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.

John Milton is a major author in the history of writing the nation in early modern England. A visionary Protestant writer with a keen sense of prophetic vocation, he aligned his authorial identity closely with England as an exceptional ’Nation chos’n before any other’. Yet in his works written before, during and after the English Revolution, Milton agonises over the godly nation’s susceptibility to political and religious servility, so that he vacillates between intense identification with England and strong repulsion. Milton’s evolving relation to the nation thus remains conflicted and volatile. England’s exceptionalism can never be taken for granted: it must be strenuously tested, reassessed and reimagined. Although the late Milton turns away from national exceptionalism and challenges Restoration’s cultural, religious and political values, the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published close to the Glorious Revolution, tells another complex story about the posthumous creation of Milton as England’s exceptional national poet.