Violence without Limits

Abstract

Abstract The officials running Britain’s colonial wars worked to keep unsettling details about violence out of sight. But the suppression of information operated in tandem with another tactic: the open justification of brutality. Illiberal militarism was a set of attitudes that chafed at legal and moral restraints on soldiers in the field, cast debate and dissent at home as treachery, and elevated national greatness and racial prestige above other values. It found support from elements of the political, military, and media elite; some ordinary Britons; and a resurgent far-right movement. Even as radicalization went further in rhetoric than in practice, fantasies of unlimited violence and absolute destruction created a context for the abuses that did take place, making them easier to imagine and to defend.