Philip G. Dwyer - Violence, colonialism and empire in the modern world

The Author(s) 2018

Philip Dwyer 1

Violence has always been central to the long, complex history of empire and colonialism that stretches back over four centuries of the modern era. While the concept of empire has varied in its definitions, all empires shared a number of common features: they were multi-ethnic, asymmetrical and repressive power structures, governed by authoritarian powers that could be linked together by common (racial) ideologies. Colonial violence was diffuse, multi-layered and enormously variable. And while violence is far from unique to colonial practices, it was always embedded in the social, legal, economic and gendered foundations on which colonial relations were built.

Exploring the shared and varied expressions of imperial and colonial violence is the object of this collection. Such a project carries with it the reminder that violence is a fundamentally ambiguous concept, whose meanings had a different cast across different practices and settings of colonialism . In this respect, violence can only be viewed as a process that is always historically contingent, not as a singular outcome or event. In the colonial context, the symbolic dimensions of violence encompass a range of strategies that legitimated the political marginalisation and social disempowerment of colonised peoples. These were perpetuated through imposed legal norms, religious institutions, education, surveillance and policing systems, as well as through sheer brute force.

Although the foundational role of violence in the process of empire -building is now widely accepted, we still need closer attention to the structural relationship between colonialism , empire and violence beyond spectacular moments in imperial history. The law appears to have remained largely ignored by French high school teachers, but the emergence of modern-day proponents of empire underlines the difficulties historians face in conceptualising the violence at the heart of the colonial project.

The best-known theorists of the structural relationship between colonisation and violence in the post-Second World War era, both of them from the island of Martinique, are Frantz Fanon and Aim Cesaire.

Recent analyses of the relationship between violence , colonialism and empire have not been without controversy, attracting some suggestions that the historical pendulum has swung the other way. Just as there is a desire in some quarters to whitewash or to gloss over the violence of the colonial project, some scholars have been accused of skewing the debates by focusing on the most spectacular aspects of colonial violence , or of oversimplifying the racism or the civilising mission that underpinned it. A good part of this scholarship analyses particular practices of violence as a tool of empire within clearly define geo-political spaces, as do a number of the chapters in this collection. With a somewhat different aim, this chapter identifies some of the shared expressions of violence within a comparative framework in assessing its place as an ever-present feature of modern colonial history. From the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, technologies , ideologies and conditions have radically changed, but the deployment or the threat of violence still remained at the core of colonial relations. Indeed, from the first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples through to decolonisation processes in the twentieth century, violence was so prevalent that its legacies continue to structure cross-cultural relationships in post-colonial societies of the twenty-first century.