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Tom Menger, "The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hi, and welcome to New Books and Genocide Studies, part of the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Kellen McFall from Newman University, and I'm a host on the show. And today I'm thrilled to be talking with Tom Menger, author of the Colonial Way of Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires circa 1890-1914. The book is published by Cambridge University Press and it's phenomenal. I'm really looking forward to talking to Tom about it. So, Tom, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us in New Books and Genocide Studies.
- [01:39]
C
Thank you so much for inviting me.
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B
So, Tom, I always ask our guests just to introduce themselves a little bit to the audience. So could you say a little bit about yourself and about what you do and in particular about how you got interested in the study of colonial violence?
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C
Yes, I'm very pleased to do so. So I am an historian, a historian of imperial history, or actually, more accurately, trans imperial history. I'm currently affiliated to the Munich center for Global History and will be teaching again in the next semester at the LMU University of Munich. So I think my interest in colonial violence stems from a more general interest in transcultural encounters, which I think is, at least in hindsight, very much linked to my own biographies. So my parents are both Dutch. I lived in the Netherlands for seven years, but then my parents immigrated to Portugal actually, and I lived there for most of my youth actually, but spent part of that time at a German language school as well. So I've really had already sort of these many transcultural experiences and transnational European backgrounds. I think this always. I always had this interest in transcultural encounter and I've worked on that basically from the day I started my history degree. But I think at some point my interest sort of led to the sort of most extreme form of these transcultural encounters, namely colonial war. I would say that's sort of how I came to it, I think.
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B
Yeah, you used a word there that I think everybody kind of intuitively understands. But maybe I'll ask you to say a little bit more about trans imperial history. What is that?
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C
Yes, so this is actually quite a new field in history writing. And the idea is that we've been writing imperial history for a very long time. And I think that's familiar to all listeners here. But that's mostly been sort of narrowed into national containers. So you're right about one empire or one particular nation, whether it's the British, the French, the German, French, Italian, Portuguese, et cetera. And recently people have started to ask whether that actually reflects imperial realities where an all empire is really so much sealed off from the others, Was there so little contact between them? We will start to look not only at sort of the cooperation and competition between empires that had been researched already a bit, but also specifically more on the connections which existed between them. And these three Cs together make up trans imperial history as defined by heating and hay, for instance, sort of made a first definition of the field. So it's really about looking at empires, how they competed, how they cooperated, but also how they were connected and the manifold connection that exists between them. And that's the field I position myself in. And this history of colonial violence is also an explicitly trans imperial one.
- [04:57]
B
Yeah, and we're going to talk a lot about that. So maybe let's start by just asking you why did you decide to write this book?
- [05:04]
C
That's a very good question. I think, as I said, I always had this interest in these transcultural encounters. And I think I also always had an interest in perpetrators of violence. How do people come to be perpetrators of. Of such deeds? And I think that sort of came together in this history. And when I was studying history I got more into colonial history and especially my undergraduate. I worked quite a bit on German colonial history and also this Continuity thesis, which is quite contested idea that sort of the violence of German colonialism overseas later on sort of came back to the Metropole and sort of stands at the basis of the violence was the Second World War, of the Holocaust, et cetera. And what I noticed there always was this is very much sort of national particularity. There's this idea that there's something specific to German colonialism. And when it was branching out to other empires, looking at the British Empire as well, the Dutch Empire, I started to notice that they all have their own sort of national particularity or theories of national particularity. And this is something which I instinctively wasn't a friend of. And I knew there were already historians who had criticized these different national peculiarities. But what I found was that actually this never really went beyond this one article. They had never really delved deeper into it or brought different empires together under this one specific aspect of extreme violence in colonial warfare. And mostly it was also comparative and asking much less about these connections. And here we're again at the trans. Imperial history aspect as well. And also it had never been done on this broad empirical basis that I think my book now finally presents. So it has a lot of different case studies and also a large source base. So this was really what I wanted to do. And this is where the idea for this book came from and how developed.
- [07:22]
B
Yeah. So let's start talking about it. And let's just start with the kind of easy standard way of asking, what's the thesis of the book?
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C
I think the thesis in the book is already in the sort of the title, the Colonial Way of War, which is probably, some will recognize, a sort of reaction to this national very. The many national ways of war that have been postulated. There's this idea of a British way of war, a German colonial way of war, et cetera. And these also exist in the colonial realm. And what I want to say with this word of the colonial way of war is that first, this is shared by many different empires in very similar ways. And secondly, it is colonial, which means that it's very much defined also by processes of racialization and colonial ideology, which makes it distinct from warfare in other theaters at the time. So that would be, in a nutshell, I think, the argument.
- [08:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. So let's unpack that and let's just start. We don't have time to kind of go through the history of your case studies, but I am curious about why. Maybe you could say a little bit about why you. Which case studies you picked and why you thought Those were the appropriate case studies to look at.
- [08:43]
C
Yeah. So first I would say with each choice of cases, there's always a bit of arbitrariness to it. I had settled on doing the German, British and the Dutch Empire, which was partly also because of my language expertise, but not only. It also had to do with sort of accessibility of sources, for instance. And then I started looking. I mean, the time period had also already been set by the project, so that would be basically the famousiecle time period. And then I started looking for specific colonial wars which would serve as case studies. And for the German case, I think it was pretty obvious because in this time period you have these two large colonial wars in German southwest Africa and nowadays Namibia, and in German East Africa and today largely Tanzania. That was sort of obvious. And maybe I have to take one step back, but I also wanted to have a focus on cases that were comparable in scale. So I chose this sort of larger colonial wars that also occurred after the first colonial conquest. So it's quite an interesting pattern. We see in many cases that there's first a colonial conquest and then after a couple of years when colonial penetration sort of advances, there's increasing taxation, for instance, increasing use of forced labor, et cetera. You often see this large scale backlash which results again in. In bigger colonial wars. And basically all the cases I treat here can be defined in that way. The Aceh War in Dutch East Indies is a bit of a special case, especially because it takes much longer than any of the other cases treated here. But it's definitely in scale, quite comparable.
- [10:29]
B
So one of the things that's implicit or that you look at in your argument is this question about how ideas and lessons and stories about these conflicts move from place to place. So, so let's start by asking a question about metropolitan armies, the armies at home. How did these armies in Germany and Britain and the Netherlands, how did they share ideas and information and experiences in the late 19th century?
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C
So this is a really interesting question, and it's interesting. We would generally start, we think of colonial violence. We'd also start with these metropolitan armies. The interesting thing is that they did share very little information on colonial warfare in the metropole in this time period, because these colonial armies were all basically very much directed towards conducting a large European conventional war. That was the idea, that was what they were preparing for. And the idea was that colonial warfare, even though in this time period basically all of these armies were mainly or the only conflicts they were fighting were actually colonial ones, it was still something they didn't collect information on in a very systematic way. And the whole sort of military education at the time was completely geared towards the European conventional war, with partly an exception for the Dutch case, where there was a bit more sort of a track towards the colonial service. But militarily there was very little. So they had ways of sharing information, but they didn't share information on colonial warfare, actually or largely not. The only thing where you had a certain avenue of exchange was in military journals who generally touched also on colonial cases of their own empire and of foreign empires. But within sort of the institution of the military, there wasn't very much a systematic way of sharing this information.
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B
So then that brings us to the question of the colonial armies. So you argue that there is significant transfer of information and lessons and stories between these armies. Say a little bit about how that didn't happen and how it did happen. And you talk about. I think I've got it memorized, right, the idea of an imperial cloud to talk about, talk about how these ideas were shared and to what extent in colonial armies.
- [13:13]
C
Yes, and this obviously connects to what I've just said. So also, within these colonial armies there is very little sort of institutionalized ways of exchange. But what there is is that actually its members are surprisingly mobile between empires. So basically their practice, their experience travels with them. And there's this quite fortunate phrase of a British author which I found quite striking, where he says that basically all information travels while locked up in the brains of those who have by practice one experience. And that sort of captures exactly what's the avenue of exchange in this case. So I would say first, that's the most important way this information travels. There are other ways of information exchange which actually, when you start doing such a project, seem maybe even more plausible that this obviously is military journals, the military manuals, which for me were an important source base. But the interesting thing with them is that even though towards the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, they become quite trans imperial in the sense that they take examples from different empires. But that is very late, obviously. They're basically too late to shape practice that has already happened. What they do is basically reflect what is already an established body of knowledge. Another thing most people would think of first is actually military attaches, which this was really an institutionalized way of exchanging information between militaries, obviously. And I was surprised I was able to find quite a number of these military antichades also in the colonial sphere. But again, I wouldn't say they're one of the central avenues of exchange. Because also oftentimes their attention was on things other than this aspect of extreme violence which interests us the most nowadays. But wasn't necessarily what interested these Alices and mouths at the time period. One important thing to add definitely here is that I've now mostly spoken of European actors who are mobile between empires. A very important actor group here as well are actually non European serving colonial armies, mostly Asians or Africans obviously who also work very mobile between these different colonial armies and colonies and also were quite instrumental in transferring knowledge and practice. And one case which has already been treated by others, but which I find very instructive is that of the so called Sudanese soldiers who were recruited actually in what is nowadays mostly South Sudan. First actually mostly for the Anglo Egyptian army, partly also for its main opponent in the 1880s, namely the Mahdi state, who this was another colonial war between basically between the British in Egypt and the Mahdi sort of prophetic figure operating in that area. But these soldiers then after this war ends, most of them are actually in Cairo then being out of work. And then when the Germans start their calling on endeavor in East Africa, Wisman, who is one of the so called pioneers there in the German case, he actually goes to Cairo to recruit these soldiers to build up his colonial army. So you have here this very experienced soldiers were very experienced already in colonial warfare and who bring all this knowledge and experience with them to Germany, East Africa. So this is just one case where you can see how important also these non Europeans are in these transfer processes.
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B
Yeah, I was really struck by that. And I was really struck. I mean, one of the things about your book is I read your footnotes and I'm astonished at the number of memoirs and similar kinds of documents you've read by these figures who seem to travel all over the world and participate in conflicts or colonializing impulses in a variety of places. I wonder if you could give. Do you have like a favorite memoir or favorite example of somebody you read where you just kind of sat back and marveled at how many things they did and how many places they saw?
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C
I mean, favorite is obviously always a difficult word with actors, but one is certainly. Which certainly struck me even though this remains in this case exceptionally or exceptionally. Maybe not, but in this case it remains a large largely within the British Empire is that of. And I forgot the name for a moment now. It's really sort of archetype of colonial adventure. And it goes really from one colonial war to the next. I think at least four or five different ones. And even though the book Also has a lot of things made up. We can actually corroborate his presence at quite a number of sites. And he also appears in memoirs of other colonial actors, which is quite interesting. And it was just for me, so striking to see how mobile these people could be. And it's just interesting also to realize really how they got so accustomed to colonial warfare on each different side. And there's one thing, I think at one point he has this quote where he says that any feelings that they might once have had were blunted by years of savage warfare. That's I think his quote. So that was quite telling to me. And I think even though his case in a sort of frequency of moving is exceptional maybe, but it is illustrative of this larger mobility of colonial actors.
- [19:04]
B
So you've got this network of people who share ideas and insights and experiences and shape the lessons that leaders learn or the actions that leaders take. Let's think about those actions. And you start with an argument that behind many of the practices of colonial argument, army, sorry, is. Is a basic perception of racial difference. So maybe you can talk about that. What, how is. How are you making the case that many of the. Many of the actions and choices that armies make are driven by a sense of racial superiority? And how does that differ from other. Other historians who have looked at this?
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C
So first, it's very important to realize this is about the aspect of extreme violence. The main question always is here is like, where does this extreme violence come from? And we can talk about this later maybe what is extreme violence and what my definition is. But the question for me was, so why is this so typical for the colonial way of war? And at the base, as I found out, it really is this sort of process of racial ordering. The basic perception of the opponent as a racial other, as a human different from oneself. And this sort of basic perception led to different imperatives for colonial warfare being formulated on this idea of, or sort of the idea that the European actors had about mostly the mind of their colonial opponent. And that's why it places idea of the native mind quite central as well. Because they develop certain ideas of how this mind supposedly worked. And it's obviously very stereotypical. There's an idea that it's really easy to impress. It's very rational. It will see all sort of clemency as weakness. All these sort of things go in there. And based on this they develop certain ideas of what non colonial warfare should do. Especially also to sort of impact the native mind and have an impact on the native mind or what they call the native mind. And this leads to very similar practices being adopted. Very similar highly violent practices being adopted across the borders of empires. And I sort of. I think these sort of coalesce around this basic imperative, as I call them, of colonial warfare. There's basically five basic imperatives that the practitioners of colonial warfare perceive as being imperative to achieve in colonial warfare. There might be many other imperatives in colonial warfare, but these are the five, I think, which most explain best why this generally is so highly violent.
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B
Yeah, I was going to ask you. We don't have time, obviously, to get in depth with these, but I wonder if you. I'll kind of run through each of the five, and you can maybe say a little bit about what you mean by them and what impact they had on the military choices that were made. So the first is moral effect.
- [22:19]
C
Yeah, yeah. So this is, I think, really the central one, which sort of stands at the base of the other four as well. There's really this sense that a colonial. If you wage war in the colonies, it's not just about sort of achieving a victory or beating in an enemy army. It is really about you have to have a moral effect on the enemy. And so this is about psychological effect mostly it's about instilling fear or awe is actually a term also used in the colonial realm. And this connects obviously to these racialized ideas about the native mind being easy to impress, very irrational. So there's this idea that it won't just suffice to say, okay, you've lost your army now, you've lost. He needs to be somehow imposed upon mentally. And maybe unsurprisingly, there is this idea that this can only be done by the use of heavy violence. So this is really one very important factor behind much of the extreme violence being used there. And it's also connected to sort of performativity of colonial violence. There's this idea that you have to perform your superiority in order to also reach this native mind. So that's all about moral fact. And the idea is if you produce enough moral fact, you'll sort of establish prestige, which is another key term in discourse of colonial warfare. And you'll be able to govern, to rule a colony with actually quite limited means, because you have made such a psychological impact, supposedly. So this is moral fact. It's hugely important in the thinking of the practitioners of colonial warfare. And it's also very much a trans Imperial notion. You can see it in the British, German and Dutch context in very similar ways. Maybe I'll stop There. There's a lot more to say about the moral effect. But I think I'll also touch upon it when I speak about the other imperatives.
- [24:15]
B
Yeah, I was going to say. So the second one is you labeled the offensive and the need for a bold initiative.
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C
Yes. So this is also something which recurs everywhere in basically every treatise on colonial warfare. The idea that when you are conducting these wars you have to always be on the offensive and you have to be bold every time. Because again, this is about moral effect. There's this idea if you don't do it, you won't have a moral effect and you will rather be seen as weak. So it's very much linked again to sort of racial ass ideas of the native mind. It's an imperative that on itself does not necessarily lead to extreme violence being used. But in practice it often does. Because there's this idea you have to go forward all the time and you have to be bold. And you can already see there's a sort of imperative there to also use violence that are methods that are more violent. So yeah, that's in brief, I think.
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B
On that ties into this idea that force must be felt first as a way of to produce a lasting peace. Say a little bit about that.
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C
Yes, this is also highly important or seen as highly important in thinking of colonial warfare at the time. So obviously what they want is the lasting peace in the colony. There's this idea that if we establish peace it has to be lasting. This is a phrase which is quite often used. But there's also this idea that the only way that peace can be lasting is if you have used heavy force first. So force must be felt first. Again linked to a moral effect. There is this idea that if you don't make this impression first on the mind of the opponent, he won't keep quiet for a very long time. That's basically the idea behind it. And it's really something which also leads to a preference for extreme violence because. Well, first, because apparently you have to use force first. You cannot even just parley first or so. But also especially if then there's a second rising or there's first conquest and then a rising. There's this idea that. So our conquest probably wasn't. There wasn't enough force used because apparently there's no lasting peace. That's sort of the very basic rationale behind it. So this again pushes to sort of much more heavy handed approach. So this is an imperative which I think also explains a lot of. And you can really see it also in the writing of the European officers who say that I don't think we should yet stop our campaign because not enough force has been felt yet, for instance. Yeah.
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B
The fourth is the need for punishment.
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C
Yeah. So this is a very interesting one. Also very recurrent across all the three different empires I looked at. I think there's sort of three rationales behind it. So the first is vengeance. You see this quite often, especially in settler colonial settings, when settlers, for instance, have been murdered at the end outside of a colonial war, there's obviously a very strong sense of vengeance. And so this is also understood the war. Colonial war is understood as also imposing punishment on the opponent for the purpose of vengeance. There is also this idea of sort of teaching a lesson. The opponent, because again, a racialized other is seen also often as sort of childlike, not an adult, as a white European, so to say. And there comes this idea that you have to make him behave better by imposing punishment. Very much 19th century pedagogical tenet, I would say. And then the third is obviously the sort of spectacular aspect of it of has to be punishment. Oftentimes at least if we think of it in a sort of public spectacle, also, as I said, it has to have a spectacular aspect. So all these three things also push to using heavy forms of violence, because that is what punishment is about to do. Right. It's about imposing suffering on the opponent to make him atone also. And that's actually a term. This idea that he has to suffer severely is a term which appears quite often the British context.
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B
And finally, is the importance of massacre or what you. And I think this is you citing people of the time or the idea of the big bag.
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C
Yeah, the big bag is actually a term used quite often in the British colonial context. So there is this idea and it's actually one of those imperatives which grows stronger over the 19th century. It's less present at the beginning of which also has to do with the sort of changing circumstances of colonial wars over time. But there's this idea at some point that it doesn't suffice. Again, it doesn't just suffice to vanquish the enemy. You also have to have a sort of large body count or what they would call the big bag. So basically it is a sort of call to massacre. And this is how strong it impacts. Is different from case to case. But you see, like I said, especially towards the end of the 19th century, in the early 20th century, ever more accuracy that you can win a fight, but if you don't leave Enough bodies on the enemy, bodies on the battlefield, it won't really count. So this is a very dangerous imperative again, because it really. And I think that explains partly sort of the recurrence of massacre in colonial warfare. We have this quite iconic images of all these sort of battlefields strewn with bodies. And people tend to think about, okay, maybe this was because they used sort of these weapons superiority, the machine gun, et cetera, which is part of the explanation, but it's also there because it was what actors really wished for. And you really have these specific cases where you see that we could have stopped the killing, but we went on because we desired this spake back as they, the perpetrators would say.
- [31:01]
B
So one of the things I'm. I want to ask a couple questions about gender and I want to start by saying one of the things, at least as I read your book I saw, was that these principles or imperatives were applied pretty unanimously, not the word consistently toward men, but that when there was some argument or difference in the ways that violence is applied to women and children. So I wonder if you could say a little bit about that.
- [31:30]
C
Yeah, that's one of the more difficult aspects, because the answer is more differentiated. I think. So. First, there is this military code of honor in the metropoles where obviously you weren't supposed to harm women and children and import this keeps its application in the colonial realm. It's more difficult to, let's say it this way, it's more difficult to legitimize the harming of women, children, also in the colonial realm, than the harming of men. That having been said, there is often, there are many contexts where it can be legitimized either on the grounds of sort of necessity. There's this idea that, you know, if we can't hit the. The actual combatants, we will have to take our violence to the non combatants, which oftentimes would be women and children, but also elderly, for instance, but also in cases sort of out of pure hatred, racial hatred, which sort of homogenizes the whole population as the enemy. And this is obviously much more plausible to happen in cases where the enemy is already quite strongly othered, being othered as a racial other, which makes it a lot more or a lot easier to also include women and children into this category. On the other hand, you can often also see sort of colonial perpetrators displaying acts of charity as they see it towards women and children to sort of keep their self image as benevolent intact, oftentimes sort of glossing over the fact that their actions have been harming a Lot of women and children, for instance, if we look at dischords, urgent practice, but at the same time just showing kindness, supposed kindness towards children, for instance, to sort of keep up their image as a benevolent soldier.
- [33:31]
B
And then I'll flip the question around almost. Maybe all. I'll just be generous and say almost all of the characters, the figures you talk about in your book, are men. So how do ideas about masculinity shape their reception of these lessons, of these imperatives? Or perhaps how do these imperatives and how do their actions in these conflicts help them reimagine what it means to be a man?
- [33:56]
C
Yeah, so as you've already noticed, nearly all these actors are man. And it's very important to notice that first, it's really oftentimes actually colonies, but in colonial armies specifically, are very masculine spaces. And it's also this sort of hyper masculinity of these contexts, these spaces, which also shape colonial thinking or thinking on colonial warfare. And one thing that's certainly in place in there is this idea of you have to be harsh because that's sort of a masculine trait. And any acts of clemency are being sort of looked upon with disdain as unmasculine, as effeminate. And it's always easy for sort of those defending colonial violence to say that our opponent is just effeminate, that's not masculine. So this cosmos, this masculine cosmos is already quite important as a factor also in giving shape to such thinking. I think there was a second part to your question which, and, you know, forgotten.
- [35:09]
B
How did their experience in colonial warfare, or did it shape their understanding of what it meant to be a man?
- [35:17]
C
Ah, yeah. Well, I think, interestingly, and there's other. There are other historians who have written much more on this, but the colonies are often seen in this time as a sort of laboratory, or maybe not laboratory, but an ideal site for developing sort of manliness. There's this idea that the colonial pioneer, that's the term used as sort of this rugged individual who will, at the same time sort of has this gentlemanly virtue, certainly in the British case, sort of as the ideal type of masculinity. And there is, as historians have shown, sort of the ideal of masculinity, which also. It's not only colonial, but also takes shape in the colonial setting. It's also partly reimportant to the metropole. And you can see this, for instance, in the fact that such organizations, like Boy Scouts, are developed first in the colonial. Or at least Robert Baden Powell, who founds his organization, he developed most of his ideas in the colonial realm and even in colonial warfare and all this emphasis on tracking, et cetera. These are martial skills, obviously. So this is one example of how this sort of. These ideas of masculinity born of colonial settings, colonial war even, also come to influence conception of masculinity in the Metropole.
- [36:44]
B
I hadn't planned on asking this, and you may not have done the research in this area, but I'm curious, are women in the colonies pushing the armies to behave in a certain way toward colonized people? Are they advocating for this kind of punishment and violence? Are they advocating perhaps, for a gentler treatment of colonials? I don't know whether you can say anything about that or not, but I'm curious.
- [37:18]
C
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think there's both. So, first of all, there are women in the colonies, even though in quite small numbers generally in the settler colonies, a bit more. But even there, they are still a minority generally. And oftentimes there is, as is probably unsurprising, within settler communities, there's quite a consensus, shared by men and women generally alike, that this extreme violence is justified and has to be applied. So in that sense, I wouldn't say there are many differences. There are exceptions in South Africa, obviously, for instance, there is Olive Schreiner, an author who was always a critic of colonial violence. The thing is, as you can also imagine, many times they're explicitly also attacked through their gender. There's this idea that because they're women, they will. Obviously, they can't just cause constant violence that is needed in these cases. In the Metropole, it's a bit different sort of resistance to colonial violence within such like philanthropic groups, for instance, are quite, I would say, female dominated. But your question was more about the colony, so I would go on that one onto that point. But.
- [38:47]
B
So your last chapter deals with the question of genocide. And I'll just start by asking the question that you start with at the beginning of the chapter, which is whether genocide is really the right word to be using or thinking about in this context.
- [39:02]
C
Yes, I think if we want to use that term, we should first keep in mind that this is primarily still a juridical term. It's defined quite strictly by United nations resolution, with a very strong emphasis on a clearly demonstrable intent on the part of the perpetrators. Now, if we use that quite strict UN definition, this would mean that genocide would be. This label of genocide would be applicable only to a relatively small number of cases of colonial war, one of which is actually in the book the Genocide of Erero in German, Saudwath, Africa. But in most cases, it certainly wouldn't apply to colonial wars. If instead we start from this broader term of exterminatory warfare, which I propose in this book, I think the broader relationship between extermination and colonial warfare becomes much clearer and much more explicable because we have this paradox in a way that extermination, the word genocide obviously hasn't been coined yet this time period. But extermination is simultaneously relatively minor and at the same time an inherent presence in discussions on colonial warfare at the time. Extermination is rarely mentioned as an aim really of colonial warfare, which is maybe unsurprising because generally colonialism is rather about the conquest of a population which you then come either exploit or put to forced labor or tax, Christianize, maybe also civilized, depending on the interest group. But in that sense, genocide is sort of antithetical to colonialism, as some scholars have argued. This is obviously different or can be different in settler colonial settings, especially where the main question is about the land. And there extermination can be an explicit aim, Even though in the case of the settler colonies I mentioned, even there the population is still seen as a sort of really necessary pool of labor. But interestingly, none of this differentiation between settler colonies and normal colonies is made in literature and colonial warfare. They're both seen as the same sort of phenomenon. However, whatever the setting is, it was generally acknowledged and accepted that colonial wars could lead to the partial or even complete extermination of certain groups. And this was perceived as a. And the term is slightly cynical, but as collateral damage in case it just took extraordinarily long or required highly destructive method to defeat a colonial opponent. And I think here again, we see the colonial way of war, the permissiveness inherent in the colonial way of war. This sort of partial extermination or even near complete extermination of a group is sort of accepted as legitimate as long as it serves this aim of subjugation. And I know collateral damage sounds highly cynical, but this is really the sense we get from reading this contemporary literature. And legitimations offered are different actually. Either some actually just talked about these are the hardships of war. Others sort of use more civilizational, social Darwinist terms, this idea of struggle between races, et cetera. Again, in settler colonial settings, this could be a bit different. But just if we ask really about sort of the relationship between colonial war and the extermination, this is, I think, the Main argument.
- [42:42]
B
So you talk. Let's unpack that a little bit. You talk about the idea of wars of devastation. So talk about that and about both in terms of the techniques of devastation and whether wars of devastation are the same or different from wars of extermination.
- [43:01]
C
Yes. So wars of devastation is a term I introduce here which mostly refers to scorched earth practices, but here specifically in colonial warfare. And that's why I chose a different term, because scorched earth can have, I think, different meanings depending on the context. It can also mean, for instance, a retreating army leaving foodstuffs behind, for instance. But in this case, it refers to colonial armies purposefully destroying villages, food stores, crops, etc. Of their opponent in order to artificially create a famine which will then serve to sort of subdue population. And I think it's often not appreciated enough how central this is to the colonial way of war, how frequent this occurs in colonial warfare. And I think I write in a book that most people, when they hear colonial warfare, they will think of maybe specific atrocities, machine guns, etc. But the image of colonial warfare is actually these soldiers, mostly auxiliaries, actually burning down villages, cutting crops, et cetera. And that's what I call the war of devastation. And I sort of differentiate this from genocide or extermination because there certainly is not necessarily the intent to exterminate certain people is really about. It's actually spoken about still in quite military terms about sort of cutting, provision, provisioning, et cetera. But there's also this aspect that I mentioned before. As long as this serves to subjugate the opponent, who is clearly seen as inferior and of less value as a human being, then this is all legitimate. And these practices can lead to partial extermination or even complete extermination due to these massive famines that they often create. And for me, one of the interesting statistics is that if we look at the cases of German Southwest Africa and German East Africa. Among Niriro and the Nama, it's often contested, like what percentage exactly was killed. But if we, for instance, go with 50 or 60%, you have very similar percentages during the war in Germany, East Africa, or also certain ethnicities or decimated by 50%, for instance. But there's no policy of extermination or genocide there at all. It's just because these famines created by the colonial army are so massive that there's the same mortality. So again, you can see that in its sort of results, it can be very similar to extermination. But it's not necessarily what was intended. Intended there.
- [46:06]
B
So you have a lengthy section of the chapter on German Southwest Africa, and we don't have time to kind of walk through that. But I would ask you, how does your treatment of this conflict add or nuance previous interpretations of what's going on in German Southwest Africa?
- [46:26]
C
I think this, as you know, there's been written a lot already on the genocide, German Southwest Africa. What was important for me is to place this really squarely within the. This trans Imperial context. So how does this fit within the larger imperial context if we look to the other empires as well? Because obviously this case has been used particularly to sort of argue with German Sonderweg, that's actually word used colonial Sonderweg, German exceptionality in that you see supposedly specifically German way of conducting a colonial war which now has continuities with sort of violence later on in Europe in the Holocaust and on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. That's the argument. And what I want to show is that actually if we look at the thinking of the actors at the time so involved in this genocide, it fits much more in the context, the broader imperial context of thinking on colonial warfare that I identified throughout the book than have been stated before. So that's what I tried to do to see these trans imperial patterns in this German case. And, and also, and I try to do this from time to time as well, to look at the connections again to other colonies actors that they might have or that they might refer to in their writing as well. These German actors, for instance, foreign actors. That's what I mean.
- [47:53]
B
So every once in a while you take a step back and talk about the way Dutch behavior in Indonesia may or may not be different. So I want to just give you a chance to talk about whether there is. Whether how well Dutch, the Netherlands and the Dutch colonial army fit into this broader pattern. Is there such a thing as Dutch exceptionalism or not?
- [48:19]
C
So I would say the main argument of the book in the end is that there is no national exceptionalism. Also not in the Dutch case, but. But the Dutch case is interesting. And that's why from time to time I elaborate a bit on it, because on first sight it might seem to diverge from the colonial patterns we see in the. Well, mainly here in the British and German case that I treat as well. And in one case, this is with the abandonment of scorched earth or the war of devastation in the Ace War. So first, the Aceh war is the big Dutch colonial war that Takes place on Sumatra, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, basically between 1873 and 1914. It's not even clear where exactly it ends. So it goes on for a very, very long time, Even though my focus is mostly on the 1890s and early 20th century. And at some point, actually. So the Dutch, as all other colonial powers, they first make massive use of this war of devastation. They burn the villages. Those are called kampongs. They're. They destroy foodstuffs, crops, et cetera. That's just standard practices actually used to such an extent that some areas actually are completely devastated and depopulated already by the 1890s. And then at some point, because even though they use this massive islands, they don't manage to break the resistance of the Heche knees. And then at some point, there's this new approach, mostly spearheaded by von Heutz, this general. And one of the things he does is actually to abandon this idea are this massive use of scorched earth. And this obviously sort of is very much a divergence from the practice of other colonial powers who basically continue to use this method throughout the famous Yecna. So that was, for me, quite intriguing. And I started to look deeper into this, and I noticed that even though they sort of let go of this method, the ideas behind it and sort of the other practices that come up to sort of replace this violence recur or. Yeah, recur on the same colonial imperatives or basic imperatives as the scorched earth has, actually. So in that sense, it's not as much as divergence as it might seem at first sight. One thing which is often overlooked is that. That what happened, instead of destroying villages, aceh sort of becomes a sort of killing ground, basically, because there is constant patrolling. That's another one of the measures of Von Heerdz. There's the idea that you have to impose control by constant patrolling of small patrols of the colonial army. And these patrols, they kill, sort of, to put it cynical, it's a piecemeal killing. So patrols often kill one or two people they come upon during their patrol. But it builds up and up, and especially in the high days of the Ace war, it kills thousands a year, really. And it recurs very much. Also on the base comparatives of colonial warfare. There's this idea that you have to. If we can't impress them with the burning of their villages, et cetera, if we can't have that moral fact, we will have to have this body count versus the big back, so to say, in its touch version. So if you look deeper. It's much less of a divergence than you would initially think, and it certainly doesn't make the war more humanitarian than in other colonial spheres. And one other case, especially because you mentioned genocide before, obviously, which is quite interesting, is that I found this really interesting discussion of the war in German southwest Africa in a Dutch colonial military journal. And for the most part it's not very critical or it's not critical of the violence inflicted. But then really at the end of the article, he says that he disagrees with one thing Trotha does, which is Trotha, at one point he says, I won't offer the option of surrender anymore. And he really the only way which is left basically is extermination in the desert or for those who make it across the desert, they will survive, but they won't be able to come back to Tiramisad with Africa. And there this Dutch author, he sort of disagrees and says that this population could have been safe and could have been a colonial asset or an asset to the colony. So I think there we might see sort of a divergence there from colonial standards. But for the rest, I would say the Dutch fit just as much into these trans imperial patterns as the other colonial powers.
- [53:30]
B
We've taken a lot of your time. It's a terrific book. I learned a lot. I encourage listeners to go out and get it. There's lots more that we haven't had a chance to unpack. I always end the same way, Tom, with a couple of the same questions. One is, and I'll just frame it in the sense that my semester ends in about, oh, I don't know, starts, sorry, wishful thinking in seven or eight days. So I have a little time before I need to be back in the classroom. Do you have a book recommendation or something, maybe a movie, something that was meaningful to you about this while you were writing this that you would recommend to me in the audience?
- [54:07]
C
Well, I think I'll be very academical and propose here academic work as well, especially because this is a podcast on genocide studies. I think what I profited from quite a bit, interestingly, was two authors writing on genocide or extermination in the American case. One is Kyle Jacoby, who wrote a terrific article which is called the Broad Platform of Extermination. And the other one is Benjamin Mattley with the book on American genocide. And I think what I like so much about this, there's a whole debate on colonial genocide and there's. There's one side who claim there's Basically colonialism did not involve genocide. And there's another side. So these are the two extremes claiming that basically all colonialism was genocidal. And what I like so much about these two works, even though they were about very different settings from the one I treated in my book, is that they really have this nuanced approach where they first are attentive to the fact that genocide is obviously a much more modern term. But also they stand for the fact that we have to look at each case individually and do sort of a really thorough reconstruction of different actors involved, the state involvement. And Banjo and Mattley especially is able to show on this basis that even if we use this very strict UN definition of genocide that I mentioned, we can speak of genocide in certain cases. So this is, and I think this is the way forward also for colonial genocide studies to really go for individual cases and reconstruct in a sort of thorough, empirically based way. So when it comes to colonial thinking, my thinking about colonial genocide, I've really profited from these two authors. Excellent, thank you.
- [56:00]
B
My wife will look at me oddly when I'm reading madly in my bed on Saturday morning before I work on my syllabus, but good. Second question, the book's been out for a year or so. Are there new projects you're working on?
- [56:16]
C
Yeah, it's basically only half a year for the book. But yeah, I've been working for some time already on something new. I'm really, as you might have guessed by now, I'm really quite passionate about this trans imperial history. That's where I position myself. And I think there's been going on quite a bit in that field recently. I think really the next step for this field would be to bridge this analytical dichotomy which is quite so prevalent between sort of land based continental empires that is mostly the Ottoman, the Austro Hungarian and the Russian Empire and these sort of sea maritime empires that I actually deal with in my book. So the overseas British, French, German, Dutch, etc. And these are so often in the literature they are treated as two different things and there's very little sort of analytical overlap in the study of these. We now have obviously this sort of large overview books which treat empires of all different shapes and forms generally over a very large time period. What I think is we need to study these sort of interactions, we need to study much more these direct interactions between these types of empires, the underground encounters and transfer of knowledge and practice. We need to see these much more closely in specific case studies. And I think there's a lot to learn from the intervention of overseas empires, actually within land empires in Europe. And I'm thinking especially of the Ottoman Balkans, which we're also figuring in this project. I'm developing. Developing. And for me, this is also spatially interesting because as I mentioned already a couple of times, the sort of boomerang thesis of German colonialism has always been somehow present in my work. This idea that colonial violence came back to Europe. And obviously there's a lot of often quite polemical work on this, but it's very German centered. And then that sounds quite narrow. And I think we need unconventional approaches to reinvigorate this debate. And I think this sort of broader idea of connecting overseas and continental empires and looking at maybe unexpected spaces such as the Ottoman Balkans, will be a way forward for this debate. So this is something I'm working on currently, but it's still very much in development as a project.
- [58:50]
B
We've been talking with Tom Menger about his terrific new book, the Colonial Way of Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, 1890-1914, published by Cambridge University Press. Tom, it's a great book. It sounds like a great project. I hope when you're through with it, you'll come back on the New Books Network to talk about it. But until then, thanks so much for being with us and I hope that you have a great semester.
- [59:16]
C
Thank you.