Racial Difference and the Limits of Fellow Feeling: British, German, and Dutch Soldiers Encounter the Enemy in Colonial Wars, c. 1900

This chapter gives a broad sketch of the ‘enemy encounter’ in colonial wars around 1900 from the side of the Europeans involved, with particular attention to its ideational determinants. It notes the frequently elevated levels of violence in this encounter and points to two crucial existing barriers to fraternisation or fellow feeling. First, the colonial enemy had already been conceived in general and a priori in highly negative and degrading terms as a racial ‘Other’. Second, European colonial soldiers mostly regarded such warfare as performing their racial, civilisational, and masculine superiority. With leniency predominantly considered a sign of weakness, this precluded both mercy towards the enemy and the acceptance of a certain equality in status (often a prerequisite of fraternisation). I emphasise that the ‘enemy encounter’ in colonial warfare often translated to an encounter with civilians. While violence was widespread there too, not least because dehumanising racialisation extended to all the group’s members, its acceptance was still more tension-ridden. Most European soldiers were aware that brutality against civilians (women and children in particular) violated tenets of honourable warfare, and thus searched for additional legitimation. The chapter notes similarities between colonial wars and European nineteenth-century guerrilla wars, but also argues that the first were distinct in important aspects.