Colonial Revenge Atrocities and Technologies of Control

This paper considers the phenomenon of the colonial revenge massacre, examining the rhetoric around it, its tactics, and symbolic actions. Beyond power, colonialism’s authority was projected by military displays, monumental building works and by the establishment of racial hierarchies that were enacted in everyday life. Anti-colonial rebellions fatally disrupted those hierarchies. The Great Rebellion in North India in 1857-58 was an example, where rebels targeted British cantonments precisely to make the point that the EIC officers and troops were not invincible. Colonial powers acted as though only the use of extreme force could restore the colonial order. Some historians believe that the British reconquest led to the deaths of as many as 800,000 people, if fatalities from disease and starvation are included. Another frequent trope is the patriarchal justification of subsequent massacres by pointing to settler women and children killed or defiled. The settlers and their colonial military typically replied with disproportionate force, so that the number of indigenous people killed is orders of magnitude higher than the casualties among the settlers. The Germans in Namibia carried out the Herero and Namaqua genocide in 1904-1908, blockading the populations from food and water and using machine guns against civilians in revenge for the killing of 100 German settlers. The Germans slaughtered between 24,000 and 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Namaqua. Similar measures were taken by the French in Algeria and by the British in Kenya. This paper sets Israeli actions in Gaza after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas in the context of such cases of past colonial atrocities, pointing to the similarity in the governmentality of Israel over Palestinians to previous colonialist enterprises, and showing commonalities in the technologies and representation of power deployed in the face of indigenous challenges.