“Press the thumb onto the eye”: Moral Effect, Extreme Violence, and the Transimperial Notions of British, German, and Dutch Colonial Warfare, ca. 1890–1914

Tom Menger

doi:10.1017/s0165115321000371

Abstract

AbstractHistoriography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as atransimperialphenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

Highlights

In the case of the British Empire, the historiography has revolved around the British Army’s doctrine of “minimum force,” a doctrine put forward in the 1930s that proclaimed that British forces were never to employ more than the minimum force necessary to suppress riots or insurgencies in the empire.[1]
Isabel Hull has famously interpreted the genocide in the German colonial war against the Herero and Nama as the result of a metropolitan Prussian-German “military culture” that spiralled out of control when its prescriptions proved unsuitable for the type of war encountered in German South West Africa.[3]
Debates on the extreme violence of colonial warfare have too often revolved around supposedly distinct “doctrines,” “military cultures,” “dispositions,” or “schools” of national armies

Summary

Conclusion

Debates on the extreme violence of colonial warfare have too often revolved around supposedly distinct “doctrines,” “military cultures,” “dispositions,” or “schools” of national armies. This gave rise to the obsession with producing a “moral effect” in the “native mind.”. Mapping more comprehensively how such notions were part of a shared transimperial body of thought offers us a way to understand some of the origins of extreme violence in colonial warfare without falling into the trap of national exceptionalism. Such an approach might seem more banal than theories about national doctrines of “minimum force,” “military cultures,” or colonial pre-histories of the Holocaust. It does bring us far closer to what went on in the minds of the Europeans engaging in colonial warfare at the time

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