Part II, 217.

  58.Michael Crowder with LaRay Denzer, ‘Bai Bureh and the Sierra Leone Hut Tax War of 1898’, in Crowder (eds.), Colonial West Africa: Collected Essays (London: Frank Cass, 1978), 89.

  59.Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 564; Appendix D, ‘Staff Diary 24 February to 20 and 27, 28 March 1898’, TNA WO32/7624.

  60.Woodgate, 17 April, ‘Karene Report on Operations 14 April to 24 April 1898’, TNA WO32/7626.

  61.Private Papers of Brigadier General F. M. Carleton DSO, Documents. 20718, 8 May 1898, Imperial War Museum.

  62.Major General Charles Howard Foulkes (1875–1969): GB0099 KCMA Foulkes 4/1, King’s College Liddell Hart Military Archives.

  63.Michael Crowder, ‘West African Resistance’, in Crowder (ed.), West African Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occupation (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 16; Wallis, The Advance of Our West African Empire, 81. The need for such tactics in the face of a conflict with no clearly defined enemy was argued by Callwell, Small Wars.

  64.‘Karene Report on Recent Operations’, TNA WO32/7623; Chalmers Report Part II, 228.

  65.Chalmers Report Part II, 342.

  66.Crowder, ‘Bai Bureh’, 91.

  67.Cited in LaRay Denzer, ‘A Diary of Bai Bureh’s War: Part I: February 1st—April 1st: Bai Bureh Holds the Initiative’, Sierra Leone Studies, New Series 23, (1968), 59.

  68.Cardew to Chamberlain, 23 July 1898, CO879/55.

  69.Cardew to Chamberlain, 23 July 1898, CO879/55.

  70.Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 601.

  71.See: P. M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1898: A Study of its Origins, Development and Overthrow, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1970 [1958]).

  72.Holt, Mahdist State, 240.

  73.See: Unsworth, 16 April 1898, Sudan Archive, University of Durham Library (hereafter: SAD) 233/5; Winston S. Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, vol. II (London: Longman’s Green, 1899), 196.

  74.See for example: Rudolf C. Slatin, Fire and Sword in the Sudan: A Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes, 1879–1895, trans. F. R. Wingate (London: Arnold, 1896); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 136.

  75.Holt, Mahdist State, 273.

  76.Egerton, Memorandum, SAD/477/8. E. W. C. Sandes, The Royal Engineers in Egypt and the Sudan (Chatham: Institute of Royal Engineers, Mackays Ltd, 1937), 217, n2.

  77.See for example: Private George Teigh in John Meredith (ed.), Omdurman Diaries 1898: Eyewitness Accounts of the Legendary Campaign (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 1998), 85.

  78.See: M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2–3.

  79.Holt, Mahdist State, 240.

  80.Churchill, River War, vol. II, 195.

  81.See Medical Officer Major Adamson’s account of his departure from Omdurman for example, in Henry Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting: A Centenary Review of the Sudan Campaigns 1883–1899 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 241. The following work was central to these claims: Ernest N. Bennett, ‘After Omdurman’, Contemporary Review, 75 (1899), 18–33; cf. W. Gatacre, ‘After the Atbara and Omdurman’, Contemporary Review, 75 (1899), 299–304. Churchill, River War, vol. II, 225.

  82.Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting, 243. On the massacring of the enemy wounded by the British in the Zulu War see, Michael Lieven, ‘“Butchering the Brutes All Over the Place”: Total War and Massacre in Zululand, 1879’, History, 18 (1999), 614–632. For further discussion of the reconquest in relation to European colonial violence and Nazi genocidal violence see, Michelle Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence and Holocaust Studies’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 21:4 (2015), 272–291.

  83.See Bennett, ‘After Omdurman’, 24–25; Daly, Empire on the Nile, 3; ’Ismat Hasan Zulfo, Karari: The Sudanese Account of the Battle of Omdurman, trans. Peter Clark (Bath: Warne, 1980), 236.

  84.See for example: Hunter, ‘Sudan Campaign May–Oct 1898’, SAD/964/3. Colonel John admitted to killing several Emirs the night after the battle: Maxwell to Wingate, 24 May 1908, SAD/282/5; see also Daly, Empire on the Nile, 4.

  85.Clayton, 4 September 1898 SAD/942/7/87.

  86.Steven Serels, ‘Feasting on Famines: Food Insecurity and the Making of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1883–1956’, (PhD, McGill University, 2012), 190. See also Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 134.


  87.See for example: Sudan Intelligence Report 56, 6 October to 12 November 1898, SAD.

  88.Serels, ‘Feasting on Famines’, 191–192.

  89.Gabriel Warburg, The Sudan under Wingate: Administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1899–1916 (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 3.

  90.J. Gorst to Cromer, Egypt Confidential No. 4 (1898), TNA FO78/5050.

  91.See for example Roger D. Long, The Man on the Spot: Essays on British Empire History (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995).

  92.Jervois to Carnarvon, 16 November 1875, C.1505, 86.

  93.Peter Gordon (ed.), The Political Diaries of the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon, 1857–1890: Colonial Secretary and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (London: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2009), 272.

  94.See Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999).

  95.LaRay Denzer, ‘Sierra Leone-Bai Bureh’, in Crowder (ed.), West African Resistance, 243–244.

  96.‘The Responsibilities of Empire’, The Times, 10 November 1875.

  97.Cardew to Chamberlain, 28 May 1898, TNA CO267/438.

  98.Cardew cited in Abraham, Mende Government, 132.

  99.Cited in McIntyre, The Imperial Frontier, 307: emphasis in original.

  100.‘Leave of Absence’, The Straits Times, 19 June 1875. See also Mallal, ‘J. W. W. Birch’, 37.

  101.See Daly, Empire on the Nile, 3.

  102.Though Lord Salisbury had voiced his support for extreme methods from the beginning of the campaign. See Salisbury to Cromer, 20 March 1896, TNA FO633/114.

  103.See Holt, Mahdist State, 230. On the role of Sudanese troops see Ronald M. Lamothe, Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers and the River War 1896–1898 (Oxford: James Currey, 2011).

  104.Lt. H. V. Fison claimed that Kitchener gave orders prior to the battle that ‘all wounded Dervishes passed over had to be bayoneted’. Cited in Frank Emery (ed.), Marching Over Africa: Letters from Victorian Soldiers (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986), 171.

  105.Bennett, ‘After Omdurman’, 20.

  106.Jervois to McNair, 23 December 1875, C.1505, 250.

  107.The term ‘fanatic’ was often linked to justifications for violence in ‘colonial’ language, see Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: “Frontier Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, 120:4 (2015), 1221, n10.

  108.Alex J. Bellamy, ‘Mass Killing and the Politics of Legitimacy: Empire and the Ideology of Selective Extermination’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 58:2 (2012), 159–180.

  109.Surgeon Major-General J.B. Hamilton cited in Edward M. Spiers, ‘The Use of the Dum Dum Bullet in Colonial Warfare’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 4:1 (1975), 7. See also Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, Volume II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 266; Bellamy, ‘Mass Killing’, 159–180; Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980).

  110.See for example: J. F. V. Keiger, ‘Omdurman, Fashoda and Franco-British Relations’, in Spiers (ed.), Sudan, 163–176; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 519–521.

  111.Levene, Rise of the West, 47.

  112.Levene, Rise of the West, 254. Regarding fatalism among Bai Bureh and his men see Crowder, ‘West African Resistance’, 15.

  113.Henk Wesseling, ‘Imperialism and the Roots of the Great War’, Dædalus, 134:2 (2005), On Imperialism, 104.

  114.Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past and Present‚ 233:1 (2016), 214.

  115.One example is the otherwise impressive five volume Oxford History of the British Empire, also noted by Dan Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, in Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2006), 182. For more on Britain’s relationship with genocide see, Martin Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Parameters of National Responsibility’, Review of International Studies, 37:5 (2011), 2417–2438.

  116.See Duncan Bell’s ‘Comment: Desolation Goes before Us’ in ‘A Roundtable on John Darwin’s The Empire Project’, Journal of British Studies, 54:4 (2015), 989.

  117.For example, Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

  118.Bender, 1857 Indian Uprising, 19. See also Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  119.See for example: Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘Deadly Learning? Concentration Camps in Colonial Wars Around 1900’, in Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (eds), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 219–235; Donald Bloxham et al., ‘Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence’, in Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20.

  120.Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, 1231.

  121.Anson cited in The Spectator, 20 August 1920. On ‘imperial careering’ see: David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Lambert and Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–31. On exchanges of military personnel see: Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Massacre in the Old and New Worlds, c.1780–1820’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:2 (2013), 113.

  122.John S. Galbraith, ‘The “Turbulent Frontier” as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2:2 (1960), 168.

  123.See John Darwin’s reply in ‘A Roundtable on John Darwin’s The Empire Project’, 995.

  124.See: Bloxham et al., ‘Europe in the World’, 11–39; Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence and Holocaust Studies’.

  Acknowledgements

  The research for this chapter was supported by a bursary from the Friendly Hand Charitable Foundation and a Reid Scholarship from Royal Holloway, University of London. I am very grateful to the editors of this book for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

  © 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_9

  Disciplining Native Masculinities: Colonial Violence in Malaya, ‘Land of the Pirate and the Amok’

  Jialin Christina Wu1

  (1)Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

  Jialin Christina Wu

  Email: christina.wu@uclouvain.be

  On the morning of 4 June 1901, in the British Crown Colony of Singapore, a Malay man named Ibrahim fatally stabbed a woman, Tasmia, in his rented house at Little Cross Street. Armed with his spear, Ibrahim then murdered two unsuspecting neighbours in the vicinity before turning his steps towards Arab Street. Slashing and chasing frightened pedestrians with his weapon, Ibrahim was finally overpowered by an onlooker who struck a mortal blow to his skull with an improvised club. Ten people perished. Seven others suffered grave injuries. The colony’s journalists were quick to report on the grisly details of Ibrahim’s sudden and gratuitous attack on the co-inhabitants of his rented residence and the innocent bystanders along Arab Street. ‘No motive can be assigned for the murderer’s action’, concluded a reporter for one of Singapore’s leading English newspapers, The Straits Times. ‘[Ibrahim] was practising as a quack doctor, and was not known by anyone.’ 1