Colonial Violence
It is an odd but telling fact that until very recently the question of colonial violence has not figured much in the narratives of the British Empire. Surely no imperial historian would deny that violence was part of empire history. But I think it true to say that most commonly the issue of imperial violence has been safely confined to the categories of war, or an occasional âscandalâ of empire ignited by an over-enthusiastic use of force. Yet, as I discovered (to my surprise, I must admit) in the Cape Colony archives whilst researching the British-Xhosa encounter in the nineteenth century, the presence of violence in empire cannot be reduced to the margins of its history. In those archives it was impossible to ignore the atrocities and the everyday violence that accompanied the expansion of British rule over the Eastern Cape . This was often âunofficialâ violence; it was the violence of settlers against Indigenous peoples. And it was baked into the everyday experience of empire, at least in the early stages of settler colonial states, and often for much longer. When I turned my own research gaze away from the Cape and towards the other settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand during the same period of the early nineteenth century, it was impossible to ignore the presence of the same kind of violence I had glimpsed in the Cape. 1
If it is true that imperial historians have not typically highlighted settler violence as central to the experience of making empire, local historians of empire have long been aware of the phenomenon. What Elizabeth Elbourne referred to some years agoâadopting the phraseology of the humanitarian discourse of the 1830sâas âthe sin of the settlerâ was familiar to those who worked in the colonial archives. This is particularly true in the case of Australia. Many years of official and unofficial silence, when histories of Australia carefully avoided or sanitized the degree of violence in its past, were broken in the early 1980s as national historians such as Henry Reynolds , and local researchers such as P.D. Gardener and Lyndall Ryan carefully documented the extent of settler violence. 2
But once this happened, a storm of political and academic controversyâwhat became known as the âhistory wars ââbroke over the findings of this research. In a sense, this was hardly surprising. The evidence of a deeply embedded tradition of violence against indigenous peoples sharply contradicted the dominant Australian sense of a benign national identity. The idea that the country had âanother pastâ, in the words of Raymond Evans, was hard to take, and the fires of controversy were stoked when the would-be historian Keith Windshuttle mounted an extensive assault on scholarly integrity of those who had presented evidence of the violence. This set off a long and bitter controversy that became a national political issue in which historians who pointed to this aspect of Australiaâs past were tagged as âblack armbandâ purveyors of a disloyal past. Thankfully, it is unnecessary for an outsider such as myself to venture into that particular political and historical morass. Now that the dust has settled down, the claims of scholarly deception about frontier conflict have been effectively dismissed, and the presence and the scale of settler violence have been amply documented as an undeniable fixture in Australian history. 3
Whether the extent of the violence was the same in other parts of the British empire is not clear. And what determines its local differences is also unclear. It may be particularly sharp, for example, where pastoralist settlers compete for land with hunter gatherers. What is evident, however, is the intimate association of violence with the making of empire wherever it is experienced. And significant studies of frontier violence are beginning to appear for other areas of the British world. Major studies of frontier violence in South Africa have appeared, for example. It is a topic that is now attracting some attention in the largest settler colony of them allâthe United States. The everyday violence of the State in colonies like Burma and India has been delineated. In New Zealand, where the degree of casual violence was, perhaps, less common than it was elsewhere, it has still proved necessary to rescue the brutality of the various frontier wars from the hush of posterity. 4
Let me first define the key features of this violence, as I treat it here. First, it was quotidian, almost everyday in character, and personal. It was outside of the big-event violence like the Indian uprising of 1857 . It was the kind of violence Elizabeth Kolsky has documented for India as being âan intrinsic feature of imperial ruleâ but which has also been âone of the empireâs most closely guarded secretsâ. Evidence of such incidents can be found in official and unofficial records; in newspapers, and in published memoirs. This violence was primarily driven by the settler community, and it possessed a personal quality even when conducted by collective groups. Violent episodes ranged from set-piece battles between settler posses and indigenes, to informal parties of settlers going off hunting native people, to the individual murder of settler or aborigine in their isolated, lonely homestead. 5
Second, its demographic impact on the Indigenous populations could be profound. The greatest efforts to delineate this have been in Australia. But reliable statistical measures have proved difficult to achieve and controversial. Estimates of the base indigenous population which suffered the violence are, of course, largely guess work; the records of violent incidents themselves are scanty and often unreliable. It has taken considerable ingenuity on the part of historians to come up with reasonable figures even for a region such as Queensland which was universally acknowledged to be a killing ground in the nineteenth century. But to give an idea of how the numbers have proved difficult to comprehend, in 1972 Henry Reynolds estimated a toll of 5000 indigenous people killed in Queensland. By the early 1980s this estimate had doubled, and the most recent total, after careful reconstruction of available records, is about 60,000âwhich is twice the number that Reynolds had thought was the total of indigenous peoples killed in all of Australia between 1788 and 1900. Looking at another area of Australia, one authority has estimated that such violence killed 11% of the indigenous population in the Port Phillip (Melbourne) district in 1836 alone. In the case of Tasmania where the Indigenous population in 1800 was about 5000, it is estimated that about 1000 were killed by settler vigilante groups mainly between 1823 and 1831. And this dismal catalogue could be continued. 6
Third, the relationship of this kind of violence to the State and to State violence was tangled. It was a violence that did not necessarily emanate from official policy or organs of the State. Even when committed by officers of the State, it frequently possessed a personal rather than an official quality. It was a category of violence that was racial, social and imperial, but which often stood outside the sphere of the State. Indeed, it was often hidden from the State for fear of legal sanction. The point is that at this historical moment of the early nineteenth century, the State did not have a monopoly on violence that was linked to imperial rule. Nor did it necessarily have clear legal guidelines or signposts to arbitrate its actions. This was one reason why the Stateâs use of salutary terror as a strategy of punishing recalcitrant or troublesome natives was oftenâif not alwaysâaccompanied by detailed explanations and exculpations that were designed to reassure the Colonial Office and others of the necessity of such violence.
It is important to remember that colonial violence was not the same over time. Certain patterns and structures characterize the different periods of imperial rule. During the early nineteenth century state structures were frail and rickety. In this context, as Julie Evans has quite brilliantly argued, the condition of lawlessness became the law and it was precisely within this zone of legal anarchy that settler sovereignty was established. Governors and others were frequently incapable of imposing the kind of order they might have wished. Indeed, in the colonies of the southern seas, a viable network of legal institutions and policing capabilities was not fully established until the mid-century. Only then was the State in a position to claim the sole right to exercise of violence. Its subsequent failure to smother the tendencies to vigilante violence did not reflect the weakness of the State, however, but rather its appropriation of this practice from an earlier time. 7
And the final quality of this violence that I wish to highlight was its sheer brutality, reflecting what AimĂ© CĂ©saire referred to as the de-civilization and brutalization of the colonizer. Again there are many gruesome tales of atrocities packed into the colonial record. But let us just note briefly the popularity of decapitation as an expression of colonial rule in this period. Tattooed Maori heads were reported sold as âobjects of curiosityâ in Sydney in the pre-1840 period. One early settler in Van Diemenâs Land killed an indigenous man, took the wife for a sex slave, and made her wear her ex-husbandâs head around her neck. Even the Colonial Office, which was by this time accustomed to receiving reports of such events, could hardly believe their eyes when they read the account of this outrage. They were even more outraged when a few years later the Xhosa chief Hintsa was not only shot down in cold blood, his ears were cut off and his head may have been, too. Even if his head remained where it belonged, there were plenty of Xhosa skulls adorning settler homes around the Eastern Capeâand plenty in museums and other places in Victorian Britain where, of course, they were the raw material for phrenology and other âscientificâ speculations. 8
The question is: how are we to historicize and understand such episodes of colonial violence? Obviously, we ...