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In 'Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency' (History Workshop Journal 85, 2018), Kim Wagner rightly argues that violence was a ubiquitous feature of colonial rule and that this fact must be acknowledged if we are to fully confront the legacies of empire, and their implications for conflict today.1 In presenting his case, however, Wagner makes serious historical errors as well as the sweeping accusation that military historians, especially those working in military education, are guilty of abandoning the scholarly standards of the historical discipline, perpetuating indifference to suffering outside the Western World, and having 'weaponized' history to justify military interventions and coercive and unjust treatment of non-white populations. These unsubstantiated accusations constitute an attack on the ethical and scholarly integrity of an entire field of history and the scholars within it. We have written this response to address the deficiencies in Wagner's assertions about the use of expanding bullets and colonial military conduct, the historiography of colonial violence, and the current state of what he calls 'parochial military history'.

In Empire's Violent End, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis, along with expert contributors, present comparative research focused specifically on excessive violence in Indonesia, Algeria, Vietnam, Malaysia, Kenya and other areas during the wars of decolonization. In the last two decades, there have been heated public and scholarly debates in France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands on the violent end of empire. Nevertheless, the broader comparative exploits into colonial counter-insurgency tend to treat atrocities such as torture, execution, rape, and others on the side. The editors describe how such comparisons mostly focus on the differences by engaging in 'guilt rating.' Moreover, the dramas that have unfolded in Algeria and Kenya tend to overshadow similar violent events in Indonesia, the very first nation to declare independence directly after World War II. Empire's Violent End is the first book to place the Dutch-Indonesian case at the heart of a comparison with focused, thematic analysis on a diverse range of topics to demonstrate that despite variation in scale, combat intensity and international dynamics, there were more similarities than differences in the ways colonial powers used extreme forms of violence. By delving into the causes and nature of the abuse, Brocades Zaalberg and Luttikhuis conclude that all cases involved some form of institutionalized impunity, which enabled the type of situation in which the forces in the service of the colonial rulers were able to use extreme violence