Michelle Gordon is a researcher at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, Sweden.

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresAbstracts and Key Words1. Introduction: The Place of Colonial Violence within the History of the British Empire2. A ‘Little War’ in Perak: British Intervention, 1875–763. British Suppression of the ‘Hut Tax’ War in Sierra Leone, 1898–994. The Anglo-Egyptian Reconquest of Sudan, 1896–995. Conclusion: Was there a British Way in Colonial Warfare?Bibliography

Michelle Gordon’s history of violence in the British Empire is an important corrective to a traditional historiography which regards such violence as the exception rather than the rule. Gordon demonstrates instead, using the insights of genocide studies, that extreme violence was essential to the establishment and maintenance of control in the British empire. That violence was often knowingly outside of the legal conventions of warfare and included the targeting of potential resistance before the event, collective reprisals including scorched earth policies and the destruction of civilian communities. Ultimately Michelle Gordon requires us to write violence back into the history of the British Empire, which often held the potential for genocide.