Abstract
For a long time, historiography on the colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a predominantly national focus, often leading to theories of national exceptionalism concerning colonial violence. Even if the latter was refuted, it was done so from within a national framework. Colonial war has often been presented as something fought largely along national lines. In the Netherlands, for example, it was long assumed that, yes, the British and German empires were expansive and violent, but not so the Dutch possessions and policy in the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, some imperial historians have claimed that violence was somehow restrained, i.e., ‘better’ than that committed by other empires, claiming an exceptional position, for example in the British case.
In his thought-provoking The Colonial Way of War. Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914, post-doctoral researcher Tom Menger states that this is wide of the mark; one should take a transimperial approach as its starting point. He concludes: ‘I have advocated here instead to see it [extreme violence in the colonial wars of this period, ML] as part of a colonial way of war. The concept not only stresses that it was a way of war shared by all colonial powers; it equally emphasises its character as specifically colonial, in the sense that the violence in its frequency, shape and justification took forms that were specific to the colonial sphere’ (p. 306).
Before coming to this convincing conclusion, Menger paints a detailed picture of how and why the violence used by the Dutch, British and Germans took such extreme forms, even resulting in genocide by the latter in East Africa, nowadays seen by many as a prelude of Nazi mass violence and genocide against Jews and others in the Second World War. Merger's core argument is that shared thoughts and practices arose from exchanges and transfers between actors of different empires, both Europeans and non-Europeans. In short: similarities were much more significant than differences. Extreme violence was ‘an inherent part of this way of war, and thus a shared phenomenon among all Western colonial powers independently of national particularities; it holds that colonial ideology and racialised ideas explain an important part [of] this extreme violence’ (p. 8).
As Merger makes abundantly clear, most of those involved in the colonial warfare of the late nineteenth century had a certain sense of what forms of violence were extreme, or, as he calls it, ‘transgressive’, at least when it was about the norms of European warfare. However, those rules did not apply to colonial warfare. The most famous British treatise on the conduct of colonial war stated as such; Lothar von Trotha, the architect of genocide in Africa in 1904–1905, stated in a newspaper ‘that a war in Africa cannot be waged exclusively according to the Geneva Conventions, is self-evident’ (p. 24). Racism played an essential role here. In fact, as Merger, following others, states, these were racialised wars. The notions of these ‘were constantly reproduced and carried further, either in print (in war memoirs, newspaper reporting, and later, manuals) or, because the practitioners of colonial warfare, who had drawn on such notions to make sense of and justify their actions, moved to other contexts or wars and carried their knowledge with them’ (p. 46).
Using five case-studies, Merger shows in great and often harrowing detail how this worked out in practice and what gruesome methods were employed, such as scorched earth policies. For example, in the Ndebele-Shona War of 1896–1897, the British resorted to indiscriminate killing; frequently, no prisoners were taken at all, villages were burned to the ground. Merger: ‘Whether there was enemy contact or not, in all cases “clearing” also meant the systematic carrying off or destruction of livestock and foodstuffs […] as well as the extensive burning of the kraals, in other words, a war of devastation’ (p. 83). The Germans and Dutch essentially used the same tactics. When fighting the Herero, the German conduct of war showed all the marks of the general brutality of a colonial war, ‘exacerbated by vengefulness due to the initial murder of male settlers and the wildly exaggerated stories of Herero atrocities that were still circulating. Herero wounded in battle were killed off in the field. Many units refused to take prisoners’ (p. 103). During the War in Aceh (1873-c. 1914), the Dutch employed comparable tactics. KNIL [the colonial army, ML] warfare was often directed against strongholds, and as time passed, the Dutch increasingly cut off all escape routes from them. As Merger states, this was ‘seeking to inflict a bloodbath in them’. Moreover, ‘a second major characteristic was the war of devastation used by the KNIL. In areas considered hostile, villages, fields, fruit trees and food stores were routinely destroyed’ (p. 120).
Merger makes convincingly clear that there was indeed a Western way of war in the colonies, and that there were a number of ‘basic imperatives’ that ‘appeared in remarkably similar form and denomination in the British, German and Dutch empires […] At the bottom of these notions lay the conviction that the enemy in colonial war was fundamentally different from the European’ (p. 186). Central was also the use of devastation and hunger. Merger: ‘Against “uncivilised” enemies, the use of devastation methods was seen as self-evident’ (p. 240). An increasing stress on killing was a larger transimperial trend after 1900, the most explicit in the genocide in South West Africa, but also visible in Aceh and in the British colonies. Merger states: ‘It should be noted that the rigid binary coding of “us” vs. “them”, which was a recurring feature of colonial warfare, has also been identified as one precondition for genocide (one could also put extermination). Such dichotomisation in our case included: civilised-uncivilised/colonisers-colonised/white-not white. In this sense, one could interpret these wars as potentially genocidal’ (p. 267). In fact, Merger suggests that applying the narrow concept of genocide ‘fails to capture the place that mass killing occupied in colonial warfare at the time, as it comes to externalise it. If instead […] we conceive of these practices as extermination […] we can come to understand how the large-scale, if not always complete, destruction of particular ethnic groups was thought of as a part of colonial war’ (p. 307).
Merger has written a fascinating book that is a very welcome contribution to the ever-growing body of literature on colonialism and the nature of war in the colonies. He shows that instead of a national approach, we should look at the transimperial characteristics of what he rightly labels as ‘the colonial way of war’. Using a plethora of primary and secondary sources, The Colonial Way of War is essential reading for anyone interested in colonial and military history.
