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  • Savage Warfare:Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgenc
  • Kim A. Wagner (bio)

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Fig 1.

British officers with trophy-skulls and other souvenirs during the ninth Xhosa War in South Africa, 1878. F. N. Streatfeild, Kafirland: a Ten Months' Campaign, London, 1879.

The nickel plate bullet hitherto used with the Lee-Metford rifle went clean through the body, and unless a vital part was struck the person did not feel the inconvenience for some little time. The Dum Dum bullet, on the other hand, stops the man instantly, and causes such a wound that the percentage of deaths and lifelong injuries is very largely increased. That is the way to spread civilising influences and impress the hillmen with a respect and admiration for their British foes.

Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 1897.1

Within the last few years the subject of colonial violence has come to the fore in debates on the legacies of the British Empire, with a range of lawsuits and calls for formal apologies and reparation, as well as demands for the [End Page 217] repatriation of imperial loot or the removal of statues of avowed imperialists. At the same time a growing body of scholarship has explored the role of colonial violence, both epistemic and physical, as an intrinsic aspect of British and European imperialism.2 The insights provided by such studies, however, have yet to make much of an inroad in conventional historiography of the Empire – certain quarters of what was once described as 'new imperial history' now seem positively dated. In a recent roundtable discussion of John Darwin's The Empire Project, Duncan Bell, for instance, takes the author to task for not adequately including 'the brutal violence and insidious racism at the core of the Victorian empire' in his analysis.3 Darwin's response is telling:

Exactly how to discuss violence in relation to the British Empire is an interesting question. Plainly there were many brutal episodes in its history. Plainly, its authority depended ultimately (and sometimes immediately) upon the use of violence. But then so has that of almost every state in history, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial (and things are not getting better). To say that violence played a central part in Britain's imperial history is not to add much to the sum of knowledge.4

Since violence was not unique to imperialism, Darwin seems to suggest, no further examination is warranted beyond a token gesture towards those 'episodes' about which it is difficult to equivocate. The inevitable invocation of the 'Mutiny' of 1857, the Amritsar Massacre or Mau Mau as unfortunate yet singular excesses, ultimately serves to marginalize the role of violence as a key aspect of British colonialism.5 Add to this the similarly inevitable comparison to German or Belgian colonial atrocities, or in Darwin's case, to the mass murders of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, which relativizes British colonial violence to the point of whitewash. The result is an implicitly sanitized account of the British Empire.

Rather than looking at the 'usual suspect' that is settler violence, this article examines the violence at the heart of British colonial counterinsurgency during the high-point of Empire. The racialized aspects of colonial military doctrine and practice would be an obvious place to look if one were to examine the role of violence in the context of British imperialism, yet the subject has somehow managed to hide in plain sight. Largely eschewed by most imperial and global historians, colonial military history has till recently been the prerogative of parochial military histories. While the pervasive nature of colonial violence is commonly accepted, or at the very least acknowledged, within British and imperial history, the same cannot be said for the way in which military historians have dealt with the subject. Quite the opposite in fact; concurrent with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001, military historians and practitioners have increasingly invoked a narrative concerning British expertise and proficiency in [End Page 218] counterinsurgency, with particular reference to the colonial experience of its armed forces.6


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Fig 2.

'A Zulu Scout': nineteenth...

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