 So, welcome everyone to the first event in the Sir Michael Howard's New Directions program for 2022. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dr. Mark Condos and I'm one of the co-directors of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War and I'm also the convener of this new seminar series. And I'm very happy tonight to introduce our speaker, Dr. Tom Manger. Tom is a postdoctoral research associate currently at Ludwig Maximilian's University in Munich. And I actually had the pleasure of meeting Tom while he was still a PhD student and he was completing part of his PhD at Queen Mary University of London. His recently completed doctoral dissertation entitled Colonial Violence in European Comparative Perspective 1890 to 1914 examines the process of knowledge sharing when it came to theories of practice of colonial warfare across the German, British German and Dutch colonial empires during the Founder's Siege. And Tom's work demonstrates how colonial violence was rooted in a common body of knowledge rather than shaped by individual national cultures. So it's a very interesting and I think important intervention into this field that some people might disagree with, but anyway. More recently, Tom's also published an article just in, I believe, January of 2022 in itinerario entitled Press the Thumb on to the Eye, Moral Effects, Extreme Violence and the Trans-Imperial Notions of British German and Dutch Colonial Warfare, circa 1890 to 1914. So that's the end of my introduction. I'll turn it now over to Tom and just a reminder, please keep your microphones on mute until the Q and A after. So Tom, take it away. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for this kind introduction and I would like to thank you actually for this opportunity to speak here. I remember doing some archival research for this project back in 2018 at Queen King's College at the Little Heart Center. And while I'm delighted to be able to present some of the project results here today at this place, even if only virtually. And yeah, I would also like to commend you for putting together this exciting lecture series on New Directions and History of War and Violence. And I hope the long story I will be forcing upon you today will prove at least a bit worthy of the series title. So I'll share my screen. Can everybody see the PowerPoint? Seems okay. Yes, good. So, okay, maybe before I set off possibly needless to say about just a warning here that this paper contains historical material that might shock or offend due to its violence or racial language. So on the 22nd of June, 1879, an English newspaper carried the following article and they quote, when a French word war in Algeria, they incurred great odium because they smoked and suffocated the brave Arabs who fought under Abdul Qadir. Sometimes they took refuge in caves and on one occasion, Marshall Bourgeois and Marshall Bourgeoisy sealed up the mouth and just suffocated the poor inmates. Remember too, how all this was announced in England. Lord Palmerston especially went down to Tiverton to make a speech about it. And all England, thank God, and we were not as other men, not even as those Frenchmen. Well, now in Zuland, that's actually Bazutaland, we're doing something very like with Bourgeois and Bourgeoisy, and it is not pleasant reading which comes to us. So the quote stands here as a sort of teaser. I will come back to the story of the caves later in my presentation. First however, I think the newspaper article points us here to something that historians have done too little to place the colonial violence of one empire in relation to that of others. Research in the field of colonial war has often remained nationally fragmented or even actively invested in theories of national exceptionalism. And in today's paper, I hope to be able to show some to show some steps towards the trans-imperial history of colonial war and violence. And I draw here on my own doctoral dissertation on the British, German and Dutch Empire between approximately 1890 and 1914. And as a source base, I analyzed there the corpus of manuals of colonial warfare to distill sort of the basic notions of petitioners on colonial warfare. And I also used a selection of five case studies from the said empires to study how these notions reflected in practice. And these case studies as listed here on the PowerPoint are the endabilia shona rising in Rhodesia that's current days in Bapua, the so-called hot tax war in Sierra Leone, the Roman Nama war in German Southwest and the Magi Magi war in German East Africa that's currently in Namibia and Tanzania. And finally also for a Dutch empire, the Archive War in the Netherlands, East Indies. So for this paper, I will proceed as following. First, I will elaborate on national exceptionalism in research on colonial violence and how we might go beyond it. And I will then touch upon connections among empires as one of the key elements of a trans-imperial history. And I will then close with two larger case studies on specific practices of violence to further illustrate some of the points made. To start with, it's useful to remark here on the limits of this research. When Sierra and colonial war transpirally, one can look at many different things, but my research has been focused on the knowledge and practices of extreme violence that mark colonial wars. It's a focus which admittedly has complicated my job quite a bit, but I also think it's the field most in need of a history that transcends the borders of empires. Now, I realized some more words on the term of extreme violence are in order here. First of all, I'm concerned exclusively with physical violence. And secondly, there are no objective measures to define what constitutes extreme or transgressive violence. And in a way, I adopt a pragmatic approach here, looking at what was considered as transgressive by contemporaries. The fancy eclopyrid witness concerns attempts at regulating and restraining violence in wars between European powers, the so-called civilized wars. And this culminated in international laws of war laid down in the Geneva and Hague conventions of 1864 and 1899 and 1907. However, the use of methods that transgressed these commonly accepted boundaries of civilized warfare continued to be a general feature of the end of the colonial wars waged by European powers in the same time period. Charles Caldwell, the most famous theoretician of colonial warfare, even saw this aspect of, quote, committing havoc, which in laws of regular warfare do not sanction as a defining feature of what he called small wars. The contemporaries, thus, were very much aware of these boundaries of what was considered transgressive violence and what was not something also borne out by, quote, that German quote here, or, well, the quote is not in German, but it was originally in German. So transgression of these boundaries does only became self-evident in wars against the so-called uncivilized, the fact that it had to be mentioned as such, however, makes clear that there was a distinct sense of what in European warfare was indeed considered transgressive. So why has a trans-imperial history of extreme violence in colonial wars around 1900 not been forthcoming so far? One thing I think has been the outspoken tendency in military history in particular to focus attention to typical institutions, armies, and doctrines, and both, certainly for the time period on our consideration here, were understood to be national institutions. The corollary has been that the men are colonial wars were waged has frequently been assumed to be the outflow of such national institutions as well. Many scholars have been keen on finding some state specific elaborate and formalized doctrine of war in the colonies where that could not be found at least in national way of war, national school, military culture or approach. And as you can see, the list has become quite long already and I'm afraid it's still growing. And unsurprisingly, this has brought forth approaches that are highly national exceptionalist in character. And a great number of these might actually be familiar to you, such approaches have been particularly prominent in historiography on the German colonial violence. Since the early 2000s, the rise of interest in the genocide committed by German soldiers in Southwest Africa at the beginning of the 20th century has produced a host of publications that have interpreted the events there as precursors to national socialist racial policy, mass murder and destruction in Europe between 1939 and 1945. And these arguments often refer to as the Vintog to Auschwitz or Colonial Zandavek thesis have been advanced particularly by the work of Jungtzimola. Isabel Ho on the other hand has put forward a very different but also highly influential version of German particularity. In her review, the genocide committed in what is now Namibia with the outcome of a specific military culture of the German Prussian army, which prescriptions proved so spectacularly unsuited for clinicians in the colony that they spiraled out of control and finally ushered into extermination. In the British case, the focus on national doctrines has also produced theories of national particularity, especially around the British interwar doctrine of minimum force, which is lab scholars such as Thomas Mokaites and Rothhorn to claim that British colonial counterinspiracy is to distinguish itself by special restraint. And in part powerful institutional incentives have also been at work there. This has been felt in a British and two degrees in the Dutch case where national military is after 9-11 showed themselves quite keen on discovering a supposedly successful and benevolent national tradition of counterinsurgency in the colonial past. And this is obviously not to speak yet of the way this issue has also been and continues to be entangled with more general politics of remembrance and identity concerning the imperial past. And to be sure for all these exceptional theories I have been attempts to debunk them. The shortcoming of these attempts however, is that they refute national exceptionality largely from within a national framework. The transinferable perspective is either absent or lacks a larger empirical base. Where the violence is classified as part of a larger European phenomenon, it remains unclear where in the commonalities it consists beyond the reference to a number of comparable practices. I believe we really need more in order to grasp the character of what in the end was also shared Western way of war, just a very different one. So to start with, I posit that we have to look for commonality in the existence of a transinferial body of knowledge that legitimized and generated such extreme violence. This also means being attentive to the common role that the perception of racial utterness played in shaping his body of thought. More racism and racialized difference in engendering the extreme violence of colonial war continues to be debated in scholarships such as Isabel Holt or Dieg Weiter's Survey of European Colonial Violence based on deeply racism's importance seeing it predominantly as a post facto legitimation tool. However, I believe this misses an important development. While certain racialized conceptions about the war against a non-European utter might once have served mainly as post facto justifications of extreme violence and increasing repetition and reproduction over time meant that by the turn of the century they proceeded the event. It become commonly accepted knowledge and co-determined how actors fought a colonial war right from the beginning. A process of escalation was not necessary anymore. The practitioners of colonial warfare generally knew or at least thought they knew how to fight such a war. The use of extreme violence have become linked not so much the structural circumstances of the theater of war but to the self-evident perception of the utterness of the colonial opponent. And such common conceptions of racial utterness of the enemy give rise to a basic set of precepts for colonial warfare. And I have dubbed these the five basic imperatives of colonial warfare. And I believe they stood at the heart of this body of knowledge on colonial war. Rather than by some elaborate doctrine the practitioners of colonial warfare were guided by exactly these basic notions which were truly trans-imperial. I've opted for the term imperative as they very much sought to prescribe what colonial warfare in the eyes of the practitioners must do or achieve. It had to generate a moral effect on the opponent and had to create a lasting peace by using heavy force first. It had to be bold and offensive. It had to punish. And increasingly it also had to produce high dust or in other words to massacre. Needless to say generally these imperatives operated in combination but it will take here a moral effect as one example. So moral effect was generally agreed to be a central imperative of colonial war as the two quotes here on the PowerPoint also illustrate and they were taken from a British and a German manual respectively. Like the other imperatives moral effect was based on thoroughly racialized view of the opponent. It fitted well with beliefs about the irrationality of the so-called native mind. It's supposed in capability of rationally weighing arguments. It's susceptibility to shock and the idea that it would only listen to violence. It equally subscribed to beliefs about the alleged effeminateness of most so-called lower races. Tellingly these characteristics represented everything the European soldier supposedly was not. And how this notion contributed to the extreme character of colonial warfare becomes clear for instance in the Cossack Porter's remarks on the Zulu war in his essay titled Warfare Against Uncivilized Races. And they quote him, in the earlier phase of the war, the Zulu's had suffered at least as happily in more than one engagement as they did in a final battle at the Lundi. But the moral effect of the advance, the devastation and the burning of a king's crowd were one thing. So obviously battle here was not considered enough. It needed additional violence to generate the hope for moral effect. The quote also demonstrates the important link between legitimation and generation of violence in this body of knowledge. And it's interesting here, or interesting here is also one of the notions first mentioned in the German colonial manual as moral effect as you can see in the quote on the left. And this appears to indicate, in fact, it's British origins as a more common German term would actually have been moral effect. And moral effect really seems to be a direct translation in that sense and that the author had indeed come to know the term from British context is not implausible. After all, Peter that's been several years in London where he had also read up on the British Empire. Furthermore, another German colonial so-called pioneer, Evans and Wismann, actually counseled his readers on the first page of his own manual of 1895 to study the British colonial wars in order to prepare militarily for what he called African conditions. Actually, as you hear, he says not British but English but he means the same. Which brings us to the second major point of this paper, Trans-Imperial Connectivity. It's Daniel Heddinger and the Dean Hehrite. It's precisely the new empirical field of connections between and among empires that defines a Trans-Imperial history. It's also an aspect that are missing in the comparative survey, surveys of colonial war that we have such as by Diego Guaidro or Jacques Frimoul. In the field of colonial war, however, the transfer or circulation of knowledge is not easy to grasp conceptually. 10 years ago, Robert Gawad and Stefan Malinowski postulated a common Western colonial archive quote, to be understood as common knowledge on the treatment, exploitation and extermination of subhumans accumulated by Western powers. They did, however, not elaborate on the archive's precise forms or on how it might have come about. My research suggests that we should first think about such processes along the lines of what come in second, Keimbaum have called an Imperial Cloud. And deliberately playing on the association with the digital cloud, the author defining Imperial Cloud asked, quoting on 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 peripheries and to metaphors. Therefore, the Imperial Cloud is explicitly trans-imperial. Neither the cloud itself nor access to it are under control of one single empire. Although certainly power relations are still at work in determining who can access and particularly who can contribute to it. Fundamentally, the Imperial Cloud accounts for the quote, often unplanned and unsystematic spread of Imperial knowledge and the constant transformation at inner wind. It acknowledges that Imperial knowledge transfers are in many cases not detectable or traceable by historians. And other actors regularly also stay silent in these processes. One of the big questions when studying knowledge transfers in colonial war and violence is therefore where to look for avenues of transfer. Studying trans-imperiality in other fields has often come down to investigating international correspondences, conferences, diplomatic gatherings and journals. We do not really have these for the field of colonial warfare. Nevertheless, the field had its written publications and these are certainly worth looking into. The famous British manual by Charles Cowell, for instance, and still too often seen exclusively in the context of a British way of war actually carry examples from eight other empires. And you can see all of them listed on the PowerPoint. Some other manuals were also highly trans-imperial. These footnotes from a 1930 Dutch handbook actually unite references to four non-Dutch publications on a single page, as you can see there. And more examples can be found. Certain publications thus certainly contributed to shaping a more common language among empires. However, I believe they reflect the trans-imperial character of colonial war at that point rather than that they brought it into being. Most of these trans-imperial publications came rather late into the found siacra and the aspect of extreme violence was not always prominent in them. Rather, where such violence is mentioned in reference to other empires, what is striking is its inconspicuousness which confirms how similar it was perceived by practitioners across empires but does not seem to indicate a clear instance of transfer. For transfers, I believe we should look elsewhere. This means at times to go beyond the imperial clout. Garmeseg and Kreienbaum hold that knowledge, quote, was stored in the myriads of manuals and reports, articles, travelogues, and pictures which were accessible to all empires and of course also to the hats of people. However, as I would argue, the hats of people could also serve as storages and carriers of knowledge themselves. The fundamental role in transferring knowledge on the transgressive violence of colonial campaigning was not occupied by written tracks or official military observer missions which rather by the mobility of individuals be they regular soldiers, settlers, or primateers who transferred knowledge from one context to another, mainly by oral transmission. Their itineraries or their roots of violence, so to say, can regularly be traced and at times such roots also crossed the boundaries of empires. Take for instance, Hermann von Wismann and Quote von François, the first commander to the colonial armies in German East and German Southwest Africa respectively. Instead of being representative of a specific German tradition, both had previous experiences of colonial warfare in the so-called exploration of the Congo basin in the name of King Leopold, the Belgian King Leopold in the 1880s. The fact that both have been socialized into such violence in the Congo endeavor which itself is a highly transnational venture makes the idea of a specific national tradition to be untenable. Also, it was not only the mobility of Europeans that was key. In Germany's Africa, the initial core of the colonial army was formed by the so-called Sudanese who were officers by German volunteers. The Sudanese have been recruited by Wismann when he set out to form a mercenary army to suppress the Bushiri revolt, as it was called, on the East African coast. Many of the Sudanese belong to groups such as the Dinka, Shilu, Xanlor, Bagara, residing in a region now known as South Sudan or Sudan. They were socialized in a system of slave soldiering in which young men were captured to be incorporated in the region's military institutions and in cooperation which started out as enslavement but did frequently morph into a more ambiguous military clientage. With the onset of the modest war in the Sudan in the 1880s, many of these soldiers came to fight in the Egyptian army under British leadership. They were just trained after European models and came to participate in the colonial warfare of the Anglo-Egyptian army. After suffering a number of disastrous defeats, that army had left the Sudan for the time being in 1885. A larger number of the Sudanese soldiers ended up unemployed in slums of Cairo where Wismann was then to recruit some 900 of them in 1889. Thus, while Wismann had formed a new colonial force, the bulk of its African personnel carried extensive knowledge on colonial warfare which was now transferred from the Anglo-Egyptian context to the German East African one. That German colonizers highly valued the knowledge of the Iskari was confirmed as late as 1911 when a colonial military manual stated that, quote, it does not hurt a European if he notwithstanding his complete responsibility, gathers the advice of old experience, NCOs and the Iskari in difficult situations. I now want to move on to discussing two practices of violence that are considered typically colonial with which I also hope to further illustrate some of the points made so far. So the first practice I want to pick here is the so-called cave dynamiting in Michonaland, Rhodesia, during the Andabila-Chonau war of 1896 and 1887. And when I started my research, I came upon this still little known instance of brutal colonial violence rather by accident. Little could I know that it would gain a curious political relevance recently and becoming embroiled in a controversy around the road statue at Oxford. However, the case is relevant here to me because of what it can say first about notions of British exceptionalism in colonial warfare and secondly about the trans-nuclear character even of lesser known practices of colonial violence. And finally, it also illustrates the points made before about the modes of knowledge transfer. So when the Chonau people rose against the oppression of British South Africa company role in Michonaland in 1896, the settler and imperial troops sent out against them soon found out that the Chonau were often without reach. Traditionally, Chonau communities had built their villages on copches or hills where caves nearby generally offered a refuge in the case of danger and you can see one sketch of this on the PowerPoint. British attacks on Chonau villages therefore ended almost invariably at the mouth of the caves. The partitioners of colonial warfare, the pacifity in front of the caverns violated some of the central tenets of the colonial wave. Yes, dude. I am okay. Where was it? So it made the colonizers appear weak and impotent in phase of the so-called native and supposedly feel to produce a moral effect. First hand accounts testify to the sense of frustration and a quote from a letter. For instance, Aldersund is much blamed for leaving the crowd after he took it. In fact, he seems to be floating around from stronghold to stronghold, burning the huts and leaving Yang. You can imagine when it says laughing in the caves or from a diary. We did not have any systematic way to try and do them harm. We did nothing but loiter about the place. So it was in this situation that British troops started to insert and explode dynamite into the cave refuges while fully aware that they housed men, women, and children. The myth of British restraint was still active when historian Victor Kirnan, rather disingenuously, claimed of this that explosives were set of only to quote, frighten the occupants, men and women, to giving themselves up. Historical sources, however, speak a rather different language. I don't think I have to read all of these because they rather speak to themselves, I think. Oh, there's something in the chat. Can I miss something? Now, massacres in caves were nothing new to colonial warfare. And public awareness, however, they are mainly linked to the French Empire and the so-called en fumale in Algeria in the 1840s. There, French troops had smoked the death hundreds of men, women, and children in caves, causing outrage in European press at the time. The practice was still known to Charles Calvo when he wrote his manual in the 1890s and stated cryptically of warfare in Algeria that quote, caves and clefts of rock formed strongholds not easily rested from a savage foe. More explicitly, the German Carpitas had already recommended the method in a small booklet on Germany's Africa writing them. The caves cannot be taken but by stuffing all exits they generally have three with combustible materials and setting fire to it. So far, this is a story of the imperial cloud of knowledge being somehow available for download to the agents of empire, yet the exact lines of transmission remaining unclear. At the same time, however, many individual routes of violence were converging underground in Rhodesia. As it is, wars in Britain often also in conjunction had been using the same smoking out method for decades at the South African frontier. Since the late 1870s, smoke out there sometimes been substituted for by dynamite, probably influenced by the South African mining boom which employed copies amounts of the explosives. It was likely no coincidence that a large number of men who found themselves in Rhodesia in 1896 came exactly from this larger frontier area marked by colonial warfare and mining, an area which covered both the British possessions at the cave and the war of publics. Even if the connections cannot be definitely established, everything seems to indicate that it was men from this frontier region who brought the practice to Rhodesia. And the numerous instances of cave dynamite that has occurred in Michonneal entities two years also became a process of knowledge production themselves for, and however cynical this may sound, its perpetrate is also accumulated and refined practical knowledge over time. The British army, far from considering this embarrassing episode, best forgotten, apparently found this knowledge useful enough to codify it in the so-called Precy of 1899. It was meant to prepare officers for service in Rhodesia. The Precy reproduced a detailed report on how to best prepare and execute and execute cave dynamitings, not only giving exact amounts of dynamite to be employed, but also not forgetting to mention that breakfast could be had in between, and that's where the arrows are pointing at actually. But typical for such a written knowledge production, silences and euphemisms were interspersed in narrative. The report chose to remain silent on the fact that women and children had also been killed in the caves. And the curious transpirational wonderings of the practice did not end there. In 1911, cave dynamite made an appearance in the German guidebook for East Africa in which it was recommended to blast the entrances of cave refuges or throwing in charges of dynamite before storming them. You do not know whether this was in any way linked to the British precedents in Southern Africa. It does demonstrate, however, the transpiral range of many practices of colonial violence and how potential transfers often remain veiled. The second case I wish to highlight here concerns questions of German particularity and touches on the genocide of the railroad in 1904 in current day Namibia. And I put a short timeline of the war here just to recall some details I cannot really elaborate that much on the war itself. But this event has been described in the influential reading by Isabel Howell as the outcome of a metropolitan Prussian-German so-called military culture. According to her, this military culture prompted German commanders, both Olaf and Trotha, to cling dogmatically to a European-style concentric battle to destroy their enemy. And when the railroad managed to flee the encirclement at Waterberg, the German army switched to the second standard script of this military culture, a relentless pursuit. And you see a picture of the Waterberg narrative. But when the German troops equally failed to catch up in pursuit with the fleeing railroad, they finally decided to seal off the desert and not allow any railroad to return, spelling the death of thousands in the desert. And this reading by Howell, however, overlooks the importance of colonial thinking in the unfolding of the events, events which, as I would argue, are much better understood in a trans-imperial frame of reference. First of all, Trotha was not a typical metropolitan officer. Rather, as Christopher Kamasek has pointed out, Trotha could look back at several years of colonial experience in East Africa and China when he came to Southwest Africa in 1904 More generally, that the Germans aimed for a battle on encirclement is not sufficient reason to assume that the war was fought exclusively on metropolitan lines. Colonial texts, too, preferred encirclement tactics, as this would allow to inflict high losses on the opponent, preclude a protracted guerrilla war, even if colonial manuals admitted that the encirclement was often, that encirclement was often infeasible to bring about in specific conditions. Nevertheless, after 1900, it's clearly discernible in the British, German, and Dutch colonial handbooks that actors increasingly emphasize the employment of envelopment tactics to bring about a bloody conclusion in colonial war. For instance, the Dutch manual by M.E.A. Bosch urged, quote, complete encirclement of enemy positions. And interestingly, he quoted here a German colonial handbook of 1903, as you can see there. I mean, you can at least see that it is in German, I hope. So, obviously, Bosch did not perceive something peculiar, German there, with the static common understanding of the necessities of colonial warfare. Similarly, Charles Cowell had, in his earlier manuals, still advocated leaving an encircled enemy a loophole for escape, so it still avoid the danger of a desperate opponent. By the 1906 edition, however, his recommendation had been omitted entirely. Isabel Howell further holds that the transition to genocide in Southwest Africa after the unsuccessful encirclement at Waterberg and the field pursuit should be understood in the context of a German military culture in the search for complete destruction of the enemy and so-called final solutions to problems. This, after a too earlier failure, supposedly led to the adoption of a genocidal policy. It seems to me, however, that for an officer with a longer colonial experience like von Trotha, what was much more important were certain colonial and racialized mode of thinking about colonial settlement and the ways of securing it. It's these modes that allowed to place Trotha in broader trans-liberal contexts in which extermination to time could become thinkable. For when Trotha in 1909 defended his own genocidal policy in a newspaper article, he made reference to a book passage by the famous British imperial adventurer, big game hunter and settler, Fredericks Lu, who had written on Matabealand in Rhodesia, and he quote, therefore Matabealand is doomed by what seems a law of nature to be ruled by the white man and the black man must go or conform to the white man's laws or die resisting them. This was what Matthias Hoisler has called a triad of submission, expulsion or extermination. The basic settler colonial idea that if the black man was not the seductive white man, he was here to expel or exterminate it. The same rationale can also be seen in Trotha's infamous Vernichtungsbefeer or extermination order released during the war itself which some of you are probably familiar with and put it here in its entirety on the PowerPoint. And I think which quite clearly it quite clearly demonstrates this triad as well, even if the line between expulsion and extermination is already blurred and it's not entirely clear whether one should come before the other but we have first sort of the failure of submission which then leads to either expulsion or extermination. And the triad appears to me the connecting trans-imperial element here. We do not only find it with Sulu or Trotha but also with other British actors engaged in Rhodesia in the 1890s. General Carrington for instance who would be officer commanding of all troops in Rhodesia in the war of 1896 had already raised the option of expulsion of the Annabela if they were not to quote live in peace with the white man in 1893 and he would do so again in 1896 and the quotes again are on the PowerPoint. So though Carrington did not touch on the third element of the triad extermination his language of the last mercy the batter and don't clean appear to come close as we know expulsion or extermination is not what would finally occur in Rhodesia but it shows the similarity of thinking between Rhodesia and Germany and South Africa or more broadly between the two empires and there are some other interesting links between the two cases as well. One might point here for instance to the figure of Kurt Schwabe who had served in German Southwest Africa in 1890 before becoming an influential publicist on the colony in German circles and also later colonial advisor to the German government as well as the author of one of the foremost accounts of the River Nama War. And interestingly like Kurt Schwabe had also read Salus' work on Rhodesia already mentioning the book in the literature list of his 1903 colonial military manual as you can see on the right and that was actually before the River Nama War and he also referred to the Anabela rising in his later account of the Germany River War which came out in 1908. So to end the story of mutual observation we might take appear Koval's comment on the German killing over the river in the desert. Koval criticized how the slow movement of German columns had led the river to escape from the Waterberg but it appears he actually held it to German credit that at least every river quote appeared to have suffered severely after the withdrawal into a district of Sandfell. A rejection of these German methods is not discernible. From his own British perspective Koval did not seem to see anything abjectionable in the final court's defense and here that my two main strands of argumentation of this paper converge again not only in not only trans-imperial connectivity in the British attention here to German colonial warfare but also the question of national exceptionalism to Koval one of the most eminent contemporary theories of colonial warfare after all it was apparently a little exceptional to the German court of action. As I've argued we need to move away from a preoccupation with finding national military doctrines of colonial warfare which are often fallacious suggestions of national particularity in colonial violence rather if we focus on a more basic body of thought determined by certain colonial and often also racialized images of the opponent we will find many connecting elements across empires elements that were influential in shaping extreme violence on the ground and in the second step such a trans-imperial history also means investigating how colonial warfare as a phenomenon evolved in a dense web with mutual interaction observation and transfer among empires as my examples have shown such connections were rarely straightforward or manifest and in many cases we will not be able to trace exactly how an imperial cloud or colonial archive on colonial violence came about writing a trans-imperial history of this phenomena will therefore always be more intricate less clear-cut and more complicated than theorizing about say colonial zombie or national doctrines of minimum force it will, however, bring us much closer to understanding colonial war and violence around 1900s for what they were namely phenomena that transcended imperial borders and I thank you very much for your attention