Typologies of Colonial Violence

In The Trouble with Empire, Antoinette Burton explores how violence accom­panied the imperial project wherever it went. Arising from a perennial struggle between imperial expansionism and counter-resistance, she argues, violence emerged as an inherent feature of Britain's colonial frontiers.

In this respect, the consequences of colonisation for the peoples whose territories became part of the British Empire's global map after 1783 took more subtle forms besides conquest through military power. Justified on the grounds of taking British civilisation to the world, different kinds of cultural and institutional violence were imposed on colonised peoples through administrative measures that included the introduction of British law, the spread of British jurisdiction through offices of government, the systematic dismantling of Indigenous sovereignty, and the incarceration and cultural re­education of Indigenous peoples.

However, while all these forms of physical and cultural violence were apparent in different degrees across the British Empire, frontier violence stands out as a particular feature of the British settler colonial world, where incoming settlers sought to displace Indigenous peoples from their home­lands and turn those lands to new economic use. The economic forces that drove colonisation in Britain's slave and plantation colonies, or that under­pinned the model of company rule in British India, were shaped by access to natural resources such as mineral wealth or human labour. In distinction to these forms of ‘exploitative' colonisation, the principal motivator of settler colonialism in the nineteenth century was the permanent acquisition and cultivation of land. Patrick Wolfe describes this core distinction between settler colonialism and colonialism per se as being grounded, quite literally, in the inherent value of the land itself. Because settler colonies such as the Cape Colony, Australia, New Zealand and British Canada were principally estab­lished not to accrue economic benefit from labour or other extractable resources but to take possession of profitable territories from which Indigenous occupants would need to be dispelled, they were predicated on the elimination of native societies.

The ‘logic of elimination' that defines settler colonialism, Wolfe stresses, not only encompassed physical violence - most characteristically in the form of frontier wars and homicide as strategies of conquest - but also entailed an array of institutional strategies through which colonial governments sought over time to render Indigenous peoples and societies ‘superfluous'.

From the 1820s onwards the scope and scale of settler colonial migration around the British Empire increased exponentially with what James Belich has described as the ‘settler revolution': a period of dramatic expansion in settler migration and entrepreneurialism through the early to mid nineteenth century that was made possible by new technologies in communication and travel, flourishing cross-colonial networks of trade, and burgeoning oppor­tunities for economic investment in the colonies. The sheer pace and inten­sity of this settler explosion, Belich argues, had an overwhelmingly negative impact on Indigenous societies. While imperial expansion in an earlier era had remained sufficiently contained to allow Indigenous peoples to respond to colonial newcomers with strategies of resilience and adaptation, the explosive degree of settler migration that occurred from the 1820s onwards was unprecedented and devastating.^[371]