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.

This chapter presents the five major colonial wars that figure as the main case studies of this book: the 1896–1897 war against the Ndebele and Shona in Rhodesia (also known as First Chimurenga or Second Matabele War), the so-called ‘Hut Tax War’ in Sierra Leone (1898), the German–Herero and German–Nama War as well as genocide in German South West Africa (1904–1908), the Maji Maji War in German East Africa (1905–1907), and finally the Aceh War in the Netherlands East Indies (1873–ca. 1914). Their specifics notwithstanding, all these cases are typical to an extent for the large-scale ‘wars of colonial penetration’ that increasingly came to the fore around 1900. The empirical descriptions of these cases give an impression of the practice of colonial war, as well as provide the necessary background for the following chapters. A summary at the end highlights the practices and discursive patterns that connect all these cases and leads towards the analysis of these phenomena in the coming chapters.

Chapter 3 traces how the Dutch and British during the eighteenth century became increasingly concerned with the problem of piracy in Southeast Asia. The explanations for the prevalence of piracy in the writings of nineteenth-century British and Dutch authorities on the subject, such as Raffles, Crawfurd, Veth and Snouck Hurgronje, are investigated. The emphasis on racial, cultural and religious factors to explain piracy in the Malay Archipelago are highlighted. Different types of piracy in the Strait of Malacca after the 1840s are also identified, and a distinction is made between the petty Malay piracy and the larger and more organised activities perpetrated by heavily armed Chinese pirates, many of whom were based in Singapore. The British and Dutch efforts to suppress piracy are investigated, and the often dubious allegations of piracy directed against Malay states, such as Aceh, Perak and Selangor, are highlighted. It is concluded that piracy was actively securitised in order to justify colonial expansion but that such rhetoric and policies did not go unchallenged, particularly in Great Britain, where vocal opponents of colonial expansion questioned the motives of those in favour of military intervention and colonial expansion.