This thesis examines a crucial tension underpinning popular discourses on “techno-war”: while technology is increasingly claimed to transform the conduct of war, lived experiences of conflict still foreground human bodies as war’s main subjects and targets. Within both strategic and critical debates, the technoscientific dimension of war and its human experiences are portrayed as distinct – if not opposite – domains. On the one hand, technology often threatens to sideline and overcome human agency in war. On the other, war experience is understood as exclusively rooted in the human body, providing uniquely authoritative knowledge about conflict.

To address this puzzle, this thesis develops a theory of war experience that foregrounds the role of technology in the imperial history of world politics. I ask: What are the historical and conceptual relations between military technology and the embodied experience of war? How do they shape strategic and political discussions on the role of martial violence? How are they connected to particular visions of international order and global structures of power? Bringing together historical analysis with theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies, Human Geography, Black Studies and Feminist Theory, I argue that a more-than-human conception of war experience has been historically foundational to the construction of an imperial global order. Against widespread claims about the exceptionality of contemporary techno-war, I demonstrate that the symbiosis between humans and technology has long been recognised as central to war-making, and consequently politicised to validate racial and civilisational hierarchies. I develop these arguments through the analysis of three key moments in the history of technological development in Western imperial expansion and intervention: the deployment of breechloading rifles and machine guns by the Victorian Army in the Anglo-Zulu War (1879); the use of aeroplanes and mustard gas by Fascist Italy in the Abyssinian War (1935-6); and the extensive development of simulation technologies in the US Army around the First Gulf War (1990-1). My enquiry provocatively shows how the sources that should most explicitly depict a shared understanding of the human experience of war – from memoirs and strategic thought to literature and political art – are precisely the site where ideas about what counts as war experience are challenged, negotiated and reshaped.