This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book and tentatively goes beyond them. When it comes to thought and practice of fin-de-siècle colonial war and violence, we should emphasise essential comparability and connectivity instead of national particularities among the British, German and Dutch empires. It is suggested this research finding might apply to other Western colonial empires as well. At the same time, a number of smaller aspects in which we might actually find national differences is noted. Taking up the transimperial mobility of ideas and experiences of colonial warfare noted throughout the book, the conclusion then asks what questions these findings raise for thinking about the temporality and spatiality of empires more generally. Finally, it touches on continuities in war and violence beyond 1914, both in later colonial wars as well as in the fighting of the First World War in Europe. It tentatively suggests that continuities were considerable in the first case and much lower in the second case.

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.

Knowledge about colonial warfare’s violence was transferred between empires in complex ways. Though differing in degree and over time, British, German and Dutch actors were willing to observe and learn from the colonial wars of others. Writings on colonial warfare became increasingly transimperial in scope from the 1890s onwards, even if this came too late to shape practice and was often distorted by authors’ own agendas and national stereotypes. Observer missions in foreign colonial campaigns were also regular, though their focus was seldom on colonial violence. Whether actively transferring or not, these modes of observation fed knowledge into an ‘imperial cloud’ (Kamissek/Kreienbaum) and reveal that the practitioners of colonial war rarely found the violence of others conspicuous, a fact which gives the lie to exceptionalist historiography. Actual transfers mainly took place through the intra- and transimperial mobility of European and non-European, mostly non-elite, individuals. They lived in frequently highly transnational colonial societies, and a striking number moved from one colonial frontier to the next, forging recurring connections I denote as the ‘routes of violence’.

Discussing the historiography, this section posits the need to move away from national-exceptionalist theories of colonial violence and the military-historical search for national doctrines of colonial warfare, instead recognising the extreme violence of fin-de-siècle colonial wars as part of a transimperial Colonial Way of War. Research should take into view several empires and the shared thought behind such violence. Europeans racialised colonial warfare and infused it with performative aims and imperial anxieties. Such racialised notions eventually became more important than structural constraints in determining extreme colonial violence. Cross-imperial connectivity explains the highly transimperial character of this knowledge, a connectivity that rested mainly on human, colony-to-colony mobility and on transnational colonial populations. Researching this requires rethinking ideas of imperial networks and reservoirs of knowledge. The introduction also offers definitions of ‘knowledge’ in relation to colonial warfare and of ‘extreme’ violence (arguing that there was a qualitative difference between colonial and ‘European’ wars at the time) and discusses sources and periodisation.