"Savage wars of peace": violence, colonialism and empire in the modern world

Abstract

Violence has always been central to the complex histories of empire that reach back over four centuries of the ‘modern era’. As an integral part of the social, legal, economic and gendered foundations on which colonial relations were built, violence was diffuse, multi-layered and enormously variable. Yet although the foundational role of violence in the process of empire-building is now widely accepted, we still need to pay closer attention to the structural relationship between colonialism, empire and violence beyond individual, spectacular moments in imperial history. This chapter considers colonial violence in a comparative context in order to identify some of its shared expressions, technologies and legacies.