This is especially true for France, with its focus on its violent history of warfare in Algeria, and for Germany, where debates on genocidal violence in Namibia and its possible relations to Nazi crimes dominate recent scholarship. The second is the more general boom in historiography on colonialism and empire since the 1990s that has also stimulated a great deal of work on colonial warfare and violence. The first is the latest round of “small wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq that spiked a new interest in learning from past experiences of fighting on the periphery. Two reasons have greatly contributed to a surge of interest in studying colonial warfare in the past decades. And also modern histories of colonialism and colonial warfare often assume that colonial wars are different from “conventional”, mainly understood as European inter-state wars, that they form a category of their own. Callwell (1859-1928) had likewise opined that “he conduct of small wars is in fact in certain respects an art by itself, diverging widely from what is adapted to the conditions of regular warfare”. In his 1896 “bible” of colonial or small wars British Colonel Charles E. In its official history on the Herero and Nama war in German Southwest Africa (1904-1907), which was published immediately after the war had ended, the German General Staff, for instance, concluded that any lessons learnt would be of “very limited significance” for “European circumstances”. However, contemporaries rarely believed that experiences in colonial campaigns had any relevance for warfare in Europe. While European empires were scrambling over colonies in Africa and trying to consolidate their hold over possessions in Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean, they were constantly engaged in punitive expeditions, police actions, and outright colonial wars. Nevertheless, Europe’s militaries were gathering plenty of fighting experience between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the last conflict between two large European powers, and August 1914. Outside Europe, it was only Tsarist Russia that faced a military confrontation with another great power, Japan, in 1904/05. For nearly half a century before the outbreak of the First World War, great powers did not engage in major wars on the European continent.
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