Conquest, Empire, and the Struggle for Supremacy

The revival of scholarly interest in the global history of imperialism is now well established and shows no signs of waning. The catalytic effect of postcolonial scholarship and new imperial history is widely acknowledged, both in widening the scope of enquiry and provoking robust responses from more established approaches to the subject. A growing body of review articles and essays periodically rehearses and surveys contending positions on methodology.1 This debate often turns on the prominence given in historical accounts to violence, not so much the large- and small-scale wars that have long been studied by naval and military historians, but the inherent violence of colonialism on societies and their culture. Three of the works reviewed here, Conquest, The Rule of Empires, and Empires at War, demonstrate that these supposedly contrasting approaches to violence are not irreconcilable. This no doubt reflects their common practice of aggregating case studies to identify patterns, a feature also of Europe, although it is more concerned with the politics and diplomacy of great power rivalry. The resulting overarching syntheses bear the imprint of research expertise in particular and contrasting subfields of historical research, rendering their approaches to selection and comparison both compelling and provocative.