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AbstractHistoriography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as atransimperialphenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an "imperial cloud." Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of "moral effect" to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

The present issue of the European History Yearbook showcases research initially presented at the annual Mainz-Oxford graduate workshop "European History Across Boundaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century". The essays shed the straightjacket of national history and cross boundaries and borders. They do so by discussing the transcultural, transnational, and transimperial scopes of their research. Methodologically speaking, the European history that the authors have been researching and writing draws on comparative history, the study of transfer processes and entanglements, and the histoire croisée, among others. The contributions are not only interested in writing European history across boundaries but also in decentering Europe. Individual papers deal with Central America, East Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania. They take the readers far away from the imperial metropolises of Berlin, Madrid, or London - and yet still tell a story about these European imperial centres and societies