Understanding colonial war and violence beyond national-imperial borders

By the final decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, a considerable number of European countries were engaged in colonial wars overseas – wars that were generally marked by extreme violence. While the similarities between these wars have regularly been noted, few historians have attempted to write a transimperial history of this violence, a history that incorporates several empires in the same analysis.

Dr Tom Menger posited in this New Directions in the History of War and Violence series event that if we want to write such a transimperial history, we should move away from the tendency to focus on doctrines of national armies to find a shared European body of knowledge concerning colonial war, and that we should also pay attention to transimperial connections in the field of colonial warfare.

This event explored how we can come to understand colonial war and violence around 1900 as a transimperial phenomenon, drawing on a number of case studies as well as contemporary literature from three different empires: the British, German, and Dutch Empire.