Imperial Violence in the Garden

Empires were engines of violence. From raiding to slaving to armed interventions, many varieties of imperial violence were not classed as acts of war. Yet serial, “small” violence had profound and far-reaching effects. It penetrated distant, intimate social spaces and structured daily experience far from any front.
To recover these connections, we must first remove the lens through which we have been taught to regard small wars. The conflicts are now often described as exceptional events—brief, sudden breaches of peace in a modern international order devoted to ending war. We expect periodic outbursts of violence to concentrate in global hotspots—in places of supposedly intractable religious or factional divides. When fighting escalates, experts readily characterize the conflicts as examples of “asymmetric warfare” in which irregular forces confront conventional armies.
The history of imperial violence in the last millennium contradicts these comfortable generalizations. Instead of representing anomalies, serial small wars were endemic features of the early modern world. Empires projected desultory violence across every region of the globe. Rather than uniformly pitting guerilla warriors against state-sponsored soldiers, imperial conflicts enveloped all sides in opportunistic raiding and vigilantism.
Most shockingly, imperial “small” wars produced atrocities like clockwork. The threat of cataclysmic violence hovered above routines designed to limit the scope and virulence of war. Periodic raiding and counterraiding could explode into horrific massacres—as occurred, for example, when armies conducting sieges entered towns where populations had refused to submit and went on rampages of civilian killing and enslavement. Low levels of violence along porous imperial frontiers in expanding empires transitioned all too smoothly into vast campaigns of dispossession and extermination.
In my book They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence, I trace this grim history and describe the legal frameworks in which it unfolded. The book shows how sometimes sincere efforts to limit the horrors of war cultivated acceptance of perpetual, quiet war that could and did generate fury and destruction. This history delivers no easy moral lesson, but it does point to dynamics of violence that may continue, in different forms, into the present. In many ways we still suffer from the terrible choice between the imagination of limited war and the horror of its escalation and brutalizing effects.
One poignant dimension of this unorthodox history is the uncanny reach of war into the heart of households. Mapping the intricate ties between imperial wars and households is essential to understanding generational, sexual, ethnic, and racial violence. It also helps illuminate hidden corners of war tucked inside everyday social relations.
In early modern Europe, political theologians evaluated the justice and injustice of imperial violence and its relation to conscience and salvation. They relied on an Aristotelian tradition that defined households as foundational units of political community. In this view, households came together to form the raw material of commonwealths, including the political order of distant colonies. The presence of households distinguished life within the walls of the political community from the frightening world beyond.
This tradition nominated households as civilizing entities. But by another, parallel logic, households were inserted squarely into the dynamics of imperial expansion and war. Imperial sponsors and agents sought legitimacy for their ventures and their violence by attracting, cultivating, and protecting households.
Europeans promoting early overseas empires used households to fortify claims to colonial territory. A settlement was powerful proof of possession, and inhabited dwellings carried more symbolic weight than rudimentary fortifications in contests with rivals. Households, in other words, could turn garrisons into towns.
The fixation on household formation in colonies was shared across early European empires. In the sixteenth-century Portuguese Estado da Índia, Governor Afonso de Albuquerque announced incentives for Portuguese soldiers to marry local women and create households. He rewarded married men with patronage and seats in municipal governance. In English colonies in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, officials distributed land to heads of household and affirmed their access to servants and land, as well as their ability to acquire enslaved people. Households composed colonies and turned them into pieces of imperial realms rather than mere outposts.
But households were not just structures of colonization. Coiled within them were the promise and capacity for war. An intricate legal logic gave households a role to play in establishing the right to make war, converting plunder into property, turning war captives into servants and slaves, and justifying ongoing violence against Indigenous communities.
From their earliest settlement, colonial towns claimed a right to make war for self-defense. The argument reflected elements of just war doctrine, whereby a political community could lawfully answer an injury with violence. The rationale gained force and legitimacy with the proliferation of households. As officials plotted to install and multiply households in fledgling colonies, they cited self-defense to pursue local wars without metropolitan authorization.
For example, the approach was key to settlement and warfare in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. We tend to think of English Jamaica as a den of pirates in this era—a base for rogues operating outside the imperial order. But as English raiders fanned out to attack Spanish targets on nearby islands and the Spanish main, most carried authorization to raid. Persisting in their attacks in times of peace, the raiders were not acting as pirates. Many carried commissions issued by governors who asserted an independent, local right to make war. Officials pointed to the presence of households to justify aggression against enemies—or merely potential enemies—of island security.
Households undergirded not just the right but also the capacity for violence. They held soldiers in place and made the men available for future defensive and offensive colonial wars. Rooting soldiers in communities was an important goal in a world saturated with the allure of plunder. Lucrative raiding threatened to pull men away from colonies and facilitate shifting allegiances. In the Indian Ocean, Portuguese officials complained about footloose Europeans who settled in Muslim coastal communities, their labor and lances lost to understaffed imperial garrisons. A similar danger confronted European settlements in the Caribbean, where maritime raiding lured single men away from settlements and created incentives for the transfer of their allegiance to rival empires.
Most disturbingly, as households anchored economies of plunder, they became the principal legal repositories for human captives.
Here a sinister, elemental logic was at work: in theory and practice, captives who were taken in just wars could be lawfully enslaved. Slaving, in this view, represented an act of mercy because captors were forgoing their right to kill subdued enemies.
Some captives were assigned to public authorities—for example, for work on fortifications. More often, they entered private households. The law empowered household heads to violently hold and discipline captives. This legal arrangement was not new. Household heads already presided over semi-private jurisdictions with the imprimatur of the sovereign. They were delegated to judge and punish household subordinates.
Their position gave heads of household dominium over various classes of subordinate persons, including wives, children, servants, and enslaved people. Power over these classes of people was not unlimited, but it was very extensive and often went unchecked. The authority of household heads to judge and punish was guaranteed by colonial towns and imperial governments.
The arrangement turned households into sites of war. Charged with carrying out the perpetual punishment of war captives, they operated symbolically as microcosms of armed struggle. Past and future violence thrummed beneath the skein of familial relations and domestic peace.
Both captives and captors recognized the shadow of war looming over households. Some captives kept alive the view that they were in a perpetual state of war with captors. As the historian Vincent Brown has pointed out in writing about Tacky’s Revolt, the 1760 slave rebellion in Jamaica, enslaved people in the Caribbean organized revolts in part by appealing to warrior solidarities persisting in captivity.
Planters sensed, too, that they were presiding over a fragmented army ready for war. They searched for ways to banish the specter of revolt. A favorite tactic was to cultivate the fiction of consent to subordination. The historian Sonia Tycko has traced the language of consent in contracts of indentured servants in England and British North America. Even enslaved people could be imagined as having consented to slavery, supposedly choosing it over death at the moment of capture. Fictive consent made household violence a species of punishment, not war.
Terrifying violence inside households could flow from the legal authority of household heads. When Arthur Hodge, a British planter, was tried for the murder of a slave in Tortola in 1811, witnesses described a long pattern of extreme violence toward enslaved people in his household, including the horrific act of pouring boiling water down the throats of two enslaved women. Until a feud with other planters prompted officials to bring charges against Hodge, the white community classified his cruelty as falling within the parameters of household discipline.
Even when colonists did not deny the violence of slaving, they found ways to push it out of sight. In New France, as the historian Brett Rushforth has shown, householders in Quebec sanitized Indigenous enslavement by imagining it as an act that had occurred far away, in distant Indigenous warfare in the heart of the continent. French colonists labeled Indigenous slaves as “Pani,” attaching the name of a Great Plains people to all Indigenous captives, regardless of where they came from. The move erased captives’ kin ties and pushed the specter of violence beyond town walls.
The myth of faraway enslavement deflected attention from ongoing, proximate violence. Raiding for Indigenous captives persisted on the threshold of towns in the post-independence Americas. It also coursed through imperial ventures in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds. Raids continued to funnel human captives into settler households during and after the Age of Revolutions and through the era of abolition and emancipation.
Some aspects of this story better known than others. Accounts of the history of the plantation complex in the Americas note that transatlantic slave ships continued to transport enslaved Africans to plantations in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico after the dismantling of most of the Spanish American empire and after the formal end of slavery in the United States.
The long tail of the “other slavery,” as the author Andrés Reséndez dubs Indigenous slavery, is less often followed. Reséndez traces a lively cross-border trade in Indigenous captives in the Southwestern United States that developed into practices of debt peonage in the early decades of the twentieth century. Here and elsewhere, households made the system of human captivity tick.
Long waves of raiding by Spanish and Republican forces against Charrúas, Minuanes, and other Indigenous groups in the Rio de la Plata backcountry illustrate the centrality of households. Just war language filtered into instructions to raiders to kill Indigenous men and seize women and children in organized assaults on Indigenous communities. Because enslavement of índios was illegal, officials described the “distribution” of captives to households as servants. The Uruguayan anthropologist Diego Bracco argues that the women-stealing produced catastrophic demographic decline. In 1830, forces of the new República Oriental del Uruguay massacred Charrúas at a place called Salsipuedes (“Get-Out If-You-Can”). A Frenchman took four of the survivors, three men and one woman, to Paris for public display as the last of “the Indian tribe Charrúas, recently exterminated.” Others became servants in Montevideo households.
The corollary of embedding captives in households was to block enslaved people from forming households of their own. Whereas sixteenth-century political theologians had imagined wives, slaves, and even children as possessing some fundamental natural rights, including rights to marry and procreate as adjacent to the right of self-preservation, that interpretation did not hold. Household despotism left little room for bodily autonomy or reproductive rights, as the historian Jennifer Morgan has shown in writing about enslaved African women.
This picture is grim, but it is not exaggerated. Imperial violence entered households through many doors. It affected relations of kinship and dependence, structured practices of punishment, and turned the most intimate circles of social life into specialized sites of violence within wider, perpetual wars.
And yet. We would be remiss not to mention complex familial and affective ties inside households. Captives made relationships of love and kinship, and emotions vibrated behind all household relationships, even crossing status divides in unsettling ways. Enslaved and formerly enslaved people, we know, fought hard, in courts and in myriad informal ways, to create and sustain families. In Africa and the Indian Ocean world, some captives maneuvered to improve their positions by moving closer to the status of political insiders. Fictive and real kinship could help to open that pathway.
It is very difficult for us to recover the emotional soundtrack of these patterns. Stories about love and commitment within households were often used to cover up the horror of private violence and to paper over the shame and constancy of its public endorsement. Writing about European-Indigenous relations in early colonial North America, Nicole Eustace and other historians of emotion remind us of the full range of passions, including anger, shame, and fear, and of their resolutely political character. Households were always volatile social fields of shifting power and interpretation. To reimagine them in their full dimensions requires great care—and actual evidence rather than mere conjecture.
Gleaning lessons from the relation of private and public violence is even more challenging. This much we know: In and around empires, actors pushed to limit violence, often doing so with the best of intentions. Even when those efforts seemed to succeed, the result was not peace. Perpetual war remained in the background, threatening to produce explosive violence and seeping into domestic spaces full of conflict and emotion.
The search for personal security and private shelters from war were also constants. They remain so. If history serves us at all, it is perhaps to teach us to open our eyes to the hidden contradictions, and tragic tendencies, of limited violence. What passes for peace in our own time is still an illusion.