“[General Bugeaud] knew the game. And his appearance on the scene as chief marked a transformation. ‘Vous aurez beaucoup à oublier,’ he said to his assembled lieutenants; and he altered the whole system of campaigning on the spot.”
- Charles Callwell, Small wars (1896), 109.The above lines, stemming from the most famous manual of fin de siècle colonial warfare, Charles Reference CallwellCallwell's Small Wars (1896), picture how its author imagined the arrival of the French general Bugeaud in French Algeria in 1836, ready to turn the war around in French favour. The lines carry two lessons for us. First, they demonstrate how colonial war was generally thought of as being waged independently of the doctrines and precepts of the metropolitan national army; these doctrines were best forgotten rapidly, as Bugeaud told his lieutenants. Secondly, the fact that a British manual author sixty years later quoted a French colonial general and discussed a French colonial war should alert us to the transimperial dimension of colonial warfare. Historians writing on the violence of colonial warfare appear regularly to have forgotten about these points. Their work has often focused on national armies and their supposedly specific “doctrines,” “schools,” “ways of war,” “approaches,” or “military cultures” of colonial warfare. The result, unsurprisingly, has been to nationalise historiographical debates on the extreme violence of colonial warfare.
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.Footnote 1 The doctrine has triggered a lengthy debate among historians on whether British colonial warfare was supposedly more moderate and culturally subtle than that of other empires, whereby the proponents of this claim have also frequently assumed that the contents of the doctrine can be held to apply to British warfare even long before their official formulation.Footnote 2 For German colonial violence, national-exceptionalist historiographical approaches have also featured prominently in the field. 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.Footnote 3 A second strand in historiography has equally read the German violence there as a national phenomenon, though from a very different angle, presenting it instead as an expression of a particularly German genocidal disposition that would later also manifest itself in the mass destruction and genocide of the Second World War.Footnote 4 Finally, in the last case that will concern us here, the violence of fin de siècle Dutch colonial warfare, it is not so much national exceptionalism but rather the lack of any placement within transimperial frameworks that we have to bemoan.Footnote 5
The British and German theories of national exceptionalism have been challenged, but such challenges have also occurred mostly from within a national framework.Footnote 6 Where the violence is identified as part of Western colonialism as a whole, this remains abstract and little fleshed out empirically.Footnote 7 It is here that this article seeks to intervene, by providing a possible way of conceptualising and giving empirical substance to a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence of colonial wars in the fin de siècle. I argue that, by attending to transimperial connections and the specific ways the colonial conduct of war was shaped by the racialisation of the opponent, we can arrive at an understanding of such violence as a transimperial phenomenon. This places at the centre a basic similarity in thought as well as connectivity between empires, rather than national narratives of colonial violence.
This article is based on a larger research project on the violence of colonial wars in the British, German, and Dutch empires between 1880 and 1914. It draws on a double source base. The first base is a corpus of manuals of colonial warfare from said empires.Footnote 8 Apart from the famous British manual by Charles Callwell, handbooks of colonial war have barely been the subject of historical analysis.Footnote 9 Such texts started to appear in larger numbers only late into the nineteenth century, and should be seen as the codification of what had already been general knowledge for several decades.Footnote 10 The main development behind this codification certainly was the heightened frequency of colonial wars in the wake of the “Scramble for Africa.” In the British and German case, manuals started to be published in the 1890s and the momentum continued into the early 1900s, though in Britain some essays on the topic had already appeared in the two decades before.Footnote 11 In the Dutch case a first spike was already seen around 1860, followed by another one around 1900.Footnote 12 Written after actual campaigns and heavily involved in imperial ideology, such manuals are obviously more prescriptive than descriptive about the reality of colonial war. However, being generally composed by practitioners of colonial warfare with fellow (or future) practitioners in mind, they give us an indication of what those involved actually considered important and provide a glimpse of the main ideas that generated and legitimised the extreme violence of colonial warfare in the minds of its European perpetrators.
Certainly, the ideas we find there were not the only factor behind extreme violence. Not least, many of the practices of colonial warfare had originally developed on the ground, in cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans, the latter being agents either as enemies or allies (or something in between) or as soldiers in colonial service. Outside of settler colonies, non-whites always constituted the bulk of the rank and file of colonial armies. As such, they had and would continue to codetermine the face of colonial warfare. However, they were arguably less involved in the ways Europeans came to interpret the violent practice of war that had taken shape and the heavily racialised discourse on colonial war that emerged from this process. This discourse, as I show below, functioned both as a generator as well as a legitimation of extreme violence; furthermore, it was also to spread transimperially. Thus, even if not the only factor, it constitutes a highly important one in explaining the violence of colonial warfare. And certainly it seems better suited as an explanation than a focus on national military doctrines or “military cultures.”
A second source base occasionally drawn on for this article is a selection of case studies: the colonial wars in Rhodesia (1896–1897), Sierra Leone (1898), German South West Africa (1904–1908), German East Africa (1905–1907) and Aceh (Dutch East Indies, 1873–1914). All these were “post-conquest” wars. Except one, all these colonies had gone through the declaration of a “protectorate” and/or an initial war of conquest around 1890; accelerating colonial encroachment on native societies (introduction of taxes, forced labour, increasing settler and police abuses, etc.) would however only follow in the years thereafter. Increasing pressure would eventually usher in larger-scale wars of resistance in all these cases. Only the Aceh War is somewhat dissimilar. Here, the initial conquest of the sultanate by two expeditions in 1873 to 1874 failed to lay the base for further colonial penetration. The colonial army remained holed up within a small stretch of territory, assailed by a guerrilla movement. A significant turnaround would only occur more than twenty years later, particularly after J. B. van Heutsz became Governor of Aceh in 1898. He abandoned the customary colonial method of a scorched earth war and replaced it by measures to co-opt local political leaders, bring the population under actual control, and hunt down resistance groups. Still, it was to take more than fifteen years of bloody anti-guerrilla warfare before the war could be considered at an end.Footnote 13
Racialised War
If we are to find the connecting elements in fin de siècle European thinking on colonial wars rather than to remain stuck in national exceptionalisms, I suggest we accord far more importance to the emergence of a discourse on colonial war centred on racial otherness that arose in the nineteenth century and which, to European colonial perpetrators, served both to legitimate as well as generate extreme violence.
Colonial wars had always involved a strong element of othering of the opponent. However, over the nineteenth century, “race” became “the organizing grammar of an imperial order,” so much so that some have even spoken of a “racial century” between 1850 and 1950.Footnote 14 This development also transformed the conception of colonial wars. As Jürgen Osterhammel writes, “as a repertoire of racist categories took shape in the nineteenth century, colonial wars were readily ideologized as wars against inferior races.”Footnote 15 Wars overseas, not least because they were mostly irregular conflicts, forced Europeans to come to terms with a warfare that was profoundly different from “European warfare.” Ideologies of racial difference provided the interpretative patterns to make sense of this all, not least of the extreme violence that marked the European reaction. It is important to view this ideologisation not only as ex post facto legitimation. Colonial wars greatly increased in frequency over the nineteenth century, with ever more actors involved. Repeated in each war, racialised interpretations of colonial warfare were constantly reiterated and reproduced in a world of increasingly globalised communication, either in writing (in newspapers, campaign memoirs, and—later—also manuals) or by the practitioners of colonial war themselves, who frequently would move on to other colonial sites or conflicts. These racialised notions thus came to stand at the base of the conduct of colonial war, because, as Dierk Walter notes, public legitimation generated a new reality among the perpetrators of the violence themselves: “if they come to regard a conflict in a certain light, then that is also how they will henceforth conduct it.”Footnote 16 Extreme violence was no longer an ad hoc reaction to certain structural constraints but rather had become linked to the perception of racial otherness; the presence of the racial Other already demanded the application of extreme violence, irrespective of the concrete military situation.
What is more, the notion that the Other was inherently different also prompted practitioners to mould and perform violence in ways that they thought would be understood by an opponent who supposedly thought and acted so differently from oneself. This is an aspect that has been highlighted in newer research on colonial violence and war, research which stresses its communicative and performative aspects. Scholars such as Kim Wagner, Gavin Rand, William Gallois, Michael Pesek, Elizabeth Kolsky, and Bruce Collins have noted how colonial violence was often designed to send a certain message and perform “white superiority” for what was often referred to as the “native mind.”Footnote 17 As such, much thought went into what violence was suited to reach this “native mind,” which was often felt to be nearly inscrutable.Footnote 18 European fin de siècle thinking on colonial warfare clearly reflected this perceived need. True to the one colonial trope that “the native” would “only listen to violence,” it often presented extreme violence as a way to influence the “native mind,” to have an “effect” on it, or to “overawe” it.
Furthermore, it was an exercise in self-assurance. Indigenous agency and resistance often exposed the limits of what the agents of empire could do in colonial warfare. The discourse that the latter produced partly erased this agency, telling the colonisers that they possessed the correct methods and understanding to perform and assert their supposed superiority vis-à-vis the “natives.” This also served as an antidote against the constant sense of imperial anxiety about preserving the semblance of absolute colonial control and superiority which, as recent studies increasingly emphasise, was a staple of all empires.Footnote 19
Transimperiality
Attending to the specific body of thought that racialised war begot will help us to understand colonial warfare around 1900 as a transimperial phenomenon. Transimperial history is still a very new field. A first definition was put forward in 2018 by Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé. They noted that, paradoxically, the transnational turn in historiography had largely ended up nationalising empires. Scholars had sought to deconstruct the nation and demonstrate the fluidity of national boundaries by bringing colony and metropole “into one analytic field,” but in doing so had mostly focused on intra-imperial processes; the borders of empires were rarely transcended in these studies.Footnote 20 Hedinger and Heé therefore propose a transimperial turn in empire studies. Transimperial history, they hold, does not only mean the inclusion of two or more empires in one's research design. It also means moving beyond the dichotomy of competition or cooperation between empires to arrive at a broader view of the imperial sphere. One result, the authors predict, will be that “narratives for each empire will change for they will appear less unique.” Furthermore, such a new understanding of the relationship between empires will also constitute an empirical field within the framework of the interplay of competition, cooperation, and connectivity.Footnote 21
Another historian who has done much recently to promote transimperial history is Bernhard Schär. Rather than forwarding a specific methodology, Schär's work on imperial science uses the term predominantly to alert us to the fact that imperial networks were often highly multilingual and transimperial in their makeup.Footnote 22 Following the newer imperial histories that understand empires as primarily held together by multitudes of networks, Schär contends that these approaches will only realise their full potential if they investigate networks not only within a single empire but in their full range, extending across imperial borders.Footnote 23
This article, first and foremost, seeks to make the narratives for each empire “appear less unique,” as Hedinger and Heé predict. This it does by pointing out the essential similarities in the discourse underlying the violence of fin de siècle colonial warfare in the British, German, and Dutch Empire. Nevertheless, I would argue here as well that these commonalities have something to do with transimperial connectivity. These connections cannot be traced in all their aspects in this article, but several can be pointed out that will give an inkling of how this discourse evolved in a dense web of mutual observation.
In one of the few existing studies on transfers concerning colonial violence Jonas Kreienbaum and Aidan Forth, who focus on colonial concentration camps, point out one of the main problems in this field: the difficulty in determining whether observable similarities recur based on previous transfers or are simply due to similar circumstances giving rise to comparable developments.Footnote 24 The authors however conclude that “empires were not hermetically sealed units that generated military tactics spontaneously or independently; rather they shared and borrowed from one another when faced with related challenges.”Footnote 25 I would argue so as well. To understand the specific ways of transfer in this study, I suggest drawing on Kreienbaum and Kamissek's concept of the “imperial cloud.” In analogy with the modern-day digital cloud, the “imperial cloud” represents “a shared reservoir of knowledge, which was not bound to a single empire, but had a multi-local existence and was accessible to agents of different empires, both from the peripheries and the metropoles.”Footnote 26 It is thus emphatically transimperial and, crucially, it acknowledges the “often unplanned and unsystematic spread of imperial knowledge.”Footnote 27 This fits our case very well: on colonial war-making there was always lively mutual observation and individual mobility between imperial settings, but rarely can we pinpoint the one specific, clear-cut moment or actor of transfer.
A transimperial character is certainly evident in the literature on colonial war. Charles Callwell's manual of 1896 covered for instance not only British colonial campaigns but French, Russian, United States, Dutch, and Spanish ones as well. By the third edition of 1906, German, Italian, and Portuguese campaigns were also mentioned.Footnote 28 German texts of instruction often drew on British or French precedents; the early text by Wissmann (Reference Wissmann1895) had recommended its readers on the first page to study the British colonial wars in order to “prepare militarily” for “African conditions.”Footnote 29 The Dutch manual by M. J. E. Bos (1913) was equally highly transimperial, with references to British, French, German, and Belgian colonies.Footnote 30
Military journals reflected this international orientation even earlier. Surveys of the Netherlands Indies military journal (Indisch Militair Tijdschrift; IMT) or the German military weekly Militär-Wochenblatt (MWB) have revealed how regular the reporting on foreign colonial expeditions was.Footnote 31 In the late 1870s and early 1880s, for instance, the IMT published a flurry of articles on French wars in Algeria and Tunisia.Footnote 32 Even before the onset of formal German colonialism, the MWB had already published on, for example, the Anglo-Asante War of 1873–1874 and the contemporaneous Dutch expeditions to Aceh.Footnote 33 In 1889, an article on French Tonkin was introduced by a note from the editors stating the article might be of interest now that Germany had also embarked on war against “savage nations.”Footnote 34
All these instances of observation should be seen as feeding into the “imperial cloud.” If we however want to identify more direct ways of transfer, it is at the mobility of individuals that we should look. Once more, this can only be hinted at here, but this can give an indication. To start with, it is important to recall the important role of non-Europeans in colonial armies. Their mobility too contributed to transfer in the field of colonial warfare. The “Sudanese” askari (soldiers), for instance, who formed the backbone of the early German colonial troops in East Africa, had extensive previous experience of colonial warfare, having served in the Anglo-Egyptian Army before the Egyptian retreat from Sudan in the 1880s spelled their discharge from the army and an existence in poverty in Cairo. It was there that the German Hermann Wissmann, looking for mercenaries to set up the force that would eventually become the colonial army of German East Africa, recruited some nine hundred of them in 1889. For the formative early phase of the Schutztruppe, these men would form the core of the troops and their NCOs would for long be an important support for German officers, especially for those who were ignorant of colonial conditions.Footnote 35 The askari in East Africa thus constitute a clear example of transimperial transfer on the non-European side.
On the side of the colonisers, following Bernhard Schär, one aspect to look at here would be the transnational composition of empires’ European populations. In Rhodesia in 1896, for instance, we find a considerable number of Australians, Americans, and Afrikaners from the Boer republics, a part of whom at least carried earlier experiences of colonial war, acquired elsewhere.Footnote 36 In German South West Africa in 1904, around half of the population was non-German, mainly of British and Boer descent.Footnote 37 And in the Netherlands Indies, a considerable proportion of whites in the colonial army were non-Dutch Europeans; at its height, the percentage was fully fifty percent.Footnote 38 For the individuals who stood at the origins of German colonial warfare, a transimperial socialisation is particularly evident. The respective founders of the colonial armies in German South West as well as East Africa, Curt von François and Hermann Wissmann, had both spent years in the transnational endeavour of the “exploration” of Central Africa in name of the Belgian King Leopold, which had provided them with a “training ground” in the 1880s.Footnote 39
As the above makes clear, nineteenth-century colonial warfare certainly did not develop within national-imperial containers. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that the need to observe others was felt in varying intensity across different empires. The British, with their own extensive empire and imperial history, could often draw on their own experience and look down on less experienced imperial powers. Their military journals, for instance, appear to have looked less at other empires.Footnote 40 The Germans, on the other hand, often keenly felt a lack of colonial experience.Footnote 41 Even in 1905, this was still openly admitted in the Militär-Wochenblatt, with one contributor arguing that Germany could not forgo becoming acquainted with foreign states’ experiences in colonial campaigning.Footnote 42 In part, empires which were already expanding in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as the British and the Dutch, also simply had fewer fellow empires that they could observe. However, this should not be overstated either. French Algeria, for instance, was already widely observed by foreigners in its early decades.Footnote 43 In the 1840s, the British were even translating German-language accounts of that war (stemming from former Foreign Legionnaires), and the virtually boundless admiration that Callwell betrayed for Bugeaud's conquest of Algeria in his manuals seems to testify to an enduring influence.Footnote 44 The Dutch, for their part, had had at least two military observers in Algeria in the 1850s.Footnote 45 And in the 1890s, when Major Van Heutsz, who was soon to be put in charge of the Dutch conduct of the Aceh War, was thinking about strategy changes in that war, he still referred to Algeria, mentioning the tactics used by Bugeaud there in the 1840s.Footnote 46
Thus, mutual observation over decades had constituted an “imperial cloud” for the subject of colonial war-making, while the mobility of individuals equally contributed to the spread of ideas.
“Moral Effect”
If racialised war brought forth a shared, transimperial body of thought, what did this body look like? Below, I want to give an indication by selecting one central notion, that of producing a “moral effect,” to show how such thinking emerged, how it worked, how it pushed towards extreme violence, and, most importantly, to what extent it can be considered transimperial.
Exerting a “moral effect” on the racial Other emerges in the sources as one of the key concerns of the European practitioners of colonial warfare. Callwell's manual for instance even included “moral effect” in his definition of colonial wars, naming it as one aspect which distinguished small wars from “regular” wars: “that moral effect is often far more important than material success.”Footnote 47 This view also had official sanction: the course-book for the British officers’ academy at Sandhurst, Tactics for Beginners (1899), already emphasised that “Moral effect has a great influence on savages,” and this received official endorsement when a section on “warfare in uncivilized countries” was finally inserted into the official British infantry regulations in 1909.Footnote 48
The notion of moral effect had some roots in European warfare. There, it alluded to the psychological impact (distinguished from material or physical impact) created by military action, particularly by battlefield victories. Clausewitz, the most eminent theoretician of European war in the nineteenth century, identified moral effect in battle mainly with the loss of order, courage, confidence, cohesion, and plan; it could be measured principally by the loss of the ground fought on, and the superiority of the enemy's reserve. While Clausewitz saw in dissipating moral force a frequently decisive factor in battle, he stated that the objective of battle must be the imposition of physical loss on the enemy. He also viewed moral effect as generally of rather short duration, though growing with the number of defeated soldiers on the opponents’ side, and of more durable effect on the civilian apparatus of state and government.Footnote 49 For Clausewitz, moral effect generally appeared to come about as a result of the developments in war rather than something actively administered on the foe.Footnote 50
In contrast, in colonial war moral effect appeared as an aim, frequently even the principal aim, of military action, something actively pursued. The notion was markedly more present in colonial warfare than it was in its European counterpart and its generation was perceived by practitioners as imperative. Moral effect was measured by its alleged effect on the “native mind” and was closely related to two other key terms in European thinking on colonial warfare: “instilling awe” (or “overawing”) and “prestige.”Footnote 51 These three terms can hardly be neatly distinguished and regularly appear interchangeable in the use of the practitioners. I would argue nonetheless that moral effect was generally understood as being more transient, a moment of shorter duration of shock in war, which then was to lead to the establishment or re-establishment of a more long-term European moral ascendancy that was referred to as “prestige” or “awe” (with the first supposedly pertaining to the white victor and the latter supposedly instilled in the local population).Footnote 52
The distinction is discernible for instance in the following remarks by a British soldier on the results of the Yoni expedition of 1887 in Sierra Leone:
The moral effect of this expedition throughout all the district was profound. [. . .] When the expeditionary force returned to Sierra Leone, a force of 30 men of the West India Regiment was left at Robari under the command of a subaltern [. . .]. This force proved amply sufficient to overawe the neighbourhood, though sixty miles distant from any reinforcement, and to maintain order among the adjoining tribes.Footnote 53
Evidently, the moral effect allegedly brought about by the military expedition is presented here as enabling the subsequent overawing of the district by a minimal force. The quote also speaks to the belief that this effect had not to apply exclusively to the vanquished military force, but rather to the population of the district as a whole.Footnote 54
One of the reasons moral effect had taken on such importance in the colonial sphere was because it reacted to European sensations of impotency that were linked to several structural circumstances of colonialism and colonial war. Colonialism represented the rule of a tiny minority over often huge populations and/or areas. In this situation, and with the normally limited means of the colonial state, a rule through fear was almost invariably settled upon as the most economical mode of asserting control.Footnote 55 In this sense, moral effect must be read as a euphemism for intimidation through spectacular force. It had however other uses in camouflaging experiences of impotency as well. In colonial campaigns, European armies often struggled to find an opponent to fight in a pitched battle. This ineffectiveness could be concealed by invoking moral effect: even if no battle had occurred, at least a moral effect could be claimed.Footnote 56 This sort of reasoning is apparent, for example, in how a soldier of the Dutch East Indies army made sense of a rather futile patrol in the Moluccas:
Although this patrol did not achieve a direct result, that is, contact with and punishment of the mountain Alfurs, it had indirectly still been of use: a moral impression had been made on the beach population.Footnote 57
Furthermore, moral effect could be used to paper over the want of actual territorial control or presence in large swathes of colonial land, as with one manual author who claimed of isolated forts that “in ordinary cases the moral effect of these forts will keep the surrounding country quiet.”Footnote 58 The employment of artillery in colonial wars, frequently a drag on necessary mobility and embarrassingly ineffective against scattered and evasive opponents as well as against supposedly “primitive” fortifications, could also be defended with reference to moral effect. Typical in this respect is C. B. Wallis’ manual on warfare in West Africa: “In the operations in the Karene country, in the Sierra Leone hinterland in 1898, seven-pounder guns had no effect whatever upon the stockades. Nevertheless, the moral effect of artillery fire upon savages is always great.”Footnote 59 By that time, this statement had been repeated so often that most colonial soldiers certainly took it for granted.Footnote 60
Camouflaging different experiences of impotence, the notion of moral effect helped the colonisers to maintain their self-perception of racial superiority also in war, and probably even enhanced this perception. As these men told themselves they were capable of administering a powerful effect on the “native mind,” even “overawing” it, they must have experienced, occasionally at least, a heightened sense of power, self-worth, and masculinity—as stated before, this was a useful counterbalance to the ever-present imperial anxieties.
“Moral Effect” and Extreme Violence
The establishment of “moral effect” as a central aspect in colonial war-making is in many ways typical for the process described in the first section: initially linked, in part at least, to certain structural conditions of colonial war, the notion subsequently gained a life of its own and became indispensable in the colonisers’ minds precisely because it came to be racialised. The notion's connection to certain ideas about racial difference is visible from the beginning; the two were probably in a mutual relationship. Ideas about generating moral effect connected easily with views on the irrationality of the “native mind,” the supposed inability of “natives” to weigh arguments rationally, and their “impressionability.”Footnote 61 They furthermore corresponded to the supposed effeminacy of many “lower races.”Footnote 62 (It should be noted here that these characteristics at the same time stood for the opposite of everything the white soldier was believed to be). Through this racialisation, the need to create a moral effect had long been decoupled from the specific constraints of a theatre of war and had instead become linked to the race of the enemy. As Daniel Whittingham has noted, in colonial wars the generation of moral effect through “punitive methods” came to be seen as necessary even where the opponent had a capital and/or an army that could be militarily targeted. As a result, Whittingham concludes, small wars “tended towards totality for native populations.”Footnote 63 Indeed, in many instances the idea of moral effect pushed towards the unshackling of violence, as it suggested that a simple victory over the opponents’ arms would be insufficient and that additional forms of violence might be necessary to produce the desired impression or effect. Significantly, what once had been in part a fig leaf for impotence thus had grown into a driving force of violence itself.
One can observe this already in an early treatise, “Warfare against Uncivilised Races,” written by the military engineer da Costa Porter (a participant of the Zulu War), who argued as follows:
In the earlier phases of the war the Zulus had suffered at least as heavily, in more than one engagement, as they did in the final battle at Ulundi, but the moral effect of the advance, the devastation, and the burning of the king's kraal were wanting.Footnote 64
To the author, the heavy battlefield losses suffered by the Zulu were not enough; it needed other forms of violence for the sake of moral effect. It is crucial to recognise here that da Costa Porter linked such moral effect to the devastation of the enemy's lands and presented the destruction of the Zulu royal residence as necessary. It becomes clear how in such notions the functions of generating actual violence and legitimating it go hand in hand: on the one hand, devastation of the land is prescribed in order to create moral effect; at the same time it is legitimised already as the only way to bring about capitulation of the Zulu, who, supposedly, would not be sufficiently impressed by battle defeat only.
This perceived need for psychological effect on top of ordinary military victory can also be found distinctly expressed in one of the earliest German texts on colonial warfare, when the author Georg Maercker pointed out that the objective of the Wissmann troops on the coast of East Africa should not merely be to suppress the uprising there, but rather to “impress” [imponiren (sic)] the Africans.Footnote 65 Maercker's use of the German proverb that one had to “press the thumb onto the eye” of the African leaves little doubt that Maercker too believed that such psychological effect had to be achieved through extreme violence.Footnote 66
This identification of moral effect with “additional,” that is, extreme, violence, was enormously consequential. As exerting a moral effect came to be seen as an imperative of colonial warfare, there was little chance of the conduct of these wars being in any way meaningfully restrained.
Another instance in which the deadly consequences of the notion of moral effect manifested themselves was in the use of summary executions in war. It was an oft-repeated belief in the world of the European practitioners of colonial warfare that summary executions of captured “rebels” supposedly had such a “salutary effect” that many remaining chiefs or followers would promptly capitulate and tender their submission. When Baden-Powell (of later Scouting fame) had the Rozwi chief Uwini shot without a proper process in Matabeleland in 1896, he noted that he had “great hopes that the moral effect of this will be particularly good among the rebels.” The next day, many of Uwini's followers, besieged in their stronghold and denied access to water already for two days and nights, gave up. Baden-Powell immediately attributed this to the moral effect: “Thus, within a very few hours of his execution, the death of Uwini began to have its effect.”Footnote 67 A very comparable execution of the Shona paramount Makoni Mutota Cirimaunga in neighbouring MaShonaland was defended by Rhodesian settlers with a similar reasoning: the execution had made a “profound impression on the native mind,” and it had allegedly given rise to the same sudden effects: since then, submissions had numbered into the hundreds each day, a powerful chief had suddenly come to declare his loyalty, and two hundred arms had been given up to the authorities.Footnote 68 Similar thinking can be found in German East Africa in 1905, as seen in the case of one naval officer who had five prisoners shot in order to “make an impression on the opponent,” afterwards showing himself convinced that this swift execution now prevented hundreds of Africans from going over to the enemy.Footnote 69
In all three cases, there was probably no such effect at all. For example, the surrender at Uwini's had probably more to do with being cut off from the water supply for more than 48 hours than with some “moral effect,” and for MaShonaland there are clear signs that Makoni's execution was counterproductive as it actually heightened the fear of submitting to the colonisers.Footnote 70 Months later, in a parley with a Rhodesian officer, another Shona leader was recorded as saying he did not dare to come, as the whites “had shot Makoni when he surrendered, and we might also shoot him.”Footnote 71
Moral effect also became associated with one of the deadliest weapons of the colonisers: the machine gun. From early on, these weapons were hailed for their supposed moral effect. In this way, the mass slaughter machine guns were capable of inflicting was turned into a story that foregrounded psychological effect on the “native mind.” When the Germans embarked on their first major colonial war in East Africa in 1889, the Wissmann troops already carried Maxim machine guns with them, and in the manuals that participants wrote afterwards it was the moral factor of these guns that they highlighted.Footnote 72 It was however the 1893 invasion of Matabeleland, which saw British South Africa Company troops kill and incapacitate hundreds of charging Ndebele with Maxim gun fire, that established the weapon's colonial “fame.”Footnote 73 Its “moral effect” afterwards even became a selling point: in 1896, a representative of the Maxim Company offered to sell the Dutch government fifty machine guns in case the course of the Aceh War would make it desirable to produce “a great moral impression, for which these guns are, as has among others been shown in the Matabele War, so particularly suited.”Footnote 74 Later Dutch discussions of the machine gun also recurred regularly on the 1893 Ndebele War.Footnote 75 In 1905, when a campaign to the island of Bone was being prepared, an officer of the Netherlands Indies colonial army wrote a newspaper article arguing for the addition of machine guns to the expedition. This would allow not only inflicting “severe losses,” but would also have a “moral effect [morele uitwerking]” on big masses.Footnote 76 Indeed, it even appears the discussion of machine guns was one instance that brought the specific term “moral effect” into wider use in Dutch discourse on colonial warfare. This brings us to our next point.
Moral Effect in the Transimperial Context
Where scholars have explicitly touched on the notion of moral effect in colonial warfare, it is generally presented, implicitly or explicitly, as a British phenomenon. For Daniel Whittingham, it was a “Victorian idea.”Footnote 77 Priya Satia discusses the term exclusively in the context of the British system of “air policing.”Footnote 78 And Timothy Moreman has claimed the conceptualisation in moral terms was one of the aspects which unified the so-varied British experiences of colonial wars.Footnote 79 Yet, moral effect not only unified the British experiences. As a term, it was most prominent in British accounts, but in similar forms it can be found many times in German or Dutch contexts. In German publications on the subject, it can be observed from the beginning, as already seen in the above-cited speech by Maercker of 1889.Footnote 80 The brief manual by Carl Peters of 1892 equally emphasised that wars in Africa were conducted primarily with “moralischen Effekten.”Footnote 81 This reflected the influence of the British Empire on some of the early German colonial commanders. Peters for example had been perusing literature on the British Empire while in London before he entered upon his own colonial enterprise.Footnote 82 The same was true for Wissmann, who was Maercker's commander in German East Africa and of whom Maercker was an avid pupil.Footnote 83 That Peters spoke of moralische Effekte rather than moralische Wirkungen, the term which was much more common in German military literature, might even speak to the direct British origins.Footnote 84
In the case of the Dutch East Indies, there was a similar discourse on the moral effects of colonial warfare, though with important differences. More literal equivalents of the term such as morele indruk or morele (uit)werking can be found only rarely in the fin de siècle literature.Footnote 85 Instead, the earliest manuals spoke regularly of zedelijk overwicht (“moral ascendancy” in loose translation).Footnote 86 Notions of moral effect were also present in the oft-recurring expressions about ontzag (“awe”) and “prestige.”Footnote 87 Together with “moral ascendancy,” it was thus the more long-term notions which dominated in the Dutch discourse. Nevertheless, the close relation to the British conceptions of “moral effect” can be discerned in some Dutch translations of British texts on colonial war. The translators, who were themselves Dutch colonial soldiers, apparently had no difficulty recognising the meaning of “moral effect” in the British colonial usage and simply translated it with the terms moreel effect or zedelijke indruk (moral influence/impression).Footnote 88 This was the case, for instance, when the abovementioned essay by da Costa Porter was translated into Dutch and published in its entirety in the military journal of the Netherlands East Indies.Footnote 89
What was peculiar to the Dutch situation, however, is that such talk of moral influences appears to have receded markedly in the two decades that followed the start of the Aceh War in 1873. The endless war apparently produced a mismatch with reality that was ever harder to ignore: whatever the amount of violence employed, the Dutch simply failed to end the war. It was consequently increasingly difficult to maintain that one was generating a tremendous moral effect in the Acehnese mind. Indeed, resignation is palpable in a book published by an anonymous colonial officer in 1896. Describing how one Dutch post in Aceh continued to be harassed by Acehnese fire despite recurrent military counteractions that had inflicted considerable casualties, the officer sighed: “One sees, they never give up. Will the view of many, that the war will go on as long as there remains one Acehnese, be so wrong?”Footnote 90 No faith seemed to remain in a “moral effect” that would “shock” the Acehnese into giving up.
Nevertheless, for those Dutch colonial soldiers who were not yet resigned, the conviction that “instilling awe” into the Acehnese was the way to win the war continued to feature prominently. W. A. Coblijn, a retired colonel of the colonial army, published a blood-curdling treatise in 1893 in which he advocated an intensification of the earlier war of devastation practised in Aceh in order to finally make the “desired impression” on the Acehnese.Footnote 91 Underlining Coblijn's argument were repeated references to the British suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, among others a quote from Kaye and Malleson's History of the Indian Mutiny: “The native mind is readily convinced by the inexorable logic of the sword.”Footnote 92
When Major Van Heutsz in the same year presented his own thoughts on ending the Aceh War, these were of a less destructive nature, but they too still saw the necessity of “instilling awe” as central to the war's resolution. As soon as Acehnese awe and fear for the Dutch had dissipated, so too had any hope of ending the war soon, van Heutsz wrote.Footnote 93 After van Heutsz was made Governor of Aceh in 1898 and he had started applying a new strategy to the war which appeared to yield success, officers also interpreted this in old-fashioned terms. In 1907, when one of van Heutsz's former subordinates touched upon the changes introduced by his commander, he did not highlight the co-optation of local leaders or the proscription of scorched earth tactics. Instead, he mainly recurred to the classic notions of “forceful action,” “awe,” and “making an impression”:
By his forceful action he [van Heutsz] managed to instil awe for our weapons into the Acehnese everywhere and, informed by the great scholar Snouck Hurgronje on [Acehnese] mores and customs, to always take those measures which made the biggest impression on the kafir-hating Acehnese.Footnote 94
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. Unsurprisingly, this often found scholars arriving at positions of national exceptionalism. Even the challenges to such positions have largely remained within a national framework. This article, on the contrary, has argued for a consideration of such violence as a transimperial phenomenon, highlighting the similarity in thought and the manifold connections between empires when it came to the use of extreme violence in British, German, and Dutch colonial wars of the fin de siècle. My first objective here has been to challenge narratives of imperial uniqueness. I have however also sought to give an indication of the dense web of mutual observation and the transimperial connectivity and mobility that marked the waging of colonial war in this time period, even if in the field of colonial violence one will rarely find straightforward avenues of transfer. Instead, knowledge exchange frequently occurred in a more diffuse way via the “imperial cloud.”
I have zoomed in on the notion of “moral effect” here to show what one part of this transimperial body of thought looked like. The thorough racialisation of colonial warfare in the nineteenth century prompted practitioners of colonial warfare to consider how to best impact an opponent often understood as an absolute racial Other. This gave rise to the obsession with producing a “moral effect” in the “native mind.” Recurring in similar forms and wordings in (among others) Dutch, British, and German manuals of colonial warfare between the 1860s and 1910s, this notion both legitimated as well as pushed towards extreme violence.
Of course, “moral effect” was only one notion of a larger complex. The perusal of the manuals that have been consulted here as primary sources points to other recurring convictions of the colonial practitioners: the conviction that colonial war had to be waged exclusively offensively and by “bold initiative” (even more so than in European warfare at the time), that overwhelming violence was a prerequisite if peace was to be sustainable; that warfare had to inflict “punishment” (whatever that meant exactly) and that it had to inflict high losses or, one might say more bluntly, to massacre.Footnote 95 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 prehistories of the Holocaust. It does, however, bring us far closer to what went on in the minds of the Europeans engaging in colonial warfare at the time.
Acknowledgements
This article was born of my larger doctoral project on extreme violence in the knowledge and practice of colonial warfare in the British, German, and Dutch empires (ca. 1890–1914), which I pursued in the EUmanities programme at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. This programme has received funding from the European Union Horizon's 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 713600.
I would like to thank the journal editors, the two anonymous reviewers, and Valentina Mann for the feedback on the article draft.
Open access
