Empires of Violence

Massacre in a Revolutionary Age

Philip Dwyer, Barbara Alice Mann, Nigel Penn, Lyndall Ryan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350538665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts

Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire's many incursions into Europe. Yet how did the forms of violence perpetrated in these four corners of the world compare? Did the oppression and exploitation of colonized peoples constitute a new form of violence? Or was it the same that Europeans had always used against conquered peoples?

In this book, four experts specializing in four different regions of the world come together to interrogate the violence committed against Indigenous peoples between 1780 and 1820. Showing how violence and massacre were a tool at the disposal of the colonizer, and often used to subjugate unruly populations, they examine the changing nature of warfare and killing from both a European and Indigenous perspective. Empires of Violence shows how race, othering and fear were maintained and buoyed by violence, in spite of prevailing discourses on humanitarianism, civilization and progress.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• A Note on the Use of Names
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Revolutionary Age in a Global Context
• 2 Ways of Being, Ways of Seeing
• 3 Local and Indigenous Ways of Warfare
• 4 The Logic of Violence and Massacre on the Imperial Frontier
• 5 Massacre, the State and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
• 6 The Colony of New South Wales
• 7 ‘Determining to Exterminate Them’ in ‘Terror and Desolation’: Massacre in North America
• 8 ‘Striking Terror into the Enemy’: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Zuurveld
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index