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This chapter examines English colonial expansion in Ireland in the early modern era, from the early sixteenth century through the end of the seventeenth. State-sponsored imperialism, which promoted military conquest, plantation, and active colonisation, was pursued alongside more reforming assimilationist policies. The metropole first intended to complete the military conquest of Ireland; then, having pacified the island, the state aimed to establish political, administrative, and legal control over all elements of Irish society. Closely linked to this was the determination to secure religious conformity with the Church of Ireland. Finally, a combination of reform initiatives in the 1540s, 1570s, and 1580s together with official plantation and unregulated colonization, transformed the legal basis on which land was held in Ireland and reconfigured Ireland's economic and tenurial infrastructure. These strategies effectively amounted to a form of imperialism that sought to exploit Ireland for England's political and economic advantage and to Anglicise the native population.

This chapter recounts the history of Japan's brutal military conquest of the Taiwanese aborigines and examines the legal rationales that colonial officials offered to justify this conquest. As Japanese military force encountered fierce resistance by aboriginal groups, the aborigines came to be viewed in Japanese discourse entirely in terms of “headhunting.” Even as Japanese colonial administrators endeavored to stamp out this custom, they carefully preserved the figure of the “headhunter” as a trope, and they circulated images of this “headhunter” to justify the violent subjugation of the savage “Other” and to affirm their civilizing mission. In the legend of Go Hō, a story that was widely disseminated to young Japanese and Taiwanese, a Qing official sacrifices his own life in order to persuade the savages to renounce headhunting. Once the savages were incorporated into the Japanese empire, some Japanese writers discovered a savage within themselves. The protagonist of Ōshika's “The Savage” goes to the aboriginal lands in search of his inner savage and becomes a “headhunter” to free himself from civilized modernity. Just as an earlier generation of writers drew on global discourses on civilization to write tales of Japan's colonial conquests of savages, late imperial writers appropriated tropes of primitivism prevalent in Western literatures to address a critique of Japanese modernity.

This chapter describes Russia's conquest and colonization of North Caucasus. Russia's annexation of the North Caucasus began in earnest in the 1760s with the construction of the Mozdok Fortification Line. By the mid-nineteenth century Russia had succeeded in turning the Caucasus from a contested frontier zone into a borderland of the Russian Empire. The North Caucasus was substantially altered by Russian policies. The geography of the region underwent a dramatic transformation as rivers were diverted, primeval forests systematically cut down, and pastureland seized to build forts, settlements, industries, and spas. The traditional economies had become more dependent on Russian products and cash. Traditional law had increasingly come under the influence of the Russian one, and various peoples began to redefine their identity through modern notions of ethnicity. Finally, Russian policies created a colonial situation that served as a catalyst in intensifying the social antagonisms between the indigenous elite and commoners on the one hand, and among different groups of the indigenous elite on the other. The result was the emergence of two sharply polarized factions within native societies: one pro-Russian, the other pro-Islamic and consequently anti-Russian.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of France's invasion and colonization of Algeria starting in the 1830s. It then sets out the book's central argument, that the roots of French Algeria lay in contests over political legitimacy sparked by the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The crisis of colonial legitimacy resulting from the Haitian Revolution as well as the crisis of political legitimacy engendered by the French Revolution pushed forward the processes of military conquest and settlement colonization that made Algeria not just a French colony, but ultimately part of France itself. The book seeks to explain the policy choices that led France back onto the colonial stage between 1830 and 1848. It also aims to understand how contemporary culture shaped the processes of military conquest and settler colonization that made Algeria French. Together, these questions provide an understanding of why the founding of France's most important modern colony took place when and how it did.

This chapter is based on a close study of the memoirs and diaries of Alexei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin (1848 – 1925), appointed Governor-General of Turkestan in August 1916 and tasked with suppressing the 1916 Revolt. It shows that Kuropatkin was heavily influenced by his memories of the Russian campaigns of conquest in Central Asia, in which he had participated as a young man in the 1860s – 1880s, and by the imagined legacy of the first Turkestan Governor-General, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (1818-1882). This helps to explain the disproportionate use of force and violence by Russian forces in suppressing the revolt.

Based on international law, military occupation, which is defined as a legally and customarily defined situation that differs from military conquest, territorial annexation, or regime change, is, as a phenomenon, central to the relationship between civilians and war. This chapter challenges the notion that military occupation has been a transhistorical feature of war since ancient times and argues that it has a historically specific character in the context of warfare in continental Europe. Military occupation is both an index and a component of the ‘bureaucratisation’ or rationalisation of war. The chapter examines the administration of occupation in the German territories during the mid-eighteenth century, focusing on the development of a regulated system of payments, billeting, and political intervention as well as arbitrary violence during occupation. It also considers irregular warfare, or kleiner Krieg, and how patriotism undermined efforts directed towards the ‘containment’ of war.

Drawing on rich archival material, sportsmen’s memoirs and colonial documents, this chapter develops the argument that hill-sport was another important feature of British social and cultural life in colonial India. Hill-sport played a significant role in shaping and transforming their cultural identity from the beginning of the nineteenth century. While scholarship to date has not touched upon this subject, chapter two traces the historical antecedents of the British military conquest, which led to exploration and the discovery of new geographies, that is, mountain and hill terrains in the north and south of India. It is possible to argue that the Nilgiris and the Doon Valley had the advantage of favourable climatic conditions and better hunting grounds, and therefore plentiful opportunities for hill-sport, which in turn provided the healthier lifestyle to the Britons living on the hill stations. In such mountain peripheries, there emerged aesthetic preferences among the colonial sporting fraternity, which were born out of their hunting experiences in the cultural geography of the Himalayas and the Nilgiris. Furthermore, this chapter also suggests that the British hunters in colonial India also created a dichotomy of difference in terms of the ecology and wild fauna of the mountains, which also influenced their development of different genres of hill-sport. In addition, this chapter offers a fresh perspective on the notions of masculinity and virile energy enshrined in the big-game hunting tradition in relation to mountain geographies in colonial India.