Civilising Violence: International Law and Colonial War in the British Empire, 1850–1900

What is it about?

Could international law apply to colonial warfare? Older scholarship may lead to assumptions that it did not apply, or did on the basis of a universalism that served to justify war for imperial powers alone. But much of that previous work focused on the intellectual history of international law, on prescriptive sources such as military manuals, and approaches extending from criminal law and colonial policing. There is a need to follow newer scholarly trends toward the everyday discussion and application of international law. An examination of intragovernmental debates in the British Empire demonstrates how the use of international law in the second half of the nineteenth century was present, yet initially varied in the service of imperial interests. But especially in the period of both increasingly formal imperialism and the increasing professionalisation of international law in the late nineteenth century, public activism, among other forces, increasingly encouraged a more consistent approach - leading the British government to acknowledge the application of new international legal sources like the Geneva Convention to one of the most brutal colonial battles of the period at Omdurman in 1898. In this activism there are lessons for how international law might apply more consistently to armed conflict today, but also for how empire persisted amid "sanitized" warfare.

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