Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  Johnston , in his own words, appeared ‘carried in my cloak, fastened to a stick…emaciated by fatigue, and labouring besides under a severe dysentery’. 34 Alexander revealed in his autobiography what he learned of the detachment’s experiences inland. The local guides ‘had either lost their way, or pretended they had done so’ and Johnston , ‘in this dilemma, had recourse to the whip; he tied up the guides to the trees and flogged them, to make them look sharper’. 35 Testimonies of those who reached Trincomalee spoke not only of punishment enacted upon the bodies of local guides and porters, but gunshot, knife, or sword wounds aimed at, sustained, or generated by British, Malay, or Lankan soldiers. Alexander also recorded the soldiers’ accounts of brutality directed against animals and the destruction of Kandyan provisions and land, going so far as to ascribe violence to incidents of weather and the specificities of climate. While many military ‘excursions’ had made their way back to Trincomalee, Bombardier Alexander recalled that ‘none went so far during my stay, or suffered anything like this’. 36 ‘But,’ he added, ‘all the talk soon died away’. 37

  Why the move towards silence, after the stories of suffering had been articulated? Surely the silence was not a move to forget. Arthur Johnston published his account just six years after the conclusion of the debacle, and while it took more than 25 years for Alexander Alexander to bring his memoir into print, it was not for lack of trying. 38 William Lyttleton published A Set of Views in the Island of Ceylon within four years of his participation in a later Kandyan campaign, during which he too experienced and witnessed diverse forms of violence. Marching through the island’s interior, an elephant pursued and attacked Lyttleton and a sergeant; the latter was ‘torn piecemeal’. 39 Yet in Lyttleton ’s The Summit of the Balani Mountain, Kandyan territory is depicted as a ‘delightful valley’. The inland provinces had long been characterized by colonizers as terrifyingly pathless, with Kandyans firing ‘in perfect security from behind rocks and trees’, 40 but this aquatint conveys a landscape warm with sunlight and gentle hills. It is a composition that would likely bring Italy’s Campania to the minds of nineteenth-century British viewers, or a fine summer day in Britain itself. Not unlike the diminishing ‘talk’ of violence in Trincomalee after the retreat of Johnston and his detachment in 1804, Lyttleton’s image offers calm.

  If imagery produced in the aftermath of conquest by Mackenzie , Home , and Lyttleton acknowledged, yet minimized, the appearance of British military activity in India and Sri Lanka, harbour views made by Samuel Daniell , a professional artist who resided on the island during the years following Britain’s first war with Kandy , illuminate the extent to which picturesque discourse could negate altogether the realities of colonial violence. His View of the Harbour of Trincomalee (Fig. 5) is a case in point. Daniell arrived in Sri Lanka in 1806, the year after Frederic North concluded his governorship, and the image suggests that North had indeed left Sri Lanka in a state of tranquillity.

  Fig. 5 Samuel Daniell View of the Harbour of Trincomalee: Taken from the Fort Ostenburg. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

  One of 12 aquatints that comprise Samuel Daniell ’s A Picturesque illustration of the scenery, animals, and native inhabitants, of the Island of Ceylon of 1808, 41 View of the Harbour of Trincomalee depicts the strategically important harbour as a placid, luminous body of water, framed by a fort on the composition’s right side. Daniell clarified his vantage point in the aquatint’s subtitle, acknowledging that the view was made from Fort Ostenburg, but the written description he provided to accompany the print makes no mention of the fort or of soldiers garrisoned there. Instead, the artist directed viewers to consider the natural environment in the vicinity of the fort.

  Daniell described the bay and harbour as ‘bold and romantic’ with a ground covering of ‘the most luxuriant shrubbery, the verdure of which is perpetual’. Aside from a few cottages ‘interspersed about the hilly coppices’ (invisible to viewers of the aquatint), his text claims that ‘[the] whole surrounding country may almost, indeed, be considered as in a state of nature, there being very little cultivation carried on in the neighbourhood of the bay’. In the text that accompanies another harbour view in the series, View of Caltura, the artist acknowledged a fort at the site but only to point out its excellent placement ‘upon an eminence, commanding the river’—a ‘delightful situation, [since] the mountain known by the name of Adam’s Peak is distinctly visible’. Daniell also referenced the presence of teak, coconut, and Palmyra trees that ‘finely clothe’ the riverbank and village of Kalutara. 42

  Daniell ’s celebratory descriptions of the environs of Fort Ostenburg at Trincomalee and the fort at Kalutara may as well have been written by a realtor. As early as October of 1802, the first year of publication of the Ceylon Government Gazette, a property on the island was advertised in similar terms: ‘as pleasantly situated as any Fruit gardens in the environs of Colombo, having a View over the Lake to the Fort & Cinnamon Gardens, as well for Riding as for Walking’. 43 Ten years on, the Gazette continued to publish such notices. In June of 1812, a country house on the island was listed for sale in the following terms:most delightfully Situated on an Eminence, that Commands an extensive View of the sea, and the interior of the Country around – and, without exaggeration, is really worthy of the notice of any Gentleman in want of the like, being a short distance from the Fort. 44

  These descriptions isolate aspects of landscape for the purpose of calling attention to what was most valued at the sites: the views afforded by access to them, particular trees or gardens, and ‘environs…for Riding as for Walking’. Geographer Nicholas Blomley finds that separating ‘a bounded space from the things and relations that inform it, thus imagining the space as a purely abstract and empty site’ is an act of territorialisation, part and parcel of ‘the logic of private property’. At such a site, meaning is conveyed through its natural attributes. 45 It is suitable to consider the work of colonial landscape artists in this light. 46 Daniell ’s harbour views, produced at forts but emptied of military personnel, like the warscapes of Mackenzie and Home , insist that ‘Ceylon’ was available for habitation.

  Set alongside the poignant descriptions of violence in the memoirs of Arthur Johnston and Alexander Alexander , picturesque imagery by Samuel Daniell and William Lyttleton may be understood to effect a conceptual transformation of places like Trincomalee, where there had been much testimony of suffering, and the Kandyan territory, which had seen centuries of military violence, into places of ‘good order’. Arresting as such images may have been to metropolitan viewers in the early nineteenth century, the conversion of burned, scarred, and increasingly deforested sites into tranquil landscapes staffed by passive locals hints at something akin to propaganda, and highlights the complicity of picturesque discourse in matters of colonial violence. 47 Could it be that colonial agents began to consider seriously whether the island would be suitable for development as a plantation economy with the visually satisfying aquatints of Samuel Daniell and William Lyttleton before their eyes?

  Notes

  1.Lieutenant William Lyttleton, A Set of Views in the Island of Ceylon (London: Edward Orme, 1819), unpag.

  2.Lyttleton, A Set of Views in the Island of Ceylon, n.p.

  3.Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), 28.

  4.Colonel Colin Mackenzie, Distant View of Savan-Droog in Mysore from the East Side, a wash drawing in the collection of the British Library, London.

  5.Reverend William Gilpin, Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1772, on several parts of England; particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, 2 vols. (London: R. Blamire, 1786), v.

  6.Gilpin, Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, 162–163.

  7.Gilpin’s father, John Bernard Gilpin, was an officer in the 12th Regiment of Foot. While not formally designated a draftsman, John Bernard Gilpin
admired the approach to landscape representation taught by Paul Sandby, drawing master for over 30 years at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. As Rama Sundari Mantena points out in The Origins of Modern Historiography in India, Colin Mackenzie’s work as a surveyor was also indebted to Sandby’s approach. See Rama Sundari Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 48.

  8.Robert Home, Select Views in Mysore, the Country of Tippoo Sultan; From Drawings Taken on the Spot… (London: Mr. Bowyer, 1794).

  9.Home, Select Views in Mysore, 21–22.

  10.Rosie Dias, ‘Memory and the Aesthetics of Military Experience: Viewing the Landscape of the Anglo-Mysore Wars,’ Tate Papers 19 (Spring 2013), http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​research/​publications/​tate-papers/​19/​memory-and-the-aesthetics-of-military-experience-viewing-the-landscape-of-the-anglo-mysore-wars. Accessed 5 October 2016.

  11.Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 213.

  12.William Jackson, ed. Memoirs of Dr Richard Gilpin, of Scaleby Castle in Cumberland; and of his posterity in the two succeeding generations; written in the year 1791 by Rev Wm Gilpin, Vicar of Boldre: together with an account of the author, by himself; and a pedigree of the Gilpin family (London: Bernard Quaritch and Carlisle: Chas Thurnham and Sons, 1879), 127.

  13.Joseph Addison, ‘No. 409. [On Taste]’, The Spectator (19 June 1712), in Denise Gigante (ed.), The Great Age of the English Essay (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

  14.Addison, in Gigante (ed.), The Great Age of the English Essay, 79.

  15.Addison, in Gigante (ed.), The Great Age of the English Essay, 80.

  16.Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959), 36.

  17.Reverend William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, &c. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty; made in the summer of 1770, third edition. (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 50.

  18.Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, 52.

  19.Uvedale Price, An essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and the beautiful; and, on the use of studying pictures, for the purpose of improving real landscape, 3 vols. (London: J. Robson, 1794).

  20.Price, An essay on the picturesque, i. 29–30.

  21.Price, An essay on the picturesque, i. 29.

  22.Price, An essay on the picturesque, i. 188.

  23.Price, An essay on the picturesque, ii. 119.

  24.Richard Payne Knight, The landscape, a poem. In three books (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1794).

  25.Knight, Landscape, 66–67.

  26.Knight, Landscape, 29.

  27.Richard Payne Knight, An analytical inquiry into the principles of taste (London: T. Payne and J. White, 1805), 453–454.

  28.He acquired Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire as well as Waldershare, the North family estate in Kent.

  29.Frederic North to Earl Camden (10 July 1805), COL 54/18, British Archives, Kew. Emphasis added.

  30.‘Proclamation No. 7 at Colombo’, Ceylon Government Gazette 86 (12 October 1803).

  31.Sujit Sivasundaram points out that even the Kandyans, who considered themselves rulers of Sri Lanka in its entirety, conceived of the island in terms of ‘low country’ and ‘up country’ during the periods of Portuguese, Dutch, and British coastal occupation, so as to more effectively protect the inland provinces from further European invasion. See Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka & the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 174–175.

  32.Major Arthur Johnston, Narrative of the operations of a detachment in an expedition to Candy, in the Island of Ceylon, in the year 1804 (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1810).

  33.John Howell (ed.), The life of Alexander Alexander: written by himself, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1830), ii. 164.

  34.Johnston, Narrative of the operations, 82.

  35.Johnston, Narrative of the operations, 163–164.

  36.Howell (ed.), The life of Alexander Alexander, ii. 166.

  37.Howell (ed.), The life of Alexander Alexander, ii. 166.

  38.Howell (ed.), The life of Alexander Alexander, i. iv–vii.

  39.Reported in the Sydney Gazette in 1816 and Asiatic Journal in 1817, and recounted by R.K. de Silva, Early Prints of Ceylon (London: Serendib Publications, 1985), 42.

  40.Johnston, Narrative of the operations, 5.

  41.Samuel Daniell, A Picturesque illustration of the scenery, animals, and native inhabitants, of the Island of Ceylon (London: T. Bensley, 1808).

  42.Daniell, n.p.

  43. Ceylon Government Gazette 34 (27 October 1802).

  44. Ceylon Government Gazette 559 (3 June 1812).

  45.Nicholas Blomley, ‘Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:1 (March 2003), 129.

  46.Mary A. Favret has suggested that to some degree the purpose of the work of colonial surveyors ‘would be to produce a vision of the conquered land now ready for exploitation’. See Favret, War at a Distance, 203.

  47.For further analysis of imagery by artists who visited or lived in Sri Lanka during or in the aftermath of Britain’s first war with Kandy, see Elizabeth Mjelde, ‘The Imperial Wye’, Romanticism, 19:2 (2013), 153–162.

  Acknowledgment

  The author is grateful to Dr. Daniel Ferris for his careful reading of this essay and his many helpful comments.

  © The Author(s) 2018

  Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds.)Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern WorldCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62923-0_4

  Categories of Conquest and Colonial Control: The French in Tonkin, 1884–1914

  James R. Lehning1

  (1)University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

  James R. Lehning

  Email: Jim.Lehning@utah.edu

  When the French announced, in a decree in 1888 organizing the gendarmerie in Tonkin , that ‘the conquest is completed’, 1 the declaration downplayed the continuities in violence that marked the entire period of French rule in Southeast Asia. In contrast to the optimism of this decree, the French faced opposition from Vietnamese elites, the officials loyal to Ham Nghi, the deposed Nguyen king; from armed bands who had thrived in the countryside of Tonkin for decades before the arrival of the French; and from deserters and regular troops from China. Asserting French control against these opponents necessitated frequent military and police operations. As warfare , these operations were influenced by nineteenth-century military practices in both Europe and the colonial empires, if for no other reason than that the officers who commanded French troops in Indochina had often previously been involved in European and other colonial wars. These practices, some historians have claimed, became more violent in the course of the nineteenth century. David Bell has argued that the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire transformed the disciplined warfare of the Old Regime into the ‘total war’ that marked military operations in the Vendée, Calabria, Russia, and Spain. Other historians have argued that subsequent colonial wars took on many of the same characteristics. 2

  The violence of European colonial conquest is difficult to avoid in the reports, memoirs, and other descriptions historians use. But to understand the expansion of European empires and the colonial regimes that expansion created, we need to move beyond this obvious truism. My argument here is not simply that colonial wars were violent, or that they asserted colonial control, but rather that they also performed cultural tasks central to the colonial project. As Jennifer Sessions has suggested, the violence of colonialism constituted imperial identities and ideologies, 3 identifying the participants in colonial relationships and structuring the links between colony and colonizing power. In the same vein, Benjamin Claude Brower argued that in Algeria th
e ‘logic of colonialism tried to reduce [the actors] to colonizer and colonized’, and ‘establishing this divide was the work of the earliest forms of French violence, beginning in 1830’. Violence, in his view, ‘simplified the country’s considerable social complexity and the violence against law, property, and people’ and ‘engendered the social hierarchies of the new order’, although the binary categories of barbares (barbarians) and civilisés (civilized) were strained by the realities of the conquest. 4