Mark Condos, Co-Director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, is a historian interested in the intersections between violence, race, and law within the British and French Empires, with a particular focus on India and Algeria. 

He completed both his BA (Hons.) and MA at Queen’s University in Canada. In 2013, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining King's College London in January 2020, Mark held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London, between 2014 and 2017, and subsequently worked as a Lecturer in Imperial and Global History between 2017 and 2020.

Research

His previous research has examined the relationship between militarism, violence, and state-building in colonial Punjab and along the North-West Frontier of British India. This work explored how colonial anxieties, fears, and vulnerabilities played an important role in determining the authoritarian and often violent practices of the British colonial state. 

Mark has also written extensively on the phenomenon of ‘fanaticism’ along the North-West Frontier of British India, tracing the colonial origins of some of the key legal and discursive tropes in contemporary engagements with terrorist violence. 

He is currently working on two different projects. The first examines how various forms of legal and extrajudicial violence were incorporated by the British and French empires in their attempts to police different frontier regions, with particular emphasis on the ways that Indian revolutionaries used the tangled legal geography of British and French India to carry out their activities in the early 20th century. The second project looks at how concepts of prestige, dignity, and honour informed imperial practices of retributive violence, and the ways that imperial powers attempted to justify these within legal, moral, and other normative frameworks.

• Colonial India and Punjab
• Imperial and global history, c. 1750-1947
• French Algeria
• Colonial anxiety, fear, and terror
• Anti-colonial resistance and insurgency
• Race and violence
• Law
• Imperial policing and pacification
• Frontiers
• Empire

Publications

Monographs:

The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India, 1849-1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Articles:

'The Ajnala Massacre of 1857 and the Politics of Colonial Violence and Commemoration in Contemporary India', Journal of Genocide Studies (January, 2022), 1-19

The Indian “Alsatia”: Sovereignty, Extradition, and the Limits of Franco-British Colonial Policing’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 48, no. 1 (2020), 101-126

With Gavin Rand, ‘Coercion and Conciliation at the Edge of Empire: State-Building and its Limits in Waziristan, 1849-1914’, The Historical Journal, vol. 61, no. 3 (2018), 695-718

Fanaticism and the Politics of Resistance along the North West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 3 (2016), 717-745

License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867-1925’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (2016), 479-517