“Empire with a Vengeance: Honour and Revenge in European Colonial Warfare”--Mark Condos

Thursday, 12 March, 5:15pm (Humanities Research Hub, 1 University Gardens, Room 102)
Dr Mark Condos (Kings College London), “Empire with a Vengeance: Honour and Revenge in European Colonial Warfare”

Today, the use of military force to punish enemies is strictly prohibited under international law. It is also a widely accepted principle that acts of vengeance and reprisal have almost no legitimate place in warfare. Throughout much of Western history, however, punishment and retaliation were not only important aspects of conflict, but were key justifications for waging war in the first place—particularly when it came to the defence of national honour. European empires were no exception to this rule. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two of the world’s most formidable powers, France and Britain, regularly framed wars of conquest and counterinsurgency using the language of ‘honour’, justice, and revenge, offering a pervasive and easily repeatable rationale for violence perpetrated against non-European peoples around the globe. This talk will focus on two particularly striking examples: the 1830 French invasion of Algeria, and the 1868 British punitive expedition against Abyssinia.

Mark Condos is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Global History in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he researches and teaches the history of the British and French empires. He is the author of The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (2017). His new book, Empire with a Vengeance, will be published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in the spring of 2026.