Political Economy of Conquest

By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political economy of conquest had crystalized into a distinctively recognizable modern form. Expanded scale of war-making created a need to surveil the financial operations of the colonial state. The changing valence of ‘corruption’ came to include a growing insistence on eliminating leakages from the financial flows that enabled conquest. Corruption was not merely a moral scourge but a structural flaw, which if left unresolved would drain the war-making capability of the early colonial regime. Financial accounts of the East India Company therefore had to be rendered legible to public scrutiny and parliamentary debate in the form of an annual India Budget. Colonial conquest captured the cultural imagination of metropolitan Britain – from painting and the Georgian stage to a new graphic scheme of statistical visualization – all sought to comprehend Britain’s territorial empire in South Asia. The growing appetite for war was fed by territorial conquest on an ever-expanding scale and transformed colonial warfare into the most fiscally impactful activity. An entire infrastructure of financial surveillance had to be created to organize warfare and conquest more efficiently. This edifice of control and scrutiny rested upon a growing appetite for reliable information about the financial health of the Indian empire and forecasting the dividends of territorial conquest.

Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India

Does pre-colonial history – and in particular the role of interstate warfare – help explain long-run development patterns across India? To address this question, we construct a new geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent. We document a robust positive relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development today. Drawing on archival and secondary data, we show that districts that were more exposed to pre-colonial conflict experienced greater early state-making, followed by lower political violence and higher investments in physical and human capital in the long term.

Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare

This article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this “surcharge of people” is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.

Imperial Conquest, Violent Encounters, and Changing Gender Relations in Colonial Warfare, 1830s–1910s

The period between the 1830s and the 1910s is significant for the rapid expansion of the British and French Empires in particular and fierce interimperial rivalries, as well as the late rise of non-European empires. The warfare that characterized imperial expansion and indigenous resistance, as sparked by imperial invasions and gradual conquests of colonial territories, including the suppression of uprisings, was often diffuse and chaotic. This chapter considers how the contact zones of aggressively expanding colonialism were structured by violence, in places ranging from the British settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to Crown colonies of various European empires, including British India, the Netherlands East Indies, and French Indochina. It assesses the intersections of gender and militarized violence on frontiers and in the daily life of colonial societies.

Psychological Warfare and the Dahra Peasants

Chapter 17 examines how Opération Pilote was implemented through a case study of the military sub-secteur of Ténès. A first problem in implementing Pilote arose from the fact that there were major disagreements within the army about the project. Some commanders resisted the new methods of the psychological warfare 5th bureaux, disliked the creation of a ‘parallel’ hierarchy of political commissars, while major tensions emerged between the civil authorities, the prefect Chevrier, and the generals. A close study of Pilote in the Dahra mountains shows that the aim of ‘pacification’ of each douar by cleansing the ALN and installing harkis autodefense, schools, medical teams, and a proto-municipal government was only successful in two highly mediatized locations, the Breira mine and Bou Maad. Far more typical was the situation in the Djebel Bissa where, following large-scale sweep operations and mass arrests, the army was unable to secure the terrain, and moved on rapidly before consolidating new communal organizations. The army command, frustrated at the slowness of Servier’s ‘hearts and minds’ approach, rapidly reverted to traditional methods of colonial warfare, the creation of zones interdites, bombing of civil populations, starvation, and the forced mass evacuation of peasants into army camps. A generalized ‘Massu model’ of cutting the vital ALN dependency on urban-rural supply networks was also tried in Ténès but failed.

The logistics of police power: Armored vehicles, colonial boomerangs, and strategies of circulation

Images of police armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore have been influential in a public conversation about the militarization of the police. However, recent critical and abolitionist work on policing rejects the concept of “militarization” for obscuring the longstanding histories and institutional connections between military and police apparatuses. By following the transfers of armored vehicles to police, this article illuminates the logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing, adding an account of the material composition of police power to the historical work of critical and abolitionist thinkers. The article proceeds through a critical reading of records of the Defense Logistics Agency, tracking the transfer of surplus armored vehicles to the police. Designated as “high-visibility property” by the Defense Logistics Agency, these vehicles testify to the materiality of police power. The article then tracks the visibility and materiality of these vehicles as they are deployed in urban and suburban spaces and considers their unique capacity to suppress the democratic energies of crowds. Tracking the armored vehicle provides a way to ask how the rigid lines of fortified urban space are organized into mobile vectors and where ongoing processes of colonization enter these spatial processes.

Civil War, Genocide and Beyond: How to Re-found the Narrative Framework on the Destruction of the Spanish Democratic Republic after 1936

This article contends that the category of civil war is not suitable for studying the massacres of civilians during the Spanish 1936–1039 war and its aftermath. In trying to build an alternative narrative for the understanding of the destruction of the democratic republic of 1931 founded on the human rights paradigm, an analytical framework is devised based on the deficit in deliberation processes allowing for the re-classification of social constituencies as ontological enemies. By showing that the repression by Franco's followers supplemented institutional logics and rationalities from colonial warfare and religious wars, the article also provides insights for a qualitative differentiation in repression between the two contending sides.