ABSTRACT
From the moment that Britons arrived in the Andamans in 1789, they were engaged in war against the aboriginal population. This violence, which continued through the inter-settlement period and beyond, did not involve large concentrations of troops and weapons. Rather, it was an erratic pattern of skirmishing and guerrilla warfare that was highly ‘irregular’ in the ways in which it was conducted, experienced, narrated and imagined by Europeans. It was not a war for territory, a war of extermination, or a consistent attempt to bring about fundamental transformations in Andamanese society. It was, rather, an exercise in the taming of the savage on the edge of the colony, in which tameness was imagined not as the end of the war but as a fleeting and renewable part of the experience of violence.
