Of “Golden Bridges” and “Big Bags”: Thinking the Colonial Massacre in British, German and Dutch Manuals of Colonial Warfare, c. 1860–1910

Abstract

This article makes a case for the transimperial study of the extreme violence of colonial warfare in the fin-de-siècle period. It argues this can be done fruitfully through an analysis of the thought that stood behind such violence. Using British, German and Dutch manuals of colonial warfare as sources, it takes one specific form of colonial violence, the colonial military massacre, as an illustration. Through the reading of a source corpus covering several empires, it is able to show that, though the massacre was always present in colonial wars, the practitioners of such warfare only came to codify it as an indispensable tool by the late nineteenth century. After 1900, the option to leave the opponent an outlet for escape had completely vanished from the manuals of all three empires - underscoring the transimperiality of patterns in colonial warfare and arguing forcefully against any national exceptionalisms when it comes to colonial violence. Finally, the case speaks to the lively circulation of knowledge and mutual observation among empires that also made colonial warfare a transimperial phenomenon.