Oh, definitely. Well, first of all, the very act of occupying other peoples’ homeland is violent. The concepts of colonialism and imperialism are violent to their core.

If we’re looking at the early 20th century, we can start at the very beginning: the 1900 Asante Rebellion (also known as The War of the Golden Stool). So, in 1896 the British government took control over the Asante Empire (a region in modern-day Ghana) and four years later a rebellion broke out. In his own words, here’s the strategy of the military officer in charge of crushing the rebellion, Colonel James Willcocks:

‘there was only one way of ending it, and that was to make the punishment so severe that the enemy would prefer submission to total extinction’ (Willcocks, 1925: 144).

Whole villages were burnt to the ground and crops were destroyed, with predictable results for the civilian population.

But you talk about the ‘20’s and ‘30’s so I’ll move there. Sticking with the British government, we can look at Ireland where, from 1919-1921, was the Irish War of Independence. It wasn’t uncommon for the two police forces created to crush the IRA, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, to commit murder, torture, robbery, arson, ec. This included the burning of the city of Cork in 1920. After the peace treaty was signed, many of those same police officers were sent to Palestine and did similar things to the people there. Also in the 1920’s, as you point out, there were rebellions in Sudan and Iraq against the British - in the latter, the British government allegedly used poison gas and would bomb Iraqi villages from the air.

In the 1930’s, we can look at the Fascist Italian government in Ethiopia (then Abyssinia), where many people were killed with mustard gas in 1935. Back in 1911, the Italian government invaded Libya and committed many atrocities against the civilian population for resisting their forces, including in one instance allegedly burning down a mosque full of people. From 1923-1932, there was the so-called “Pacification of Libya” by Mussolini’s government which saw tens of thousands of Libyans killed. There was also a crackdown by the Spanish and French governments in the twenties against the Rif in Morocco, which saw Spanish troops using poison gas against Rif villages and even into rivers to poison drinking water.

Moving to the US government, they were involved in the Banana Wars at this time which saw a horrendous amount of violence. On a smaller scale than Amritsar but in an event which was quite similar, the Les Cayes Massacre in Haiti by the US Marine Corps in 1929 saw Marines shooting into a crowd of unarmed protestors. Violence against civilians all across the lands occupied by US forces in the Banana Wars was very common.

Racial violence played into this a lot because colonialism and imperialism require racism and xenophobia for their justification. For example, the Black and Tans in Palestine saw the locals as subhuman, with one saying: ‘Most of us were so infected by the sense of our own superiority over these “lesser breeds” that we scarcely regarded these people as human’ (Cronin, 2017).

In the Rif War, one Spanish general wrote to the Spanish king that the Rif were ‘completely [...] uncivilised’ and that they ‘despise all the advantages of civilisation. They are hermetic to benevolence and fear only punishment’. The Spanish king, for his part, called the Rif ‘malicious beasts’ (Tezcür & Horschig, 2021: 372).

When the US occupation forces landed in Haiti, they implemented the Jim Crow Laws, segregating Black and White people. Much of the actual acts of physical violence were founded in the racist attitudes of the US soldiers.

But this by no means ended in the 1930’s. As I said, colonialism and imperialism are inherently violent and are fuelled by racist justifications. Right up to the end of the European empires, violence was the norm. I would argue that Amritsar can’t be taken as a high water mark, but just another day in the office, in many ways. We can look to the British army in Egypt in the 1950’s before the Suez Crisis. One soldier reported how when they captured a 16 year old sniper, he was executed. Another said ‘There was a sense of “we are white and superior and the ruling race. There was the attitude that that's how we treat the natives - don't for one minute think that they are your equals because they are not’.

Another wrote of the British military presence in occupying the Suez Canal Zone: ‘I have heard people saying “fancy fighting over a body of water” but we had a perfect right to it and it made me grow up, that's all I can say’ (Parkes, 2016).

Also in the 1950’s we can look at how the British government and military responded to challenges against their colonial rule in places like Malaya (where my own grandfather served) and Kenya: concentration camps, murder, destroyed villages, mutilation, etc. At the same time the French government was committing atrocities in Indochina and Algeria, the latter from 1954 to 1962 in a campaign which saw as many as 500,000 or more people die.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Portguese military committed war crimes in its colonial war in Madagascar, Angloa, and Guinea-Bissau. But I’m getting ahead of the question so I’ll stop now.

I do think that the racist element in colonial violence has been mostly forgotten, mainly because people who strongly identify themselves with their nationality and hold their national history in high esteem don’t want to think of their compatriots or their past as bad. There is obviously more of a move these days to increase awareness of this aspect but it’ll take a long while yet before it becomes more mainstream knowledge in Western countries, and (speaking from my own experience where this is how my lessons on the subject were done) where the educational curriculum doesn’t regard the historic empire of the country as a force for good.

Anyway, hope this helped!

Sources:

Cronin, David (2017) Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine. The Irish Times, May 19. Available at: Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine (irishtimes.com). Last Accessed: 14/06/2021

Parkes, Pamela (2016) The Suez Emergency: The forgotten war of the conscript soldier. BBC News, October 24. Available at: The Suez Emergency: The forgotten war of the conscript soldier - BBC News. Last Accessed: 14/06/2021

Tezcür, Güneş Murat & Horschig, Doreen (2021) A Conditional Corm: Chemical Warfare from Colonialism to Contemporary Civil Wars. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 42 (2), pp. 366-384

Willcocks, General Sir James, GCB, GCMG, KCSI, DSO (1925) The Romance of Soldiering and Sport. London: Cassell & Co.