Empires of Violence is a comparative, global study of violence on the colonial frontier, and of the interactions between conquerors and the conquered from around 1780 to 1820. It deals with the expansion of Britain into the world, especially on the Australian and African continents, the westward and southern expansion of the United States, and the expansion of France in Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The four regions under study might at first glance appear too diverse to warrant comparison; there are differences in language, institutions, cultures, and the very history of conquest and settlement itself. Three regions were subject to settler colonialism, while the fourth was an empire in the traditional sense of the word. However, these regions also exemplify what was happening in the world during this period, when the French, the British and the Americans created new empires or expanded old ones, using very similar if not the same violent methods and techniques, and often using very similar if not the same arguments to justify their use of violence. For some years now scholars have attempted to think of ‘colonial’ in the largest possible terms. Comparing these distinctive colonial societies will help bring to the surface the vastly different cultural assumptions, as well as European conceptions of killing and conquest on the one hand, and the Indigenous and local responses on the other. Those contrasts will become clearer in the process. The absence of Indigenous peoples in the literature on the Age of Revolutions is telling. They sometimes appear at the margins but are almost never driving the narratives. This book suggests that there is much more to the story and attempts to place Indigenous resistance and agency front and centre.