ABSTRACT
Terrorism studies tend to date modern terrorism to the late nineteenth century, citing the intersection of both crucial technological advancement and the advent of political anarchism. Recently, scholars have complicated this origin story by insisting on the importance of “terrorism”’s conceptual and etymological origins in the French Revolution. This chapter argues that the history of late nineteenth-century terrorism is likewise incomplete without considering imperialism’s constitutive role in shaping the discourse of terror. The chapter surveys literary representations of colonial terrorism, demonstrating how generic and political concerns of the 1880s were crucially inflected by a longer history of terrorism fiction. As “terrorism” slowly worked its way into nineteenth-century usage, other words and neologisms like “thug,” “fanatic,” and “incendiary” became crucial semantic synonyms for illegitimate, anti-state violence. Meanwhile, the fact that early instances of “terrorism”’s semantic creep involve Ireland is not mere happenstance; they are rather an indication of the extent to which imperial expansion is inextricable from terrorism’s evolving signification.
