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.

In the early twentieth-first century, settler colonialism emerged as one of the most identifiable paradigms of social and cultural analysis. This chapter assesses this paradigm’s conceptual origins and identifies the study of Indigenous genocide at its center. Drawing from readings of Patrick Wolfe’s work, this chapter highlights the utility of settler colonial studies for the study of genocide and identifies sets of problematics within certain works of genocide. It examines in particular the inability of historians of the United States to reconcile celebratory and/or exceptionalistic visions of North American history with the genocide of Indigenous peoples.