Empires of Violence

Massacre in a Revolutionary Age

By: Philip Dwyer, Barbara Alice Mann, Nigel Penn, Lyndall Ryan

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eBook | 30 October 2025

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Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire's many incursions into Europe. Yet how did the forms of violence perpetrated in these four corners of the world compare? Did the oppression and exploitation of colonized peoples constitute a new form of violence? Or was it the same that Europeans had always used against conquered peoples?

In this book, four experts specializing in four different regions of the world come together to interrogate the violence committed against Indigenous peoples between 1780 and 1820. Showing how violence and massacre were a tool at the disposal of the colonizer, and often used to subjugate unruly populations, they examine the changing nature of warfare and killing from both a European and Indigenous perspective. Empires of Violence shows how race, othering and fear were maintained and buoyed by violence, in spite of prevailing discourses on humanitarianism, civilization and progress.