Professor Martin Thomas
University of Exeter

Some of the most egregious acts of violence in imperial history occurred as empires approached dissolution. Villages razed at the stroke of an official’s pen; refugees massacred by communal rivals as police look on; newsreel rolling as a gendarme executes a young Algerian on the roadside: multiple instances of collective, administrative, and individual violence from the final decades of European colonial rule overseas are easily found. If Britain’s suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising is any indication, many more remain unearthed.

So obvious seems the connection between contested decolonization and escalating levels of violence that three macro-level actors are typically identified: the imperial authorities that resisted pressure to withdraw, the settler populations wedded to white minority rule, and the anti-colonial nationalist groups that wanted the opposite outcome. Reductive explanations of this type begin to unravel as soon as the forms of violence practiced are explored, so it is on these issues of form and practice that this paper focuses. The point is not to suggest that political struggles between imperialists and their opponents were irrelevant to violence and the ends of empire. It is, rather, to indicate that violence in the late colonial world was rarely as binary as the notion of fighting for or against empire might imply. People were killed, starved, dispossessed, or otherwise maltreated physically or psychologically - the working definition of violence applied here - for multiple reasons. Most were more proximate to their social situation but more remote from any unifying narrative of adversarial decolonization.

Prevailing interpretations of anti-colonial violence suggest that intransigent imperial powers and their discriminatory legal regimes left nationalist groups with ‘no other way out’ than rebellion. Organizations committed to self-determination, it is claimed, turned to violence when their attempts to negotiate or bargain that option were denied. Conflict then escalated as each side sought to control the civilian population caught in this crossfire between armed anti-colonialists and imperial governments. A potential flaw in this analysis, as Adria Lawrence argues, is its failure to explain the timing of violent outbreaks. Colonialism was always authoritarian, colonial laws invariably racially uneven, so what triggered the nationalists’ turn to violence? This paper explores this question from the perspective of work on colonial violence, on civil wars, and on the laws of warfare in the twentieth century.