This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

Chapter 2 analyzes the regulation of colonial archives in Kenya as a method of racialized secret-keeping that involved cooperation between the Colonial Office in London and officials based in Kenya. It demonstrates that the regulation of its archives was one of several strategies of the colonial administration to control access to information and intelligence pertaining to the Emergency. The first half of this chapter examines the negotiations between the Colonial Office in London and the British colonial government in Nairobi over how best to deal with managing and securing secret records. The second half proceeds to analyze the only instance in which a “researcher” has ever been granted full and unconditional access to the secret records of the Emergency. In doing so, it argues that the British colonial government was interested not only in barring access to sensitive documents but also in enabling their use in highly controlled settings so that official documents could serve as evidence supporting sympathetic “research,” or propaganda, which vindicated the government at a time of growing critique.

This chapter foregrounds practices of colonial warfare, focussing on the transimperial knowledge behind scorched earth and extermination. The first section identifies devastation and hunger war as the most common practice of colonial war, specifically colonial in the way it was racialised, applied ubiquitously and considered self-evident. In line with the book’s argument, it is argued that the contestation and final abandonment of the method by the Dutch in Aceh represent less of a national particularity than it might appear. The second section departs from conventional approaches to colonial genocide and explores how exterminatory practices were part of Western thought on colonial warfare. There were specific war contexts in which extermination became thinkable, even if these were not held to apply to the majority of colonial wars. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, extermination was an inherent and at the same time relatively minor presence in thinking on colonial war. Engaging with theories of German colonial particularity, the chapter applies these findings to the genocide in German South West Africa, showing how the actions and motivations standing behind it fit into broader transimperial patterns.

This chapter charts how the rise of modern racism came to racialize colonial warfare over the nineteenth century, and touches on the role of imperial anxiety and colonial masculinity in such warfare. The extreme violence that was part of colonial warfare might once have rested on structural circumstances, but constant explanation and justification of such violence through racial categories meant that over time racialized notions came to precede the event, becoming generators of violence themselves. The chapter also offers general observations on the nature of colonial war and colonial armies and on the relationship between knowledge and Western militaries. The main point is that detailed knowledge on colonial warfare was largely absent in formal military education at the time, and that such knowledge was largely gathered through (practical) experience and remained concentrated in relatively small groups of ‘experts’. The chapter closes with a description of the manuals of colonial warfare published between 1829 and 1920 in the Dutch, British and German empires, presenting their general characteristics and a chronology and briefly discussing their use as historical sources.

A constructed racial otherness of the enemy distinguished colonial warfare from other modes of fin-de-siècle warfare, while it constituted at the same time a unifying element across different empires. It gave rise to a general culture of permissiveness and the fashioning of an imagined ‘native mind’, two preconditions for a specific body of knowledge on colonial warfare to emerge. This featured specific prescriptions as to what colonial warfare was to do, denoted here as the five ‘basic imperatives’: colonial warfare had to generate a ‘moral effect’ on the opponent, it had to be ‘bold and offensive’, it had to create a ‘lasting peace’ by using heavy force first, it had to ‘punish’ and, increasingly, it had to produce high death tolls (the ‘big bag’). The chapter explains how all these imperatives pushed towards extreme violence and demonstrates how all were present in very similar forms in the British, German and Dutch empires. For each, the origins, development and empire-specific appearance are discussed. With a transimperial corpus of colonial manuals as main source base, it is also shown that there was a further convergence in this body of knowledge around 1900.

In this chapter, the founding of the magazine The End and the Toxteth riots are twin jumping off points for a history of Liverpool’s subcultural resistance to Thatcherism via music, fanzines, and football in the 1980s. The chapter analyses the tensions between race, class, and politics, which profoundly shaped the history of the club and the city during this troubled decade.

This chapter uses the short but toxic ownership tenure of American businessmen Tom Hicks and George Gillett (2007-10) as a window onto the tensions between activism and commercialism, and between the local and the international, at LFC in the twenty-first century. Drawing on testimony from members of the supporters’ union Spirit of Shankly, Chapter 13 analyses the power, and the limits, of fan protest in ‘the age of football’.

While the country’s public hospitals were still virtually all segregated, a unique experiment in medical integration took place at Fort Huachuca, involving both patients and doctors. The black hospital’s reputation for medical excellence attracted white patients – first officers, then their wives (despite the taboo of interracial intimacy), then civilians from the surrounding areas who knew they could not find such quality of care elsewhere. Prejudices about white patients’ reluctance to see black doctors were thus invalidated. Furthermore, given the inadequate qualifications of white doctors and the departure of many of them for the front, the white hospital had to call on black doctors. Care was therefore provided on an interracial basis. This experiment was tolerated by the Surgeon General’s Office, but turned out to be difficult to sustain.

This chapter offers an overview of Nazi anti-Roma policies, yet focuses on the reactions of the victims. The voice of the Roma victims remains muted. The collection of witness testimonies began late and is hardly representative. The extended Roma families who fell victim to genocide did not have a recognizable leadership that could speak on their behalf. Romani history is a history of prejudice by definition, since most available sources on their life and death come from the agencies or courts that consistently regarded them as a problem.

This chapter explores the coherence, evolution, and national specificity of antisemitism. It introduces and contrasts the different categories of antisemitism scholars have deployed to provide an explanation for violence (political, racial, eliminatory, redemptive, and so on.)It explores questions of contrast and continuity, and particularly the role of the First World War and its aftermath, and the relevance for understanding Nazi violence against Jews of the unprecedented lethality of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Civil War.

This chapter explores the evolution of racial ideas before and after the First World War, comparing German-speaking central Europe with the rest of Europe, the USA, or Japan. It analyzes nuances and tensions in German racial discourse between conceptions of Volk and Rasse, both of which might connote “race” in the broader English sense of the term; between Germandom, which privileged the idea of a pure Nordic race native to northern Europe, and Aryanism, which emphasized the racial superiority of multiple “Aryan” nations and peoples; and competing notions of eugenics, including concepts such as “Systemrasse” and “Vitalrasse,” with the former highlighting the differential quality of nations and races and the latter focused on improving the quality of a given population. Finally, it highlights the porous boundaries between conceptions derived from science and eugenics and those emerging from humanist, religio-mythological, and esoteric conceptions of blood and soil. Nazism drew equally on “scientific” eugenic and more “humanist” traditions, which were not unique to Germany but together created the syncretic apotheosis of race-thinking that undergirded the Holocaust.

Examines an apparent tension between clothing’s role as a social artifact and its rationality. Examines how we might think about disagreement when it comes to the fittingness or appropriateness of clothing. Considers how the social role of clothing plays a part in our judgments of individuals belonging to certain groups, and how this might contribute to epistemic injustice.