The Colonial Way of War: Extreme Violence in Knowledge and Practice of Colonial Warfare in the British, German, and Dutch Colonial Empires, c. 1890–1914

Menger, Tom

doi:10.5771/9783835348776-273

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“…At the same time, these memorabilia are an indicator of the violent encounters that facilitated their taking and collection. Beijens's extensive knil network shows the extent to which personal and colonial networks were involved in military collecting, but it also reflects the 'transimperial' character of colonial warfare and violence as such (Menger 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death

Hermkens,

Venbrux

2023

Bijdr. taal-, land- volkenkd.

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Nineteenth-century, private collections of ethnographic artefacts have a bad reputation in anthropology. Appearing to comprise ‘a haphazard assemblage of junk’ (Gathercole 1978:276), anthropologists and others interested in ethnographic objects and collecting have ignored private collections for some time. While Jean Louis Henri Beijens’s collection resembles at first glance a haphazard assemblage not worthy of attention, a closer inspection reveals its historical and contemporary significance. In this article, we offer a glimpse into Beijens’s private military collection, which contains artefacts originating from the Dutch colonies in both the East and West, as well as from Belgian Congo. Highlighting the colonial self-fashioning that occurred while he was assembling his ‘haphazard’ collection, we elucidate the colonial dispossession and violence that is at the heart of Beijens’s and other private and public collections. In doing so, this article attempts to address the enduring legacies and responsibilities of colonial collecting and collections.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death

Hermkens,

Venbrux

2023

Bijdr. taal-, land- volkenkd.

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Concealing Colonial Comparability: British Exceptionalism, Imperial Violence, and the Dynamiting of Cave Refuges in Southern Africa, 1879–1897

Menger

2022

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

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The 1845 Dahra Massacre, in which French troops killed hundreds of Algerians by 'smoking out' their cave refuges, instantly became (and remains) an emblematic case of colonial violence. In Britain, this atrocity came to stand for everything British colonialism supposedly was not, and thus buttressed the claim to British exceptionalism as having a supposedly 'better', less violent colonialism. And yet, such attacks on caves had featured regularly in nineteenth-century British warfare in southern Africa, smoke being supplemented by dynamite from the 1870s onwards, cumulating in the little-known but extensive cave dynamitings in MaShonaland 1896-1897. This article reconstructs that long history, describing not only how practitioners accepted the dynamitings largely unquestioned, but also asking how at the time the British claim to exceptionalism was sustained despite the more than apparent resemblances to foreign cases. Apologists of empire did not cover up the violence but rather defended it; what they chose to remain silent on were the foreign analogies -concealed comparability was key to successfully sustaining British exceptionalism. Given the continued influence of exceptionalist arguments in public debate and historiography, this article finally makes a case to more forcefully place histories of British colonial violence next to those of other empires in an explicitly transimperial framework.

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The Colonial Way of War: Extreme Violence in Knowledge and Practice of Colonial Warfare in the British, German, and Dutch Colonial Empires, c. 1890–1914

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death

Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death

Concealing Colonial Comparability: British Exceptionalism, Imperial Violence, and the Dynamiting of Cave Refuges in Southern Africa, 1879–1897

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