Writing imperial histories 9781526112552

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STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

Writing imperial histories Edited by

ANDREW S. THOMPSON

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general editor John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With more than ninety books published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

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Writing imperial histories

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Writing imperial histories Edited by Andrew S. Thompson

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2013 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER M13 9NR, UK and ROOM 400, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC PRESS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2029 WEST MALL, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8600 7 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or­ ­appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval by Koinonia, Manchester

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C ont en ts

Complete list of the Manchester University Press Studies In Imperialism Series, 1985–2013—vii Notes on contributors—xiii List of abbreviations—xvii List of figures and tables—xix

Introduction  Andrew Thompson 1

 1 The MacKenziean moment in retrospect (or how one hundred volumes bloomed)  Stuart Ward

29

 2 The power of culture and the cultures of power: John MacKenzie and the study of imperialism  Cherry Leonardi

49

 3 Sex matters: sexuality and the writing of colonial history Robert Aldrich

74

 4 Exploration, the environment and empire  Dane Kennedy

100

  5 Spatial concepts and the historical geographies of British colonialism  Alan Lester

118

 6 Policing the colonial crowd: patterns of policing in the European empires during the depression years  Martin Thomas

143

 7 Whatever happened to the Third British empire? Empire, Nation Redux  Mrinalini Sinha

168

 8 Media, India and the Raj  Chandrika Kaul

188

 9 Empires, diasporas and cultural circulation  Sunil S. Amrith 216 10 Decolonisation, space and power: immigration, welfare and housing in Britain and France, 1945–1974 Jim House and Andrew Thompson

240

Afterword  John M. MacKenzie

268



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Index—275

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C OmP L ETE LI ST OF T HE M ANCH ESTER UNIV ERS IT Y PR ESS STUDIES I N I MPERIALISM SE RI ES , 1 9 8 5 –2013

1984 1986 1988 1988 1988 1988 1988 1988 1989 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1991 1991 1992 1992 1994 1994 1995

John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and empire John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and popular culture David Arnold (ed.), Imperial medicine and indigenous societies J.W.M. Hichberger, Images of the army: the military in British art, 1815-1914 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral vistas: exhibitions and expositions universelles John M. MacKenzie, The empire of nature: hunting, conservation and British imperialism J.A. Mangan (ed.), ‘Benefits bestowed’: education and British imperialism W.J. Reader, ‘At duty’s call’: a study in obsolete patriotism Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Imperialism and juvenile literature Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and empire Stephen Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and empire Ronald Hyam, Empire and sexuality John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the natural world J.A. Mangan (ed.), Making imperial mentalities David E. Omissi, Air power and colonial control Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush (eds), Asia in western fiction J.S. Bratton et al, Acts of supremacy: The British empire and the stage, 1890-1930 David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the empire John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular imperialism and the military David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing and decolonisation Robert H. MacDonald, The language of empire Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa Kent Fedorowich, Unfit for heroes: reconstruction and soldier settlement

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studies in imperialism

1995 Mrinalina Sinha, Colonial masculinity 1996 Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s children: reading colonialism through children’s books 1996 Keith Jeffery (ed.), ‘An Irish empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British empire 1997 Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (eds), Western medicine as contested knowledge 1998 Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and imperialism 1998 Gordon T Stewart, Jute and empire 1998 Brian Stoddart & Keith A P Sandison (eds), The imperial game 1998 Martin Thomas, The French empire at war 1940-45 1998 Marjory Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the wars 1999 Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial cities 1999 Robert Bickers, Britain in China: community, culture, colonialism 1900-49 1999 David Killingray and David Omissi (eds), Guardians of empire 2000 Donal Lowry (ed.), The Boer War reappraised 2000 Robert Bickers & Christian Henriot (eds), New Frontiers: Imperialism’s new communities in East Asia, 1842-1953 2000 Saul Dubow (ed.), Science and society in South Africa 2000 Rob David, The Arctic in the British imagination, 1818-1914 2001 Lynette Russell (ed.), Colonial frontiers: Indigenous-European encounters in settler societies 2001 Stuart Ward (ed.), British culture and the end of empire 2001 Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Law, history and colonialism: the reach of empire 2001 Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and music: Britain 1876-1953 2002 Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 2002 Katie Pickles, Female imperialism and national identity 2003 Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial persuaders: images of Africa and Asia in British advertising 2003 Evans, Grimshaw, Philips and Swain, Equal subjects, unequal rights: Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies 2003 Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: the British press and India, c.1880-1920 2003 Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian intellectuals in Britain 2003 John Marriott, The other empire: Metropolis, India and progress in the colonial Imagination 2004 Dana Arnold (ed.), Cultural identities and the aesthetics of Britishness 2004 Satadru Sen, Migrant races: Empire, identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji 2004 Edward M. Spiers, The Victorian soldier in Africa

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complete list, 1985–2013

2004 Heather Streets, Martial races and masculinity in the British Army, 1857-1914 2005 Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant homecomings: the return movement of migrants 1600-2000 2005 Brenda M. King, Silk and empire 2005 Martin Thomas, The French empire between the wars 2005 Zöe Laidlaw, Colonial connections 1815-45: Patronage, the information revolution and colonial government 2005 Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820 2006 Diane Robinson-Dunn, The harem, slavery, and British imperial culture 2006 Annie Coombes (ed.), Rethinking settler colonialism 2006 Richard Phillips, Sex, politics and empire: a postcolonial geography 2006 Freda Harcourt, Flagships of imperialism 2006 Georgina Sinclair, At the end of the line: colonial police forces and the imperial endgame, 1948-80 2006 Daniel Gorman, Imperial citizenship: empire and the question of belonging 2007 Chloe Campbell, Race and empire: eugenics in colonial Kenya 2007 Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865 2007 Helen Tilley (ed.) with Robert J. Gordon, Ordering Africa: anthropology, European imperialism, and the politics of knowledge 2007 John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: ethnicity, identity, gender and race 2007 Kirsty Reid, Gender, crime and empire: convicts, settlers and the state in early Colonial Australia 2008 Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and empire: Indo-Irish radical connections, 1919-64 2008 David Hardiman, Missionaries and their medicine: a Christian modernity for tribal India 2008 A. Martin Wainwright, ‘The better class’ of Indians: Social rank, imperial identity and South Asians in Britain 1858-1914 2008 S. Haggerty, A. Webster & N. White (eds), The empire in one city? Liverpool’s inconvenient imperial past 2009 Mary Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: representing naval manhood in the British Empire, 1870-1918 2009 Andrekos Varnava, British imperialism in Cyprus, 1878-1915: the inconsequential possession 2009 John M. MacKenzie, Museums and empire: natural history, human cultures and colonial identities 2009 Carol Polsgrove, Ending British rule in Africa: writers in a common cause 2009 Lucy Chester, Borders and conflict in South Asia: the Radcliffe boundary commission and the partition of Punjab

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studies in imperialism

2009 Emma Robertson, Chocolate, women and empire: a social and cultural history 2009 Gordon Pirie, Air Empire: British imperial civil aviation 1919-39 2010 John McAleer, Representing Africa: landscape, exploration and empire in southern Africa, 1780-1870 2010 Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, nation, race and empire 2010 Mary Chamberlain, Empire and nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937-66 2010 Pratik Chakrabarti, Materials and medicine: trade, conquest and therapeutics in the eighteenth century 2011 John M. MacKenzie (ed.), European empires and the people 2011 Angela McCarthy, Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840 2011 Neville Kirk, Labour and the politics of Empire 2011 Frances Steel, Oceania under steam: Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism 2011 Lindsey Proudfoot and Dianne Hall, Imperial spaces: placing the Irish and Scots in colonial Australia 2011 Huw Bowen (ed.), Wales and the British overseas empire 2011 Patrick D. O’Leary, Servants of the empire: the Irish in Punjab, 1881-1921 2011 Michael D Leigh, Conflict, politics and proselytism: Methodist missionaries in colonial and postcolonial Upper Burma, 1887-1966 2011 Helen Cowie, Conquering nature in Spain and its empire 2012 Giordano Nanni, The colonisation of time: ritual, routine and resistance in the British empire 2012 Gordon Pirie, Culture and caricatures of British imperial aviation: passengers, pilots, publicity 2012 Sarah Longair and John McAleer (eds), Curating empire: Museums and the British imperial experience 2012 Brad Beaven, Visions of empire: patriotism, popular culture and the city 2012 Andrew J May, Welsh missionaries and British imperialism 2012 Dianne Lawrence, Genteel women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840-1910 2013 Will Jackson, Madness and marginality: the lives of Kenya’s White insane 2013 Christopher Prior, Exporting empire: Africa, colonial officials and the construction of the British imperial state, c. 1900-39 2013 Catherine Ladds, Empire careers: working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854-1949 2013 Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson (eds), Empire, migration and identity in the British World 2013 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of scholars: universities, networks and the British academic world, 1850-1939

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complete list, 1985–2013

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2013 Doug Lorimer, Science, race relations, and resistance: Britain, 1870-1914 2013 Berny Sèbe, Heroic imperialists in Africa: the promotion of British and French colonial heroes, 1870-1939 2013 Emily Manktelow, Missionary families: race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier 2013 Andrew S. Thompson (ed.), Writing imperial histories

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not e s on Cont ri b uto r s

Robert Aldrich is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney. He has written widely on the French in the South Pacific, on remaining ‘colonies’ in the contemporary world and on the legacy and memory of colonialism. Among his books are Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (1996) and Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memory (2005). He is also the author of Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003) and, most recently, Gay Life Stories (2012). He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Sunil S. Amrith is a Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College in the University of London. His research focuses on the movement of people, ideas and institutions between South and Southeast Asia. His recent work has been on the Bay of Bengal as a region of cultural and political interaction, focusing on the history of migration and on environmental history. He is author of Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 (2006) and Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (2011). His current project is on the Bay of Bengal’s history, which will bring together the history of migration with environmental history: Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (forthcoming). Jim House is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on colonial repression and memory, focusing on the history of Franco-Algerian migrations during the Algerian war of independence, and is the co-author (with Neil MacMaster) of Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (2006). He is currently writing a comparative study of the spatial dynamics of socio-political change in late-colonial Algiers and Casablanca, examining how the rise in pro-independence nationalisms in the context of extensive migration into these cities brought both reformist and repressive responses from the colonial authorities. Chandrika Kaul is a Lecturer in the Modern History Department, University of St Andrews. She has published extensively in the field of media and empire and is founding co-editor of the book series, Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media (Palgrave Macmillan). Her monograph, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India (2003), is the first detailed study on the subject. She has also edited Media and the British Empire (2006), Explorations in Modern Indian History and the Media (2009) and co-edited International Communications and Global News Networks: Historical Perspectives (2011). Her book Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century is to be published in 2013.

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list of contributors

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Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, Washington, DC, and current president of the North American Conference of British Studies. His books include Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (1987), The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (1996), and The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005). His latest book, The Challenge of the Continents: Exploring Africa and Australia is forthcoming in 2013. Cherry Leonardi is a Lecturer in African History at Durham University. Her research and publications over the last decade have focused on the historical and contemporary role of chiefs in South Sudan and what this reveals about state–society relations. Her forthcoming book on this subject, Dealing with Government in South Sudan: Histories in the Making of Chiefship, Community and State (2013), is based on a combination of fieldwork, oral histories and archival sources, which argues that chiefship and state have been mutually constitutive since the nineteenth century. She held a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2010 and has published several articles in international journals on South Sudanese history and contemporary justice and governance issues. Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on the historical geographies of South Africa, the humanitarian, governmental and settler networks of British colonialism and biographical approaches to colonial encounters. He is author of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001) and, with David Lambert, co-editor of Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (2006). He is currently co-writing a book with Fae Dussart on the relationship between humanitarianism and governance in the early nineteenth-century British Empire. Mrinalini Sinha is the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor at the Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995) and of Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (2006), which won the Albion Book Prize from the North American Conference of British Studies and the Joan Kelley Memorial Book Prize from the American Historical Association. She has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anticolonialism, gender and transnational approaches. She is currently working on a project, with the title ‘Complete Political Independence: The Curious History of a Nationalist Indian Demand’, which will explore the contingency of the development of the nation-state form in India. Martin Thomas is Professor of Colonial History at the University of Exeter. He has published extensively on French and British imperial politics and comparative decolonisation. His most recent books are Violence and Colonial Order:

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list of contributors

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Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (2012) and Fight or Flight: Britain, France and Their Roads from Empire (2013). He is a director of the University of Exeter’s Centre for War, State and Society, an inter-disciplinary research centre that supports research into the impact of armed conflict and collective violence on societies and communities. Andrew Thompson is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter and a Council member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has published widely on the relationship between British history and imperial history and is author of The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2005) and editor of Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (2012), a companion volume to the Oxford History of the British Empire. His recent book, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods, and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (2010), co-authored with Gary Magee, blends insights from the history, economics and the social sciences to provide an analysis of the cultural economy of Britain’s empire and to trace the historical antecedents of modern globalisation. Stuart Ward is Professor of Imperial and Global History at the University of Copenhagen. He specialises in the politics and culture of European imperialism, with a particular emphasis on the enduring effects of global decolonisation since the Second World War. His major works include Australia and the British Embrace (2001), British Culture and the End of Empire (ed., 2001), The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire (co-authored with James Curran, 2010) and Exhuming Passions: The Pressure of the Past in Ireland and Australia (ed., with Katie Holmes, 2011). He also co-edited the Australian companion volume to the Oxford History of the British Empire in 2008. His current work explores the demise of imperial civic culture throughout the British world in the twentieth century and its relationship to the fate of Britishness in the United Kingdom.

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li st o f a b b r e viati o n s

AINEC CARD CIAC CPU CTAM EPU FAS FLN GIP HLM NCCI MTA PCF PIDE PVDE

All-India Newspaper Editors Conference Campaign Against Racial Discrimination Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council Commonwealth Press Union Technical Advisors for Muslim Affairs Empire Press Union Social Action Fund National Liberation Front Inter-Ministerial Group for Slum Clearance habitation à loyer modéré National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants Arab Workers’ Movement French Communist Party State Security Police Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado

Source material CAC Centre des Archives Contemporaines CHAN Centre Historique des Archives Nationales NA National Archives

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li st o f fi g ur e s a n d ta bl es

Figure 1  ‘The Mad Dog’

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Tables 1  Indian press laws until 1940 2  Members of EPU–Indian press representatives in London

195 199

[ xix ]

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i nt r o duc t io n

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Andrew Thompson This collection of essays is to mark and reflect upon the fact that the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series has passed its 100th publication. In the world of academic publishing, this is, by any standard, a rare and remarkable achievement. The longevity, vitality and extraordinary diversity of the Studies in Imperialism series owe a great deal to the pioneering spirit, eclectic vision and relentless energy of its general editor, John MacKenzie. Under his careful guidance, Studies in Imperialism has played a conspicuous role in reshaping both British and Imperial histories, partly by greatly expanding their respective repertoires to explore new and previously neglected subjects, and partly by fixing attention more firmly on their tightly interwoven relationship.1 Over the years, the Series’ foundational concerns – that empire had ‘as significant an effect on the dominant as the subordinate ­societies’, and that culture was just as vital as politics to the production and circulation of imperial power – have become so familiar that it is worth reminding ourselves that to espouse these views was once to work against the scholarly grain.2 When Propaganda and Empire and Imperialism and Popular Culture were first published (in 1984 and 1986 respectively), the discipline of imperial and Commonwealth history was by common consent atrophying. ‘British’ history had yet to be repositioned in a wider imperial and global framework, and empire was still something widely judged to have happened overseas and to have been mostly marginal to the lives of the British people. In so far as ‘British’ historians acknowledged imperialism, it was usually as an unpleasant ‘aberration’ that was ‘corrected’ by decolonisation, which reinstated a ‘normal’ course of national development.3 That imperial history is no longer held at arm’s length from national history, while by no means the achievement of the Series alone, is nonetheless one of its deepest and most enduring impacts.4 With the whirligig of time, the situation has indeed almost turned full circle. To question today the extent to which Britain was in fact ‘imperialised’ is almost to adopt a revisionist position.5 How, then, did this happen? Twenty-five years on from the birth of Studies in Imperialism, we now have the distance and perspective required for a critical evaluation of the Series and its responses to, and engagement with, wider, underlying trends in imperial historiography. Writing Imperial Histories is therefore both commemorative and [1]

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writing imperial histories

retrospective, in the sense that it marks and looks back at a hundred volumes of the Studies in Imperialism series in order to reprise, reflect upon and reappraise several of the key themes that John MacKenzie has been personally concerned to develop. In a discipline often felt to be dominated by more traditional concerns and practices, Studies in Imperialism has done much to expand our frames of reference, with welcome, far-sighted and sometimes controversial contributions to the new imperial histories of sexuality and gender; exploration, hunting and the environment; colonial armies and policing; and the media and communications – all of which form the subject of chapters in this volume. Indeed, in each of these fields, the Series that MacKenzie has so painstakingly built boasts a number of landmark publications, several of which are highlighted in the pages that follow. Diversity is a hallmark of the Series, which, subject to its general remit, has consistently sought to open itself to a range of different perspectives and approaches. If imperial history as a discipline has shown a striking capacity to renew and even reinvent itself over the generations, so more recently has Studies in Imperialism. The Series’ original masthead unapologetically remains. Over the years, however, it has been amplified and extended in several ways. Alongside an early emphasis on popular imperialism, propaganda and social control, there have been rich veins of scholarship on cultural encounters between the coloniser and colonised, the circulation of power through the production and organisation of colonial knowledge, and the construction of identity at the heart and on the margins of empire. This process of refinement is likewise evident from the way the Series has, over time, ranged more widely geographically, with volumes focused on the imperial culture of metropolitan Britain increasingly matched by those focused on the history of one or more of the colonies. Of particular note is the number of volumes in the Series devoted to the Indian subcontinent – as much as a fifth of its total output. This emphasis has been welcomed, not least by scholars of South Asia, because it has countered the tendency evident in Western historiographical traditions to treat India as a ‘special case’ or ‘awkward relation’ in the imperial family, rather than to recognise the Raj for what it really was – ‘a key component of the empire’.6 The general thrust of Writing Imperial Histories is to think outwards and expansively to a wider historiography rather than to focus narrowly or exclusively on the Studies in Imperialism series itself. It is a book which is as much about how we have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century – and the problems and possibilities thereby entailed – as it is about situating a particular, if influential, body of scholarship in that landscape. Thus [2]

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introduction

Dane ­Kennedy’s chapter on exploration and the environment and Alan Lester’s chapter on spatial concepts show how the insights provided by the Series have gained purchase as part of broader dialogue about empire. With respect to the Series’ overarching aim of bringing the empire back into the story of the making of modern Britain, Cherry Leonardi observes how not all of this scholarship would acknowledge any direct debt to John MacKenzie. Rather, she suggests, MacKenzie’s own research has been ‘amplified, complemented and in certain respects critiqued by this wider and increasingly varied scholarship on imperial culture and the colonial encounter’. Firmly situating the Series in its historiographical hinterland also helps to explain some of its silences and omissions. If the subject of political economy has figured little in the pages of Studies in Imperialism, Martin Thomas helpfully reminds us how, like other more wholly economic approaches, it has largely been absent in the innovative works of the ‘new’ imperial history.7 In short, whether speaking of the Series’ strengths or of its limitations, we have to take account of the wider intellectual context in which Studies in Imperialism first emerged and has subsequently evolved. * * * The volume opens with an essay by Stuart Ward about the Studies in Imperialism series as a whole. This essay explores the deeper set of social and political contexts that informed the genesis and subsequent development of the Series, and, in particular, the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. It fleshes out the prevailing ‘end of empire’ climate in which Studies in Imperialism was conceived: imperial history, as a discipline, was in steep decline, sorely in need of new stimuli, yet rapidly fracturing into ‘area studies’, and largely and artificially sealed off from the history of Britain.8 During the Series’ formative years, there was little, if any, sense of anticipation of the reinvigoration of the discipline that would occur over the following two decades. Indeed, as Ward shows, the impression that the empire was a distraction and an irrelevance for the British people – something to escape from, or even perhaps to define themselves against – had been reinforced by the psychological reorientation required by the ‘onset of global decolonisation’. The apparent ease with which the colonies were cast aside nurtured the idea that metropolitan societies were ‘hermetically sealed from their dissolving empires’, with disgruntled and increasingly dejected settler and expatriate communities left feeling that their interests and identities were being marginalised by the British government’s lack of resolve to support them, by the British public’s lack of concern for their plight, and by Britain’s strategic and psychological realignment away [3]

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from the Commonwealth towards Europe. And arguably many of those ex-settler nations were equally happy to disengage from their imperial past and strike out on their own with a new confidence, albeit also with a sense of historical amnesia. Either way, the mapping of new paths to modernity, of which greater European involvement was for some a key part, only served to reinforce the impression that the empire was a thing of the past, out of kilter with prevailing economic (‘the white heat of technology’) and social (‘the decline of deference’) values, and something which Britain felt more of a duty than a real desire to defend. For the first half of the twentieth century, empire had embodied ideas of Western civilisation, progress and technological prowess; across Europe, decolonisation saw an inversion of this relationship, so that empire was more likely to be seen as an obstacle than as an asset to the social and economic advancement of metropolitan populations. Ward then skilfully unpicks several of the intellectual currents that were contemporaneous with the emergence of what he calls the empire and metropolitan culture ‘paradigm’ of the 1980s. The social, cultural and intellectual consequences of decolonisation for the British have only just begun to be effectively explored by historians, yet, as he makes clear, the lowering of the ‘interpretative barriers’ between British history at home and British history overseas was prefigured and arguably made possible by the publication of Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain (1977) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Both authors polemically asserted the importance of empire to the ways in which the inhabitants of the British Isles thought about themselves. Although a decade later Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) could still with conviction declare that the problem for the ‘English’ was that their history had taken place overseas and so they could not understand its importance, in the intervening years there had, however, been a considerable chiselling away at the assumptions that had up to this point underpinned the view that British and imperial histories could safely be confined to separate spheres. An intensifying concern with what it meant to be British, renewed racial anxieties after the 1981 Brixton riots, the press and popular endorsement of the 1982 Falklands war, and the growing influence of (and backlash against) ‘Raj nostalgia’ – all of these threw into sharper relief the presence in Britain of an imperial past. What Ward’s essay shows, therefore, is that the ‘MacKenziean moment’ itself needs to be read historically, as a product of the ‘delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities’, in which contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship came together in the 1980s to integrate Britain and its empire into a single field of enquiry in ways that promised to enhance our understanding of both. The next set of essays – by Robert Aldrich, Dane Kennedy and Alan [4]

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Lester – casts its net broadly to take stock of some of the major developments in imperial historiography and the Studies in Imperialism series. Aldrich’s chapter on sex in the colonies provides a compelling account of how this ‘novel and even provocative theme’ gained traction in a field ‘traditionally dominated by theories and practices of colonial governance, the economic balance-sheet of empire, and the collaboration and resistance of colonised peoples’. Imperial history’s slow embrace of sex as a subject, he explains, was anticipated by the social history of the Annales school, and by developments in the history of medicine and women’s and gender history, and therefore has to be read in the wider context of second-wave feminism and gay liberation. If sexuality made early appearances in the Studies in Imperialism series, it was the publication of Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality (1990) that was the ‘defining milestone in the history of sexuality and imperialism’.9 Aldrich’s re-reading of Hyam is careful to acknowledge the intolerant public attitudes of the day that he set out to challenge, as well as the later historical work that his book anticipated. Yet it also highlights the difficulties of Hyam’s ‘wholesale rejection of feminist studies’, and, moreover, the limited role he granted to sexuality in determining imperial policy. Aldrich moves on to consider four subsequent volumes in the Series, all of which mark different moments in the development of the field. Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity (1995), Clare Midgley’s Gender and Imperialism (1998), Richard Phillips’s Sex, Politics and Empire (2006), and Kirsty Reid’s Gender, Crime and Empire (2007) shifted the focus of attention away from the opportunities empire offered colonisers for sexual gratification towards the sexualisation of debates about Indian social and legislative reform, gender as a crucial category and shaper of colonial experience, moral purity movements in the colonies and the diverse sexual cultures of the early colonial frontier. In doing so, they sometimes by-passed Hyam and sometimes took him to task. Aldrich then traces the variety of topics through which sexuality has been explored in several other works in the Series, as well as some aspects of sexuality that it has neglected, such as issues of abuse and exploitation, miscegenation and stereotypes of African and Asian sexuality and morality. He concludes by exploring some of the ways in which sexuality has more recently been looked at in colonial situations, thereby setting this theme within a wider historiography, highlighting the several traits about imperial sex that feature in this research and identifying the areas where further work remains to be done. The themes of exploration, environment and empire are woven together in Dane Kennedy’s chapter, which clearly conveys the [5]

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considerable impact of John MacKenzie’s own scholarship in this field. MacKenzie’s Empire of Nature (1988) opened up ‘a topic that had been hiding in plain sight’, namely imperial hunting; Imperialism and the Natural World (1990) established the role of science and learned institutions in the imperial engagement with the natural world; and Museums and Empire (2009) provided the first comparative study of natural history museums in the colonies and their reliance upon explorers for artefacts and specimens. Ranging across metropolitan popular culture, the institutionalisation of scientific practice and cross-cultural encounters, Kennedy points to the differential contributions of the Studies in Imperialism series in each of these spheres, as well as the broader dialogue – in particular with the work of historical geographers and historians of science – of which the Series forms a part. Epistemological issues loom large – even if they are not always well covered by the Series itself – whether with respect to the question of ‘ocular authority’ (how much credence should be given scientifically to explorers’ reports?), or with respect to the ways in which Europeans sought and struggled to make sense of unfamiliar and exotic overseas environments. Representations of the ‘tropics’ as innately different from Europe, and often deadly for Europeans, arose partly from acute concerns about European physical and mental health in zones of Western expansion – a point well made by an early edited volume in the Series, David Arnold’s Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (1988). Kennedy’s chapter concludes with a call for synthesis: ‘exploration as practice and as representation, as science and as spirit, as experience and as epistemology’. Here, in emphasising the importance of bringing different historical literatures into closer dialogue, he strikes a chord with other recent reflections on the state of imperial historiography – a call for more integrated histories of the experience of empire. The historical geographies of British colonialism have long enjoyed a prominent place in the Studies in Imperialism series. Alan Lester’s chapter locates the Series in the wider body of scholarship responsible for the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in imperial history. If concepts of place and scale now seem just as important as those of chronology and periodisation, John MacKenzie and other contributors to the Series were important in effecting this transition. Rightly observing how geographical metaphors and frameworks have long been important to key developments in imperial history, Lester explores the ways in which different ‘spatial imaginations’ have been made possible by the ‘MacKenzie project’. He shows how that project, as it has moved beyond older binaries of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, as a means of diffusing modernity from the metropole, towards thinking of metropole and [6]

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colony as two interacting entities, allowed metropolitan British history to be reconceived in the light of empire. Yet, if the empire markedly extended the boundaries of domestic British society, that still begs the question as to how imperial influences were absorbed, incorporated and assimilated: what were the mechanisms that mediated such influences or the channels along which they were carried? Through the optics of ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘scale’, Lester considers the type of conceptual apparatus required for a better understanding of the interconnectedness of various imperial worlds. With close reference to work published in the Series, he urges a more far-reaching geographical reorientation of imperial history. More attention, he argues, needs to be paid to the connections between colonial sites. The characteristics of places need to be seen as the products of broader spatial networks, with their social and racial privileges and uneven power relations. And units of scale, whether local, regional, national or global, need to be thought of relationally and seen for what they are – the constructs of government policy and projects, ‘with real effects in the world’, rather than ‘naturally occurring entities in their own right’, the existence of which can be taken for granted. In this way, Lester sketches out an exciting agenda for ‘where next?’, reflecting upon how geography and the new imperial history might continue to respond to and engage with each other. * * * Each of the above contributors provides the reader with a critical commentary on influential strands of scholarship within the Studies in Imperialism series, although they are equally mindful of work published beyond the Series, and of the counter arguments advanced by its critics. Chapters 6 to 10 proceed differently. While inspired by work in the Series, they cast their gaze forward, taking work within Studies in Imperialism as a point of departure in order to develop particular lines of argument and to suggest fruitful ground for a new generation of imperial historians to take the discipline in different directions over the next twenty-five years. If there is a thread running through these chapters it is their common search for a more productive framework for studying imperial histories – a framework more expansive than ‘empire’, yet not perhaps quite as all-encompassing as ‘world’ or ‘global’ history, or as open-ended as ‘interconnected’ or ‘networked’ history. Martin Thomas’s chapter on colonial policing during the depression years, and Jim House’s and Andrew Thompson’s on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from John MacKenzie’s recently published European Empires and the People, which surveys in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public of [7]

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six European countries.10 Such comparative studies, moving beyond the realm of the colonial ambitions of individual European powers, call into question notions of national exceptionalism, not least the idea that the imperial impulse was ‘presumptively English or British’.11 According to MacKenzie, ‘fascinating trans-national similarities, as well as significant differences’ emerge from this comparative approach.12 Far from being a purely national phenomenon, imperialism ‘often constituted a dominant ideology in these countries’, and European empires learned from and even copied each other.13 This, in turn, raises the question of whether and in what sense imperialism may be approached or conceived of as a ‘transnational’ phenomenon. Considering imperialism comparatively is a necessary and vital building block for considering it transnationally, and historical studies which compare and contrast discrete examples of empire-building are growing in number. They are, however, still vastly outweighed by single and largely compartmentalised country studies – in his chapter on sexuality, for example, Robert Aldrich notes that comparative studies of the subject in different empires would be enlightening. In other words, we need more histories that narrate European and non-European imperialisms not as the parallel experiences of individual nation-states but of Europe and the non-European world as a whole.14 The significance of non-national affiliations implied by the term ‘transnationalism’ forces us to ask in what ways the experience of empire transcended national cultures. For if, as it is now widely asserted, transnational impulses and operations were intrinsic to the operations of empire,15 this claim surely requires something more than the observation of patterns and parallels across the experiences of imperial powers. Stephen Howe has spoken of the ‘trans-nationalism of empire’ – the idea that colonialism was as (or an even more) powerful a transnationalising force than was anti-colonialism. What is suggested here is a more radical re-orientation of imperial history – a greater recognition of how the networks of different empires overlapped and intersected with each other (as people, goods, ideas and practices moved between and beyond different sites of colonisation), and how such movement, in and of itself, shaped and re-shaped experiences of settlement and conquest.16 Recent writing in the Series has begun to give more emphasis to cooperation as well as conflict as a theme between imperial powers.17 There are telling examples of how the nationals of one state worked in the empires of others, such mobility of people (typically from the professional middle classes) enabling empires to learn and borrow from each other, and setting up a dialectic between rivalry and emulation that became an enduring characteristic of the [8]

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‘imperiality’ of several European powers. Yet these examples beg the bigger question of whether, in the words of Stuart Ward, imperial culture might itself be seen as inherently transnational, ‘permeating not only the borders between colony and metropole, but also the boundaries between the empire-building centres themselves’. How far did the racial beliefs, bureaucratic techniques and forms of military rule and repression of Europe’s imperial powers stem from common roots? How far can imperialism be seen as part of a wider European social or cultural formation, mobilising similar sentiments, legitimised by shared ideologies and lending new and related meanings and significance to what it meant to be British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Belgian or Dutch? And what happened on the borders of these empires? If historians have become more willing to think in terms of the transnational processes that gave rise to nationstates, should they not extend this insight and work through its implications for empire-states? A macro-level comparison between colonies and empires with respect to patterns of policing is offered by Martin Thomas. Focusing on the European empires during the depression years, Thomas makes a convincing case ‘for considering political economy as an explanatory tool for colonial police action’. He shows how an early twentieth century transition from imperial soldiering to imperial policing can be observed across several western European empires – the British, French and Dutch especially – and seeks to explain this. Probing the key features of the late colonial state, he highlights the importance of the ‘combination of the political and economic’ – on the one hand, what was required to suppress internal disorder and, on the other, what exporters required to enhance their output. Colonial police forces were thus intimately involved in labour market regulation and in the industrial disputes which were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. Indeed, after the depression, worker protest and anti-government protest became difficult to distinguish as targets of police repression in many colonies, with changing economic conditions and the consequent treatment of colonial workforces emerging as ‘recurrent markers’ of European colonial policing between the two World Wars. In their chapter on multicultural urban experiences during and after decolonisation, Jim House and Andrew Thompson also seek to relocate the history of the British empire alongside that of other European empires. In so doing, they question the general historiographical tendency to separate European imperialisms into discrete national entities. Notwithstanding significant national differences in public discourse, they identify a deeper, underlying convergence in [9]

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the assumptions and outcomes of British and French housing policies towards colonial and post-colonial immigrants. They show how, in both countries, such policies were formulated and delivered within a very similar set of constraints, and how the dynamic that developed in Britain between local and national governments in relation to the housing question (and, in particular, its local-level politicisation) paralleled that in France. They conclude that the pervasive idea that Britain and France operated two entirely distinct national ‘models’ towards housing provision in particular, and immigrant welfare systems more generally, after the Second World War is misleading. Rather, as Britain and France decolonised, and formerly colonised peoples settled in their major cities, the response to what was widely regarded as an unwelcome ethnic diversity was to a large extent shared. State intervention, when forthcoming, fed off recurrent private and public concerns regarding ‘integration’, ‘assimilation’, ‘segregation’, ‘enclaves’ and ‘ghettos’, as run-down and overcrowded private rental dwellings and low-standard social housing became the main recourse for immigrant families. Furthermore, such concerns emerged from structural, largely unresolved, tensions in the policies designed to control the spatial distribution of immigrants between 1945 and 1974. A raison d’être of empire lay in the constant shifting of people between different parts of the world in ways that were likely to destabilise old identities and forge new ones.18 Sunil Amrith’s chapter takes as its main theme the long history of imperial mobility which brought with it encounters of cultural difference that deeply shaped both European and non-European societies. Building on the ‘connected approach’ to imperial history pioneered by Studies in Imperialism, Amrith focuses on the later nineteenth century as a period in which the world witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication and new ‘global political imaginations’. He charts the rooting of diasporic cultures in their localities over time, conveying how, in the early stages of mass migration, diasporas were in flux, but later developed firmer contours, as ‘sojourning’ was replaced by ‘settlement’. The condition of ‘living in diaspora’ itself generated many debates: initially their focus was upon how far diasporic cultures should adapt to being practised in their host societies; it later shifted to the more fundamental question of whether descendants of migrants could ever truly belong within a national community. By comparing the experiences of Chinese and Indian diasporas within and beyond the British empire, Amrith also addresses the important question of ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’. If among British settlers imperial power promoted a form of ­cosmopolitanism that strengthened its own sense of national identity,19 so too in the [ 10 ]

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port cities of Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Jakarta, Singapore and Shanghai did a non-European class of educated journalists, clerks and intellectuals, thrown together by the ‘uprooting force’ of colonial capitalism, engage in debates about social and religious reform and political legitimacy, and over questions of race, nationality and empire. The space thereby opened up for intercultural communication was, however, increasingly matched by a sharpening of ethnic and racial distinctiveness, especially as the idea of imperial citizenship came under attack from the early 1900s and settler colonies passed a raft of discriminatory immigration legislation – a precursor, as Adam McKeown and others have shown, to the later twentiethcentury global history of migration control.20 Diasporic peoples, who had previously and readily traversed the boundaries between colonies and empires, now came to be regarded as sources of destabilisation and potential disloyalty. They were marginalised as ‘orphans of empire’ in a new age of nation-states: some were ‘expelled to homelands they had never known’, while ‘others became permanently stateless’. The ability to navigate a complex and shifting set of international forces was, as recent scholarship has shown, a prerequisite to the longevity of any imperial project.21 The chapters by Mrinalini Sinha on the ‘Third British Empire’, and by Chandrika Kaul on the role of the Indian press before and after independence, also seek to reposition British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations. Developments in other empires were as likely to condition (and complicate) the ability of a metropolitan power to project its influence and secure its interests overseas as were the internal dynamics of its own imperial system. In a similar vein, Mrinalini Sinha presents the real challenge of bringing a global perspective to (and through) the study of the British empire as that of achieving a better appreciation of ‘the changing dynamics of the international order’. Building on the Series’ rethinking of the relationship between empire and nation (which she considers to be the most significant development in British imperial historiography since Robinson’s and Gallagher’s influential theory of the imperialism of free trade), her chapter revisits, yet expands, the idea of a ‘Third British Empire’ – the imperial system, as it ­reconfigured itself, in between the two World Wars. Sinha sees the interwar years as a moment when an imperial conception of citizenship was decisively defeated by a new nationalising vision of empire. This vision, she persuasively argues, was less the inevitable outcome of an evolutionary process than a controversial triumph of nation-state form over other possible futures. With reference to the status of Indians as British subjects, Sinha hones in on debates at the Imperial Conferences of 1911, 1917, 1921 and 1923, in order to reconstruct the ‘political [ 11 ]

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evisceration of the lineaments of British subjecthood’, as the right to free mobility within different parts of the empire was withdrawn and hard-won recognition of the privileges of citizenship reversed. ‘Equality for British subjects’, she observes, was thereby turned into a question of ‘equality for constituent states within the empire’. Moreover, the legitimacy of this new global order of nation-states, as the optimum form of political belonging, derived not only from a series of resolutions at Imperial Conferences but from the ‘revolutionary upheaval’ caused by the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. In Sinha’s view, therefore, the ‘Wilsonian moment’ was as pregnant with possibilities for the re-ordering of empires as it was for the rise of anticolonial nationalism.22 If empires were a vehicle for transnational forces, Chandrika Kaul provides a compelling case study in the form of the Empire (later Commonwealth) Press Union (EPU), whose ethos was ‘unashamedly imperial’, and whose remit was to incorporate and articulate the varied interests ‘of members differently situated in terms of power, resources, geography and media context’. Within this ‘imperial press family’ the concepts of a free public sphere and journalistic freedoms were vigorously debated. Confronted by a critical press furthering nationalist campaigns, the British government readily resorted to censorship and closures, press laws and detention, yet the EPU nevertheless held on to the notion that the world of empire and free enquiring journalism were compatible. Indeed, as Kaul makes clear, the fight for a free press was waged in India by British and European journalists as well as by their nationalist counterparts. To begin with the Indian wing of the EPU was small and dominated by representatives of the Anglo-India press, but over time the numbers of Indians grew, with a greater proportion coming from radical and indigenous papers. For many of these journalists, India’s independence witnessed a move away from the role of ‘anti-imperialist crusader’ to one of ‘partnership in national development’. Like his British predecessors, Jawarhalal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, saw the press in adversarial terms. When the EPU met in Ottawa in 1950, British and Dominion journalists parted company with their Indian colleagues. The former were acutely sensitive to the extension of wartime restrictions on the press into peacetime. The latter meanwhile were supportive of United Nations’ moves to lay down minimum standards on the part of the press and government, and, influenced by an emergent doctrine of ‘social responsibility’, were willing to accept the case for self-regulation on the grounds of preserving communal and religious harmony. * * * [ 12 ]

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The relationship of the Studies in Imperialism series to the ‘new’ imperial history is touched upon at multiple points in this volume. In some respects, it is possible to argue that, from the very outset of the Series, the two have been closely aligned: for example, their shared emphasis on the interconnections between metropole and colony, as well as on the cultural dynamics of colonial power. A decade or so after the Series was founded, Christopher Bayly could declare John MacKenzie to be at the ‘very forefront of attempts to create a new type of imperial history’.23 Similarly, Chandrika Kaul’s chapter points to the Series’ notable achievement ‘of integrating media history more fully with the growing field of the new imperial history’. She suggests that this paved the way for more persuasive critiques of the role of the media in the creation of imperial value systems and the propagation of imperial beliefs, as well as helping to realise the vision of prominent media and communications scholars for more historicised accounts of the media and its wider socio-political and economic impact. From such a perspective, Studies in Imperialism can be viewed as an integral part of the revitalisation of the genre that has come to be known as the ‘new’ imperial history. Elsewhere, however, it is what one contributor refers to as the ‘productive tensions’ between a more empirically and historically minded Studies in Imperialism, and the primarily literary and more theoretical orientation of post-colonial studies,24 that come to the fore. Cherry Leonardi’s chapter blends biography and historiography to return John MacKenzie to his Glaswegian, Lancastrian – and Southern African – roots. Her penetrating and nuanced analysis of the intellectual trajectory of MacKenzie’s own scholarship reflects on how this has been perceived and depicted by others. Leonardi provides a particularly insightful account of MacKenzie’s Orientalism (1995) – the problems of ‘power’ and ‘agency’ with which it sought to grapple and the sometimes hostile responses it provoked. By those frustrated by the separate paths taken by British and imperial histories, or by the latter’s preoccupation with political, diplomatic and constitutional narratives, MacKenzie could be hailed as the ‘leader of a revolution in imperial history’. But for others who felt that a conservative historical empiricism – to which the Series belonged, rather than necessarily exemplified – was at odds with a more politically oriented and methodologically reflexive study of the imperial past, MacKenzie was more easily cast in the role of the traditional or conservative, who was apt to take an overly benign view of imperial power and the contribution of artistic and cultural forms to its legitimisation. (It should be noted that the conflation in some of these debates of two forms of ‘conservatism’ – one a method of enquiry into the colonial past, the [ 13 ]

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other a set of assumptions about colonialism’s consequences – can nonetheless be misleading, as they are not one and the same thing and do not always go together.) Meanwhile, notwithstanding his interest in the cultural forms and registers of imperial power, MacKenzie has been wary of the more polemical positions taken up by post-colonial criticism and, even more so, by what he has perceived to be its generalising and homogenising tendencies, which, in his view and that of others, seriously underplay the complexities and ambiguities of colonial encounters and relations. Interestingly, Leonardi is joined by Amrith, Lester and Ward in positing a greater convergence between the agendas of the Studies in Imperialism series and the new imperial history over more recent times. This they partly explain in terms of the reaction to Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), with MacKenzie’s views on the extent of imperial culture in Britain, the ways in which British society incorporated and internalised imperial influences, and the definition of imperialism itself, all providing common ground with Porter’s post-colonial opponents.25 There may also be merit in the view that the Series has generally been more open to post-colonial and feminist approaches since the mid-1990s,26 and that, with its sustained interest in imperial migrations, the Series has broadened the dialogue about the different – and racialised – kinds of cultural circulations, encounters and practices that resulted.27 Alan Lester sums up the relationship well when he writes that the ‘new’ imperial history has developed sometimes ‘in parallel’ with, sometimes ‘in tension’ with, and sometimes as an ‘integral part’ of the Series. Given the various ways in which the idea of a ‘new’ imperial history has been used, and its differences of emphasis and intellectual lineage, it perhaps could only be so.28 Lester and others also rightly note that, twenty years on, the ‘new’ imperial history is not in fact so new anymore. Aldrich goes so far as to suggest that the post-modern moment, with an emphasis on representations of the ‘other’, may have passed as issues of governance and the law, and the social processes of institution formation, come back to the fore. Elsewhere Dane Kennedy has questioned how well, in the light of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the global financial crisis, post-colonial studies is placed to address questions of military and economic power.29 If we are on the cusp of new departures, we might well ask whether there will be a return to an ‘ante-post-colonial’ version of imperial history, with an alternative emphasis on the political, military and economic side of empire, or a transition to a ‘post-post-colonial’ version, which seeks to integrate the different dimensions of imperial power in ways that remain to be resolved. There are several signs to suggest the latter [ 14 ]

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rather than the former – a progression rather than a turning of the circle. Some of the general histories of Britain which have appeared over the last decade have been much more attuned to the imperial dimensions of its history than previously was the case, although there remain more insular strands of British history which have taken little or no account of the insights and contributions of MacKenzie’s work and that of the ‘new’ imperial history more broadly.30 That said, as Ward and Leonardi suggest, our terminology and conceptual tools for understanding the metropolitan history of empire have evolved considerably since Studies in Imperialism was founded. The Series’ initial, top-down emphasis on the production and dissemination of various forms of imperial propaganda, which may at times have appeared to assume, rather than to account for, its impact, has given way to a more fruitful and far-reaching enquiry into the different types of imperial influence at work on Britain and the different ways in which empire can be read into its domestic culture. What one contributor describes as the ‘methodological cul-de-sac’ of the ‘maximalism’ versus ‘minimalism’ debate – an imperial Richter scale for measuring the magnitude of empire in national culture – has gradually been circumvented by a greater concern with the nature as much as the extent of imperial influences on Britain. Hence, rather than try to quantify imperial influences, and to enumerate the references to empire in British private and public life, we now have a different set of metaphors and devices for interrogating what the empire meant to the ‘mother country’. By examining the differentiated and uneven impact of imperialism – a product of the (increasing) diversity and plurality of both Britain and its colonies – we have become more attuned to the range of attitudes people held towards empire, the multiple meanings they ascribed to it and the variety of experiences they derived from it.31 By questioning the binary opposites of the domestic and the imperial, we have come to better appreciate how the effects of empire were sometimes so closely entwined with other domestic impulses and influences as to become thoroughly internalised.32 By recognising that silences about (and even the denial of) the empire were sometimes a strategy for selecting and filtering representations of the colonies to the British public, and not necessarily a sign of imperial ignorance or indifference, we have become more aware of how certain (often highly sanitised) kinds of empire came to assume greater prominence in metropolitan thinking.33 By distinguishing between an unconscious acceptance of the burden of empire and its more active championing and support, we have been able to see how, beyond ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ positions, there may have been a much wider constituency who simply, yet significantly, took Britain’s imperial involvement for [ 15 ]

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granted. By exploring how evolving ideologies of race and class drew and ricocheted off each other, different readings of popular imperialism have become possible – readings centred around the ‘precarious nature of empathy’ and ‘distant sympathy’ displayed by Britain’s labour leaders towards colonial workers and their movements, and readings which, as Cherry Leonardi argues, identify ‘agency in complicity as much as in r­ esistance’.35 Significant challenges of explanation and conceptualisation none­­­ theless remain. Imperialism was never self-contained; it was always, as John MacKenzie has argued, part of a larger imaginative complex. Much work remains to be done in relating imperialism to a variety of other contemporary discourses. Post-colonial theory has done much to explain the struggles of liberalism and socialism to come to terms with empire, and to highlight how these ideologies were tainted by orientalist assumptions of colonial ‘inferiority’.36 Yet outside the realm of Edwardian ‘radical conservatism’ and ‘constructive imperialism’ much less attention has been paid to the dynamics of the Conservative engagement with empire over time.37 Furthermore, there were a variety of other domestic discourses, sometimes widely embraced, sometimes espoused by particular social groups, which were closely yet complicatedly related to race and empire: civilisation, Christendom, anti-slavery, the freeborn Englishman, Anglo-Saxonism, bucolicism, progress, modernity, masculinity, feminism and citizenship can all be counted among these. Was empire reliant or parasitic upon the hospitality offered by these broader discourses, as has persuasively been argued in relation to the British left?38 Or did imperialism succeed in harnessing these discourses and bending them towards its own ends? New work on anti-slavery – a humanitarian and philanthropic sentiment that defies easy categorisation as imperial – and its relationship to imperial culture suggests that ‘superiority mattered as much as ownership’. While anti-slavery policies and campaigns were at times linked specifically to formal territorial empire, they are also said to have been part of a wider ‘global chauvinism’, never confined by red lines on a map.39 Rather than attributing influences either specifically to empire or to Britain’s wider role as a global power, we should think of the imperial and the international as inseparable – rather like the weft and warp of a piece of cloth. The difficulty of knowing where the imperial ends and the international begins is thrown into sharp relief when considering the United States’ new colonial empire, of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, in relation to that of the British. In the face of violent resistance on colonial frontiers, narratives of American and British territorial expansion both readily invoked doctrines of racial Anglo-Saxonism [ 16 ]

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and national exceptionalism – their ‘imperial destinies’, if not shared, were nonetheless part of a wider system of thought and practice.40 Histories of race making and settler colonialism are increasingly being set in this wider transatlantic frame, as an older model which saw the United States growing out of (and later superseding) the British empire is replaced by a newer model which presents the British and American worlds as overlapping empires, sometimes competing, but sometimes borrowing from and even supporting each other.41 Inter-imperial crossings and intercolonial exchanges were particularly evident in the fields of welfare policy, science, technology, agriculture, trade and development. Again, what we see here is collaboration emerging as strongly as competition as a theme among Europe’s imperial powers and between Britain and the United States. If relating the ‘foreign’ to the ‘imperial’ has posed problems of definition and interpretation, the challenge of placing metropole and colony in the same analytic frame, though rhetorically commonplace, has in practice been no less demanding. Notwithstanding the rise of new ‘networked’ histories as a way of mapping the contours of a ‘British world’, studies undertaken by scholars of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa often remain quite self-referential.42 This should not surprise us. To simultaneously master archives in both metropole and colony is a huge undertaking. The tendency therefore remains either to work outwards from Britain – with the risk that we fail to incorporate indigenous or subaltern perspectives, experiences and epistemologies in our understandings of empire,43 or inwards from the colonies, with the risk that we fail to grasp the complexities of the way in which British culture operated and how this might have shifted over time.44 In his seminal work, Sweetness and Power (1985), Sidney Mintz once observed that all too often when scholars focus on the centre, they lose sight of the periphery, whereas when they focus on the periphery, they lose sight of the centre.45 Mintz’s technique for connecting the colonial centre and the colonial periphery was to focus on the history of a commodity – in his case sugar – and its transition under plantation capitalism from a luxury good to one of mass consumption. Following in his footsteps, the history of the material world, and the exploration of commodities as a category of experience, has since attracted a good deal of attention from historians of empire, resulting in interesting and informative studies of jute, silk and chocolate published in Studies in Imperialism.46 Histories of commodities and their impact on people’s lives – social, political and aesthetic – have been one way of moving imaginatively in and out of the British Isles and traversing metropolitan and colonial spaces. Yet another has been to reconstruct the religious, [ 17 ]

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scientific and other associational cultures mobilised in support of and against the empire. Engaged as they were in constructing constituencies of popular support through representations of ‘interest’ and ‘identity’, missionaries, humanitarians and a range of other extraparliamentary lobbies and professional bodies faced the multiple challenges of tailoring their rhetoric to different audiences, at home and overseas; of marrying together the respective preoccupations of lobbyists in the metropole with promoters in the periphery; and of adapting to changes in the wider imperial environment (which, from time to time, could provoke a more fundamental reappraisal of the very concept of empire and how it stood in relation to the kind of country Britain aspired to be).47 Their ability to fix the empire in the public imagination, and to translate their reforming rhetoric from one political context to another, required them to bridge the domestic British and settler-colonial ends of the imperial axis. But, as a study of the ‘British world’ concept in the context of South Africa makes clear, this was by no means an easy task.48 Affiliations to empire in the colonies, often expressed in terms of an attachment to constitutional forms of government, or ideals of progress and improvement, or notions of respectability, ‘correlated uncertainly with conditions in metropolitan Britain itself’.49 While many affirmations of loyalty and patriotism by settler communities can thus be read as acts of resistance to British imperialism, the faith placed by indigenous elites in the promises of empire, rather than simply being written off as naive and misguided, is also better understood as a strategy ‘of patience and moral persuasion’ – a self-conscious counter to the predations of land and labour hungry settler politicians, and, for this reason, perfectly compatible with the fashioning of more independent African political structures.50 Precisely because of this plurality of patriotic and loyalist discourses in the colonies – subaltern as well as settler – Britishness in the colonies often functioned more as a set of claims on the metropole than a simple statement of belonging to a wider British World. Indeed, empire-minded people and parties at the domestic end of the imperial axis frequently discovered that assertions of Britishness at the colonial end were far from easily harnessed to the interests of the British state. * * * All empires generate their own legacies. As historians have come to recognise that multi- and supra-national empires were an enduring feature of the international order, so they have developed a heightened consciousness of their legacies as one of the most powerful forces to have shaped the modern world.51 When the American novelist, William [ 18 ]

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Faulkner, wrote that ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’, he was expressing a widely shared sentiment that history matters partly because of the pattern of constraints that the past can impose on the present and possible futures.52 Phrases like the ‘dead weight of the past’, ‘prisoner of the past’ and the ‘burden of the past’ evoke a desire to escape from or even eradicate the difficulties bequeathed to us by previous generations, yet one tempered by a recognition that history is not always kind to those who would seek to do so. While the notion of a ‘historical legacy’ is to be frequently encountered in many forms of writing – academic, literary and journalistic – that seek to unravel the past in the present, the reader is rarely presented with a clear definition of a legacy or how it might be structured and actually work.53 If we were to consider any outcome at the end of a causal chain of other factors as a legacy, the door would then be open for virtually anything to be categorised as such. Indeed, it has been observed, ‘everything is at some level the product of the past because there is nothing else it could be a product of’.54 In other words, this claim, because it explains everything in general, does not explain anything in particular. But in order to achieve a more precise definition, and to identify the criteria for a phenomenon to be considered a historical legacy, we have to grapple with complex questions relating to their temporal dimension. The very world ‘legacy’ implies an in-built distinction between the past and the present: that the phenomenon we are studying should exist in two (or more) different time periods – a reference period (or periods) in which the effects of the legacy are felt (often but not always pertaining to the present), and a preceding period in which the legacy originated. Locating the colonial past in a post-colonial present similarly requires us to get to grips with important issues of temporal practice and perception. The discursive dynamics of time and memory are receiving more critical attention from historians of empire. There is, for example, an emerging interest in the concepts, vernaculars and rituals of time, particularly Western time and its impact on indigenous temporalities. Others meanwhile have sought to explore the social constructions of imperial memory and their relation to historical meanings of empire. As a recent and highly original contribution by Giordano Nanni to the Studies in Imperialism series argues, time is itself a construct with different meanings and values attached to it by different societies.55 By probing the intimate relationship between the colonisation of time and the conquest of land, Nanni has helped us to see how concepts of time are culturally specific. They were sometimes expressions of collective identities and civilities, yet they were also a means of subsuming, reforming or disciplining other [ 19 ]

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cultures. Western constructs of time, based around regularity, order and discipline, were intolerant of non-Western and nature-oriented cycles of time, which were condemned as irregular, irrational, unpredictable and superstitious. Ushering African and Aboriginal societies into an age of modernity therefore meant keeping ‘true’ or ‘human’ time by Western calendars and clocks. The culmination of this process came in 1884 with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), an act of standardisation and centralisation underpinned by the enlightenment ideas of progress and evolution by which Europeans legitimated their territorial ­expansion. If colonial discourse sought to undermine the ‘alternative temporalities’ of indigenous peoples, time is equally fundamental to our understanding of how the British sought to come to terms with the loss of empire at home. What were the main psychological, temperamental and emotional consequences of the end of empire? And where do we locate them – during decolonisation or in later decades? There have been important polemical works which have attempted to explain the lack of radical dissent in Britain in terms of the cultural and constitutional legacies of colonialism, and to highlight the longterm damage inflicted by the ‘pathologies of colonialism’ by sanctifying forms of institutionalised violence, justifying a limited role for women and producing a false sense of cultural homogeneity.56 Yet to think of Britain as a post-colonial society is not only to seek to establish how far imperial attitudes were internalised by the British, but whether such ‘inherited collective instincts’ possessed a longer life and, if so, how they played themselves out over time.57 Bill Schwartz’s Memories of Empire takes us back to the vital question of how the end of empire was narrated by those who lived through it and later sought to reconcile themselves to it.58 By joining together the racial dimensions of decolonisation overseas, and the colonial dimensions of race at home, he argues that the end of empire ran along different historical timelines. In particular, Schwarz’s idea of ‘the simultaneous existence of competing historical times’59 helps to explain how decolonising sensibilities and many of the repercussions of the end of empire could be delayed or displaced from the 1950s and 1960s, when an imperative to forget predominated, only to surface in later decades. For Schwarz it was above all post-war immigration from the new Commonwealth which brought the empire’s past ‘back into the field of contemporary vision’60 and brought back to the surface memories of white authority and colonial rule. The chapter by House and Thompson in this volume likewise seeks to link racial questions to a wider politics of decolonisation. They show how state welfare was a key terrain upon which unappeased memories of empire could combine [ 20 ]

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with quotidian housing problems of post-war Britain and France, in such a way as to turn an unconscious into a conscious discomfort with decolonisation. A recurrent debate on the segregation and dispersal of immigrants – which in both countries fed off the notion of a ‘safety’ or ‘tolerance’ threshold beyond which assimilation or integration (the two words were often used interchangeably) would never be achieved – was repeatedly reworked within new contexts. However, if, as scholars of post-communist societies have argued, historical legacies must in some sense be carried over from the past rather than merely replicated in the present, do immigrant welfare and housing really qualify as legacies?61 It might be said that it is simply the underlying structural conditions in the housing market and, in particular, discriminatory systems for allocating social housing that explain why immigrants often live in the least desirable and most dilapidated forms of housing today, just as they did in the past. Yet that would be to ignore the way in which hostile attitudes towards AfricanCaribbean and South Asian immigrants have been passed down from prior generations. The dramatic differences in generational attitudes towards immigrants today emerge clearly from opinion polls. Such polls bear testimony to what one commentator calls ‘the psychological impact of an ageing democracy’, which tends to value security and stability and to feel threatened by change, and which expresses itself in the view that immigrants constitute an undue and unwelcome burden on the welfare state.62 The motor for the legacy is thus to be found in the generation that experienced the ‘twin spectres’ of national decline and post-colonial immigration at the end of empire.63 For the British, and arguably for the French, this was how decolonisation principally came home to roost. The question of the historical timelines through which imperial legacies might effectively be explored is also pertinent to the chapter by Chandrika Kaul, which presents the liberal conception of the press and its associated freedoms in civil society as ‘a significant legacy of Britain’s global empire, whose consequences are still with us today’. In doing so, Kaul highlights the importance of contemporary history – roughly coterminous with decolonisation – as a link between the more distant and the very recent past. Here the decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s provide Kaul with a clear historical base from which to project backwards to the debates about press standards and responsibilities under the Raj, and forwards to the relationship between the media and democracy today. What emerges from her analysis is the complexity of the structure of certain legacies. Under the Raj, there was a tussle between a commitment to a free and open press and the principles of imperial domination. This left a highly ambivalent legacy [ 21 ]

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for India on the eve of independence. In the aftermath of the Second World War, ‘the logic of post-colonial realities … tempered the ardour of even the most strident supporter of press freedom’. Any attacks on government were likely to be interpreted as an attack on the stability of a nascent Indian state: the press was therefore ‘obsessively monitored’ and many Indian journalists were open to arguments for greater press restraint. While India today may be able to boast the fastest-growing media network, Kaul reads the pre-history of continuing and contemporary intrusions into media freedoms against this official history as much as more recent market forces. In other words, what we see here is a double legacy: colonial to post-colonial and post-colonial to present. The clear implication is that historical legacies may exist in multiple time periods, provided there is continuity between them – stability in the essential features of the phenomenon under consideration, yet with the possibility of new features gained at later stages. Another product of empires that outlived them is the diasporic expansion of Western and non-Western peoples. The paths trodden by previous generations of imperial migrants – free and indentured – have left their imprint in the patterns of global migration we observe today. A 2002 Home Office report on asylum seekers noted that one of the key factors influencing the choice of the United Kingdom as their destination was ‘previous links between their own country and the UK, including colonialism’.64 If colonial links present powerful connections for many of today’s asylum seekers, Sunil Amrith’s chapter sets the explosion of diasporic cultures we have witnessed in our own times – whereby many people imagine themselves as part of a nation beyond a homeland – in the context of the migratory imperial networks that were ‘submerged rather than suppressed’ by the end of empire. Amrith argues that the longer-term effects of ‘the imperial history of diaspora and cultural circulation’ can be seen almost everywhere in the world today, as new connections build on older ones, and the routes taken by workers back and forth across the Indian Ocean evoke very old histories of mobility in the region: as he puts it, ‘the living legacies of old migrations are inscribed on the land and the landscape, around the world’. At a time when we are grappling with our own ‘global migration crisis’,65 and emigrants continue to be more likely to be regarded as a threat than an opportunity for receiving countries, it is salutary to be reminded that the figure of the migrant as everyman is as much a defining feature of a colonial past as it is of a post-colonial present, and that the two indeed are integrally linked. * * *

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During decolonisation, the British tried to run away from their imperial history, as the colonies began to be depicted as a thing of the past, even before the process of formal decolonisation had come to an end. For a while this attempt at forgetting was partly, if never wholly, successful. In so far as the empire had an intellectual appeal or emotional purchase during these years it was often as a domestic ‘other’ – a foil against which to define the national character. The social and cultural crisis of the 1960s, with its retreat from what were widely perceived as the imperial values of duty and deference, and the economic crisis of the 1970s, refracted as it was through the discourse of decline, are both cases in point. A collective amnesia – or ‘forgetting of the present’ – for a while took hold.66 For any scholar wishing to study nation and empire as convergent rather than divergent phenomena this was hardly a conducive context. Buffeted by the winds of a ‘Little Englander’ history, a powerful strand of left- and right-wing historical thought, the self-consciously revisionist scholarship of the 1980s sought to offer a more expansive view of Britain’s past. Yet such scholarship repeatedly ran up against a view that the underlying, long-term influence of imperialism on the home society was superficial and slight.67 A string of post-war surveys and opinion polls of public attitudes to empire were further invoked as evidence of this insularity, ignorance and supposed indifference.68 Since then, there has been a wide-ranging and fundamental reappraisal of empire and, alongside this reappraisal, a gradual yet growing recognition of its centrality to the making of modern Britain. When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded, the discipline of imperial history was at what was probably its lowest ebb. To say the Series single-handedly revived the discipline would be an exaggeration; to say that such a revival would have been much impoverished without the Series would not. For just as John MacKenzie’s own scholarly life has been framed by Studies in Imperialism, so the new directions taken by imperial history have in many ways been framed by Series. One hundred volumes on, there has been a tremendous broadening of the scope of what imperial history encompasses: a reconnecting of British and imperial histories, such that their previous separation may to some now seem surprising as well as artificial; a much more systematic and sustained attention to the cultural registers and expressions of colonial power, alongside and intersecting with military, political and constitutional techniques of overseas rule; and a greater awareness and appreciation of the variety of experiences the home population derived from empire and the different attitudes they formed towards it. Studies in Imperialism monographs and edited collections – the Series roughly equally weighted between the two – have been prominent in [ 23 ]

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this widening of historical horizons, such that it is hard to imagine an undergraduate or postgraduate reading list about an aspect of empire and imperialism that did not feature one or more of its contributors. Furthermore, while MacKenzie has left his personal imprint on the Studies in Imperialism series, he has at the same time succeeded in opening up the space for a variety of scholars, representing different types of history, and indeed different disciplinary backgrounds, to pursue their interests and enthusiasms. The Series has thus developed organically, sometimes under, yet sometimes independently of, his general editorial hand. In this way, the first twenty-five years of the major book series exploring the history of empire have made a powerful and lasting impression on the discipline’s objects as well as its methods of enquiry. It is to be hoped that the Series which John MacKenzie created will continue to prosper in the quarter century to come.

Notes  1 See, for example, the judgement on Studies in Imperialism in C. Hall and S. Rose, ‘Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire’ in Hall and Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006): ‘This constitutes a body of work that has significantly shifted the parameter of knowledge about the interplay between the domestic and imperial.’  2 See, for example, the remarks by Stuart Ward, pp. 29–30 and Mrinalini Sinha, pp. 168–9.  3 A. S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005), p. 2.  4 For a discussion of other contributors to this historiographical shift, see Ward, pp. 34–6.  5 The discussion of Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004) by some reviewers, for example, Ian Phimister in the English Historical Review and John Darwin in the Times Literary Supplement, applauded Porter’s attacks on those who simply assumed that Britain was awash with empire, or read empire into phenomena that were only tangentially connected to it, if at all, see n. 25 below.  6 See Chandrika Kaul, p. 189.  7 Notwithstanding its name, the ‘new’ imperial history is actually not so new anymore; in fact, writing in this genre can be traced back two decades or longer.  8 For a contemporary verdict, see, for example, D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘Can HumptyDumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12: 2 (1984), 9–23. For a subsequent assessment, see A. S. Thompson, ‘Is Humpty-Dumpty Together Again? Imperial History and the Oxford History of the British Empire’, Twentieth Century British History, 12 (2001), 511–27.  9 For an earlier book, which tackles the growing taboo of interracial sexual intercourse, see K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London, 1980). 10 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester, 2011). 11 On this point, see A. Burton, ‘Getting Outside the Global: Re-positioning British Imperialism in World History’ in C. Hall and K. McClelland (eds), Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester, 2010), p. 201.

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introduction 12 Quote taken from the dust-jacket of the book: European Empires and the People. 13 Ibid. p. 7. 14 On the importance of comparative European histories, see esp. S. Berger (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2006), p. xxv. 15 For an eloquent statement, see K. Grant, P. Levine and F. Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke, 2007), esp. pp. 7, 12. 16 G. Magee and A. S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 26. 17 See, especially, B. Gissibl, ‘Imagination and Beyond: Cultures and Geographies of Imperialism in Germany, 1848–1918’ in MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People, pp. 158–94. 18 On this point, see J. Darwin, ‘Empire and Ethnicity’, Nations and Nationalism, 16 (2010), 391. 19 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonisation’, Past and Present, 200 (1998), 215, 218–19, 228–32. 20 A. McKeown, A Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008). 21 J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009), esp. pp. 649–55. 22 See also E. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford and New York, 2007). 23 C. A. Bayly, ‘Review: John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22: 3 (1996), 361. See also Cherry Leonardi, p. 57. 24 Summarised by one leading exponent as ‘a politics and philosophy of activism that contests disparity, and so continues in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past’: see Robert Young’s succinct analysis of the historical and theoretical origins of post-colonial theory, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2003), p. 4. 25 For a range of responses to Porter, see John Darwin in the Times Literary Supplement (18 Feb. 2005), Ian Phimister in the English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 1061–3, and Stephen Howe in The Independent (14 January 2005). For a more detailed assessment, see Stuart Ward’s ‘Echoes of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006), 264–78. For Porter’s response to his critics, see ‘An Imperial Nation? Recent Work on the British Empire at Home’, Round Table, 96 (2005), 225–32. 26 See Alan Lester, pp. 122–3. 27 See Sunil Amrith, pp. 216–17. 28 For the different dimensions, see, especially, S. Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (London, 2009). For the continuity and discontinuity between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ imperial histories, and intellectual ancestry of the latter, see Saul Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37: 1 (2009), 2. 29 D. Kennedy, ‘Postcolonialism and History’ in G. Huggan (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford, forthcoming, 2013). 30 There is not the space here for a systematic enquiry. However, the volumes of the Oxford History of England provide an interesting case study. Several of the seventeen chapters of Theodore Hoppen’s, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), have separate sections on ‘Imperial and Foreign Affairs’, with separate chapters on the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, good coverage of the economic aspects of empire, and more limited coverage, but at least recognition, of the effects of emigration. Geoffrey Searle’s, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford, 2004) highlights ‘imperial pomp and circumstance’ and the ‘zenith of imperialism with its idealisation of war’ as a major theme of the period, and ranges across the economy, emigration, schooling, defence and concepts of nationality to account for the influence of empire at home. As their titles suggest, Brian Harrison’s Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom, 1951–70 (Oxford, 2009)

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31 32 33 34

35

36

37

38 39 40

41

42

and Finding a Role, 1970–1990 (Oxford, 2010), take as a central thread the shifting understandings of Britain’s place in the world, international and imperial, which are explored through travel and emigration, forms of cultural expression, notions of the Commonwealth, overseas aid, foreign policy and immigration. Interestingly, Ross McKibbin’s stimulating Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–51 (Oxford, 1998), not strictly a part of this series, but nonetheless covering the interwar years, explicitly excludes the domain of ‘formal politics’, and with it ‘England’s relations with the empire and rest of the world’, the two exceptions being the ‘sporting empire’ and the United States – the latter on the grounds that the ‘American influence on English civil culture was much more powerful and problematic’. A. S. Thompson, ‘Social Life and Cultural Representation: Empire in the Public Imagination’ in Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012), p. 252. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 6. R. Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45: 3 (2006), 602–47 For the most eloquent statement, see the emphasis on the ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everydayness’ of empire in Hall and Rose, ‘Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire’, esp. pp. 2, 21–2, 29. See also Krishan Kumar on the concept of ‘banal imperialism’ in ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’ in Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, pp. 298–302. See, for example, Nicholas Owen’s exploration of the dynamics of commitment of British labour leaders towards Indian nationalism: The British Left and India. Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1–21 (quotation from p. 16). E. W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978) and ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley (eds), Europe and Its Others, vol.1 (Colchester, 1985), and Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993). See also U. Metha, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999). See, for example, E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995); F. Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (Oxford, 1990); A. S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932 (Harlow, 2000). For a more recent contribution, see D. Thackeray, ‘Rethinking the Crisis of Edwardian Conservatism’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 191–213 and Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century England (Manchester, forthcoming 2013). N. Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Oxford, 2007), p. 17. R. Huzzey, ‘Minding Civilisation and Humanity in British Imperial Culture: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Slavery’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (forthcoming, 2013). J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloWorld, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009); M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008). See also M. Daunton and R. Halper (eds), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples 1600–1850 (London, 1999). P. A. Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History, 88 (2002), 1315–53; D. T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998). On welfare debates and policy specifically, see Edmund Rogers, ‘The Impact of the New World on Economic and Social Debates in Britain, c. 1860–1914’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2009). There are, of course, a growing number of important and illuminating exceptions. For a selection, see: S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibil-

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43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

ity and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford, 2006); C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–67 (Cambridge and Chicago, 2002); A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in NineteenthCentury South Africa and Britain (London and New York, 2001); R. Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in NineteenthCentury Africa (Cambridge, 2008). For a rare example of multiple metropoles and multiple colonies sandwiched successfully between single covers see C. van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath (London, 2007). See Alan Lester, p. 137. Price, ‘One Big Thing’; Thompson, ‘Empire in the Public Imagination’, p. 268. S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). For works in Studies in Imperialism, see: G. T. Stewart, Jute and Empire: The Calcutta Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire (Manchester, 1998); B. M. King, Silk and Empire (Manchester, 2005); and E. Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009). For other works, see: L. Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (Basingstoke, 2003); and R. Ross, Clothing: A Global History, or the Imperialists’ New Clothes (Cambridge, 2008). On the concept of a colonial bridgehead, see J. Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victor­ ians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112: 447 (1997), 614–42. Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World?’ and A Commonwealth of Knowledge. Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World?’, 18. See S. Marks, ‘Southern Africa’ in J. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 560; A. S. Thompson, ‘The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c. 1870–1939’, English Historical Review, 118: 477 (2003), 637–9. See Mrinalini Sinha, p. 182. See also J. Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (London and New York, 2007) and J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010). W. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York, 1951), Act 1, Sc 3. The best discussion I have been able to find is that by Jason Wittenberg: ‘What Is a Historical Legacy?’, 27 August 2010, http://web.ceu.hu/polsci/teaching/seminarpapers/Wittenberg11.pdf (accessed 26 June 2012). Ibid. p. 4. G. Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester, 2012). T. Benn, ‘Britain as a Colony’ in C. Mullin (ed.), Arguments for Democracy (London, 1981), pp. 3–17; the quote is taken from A. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 29–48. The quote is taken from Bill Schwartz, ‘Crossing the Seas’ in B. Schwartz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003), p. 3. B. Schwarz, Memories of Empire. Volume 1: The White Man’s World (Oxford, 2011). Ibid. Ibid. p. 11. For the distinction between ‘survivals’ and ‘replications’ with regard to the subject of historical legacies, see ‘Wittenberg, ‘What Is a Historical Legacy?’, p. 15. D. Aaronovitch, ‘Let’s Not Be a Whiskery, Scared Old Nation’, The Times, 28 June 2012, p. 23. Schwarz, Memories of Empire, p. 31. W. Webster, ‘The Empire Comes Home: Commonwealth Migration to Britain’ in Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, p. 157. See here D. S. Massey, J. Arango, G. Hugo, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor (eds), Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium (Oxford, 1998), pp. 6–7.

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writing imperial histories 66 Kumar, ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’, pp. 300–1. 67 See the essays by R. Gott (‘Little Englanders’) and E. H. H. Green and M. Taylor (‘Further Thoughts on Little Englandism’), as well as the Preface and Introduction to R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of a British National Identity. Volume 1: History and Politics (London, 1989), pp. x–lxvii, 91–109. For the right, the locus classicus remains Enoch Powell’s ‘England: St George’s Day Lecture’ in Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell. Selected by Rex Collings (London, 1991). For the revival of ‘Little Englander’ history by Lady Thatcher and her successor John Major, see D. Cannadine, ‘British History as a “New Subject”: Politics, Perspectives and Prospects’ in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom: The Making of British History (London, 1995), pp. 12–13, 27–8. 68 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, pp. 207–9.

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The MacKenziean moment in retrospect (or how one hundred volumes bloomed) Stuart Ward 1

It has become commonplace to hear historians assert that the British past cannot be fully appreciated within its own self-sufficient, sovereign borders; that the nation is a distorting prism, ill-suited to the global dimensions of the world we inhabit today. An earlier generation of scholarship is routinely taken to task for erecting artificial distinctions between national history and the world beyond Britain’s shores. This has had major implications for the study of imperial history, where older habits of treating nation and empire as separate spheres of enquiry are now widely regarded as obsolete. Since the mid-1980s, a consensus has grown around a theme that has come to be known as ‘empire and metropolitan culture’ – namely, that Britain’s global projection as a maritime, migratory and mercantile power is fundamental to understanding major historical trends and tendencies at home over the past three centuries. Initially, this took the form of a debate about the ‘fatal impact’ of empire on British culture and society, with opinion divided between so-called ‘minimalists’ and ‘­maximalists’.2 Over time, however, the notion of ‘impact’ (with its connotation of distinct entities in collision) has given way to a new emphasis on the ‘sheer porousness’ of the divide.3 Thus, a new cluster of metaphors are widely circulated and recycled in contemporary scholarship, each conveying a sense of metropolitan British society ‘imbricated’, ‘infused’, ‘embedded’, ‘steeped’, ‘interwoven’ and ‘entwined’ in empire – each seeking to capture the imperative of placing the national and imperial past in ‘the same analytical frame’.4 Such is the scale of the emerging consensus that Bernard Porter’s spirited 2004 rebuttal, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, could credibly pose as a lone voice of iconoclasm.5 To be sure, Porter had reason to sense the danger of professional bandwagonry. Like any orthodoxy, there has at times been a tendency to assume readily that Britain was awash with empire from the very first plantations in sixteenth-century [ 29 ]

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Ireland. Yet Porter’s blanket scepticism seems to have attracted few followers. While Ronald Hyam could conclude that the Porter thesis had ‘enabled those who believe the impact was minimal to win the argument’, the overwhelming weight of historiographical evidence points the other way.6 The past decade has witnessed prominent titles ranging from How the British Saw Their Empire (Cannadine 2001); The Empire Strikes Back? (Thompson, 2005); At Home with the Empire (Hall and Rose, 2006); and Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Thompson, 2012) – each addressing the reach and resonance of popular imperialism in metropolitan Britain, and each affirming the basic proposition that empire made substantial inroads into everyday life. The perspective of these works has filtered into mainstream publishing with Jeremy Paxman’s recent offering (and BBC documentary series) What Ruling the World Did to the British (2011).7 None of these titles would have been obvious career moves as recently as three decades ago. As Andrew Thompson suggests, the shift of empire from periphery to centre stage is now so pronounced that we need ‘reminding’ of how differently things looked in the 1960s and 1970s.8 That era had witnessed the consolidation of a very different interpretation, centered on an ingrained ignorance of the British towards their empire. Max Beloff emphasised the elitist nature of the imperial enterprise as the key to understanding why the British had never been ‘imperially-minded’.9 Richard Price’s detailed 1972 study of working-class attitudes to the Boer War revealed the ‘essential irrelevance of imperialism’ among the lower orders. His verdict left scarce room for argument; the empire ‘had little or no meaning to workingclass life and society’.10 More popular accounts – to the extent that they considered the matter at all – tended to echo the idea of a broad public indifference to the empire.11 With imperial history itself in steep decline in the 1970s – ‘one of the deadest of dead fields within history’ in Frederick Cooper’s memorable turn of phrase – the idea that empire might play a key interpretative role in the study of Britain’s metropolitan past seemed at best remote; at worst wholly far-fetched.12 It was against these prevailing winds that John M. MacKenzie’s Studies in Imperialism series was launched in the mid-1980s, with the publication of MacKenzie’s own Propaganda and Empire.13 Now in its 100th volume, the Series has had a deep and lasting impact in the field – far more so than is normally the case with serial publishing ventures of this kind. MacKenzie himself can be justifiably credited as the chief architect of ‘empire and metropolitan culture’ as a sub-specialisation within British and imperial history.14 This, however, is not to suggest that he and his authors set out in a scholarly vacuum. The Series [ 30 ]

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masthead – in its conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’ – was both a response to, and an elaboration upon, a range of social, political and intellectual cross-currents. At a time when the neo-jingoism of the Falklands War was a recent memory and the pervasive ‘Raj revival’ in British popular culture seemed ubiquitous, there was indeed much to be said for pursuing the idea of a deeprooted British popular preoccupation with the culture of empire. Yet MacKenzie and his authors were also responding to underlying trends within the discipline of history itself and related developments in the neighbouring field of literary studies. By the early 1980s, the established practice of ‘imperial history’ was likened to HumptyDumpty in D. K. Fieldhouse’s 1984 diagnosis, and sorely in need of reinvigoration.15 The History Workshop movement was increasingly turning its attention to the question of British identity – Britain itself a relative latecomer to this (still) burgeoning field of enquiry. And Edward Said’s pioneering work on the literary representations of the Orient in the late 1970s had spawned what would become a steady stream of work grouped loosely under the category of ‘post-colonial studies’.16 Each of these developments was in some way responding to the intellectual climate of late decolonisation. ‘It was the end of empire’, Robert Skidelsky has recently noted, ‘that raised the British problem’, but it also opened up a range of rival perspectives on the meaning of the imperial past in contemporary Britain.17 Looking back at these formative years, we now have the requisite critical distance to examine the contexts and currents that informed the origins of the MacKenzie Series. One hundred volumes later, it is also worth considering how MacKenzie’s optics have fared with the passage of time. The following therefore represents an attempt to locate the major influences that gave rise to the Studies in Imperialism series, as a means of understanding its extraordinary longevity over more than a quarter of a century. * * * The idea that the possession of colonies might have ‘as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’ is by no means a recent innovation. From the time of James I’s ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco’ (1604), contemporaries have readily drawn attention to the often profound material and cultural influences of empire on the metropolis. It became a familiar theme of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury political philosophy, with the likes of Smith, Burke, Bentham and a host of others inveighing against the debilitating effects at home of despotic ruling practices abroad.18 An understanding of the two-way [ 31 ]

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traffic of imperial culture was not confined to critics of empire. J. R. Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883) stressed the need to integrate metropolitan and imperial perspectives as part of a single, broad canvas, while J. R. Green’s bestselling Short History of the English People (1874) concluded with the incantation: ‘England is only a small part of the outcome of English history’.19 Down to the end of the First World War, the empire could appear in school textbooks as ‘a kind of ultimate fulfilment of the country’s historic mission, and earlier phases of national history were reinterpreted in the light of it’.20 J. A. Hobson famously argued that imperialism had ‘exercised the most notable and formidable influence’ on ‘the nations which indulge in it ... fraught with grave perils to the cause of civilisation’. He presented this dynamic as ‘a natural overflow of nationalism’, alive as he was to the myriad permeations between colonial and metropolitan contexts.21 As late as the 1940s, Sir Ernest Barker could deploy a similar rhetoric for very different ideological purposes: ‘It is a natural or at any rate an expectable thing’, he argued, to regard Britain’s settler colonies as an extension of British liberties.22 We might well wonder, then, how the ‘minimal impact’ thesis became so entrenched as to warrant the new departures of the 1980s. In a variety of respects, the onset of global decolonisation from the late 1940s through to the end of the 1960s nurtured the idea that metropolitan societies were hermetically sealed from their dissolving empires. One source of this idea came from disgruntled elements in Britain’s settler colonies and dominions. Australia’s Lord Casey lamented in 1963 that the empire had never ‘aroused any broad-based emotional enthusiasm among the people of Britain, high or low’23 – a verdict clearly tinged with the recent rancour over Harold Macmillan’s ‘sellout’ of Commonwealth interests as the price of EEC membership.24 Ten years later, J. G. A. Pocock reached a similar verdict (and for similar reasons) from his vantage point in New Zealand: ‘The English have been increasingly willing to declare that neither empire nor Commonwealth ever meant much in their consciousness, and that they were at heart Europeans all the time.’25 These sentiments were frequently reiterated by settler communities in Africa who looked aghast at the disengagement of successive governments from their ‘obligations’ to Britons abroad. The leader of the ‘New Kenya Group’, Michael Blundell, recorded his dismay at the loss of character and resolve in Britain in his 1964 memoirs, noting with particular umbrage the attitude of one young Conservative who had bluntly told him: ‘What do I care about the f…ing settlers, let them bloody-well look after themselves.’26 The notion that the ‘majority of people ... cared very little’27 was to become a recurring motif of contemporary commentary on the pace of decolo[ 32 ]

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nisation, which in turn influenced perceptions of the empire’s significance to earlier generations. The disaggregation of the imperial from the domestic was also clearly in evidence among those who avowedly did care about the consequences for Britain of global decolonisation. Enoch Powell, who had so keenly felt the ‘spiritual amputation’ of Indian independence in 1947, had by the 1960s radically rearranged his thoughts.28 In a series of articles and speeches he turned his ire towards the ‘persisting illusion that there is a world elsewhere’, likening the imperial past to a debilitating injury that had diverted the people’s energies and aspirations to self-defeating ends. He announced in 1964 that the time had come when ‘the wounds have almost healed ... and the bandages can come off’.29 For Powell, the end of empire brought a new revelation of an England that lay preserved intact beneath centuries of selfdelusion.30 But as Bill Schwarz perceptively notes, ‘at the same time he continued to imagine postcolonial England (if that is what it was) from the vantage of a man for whom the precepts of colonial order remained the natural order of things’.31 This species of doublethink could only be sustained by walling the empire off from a renewed conception of Englishness rooted in the pre-British past.32 It was not merely Conservatives who took this route. As Raphael Samuel observed, ‘for the “Progressives” of the 1960s, Empire, the British national identity itself, was something to escape from’.33 This was evident, not only in initiatives such as the Schools History Projects (established in 1972 to address the place of history in schools and propose curriculum reform) but also in the wider perspectives and practices of the discipline itself. When A. J. P. Taylor published the final volume of the Oxford History of England in 1965, he confessed openly that his subject had changed markedly since the first volumes of the 1930s. At that time, he wrote, ‘“England” was still an all-embracing word. It meant indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire.’34 While Taylor is best known for his infamous excision of Scotland from his remit (or ‘the Scotch’, his preferred ‘English’ term), he was equally determined to keep the empire at arms’ length. ‘I’ve never been an imperialist’, he once reflected. ‘All the grandeur and splendour of empire is totally not for me.’35 Much like Powell, but for antithetical reasons, Taylor had a major stake in the task of erecting interpretative barriers between empire and a substantially downsized metropole. These are just some of the undercurrents that subtly sealed off the connections between British (or more commonly ‘English’) history and its wider colonial resonances in the decades after 1945. It was by no means unique to Britain. A new national self-sufficiency had begun to [ 33 ]

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influence the study of any number of post-colonial societies around the globe, with new journals, new histories, framed in terms of a new, often liberating national imperative. Similar processes were clearly at work in other European historiographies, most notably in France where the new semiotics of l’hexagone were projected on to a reframed national historical subject, safely cut adrift from North Africa and Indochina.36 In Britain, even those issues with obvious resonances in the wider colonial world, like the ongoing sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, were depicted as local derbies. * * * How, then, are we to understand the emergence of the empire and metropolitan culture paradigm in the 1980s, and the MacKenzie Series in particular? There is little in MacKenzie’s prior career to suggest this new departure, apart from a cosmopolitan upbringing in Africa and Canada that may well have attuned him to the possibilities. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) would seem, on the face of it, to have been a major influence. MacKenzie has acknowledged that he originally found Said’s early foray into the metropolitan imprint of empire ‘provocative and stimulating’, and that he had felt ‘its range could be widened to include the popular arts’.37 Yet a close reading of the first two volumes in his Series reveals little, if any, trace of Said’s influence. Neither Propaganda and Empire nor Imperialism and Popular Culture referred explicitly to Said himself or his ideas about Western depictions of the Orient. Indeed, Said’s book did not even merit a bibliographical listing. It seems more likely that MacKenzie was ploughing a different furrow – related to, no doubt in awareness of, but by no means in direct descent from the Saidian canon. This makes all the more sense in the light of MacKenzie’s wholesale refutation of Said in the mid-1990s.38 Despite common cultural inclinations and a shared field of vision, MacKenzie’s project represented an empiricist’s alternative to Said’s theory-driven polemics – a distinction that would become more pronounced as Said’s work was deployed and developed by literary scholars. That MacKenzie’s approach represented one of several ways of reassessing the domestic culture of empire suggests, in itself, a deeper set of social and political contexts that informed the genesis of his Series – some general, others anchored more directly in the political culture of the Thatcher era. At the most general level, the decade saw the beginnings of a major critical assault on the nation as a discursive construct, which in turn served to prize open the conceptual barriers between empire and the domestic realm. The year 1983 saw the publication of three key titles: Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism; [ 34 ]

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Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities; and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s edited collection, The Invention of Tradition, each of which contributed to an emerging ‘modernist’ consensus about the novelty and contingency of the nation as a natural and inevitable way of categorising peoples and their pasts.39 These works were doubtless informed by deeper processes at work – technological, demographic, commercial – that paid little heed to ‘nationalism-as-seen-by-itself’ as the primary building blocks of an inherently bordered world.40 What Theodore Levitt dubbed ‘globalisation’ (also in 1983) was a neoliberal variant of the modernists’ contempt for the blinkered optics of nationalism.41 Levitt’s conviction that ‘cosmopolitanism is no longer the monopoly of the intellectual and leisure classes ... Gradually and irresistibly it is breaking down the walls of economic insularity, nationalism and chauvinism’, was to have an equally profound impact on historical scholarship in the years ahead.42 Breaking down the walls would pave the way to a renewed interest in the imperial past. More specifically to Britain, the 1970s saw the first of many gloomy forecasts about the long-term viability of the British nation-state. As early as 1969, H. J. Hanham observed: ‘Now that the Empire is dead many Scots feel cramped and restricted at home.’43 These early premonitions of national disintegration were often couched in terms of an imperial requiem. J. G. A. Pocock was one of the first to raise the possibility that ‘future historians may find themselves writing of a “Unionist” or even a “British” period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic Archipelago, and locating it between a date in the thirteenth, the seventeenth or the nineteenth centuries and a date in the twentieth or the twenty-first’.44 This view became all the more prominent with the publication of Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain in 1977, which again posited a causal link between the end of empire and the fracturing of the Union.45 By the end of the decade, Welsh Historian Gwyn Williams could declare that ‘Britain has begun its long march out of history ... into a post-imperial fog’ – his choice of metaphor clearly evoking the slow creep of imperial decline closing in on the post-imperial state.46 These perspectives came together at a time when nationality was becoming ‘a storm centre of British politics’, between the political ructions of early EEC membership, the civic disturbances in Northern Ireland and devolutionary pressures in Scotland and Wales.47 They would later give rise to what became known as ‘four nations history’ (subsequently redubbed the ‘new’ British history), pioneered by the likes of Hugh Kearney, Keith Robbins, R. R. Davies and Conrad Russell, at the very time that Studies in Imperialism was making early headway. Although concerned with crafting new ways of configuring the several histories of the ‘North Atlantic [ 35 ]

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archipelago’ – ‘breaking down the barriers between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales’48 – four nations history was in many respects an internal response to the same reconfigurations that brought the empire into the domestic sphere. David Cannadine rightly notes that there can be ‘no coincidence’ that English history was radically reformulated to take account of the ‘British question’ in the 1980s.49 Yet it is equally the case that the turn to empire and metropolitan culture emerged – at least partly – out of this same complex. Significantly, some of the more recent offerings in the MacKenzie Series have sought to project the four nations optic back on to the empire itself, in a cluster of titles emphasising how ‘the relationships of various British ethnicities to a wider imperial world were, in truth, very important in the maintenance and development of [those] identities’.50 The empire, like Britain itself, can no longer be regarded as a homogenising overlay, subordinating Celtic affiliations and aspirations. Of all the contextual factors that influenced the renewed scholarly interest in popular imperialism, the most immediate must surely be the Falklands War of 1982. Mrs Thatcher’s atavistic resort to imperial language and symbolism – and the popular response – was one of the more extraordinary socio-political phenomena of the decade. Her determination put the ‘great’ back into Britain appealed to a defiant sense of national regeneration, following decades of imperial decline, military retreat, industrial strife and economic stagnation. Her claim that ‘the spirit of the South Atlantic’ represented the ‘real spirit of Britain’ was a throwback to the Dilkean idea of ‘Greater Britain’ – an idea of the people that rested on its global projections. The overwhelming press and popular endorsement of her words and deeds suggested that this line of thought retained considerable political and sentimental purchase in the early 1980s. Not everyone, of course, would agree with this assessment of Thatcher’s conduct of the war.51 But for the purposes of identifying its intellectual consequences, we need only to recall that the war was widely perceived at the time as a species of imperial atavism, eliciting a deep and lasting popular resonance. Particularly for the minority who opposed the war, the whole episode raised a series of uncomfortable questions about the imperial moorings of contemporary Britishness. Stephen Howe describes this as ‘the transforming moment’ on a ‘battlefront of multi-fronted contestation’, which ‘prompted a host of historians to start thinking about the past, present and possible futures of patriotism and national identity in Britain’.52 It prompted Eric Hobsbawm’s conviction that ‘patriotism cannot be neglected … It is dangerous to leave patriotism exclusively to the right.’53 The war is also commonly associated with Tony Benn’s oft-quoted notion of [ 36 ]

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‘Britain as the last colony of the Empire’.54 The connections between the Falklands, the legacies of empire and the meaning of ‘being British’ were even more explicit in the case of Raphael Samuel’s 1983 History Workshop (eventually published as a three volume anthology, Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity). ‘These volumes’, the editor attested in his opening lines, ‘were born out of anger at the Falklands War, and consternation at the apparent failure of the anti-War half of the nation … to assert itself.’55 The conflict was a recurring reference point through the first volume, in essays ranging from Christopher Hill’s meditation on patriotism (decrying the ‘expensive toy of Fortress Falklands’) to Anthony Barnett’s appeal to get ‘beyond nationalism’ (condemning Thatcher’s ‘implacable conduct of the war’).56 Linda Colley’s piece on eighteenth-century radicalism took its point of departure in the preoccupation of the liberal and socialist press with ‘Falklands fever’.57 That Colley would publish a decade later the seminal text on British national identity suggests that the Falklands War has a lot to answer for.58 Stephen Howe’s own contribution to the History Workshop linked the pervasive disorientation of the left in the wake of the Falklands to a deeper struggle to come to terms with the imperial past – an empire ‘profoundly constitutive of Englishness … not another country, like the past or India, but … part of ourselves’.59 All of these trace elements can be found in MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire. From the outset he referred to the Falklands War as having ‘aroused many echoes of the earlier period of popular imperialism’.60 In declaring that ‘this book seeks to expose the extraordinary durability of the late nineteenth century ideological conjunction’ of empire, he clearly had the neo-jingoism of the Falklands in mind.61 Newspaper circulation and content during the Falklands crisis were likened to the experience of the South African war;62 the ‘publishing event’ of 1982 was compared with earlier publishing phenomena centered on imperial war heroes;63 and the ‘patriotic fervor and orchestrated spectacle’ of the post-Falklands homecoming was understood in terms of ‘the old nineteenth-century magic still at work’.64 Indeed, the book’s concluding sentence pointed directly to the war’s pervasive influence: ‘The values and beliefs of the imperial world view settled like a sediment in the consciousness of the British people, to be stirred again by a brief, renewed challenge in the late twentieth century.’65 In turning to the domestic resonances of imperial culture, MacKenzie went in search of the taproot of a social and cultural phenomenon that suddenly seemed much closer to home. As MacKenzie himself reflected in 1995: [ 37 ]

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This was an extraordinary conjunction, for it seemed like a nineteenthcentury colonial war up-dated to the late twentieth. It involved the re-capture of a distant and apparently insignificant piece of territory deeply embedded in imperial history. It became a matter of national honour, an objective behind which all the instruments of the state and of popular culture could be swung, a source of self-regard and a means of reviving the fortunes of an ailing government. Such mild criticism as emerged, from whatever source, was slapped down as little short of contumacious treason. Thatcher became a new Boadicea, wrapping herself in the Union flag and riding her chariot against the aggressive and ideologically unacceptable ‘Argies’. It seemed like an object lesson, the recreation in a modern laboratory of just the conditions of imperial warfare in the nineteenth century.66

Margaret Thatcher’s refrain that ‘the people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race’,67 points to another important context that forged conceptual links between empire and metropolitan culture – a renewed wave of race anxiety in the early 1980s. Peregrine Worsthorne pithily noted that ‘if the Falkland Islanders were British citizens with black or brown skins … it is doubtful whether [we] would today be fighting for their liberation’.68 The popular identification with a tiny community of simple, white Anglophone island folk confronted by a dangerously proximate continental tyranny drew upon all kinds of resonances from the Second World War.69 But it was also tied to long-standing anxieties about immigration from former colonial territories which were given a new edge in the wake of the Brixton riots of April 1981. Some have linked these events to the 1981 British Nationality Act, interpreting Brixton as a demand ‘to reclaim those citizenship privileges of the ius soli filched’ by the Act.70 However plausible the connection, both episodes certainly focused attention on the post-imperial dimensions of contemporary British racism. In 1982, a group of young activists produced a major study of race in Britain entitled The Empire Strikes Back, which asserted that ideas about racial difference ‘owe[d] a great deal to attitudes engendered throughout Britain’s imperial past and to the way nationalist movements are portrayed in the period of decolonisation’.71 The end of empire was seen as central to pervasive racist anxieties, with the very notion of an ‘orderly transition’ to ‘responsible government’ cloaking latent assumptions about innate racial savagery.72 The book drew upon Stuart Hall’s ideas about the end of empire as central to the fraught discursive field of Britishness: ‘The very definition of “what it is to be British” – the centerpiece of that culture now to be preserved from racial dilution – has been articulated around this absent/present centre.’73 Here, again, we see some of the [ 38 ]

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defining motifs of ‘empire and metropolitan culture’ emerging into view. Salman Rushdie tackled these issues in the context of the contemporary barrage of popular projections of the British Raj across British cinema and television screens, ranging from television mini-series such as The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, to David Lean’s Passage to India and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. Aside from his scathing criticism of the artistic merits of these works, Rushdie had this to say: there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is underway. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb. Britain is in danger of entering a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and posture like a great power while in fact its power diminishes every year.74

Here, only months prior to the launch of Studies in Imperialism, is a further clue, not only to the sharpening awareness of empire’s enduring presence in the metropole, but also the unique qualities of popular culture as a crucial medium. If works of entertainment, as Rushdie insisted, ‘do not come into being in a social and political vacuum’, the same must surely be true for works of scholarship. This is not to tar MacKenzie with the same brush of Tory nostalgia that Rushdie wielded against ‘the Mahattenborough’. But it does suggest that MacKenzie’s editorial emphasis – particularly in the early volumes of the Series, overwhelmingly preoccupied with popular imperialism – emerged partly out of the need to make sense of very contemporary popular phenomena. Rushdie’s reference to ‘phantom twitchings’ – of a ‘recrudescence’ of popular imperialism long after the material and political props that sustained the imperial imagination had fallen away – points to Bill Schwarz’s notion of ‘the simultaneous existence of competing historical times’.75 Stephen Howe reformulates this as ‘belated, time-lagged political decolonisation’ in order to explain why the Thatcher era seems a more obvious place to locate the metropolitan repercussions of the end of empire than the 1950s or 1960s.76 There remains much room for argument about this idea (Howe himself is in two minds). But one area where the delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities can be clearly measured is the idea of ‘identity’ itself. Britain was a curiously late entrant in the ‘quest for identity’ subgenre of historical writing. [ 39 ]

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Raphael Samuel’s Patriotism collection of 1989 was the very first to adopt ‘British national identity’ in its title.77 This was almost thirty years after the now-ubiquitous ‘national identity’ tag made its first appearance on the cover of a scholarly work in W. L. Morton’s 1961 classic, The Canadian Identity.78 Why the delay? The term itself was originally borrowed from psychology, through the influence of Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950). By the mid-1960s, Erikson’s notion of ‘identity crisis’ had come into vogue as a catch-all diagnosis for any number of issues relating not only to individual, but also increasingly group belonging.79 What distinguished the new collective label of ‘national identity’ from much older notions of ‘national character’ or ‘nationalism’ was its connotation of unease, disorientation and uncertainty. Morton himself freely applied the concept in this way, referring to himself as someone ‘groping for some effective expression of Canadian identity’ and urging his fellow citizens to ‘achieve a self-definition of greater clarity and more ringing tone’ than ever before.80 By 1964 it was common currency in Australia, where again it was framed in terms of the need ‘to develop some new sense of identity, some public feeling of being a people who can be described, even if incorrectly – as a such and such kind of nation’.81 Indeed, what is truly striking (yet rarely noticed) is the way the term – having initially been developed by American sociologists and psychologists in the 1950s – found fertile ground in post-colonial contexts, its earliest usage appearing predominantly in settler-colonial, Caribbean and African-American settings in the 1960s.82 Its first appearance in Indian library catalogues was in 1972, with the (in hindsight) predictable title, India’s Search for National Identity.83 Identity referred to a state of mind that ‘somehow fell short of the requirements of nationalism’ – a new vocabulary for a post-imperial world.84 There is every reason to suppose that the global convulsions of decolonisation, the sudden forging of post-colonial states, displacements of peoples and dislocations from the metropole, formed one of the crucial contexts that lent new meaning to a term that hitherto had only very limited application.85 That being so, the marked delay in the semantic transfer to things ‘British’ suggests a great deal, not only about ‘competing historical times’ of decolonisation, but also the deeper intellectual context that gave birth to Studies in Imperialism. The 1980s also witnessed the first appearance of ‘identity’ books about Ulster (1987), Scotland (1985), and earlier again in Wales (1983).86 In other words, this was the decade when the semantics of identity completed the slow journey from colonial incubus to metropolitan terminus. To be sure, by that stage identity had lost any conscious association with the post-colonial world, and [ 40 ]

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it is only with the benefit of searchable electronic databases that the pathway can be reconstructed. Yet something of its early connotations undoubtedly remained. Raphael Samuel’s formulation – ‘the Making and Unmaking of British identity’ (my italics) – conveyed precisely the sense of community-in-disarray that had informed W. L. Morton’s enterprise some three decades before him. Within a few short years the British, too, could be treated to their own quest narrative in Clive Aslet’s Anyone for England? A Search for British Identity (replete with obligatory rhetorical question mark).87 All this is testament to the enduring theme that Studies in Imperialism pioneered in the mid-1980s – the innumerable ways in which ‘the periphery determined the metropolis’.88 Amid the reams of scholarship and commentary that sought to fathom the ubiquitous ‘British problem’ in these years, MacKenzie and his authors – perhaps unbeknown to themselves – were tackling these issues at their source. * * * It is now twenty-seven years and one hundred volumes since the Series began, and Thatcher’s memory is now barely within reach of the coming generation of aspiring authors. Given the profound changes in the social and intellectual context in which the Series was first conceived, it is worth considering how its original remit has fared. The masthead has been slightly modified, but reiterates that the ‘prime concern’ of the Series lies in demonstrating that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. Of necessity, the Series has ranged far more widely than the dynamics of ‘empire and metropolitan culture’ over the years, with many offerings having very little to say at all about the culture of imperial Britain. But the original optics have remained its enduring statement, from the early forays into empire and education, theatre, migration, juvenile fiction, sexuality and the military,89 to more recent studies of advertising, the press, citizenship, West Indian intellectuals, ‘naval manhood’, Liverpool, and the culture of imperial decline, all of which take their point of departure in the metropole.90 As the Series has evolved, so too have the conceptual tools for understanding the nature of the empire’s interconnectedness. Mrinalini Sinha’s idea of an ‘imperial social formation’ in the 1990s, like Zoë Laidlaw’s work on imperial ‘networks’ a decade later, helped to refine and nuance the simple binaries inherent in the older notion of an imperial ‘impact’ factor.91 The nature, function and scope of imperial influences have also been progressively revised over the course of one hundred volumes. During the first five years of the Series, emphasis was placed on the [ 41 ]

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idea of ‘social control’ – of imperial culture as a means of subduing restless elements within the community and channelling popular energies into patriotic endeavour. MacKenzie himself had drawn heavily on Abercrombie, Hill and Turner’s ‘dominant ideology’ thesis in arguing that ‘the British had created a popular cultural dimension to match their remodelling of the world through economic and political control’.92 Propaganda and Empire thus contained frequent references to the ‘core ideology’, the ‘levers of propaganda’ and ‘instruments of conformity’, all of which implied a conscious devotion ‘to the task of influencing public opinion’.93 The very subtitle, ‘The manipulation of British public opinion’ made no bones about the presence of a conscious instrumentality. Imperialism and Popular Culture also pursued the ‘dominant ideology’ theme, particularly the chapters by J. A. Mangan (education), J. S. Bratton (theatre), Jeffrey Richards (juvenile fiction), Stephen Constantine (Empire Marketing Board) and Allen Warren (the Scouts movement).94 Robert H. MacDonald’s volume on the Language of Empire was particularly interested in the inner workings of ideology, demonstrating how it could be ‘masked’ in action stories, or work to ‘“interpellate” or subordinate its youngest “subjects”’.95 This emphasis can be partly ascribed to prevailing trends in social history at that time, particularly the influence of Gramscian hegemony theory.96 But it would also seem to reflect a contemporary, critical response to the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of T ­ hatcherism. In more recent years this aspect has been toned down and more attention has been given to the deeper interconnections between imperial and domestic experience, many of which were unselfconscious, understated yet intrinsic to the metropolitan dimensions of empire. This refinement has been partly in response to criticism levelled against empire as the ‘One Big Thing’ (in Richard Price’s cautionary phrase) that dictated the lives of each and every metropolitan citizen; a complaint amplified in Bernard Porter’s sustained broadside against the whole empire and metropolitan culture project.97 While these critiques themselves were often reductive, casting their quarry ‘according to a definition and interpretation of metropolitan “imperialism” that few would lay claim to’, they have arguably brought more sober reflection on the subtleties of popular awareness of empire.98 Thus, Roger Louis’s notion of the ‘unconscious acceptance of the burden of empire’ has been taken up by a range of historians, including Catherine Hall and Sonia O. Rose, who assess popular imperialism ‘not in the sense of political affiliations for or against empire, but simply assuming it was there, part of the given world that had made them who they were’.99 Andrew Thompson’s treatment offers perhaps the best escape route from the methodological cul-de-sac [ 42 ]

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of ‘maximalism’ versus minimalism’. While rejecting the notion that Britain ‘was awash with, or saturated by imperialism’, he nevertheless acknowledges the immeasurable array of influences, some highly visible, others ‘relatively discrete’, that made the empire ‘a significant factor in the lives of the British people’.100 This process of refinement is evident in MacKenzie’s own work over the past three decades. Judging by one of most recent volumes in the Series, he seems to have set aside the role of ‘manipulation’ and ‘dominant ideology’, emphasising instead the ‘colonisation of consciousness’, ‘catalysts to permeation’ and ‘internalised imperialism’ – all far more subtle in their implications.101 The fading memory of fortress Thatcher would seem to have brought new bearings on an old problem. Ultimately it is this capacity for reinvention that explains the extraordinary vitality and durability of the Series. The most recent new departure is the comparative European experience of popular imperialism, with MacKenzie once more at the helm.102 Here lies not only the possibility of assessing the extent of the imperial presence in metropolitan culture in ways that single-empire studies could never tackle, but also the more innovative possibility of viewing imperial culture as inherently transnational, permeating not only the borders between colony and metropole, but also the boundaries between the empire-building centres themselves. It offers a wider frame within which persistent claims about the centrality of ‘whiteness’ as the cultural and ideological capital of empire might be evaluated, as well as the possibility of considering whether the idea of Europe itself is the logical outcome of ‘internalised imperialism’. Although this pan-European potential has been tentatively probed in a variety of quarters for several years, it seems significant that it has only broken the surface in the volatile waters of post-2008 austerity. The spectacle of massive indebtedness, flatline growth rates, falling revenues, ageing populations, mass youth unemployment and the ever-looming threat of sovereign default in the Eurozone, undoubtedly represents a new and highly volatile era in the history of European integration. But in a wider perspective it also appears as the latest installment in a protracted process of waning European predominance and influence world-wide, with its origins deep in the twentieth-century experience of imperial decline. Not for the first time, the MacKenzie Series has displayed a knack for tapping into contemporary trials and dilemmas, and turning these to the task of intellectual self-renewal.

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Notes   1  2

 3

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 4

 5  6

 7  8  9 10 11 12 13

The author thanks Andrew Thompson for his thoughtful editorial comments and constructive critique of an earlier version of this chapter. See, for example, P. J. Marshall, ‘No Fatal Impact? The Elusive History of Imperial Britain’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 March 1993; a good introduction to the ‘maximalist’ versus ‘minimalist’ debate (with a third perspective, dubbed ‘elusivists’) is to be found in Andrew S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005). John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), p. 208. ‘Imbricated’: Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York, 1996), p. 20; ‘steeped’: Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 83, 175, 324, 525; ‘infused’: Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–67 (Cambridge and Chicago, 2002), back blurb; ‘entwined’: Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 6; ‘embedded’: Geoff Eley, ‘Imperial Imaginary, Colonial Effect: Writing the Colony and Metropole Together’ in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds), Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester, 2010), p. 218; ‘interwoven’: Andrew S. Thompson, Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012), p. 28; ‘the same analytical frame’: Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006), p. 20. One interesting measure of the semantic shift is to compare Andrew Thompson’s 2005 The Empire Strikes Back? with his more recent volume for the ‘Oxford History of the British Empire’, Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century. The former study makes use of the imperial ‘impact’ metaphor fifty-four times (including the subtitle of the book), whereas it appears only fifteen times in the more recent study – a fourfold decrease. Thompson’s use of ‘imprint’ and ‘experience’ in the titles of the latter work implies a less clearly discernible interface compared to the more tactile connotations of ‘impact’. Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004). Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 2. Porter did receive some favourable reviews, such as those of Ian Phimister in the English Historical Review and John Darwin in the Times Literary Supplement. But the book has not, thus far, radically shifted the interpretative emphasis in the field more generally. My own reflections on Porter’s contribution are to be found in ‘Echoes of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006), 264–78. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London, 2001); Jeremy Paxman, Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (London, 2011). Thompson, Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, p. 2. Max Beloff, Imperial Sunset, Vol. 1: Britain’s Liberal Empire, 1897–1921 (London, 1969), p. 19; Beloff, Imperial Sunset. Vol. 2: Dream of Commonwealth, 1921–42 (Basingstoke, 1989), p. 377. Richard Price, An Imperial War and the English Working Class (London, 1972), p. 241. See, for example, James Morris, ‘The Popularisation of Imperial History’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1 (1973), 113–18. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), p. 13. J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984). The book initially appeared as a standalone volume and was only retrospectively reissued as the first volume in the series. But it is widely and rightly regarded as the foundation stone of a major

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the mackenziean moment in retrospect intellectual and publishing enterprise. 14 The term ‘metropolitan culture’ was first used by MacKenzie in his edited collection Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986), p. 168. 15 D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12: 2 (1984), 9–23. 16 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). 17 Robert Skidelsky, ‘Britain in the Twentieth Century’ in Jonathan Clark (ed.), A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles (London, 2010), p. 665. 18 See generally Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005). 19 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883); J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London, 1874), pp. 81–2. 20 Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Vol. 2 (London, 1998), p. 81. 21 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Cambridge, 1902), pp. 11–12, 5. 22 Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire (1942) quoted in Christopher Saunders, ‘The Expansion of British Liberties: The South African Case’ in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 269. 23 R. G. Casey, The Future of the Commonwealth (London, 1963), p. 85. 24 I.e. the failed EEC membership bid of 1961–63. See Stuart Ward, Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal (Melbourne, 2001). 25 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, New Zealand Journal of History, 8: 1 (1974), 4. 26 Michael Blundell, So Rough a Wind: The Kenya Memoirs of Sir Michael Blundell (London, 1964), p. 266. 27 Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1995, 3rd edn (Harlow, 1996), p. 347. 28 Humphry Berkeley, The Odyssey of Enoch (London, 1977), p. 52. 29 The Times, ‘Patriotism Based on Reality not on Dreams’, 2 April 1964. The article appeared anonymously, but Powell is widely acknowledged as the author. 30 Stuart Ward, ‘The End of Empire and the Fate of Britishness’ in Robert Phillips and Helen Brocklehurst (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (London, 2004), pp. 242–58. 31 Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire. Volume 1: The White Man’s World (Oxford, 2011), p. 6. 32 See also Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–65 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 178–81. 33 Samuel, Island Stories, p. 83. 34 A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945: The Oxford History of England, Vol. XV (Oxford, 1965), p. v. 35 Quoted in Richard Gott, ‘Little Englanders’ in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London, 1989), p. 91. 36 Robert Aldrich and Stuart Ward, ‘Ends of Empire: Decolonizing the Nation in British and French Historiography’ in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Europe (London, 2010), pp. 259–81. 37 MacKenzie, Orientalism, p. xviii. 38 Ibid. 39 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). 40 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 48. 41 Theodore Levitt, ‘The Globalization of Markets’, Harvard Business Review, May– June (1983), 92–102. Contrary to received wisdom, Levitt was not the first to coin the term ‘globalisation’ (it made its first appearance in Webster’s dictionary in the early 1950s) but he is widely – and correctly – credited with having popularised it. 42 Ibid. p. 101.

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writing imperial histories 43 Quoted in T. M. Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), 164. 44 Pocock, ‘British History’, 5. 45 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977). 46 Gwyn A. Williams, The Welsh in their History (London, 1982), p. 190. 47 Raphael Samuel, ‘British Dimensions: Four Nations History’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 1. 48 R. R. Davies, The British Isles, 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 23. 49 David Cannadine, Making History Now and Then: Discoveries, Controversies and Explorations (London, 2008), p. 190. 50 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds: The Historiography of a Four Nations Approach to the History of the British Empire’ in Hall and McClelland, Race, Nation and Empire, p. 134; see also series volumes by MacKenzie (with Nigel Dalziel), The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007); Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005); Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in NorthEast India (Manchester, 2012). 51 Andrew Thompson presents possible alternative readings of Thatcher’s neo-jingoism as belated, superficial and avowedly anachronistic. The Empire Strikes Back?, pp. 225–6. Richard Whitting makes the valid argument that the key to understanding Thatcher’s ‘post-imperial conservatism’ in the Falklands context lies in the emphasis on the self-determination of the Islanders, not the ‘atonement for past weaknesses’. He stretches credibility, however, in asserting that Thatcher’s sense of national purpose ‘had been shorn of imperial significance’. Richard Whitting, ‘The Empire in British Politics’ in Thompson, Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, pp. 206, 208. 52 Stephen Howe, ‘Internal Decolonization? British Politics since Thatcher as PostColonial Trauma’, Twentieth Century British History, 14: 3 (2003), 293. 53 Quoted in Anthony Barnett, ‘After Nationalism’ in Samuel, Patriotism, p. 147. 54 Quoted in Stephen Howe, ‘Labour Patriotism, 1939–83’ in Samuel, Patriotism, p. 136. In fact, Benn first seems to have put this notion about at the Labour Party conference of 1972, a decade before the Falklands crisis. But it was reiterated in his Arguments for Democracy (London, 1981) in a chapter entitled ‘Britain as Colony’. 55 Samuel, ‘Introduction: Exciting to be English’ in Samuel, Patriotism, p. x. 56 Christopher Hill, ‘History and Patriotism’ in Samuel, Patriotism, p. 5; Barnett, ‘After Nationalism’, 149. 57 Linda Colley, ‘Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Samuel, Patriotism, 169. 58 Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992). 59 Howe, ‘Labour Patriotism’, 128. Here, Howe was conveying a vision of England inherent in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: A Division of Spoils. The Jewel in the Crown. The Day of the Scorpion. The Towers of Silence (London, 1973–77). 60 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 11. 61 Ibid. p. 12. 62 Ibid. p. 70. 63 Ibid. p. 214. 64 Ibid. p. 258. 65 Ibid. 66 John M. MacKenzie, ‘The “Studies in Imperialism” Series’ in International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, 5 (1995), www.iias.nl/iiasn/iiasn5/mup.html (accessed 24 February 2012). 67 Quoted in Klaus Dodds, Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (London, 2002), p. 166. 68 Quoted in Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987), p.  51. 69 Dodds discusses some extraordinary examples in Pink Ice, p. 167.

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the mackenziean moment in retrospect 70 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, 1999), p. 213. ‘Ius Soli’ refers to the entitlement of any person born in Britain to British citizenship. The Act modified this principle, so that it became necessary for at least one parent to be a citizen or permanent resident of the United Kingdom. Although the Act did not receive Royal assent until October 1981, its terms were originally tabled some months prior to the riots in late 1980. 71 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (London, 1982), p. 68. 72 Ibid. p. 66. 73 Hall, quoted in ibid. p. 80. 74 Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta, 1 (1984), 125–38. 75 Bill Schwarz, ‘Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-Colonial Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 14: 3 (2003), 266. 76 Howe, ‘Internal Decolonization?’, 292. 77 The shorter form ‘British identity’ would not appear until the 1990s, according to a key-word trawl through the British Library catalogue. Samuel’s introductory essay includes a fascinating reflection on the late substitution of ‘English’ for ‘British’ national identity in the title. Of course, the semantics of book titles are only a rough barometer of the currency of a concept, and the term ‘British identity’ had been in wide public circulation for at least two decades before it was adopted by Samuel. But it is nevertheless instructive to compare the time lag in its elevation to prominence for scholarly purposes. 78 W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity (Madison, 1961). Other titles in the fields of sociology and psychology made use of the term slightly earlier in the late 1950s such as Allen Wheelis, Quest for Identity (New York, 1958) and Anselm Strauss, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (Glencoe Ill, 1959). But Morton’s book was the first to harness it exclusively to a collective national subject. 79 Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defined ‘identity’ simply as ‘not diversity’. For centuries, the term mainly connoted the sharing of common attributes. Until Erikson, it had virtually no application to group identities whatsoever. 80 Morton, The Canadian Identity, pp. vii–ix, x. 81 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (Ringwood, 1964), pp. 24, 111. 82 See James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire (Melbourne, 2010), pp. 16–21. 83 Ainslee T. Embree, India’s Search for National Identity (New York, 1972). 84 Curran and Ward, The Unknown Nation, p. 18. 85 This post-colonial context includes the United States, where the earliest appearance of the term (in Erikson’s wake) referred to the dislocations of mass migration from the old world, as in Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston, 1951). For an introduction to the semantic evolution of the term (but which overlooks its post-colonial connotations) see Philip Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History, 69: 4 (1983), pp. 910–31. See also the absorbing essay on ‘Identity’ in Frederick Cooper’s Colonialism in Question. 86 Brett Ingram, Covenant and Challenge: Reflections on Ulster’s Identity (Lurgan, 1987); R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1985); Emyr Humphreys, The Taliesin Tradition: A Quest for the Welsh Identity (London, 1983). The first title to address Irish identity appeared in 1979: G. J. Watson’s Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey (London, 1979). England would have to wait for Robert Colls’ Identity of England (Oxford, 2002). 87 Clive Aslet, Anyone for England? A Search for British Identity (London, 1997). 88 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), p. 6. 89 J. A. Mangan, Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1990); J. S. Bratton et al., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and

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90

91

92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester, 1991); Stephen Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester, 1990); Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester, 1989); Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990); John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950 (Manchester, 1992). Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester, 2003); Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922 (Manchester, 2003); Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizen­­­ ship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester, 2006); Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003); Mary A. Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester, 2009); S. Haggerty, A. Webster and N. J. White (eds), The Empire in One City? Liverpool’s Inconvenient Imperial Past (Manchester, 2008); Stuart Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001). Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995); Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005). MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 254; N. Abercrombie, S. Hill and B. A. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London, 1980). MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, respectively pp. 253, 257, 30, 148. Bratton used the term ‘dominant culture’ (p. 73) whereas Mangan referred to ‘dominant convictions’ (p. 118). See also their respective volumes in the early years of the series: J. A. Mangan (ed.), Making Imperial Mentalities; J. S. Bratton et al., Acts of Supremacy. Jeffrey Richards echoed MacKenzie’s ‘dominant ideology’ in his Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester, 1989) noting how popular fiction ‘can act – sometimes simultaneously – as a form of social control ... and as a mirror of widely-held popular views’, pp. 1–2. Roger H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester, 1994), pp. 56, 8. MacKenzie, for example, drew directly on Gramsci in Propaganda and Empire, p. 8. Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45: 3 (2006), 602–27; Porter, Absent-Minded ­Imperialists. Stuart Ward, ‘Echoes of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006), 264–78. Louis, ‘Introduction’ in Robin W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume V: Historiography (Oxford, 1999), p. 9; Hall and Rose, At Home with the Empire, p. 3. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, pp. 5, 6, 241. John M. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester, 2011), pp. 1–2. Ibid.

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C hap t e r t wo

The power of culture and the cultures of power: John MacKenzie and the study of imperialism1 Cherry Leonardi The great expansion and influence of the Manchester University Press series has been credited to its general editor even by his most prominent sparring-partner, Bernard Porter, who implies that this influence has extended beyond the Series itself, to other scholars who place emphasis on the impact of empire upon British culture and society. Even if Porter used the label of ‘the MacKenzie school’ or ‘MacKenzieites’ rather provocatively, his critique was nevertheless indicative of the stature and respect that John MacKenzie has earned through both the Series and his own impressive, varied and often pioneering scholarship.2 Yet there is something of an irony in the ascription of such a central position in a ‘school’ of imperial history to a scholar who has often promoted and explored the peripheries and margins, not only of the imperial experience but of the discipline of history. The resulting perceptions and evaluations of his work over the last three decades reveal a series of paradoxes. He was hailed as the leader of ‘a revolution in imperial history’,3 but also depicted as representative of ‘conservative’ historians of empire;4 and he has been both associated with, and attacked by, cultural theorists.5 He is characterised most often as a scholar of the metropole, and yet he has focused largely on the complex, multilayered interactions within the empire, moving repeatedly in his own life and research between Scotland, Africa, England and the myriad sites of imperial cultural production. My own relationship with John is indicative of this tendency to move across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. I was among the last of the undergraduate students fortunate enough to be taught by him at Lancaster University in the late 1990s. Perhaps it would surprise some readers that he was teaching more African and colonial than imperial history; that the first lectures I heard John give were not on imperial culture or propaganda, but on Southern African archaeology, cave-paintings and oral history methodologies, on the Great [ 49 ]

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Zimbabwe state and the Nguni migrations, and later on debates over African resistance and nationalism. To make my personal perspective clear at the outset, my own deep appreciation of John is above all for introducing me to African history with a vigour, enthusiasm and joy for the subject that has sustained my continuing research in this field. But beyond this personal debt, I want to explore more critically in this chapter the importance of MacKenzie’s work for colonial and African studies as well as for imperial history. If many students, like myself, first encountered John as a lecturer in African history, so many of today’s senior historians of Africa knew him as a researcher on labour migration and pre-colonial iron-working in Zimbabwe, then still Southern Rhodesia, in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was this experience of oral research and southern African history on which his teaching in the 1990s still drew; he admired and had interacted with many of the scholars that we were now reading as the pioneers of African history, such as Terence Ranger and Shula Marks. John moved ‘back to the metropole’, but his subsequent research on imperial culture was deeply informed by his early personal and scholarly experiences of Africa. Indeed, the links between empire and domestic society have often been first explored by historians working ‘from the colony back to the metropole’.6 But John would move back and forth across the boundaries of imperial, colonial and African history throughout his career, and was even being described as an ‘Africanist’ in the 1990s.7 And it was one of his earlier Africanist colleagues, Shula Marks, who drew attention to the vital importance of MacKenzie’s work on imperial culture in the 1980s. Like MacKenzie, she was endorsing Field’s challenge to consider imperialism as part of English or British social history, and to explore how experiences of empire had shaped daily life and identities in Britain. ‘Sniping from the periphery’, as she put it, Marks criticised British historians for having previously failed ‘to ask what empire has done to “us”’.8 That it has become unnecessary to ‘snipe’ from the periphery – or indeed perhaps even to talk in terms of the periphery – is testament to the subsequent scholarship from multiple directions which has treated Britain and its empire as a unified field of analysis and has sought to explore the connections, circuits and contradictions of imperial culture. Not all of this recent scholarship would acknowledge any direct debt to the pioneering work of MacKenzie. But his own research has been amplified, complemented and in certain respects critiqued by this wider and increasingly varied scholarship on imperial culture and the colonial encounter. This chapter explores these connections, beginning with his recent book, The Scots in South Africa, which parallels aspects of John’s own links to southern Africa and represents [ 50 ]

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the culmination of his long advocacy of a four nations approach to British imperial history.9 Yet this recent book, as well as many other of MacKenzie’s publications, raises enduring and crucial questions. These questions centre on our understanding of power and power relations, to which, as Marks argued, studies of imperial culture should recur as ‘the heart of the matter’.10 The chapter will suggest that some of the criticism – and praise – that MacKenzie’s work has attracted over the decades has arisen from his determination to avoid binary, structural or moralistic analysis of dominance and subordination in imperial contexts. This position has at times been presented in highly polemical ways, in opposition to aspects of post-colonial theory; alternatively it has generated accusations of understatement and of an overly benign or neutral view of colonial relations. It is an approach which has become increasingly prevalent in the writing of colonial history, but one which continues to generate questions and debates over the relative importance of structure and agency in the historical analysis of power. While he has consistently refused to view imperial power as mono­­ lithic or all-determining, MacKenzie’s work has nonetheless explored the production and circulation of imperial power through more subtle and expansive cultural forms and routes. As his recent debate with Bernard Porter rather ironically reveals, this approach to power actually shares much in common with post-colonial cultural studies of imperialism, with which MacKenzie has also engaged in critical debate.11 The chapter therefore goes on to discuss his contribution to understandings of imperialism and colonialism as culture, and to the relationship of knowledge and power, through his studies of popular culture and imperial heroes, museums and missionaries, hunting, conservation, science and the environment. These studies demonstrate the significance of his work far beyond the traditional boundaries of imperial history that he has contributed so much to breaching.

Empire and identity The Scots in South Africa (2007), by John MacKenzie with Nigel Dalziel, is a detailed account of the lives and roles of Scottish men (and some women) in South Africa, written in a characteristically lucid and lively narrative style. Its biographical approach to individual lives reflects MacKenzie’s roots in social history and his enduring commitment to micro-history. One reviewer was rather disappointed by what she saw as a resulting lack of ‘analytical punch’.12 But the book makes clear at the end of the introductory chapter that it seeks ‘to occupy the space that lies at the margins of “public” and “academic” history’, [ 51 ]

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and hence to be accessible to general readers. These are not the only margins or middle grounds that MacKenzie has deliberately occupied in the course of his life and career, and nor is this book unusual among his publications in its accessibility to the non-academic reader and its meticulous archival grounding. The response of this reviewer is indicative of the resulting ease with which MacKenzie has been lumped with ‘traditional’ or ‘conservative’ historians, because of his preference for empirical accounts over elaborate theoretical discourse. And he is of course capable of tongue-in-cheek provocation: one otherwise highly positive reviewer seemed a little irritated by the tartan-covered map of South Africa on the cover of The Scots in South Africa.13 Yet this book, like MacKenzie’s other work, does engage with and contribute to broader analytical themes, providing valuable historical illustration of identity construction at the margins of empire and its articulation with multiple metropolitan national identities. This is also a welcome contribution to the history of Africa under colonial rule, a field in which ‘European agency too often remains undifferentiated, assumed and unexplored’.14 And, as a review of The Scots in South Africa in the Journal of Southern African Studies noted, ‘it may also encourage a more nuanced understanding of many other ambivalent identities in southern African history’.15 Indeed The Scots in South Africa resonates with many of the advances in the study of ethnicity more widely, not least by demonstrating how a constructivist reading of ethnicity and identity can be underpinned and nuanced by detailed historical evidence. This challenge is discussed much more explicitly in MacKenzie’s earlier papers on Scottish identity and the British empire, which had already established him as a leading figure in the study of developing national identities within the British Isles.16 His 1993 article was a gently critical engagement with Linda Colley’s recently published Britons; in it MacKenzie argues that the British empire was not a means by which Scots were assimilated into Britain, but rather ‘a means whereby Scotland asserted her distinctiveness in relation to England’.17 This argument would be made much more vociferously in 1998, in an article which confronts Colley’s influential analysis of the construction of national identities, and insists that the empire strengthened rather than eroded regional and ethnic identities within Britain. MacKenzie argues that Colley overplays the argument that ‘national identities [are] constituted of negative elements in relation to Others’, with France as the ultimate ‘other’ for Britain. He similarly takes issue with post-colonialist arguments that the significant ‘others’ were non-European, with European identities formed out of ‘notions of racial difference and a profound sense of superiority’. Drawing on [ 52 ]

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Anthony Smith, MacKenzie instead argues that national identities were constructed out of more complex ‘fractions of uniqueness’: not in solely negative opposition to the ‘other’, but also through the attractions of a more ‘positive referent society’ abroad.18 Here MacKenzie makes clearest his understanding of identity construction as a complex combination of external oppositions and attractions, and internal, self-referential cultural production and reproduction. This of course has much wider relevance, complicating as it does the idea of the boundary (however permeable) between ethnic groups, which Barth emphasised as crucial to a relational construction of identity.19 Any such interface between Scotland and England, according to MacKenzie, was negotiated ‘in relation to Empire’, not simply in dualistic opposition.20 He also draws parallels between the effects of empire on metropolitan identities and the tendency of the British empire ‘to perpetuate and enhance regional and ethnic identities among indigenous peoples, whether through indirect rule policies or divide and rule tactics’.21 His suggestion is not that such policies were pursued at home too, but rather that incorporation into the enlarged arena of empire provided new resources, counterpoints and relativities for the construction of identities, in both colony and metropole. The argument that imperialism and empire were significant, if not vital, in the constitution of British identities has of course been taken up much more widely.22 Others too have argued for the importance of South Africa to this study of the British World; for instance, MacKenzie’s work is cited and supported by Saul Dubow’s recent publications, which explore the complex multiple layers of English-speaking identity at the Cape.23 Dubow argues that Britishness was produced not through racially or ethnically defined categories, but rather by colonisers and colonial subjects asserting their claims to belong to the British empire. As he points out, even Bernard Porter ‘allows for the fact that empire might have meant more to those who experienced it from abroad than it did in the domestic context of British politics’.24 MacKenzie and Dubow thus draw attention to the margins of empire as particularly productive sites for the construction of British identities, contributing to a wider tendency to analyse borderlands as central rather than peripheral to the shaping of nations and states.25 MacKenzie explores the possibility of ‘a distinct Scottish identity which was maintained, promoted or even developed at the so-called periphery of empire’. Indeed, this very identity ‘was made up of a sense of being a marginal people’ in Britain and in Europe. And there were ‘degrees of marginality within Scotland itself’, as ‘a land where there was strong awareness of the significance of frontiers’: geographical, religious and linguistic.26 [ 53 ]

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These frontiers in turn contributed to the plurality of Scottish identities even as a new Scottish nationalism was blurring such distinctions in the later nineteenth century. And in South Africa, rather than existing in ‘an uneasy liminal space’, colonial Scottish society was producing new hybrid identities and ‘almost superior’ self-perceptions.27 Such hybridity emerged in interaction with Africans, such as the black churchmen who developed their own lives and identities in dialogue with Scotland and Scottishness, and in the process contributed to the distinctive influence of empire and mission upon Scottish identity at home. The fertility of the frontier for the production of identity is perhaps epitomised in MacKenzie’s account of the first South African Native College, which was situated upon an old frontier fort on Scots mission land at Lovedale: ‘the college was consequently located in a liminal zone, the classic point of contact invested with missionary, military and also frontier settler history. Thus higher education for Africans ... would occur at the edge rather than the centre.’ Yet from this marginal site, future African nationalism would emerge.28 The metaphor of the frontier remains vital to exploring colonial encounters, not as a simple ‘forward-advancing line’, but as ‘a margin between peoples, a zone of interaction, a place where the rules of engagement were contested’.29 Morgan, like MacKenzie, explores the Highland–Lowland divide in Scotland alongside and in connection with frontiers in the wider empire. As he argues, it is upon frontiers and cultural boundaries that the work of intermediaries, middlemen and ‘liminal people’ becomes particularly evident: ‘their function as people who went back and forth, interpreted, translated, exchanged, and explained was clearly vital to the increasingly integrated worlds they inhabited’.30 Such intermediation has become the focus of much colonial history, as Pels suggests: ‘For every imaginary opposition of home and field, one must study the hybrid work of travel that links them up.’31 The Scots in South Africa, like much of MacKenzie’s work, is concerned with precisely this hybridity and travel of imperial cultures and identities. Such travel has also been central to his own life; in exploring the complexities of identity and marginality in Scotland and southern Africa, MacKenzie has undoubtedly drawn upon his own personal experiences and perspectives. Born in Manchester to an English mother and Scottish father, he grew up in a tenement flat at the aspirant edges of working-class Glasgow, from where he could access all the vibrancy of the city’s artistic, cultural, industrial and shipping life. Empire permeated the city around him and wove into his family life, from the ocean liners he watched on the Clyde and the imperial adventures of childhood books, radio and cinema, to his emigrant relatives and his father’s [ 54 ]

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career. When he was eleven, the family moved for eighteenth months to Northern Rhodesia, where his father was employed in the Public Works Department. This first-hand – albeit childhood – experience of white colonial life gave him a profound glimpse of its ambivalence and illusions: the sense of security and comfort that racial hierarchies helped to produce, and the awe and admiration he felt as a boy for the District Commissioner, whose person seemed to embody imperial power and status. The work of an anthropologist whom he met at this time would eventually lead him back to Africa for his PhD research at the University of British Columbia, after studying history at Glasgow. In the midst of increasingly celebratory approaches to margins, it is important to recognise also that frontiers and liminalities remain uncomfortable positions to inhabit. With his relatively unconventional origins and route into academia, and by pioneering new approaches and occupying the boundaries of sub-disciplines and regional fields, MacKenzie has frequently experienced the vulnerabilities and exclusions of the margins, as well as their creativity and bricolage. With hindsight, it is possible to suggest that his personal perspective from the ‘periphery’ of Scotland contributed not only to his emphasis on the cultural productivity of the margins, but also to his avoidance of binary distinctions; this was after all a periphery where it is possible to see the colonised as colonisers and vice versa.32 But such approaches – and indeed the scholarly subject of identity – have of course emerged over the course of his career and in the wider trends of scholarship. MacKenzie’s earliest doctoral and post-doctoral work was shaped instead by the social history approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, and focused on the material and economic history of labour in southern Africa. Yet even then, he pursued a pioneering and independent approach, provoking the ire of Marxist historians of southern African labour history by arguing that Africans entered the colonial labour market for complex, varied and individual reasons, rather than focusing solely on the structural constraints and coercion of capitalist production.33 MacKenzie would later argue that aspects of class analysis remained relevant to understanding ‘accumulation’, ‘dispossession’ and ‘oppression’, particularly in imperial contexts.34 But his careful reading of what would later be much more widely accepted as the ‘agency’ of African labourers provides an early indication of his tenaciously empirical and individual approach to history, which remains evident in his discussion of the more recent subject of identity and ethnicity in The Scots in South Africa. For while the book both reflects and illustrates the now-prevailing constructivist understanding of ethnicity, characteristically this is never presented as the whole or only story. MacKenzie also argues for deeper, underlying aspects of Scottish identity more akin [ 55 ]

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to Lonsdale’s influential notion of a ‘moral ethnicity’, which posits deep moral and cultural roots beneath constructed or instrumentalised identities.35 MacKenzie thus argues for a distinctively Scottish ‘social ethic’ and ‘civil society’, emerging from historical processes but also providing an enduring element of ethnic or national identity, rather as Hastings has argued more widely.36 Between his earliest work on labour history and his later increasing interest in issues of identity, MacKenzie’s scholarship has paralleled, and at times pioneered, other broad historiographical trends, including the adoption of a more Gramscian focus on ideological and cultural forms of hegemony in the early 1980s, leading into his most influential work on imperial culture and his later engagement and debate with post-colonial scholars. The influence of more Foucauldian approaches would also become apparent in MacKenzie’s developing concern from the late 1980s with the relationship of scientific knowledge and imperial power, discussed below. This continues to be reflected in The Scots in South Africa, in which MacKenzie demonstrates a preference for what Dubow terms ‘decentred approaches to knowledge and power’.37 As one reviewer emphasised, the book demonstrates not only that the Scots in South Africa were ‘a diverse and hybrid group’, but also that they were ‘exceptionally literate, educationally advanced and commercially active’, and thus brought to southern Africa ‘a powerful urge to “improve” society’ through the spread of learning, Christianity and capitalist relations of production’.38 MacKenzie argues that knowledge and ‘information systems’ were both ‘a prerequisite of power’ and a means of defining ethnic identity.39 Most recently, the collection he edits with Tom Devine on Scotland and the British Empire argues that the distinctive economic, religious, scholarly and professional contribution of Scots to the empire constituted an ‘intellectual diaspora’.40 MacKenzie also acknowledges more structural relations of inequality and domination, and the ultimate primacy of racial identities; indeed he argues that the Scots played a pivotal intermediary role in relations between British and Afrikaner colonisers, contributing to the production of white unity. And polyglot white migration to overseas territories was in part the result of ‘the yearning for power and domination’.41 But he tends to acknowledge such power relations briskly, almost tersely, before moving on to the complexities of Scots identity and influence in which he is more interested. Similarly in his 1993 article, he states that Scots ‘participated in the violence, the destructiveness, and the exploitation marking the imperial relationship’, but he is more concerned to examine their individual agency and their distinctive social ethic.42 And in the 1998 statement – ‘Imperialism was repressive in many ways, but ...’ – it is clearly the ‘but’ that matters to MacKenzie. [ 56 ]

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On occasion this emphasis risks understatement or an overly neutral tone, such as in the discussion of the Scottish frontier campaigner, Colonel John Graham, who has been described as a ‘butcher’ by South African President Thabo Mbeki: ‘But violent frontiers inevitably spawn butchers on both sides, and the military and settlement dispositions of the frontier were exceptionally complex.’43 Such a statement is not intended to downplay the brutalities and inequalities of colonialism, but it raises a bigger question nonetheless. Does an emphasis on the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters and relations run the risk of ignoring or underestimating the power relations of imperialism? How do we reconcile the earlier structural and materialist understandings of imperial power with the more diffuse and ‘decentred’ approaches to power that have emerged through the study of culture, identity, knowledge and agency since the 1980s?

Problems of power and agency By the time MacKenzie was beginning to develop his focus on Scotland and the empire in the early 1990s, he had already established himself – as attested by Christopher Bayly in 1996 – ‘at the forefront of attempts to create a new type of imperial history which reinvigorates the older style of political and constitutional narratives with new approaches to culture, gender, ecology and medicine in the colonial context’.44 His seminal Propaganda and Empire (1984) and the follow-up edited volume Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986) were in continuous print and the Studies in Imperialism series was steadily expanding, covering the kind of subjects Bayly advocated. MacKenzie had himself turned to another innovative research focus on imperial hunting and conservation, a subject that returned his attention to Africa.45 His pioneering scholarship over a highly productive decade earned him a professorship in imperial history at Lancaster in 1991, a choice of title he defended in his inaugural lecture: ‘I am not afraid of the word imperial. It is one of those words which conveys positive and negative connotations in equal measure.’46 Such a bold statement was typical of his refusal to interpret history through the political prisms or moral dichotomies of the present. This stance led him into a public and polemical debate with post-colonial scholars, stimulated by his publication in 1995 of Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, a response to the work of Edward Said. MacKenzie’s book attracted virulent criticism from scholars of literature and cultural studies, affronted not least by his apparent elevation of what was labelled as an essentially conservative historical ­empiricism over [ 57 ]

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alternative, more politically engaged methodologies and readings.47 Such methodological and theoretical debates have rumbled on ever since, perpetuated by more extreme arguments at either end of the disciplinary spectrum.48 MacKenzie’s own position was in fact much more interstitial and his approach more interdisciplinary than his rather polemical introduction in 1995, and its subsequent readings and misinterpretations, would suggest. Even by its critics, MacKenzie’s Orientalism was hailed as an ­impressive and important contribution to the literature on ­Orientalism, particularly as it examined the arts, neglected by Said. Its critique of Said’s historical inaccuracies, generalisations and binary categorisations would be supported by other scholars, including many within MacKenzie’s post-colonial and cultural studies. Developing out of ­ own lifelong interest, enjoyment and ‘intimate knowledge’ of the arts, it was ‘terrifically researched’.49 But a number of reviewers and subsequent discussants criticised MacKenzie’s emphasis on positive European attitudes to the Orient, since Said’s point was that even attraction and ambivalence could still produce an essentialised categorisation of the ‘other’.50 In countering Said’s interpretations, MacKenzie did go somewhat to the other extreme in demonstrating the positive, creative appropriation and production of Orientalism in the arts, but his aim was to complicate rather than to reverse Said’s depiction. Nevertheless, he was criticised for an overly benign and ideologically neutral view of artistic expression, and above all for ignoring the relationship of ‘power and visuality’, the ‘unequal power relations of transcultural exchange’ and ‘the paradox by which wellintentioned artists or cultural producers might turn out to have been complicit in the very imperial power relations that they sought to undermine’.51 In opposing Said’s view of monolithic imperial power, MacKenzie thus found himself accused of ignoring power altogether. Other scholars went further in their depiction of MacKenzie as diametrically opposed to Said, even as an apologist for imperialism. An example is Moore-Gilbert, writing in 1999, who describes MacKenzie’s Orientalism as ‘representative’ of ‘conservative’ imperial historiography: ‘by this I mean figures who combine a traditional empiricism and positivism of method with a forgiving, if not uncritical, interpretation of the intentions behind – and effects of – imperialism’. Such ‘conservatives’, he writes, view Said ‘with deep antipathy ... as an upstart rival’. They view imperialism as ‘an essentially benevolent transfer of civilisation by the west’. And historians like MacKenzie ‘never presume to question their own “disinterestedness” and “objectivity”’ or the real nature of the texts they use.52 This catalogue of generalised accusations betrays an obvious [ 58 ]

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ignorance of MacKenzie’s self-professed admiration, political sympathy and initial warm endorsement of Said: ‘Said’s liberal humanity should remain the model of modern scholarship.’53 The claim that MacKenzie does not address his own subjectivity is largely belied by the Preface to his Orientalism, which makes very clear his personal and political position, including by discussing his own Glaswegian upbringing.54 He has also examined the kind of non-literary forms with which historians have been challenged to engage more recently.55 And he has pursued and urged interdisciplinary and comparative approaches: ‘Scholarly redoubts should continue to be broken down, for multidisciplinary approaches are essential to new insights and full understanding.’56 In more recent years, MacKenzie’s interest in the ‘psychological, affective, or even unconscious, aspects of imperial relations’ that MooreGilbert associates with radical ‘post-Orientalist’ historiography has become ever more apparent, for example in his adoption of the idea of ‘internalised imperialism’ among European populations.57 None of this diminishes his insistence, however, on the need for historical context and chronology, and it is this which led him into disagreement with some of the approaches of Said and other cultural and literary theorists. But nor is this concern confined to historians, conservative or otherwise; scholars from a variety of disciplines have criticised such decontextualisation.58 Rather ironically, the second major debate in which MacKenzie would become embroiled would see a complete reversal of this depiction of him as a reactionary historian opposed to post-colonial theory. In 2004, the publication of Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists sparked a vigorous public debate between Porter and MacKenzie over the extent of imperial culture in Britain. Rather than being lumped with ‘conservative’ history, this time MacKenzie would be associated by Porter with Said and the ‘post-colonialists’. Again, however, this debate raised issues of power. Porter criticised the idea – rather implicitly attributed to MacKenzie – that the British working class participated in imperial culture, claiming that this would assume their passive reception of an imperialism produced and imposed from above.59 MacKenzie has responded that he and Porter in fact share a belief in ‘history from below’ and in ‘giving agency to the indigenous people of empire and the citizens of the imperial metropole’.60 Indeed, it was from his background in social history that he first mounted his attack on top-down approaches to imperial history and began to examine popular culture.61 But although he has frequently reiterated the need to give agency to both colonised and colonisers, there has not always been room in his necessarily wide-ranging studies to fully individ[ 59 ]

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ualise and explore such agency, or its constraints and implications. Propaganda and Empire focused on the production and dissemination of imperial cultural forms more than on their reception, effects or appropriation.62 Other scholars have gone much further in examining the differentiated impact of imperial propaganda in Britain and the complexity of individual responses to and relations with empire.63 But such studies have on the whole complicated and improved, rather than contradicted, MacKenzie’s arguments and approach. In particular, recent studies have tended to support MacKenzie’s increasingly honed argument that popular participation in the cultures of imperialism does not have to mean the passive reception of propaganda; rather, we should identify agency in complicity as much as in resistance.64 This is where MacKenzie’s recurring crossover into African and colonial history, as well as his focus on the Scots, may have distinguished his approach to agency from that of Porter. Not least, his continuing interest in Africa has enabled him to look beyond metropolitan class relations to touch on the much-debated interplay of class and race, an important thread of continuity from his background in social history. In The Scots in South Africa, as in his earlier work, he supports the idea of a ‘white aristocracy of labour’, adopting the Marxistinfluenced view that the empire enabled the export of class tensions and their transformation into racial and imperial ones.65 As Stoler and Cooper argue in their influential collection on Tensions of Empire, ‘[t] he language of class itself in Europe drew on a range of images and metaphors that were racialized to the core’.66 But Cooper also warns against collapsing ‘the inequality between metropole and periphery as simply analogous to “domestic” British hierarchies’.67 MacKenzie is careful not to imply such straightforward analogies, but he emphasises the irony that ‘Scots so often left situations of economic and social deprivation’ and yet their migration to South Africa ‘invariably led to the spreading of that very economic and social deprivation to African peoples’. And while Scottish class and ethnic identities interacted in distinctive ways in South Africa, both were transcended by race, and by ‘the opening of a chasm between white and black labour’ that even the most radical Scots trade unionists did not attempt to bridge.68 The primacy of racial hierarchies does not obviate, however, the need to deconstruct and complicate both the imperial metropole and white colonial populations. MacKenzie argues that rather than seeing Scots simply as agents of British rule, their individual autonomy should instead be explored.69 This too is a central theme of his scholarly career, going back to his early arguments for the individual agency of African migrant labourers.70 At the time the nationalist African history of the 1960s and 1970s was more concerned to celebrate resistance or [ 60 ]

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to distinguish it starkly from ‘collaboration’. But since then, many scholars have instead explored the complex engagements of Africans with colonial economies, states, cultures and religious institutions, leaving behind the politicised dichotomies of resistance and collaboration. Like Dubow, MacKenzie argues that even the most radical Scots in South Africa appealed to the idea of the British empire as ‘a higher and hopefully more noble authority in the face of local injustice’. Increasingly this has also been argued of colonised Africans, not in the sense that they were victims or passive recipients of imperial hegemony, but rather that they seized the opportunity to appropriate, contract and deploy the ideologies and institutions of the colonisers.71 And this would in turn produce new tensions and resistance, when the promises of imperial and colonial ideology were tested and not fulfilled.72 MacKenzie’s arguments against monolithic imperial power structures also anticipated the direction of wider colonial studies, which would increasingly explore colonialism’s fractures, ambivalences and contradictions, as well as the agency of the colonised. Increasingly it has been the limits and incoherence of colonial government that have been emphasised, and the ways in which the colonial encounter was itself shaped by colonised peoples, especially the intermediaries on which colonial states depended for so much of their local influence and control. Colonialism was ‘a struggle that constantly renegotiates the balance of domination and resistance’.73 Scholars have therefore sought to move beyond overly structural analyses of imperial power: The binaries of colonizer/colonized, Western/non-Western, and domination/resistance begin as useful devices for opening up questions of power but end up constraining the search for precise ways in which power is deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deflected, and appropriated.74

Understanding colonial power relations requires us to address individual agency and quotidian compromises on the ground, as much as the global asymmetries of imperialism. The challenge for recent generations of Africanist historians has been ‘to free historiography and social studies from narratives of dependency, victimhood and romanticism’.75 MacKenzie’s work on the Scots in the empire has been similarly explicit in rejecting the notion of their victimhood in relation to England and Britain. Yet as scholarship has swung increasingly in this direction, so it has produced its own challenges. There remains an obvious danger that in emphasising the complexity and hybridity of colonialism, and the agency of the colonised, subordinate and marginal, we risk [ 61 ]

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­ nderplaying power relations, structures and hierarchies. Race, class u and gender might have become accepted as ‘moving categories’, but ‘we still have more work to do in accounting for how their political saliencies shift and which of these affiliations shape political choices in a specific place and time’.76 Avoiding binary understandings of power does not mean ignoring the power relations of any given moment and context, even if these relations are complicated and unstable. Historians have increasingly treated empire as ‘multiple circuits of persons, ideas and institutions’ and as ‘networks’ of knowledge and communication.77 But some have warned against the neutrality of terms such as ‘circuits’, ‘negotiation’ and ‘encounter’, if these obscure the exercise of power.78 And as the idea of the ‘mutual constitution of coloniser and colonised’ has become normalised over the decades since MacKenzie and others pioneered it, so it too needs to be challenged and critiqued, not least to take back into account the power relations in every instance of such constitution.79 As Cooper sums up the core problem, there is ‘no ready formula for analyzing power structures that are neither symmetrical nor dichotomous’.80 MacKenzie has resisted attempts to produce such a formula; he has acknowledged the asymmetries and inequalities of power relations in the British empire, but he has insisted that these cannot be understood as straightforward binaries. His approaches to structure and agency anticipated and complemented many of the directions of wider imperial, colonial and African history. But these directions have also produced their own continuing problems with which we are all engaged: the challenge of discussing power and hegemony without denying agency, and vice versa.

Culture, knowledge and power Said’s central messages should not be lost. Imperialism is a key element of western culture over the past two centuries, though often in different ways and in more complex relationships than he suggests … The relationship between knowledge and power requires to be explored much further.81

While MacKenzie has rejected overly structural analyses of power rela­­ tions, he has nevertheless addressed the pervasive power of imperial culture. Indeed it is arguably in this regard that he has made the greatest contribution to understanding the power relations of imperialism and the colonial encounter. In Propaganda and Empire, he adopts Gramscian arguments ‘that power lay with those who “controlled the means of mental production”, whether in education or in mass entertainment like the music hall’.82 By 1992, he was acknowledging [ 62 ]

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that Gramsci’s notion of hegemony might be seen to deny the free will of subordinate classes, but arguing that it nevertheless retained relevance for appreciating the ‘cultural dominance’ of ‘imperial ideology’.83 MacKenzie’s emphasis has shifted ever further in the direction of subordinate agency and the limits of hegemony. But it remains clear that he views imperial culture and knowledge as integral to the production and reproduction of power. MacKenzie’s work supports the overall point of Said and other postcolonialists, that imperialism can be implicit, interwoven so tightly into ‘the very fabric’ of people’s lives that it did not necessarily need to be self-conscious or overt in order to have effect.84 It is this approach that brought him into dispute with Bernard Porter: their debate over the extent of popular imperial culture in Britain centred on different definitions and interpretations of imperialism itself. Porter insists that imperialism must involve ‘an element of “domination”’, but then uses this to discount cultural forms produced through economic or religious activity, exploration, emigration, cartography or scientific research. As Ward points out, these are precisely the activities that have been analysed by MacKenzie and others as ‘part and parcel of Britain’s imperial experience’.85 It is perhaps only in the wider empire, however, that the aspect of domination in these subtler, sometimes subconscious, cultural forms of imperialism becomes fully apparent. From Propaganda and Empire in 1984 to Museums and Empire in 2009, MacKenzie has explored how the production and organisation of knowledge and culture was crucial to imperialism. In the former, he analyses, for example, how militarism and the celebration of warfare helped to diffuse racial ideas and a sense of superiority among the British.86 His later work on imperial heroes such as Livingstone and Gordon expanded on the themes of Christian militarism and imperial masculinity. To give just one example of the obvious implications for colonial history: Janice Boddy has explored how the ‘cult of Gordon’ profoundly shaped the cultures and attitudes of the British administrators in the Sudan Political Service. She argues that popular culture in Britain thus impacted very directly upon the colonial experience in Sudan, by tracing myths of masculinity, heroism and crusade to what she sees as their ultimate result in colonial policies towards Sudanese women.87 In a very positive review of MacKenzie’s Orientalism in 1996, Bayly expressed hope that MacKenzie would in time also ‘turn his formidable powers of synthesis and exposition’ to the obvious politics of anthropological knowledge, where ‘the alleged “complicity” between colonial power, official social taxonomizing and metropolitan scholarship can be most persuasively argued’.88 But MacKenzie’s work on [ 63 ]

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imperial culture in general has contributed to our understanding of these cultures of colonialism. As Bayly and many others have demonstrated, the European cultural and epistemological construction of ‘indigenous peoples’ profoundly shaped relations on the ground between rulers and ruled.89 The metropolitan cultures which MacKenzie has examined have thus been shown to have powerful effect, as ‘the Africa of explorers, missionaries, settlers, scientists, doctors and officials was symbolically ordered into the grid of “tribe” and “tradition”’.90 Imperial cultures and taxonomies were produced on the periphery and fed back to the metropole, as well as being transmitted centrifugally. MacKenzie has particularly explored this reciprocal production of knowledge and culture through his study of missionaries, hunting and the natural world. As other scholars have argued, missionaries often played a central role in the development of colonial ethnography and administration, as well as in the broader ideologies of imperial mission.91 Jean and John Comaroff famously explored the cultural work of missionaries and its relationship to imperialism in the specific case of the Tswana. In The Scots in South Africa, MacKenzie cites their work as exemplary of a new African-oriented mission history. But in many ways his own work has complemented the Comaroffs’ exploration of the ‘long conversation’ of the missionary encounter, by examining how this conversation continued in the imperial metropole, through the impact of overseas missions on Scottish society.92 Like MacKenzie, the Comaroffs examine ‘how “margin” and “metropole” recast each other’; more recently he has also applied their phrase, ‘the colonization of consciousness’, to the ‘internalised imperialism’ of European populations.93 And the Comaroffs make the same argument as MacKenzie’s general introduction to the Studies in Imperialism series: culture was not a by-product of a primarily political and economic imperialism; rather colonialism must be understood to be cultural as well as economic, symbolic as well as political.94 The prominent place of David Livingstone in MacKenzie’s scholarship is particularly illustrative of his broader arguments. His most positive readings of Livingstone would not be accepted by everyone; his claim that the ‘sympathetic figure’ of Livingstone was later claimed by African nationalists only touches the edges of the complex afterlife of colonial evangelism, explored more critically by the Comaroffs.95 But while they stress Livingstone’s ultimate adherence to notions of epistemological and religious superiority, they frequently depict him as exceptional among his missionary colleagues in his advocacy of native agency and respect for Tswana knowledge. Livingstone thus embodies the ambiguities and contradictions of colonialism in which MacKenzie [ 64 ]

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is most interested. Individuals were never entirely constrained by the structures of imperialism, but developed their own perspectives and relations. And yet however complex, hybrid and changing colonial and mission society was in reality, it still perpetuated a set of cultural dualisms between European and African, based upon perceptions and representations of difference.96 MacKenzie may have been more concerned to argue for the complex realities than to examine the production of difference and dualism. But he has very much argued for the dominating and imperialist aspects of missionary endeavour, as evidenced particularly in the urge to reshape African landscapes and land-use. In a paper published in 2003, he discusses the fusion of religion and natural science in the persons of Livingstone and other missionaries. He argues that this fusion produced a desire to bring Christian order and civilisation to the landscape itself, as missionaries sought to tame the African environment into gardens, and to dominate it with markers of Christianity and with the straight lines of engineering and construction. His analysis of the ‘cultural imperialism of technology, engineering, science and the landscape’ shares much with the Comaroffs’ account. In his later work he would further develop his arguments for a specifically Scottish idea of the environment, the urge to command and Christianise it, and the distinctive contribution of Scots to the ‘environmental professions’.97 MacKenzie touches on this ‘heady mixture of scientific endeavour and evangelicalism’ in his earlier work on imperialism and the natural world, in which he argues that the scientific organisation of knowledge was ‘crucial to the pursuit of power’.98 His 1988 The Empire of Nature is impressive in its range, from a deep chronology of European and African hunting to imperial hunting and conservation in India as well as Africa. It was welcomed by an Africanist reviewer for examining both African and European hunters ‘through the same kind of analytical lens’, revealing their similar motives and purposes.99 Like other aspects of imperial culture and colonial experience, MacKenzie argues, ‘nature, landscape and perceptions of environmental change have themselves been increasingly recognised as cultural constructs’.100 And natural history as a cultural form was pervaded by the ubiquitous imperialism of the late nineteenth century: The emergence of natural history specialisms, the division and ordering of the scientific effort, reflected the accelerating urge to order the world of nature, which was itself both an impulse towards and a symptom of the developing yearning to order and classify human affairs through imperialism.101

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The new ‘justification of science’ resulted in colonial legislation which prevented Africans from hunting and ultimately excluded them from reserves.102 The history of imperial and colonial environmental policy thus reveals particularly clearly how the cultural production and categorisation of scientific knowledge was bound up with the practices of imperialism.103 The book focuses on the ways in which the colonised were dismissed, restricted and excluded from natural resources to which the colonisers claimed sole rights on the basis of their superior knowledge. Yet MacKenzie also exposes the limited effectiveness of colonial governance of the natural world, both in terms of the failings of that very knowledge, and in terms of the continuing agency of the colonised in resisting or evading restrictions. As he argues characteristically in the subsequent edited collection, Imperialism and the Natural World: Intellectual, scientific and medical history serves to reveal not only the powerful centripetal effects at work, but also the absence of any continuous line of development. The record is one of failure and false moves, misapprehensions and maladroit culture-bound policies as of turningpoints and triumphs.104

MacKenzie’s analysis of hunting in The Empire of Nature was hailed as ‘particularly seminal’ in ‘ongoing research on the deep and intricate connections between imperialism, big-game hunting, and gender in colonial Africa and Asia’; hunting was not only central to the imperial desire to dominate the environment, but also to the construction of British imperial masculinity.105 The wide relevance of this research to African, imperial and colonial history epitomises MacKenzie’s ability to transcend the older divides between these sub-disciplines.106 It also established MacKenzie more broadly as a pioneer of imperial environmental history, leading to his editorship of Environment and History.107 Beinart encapsulates the sense of excitement at the advances in the field of ecological history by 1990: ‘The work on imperial hunting, one part of this academic advance, opens new fields for enquiry in British and European as well as African history, and contributes a good deal to an analysis of ecological change.’108 A decade later, Beinart was again arguing the importance of African environmental history, filtered through ‘cultural prisms’, ‘for understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised, white and black’.109 The Studies in Imperialism series has examined a range of related subjects as they were filtered through the prisms of imperial culture, from geography to medicine. As general editor, MacKenzie has been able to draw the links among these studies; an exploration of travel guides in southern Africa, for example, again reveals the [ 66 ]

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depictions of a wild Africa tamed and redeemed by colonial towns and mission stations, supporting MacKenzie’s argument that ‘[e]mpire was supremely a matter of imagining geographical space’.110 Studies of colonial medicine have similarly demonstrated the intrinsically cultural nature of medical knowledge and practice and its relationship to imperial power: ‘Imperialism highlights the fact that medicine is an ideology as much as a practice.’111 Another recent publication in the Series has finally addressed Bayly’s urge to examine the ‘scientific’ discipline of anthropology. In introducing Tilley’s volume, Ordering Africa, MacKenzie summed up his own subtle but consistent arguments regarding power and its limits: However much we must recognise the inequalities of power relations between imperial societies and their subjects, still a subject/object, binary relationship will not do. Both were deeply affected by the encounter. Colonised peoples never fully lost their own agency. Imperial relations were always interactive ... [T]he relationship between anthropology and imperial rule was often tense and contradictory ... If [anthropologists] were indeed in the business of creating a ‘cognitive architecture’, it was Gaudi-esque in its complexities, ramshackle in its construction.112

MacKenzie’s arguments for the power of imperial culture have always been subtle and self-modifying, as he grapples with the tensions between imperial power and contingent uncertainties; between cultural hegemony and the incoherence, fractures and failures of empire; between structures of power and individual agency. As the proliferating volumes in the Studies in Imperialism series and beyond demonstrate, the analysis of imperialism and colonialism as culture has been far more productive than an emphasis solely on their structural relations. Culture can be profoundly pervasive and powerful, and yet it remains unpredictable in its forms and effects; individual actors are influenced and driven by cultural assumptions and backgrounds but never wholly constrained by these. The cultures of imperialism were all about domination – in the sense of their production and application in the empire – and yet never only about domination. The study of imperial culture that MacKenzie contributed so much to developing has thus provided not a ‘formula’ for analysing the power structures of empire, but a vital prism through which to refract complex power relations.

Cultivating the study of culture The polemics and caricatures of scholarly debate and critical review can lead to the assumption of rigid positions and perspectives and associate scholars with particular schools of thought. But MacKenzie’s scholarship has always been open to new ideas and approaches, [ 67 ]

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considerate of varying opinions and responsive to criticism. And this receptiveness is even more apparent in his broader academic interactions and in his editorship of the Studies in Imperialism series. The general editor’s introductions to each book in the series make an impressive record in themselves of the developing lines of enquiry in imperial history over the last three decades. They also reveal the extent of MacKenzie’s intellectual engagement with each one and his support of varied disciplinary, theoretical and geographical approaches to the broad remit of the series. He has used these short introductions to generously acknowledge the influence of many of the publications upon his own scholarship and thinking, in such areas as gender and law, as well as to emphasise the support that many have provided for his more enduring approaches and arguments.113 MacKenzie has always endorsed multidisciplinary, transnational and comparative scholarship, and in recent years he has pursued this ever more actively both in the Studies in Imperialism series and through his own publications.114 The recent volume he edited with several European scholars on European Empires and the People represents a culmination of such comparative approaches, as well as the refinement of his own long-standing arguments regarding popular imperialism. At the same time, he remains committed to social and ‘micro’ history: ‘it has become increasingly obvious that to understand the larger issues of imperialism/colonialism, it is necessary to understand the local’.115 Just as the Glasgow of his younger life informed his awareness of empire, so the Scottish village of Alyth in which he has retired continues to demonstrate the interconnection of the local and global, metropole and empire. The general editor’s introduction to the 100th volume in the Series, Catherine Ladds’ forthcoming study of the Chinese customs service, offered him an opportunity to demonstrate such connections through the Chinese careers of an Alyth family, which MacKenzie himself had recently researched. Like Alyth, MacKenzie’s own life and home have continued to act as a ‘crossroads where the local and global intersect’;116 since retiring from Lancaster he has travelled more widely than ever, but he has also welcomed scholars into his beautiful home in Alyth, hosting events from a PhD viva to the symposium that led to European Empires. The warmth, humour, sharp engagement and intellectual generosity that inspired so many students at Lancaster has thus continued to cultivate a rich and varied body of scholarship on empire and culture.

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Notes  1 I am very grateful to David Craig and Chris Vaughan for their detailed comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank John MacKenzie for generously sharing both published and unpublished sources with me. Finally, I am greatly indebted to the general editor for his guidance, insight and detailed suggestions throughout the writing of this chapter.  2 Porter appears to include Catherine Hall and Antoinette Burton in his account of the ‘MacKenzie school’, although neither has published in the Studies in Imperialism series: B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004), p. 6. Even a highly critical review by Geoff Eley of The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by A. N. Porter (Oxford, 1999) describes MacKenzie as ‘a veritable impresario of the pioneering historiography on imperialism’s relationship to popular culture’, see Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4: 3 (2003).  3 A. Webster, The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire (Manchester, 2006), p. 180.  4 B. Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies and Imperial Historiography’, Interventions, 1: 3 (1999), 397–411.  5 B. Porter, ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36: 1 (2008), 101–17, at p. 108; conversely MooreGilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies’ (see further discussion below).  6 R. Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45: 3 (2006), 602–27, at p. 625.  7 J. McCracken, ‘African History in British Universities: Past, Present and Future’, African Affairs, 92 (1993), 239–53, at p. 245.  8 S. Marks, ‘History, the Nation and Empire: Sniping from the Periphery’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), 111–19, at pp. 113–14, 117.  9 J. M. MacKenzie with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007). 10 Marks, ‘History, the Nation and Empire’, 117. 11 Porter, ‘Further Thoughts’; J. M. MacKenzie, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36: 4 (2008), 659–68. 12 P. Scully, ‘Review: The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914’, Victorian Studies, 52: 1 (2009), 118–20. 13 P. J. Henshaw, ‘Review: The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37: 2 (2009), 325–7. 14 A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’ in F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and London, 1997), pp. 1–58, at p. 16. 15 D. Denoon, ‘Review: The Scots in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34: 3 (2008), 724–5. 16 MacKenzie’s 1993 article is described as ‘seminal’ in T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (London, 2011), p. 259. See also S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford, 2006), p. 16; N. Chaudhuri, ‘Review: The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, 50: 1 (2007), 160–1. 17 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 15: 4 (1993), 714–39. 18 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), 215–31. 19 F. Barth (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (London, 1969). 20 MacKenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities’, 226.

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writing imperial histories 21 Ibid. 231. 22 M. Daunton and R. Halpern (eds), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples 1600–1850 (London, 1999); C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge and Chicago, 2002). 23 Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge; Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37: 1 (2009), 1–27, esp. p. 11. See also Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875–1902 (Cambridge, 1995). 24 Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World?’, 19, citing Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, pp. vii, 306. 25 V. Das and D. Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Oxford, 2004); T. M. Wilson and H. Donnan, ‘Nation, State and Identity at International Borders’ in T. M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge, 1998). 26 MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, pp. 10, 13. 27 Ibid. pp. 258, 272–3. 28 Ibid. pp. 195–6. 29 P. D. Morgan, ‘Encounters Between British and “Indigenous” Peoples, c. 1500–c. 1800’ in Daunton and Halpern (eds), Empire and Others, pp. 42–78, at p. 54. See Alan Lester, pp. 100–2. 30 Ibid. p. 53. 31 P. Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 163–83, at p. 170. See Dane Kennedy, p. 109. 32 A. Murdoch, ‘Review: Empires of Nature and the Natures of Empire: Imperialism, Scotland and the Environment, by John M. MacKenzie’, Scottish Historical Review, 77: 204 (1998), 274–5, at p. 275. See also E. M. T. Powell’s account of Egyptian ‘colonised colonisers’: A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, 2003). 33 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Trade and Labour, the Interaction of Traditional and Capitalist Economies in Southern Zambezia, 1870–1923’, Collected Papers of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (1975), pp. 98–101; ‘African Labour in the Chartered Company Period’, Rhodesian History, 1 (1970). See F. Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, American Historical Review, 99: 5 (1994), 1516–45, at pp. 1524–5, on schools of South African history and analyses of labour. 34 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Marxism: A Second Wind from the Third World’, History Today, 42: 1 (January 1992), 51–4. 35 J. Lonsdale, ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought’ in B. Berman and J. Lonsdale (eds), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Vol. 2 (London, 1992), pp. 315–504. 36 A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). 37 Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World?’, 15. 38 Henshaw, ‘Review: The Scots in South Africa’, 326. 39 MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, p. 13. This argument is supported by Dubow, who argues that colonial knowledge was not only ‘an instrumental resource directed to wielding power over others’, but also ‘the urge to know about others was closely bound up with the process of identity formation’: Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World?’, 14. 40 J. M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine, ‘Introduction’ to J. M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 1–29, at p. 16. 41 MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, p. 2. 42 MacKenzie, ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland’, 732. 43 MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, p. 198.

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the power of culture and the cultures of power 44 C. A. Bayly, ‘Review: John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22: 3 (1996), 361–3, at p. 361. 45 See Dane Kennedy, pp. 102–3. 46 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Scotland and the Empire’, Inaugural lecture, Lancaster University, 13 May 1992. 47 Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies’; D. Gregory, ‘Orientalism Reviewed’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (1997), 269–78. See also the various papers in the ‘Forum: MacKenzie on Said and Imperialism’ in Nineteenth Century Contexts, 19: 1 (1995). 48 Prompting, for example, R. J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997; new edn and afterword, 2000). 49 D. Kennedy, ‘Review: John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts’, International History Review, 18: 4 (1996), 912–14, at p. 913; R. Lewis, ‘Reviewing Orientalism’, Oxford Art Journal, 22: 2 (1999), 133–6, at p. 133. 50 Kennedy, ‘Review’; Gregory, ‘Orientalism Reviewed’. 51 Gregory, ‘Orientalism Reviewed’, 273; Lewis, ‘Reviewing Orientalism’, 134. 52 Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies’, 399, 404–5. 53 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Occidentalism: Counterpoint and Counter-Polemic’, Journal of Historical Geography, 19: 3 (1993), 339–44, at p. 343. 54 As he does more recently in MacKenzie, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction’, 660–1. 55 As Powell cites Hobsbawm to emphasise, ‘social historians have learned how to investigate the history of ideas, opinions and feelings at the sub-literary level’: Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism, p. 13; Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism’, p. 169, also argues that studies of colonialism ‘increasingly stress the nonverbal, tactile dimensions of social practice’, including ‘the construction of landscape’, the latter a focus of MacKenzie’s own research. 56 MacKenzie, ‘Occidentalism’, 343. 57 Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies’, 405; J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’ to J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester, 2011), pp. 1–18, at p. 1. 58 Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism’, 168: ‘Historians and anthropologists often agree on the holistic intuition that, above all, one should be sensitive to context’ (he goes on to defend post-colonial literary decontextualisation but also questions its emphasis on text). See also the recent critical appraisal of colonial and post-colonial studies by F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), esp. pp. 12–22. 59 B. Porter, ‘“Empire, What Empire?” Or, Why 80% of Early- and Mid-Victorians Were Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It’, Victorian Studies, 46: 2 (2004), pp. 256–63; as well as Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists. 60 MacKenzie, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction’, 660. He specifically criticised the tendency of previous studies to allow the ‘intelligentsia’ to speak for everyone in condemning imperialism, in J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), p. 10. 61 See Marks, ‘History, the Nation and Empire’, on the emergence of a new imperial historiography from British social history. 62 A common criticism of Propaganda and Empire, which MacKenzie himself acknowledges in ‘“Comfort” and Conviction’, 665. 63 Notably A. S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005). 64 This argument has reached its clearest articulation in MacKenzie’s ‘Introduction’ to MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People, esp. p. 5. 65 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, pp. 7–8, arguments cited and supported by P. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), p. 35. The complexities of class and race are explored in more detail, e.g. in J. L. Comaroff, ‘Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa’ in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire,

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pp. 163–97. MacKenzie defends the continuing relevance of Marxist analysis in ‘Marxism: A Second Wind’. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 9, 27. F. Cooper, ‘Empire Multiplied: A Review Essay’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46: 2 (2004), 247–72, at p. 269 n. 33, citing M. Sinha’s criticisms of Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London, 2001) in ‘“Signs Taken for Wonders”: The Stakes for Imperial Studies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3: 1 (2002). MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, pp. 271–2, 261, 228–33. Ibid. p. 212. MacKenzie, ‘Trade and Labour’ and ‘African Labour’. B. N. Lawrance, E. L. Osborn and R. L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, 2006); D. R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, 2004). Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 37. Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism’, 164; T. Spear, ‘Neotraditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 44 (2003), 3–27; Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, e.g. p. 6. Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection’, 1517. W. Beinart, ‘African History and Environmental History’, African Affairs, 99 (2000), 269–302, at p. 302. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 25. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 28; Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005); C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996). J. Thompson, ‘Modern Britain and the New Imperial History’, History Compass, 5: 2 (2007), 455–62, at p. 459; Morgan, ‘Encounters Between British and “Indigenous” Peoples’, 52. C. Hall, ‘Book Review Forum: Reply’, Victorian Studies, 45: 4 (2003), 716–28, at p. 725. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, p. 31. MacKenzie, ‘Occidentalism’, 343. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 8. MacKenzie, ‘Marxism: A Second Wind’, 54. J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Writing Imperial History in Contemporary Context: 1970s– Present, a Personal Odyssey’, lecture given at Birmingham University, May 2011. In Propaganda and Empire, MacKenzie argued against narrow definitions of imperialism as jingoism: ‘Those who deplored jingoism were often the most fervent exponents of a “moral” imperialism’ (p. 10). See K. Grant, ‘Review: At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World’, edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 10: 2 (2009), a collection which he describes as ‘a history of the unconscious acceptance of the Empire’, and which ‘owes much to the groundwork’ laid by MacKenzie’s work and the Studies in Imperialism series. S. Ward, ‘Review: Echoes of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006), 264–78, at p. 268. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, pp. 5–7. J. Boddy, Civilising Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (Princeton, 2007). Bayly, ‘Review: John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism’, p. 363. C. A. Bayly, ‘The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760–1860: Power, Perception and Identity’ in Daunton and Halpern (eds), Empire and Others, pp. 19–41; R. Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge, 2008). Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection’, 1528. Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism’, 172.

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the power of culture and the cultures of power   92 MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, p. 100, n. 23.   93 J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1997), p. 7; MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’ to European Empires and the People, p. 1.   94 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, p. 409.   95 See also A. S. Thompson, ‘Presumed Innocent’, Times Literary Supplement (18 October 2002), p. 28.   96 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, pp. 25–6.   97 MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa, pp. 13, 195, 204–16; J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Scots and the Environment of Empire’ in MacKenzie and Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire, pp. 147–75.   98 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990), pp. 1–15, at pp. 5–6.   99 W. Beinart, ‘Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change in Southern and Central Africa’, Past and Present, 128 (1990), 162–86, at p. 180. 100 MacKenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities’, 216. 101 J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), p. 36. 102 Ibid. p. 298. 103 See Dane Kennedy, pp. 106–8. 104 MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’ to Imperialism and the Natural World, p. 4. 105 J. Sramek, ‘“Face Him Like a Briton”: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800–1875’, Victorian Studies, 48: 4 (2006), 659–64, at p. 662. 106 McCracken, ‘African History’, 245. 107 J. R. McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’, History and Theory, 42 (2003), 5–43, at p. 21 n. 63. 108 Beinart, ‘Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change’, 185. 109 Beinart, ‘African History’, 298. 110 J. McAleer, Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (Manchester, 2010). 111 D. Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988); A. Cunningham and B. Andrews (eds), Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (Manchester, 1997). 112 J. M. MacKenzie, General Editor’s Introduction to H. Tilley (ed.), with R. J. Gordon, Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester, 2007), pp. xii–xiv. 113 See, for example, MacKenzie’s General Editor’s Introductions to C. Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998); D. Kirkby and C. Coleborne (eds), Law, History and Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester, 2001); P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, 1988) all in the Studies in Imperialism series. 114 A recent example is N. Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia, 1900 to the Present (Manchester, 2011). 115 J. M. MacKenzie, General Editor’s Introduction to L. Proudfoot and D. Hall, Imperial Spaces: Placing the Irish and Scots in Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2011). 116 J. M. MacKenzie, General Editor’s Introduction to C. Ladds, Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service 1854–1949 (Manchester, forthcoming 2013).

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Sex matters: sexuality and the writing of colonial history Robert Aldrich

In 1990, among the first dozen volumes of the Studies in Imperialism series, appeared Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality, a novel and even provocative theme in a field traditionally dominated by theories and practices of colonial governance, the economic balance-sheet of empire and the collaboration and resistance of colonised peoples.1 Sex had hardly been a topic in imperial history; indeed, many would have regarded it as irrelevant or inappropriate to the great questions of scholarship. Yet the establishment of The Journal of the History of Sexuality, also in 1990, confirmed the academic legitimacy of the subject.

Sex in the colonies: Before Hyam Many currents contributed to the surge of work on the history of sexuality.2 The new social history spawned by the Annales school had focused attention on private life and marital and reproductive strategies. Growing interest in the history of medicine and psychology saw works on sexual health and illnesses, their diagnosis and treatment. Particularly important was women’s history, which gained ground in the 1970s and broadened into multifaceted gender history; studies of masculinity complemented scholarship on women in society. The first modern academic studies on the history of homosexuality appeared in the 1980s. Second-wave feminism and gay liberation, outside and inside the university, provided stimulus for study of sexual behaviours and identities. Michel Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, written between 1976 and 1984, initially academic cult reading and soon near orthodoxy, inspired studies across disciplines and exerted enormous influence even on those who did not adopt Foucault’s conclusions or post-structuralist analysis. By the 1990s, thus, historians who abstained from consideration of sexuality represented a dwindling [ 74 ]

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band, though some still squirmed at prostitution, homosexuality and copulation. The history of sexuality, broad in method, theory and subject matter, reaches far beyond fornication. As important as investigation of sexual practices has been exploration of sexual attitudes, the ways that individuals, groups and societies have structured sexual normality and reacted to deviance, and how both categories have metamorphosed over time and place. Historians have examined the mechanisms used by law, medicine and religion to regulate sexuality, and the debate sparked by permissiveness, censorship, legislation and policing. They look at representations of sexuality across the creative genres. They work on sexual hygiene, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. They trace the emergence of sexual cultures – family life and prostitution, free love and sexual continence, homosexuality and homosociality, celibacy and chastity. They write about masculinity and femininity and resistance to gender prescriptions. Scholars have researched how sexuality and gender inflect wider social relations, many positing that these count among the most powerful motors of history. Indeed, gender now forms one of the most commonly used historical categories. The days when the secrets of the bedchamber – or in an imperial situation, the bungalow, barracks and brothel – remained secret have gone. As in most areas, differences of opinion proliferate. Some feel that sexuality and gender have been pushed into too prominent a place in explaining the motivations of individuals and the interactions of colonial society. Disagreement continues about the extent of particular sexual practices and about the class-, age- and role-structured nature of behaviour, the intentions behind regulation of sexuality, and the balance of agency and exploitation in prostitution. A divide exists between an empirically based, archives documented investigation and research that allies more intentionally with post-modernist, postcolonial theoretical positions. If the ‘new imperial history’ does not shy away from sexual issues, traditional imperial history did not advance to the forefront in accommodating a sexual perspective despite extensive material in the colonial archive, ranging from ‘dirty postcards’ to learned ethnographical treatises. Kenneth Ballhatchet’s Race, Sex and Class under the Raj, published in 1980, provided a rare attempt to open the bedroom doors, but did not instigate an immediate rush on the archive doors.3 Hyam’s book brought sexuality and empire to a mainstream audience of imperial specialists. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile noting that sexuality made appearances in earlier volumes of Studies in ­Imperialism. [ 75 ]

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The first contributors indeed looked at sexual topics in prescient ways, even if they generally did not dwell on the subject. Sexuality and gender appear particularly in terms of the masculine ethos pervading colonialism and the promotion of manly virtues linked to imperial spirit and British patriotism. Early authors also uncovered references to sex and gender in music-hall songs, painting and fiction, though occasionally averting their gaze before more sustained examination. John MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire (1984) contained little on sex, but that changed with his edited Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986). J. A. Mangan moved towards the sensual aspects of the manly image of ‘grit’ and hardness, while noting Victorian fears that not all men lived up to the ideal. Jeffrey Richards wrote about the manly derring-do in 1930s films in which women played only a subsidiary or destructive role. Richards also remarked that ‘it is surely more than coincidence that many of the great imperial heroes were devoted to boys or to young men – Gordon, Rhodes, Kitchener, Stanley, BadenPowell’,4 a statement that stepped around the question of whether they were homosexually inclined. The most detailed discussion of sexuality came in Ben Shephard’s chapter on Prince Lobengula, the self-proclaimed son of the king of Matabeleland who starred in a 1900 London show on ‘Savage South Africa’. Though not taking sexuality as a central theme, Shephard enumerated the ways in which Lobengula ‘had touched a sensitive nerve in the body imperial’:5 the spectacle of semi-nude African warriors on stage; rumours that certain English women (in a contemporary’s words) ‘have petted and pampered these specimens of a lower race in a manner which must sicken those who know the facts’;6 fear about dangers to white women from African men; implicit comparisons between Europeans’ and Africans’ sexual prowess; and horror at miscegenation. Intermarriage was particularly pertinent because of Lobengula’s long-term liaison with a white woman (London officials thwarting their attempt to marry). The few pages in which Shephard discussed sexual connotations of Lobengula’s British sojourn, alongside other allusions in MacKenzie’s collection, identified themes explored by later historians: sexual stereotypes, gender roles, sexual fears and fantasies, mixed-marriage and half-caste children, the opportunities presented to colonials and migrants to the metropole. MacKenzie himself returned to sexuality in his 1988 volume on hunting, with a theme-packed paragraph reflecting on sexual aspects of the sport.7 ‘Trophies were themselves sexual emblems’ replete with the phallic symbolism of horns and antlers, he stated, adding that ‘in searching for the largest and best proportioned the hunter was studying and appropriating eugenic properties’. The hunt embodied a ‘pseudo-sexual act’, the build-up of the chase and the release of [ 76 ]

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the kill orgasmic; the hunt might represent sublimation of sexual urges. Hunters were heroised for sexy physiques and virile virtues. MacKenzie did not follow up these points (or consider the homosociality of hunting parties), but his comments shed light on the sexual presence lurking in many corners of colonial life. The other early volumes paid only passing attention to matters sexual. Sex sneaked into books on images of the army, though without detailed analysis of links between the military and masculinity or the sexual experiences of soldiers. The gendered nature of colonialist patriotism was sometimes glossed over, and counsels about sexuality in juvenile literature remained largely unquestioned. In At Duty’s Call (1988), however, W. J. Reader noted that the Victorian elite took it for granted that healthy-minded boys enjoyed fighting, and that manliness and military zeal went hand in hand. J. A. Mangan’s Making Imperial Mentalities (1990) devoted only a few lines to maternalism and concern about adolescent sexuality. The volume’s index included nothing on homosexuality, prostitution, masculinity, femininity or gender, though Mangan pleaded the general reticence concerning sexuality prevailing in public life, typified by the absence of sex education in schools.8 Sexuality was given greater space in MacKenzie’s 1990 collection on empire and the natural world through Dane Kennedy’s essay on climatic anxieties.9 Kennedy pointed to the diagnoses that sexual profligacy and sexual debility could be symptoms of neurasthenia induced by long stays in the tropics, that hot climates caused damage to ‘organs of reproduction’ and consequent infertility and that miscegenation led to degeneration. Hyam’s 1990 volume therefore arrived in a historiographical context where sexual issues had been introduced explicitly in relation to medicine and, more implicitly, in discussions about gender behaviour and roles. Subsequently, the Series published several volumes focusing directly on sexuality and gender, notably Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity of 1995 and Clare Midgley’s collection on Gender and Imperialism of 1998; then, after a hiatus, came Richard Phillips’s Sex, Politics and Empire in 2006 and Kirsty Reid’s Gender, Crime and Empire in 2007. In considering sexuality in the Series, it is useful first to revisit Hyam’s volume, then to examine these four other works. We can afterwards enquire to what degree and in what contexts sexuality penetrated other volumes. Has sexuality, post-Hyam, entered the current of scholarship on expansion represented by these hundred tomes? My aim is not to give a comprehensive overview of empire, sex and gender, nor to inventory the scholarly works that have appeared over the last decades, but rather to review the ways in which sex has appeared, as a major or minor theme, in Studies in Imperialism. [ 77 ]

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Hyam and his critics After broaching the issue in a 1976 survey of British colonialism, Ronald Hyam, in 1986, published two articles on sexuality in the widely read Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, not previously known as a forum for sex. ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’, with its memorable statement that ‘the expansion of Europe was not only a matter of “Christianity and commerce”, it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage’, introduced the idea with which Hyam would be most often associated: the colonies as lands of sexual opportunities for Britons constrained by moral codes at home. In the companion article, Hyam discussed the Crewe Circular of 1909, an attempt by authorities to combat the keeping of concubines by subalterns in the colonial service.10 This material was incorporated into his 1990 book, which provided many detailed examples of sexual liaisons involving colonials. Hyam’s work engendered strong reactions. Perhaps surprisingly, attacks primarily came not from those who felt his emphasis on the underbelly of empire was unwarranted or who denied that colonials treated the colonies as a sexual playground. Criticism came most vocally from practitioners of women’s history and gender history and those more influenced than Hyam by Foucauldian theories of power and biopolitics. Mark T. Berger’s critiques appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (with Hyam given a right of response), and elsewhere in articles by Margaret Strobel, Richard A. Voeltz, Linda Bryder and others.11 Recent appraisals of Hyam by gender historians continue in a critical vein. For Ann Laura Stoler, his book ‘exemplifies a recent twist on the theme of an unrestrictive colony and a restricted west’. With acknowledgement of Foucault’s ‘model of sexual politics’ (which she deconstructs), ‘the repressive hypothesis is what frames his [Hyam’s] argument and with it questions of power and racism remain out of his account’. Stoler adds: ‘Hyam’s narrow focus on genitalia rather than gender, on the sexual fantasies of elite white males, on “sexual relaxation” rather than rape, is only part of his problem. The sexual politics of empire has never reduced to the opportunistic possibilities prompted by repressions in Europe alone.’12 In Gender and Empire, Philippa Levine likewise distances herself: ‘Unlike Ronald Hyam, who argues that the opportunities for sexual contact in the East made a difficult environment more attractive to colonists, I see sex as a part of the politics of Empire. Sex was something that needed regulating and managing.’13 Angela Woollacott, in another study of gender and empire, gives Hyam credit for identifying sex as a driving force in [ 78 ]

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imperialism and for exposing homosexual aspects of the British experience. However, ‘while Hyam’s recognition of sexuality as an important topic was useful … the problem with his approach is that it is written from the perspective of the privileged white male coloniser, and thus sees sex only as a question of engaging in gratification or not’.14 Several writers in the Studies in Imperialism series, as we shall see, have similarly been dismissive of Hyam’s approach. These perspectives reflect developments in gender history, as well as analytical paradigms used by gender historians that differ from those of Hyam. In a prefatory note in a recent collection of his articles, Hyam has defended himself against lack of attention to theory, ‘as I had attempted to develop a “surplus energy” theory of imperialism … and had written a good deal about the interpretation of sexuality, the theory of sublimation, and my own concept of the “parergal” character of sexual activities’.15 He acknowledges the validity of some feminist criticisms, though without recanting his views about 1980s feminist history. Re-reading Hyam’s book twenty-odd years on, the breadth of his scholarship remains impressive, as does his skill in marshalling a vast amount of material on the sexual experiences of the British around the empire. In light of the criticism, it is worth looking again at his short 1990 preface, in which Hyam made it clear that his work was primarily a study of British imperial history rather than of sexuality, and especially, of gender. Perhaps anticipating charges that it centred on male Europeans, he pointed out: ‘If it seems Eurocentric, that is in part an inevitable result of concentrating on the attitudes and activities of men who ran the empire, but it is in part, I believe, an illusion, for my ways of looking at sex have become decidedly more Asian than European …’.16 The elusive second phrase pointed to Hyam’s willingness to write unsqueamishly about sexual behaviour in all its guises, another merit of the work at a time when, he added in the first chapter, ‘historians writing about empire remain extremely shy about putting sex on their agendas’.17 When some had avoided sex altogether – Hyam cited a biography of Rhodes that dispatched his sex life in a single line – Hyam wrote about prostitution, homosexuality, miscegenation and masturbation with a perspective and a language that no doubt caused fidgeting in common rooms. (‘The ejaculative mechanism varies greatly – some males spurt, other dribble’, and ‘Casement liked very tall young men, and he wanted them well hung’ were not sentences generally encountered in chronicles of colonial history.18) Worth remembering is the context in which the book was published: the AIDS epidemic, which Hyam mentions, was at its height, with Britain also living under the shadow of the Thatcher government’s Clause 28 [ 79 ]

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legislation of 1988. Indeed, John MacKenzie’s general editor’s introduction to Empire and Sexuality remarked on the ‘freedoms now being reinterpreted in light of particularly narrow bourgeois tastes, intolerant, philistinish and culturally blinkered’.19 Hyam’s open attitude to sexuality – Richard Phillips later referred to him, critically, as a ‘libertarian’ (a curiously prudish appraisal) – represented a defence of the challenge to Victorian mores posed by colonials’ libertinage as well as censure of the ‘purity-mongers’ of the 1980s. Hyam’s book, more than critics concede, anticipated later work on sexuality and gender. Mrinalini Sinha took up the theme of the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate’ Bengali that Hyam treated in a few lines, and Josephine Butler’s moral purity campaigns, which he briefly discussed, became the centrepiece of Phillips’s volume. Other studies took off from his work on sexual regulation, represented by the Crewe Circular. Hyam’s passages on prostitution led the way for fullscale works, and the connections he affirmed between masculinity and colonialism became a recurrent theme in Studies in Imperialism. I acknowledged the importance of his pages on same-sex exploits for my Colonialism and Homosexuality.20 Hyam himself has continued to work on the history of sexuality. The compilation of his essays published in 2011 includes one on the extraordinary sexual career of Kenneth Searight, who had been introduced to readers of Empire and Sexuality, as well as an intriguing new article on penises in the colonial world (measurement, size, circumcision, inferiority complexes), a subject to which he devoted several paragraphs in 1990.21 Hyam’s wholesale rejection of feminist studies is regrettable and his comments about feminist scholars are, at the least, disobliging. It is true that Hyam elided discussion about the coercive and violent nature of some sexual encounters. However, in arguing that ‘it simply is not true that native women had always to do the bidding of white men because the structure of power relations in an empire left them no alternative’,22 and in detailing ways in which prostitution might represent a choice of profession with possibilities of social mobility, Hyam implicitly recognised the agency (a post-modernist word that he did not employ) that could be exercised by women. His discussion of international conduits of prostitution foreshadowed scholarship on colonial networks and transnational aspects of colonial history. In his latitude of sexual toleration, Hyam specifically underlined the differences between native peoples and British mores; the groups that most inflamed his ire were missionaries and moral purists who mounted campaigns, fuelled with European and Christian convictions, against practices considered natural and pleasurable by indigenous peoples. Hyam’s central point that the empire, for good or evil, provided a [ 80 ]

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range of sexual opportunities remains unassailable, and it would be difficult to contest his assertion that sex provided one of the perks of imperialism. His view that sexual peccadilloes were largely ‘parergal’ (‘recreational sidelines, subordinate interests’), however, has not stood the test of time. Historians and biographers have increasingly linked private and public life and now grant sexuality a larger place in determining imperial policy than Hyam cautiously allowed. The academic study of sexuality and gender has moved on considerably since Hyam’s publication, yet his work stands as the defining milestone in the history of sexuality and imperialism.

Sexuality and gender The next major appearance of sexuality in the Studies in Imperialism series came with Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity, published in 1995 and widely hailed by critics.23 Discussing the ‘imperial social formation’ in Britain and India, Sinha examined four controversies: the Ilbert Bill of 1883, which allowed Indian magistrates in country stations to judge Europeans, government responses to Indians’ volunteering for the army in the wake of Russian belligerence in 1885, the establishment the following year of a Public Service Commission charged with promoting entry into the administration for Indians, and the Indian campaign against the raising of the age of consent for females in 1891. The originality of Sinha’s study was to explore all of these crises through connections with colonial masculinity, the contrast between the perceived ‘manly’ Englishman and the ‘effeminate’ Bengali babu. Sinha shows how both British and Indians read sex into the debates, as when a British commentator on the Ilbert Bill thundered: ‘Is it seriously meant that natives who practice polygyny, treat their wives as caged birds … who immolate infants of tender age to marriage, who compel infant widows to remain widows till death – are as such competent to try European men and women?’24 The British degraded Bengali men by attacking their physical weakness and lack of martial aptitude; new cults of physical fitness and military service provided ways to redeem Indian masculinity. With opposition to the raising of the age of consent, Indians further reasserted masculine privileges through an affirmation of patriarchy. Using concepts from gender studies and post-modernism, but through careful examination of the ‘densely historicised context’ of the late 1800s,25 Sinha’s volume deciphered the sexual texts and sub-texts of British-Indian encounters. Sinha’s domain was sexuality and gender in one country, while Hyam ranged over centuries and continents. Hyam wrote largely about men, but Sinha considered as well women’s responses to selected [ 81 ]

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conflicts (though noting the lack of concern with abuse of youthful wives in opposition to the 1891 bill). Sinha’s approach differed from that of Hyam, whose work she acknowledged in a footnote, primarily by looking not at the opportunities empire offered for sex, but at the opportunities empire produced for a sexualisation of debate on native issues. Both, however, worked with the notions of colonialist stereotypes of masculinity (and its opposite) and drew parallels between debates taking place in Britain and in the colonies in the 1800s. Hyam underlined links between colonialism and the libido of the colonisers; Sinha tied rehabilitation of Indian masculinity to nascent anti-colonialist nationalism. Three years after Sinha, Clare Midgley encompassed a series of international case studies, all but one on women, in an edited volume on gender and imperialism.26 Her preface explained that the collection constituted a challenge to traditional colonial history, not just examples of gender as a theme within imperial history. ‘Post-colonial theory’, she affirmed, ‘has effectively deconstructed Imperial History [itself] as a powerful form of colonial discourse.’27 Colonial history as a scholarly edifice must be reconstructed from the ground up, with gender a key building block. Midgley’s introduction noted that the subject of women and gender, on the one hand, and imperialism on the other, was still not ‘a comfortable marriage’,28 but she maintained that gender counted among the ‘crucial shapers and differentiators of colonial experiences’.29 She listed themes for particular attention: white women and imperialism, the experience of colonised women, masculinity, sexuality, and gender and colonial discourse. The chapters in Midgley’s work bear the influence of feminist and gender theory, and Midgley’s criticism of Hyam (‘he refuses to engage directly with questions of unequal race and gender-based power relations’30) was not surprising. Jane Haggis’ ‘non-recuperative’ history of white women and colonialism most obviously deployed the concepts and vocabulary (‘discourse’, ‘agency’, ‘hegemony’) of postcolonialism, reflected too in the positioning of ‘my secular location in the post-colonial world of the late twentieth century’.31 The other chapters retained an approach more habitual for colonial historians. Although each essay had something to say about sexuality, several contributions more explicitly looked at sexual issues. Himami Bannerji, on the Indian age of consent – a subject treated from a different perspective than Sinha – theorised about the self-appointed role of the colonial state as a guardian of morality. Sexuality appeared in Marilyn Lake’s chapter concerning Australian feminists’ views of white male abuses of Aboriginal women, and in one by Hilary Beckles on the anti-natal practices of enslaved Caribbean women. Barbara [ 82 ]

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Bush on ‘white women, race and imperial politics’ included discussion of sexual liaisons between white women and black men in Britain. Midgley’s essays thereby revealed various female responses to colonial encounters and demonstrated how generalised concern about female sexuality influenced colonial regulation. After Midgley’s book, a gap occurred in the Studies in Imperialism series in volumes specifically on sexuality until Richard Phillips’s Sex, Politics and Empire in 2006.32 It bears the subtitle ‘a postcolonial geography’, and Phillips argues for a spatial perspective on sexuality and gender politics, using case studies of Bombay, South Africa and Sierra Leone. His theme is not sexual practice per se but the ways in which the moral purity movement took root (or did not) in British colonies, the conduits by which journalists, letter-writers and t­ ravellers conveyed and shared knowledge of the campaign and the effects that the movement wrought. Phillips’s work wears a heavy armour of references to such theorists as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, as well as to specialists of gender studies. (Hyam is castigated for an ‘ahistorical and Eurocentric understanding of sexuality’.33) His ‘book’s most sustained contribution to post-colonial criticism revolves around its elaboration of the spatiality of imperial sexual politics and more generally imperial power’.34 The conclusion links this with efforts ‘to forge a truly transformative – and thus liberating – sexuality politics’.35 In ‘provincialising sexual politics’,36 Phillips uses the moral purity campaigns of the late 1800s to understand ‘peripheral productivity’ by local individuals, associations and newspapers in the colonies. The campaign was especially strong in Bombay. By contrast, the fight against regulated prostitution (and the Contagious Diseases Act) gained little traction in South Australia and Sierra Leone; though venereal disease rates rose high, missionaries and moralists failed to mobilise. Phillips shows how such mundane issues as the financial cost of enforcing the acts, rather than moral stances, swayed politicians’ decisions there. However, moralists found alternative means to combat vice, the different responses allowing for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of imperial sexuality politics. The value of a disaggregated approach became apparent in Kirsty Reid’s 2007 Gender, Crime and Empire. Her study of ‘convicts, settlers and the state in early colonial Australia’, focusing on Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), follows a sexual thread woven deeply through settler society. Questions of morality, its perceived absence in the convict system and the quest to secure respectability were essentially about sexual behaviour in normative, irregular and deviant forms. Sex appeared in conversations and controversy everywhere in Van Diemen’s Land. The peccadilloes of early officials created scandal. [ 83 ]

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Convict women were thought little more than prostitutes, but authorities nevertheless curtained assignment of them as labourers, predicting further moral risk. Observers castigated penal settlements at Hobart Town and Port Arthur as cesspools of filth. Right-thinking officials made it their mission to clean up Van Diemen’s Land and re-moralise prisoners, gaolers and those who ruled over them. Decrees, sermons and reports by committees investigating vice valorised marriage and childbearing (within holy wedlock). Officials encouraged free immigrants in an effort to transform Tasmania into a respectable society purged of convict license. Unnatural vice came in for particular concern, especially with sodomy sensationalised by the Molesworth Commission in the 1830s: endemic sodomy, moralists bemoaned, represented the most despicable vice. The prevalence of situational homosexuality among convicts became a key argument for ending transportation. According to reformers, men and women already morally compromised before their exile, now through brutality and vice in the Antipodes mutated into moral savages: harlots, adulterers, sodomites. The convict system’s failings ‘were allegedly most manifest in the disordered bodies, ungoverned passions and licentious sexual appetites of the convicts’.37 Reid locates many tensions of early colonial society in sexual behaviour; vice not only offended the morals of the respectable classes, but the immorality of convicts (and the transport system itself) temporarily sabotaged hopes for self-government and prosperity for honest landowners and upstanding members of the British race. Sex was therefore not just a question of genital practices – willing or coerced, pleasurable or painful, legitimate or proscribed. It was, she suggests, the very benchmark on which the intentions of the colonised, the achievements of the settlers and the moral nobility of governments in Hobart and London were judged. Gender, Crime and Empire is particularly accomplished because of the detailed portrait that Reid paints of diverse sexual cultures on the colonial frontier, and in the way that she connects sex with politics and law, social structures and economics, and the aspirations of penologists, humanitarians and the rising colonial gentry. She provides insight into specific issues – for instance, how flogging violated the corporeal integrity of a man’s body as well as his masculine identity – and reveals the dilemmas of an imperial project designed to regenerate the depraved. Eschewing jargon and foregrounded theorising, but informed by work in cognate fields, Reid x-rays the sexual interior of an emerging society. The books by Hyam, Midgley, Sinha, Phillips and Reid illustrate various approaches to the history of sexuality and mark different [ 84 ]

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moments in the rapid evolution of the field. Hyam recovered or discovered many details of male experiences, particularly of non-normative sexual behaviour, in a colonial world that opened paths to sexual waywardness, but he also signposted the ways officialdom tried to control and regulate sexual licence while tolerating or encouraging ‘immoral’ transactions. His emphasis rests primarily on sex within colonial society, the lived experiences of individuals. Midgley’s contributors, writing largely about women, advance an overarching project of reconceptualising the history of empire to include gender. Sinha uses specific case studies to explore the relationships of sexuality with empire, the shared and different attitudes between colonial elites in Britain and India. Reid combines the various approaches to trace the arterial system through which sexual matters spread throughout the colonial body politic.

Searching for sex in the Studies in Imperialism series What about sex in the other volumes of Studies in Imperialism? Finding detailed discussion in a number of them, given their themes, would be surprising, though there are few subjects that do not potentially allow comment in some way on sexuality. It would be fastidious to identify every allusion to sex in such a large shelf of volumes. Nevertheless, it is possible to consider a sample of those most liable to discuss sexuality. The titles of chapters and index entries map significant discussions. Indexes are not infallible, but a cloud of words – eroticism, sexuality, homosexuality, sodomy, gender, masculinity, femininity, birth control, prostitution and venereal diseases – signal pertinent sections. Sexuality has appeared most often, and in most detailed fashion, in three areas: sexualised images and stereotypes in various genres and media; masculinity and sexuality in the armed forces; and sexual behaviour by British men and women and colonised peoples. Threading through these themes runs commentary on parallels between colonial sexual issues and those in Britain. One now standard theme is the way that figures of the alluring foreigner, the manly man (or his opposite), the femme fatale and the respectable women are conjured up.38 Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush’s collection on Asia in Western fiction, published the same year as Hyam’s book, does not disappoint.39 Gavin Hambly’s essay details the stereotype of insatiable Muslim sexual appetites, from paintings of slave markets and odalisques, through the harem in novels and opera, down to 1950s press reports about King Farouk’s sex life. Milton Osborne, on Indochina, argues that French novels ‘show European [ 85 ]

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men obsessed by native women, and suffering difficulties and disasters in consequence’.40 Prostitution gets explicit mention, however, only in an essay referring to Stella Benson’s novels and her campaign against child prostitution in Hong Kong. Homosexuality appears just in relation to portrayal of Chinese culture in novels by Hermann Hesse and Marina Warner, and in passing mention of a homosexual romance set in Japan. The volume includes brief references to E. M. Forster and Pierre Loti, and to concubines and Eurasians, but sex occupies less space here than authors imply that it did in colonial fiction. It gets more play, however, than in Tim Youngs’ book on travellers in Africa, which seems unconcerned with sexuality, despite the scholarly vogue for the sexual ‘othering’ of Africans.41 Anandi Ramamurthy’s later book on colonial advertising returns to sexual stereotypes.42 A dishevelled African woman in a Lever Brother soap advertisement did not evoke desire so much as repulsion, but other soap adverts feature seductively unclothed women. Ceylon tea producers favoured decorative, passive and servile Tamil tea-pickers (‘the belle of Lipton’s Dambatene Ceylon Tea Gardens’) as objects for male fantasy. Meanwhile, a rugged settler, clad in tropical whites and pith helmet, standing in a manly pose as he smoked Player’s Digger cigarettes, incarnated virility and patriotism, virtues brought together to sell colonial tobacco. Complementary to Ramamurthy is Emma Robert­­­ son’s study of chocolate and empire.43 Robertson identifies significant links between sex and the ‘chocolate empire’, in particular, the long-standing association of chocolate with female sexuality and its use in courtship, romance and love. She illustrates sexual innuendos in advertising, from fetishised housewives to skimpily-clad dairymaids, from desexualised African children to happy-go-lucky black women (Roundtree’s ‘so grateful, so genial, so good’ Honeybunch). Another arresting advertisement hints at lesbianism with two wartime women pausing from work in the field: ‘These sturdy young amazons seem to like what they’re drinking and they’re pretty fit on it, too.’44 Robertson also shows how the public culture of chocolate generally wrote out reference to the actual labour of women, whether British or colonised. These two books, alongside other volumes’ discussions of sex in variety shows and on stage, confirm the frequency of sexualised portrayal of subject peoples. Another area in which sex has showed up with regularity, though perhaps not so often as one might anticipate, relates to colonial soldiery and the police. Neither J. W. M. Hichberger’s work on the military in British art, nor Edward Spiers’ The Victorian Soldier in Africa discusses sexuality.45 The index of David M. Anderson and David Killingray’s Policing the Empire (1991) contains no entries for gender, brothels or [ 86 ]

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homosexuality; there is a short passage on the regulation of sexuality in Queensland, and a brief mention of the blind eye turned to prostitution in the Klondike, where police officers, contrary to their Australian counterparts, saw prostitution as conducive to public order. (The difference confirms Phillips’s imperative for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of different policies and perspectives throughout the empire.) These seem a limited discussion of sex, especially since colonial police were tasked with controlling vice. In John MacKenzie’s Popular Imperialism and the Military (1992), sex is evident mostly in Dave Russell’s chapter on the music hall, a reminder of generalised wink-wink, nudge-nudge caricatures of randy soldiers evidenced by one 1887 ditty: ‘You all know what a soldier is / At least the nursemaids do, / He’s very fond of making love, / He doesn’t care who to.’46 The character of the lusty errant soldier, destined to doomed romance, competed with the suggestion that a woman’s proper love and respect (and presumably sexual favours) provided just rewards for valour. Songs also linked manhood, sexual prowess and readiness to volunteer for service. MacKenzie’s chapter emphasises the heroic myth of the brave manly soldier, but he succinctly refers to soldiers whose sexual tastes did not conform to the heterosexual model. ‘Chinese’ Gordon was ‘a celibate military priest’ with superhuman goodness; MacKenzie does not mention Gordon’s kinky pleasure in bathing young boys. On Lawrence of Arabia, MacKenzie is again concise and discreet, describing him as ‘the puritan obsessed with the sexuality he rejected’ but alluding to how Lawrence, lauded as a hero in the 1930s, by the 1960s had become for biographers ‘a psychological case study’.47 The British navy has enjoyed a long reputation for sexual vigour and impropriety. Mary Conley’s volume on naval manhood, however, is short on the sex life of sailors (sexuality, venereal disease and prostitution are missing in the index) though she considers sodomy.48 Conley’s emphasis lies on the prevalence of punishments for sodomy (31 per cent of executions from 1700 until capital punishment for the offence was abolished in 1861). She suggests that the navy fostered male intimacy and situational homosexuality, despite efforts by the Admiralty to fight it, and explains why it was considered detrimental: an unnatural act with the potential to disorient hierarchies and discipline. Conley mentions that in 1863, 10 per cent of sailors suffered from venereal diseases, though rates declined with better hygiene education and prophylaxis. Given such statistics, and the evolution of law and naval policy, further discussion would be rewarding. In David Killingray and David Omissi’s Guardians of Empire (1999), ‘vice’ scores greater attention. Douglas Peers, on British troops in India in the early 1800s, confirms that venereal disease and alcoholism [ 87 ]

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constituted main concerns. More than 30 per cent of European troopers were hospitalised for VD treatment, and how to regulate prostitution (and whether coercive detention of prostitutes in lock hospitals reduced rates of infection) exercised officials, as medicine mingled with morality. Timothy Parsons, on the King’s Rifles in the early twentieth century, provides interesting comparisons. Whereas British soldiers in India generally remained unmarried, commanders encouraged askaris to live with wives or partners, and three-quarters did so in peacetime. VD remained a problem, with infection rates soaring to half of the rankers during wartime, and decisions about whether to sanction, combat or ignore prostitution preoccupied officials in Africa just an in India; there existed parallel concerns about interracial intercourse. If British soldiers were thought to possess healthily pressing sexual needs, Africans were regarded as afflicted with uncontrollable passions. In a concluding essay, Killingray reviews the incidence of concubinage and discusses the short- and long-term changes in social behaviour affected by sexual encounters. The Studies in Imperialism authors have also reflected regularly on sex and civilian populations in the empire, though the extent of coverage is mixed. Several volumes on Scots in the empire, including Marjorie Harper’s work, seem to have nothing on sexuality.49 In John MacKenzie and Nigel R. Dalziel’s work, a comprehensive index on ‘the Scots and …’ – agriculture, business, culture all the way to universities and urban life – misses out on sex, leaving the impression that Scots or the indexer felt little concern for such matters.50 Robert Bickers on the British in China exhibits a livelier interest. In a section on ‘boundary maintenance’, Bickers examines how sexual mores worked along racial lines to preserve European respectability. In public, sex remained a taboo, and Europeans’ practice of taking concubines declined as the years advanced. Intermarriage was frowned upon, and prohibited until 1927 for the Shanghai Municipal Police. Contrary to widespread views about the eroticisation of the East, Bickers argues that colonists saw Chinese women and Eurasians (at least before the 1930s) as unattractive and not sexually desirable. Prostitution nevertheless flourished, especially after the arrival of Japanese and Russians – a fifth of Russian women in Shanghai earned money selling sexual services – and there was much tolerance for Anglo-Russian liaisons. Considerable segregation continued in the international settlement, with Chinese men barred from European brothels and massage parlours,51 again evidence of the variety of sometimes separate, but often overlapping, sexual cultures in colonial cities. Several essays in a companion volume edited by Bickers and Christian Henriot on European communities throughout Asia touch on [ 88 ]

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sex, especially relating to prostitution in Shanghai and Harbin: so widespread was it that the League of Nations carried out an investigation in the 1930s, a report that provides ample material for historians. Christopher Munn’s essay, on a scandal in Hong Kong in the 1850s, offers a model study of how sex reveals points of tension in the colonial world of the previous century. Daniel Richard Caldwell, records Munn, won appointment as Protector of the Chinese and Licenser of Brothels; unusually, he married a Chinese. After an associate’s arrest, allegations were levelled at Caldwell that he owned properties used for prostitution. As rumours circulated that his wife had spent her early life in a bordello, Caldwell was publicly labelled a brothel-keeper and his wife a prostitute. Questions were also raised about Caldwell’s racial identity, since he was born in St Helena and raised in Singapore. A commission of enquiry declared him unfit for public service (technically because of dubious financial and regulatory dealings involving pirates), and he was dismissed, though he found a new career as an arbitrator in Chinese disputes and won rehabilitation to head a quasi-official secret police force. The episode provides much insight into miscegenation and prostitution, the impact of sexual issues on individual careers and public life, and the sexual anxieties besetting settlers and officials. Though gender has attracted much attention in the Studies in Imperialism series, the sex life of colonial women (at least the respectable sort) has been less thoroughly investigated. Katie Pickles, on the Imperial Order Daughters of Empire, remarks, for example, only on the way the association promoted maternalism; the genteel society probably steered away from explicitly sexual issues.53 Mary A. Procida’s Married to the Empire offers a work on British women in India.54 Procida’s discussion of sexuality centres on the perceived contrast for Europeans between the weak, sickly and degenerate state of Indian women and the robust, healthy nature of Anglo-Indians. They viewed women in the zenana through sexualised lenses, seeing the women’s quarters as venues of rampant sexuality and unchecked fecundity. Not only was Indian women’s sexuality diseased (often literally so in British eyes), but the zenana incubated premature menses and pelvic troubles. (Other observers, however, looked admiringly at the zenana.) British women as a consequence assigned themselves a mission to uplift local women. On British women’s sex lives, Procida offers few comments, but remarks on the paucity of the documentary record and the difficulty of arriving at generalisations. She does note, however, the desexualisation of male servants by British women and the absence of fears of sexual advances from Indians (a convincing but unpredicted argument given general perceptions about colonials’ obsession with [ 89 ]

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dangers to white women). Cecily Jones also considers white women in the colonies, in this case, in colonial North Carolina and Barbados. She reveals the mechanisms through which elites marginalised white women accused of sexual immorality (for example, ostracism, denial of poor relief, interdictions on interracial marriage and fines imposed on mothers of mixed-race children). Regulation and control of white female sexuality was, she argues, the foremost concern of the plantocracy in ­ evertheless subverted the slave-based societies. Poor white women n codes of respectability, especially through sexual liaisons with black men; the mulatto children that resulted posed a particular threat to boundaries of race. With very little status to lose other than perceived respectability, some of the women dared to breach the parameters of sexual respectability.55 Obedience to puritanical standards as a signifier of respectability was not limited to Europeans abroad. A. Martin Wainwright’s work on South Asians in Britain discovers pervasive concerns about immorality.56 The British sometimes accused middle-class Indian residents in the metropole of lax morals, but Indian parents, too, worried about the demoralising effects of life in Europe on their progeny: colonisers and the colonised elite found unity in public disapproval of sexual license and vice. Both groups disavowed miscegenation, with a few Indian parents cutting off allowances of children involved in interracial liaisons, and Britons shunning compatriots who crossed the colour line. British and the Indian elites alike considered immorality a contagion that could spread from the lower classes. Wainwright concludes that class rather than ethnicity predominated concerning proper sexual behaviour: ‘at a cultural level [the view] was truly imperial, since it was mutual in its origin and appreciation’.57 Heather Streets’s volume on martial races provides another comparative perspective on British and indigenous virility, embodied here in Scottish Highlanders, Sikhs and Gurkhas, all imperial ‘races’ vaunted for valour and manliness.58 Readers hoping for details of the sexual conquests of soldiers and the marital arrangements of the martial will be frustrated, but the author gives insight into behavioural ideals. Streets references earlier work on the chivalric manliness of British soldiers versus the effeminate nature of the Bengali, but cites such colonial-era defences as a newspaper article entitled ‘A Plea for the Hindus as a Warlike People’. Soldiers should be manly, but they also proved seductive. The kilt revealed sexiness; the magazine of a non-kilt-wearing regiment lamented: ‘We read so much of the kilt … that we may be pardoned if at times we look at its swinging folds with envy. And we know that the women adore it!’59 What the Scots in practice got up to, however, is little discussed. Streets does dwell a bit [ 90 ]

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on the impact of Butler’s moral purity campaign, which has provided rich material for several Studies in Imperialism authors. Connections between sexual concerns in the colonies and repercussions at home run through various volumes. Diane Robinson-Dunn, on the harem and slavery, explains how European stereotypes (male sexual lubricity in the Levant, the slavery of women cloistered for sexual pleasures, fears for white women captured for sexual slavery) worked into debates on the ‘woman question’ in Britain.60 The Ottoman harem as a quintessential symbol of ‘Eastern barbarism’ and ‘Eastern sensuality’ could be manipulated to different ends. Feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards compared the status of British women with those in Oriental harems, both victims of gender inequality. Conservatives, opposing property rights and the suffrage for women, countered that Western marriage was the opposite of harem horrors. RobinsonDunn discovers that pro- and anti-feminists shared presuppositions about the helplessness of women, the need for male protectors and the duty to moralise men, as well as a general assumption that vice was simply un-English. She also acknowledges (as did Procida for the zenana) that a contrary image of the harem circulated, not as a den of sexual servitude but a realm of female gentility. These treatments of sexuality – scandals, anxieties about immorality, underlying paradigms of masculinity and femininity, the challenges to normative behaviour, the association of British morality campaigns with imperial debates – illustrate some of the sexual dynamics in colonialism. The Studies in Imperialism volumes adopt varying research strategies, from close reading of creative literature and iconography to study of judicial records, legislative debates and the pamphlets of morals campaigners. They confirm the multiple opportunities for sexual encounters in colonial settings, as Hyam had demonstrated, but – as his critics added – also show the intertwining of sex with politics in general, and with gender politics in particular. They identify sexual cultures through the colonial world (and the cohabitation of opposing or complementary ones in each colony), but also point to views about morality shared by the different groups. Even if sexuality has not been a primary theme for many Studies in Imperialism authors, it cannot be said that issues of sexuality have been occluded. The charge could be made, however, that consideration has still relatively seldom been given to issues of abuse and exploitation. Absent, too, has been more sustained discussion of miscegenation and the fates of ‘temporary’ wives and half-caste children. Though much attention is devoted to masculinity in the military, and to the sexual appetites of soldiers and settlers, such concepts as masculinity, and stereotypes about African or Asian sexuality and morality, are [ 91 ]

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seldom fully interrogated (to use the post-modern formulation). A few assumptions (e.g. the heterosexuality of most colonials, the easy availability of native partners, the promiscuity of soldiers on the prowl for sex) are casually made. Where sexuality does not show up in the volumes is interesting. Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews’ collection on Western medicine contains only a brief reference to HIV/AIDS in Africa, yet it would be good to know more about how Western medicine (treatment of venereal disease, birth control, gynaecology) was a ‘contested field’ in this arena. Chloe Campbell on eugenics in Kenya includes only sparse references to birth control, miscegenation and concern about female circumcision. The contributors to J. S. Bratton’s work on the empire on stage mention sexuality only in terms of the desert island and deep jungle as comic sites of libidinous desire. The sporting ideal of clean minds and clean bodies is about as close as sex comes into a volume on the imperial game of cricket. (What about the players’ sex lives?) A volume on colonial law refers to sexual classifications in female lunatic asylums, and has a few pages on the development of women’s history, but not much else. Sex seems to have played no role in soldier settlements, and is little covered in studies of migrants. Sex is mostly invisible in a work on colonial exhibitions. Sex is also absent in the Arctic, at least in a Studies in Imperialism book on the polar region; perhaps the climate chilled sexual heat.61 A final example of reticence on the sex question relates to education. Jeffrey Richards says almost nothing about sexuality in a study of imperialism and juvenile literature, other than to refer to models of muscular masculinity. The index to Kathryn Castle’s volume on imperial schoolchildren includes a mere three references to ‘race and sexuality’, limited to remarks about admiration for martial races and romanticised images of the white woman.62 In J. A. Mangan’s collection on education, sexuality, homosexuality, prostitution, masculinity, gender and even women are not to be found in the index.63 Deborah Gaitskell’s essay in the volume, on black girls’ education in South Africa, nevertheless concerns gender, and Donald LeinsterMackay’s chapter on the preparatory school reprints a satirical poem by an Eastbourne headmaster about ‘The Feminine Boy’ who refuses to play cricket. The poem invites further analysis about physical attributes, sport and imperial virtue (and there is a homoerotic twist as well). Perhaps more could have been said on sex, and on admonitions to clean living, with the sexual continence that implied, in juvenile literature, schooling and imperial youth cultures.64

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Sex in colonial history Drawing up a balance sheet, well over a third of the Studies in Imperialism volumes have included some treatment of sexual issues, as the primary theme, through sustained attention or more episodic mention. Occasionally, especially in the earlier volumes, discussions remained brief and allusive, as contributors declined to probe indiscreetly into the sexual behaviours of figures they profiled, and did not follow up tantalising incidents, quotations or situations that suggested more extensive analysis. Thorough readers of the Series discover the nexus of relationships between sex and colonialism, from sexualised images in advertising to cults of respectable colonial masculinity and femininity, ‘family values’ and marriage. They find complex sexual cultures from Hobart to Hong Kong. They see how indigenous mores worried imperial officials, but also how colonials frequently went astray. They apprehend the ways in which sex was intimately linked to the exercise of predominantly male power: use and control of women sexual partners, attempts to curb native vice, promotion of heroic heterosexual virility and maternal femininity. Readers are offered counter-arguments to received notions, among them Bickers on the lack of eroticisation of Chinese women, and Procida on the lack of fear about rape in India. They discern the intertwining of sex abroad and at home in debates, for instance, about marriage in Britain as sex slavery. They see how metropolitan moral purity campaigns played out on the colonial frontier and how colonial issues forced debate at home. They learn about sexual values shared between colonisers and colonised, such as defence of patriarchy and (public) disapprobation of vice. Only five or six books in the Series have taken sexuality and gender as a primary theme; ‘sexuality’ figures in only a couple of titles or sub-titles, gender in three, masculinity in three (femininity in none and women in a single title), with one reference to the harem and another to eugenics. Given the prominence of sexuality in some publishing lists, it seems slightly underrepresented in the Studies in Imperialism series, though only someone privy to inside information would know how manuscripts were commissioned, proposed or declined; unsurprisingly, not every volume has placed sexuality or gender high among its priorities. A critical reader might judge that sexuality and gender have not yet fully become standard thematic or analytical tropes to the same measure as the army, migration, education and representations of empire in popular culture. Sex does appear in a persistent fashion, but sometimes as a slightly awkward presence, either evoking limited interest or provoking authorial reticence. The way that sexual [ 93 ]

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matters do show up, even when issues are not pursued, detailed or fully interpreted, nevertheless underlines its importance: sex as lived experiences in the colonies, a point of friction between the colonised and colonisers (and, indeed, between different groups in each cohort), an ingredient, and sometimes determinant, of imperial policy and the exercise of power, and a highly visible trace in the popular culture of imperialism. The Studies in Imperialism series has rendered valuable service in identifying and exploring these issues. In the wider historiography of colonialism and sexuality, themes similar to those in the Series have been explored. Philippa Levine’s and Angela Woollacott’s general works on gender and empire, building on a now well-established research domain, have been mentioned. Studies of colonial women that devote sustained attention to sexuality are illustrated by one on female convicts in Australia. Imperial masculinity continues to inspire writers, from a volume on sexuality in colonial Massachusetts to another on ‘how gender politics provoked the Spanish-American and Philippines-American Wars’. Several authors have written on prostitution and its regulation in the British, French and Japanese empires. Sexually transmitted diseases have come in for analysis in places such as on Canada, and sex crimes are the topic for a volume on Southern Rhodesia. Scholars have begun to study miscegenation and métissage, and social Creolisation, in various imperial situations. General connections between sex, the family and colonialism have begun to attract attention, as seen in a book on India. Homosexuality has become a significant theme, the gay history of Australia and New Zealand perhaps the most thoroughly investigated. Scholarship in history and cultural studies has deciphered foundational sexual encounters between Europeans and native peoples, and there is research on sexual perversion and ethnographic knowledge. The sex life of colonial worthies (and the less worthy) is now an accepted theme in biography. The multifarious embodiments of intersections between colonialism and sexuality in history and in the archival record have been investigated by, among others, Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, Anne McClintock, Ann Laura Stoler and Anjali Arondekar.65 Though this represents a far from comprehensive catalogue of publications and themes, it illustrates the multiple ways of looking at sexuality in colonial situations and the popularity that imperial sexuality and gender have won as academic subjects, at least among scholars writing in English (and generally on the British empire). Several traits about imperial sex suggest themselves.66 One is the centrality of race and sexuality: concerns about establishing and maintaining settler populations pure in bloodlines and in morality. [ 94 ]

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Another is the continuing clash between sexual respectability and the challenges to it from prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, mixed-raced liaisons (consensual, commercial or coerced) and native practices. A corollary is the continuing normative effort to instil morality in colonial and colonised populations, reflected in the importance of sexual matters in the biopolitics of colonial rule, and the debates and campaigns that sexual issues inspired. This research evidences, too, the development of complex, evolving and variegated sexual cultures – proper and otherwise – under colonial flags. Finally, recent scholarship proves how sexuality and gender concerns infiltrated the whole colonial enterprise, from the dynamics of conquest, through lived experiences, knowledge production and policy formulation, to the complicated sexual legacies left behind by the colonisers. Notwithstanding the formidable number of works on sexuality, gender and colonialism, historians have not exhausted the theme. Despite Phillips’s case studies, there is not a general overview of the imposition of laws concerning sex in the British colonies and the ways those laws evolved and were resisted. A particularly interesting volume might look at the maintenance of, and opposition to, British sex legislation and attitudes in the post-independence colonies. There is as yet no volume on lesbianism or affective connections between women in the empire, nor is there one on birth control. It would be good to see more studies of sexual cultures in particular cities or regions, works that bring together, in documentation and analysis, marriage and extra-marital relations, homosexuality and heterosexuality, European and non-European practices and attitudes. Further studies of the means by which sexual issues insinuated themselves into debates on labour, governance and the transformation of social structures would be welcomed. There is more to say about the circulation of sexual ideas, ideologies and images, and about knowledge production (from medical theories to pornography) around the empire, and about the individuals, societies and transnational networks that served as conduits for exchanges. How non-Western sexual practices figured in Western sexology and the ideologies of sexual emancipation movements would make an interesting study. Difficult as it might be to evidence, more on the actual sexual practices of colonials and colonised populations would be fascinating, with studies of the sex lives of particular groups providing nuances to generalisations. One would like to know more about how sexual and gender behaviours, attitudes and stereotypes inflected cross-cultural and interracial encounters, how imperial regimes remoulded sexual practices and attitudes, and what has been the sexual heritage of colonialism. Various incidents and episodes (such as scandals) could serve as micro[ 95 ]

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histories for further analysis. Comparative studies of different empires would certainly be enlightening; authors in the Studies in Imperialism series occasionally speak of the contrasts between the British, French, Belgian and other cases, but there remains very limited scholarship on sexuality in other empires. The postmodern moment – with an emphasis on representations of the ‘other’ and a cultural approach – has passed, and there is a renewed focus in colonial history on issues of governance, law and institutions, as well as the lived experiences of those in the empire. This new turn encourages further archives-based research on the social and political history of sex in colonial societies. The Manchester Studies in Imperialism, through Hyam’s work and in subsequent volumes, has testified to the diversity of approaches to colonial sexuality and provided a mandate for further investigation. A generation ago, few eminent colonial historians took prolonged gazes, or even quick peeks, into the history of sexuality. The situation has changed markedly since Hyam commented on the scholarly blinkers surrounding sexuality in the empire. Present-day imperial historians are seriously remiss if they fail to look long and hard at sexuality and gender, no matter how far removed the objects in their focus initially seem from the colonial bedchamber.

Notes  1 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990).  2 For a historiographical overview, see Stephen Garton, Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution (London, 2004).  3 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London, 1980).  4 J. Richards, ‘Boy’s Own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s’ in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986), p. 148.  5 B. Shephard, ‘Showbiz Imperialism: The Case of Peter Lobengula’ in MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture, p. 109.  6 Quoted by Shephard, ‘Showbiz Imperialism ‘, p. 103.  7 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), pp. 42–3.  8 J. A. Mangan (ed.), Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1990), p. 108.  9 John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990). 10 Ronald Hyam, ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14: 2 (1986) and ‘Concubinage and the Colonial Service: Silberrad and the Crew Circular, 1909’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14 (1986); both reprinted in his Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 363–400 and 417–39, respectively. 11 Mark T. Berger, ‘Imperialism and Sexual Exploitation: A Response to Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality’ and Hyam’s reply in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17: 1 (1988). On Hyam’s book, see Margaret Strobel, ‘Sex and Work in the British Empire’, Radical History Review, 54 (1992), 177–86; Richard A. Voeltz, ‘The British Empire, Sexuality, Feminism and Ronald Hyam’, European

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Review of History, 3: 1 (1996), 41–5; and Linda Bryder, ‘Sex, Race and Colonialism: An Historiograhical Review’, International History Review, 20: 4 (1998), 806–22. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 175–6. Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), p. 134. Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (London, 2006), p. 89. Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, p. 363. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, p. vii. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. pp. 7, 37. MacKenzie in Hyam, p. ix. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London, 2003). Hyam, ‘Penis Envy and “Penile Othering” in the Colonies and America’ in Understanding the British Empire, pp. 401–16. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, p. 207. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). Quoted in ibid. p. 45. Ibid. pp. 11 and 12. Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998). Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 1. Ibid. p. 6. Ibid. p. 9. Haggis in Ibid. Richard Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (Manchester, 2006). Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 220. Ibid. p. 228. Ibid. p. 59. Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2007), p. 174. Though it is not part of Studies in Imperialism, reference should be made to John MacKenzie’s Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), which takes issue with work inspired by Edward Said, including the accusation that sexualised stereotypes formed part of the arsenal used to justify imperialist conquest. Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush (eds), Asia in Western Fiction (Manchester, 1990). Ibid. p. 165. Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester, 1994). Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester, 2003), pp. 54, 120, 157. Emma Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009). Ibid. p. 49. J. W. M. Hichberger, Images of the Army (Manchester, 1988); Edward M. Spiers, The Victorian Soldier in Africa (Manchester, 2004). John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950 (Manchester, 1992), p. 61. Ibid. pp. 127–34. Mary Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester, 2009). Marjorie Harper, Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars (Manchester, 1998). John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007).

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writing imperial histories 51 Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture, Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester, 1999). 52 Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (eds), New Frontiers (Manchester, 2000). 53 Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity (Manchester, 2002). 54 Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire (Manchester, 2002). 55 Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness (Manchester, 2007). 56 A. Martin Wainwright, ‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914 (Manchester, 2008). 57 Ibid. p. 218. 58 Heather Streets, Martial Races and Masculinity in the British Army, 1847–1914 (Manchester, 2004). 59 Quoted in ibid. p. 209. 60 Diane Robinson-Dunn, The Harem, Slavery, and British Imperial Culture (Manchester, 2006). 61 Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (eds), Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (Manchester, 1997); Chloe Campbell, Race and Empire (Manchester, 2007); J. S. Bratton et al., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester, 1991); Brian Stoddart and Keith A. P. Sandison (eds), The Imperial Game (Manchester, 1998); Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Law, History and Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester, 2001); Kent Fedorowich, Unfit for Heroes: Reconstruction and Soldier Settlement in the Empire Between the Wars (Manchester, 1995); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, 1988); Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester, 2000). 62 Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children (Manchester, 1996). 63 J. A. Mangan (ed.), ‘Benefits Bestowed’? Education and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988). 64 Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester, 1989). 65 Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, 1997); Thomas A. Foster, Sexuality and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston, 2006); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and the Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003); Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge, 2009); Sumanta Bannerjee, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in NineteenthCentury Bengal (London, 1998); Christelle Taraud, La Prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc, 1830–1962 (Paris, 2003); Chungmoo Choi, The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War and Sex (Durham, NC, 1997); Jay Cassel, The Secret Plague: Venereal Disease in Canada, 1839–1939 (Toronto, 1987); Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–35 (Bloomington, 2000); Anne Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002); Damon Ieremia Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford, 2011); Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris, 2007); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1950 (Oxford, 1999); Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC, 2005); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, 2006). On homosexuality in Australia, see the references in my Colonialism and Homosexuality; Chris Brickell, Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand (Auckland, 2008); Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, NY, 1995); Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca, NY, 2003); Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion:

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Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750–1918 (New York, 1996); Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London, 1999); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC, 2005); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York, 1995); Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC, 2009). 66 See, too, Ross Forman, ‘Race and Empire’ in H .G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook, Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London, 2006), pp. 109–32.

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Exploration, the environment and empire Dane Kennedy

Introduction Exploration, the environment and empire are inextricably intertwined with one another. Exploration was first and foremost an enterprise that required engagement with an unfamiliar environment, whether it was seductively appealing, as was the case with the tropical islands of the South Pacific, or harshly unforgiving, as was true of the frigid wastelands of the Antarctic. Its primary purpose was to advance the agendas of the imperial state and various metropolitan interest groups, such as scientific bodies, emigration organisations, missionary societies and trading companies. Those interests invariably involved the identification, expropriation and exploitation of land, minerals and other natural resources within the territories opened up by explorers. While the merchants, migrants, missionaries, military men and others who followed on the heels of explorers made visible marks on the environments they entered as agents of empire, all of these parties were themselves affected in discernible, often deadly, ways by these environments. None, however, were more susceptible to environmental forces than the explorers themselves, whose very survival often required them to exhibit great ingenuity and endurance in coping with the natural conditions which they confronted. Explorers were acutely aware that their endeavours were shaped by empire and the environment. From Columbus to Cook, the great oceanic explorers were subject both to the whims of their imperial masters and to the vagaries of winds and currents; their successes were contingent on how skilfully they dealt with these dual forces. Much the same could be said about their counterparts who crossed continents, though the environmental challenges that confronted figures such as Lewis and Clark in North America or Stanley in Africa were of course profoundly different from those that faced seaborne explorers. [ 100 ]

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It is equally noteworthy that such leading impresarios of exploration as Britain’s Joseph Banks and Roderick Murchison were specialists in botany, geology and other natural sciences, as well as politically wellconnected advocates of British imperial expansion.1 Their enthusiasm for exploration was premised on the conviction that gaining greater knowledge of distant environments and their natural resources would be directly beneficial to British economic and geopolitical interests. In practice, exploration’s associations with environmental forces and imperial agendas persisted well into the twentieth century, shaping initiatives as varied as expeditions to the North and South Poles and efforts to ascend Mount Everest. Starting in the second half of the twentieth century, however, a series of global developments began to erode these associations and diminish exploration’s allure. The post-Second World War collapse of the European empires and rise of independent nation-states out of the ruins of colonialism undermined the chauvinistic appeal of exploration as the founding moment in European states’ triumphant rise to global dominance, although exploits of explorers certainly retained nostalgic resonances among certain segments of post-imperial societies. For social scientists, the advent of area studies placed increased importance on the direct and unmediated acquisition of knowledge about indigenous cultures and societies in those regions of the world – now characterised as the ‘Third World’ – that had been known mainly through the eyes of explorers and the colonial officials, missionaries, settlers and others who followed them. While the United States and its allies’ Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union gave a quasi-imperial impetus to the agenda of area studies programmes, the pride that the waning European empires had placed in explorers and their adventures retained little relevance to this new confluence of knowledge and power. Meanwhile, the scientific disciplines that had arisen in association with exploration and empire – botany, zoology, geography, geology and anthropology, among others – worked to distance themselves from this now discredited imperial heritage, insisting on their disinterested pursuit of ‘pure’ scientific knowledge. Although many scientists continued to conduct what came to be termed ‘applied’ research, their work was increasingly cast in terms of ‘development’ and often conducted on behalf of international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The rhetorical, if not necessarily the practical, effect of this move was to draw a distinction between their activities and the exploitative practices associated with past imperial regimes.2 These developments provide a backdrop for professional historians’ growing lack of interest in exploration as a subject of study. From [ 101 ]

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the 1960s onward, exploration failed to stir the same sense of moral purpose and patriotic pride that had led earlier generations of historians to privilege its role in the story of their nation’s rise to prominence. Those scholars who specialised in regions of the world that had attracted the attention of explorers and empires were increasingly trained in, or influenced by, the protocols of area studies, with their emphasis on indigenous societies, not imperial outsiders. While books about explorers and expeditions continued to pour off the presses, they were largely the work of biographers, journalists and other popular writers, who placed emphasis on explorers as heroic individuals, not agents of empire. By the 1970s and 1980s, the heroism of explorers was being challenged by a counter discourse that stressed their flaws and failures, though the focus remained on the individuals themselves, not the larger contexts within which they operated.3 With the West’s ideological renunciation of its colonial past and the natural sciences’ professional distancing from prior associations with exploration and empire, a kind of historical amnesia set in, erasing much of what had been common knowledge.4

MacKenzie and the natural world It was in this context that John MacKenzie and the Studies in Imperialism series appeared on the scene. Their impact on how we think about the relationship of exploration, empire and the environment is considerable. No single work was more important and innovative in this regard than MacKenzie’s The Empire of Nature (1988).5 In this book, MacKenzie took up a topic that had been hiding in plain sight – the British landed elite’s fondness for blood sports, which was an important part of their cultural portmanteau when they ventured abroad. The expansion of the British empire in the nineteenth century opened up the opportunity for big game hunters to shoot exotic animals in Africa, Asia and elsewhere across the globe. Many of these hunters published accounts of their adventures, giving rise to one of the most popular literary genres of the century. In The Empire of Nature, MacKenzie delineates the British aristocratic roots of this hunting ethos. He describes its ruthless destruction of vast herds of elephants and other large mammals across southern and eastern Africa. He details the quasi-feudal ritualism that accompanied its enthusiasm for tiger hunts in the Raj. He also shows how the proponents of blood sports promoted conservationist policies that were designed to restrict access to game to privileged patrons, criminalising indigenous hunters as poachers. An ambitious study, it draws together aspects of the social, cultural, economic and environmental [ 102 ]

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histories of Britain, Africa and India. It demonstrates, among other things, that hunting was integral to the British imperial elite’s sense of masculinity, that it constituted an ‘asset-stripping’ enterprise that subsidised the initial imperial advance in Africa, that it undermined the economic sustainability of autonomous African societies, that it ‘prepared Europeans for and inured them to the killing of Africans’, that it forged by contrast a social and ceremonial bond between British and princely elites in India, and that it led to conservationist measures in Africa that marginalised indigenous peoples and exacerbated the problem of tsetse fly infestation.6 Although MacKenzie has little to say about exploration as a distinct and systematic enterprise, his analysis of imperial efforts to dominate and deplete the natural environment supplies an illuminating context for understanding the exploration of Africa, which was conducted in many instances by men who doubled as big game hunters, ivory traders and the like. MacKenzie followed up his study of hunting and empire with an edited volume, Imperialism and the Natural World (1990), which highlighted research by Richard Grove, Deepak Kumar and others on the relationship between empire and the environment.7 Most of the volume’s essays examine the role of science and learned institutions in the imperial engagement with the natural world. This is a subject that was also attracting increasing attention from historical geographers, who probed the imperial roots of their own discipline in a Series volume on Geography and Imperialism (1995), which included an essay by MacKenzie himself on Britain’s provincial geographical societies.8 More recently, MacKenzie has directed renewed attention to the scientific institutions that helped to shape the imperial understanding of the natural world. In Museums and Empire (2009), he examines the natural history museums that sprang up in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the nineteenth century. His study shows that these museums relied heavily on explorers and their expeditions to satisfy their ‘voracious hunger’ for botanical, zoological, geological, archeological and ethnographic artefacts and specimens. Indeed, the founding directors and curators of some of these museums were explorers themselves.9 MacKenzie took up the issue of exploration more directly in several other works. He edited David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (1996), a book produced to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. His own contribution to the volume was an essay that focused on Livingstone’s posthumous reputation, demonstrating how his apotheosis as a saintly opponent of the slave trade, and proponent of Christianity and commerce as the salvation of Africa, would serve British interests during the Scramble for Africa.10 [ 103 ]

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This analysis fed directly into MacKenzie’s other major preoccupation as a historian of the British empire, the popular culture of imperialism.11 In ‘Heroic Myths of Empire’, he highlighted how Livingstone and other famous British imperial adventurers were transformed after their deaths into mythic figures who served to inspire the public and advance imperial causes.12 This essay was characteristic of MacKenzie’s determination to integrate the story of explorers within the larger set of cultural forces that informed the British imperial experience. Other volumes to the Series contributed in further ways to the revival of interest in exploration and empire. Tim Youngs’ Travellers in Africa (1994) was a valuable addition to the growing body of work on travel literature by literary and cultural studies scholars. Youngs examines the writings of a series of prominent African explorers – Mansfield Parkyns, Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, to name a few – showing how their observations and complaints about African societies served as coded commentaries on British cultural preoccupations.13 Although he adopted a more historicist approach than many literary scholars, Youngs worked within the broad parameters of the representational paradigm that has become associated with Edward Said and post-colonial studies. Said’s Orientalism (1978) laid the intellectual groundwork for post-colonial studies with its forcefully argued thesis that the West’s efforts to know the ‘Orient’ were in fact instrumental in advancing Western imperial agendas. Among the more influential studies that followed in this vein were Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (1987) and Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), which focused specifically on the discursive practices of explorers and travellers – Australian ones in Carter’s study, South American and African ones in Pratt’s. At the heart of both studies – and the many similar works that appeared in their wake – was a postcolonial critique of Western epistemological premises and practices.14 MacKenzie himself was highly critical of Said and his post-colonial confreres, writing a scathing critique of their approach, and the Series never became a notable venue for such scholarship.15 Yet the contribution that post-colonial studies made to the resurgence of interest in exploration and empire is undeniable. What Said characterised as the ‘imaginative geographies’ that the West generated about the Orient, and what Pratt termed the ‘transculturation’ that occurred in the ‘contact zones’ between the forward agents of European imperial expansion and the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia and other regions of the world, became central preoccupations of literary and cultural studies scholars. For many historians of exploration, however, a more important source of inspiration has been the Australian art historian Bernard [ 104 ]

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Smith, whose seminal work, European Vision and the South Pacific ([1960] 1985), showed how the British landscape and botanical artists who accompanied Cook and his successors to the South Pacific responded to this exotic realm by radically altering their perceptual categories and representational strategies.16 In key respects Smith’s purpose is the reverse of Said’s: he stresses the transformative effects of new environments on Europeans’ aesthetic sensibilities rather than placing emphasis, as Said does, on Europeans’ imposition of their own discursive meanings on these environments for the purposes of power. Two recent works on exploration that have appeared in the Series refer explicitly to Smith as a source of inspiration. Robert G. David’s The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (2000), and John McAleer’s Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (2010) ask how the explorers who encountered these unfamiliar environments sought to make representational sense of them. The answers they give draw on Smith’s argument that aesthetic sensibilities were altered by exotic stimuli, though they also show that the metropolitan agents and interlocutors (printmakers, publishers and the press) who prepared explorers’ texts and images for public consumption often altered them to conform to more conventional representational models.17 Their work, with its emphasis on the subjective realm of representation, is indicative of one of the ways exploration and environment converge as objects of scholarly inquiry.

Exploration and empire While John MacKenzie and the Studies in Imperialism series have certainly contributed in valuable ways to the renewed attention that historians and other scholars have given to exploration, the environment and empire in recent decades, they have gained purchase as part of a broader intellectual dialogue about these subjects, as the preceding references to Said, Pratt and Smith, among others, have indicated. The remainder of this chapter will identify some of the main strands of that dialogue. Although it will focus mainly on the intersections of exploration and the environment in the context of empire, it will also acknowledge points of divergence, as they are equally important to the scholarly trends that are currently at play. The first section will focus on exploration, the second on the environment. The scholarship on exploration in its present permutations can be divided into three main thematic categories: exploration and metropolitan popular culture; exploration and the institutionalisation of scientific practice; and exploration and cross-cultural encounters. The first category has given rise to several distinct lines of inquiry. One [ 105 ]

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is concerned with the way press barons, politicians and other shapers of public opinion helped to turn late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury explorers into prominent celebrities (examples include Henry Morton Stanley and Pierre Savorgnan di Brazza) and, for some who died during their expeditions, national martyrs (such as David Livingstone and Robert Falcon Scott). How the reputations of these figures rose and fell over time has attracted considerable attention as well. The debt these studies owe to MacKenzie’s pioneering research on imperial propaganda is clear.18 What remains open for debate is whether the public’s attitudes were manipulated by special interests or whether its enthusiasm for explorers’ efforts to open up Africa and other lands to European imperial interests was genuine and deep-rooted. Another group of scholars has probed more deeply into the print culture that did so much to bolster public interest in exploration. Attention has focused both on issues of production and reception. We now know that explorers’ field notes and journals went through multiple emendations prior to the publication of the books and articles that purportedly provided direct and unmediated accounts of expeditions. These emendations were made both by the explorers themselves and by their editors and other intermediaries. Their purpose was not merely to smooth grammatical and rhetorical rough edges, but to eliminate embarrassing revelations and infuse narratives with greater dramatic power. In so doing, explorers’ accounts of their experiences were often distorted in important ways.19 The engravings and other visual representations of expeditions were similarly massaged and modified to ensure that they accorded more fully with popular tastes and expectations.20 How these works were received by audiences and, especially, how they were read and made meaningful by readers is more difficult to determine, though scholars have begun to grapple successfully with this important issue.21 The second main category of scholarship on exploration addresses its role in the rise of modern scientific practice. Much of the impetus for this work comes from the growing consensus that the practice of science from the seventeenth century onward was as much a matter of fieldwork as it was laboratory experimentation. Exploration was integral to that fieldwork: its contribution was especially apparent in the major expeditions of discovery that were dispatched to distant seas and lands by governments, often in collaboration with private sponsors. Historians of science have directed attention to various dimensions of this ‘knowledge in transit’, as James Secord has aptly termed it.22 They have shown that explorers and other travellers abroad were a major source of the botanical, geological and other natural specimens and the meteorological and astronomical readings that so many metropol[ 106 ]

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itan scientific experts relied upon for their own research and insights. Similarly, many of the museums and scientific institutions that came into existence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were deeply invested in the outcomes of expeditions, building their collections in large measure from the specimens and artefacts donated or sold to them by explorers and itinerant naturalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, whose endeavours were often scarcely distinguishable from those of explorers. In Britain, for example, these connections ranged from familiar and well-documented cases, such as the exotic plants and animals acquired by Kew Gardens and the Zoological Society respectively, to more surprising ones, including the Royal College of Surgeons’ large collection of skulls of Australian Aborigines and other so-called savage peoples. Explorers themselves came to be trained in scientific protocols and practices, learning what to observe and how to document those observations with meticulously maintained field notes and journals and carefully conducted astronomical and meteorological measurements. The compasses, sextants, barometers, thermometers and other scientific instruments required to carry out such measurements became standard equipment on expeditions. Their purpose was to reduce explorers’ reliance on indigenous informants and give their findings grounding in the universalist system of knowledge that Western science sought to establish by means of measurement and comparison.23 Historical geographers also have produced important work on the associations between exploration and science. Fine-grained studies of Robert Schomburgk’s expeditions into Guyana from 1836 to 1839 and David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition of 1858–1864 have demonstrated how much attention these explorers gave to scientific research and, by the same token, how much interest metropolitan scientific bodies gave to their findings.24 Much of the intellectual and organisational impetus for exploration as a scientific endeavour came from the geographical societies that sprang up across the Western world in the nineteenth century, creating an information network that extended from major European and North American cities to littoral entrepôts such as Cape Town, Bombay and Adelaide, which served as gateways to the interiors of largely unexplored continents. Geographical societies’ scientific objectives were at the same time interwoven with other agendas: an important study of the Royal Geographical Society has shown that it was ‘part social club, part learned society, part imperial information exchange and part platform for the promotion of sensational feats of exploration’.25 Even cartographic practices and knowledge, which held a privileged place in the scientific schema of the geographical societies, were susceptible to extraneous influences. [ 107 ]

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Recent scholarship, inspired in part by J. B. Harley’s highly influential essays on the history of cartography, has highlighted the discursive dimensions of the map-making that occurred in conjunction with exploration, demonstrating that a range of agendas – imperial, ideological and more – shaped cartographic practices in ways that cut against the presumption of scientific accuracy and objectivity.26 A good example comes from the maps that derived from the exploration of West Africa, which persisted in misrepresenting the course of the Niger River until the early 1830s and maintaining the existence of the fictive Kong Mountains until the 1890s.27 The larger theme that informs much of the recent scholarship on exploration and science is the epistemological clash between explorers and their metropolitan interlocutors over the issue of how much weight was to be given to ‘ocular authority’. Explorers understandably privileged their own direct observation or ‘ocular authority’ in the production and legitimation of scientific knowledge, while so-called armchair geographers and their counterparts in other scientific disciplines insisted on the critical evaluation of explorers’ reports in conjunction with a wide array of other information. While this confrontation was coloured by social snobbery and concerns about professional status – as was apparent, for example, in the efforts by the disciplinary gatekeepers of geography and other newly established sciences to discredit the sensationalist claims of the explorers Paul du Chaillu and Henry Morton Stanley28 – it was also very much informed by legitimate intellectual concerns about how much credence could and should be given to the reports of explorers, especially when they were unverified and therefore necessarily required some degree of trust. Even when explorers returned with skilfully plotted maps, crates full of specimens and other substantiating evidence of their journeys, metropolitan critics insisted that their quotidian experiences in the field did not qualify them to interpret the significance of what they had seen and found and felt, a task that required instead the technical training and depth of specialist knowledge possessed by those experts who were coming to be known as ‘scientists’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. At issue, as David N. Livingstone has lucidly argued, were the relative merits of increasingly divergent ‘modes of scientific knowing’.29 The third aspect of exploration that has attracted considerable attention from scholars in recent years concerns the cultural encounters that took place between explorers and the peoples whose lands they passed through. How these encounters affected explorers’ sense of self and cultural loyalties comprises one dimension of this issue. Indigenous societies could hold great appeal for explorers, who were often [ 108 ]

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attracted by the social, sexual and other freedoms and comforts they found in the company of native peoples in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa and elsewhere. On the other hand, explorers were also repulsed by some of the indigenous customs they observed and their forced immersion in such alien milieus frequently caused anxiety, disorientation and despair. Oscillations between these emotional poles appear to have been a common experience for many explorers.30 In his illuminating study of Belgian and German explorers in Africa, Johannes Fabian examines an additional threat to the psychic stability of European sojourners, especially in tropical territories – the destabilising effects of fevers and the drugs used to treat them (quinine, opiates and alcohol), which could produce an altered state of consciousness that Fabian refers to as ‘ecstasis’.31 While this state may have made explorers more open to indigenous beliefs and behavioural norms, it also made them more susceptible to charges of moral degeneration or, as it was popularly known, ‘going native’. Another body of work has focused on the indigenous side of these encounters. Recent research has highlighted the role of local intermediaries – guides, translators, headmen and more – in relations between Europeans and non-Western peoples from first encounters through the colonial era.32 Such go-betweens were especially important to explorers, who usually possessed little or no knowledge of the languages, customs and practices of the native inhabitants whose territories they passed through. In so far as indigenous intermediaries received recognition by explorers and their sponsors for their roles in these enterprises, they were invariably cast as devoted and submissive servants: Livingstone’s ‘Nasik boys’ and Stanley’s ‘Kalulu’ served as prototypical examples. The latest scholarship has painted a far more complex and nuanced picture of these intermediaries, revealing that many of them were so actively engaged in – and essential to – the operations and outcomes of expeditions that it makes sense to regard exploration as a ‘fundamentally collective experience’ and to acknowledge ‘the resulting contributions to geographical knowledge as co-productions’.33 Reinforcing this view are several case studies that demonstrate how much of the cartographic information that explorers (and the armchair geographers with whom they jousted) claimed to be the product of their own observations and insights actually came from indigenous informants.34 Other research, in turn, has shown that explorers frequently relied on pre-existing trade routes, labour resources and logistical strategies, thereby gaining access to regions that were already integrated into regional and global systems of trade and cultural exchange even if these networks were unfamiliar to the explorers themselves.35 [ 109 ]

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While this analysis has divided the recent scholarship on exploration into three distinct thematic categories for the purposes of discussion, it also needs to be stressed that there is some overlap in their concerns. Much of the literature on the relationship between exploration and science, for example, has been attentive to its intersection with popular culture. Although scientific disciplines at present are often too technical and specialised to generate any significant public participation, this was not the case at various points in the past, especially in Britain during the Georgian and Victorian eras. Recent research has shown that the natural sciences in particular were accessible, popular and highly contested realms of knowledge. One reason they stirred such broad interest was because they relied on the fieldwork of explorers, as well as various self-described amateurs. It has also become increasingly apparent that exploration as a scientific enterprise was not merely the projection of previously established protocols to the field, but the active reconstitution in the field of what counted as scientific knowledge and how it was produced. There has been, in short, a nascent convergence of interest around the epistemology of exploration.

Environment and empire Epistemological considerations loom large in the literature on imperial engagements with overseas environments as well. In their comprehensive overview of the historiography on Environment and Empire, William Beinart and Lotte Hughes identify two central themes, exploitation and conservation.36 While they focus mainly on the economic and political manifestations of these themes – the extraction of resources, the transformation of habitats, the establishment of regulations – the agents of empire also had to make sense of the alien and exotic environments they were seeking to dominate. This presented them with an epistemological as well as a material challenge. How they met that challenge and how it informed their views on conservation and exploitation are issues that have generated an abundance of interesting and important work in recent years. Much of this work, in turn, intersects with the renewed interest in exploration. No doubt the most influential examination of empire and the environment is Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, which stresses the ways Europeans transformed many of the environments that came under their control, turning them into ‘neo-Europes’ through the introduction of microbes, plants and animals from their homelands.37 Crosby has inspired a vast body of work by historians and others that affirms and amplifies on his central thesis. Yet it is equally apparent that [ 110 ]

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European perceptions of nature and the environment were themselves transformed by their experiences. This was especially the case when they encountered environments that were unfamiliar and exotic. While we have already touched on the representational responses that Bernard Smith and other scholars have traced in art, literature and related modes of aesthetic expression, it has become increasingly evident that European understandings of habitats, climates, diseases and other natural forces changed as well. Richard Grove has made a compelling case in his iconoclastic Green Imperialism that the colonial experience itself instigated a new awareness of the fragility of environments and the importance of conservationist measures.38 He argues that French physiocrats, English naval surgeons and other proto-scientific specialists from the seventeenth century onward began to observe a correlation between deforestation, soil depletion and the decline of rainfall on islands such as St Helena and Mauritius, with similar observations soon to follow in India. The climatic theories they developed to explain this environmental degradation led them to adopt conservationist policies that reflected a heightened environmental consciousness. Another important contributor to this intellectual tradition was the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt, whose scientific expedition across Latin America from 1799 to 1804 was followed by a series of influential publications (including a thirty-volume opus on his journey and its findings), which stressed the need to view nature as an integrated and fragile ecosystem. His example as a field scientist inspired Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, Alfred Russel Wallace and countless other aspiring scientists across Europe to launch their careers by serving as naturalists on expeditions sent out across the globe, where they gathered information and gained insights that contributed to their subsequent scientific work, including, of course, the theory of natural selection. Perhaps the most sustained and illuminating examination of Humboldt’s heritage traces his influence in the United States, where many of the leading proponents and practitioners of exploration – ranging from J. N. Reynolds to Clarence King to John Muir – found in Humboldt a model for their own efforts to adopt a more spiritual and protective stance towards nature.39 Other studies have focused attention on those environments that posed acute physical and psychological challenges to explorers and other avatars of Western expansion. Regions of the world that Europeans initially termed the ‘torrid zones’ became a particular source of puzzlement and concern because they presented such significant challenges to the health of sojourners from temperate lands. The prevalence of diseases like malaria, yellow fever and cholera across large swathes of the overseas territories that Europeans sought to control and colonise [ 111 ]

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meant that their efforts carried a heavy cost in human lives.40 Moreover, a growing body of scholarship has given attention to how Europeans struggled to make sense of these exotic and often deadly environments. By the nineteenth century, they had come to classify much of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Central America and other regions as the ‘tropics’, a geographical construct that distinguished these realms and their inhabitants as innately different from Europe, ‘neo-Europes’ and Europeans. Not only did the trope of the ‘tropics’ inform the ways these regions were represented by painters, photographers and other artists; it also shaped the views and assumptions of ‘men of science’ such as botanists, etymologists, physicians and ethnographers.41 Particular attention has been paid to tropical medicine, a subject that became imbued with notions of racial difference and imperial power. David Arnold laid some of the groundwork for this line of inquiry with a Studies in Imperialism volume he edited on Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (1988), and he has remained one of the most productive and influential contributors to this subject.42 It was not simply somatic disease, however, that distinguished the tropics as a realm of difference for Europeans. The environment as a whole – its climate, its vegetation, its wildlife, even its human inhabitants – was considered innately alien and corrosive to the physical and psychic health of sojourners, generating fears of degeneration and strategies of segregation.43 The environment of the polar regions posed an even more existential challenge to Europeans and their imperial ambitions. Although the Inuit and other peoples had managed to establish a fragile but permanent presence in the Arctic, the Antarctic was utterly inhospitable to human habitation. Ironically, it was the very harshness of these ice-bound landscapes that made them so compelling to explorers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and so fascinating to the public that devoured their reports at home.44 The Antarctic in particular served as ‘the transition’, Stephen Pyne has argued, to what he calls ‘a third great age of exploration’, one directed at the ‘abiotic’ or lifeless environment of outer space.45 For our purposes, however, the more immediate significance of the polar realms is that they provided an especially stark and compelling demonstration of exploration’s enduring engagement with the environment.

Conclusion The preceding pages have sought to trace some of the leading lines of inquiry in recent research on exploration and the environment in relation to empire. It should be stressed that the sheer wealth and [ 112 ]

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variety of work that has been produced about these subjects over the past few decades makes problematic any attempt at a comprehensive overview. This chapter has sought instead to highlight certain select themes, focusing especially on those that indicate points of convergence in the scholarship on exploration and the environment. In so doing, it has taken the pioneering work of John MacKenzie as its point of departure. What MacKenzie and the Series he nurtured for so many years have contributed to this subject ranges from sobering accounts of the material devastation that big game hunters and other avatars of imperial expansion wrought on natural environments to sensitive examinations of the ways these same environments were viewed and represented by the Europeans, especially explorers, who first came in contact with them. Also noteworthy is the attention particular publications in MacKenzie’s Series have given to the scientific disciplines and institutions that arose in association with exploration and empire, as well as the travel literature that disseminated explorers’ experiences to metropolitan audiences. The Series’ influence is less discernible in other areas of investigation. It has not had much to say about those cross-cultural ‘contact zones’ where explorers and indigenous peoples interacted and intermediaries loomed large. It has given little attention to the epistemological issues related to the question of explorers’ ‘ocular authority’ and the role of observation in the shaping of scientific knowledge. And although occasional contributors to the Series have engaged with post-colonial theory, the Series as a whole has assumed a strictly empirical stance, neglecting the insights this immensely influential body of thought has contributed to our understanding of exploration and the environment. What direction is the scholarship on these subjects likely to take in the near future? Predicting intellectual trends is always a perilous exercise, but it possesses some heuristic value. Given the growing signs that global warming is bringing dramatic fluctuations in weather patterns, historians are likely to devote increasing attention to the relationship between environmental change and natural catastrophes. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis provided one example of how to highlight the role of climate in imperial history with his study of the responses by the British Raj and other governments to the late nineteenth-century droughts produced by El Niño cycles.46 While the devastating power that nature has wielded over human societies is one theme that environmental historians are likely to pursue for years to come, another concerns the impact that human societies have increasingly exerted over nature itself. This is especially the case for those industrial capitalist societies that gave much of the impetus to modern [ 113 ]

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imperial expansion and exploitation of the environment, producing what Andrew Zimmerman has termed a ‘social-biological regime of control’ that has placed labour and other social practices, along with plants and other biological resources, in shared subjugation to the demands of profit.47 The inadvertent and often adverse effects of that regime have become increasingly apparent to all. It is difficult to discern any similarly existentialist reason for exploration to attract the continued attention of historians and other scholars. And yet, though its relevance to today’s concerns may seem limited, the subject retains a great deal of popular appeal. Its echoes can be discerned in the enthusiasm for ‘extreme sports’ that test individuals’ endurance and courage and the appeal of the exotic as an aestheticised object of commercial desire. Explorers continue to attract the interest of biographers because of their oversized personalities and event-filled lives. Some of the research cited in this chapter has shown, moreover, that their experiences offer an avenue of entry into a broader set of concerns – the construction of celebrity as a by-product of print capitalism, the contribution of field work to the rise of modern science, the contacts between cultures as the testing grounds of globalisation, and much more. One of the challenges confronting those who wish to build upon this scholarship is to draw together its various strands, to pursue an integrated analysis of exploration as practice and as representation, as science and as spirit, as experience and as epistemology.48 Lastly, it is likely that exploration will continue to attract interest because it offers such a fresh and unusual vantage point from which to reflect on our fragile and interdependent world.

Notes  1 See J. Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (New York, 1998); R. A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge, 1989).  2 J. Hodge, The Triumph of the Experts: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH, 2007); G. W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison, 1991).  3 Notable examples include T. Jeal, Livingstone (New York, 1973); R. Huntford, Scott and Amundsen (London, 1979); E. Beale, Sturt: The Chipped Idol (Sydney, 1979); F. McLynn, Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer (London, 1989).  4 I develop some of these issues in ‘British Exploration in the Nineteenth Century: A Historiographical Survey’, History Compass, 5: 6 (2007), 1879–900; and ‘Introduction’ in D. Kennedy (ed.), Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World (New York, forthcoming).  5 J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988).  6 MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, pp. 116, 159.  7 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990).

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exploration, the environment and empire  8 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘The Provincial Geographical Societies in Britain, 1884–1914’ in M. Bell, R. Butlin and M. Heffernan (eds), Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 93–124.  9 J. M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identity (Manchester, 2009), p. 9. Examples included Dr Andrew Smith, who established the South African Museum, Cape Town, and Frederick Waterhouse, first curator of the South Australian Museum of Adelaide. 10 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London, 1996). 11 J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984); J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986); J. M. MacKenzie, ‘The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain’ in Judith M. Brown and Wm. R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 212–31. 12 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths of Empire’ in MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 109–38. 13 T. Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester, 1994). 14 E. W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978); P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London, 1987); M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992). 15 J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995). Some post-colonial studies-inflected work did, however, appear in the series, such as R. Phillips, Sex, Politics, and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (Manchester, 2006). 16 B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn (New Haven, 1985). 17 R. G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester, 2000); J. McAleer, Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (Manchester, 2010). It should be added, however, that Smith’s work was little known outside Australian academic circles until its second edition appeared in 1985. Said and other post-colonial scholars had arguably helped to create a more receptive intellectual context for its representational approach by this time. 18 E. Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley, 2011); C. Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2007); B. Sebe, ‘“Celebrating” British and French Imperialism: The Making of Colonial Heroes Acting in Africa (1870–1939)’ (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2007); S. Barczewski, Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism (London, 2007). Edward Berenson points to MacKenzie’s work on propaganda and empire as a model for French historians to emulate in his essay, ‘Making a Colonial Culture? Empire and the French Public, 1880–1940’, French Politics, Culture and Society, 22: 2 (2004), 127–49. 19 See D. Finkelstein, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (University Park, PA, 2002) and the ongoing research by C. W. J. Withers, including, ‘Geography, Enlightenment and the Book: Authorship and Audience in Mungo Park’s African Texts’ in M. Ogborn and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of the Book (Farnham, 2010), pp. 191–220; C. W. J. Withers and I. M. Keighren, ‘Travels in Print: Authoring, Editing and Narratives of Travel and Exploration, c. 1815–c. 1857’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2011), 1–12; I. M. Keighren and C. W. J. Withers, ‘Questions of Inscription and Epistemology in British Travelers’ Accounts of Early Nineteenth-Century South America’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101 (2011), 1–16. 20 L. Koivunen, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (New York, 2009). 21 See especially C. Pettitt, ‘Exploration in Print: Wonders, Miscellanies and News Culture’ in Reinterpreting Exploration (forthcoming). 22 J. A. Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, Isis, 95: 4 (2004), 654–72. 23 See, for example, M.-N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe and H. O. Siburn (eds), Instruments,

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24 25

26

27

28

29

30

31 32

33

Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London, 2002); M.-N. Bourguet, ‘A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)’, Intellectual History Review, 20: 3 (2010), 377–400; J. Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, 2008); A. Desmond, ‘The Making of Institutional Zoology in London 1822–1836’, History of Science, Part 1 (June 1985), 153–85; Part 2 (September 1985), 223–50; P. Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Cambridge, 2004); B. W. Richardson, Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World (Vancouver, 2005). D. G. Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago, 2000); L. Dritsas, Zambezi: David Livingstone and Expeditionary Science in Africa (London, 2010). F. Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001), 25. Also see M. Jones, ‘Measuring the World: Exploration, Empire and the Reform of the Royal Geographical Society, c. 1874–93’ in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 313–36; R. A. Butlin, Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies, c. 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 2009), ch. 6. Some of the pioneering work on this subject appeared in the Studies in Imperialism series, notably essays in Bell, et al. (eds), Geography and Imperialism; and W. H. Schneider, ‘Geographical Reform and Municipal Imperialism in France, 1870–80’ in MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World. J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore, 2001). Harley’s influence is especially apparent in M. H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997) and J. R. Akerman (ed.), The Imperial Map (Chicago, 2009). Also see I. J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (New Delhi, 2003) and N. Etherington (ed.), Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa (Crawley, 2007). C. W. J. Withers, ‘Mapping the Niger, 1798–1832: Trust, Testimony and “Ocular Demonstration” the Late Enlightenment’, Imago Mundi, 56, Part 2 (2004), pp. 170–93; T. J. Bassett and P. W. Porter, ‘“From the Best Authorities”: The Mountains of Kong in the Cartography of West Africa’, Journal of African History, 32: 2 (1991), 367–413. See S. McCook, ‘“It May Be Truth, But It Is Not Evidence”: Paul du Chaillu and the Legitimation of Evidence in the Field Sciences’, Osiris, 2nd series, 11 (1996), 177–97; J. L. Newman, Imperial Footprints: Henry Morton Stanley’s African Journeys (Washington, DC, 2004), pp. 71–85. D. N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003), p. 42. These epistemological issues are also addressed in many of the essays that appear in D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999); D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago, 2011); and F. Driver, ‘Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 14 (2004), 73–92. J. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680–1840 (Chicago, 2001); J. Lamb, V. Smith and N. Thomas (eds), Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900 (Chicago, 2000); W. B. Carnochan, Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley (Stanford, 2008); F. Regard (ed.), British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies of the Self and Other (London, 2009). J. Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley, 2000). S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, K. Raj and J. Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, 2009); B. N. Lawrance, E L. Osborn and R. L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, 2006). F. Driver and L. Jones, Hidden Histories of Exploration: Researching the RGS-IBG

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34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46 47 48

Collections (London, 2009), pp. 5, 11. Also see L. Jones, ‘Local Knowledge and Indigenous Agency in the History of Exploration: Studies from the RGS Collections’ (PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010). A. S. Wisnicki, ‘Cartographical Quandaries: The Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton’s and Speke’s Search for the Source of the Nile’, History in Africa, 35 (2008), 455–79; A. S. Wisnicki, ‘Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856–59’, Victorian Studies, 51: 1 (2008), 103–37; D. Lambert, ‘“Taken Captive by the Mystery of the Great River”: Towards an Historical Geography of British Geography and Atlantic Slavery’, Journal of Historical Geography, 35 (2009), 44–65; L. Dritsas, ‘Expeditionary Science: Conflicts of Method in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Geographical Discovery’ in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago, 2011), pp. 255–77. S. J. Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2006); J. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, 2008). W. Beinart and L. Hughes, Environment and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2007). A. W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986). R. H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995). A. Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, 2006). P. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, 2010). F. Driver and L. Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago, 2005); N. L. Stephan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY, 2001); D. Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science 1800–1856 (Seattle, 2006). D. Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988); D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in NineteenthCentury India (Berkeley, 1993); D. Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine (Amsterdam, 1996). Also see W. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006); W. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham, NC, 2006). D. Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, 1996); M. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (Delhi, 1999); Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York, 2002); J. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (New York, 2011). David, The Arctic in the British Imagination; F. Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York, 1999); B. Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York, 2001); D. T. Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World: A History, 1870–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 2002). S. J. Pyne, Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery (New York, 2010), p. 48. M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2002). A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010). I make a move in this direction in my forthcoming book, The Challenge of the Continents: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

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Spatial concepts and the historical geographies of British colonialism Alan Lester

Introduction1 In recent decades new geographies of imperial history writing have emerged. The boundaries that used to delimit separate domains of British history, imperial history, area studies and the histories of former colonies have been traversed promiscuously. Accompanying and propelling this reconfiguration of spatial categories has been more explicit attention to the difference that relations stretched across space made to empire. ‘New imperial historians’ have established that, in order to understand British history, one must imaginatively travel in and out of the British Isles, weaving imperial relations overseas into the fabric of the national story. Area studies specialists have been persuaded that we cannot fully understand colonial relations within any one region without tracing entities that move in and out of that region, to and from imperial centres and other regions within, and sometimes beyond, empire. Historians of the former colonies have begun to think in terms of the transnational processes which gave rise to their nation-states. While, formerly, most historians had generally taken ‘social geographies … entirely for granted … viewing space and place as a relatively passive backdrop’, increasing numbers have now begun seriously to the consider issues that preoccupy geographers.2 With this ‘spatial turn’, concepts of place, space and scale now seem just as integral to British and imperial history as do those of chronology and periodisation, and spatial chains of causation just as relevant as temporal ones. Volumes in the Studies in Imperialism series have played a prominent role in effecting this spatial turn. The Series has opened up for analysis a vast new terrain of imperial spaces and places, movements and flows, interconnections and comparisons, and it has raised questions about the very nature of space and place in a proto-globalising, imperial [ 118 ]

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world. No single chapter can comprehensively track the geographical understandings that have been at play throughout the one hundred volumes of the Series, but the intention here is to provide some examples of different spatial imaginations that it has showcased, to set these examples in the broader context of developing notions of space, place and scale in and beyond recent imperial historiography, and to suggest some future directions for historical geographies of empire.

Britain and empire As Trevor Simmons has recently pointed out, ‘many of the classic works of imperial history have achieved novelty in part by considering empire’s geography in a new light’, for instance by imagining a Greater Britain including the Dominions, or by incorporating regions of informal British imperialism.3 But most such works were still premised on a basic spatial division between British core and colonial periphery. This historiographical convention served, in unacknowledged ways, to reproduce an imperialist view of the world. As Felix Driver puts it, ‘It has always been the function of imperial ideologies to represent empire in terms of centre and periphery … empire is figured as the means of diffusing modernity from the metropolis … outwards: the motor of change is located firmly at the heart of empire.’4 In a survey of the state of imperial history written in the same year that the Studies in Imperialism series began, David Fieldhouse posited that only a superhuman scholar could attain the vantage point necessary to achieve an overview of developments in both of the spatial categories of core and periphery relevant to the imperial historian. His ideal imperial historian would have to be located ‘in the interstices of his [sic] subject, poised above the “area of interaction” [between centre and peripheries] like some satellite placed in space, looking, Janus-like in two or more ways at the same time’ and giving ‘equal weight to what happens in a colony and in its metropolis ... intellectually at home in both’.5 However, in the first and second volumes of the Studies in Imperialism series, John MacKenzie pioneered a means of bringing empire and Britain, periphery and core, and British and imperial historians, closer together. Rather than thinking of core and periphery as two interacting but discrete spatial containers, each maintaining its own essential identity, he saw that one of these containers was actually constituted by the other. In Propaganda and Empire (1984), MacKenzie argued that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’.6 The Series was thus ‘dedicated to the study of the effects of empire and imperialism upon the home societies in Europe’.7 In a review of the Series at mid-point [ 119 ]

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in terms of number of volumes, Driver accordingly noted that it had ‘issued an important challenge to historians, most notably in Britain, given the separate paths taken by imperial and domestic history’.8 MacKenzie’s own challenge to the artificial boundary often placed between Britain and its empire has been amplified by the emergence of an already large and still growing body of work now conventionally referred to as the ‘new imperial history’ (although a different descriptor is now overdue).9 This has developed largely in parallel, sometimes in direct tension with, and sometimes as an integral part of, the Studies in Imperialism series. Tracing the complex relationship between the Series and the ‘new imperial history’ illuminates the refinement of geographical distinctions between core and periphery in imperial history writing as a whole over the last two decades. The ‘new imperial history’ had quite different points of origin from MacKenzie’s project. It was marked by a feminist and a post-colonial orientation; it was inspired by work from disciplines other than history and it had an explicit political agenda. While Fieldhouse was posing the problem of geographical scope and perspective for imperial historians, feminist, and increasingly American – as well as former Dominion and Indian-based scholars – were approaching colonial relations with an emphasis on culture and politics in its broadest sense rather than economics or high politics. Scholars such as Antoinette Burton were recognising the need to analyse core and periphery (although they sought to avoid imperialist connotations by using the terms ­metropole and colony) in the same analytical frame. Their post-structuralist theoretical orientation, however, led them to resist Fieldhouse’s ideal of a historian with panoptic (and exclusively gendered) vision. They admitted the inescapably immersive positionality from which s­ cholarship quite literally takes place. They also saw space and place as more active agents in the working out of colonial racial and gender relations.10 Hall, for instance, took critical inspiration from Edward Said’s insistence on the process of identity formation through a constitutive outside, and from his point about the ongoing pattern of colonial relations which continues to define both the West and its ‘others’.11 Catherine Hall’s work in the 1990s, culminating with Civilising Subjects, examined the dense set of connections between Britain and Jamaica which helped constitute the history of both sets of islands through a continual two-way traffic of people, ideas and policies. She focused on debates over slavery and its aftermath prompted by Baptist missionaries who developed close ties with the mission – and abolition – supporting public of Birmingham. These debates criss-crossed the Atlantic, carried out in texts ranging from high literature to popular broadsheets. They helped inform discussions of the limits of freedom [ 120 ]

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and responsibility for working-class men and women in Britain as well as Jamaican former slaves. In one way, such an agenda reinforced MacKenzie’s early project. It tended also to demonstrate the effect of imperial relations at home. However, the reaction of empirical historians to the theoretical and political orientation of the pioneering ‘new imperial historians’ initially distracted attention from a similar spatial analysis. The ‘new imperial’ historians were largely women pursuing feminist and anti-racist trajectories. They saw their work as having political relevance in the present as it helped shed new light on the past.12 As they criss-crossed between Britain and colonial sites, largely in the West Indies and India, arguing that the social formations of race, class and gender that defined Victorian power relations were mobile across an imperial terrain, they were breaking down taken-for-granted assumptions about both the maleness and the whiteness of the key actors within imperial and British history. This project also entailed a broader progressive political agenda. As Doreen Massey notes, ‘The identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant.’13 The thrust of the ‘new imperial history’ was to challenge the nationalist notion that places such as the British Isles ‘have fixed identities or personalities, the product of continuous and inward-looking histories stretching back for generations’.14 In linking British and imperial history, the ‘new imperial historians’ were not simply pointing out that popular British culture had an overlooked imperial dimension; they were consciously seeking to undermine versions of British history that created racial outsiders. They recognised that insular island narratives rendered black and Asian former subjects of empire, whose ancestry was fixed in the peripheries of that empire, out of place within the British Isles. Revealing the ways in which the experiences of excluded others were and are intrinsic components of Britain’s history was intended to contribute to a new collective understanding of Britain; one in which post-war migration flows from the ‘new Commonwealth’ simply added to a Britain that was ‘always already’ constituted by flows of people, ideas, practices, objects and images from other lands, and especially from lands over which it exercised imperial dominion. At first MacKenzie shared some of what Driver described as ‘the unease of imperial historians’ grappling with the resurgence of interest in the British empire and its afterlives that had occurred without reference to them, both from inside the academy … and also from public political debates over identity, race and reparation in former sites of empire’.15 Illustrating this point, Driver mentions a meeting of the [ 121 ]

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early 1990s at King’s College London in which a ‘Rhodes Professor, a Beit professor, a Smuts Professor and other representatives of the bastions of British imperial history expressed the difficulty they had in addressing not only the ahistorical characteristics of literary-inclined post-colonial theory, but also the politics of history as a dispersed and publicly-owned field of knowledge’.16 MacKenzie was more insistent on the importance of racial discourse than were many in the imperial history ‘establishment’, but he also expressed his desire to hive off ‘objective’ historical understanding from historical polemics inspired by contemporary concerns, writing in 1990 that ‘happily the eras of triumphal justification, moral outrage and apologetic sensitivity are passing away’.17 MacKenzie’s rejoinder to Said was designed to escape ‘the literary obsession’ and restore the study of Western engagements with the East to its proper domain – the discipline of history.18 As we have seen from Stuart Ward’s opening chapter in this volume, the Studies in Imperialism series was launched as much to express opposition to the ahistorical and homogenising tendencies of post-colonial criticism, as to reconceive metropolitan British history in the light of empire. While these debates were proceeding among historians of Britain and empire, British geographers were grappling with post-colonialism through a different set of disciplinary preoccupations. Until the late 1990s, it was the discipline’s own role in fostering colonial relations that attracted most attention, and the ‘decolonisation’ of geographical knowledge was the most pressing imperative.19 Geography, it was revealed, is ‘inescapably marked … by its location and development as a western-colonial science … its norms, definitions, inclusions, exclusions and structure cannot be disassociated from certain European philosophical concepts of presence, order and intelligibility … that have rooted geography amongst the advance-guard of … imperial power’.20 Some geographers focused on where and how cartographic, narrative, pictorial and statistical knowledge of other places was produced and how such knowledge circulated through metropolitan spaces to shape imperial imaginations and projects.21 But few were active in bringing spatial perspectives to bear on imperial encounters themselves – in focusing on what Daniel Clayton calls ‘colonialism’s geographies’.22 In more recent years geographers have participated in the new imperial history’s revised understanding of colonial spatiality.23 At the same time, the tensions between the first wave of ‘new imperial history’ and the historical establishment have eased, even if they have not entirely disappeared. There seems greater scope to recognise a shared geographical re-orientation between the ‘new imperial history’ and the Studies in Imperialism series in particular, as, under MacKen[ 122 ]

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zie’s editorship, the Series has become increasingly interdisciplinary. A milestone was the publication of Mrinalini Sinha’s volume which has come to be seen as a seminal contribution to the ‘new imperial history’.24 In his introduction to the book, MacKenzie emphasised its contribution to the Series’ project of recognising ‘the significance of imperial history for the full understanding of social and cultural developments in the United Kingdom’.25 But Sinha’s analysis of the ‘contours of colonial masculinity’ in Britain and Bengal went beyond the project of a different British history. She showed that the discourse of the ‘manly Englishman’ developed in contrast with the ‘effeminate Bengali’ as much in India as in Britain, and only through their interrelation.26 Colonial Masculinity provided inspiration for ensuing works that similarly moved beyond Britain to consider the implications of ‘an imperial social formation’, as Sinha put it, in other sites of empire. Other works such as Clare Midgley’s Gender and Imperialism are further testament to MacKenzie’s willingness to promote both postcolonial and feminist approaches since the mid-1990s.27 Aside from MacKenzie’s own founding volumes, a number of subsequent books in the Series have further demonstrated ways in which colonial relations worked out overseas were configured at home, shaping metropolitan life. Following Sinha, not all of these contributions have taken Britain itself as the primary locus of investigation.28 ‘New imperial historians’ have been further encouraged to converge on their common ground with MacKenzie in response to critics who allege that empire played little role in British history. Bernard Porter in particular has vocally rejected the assertion that British social, cultural and political life was irredeemably bound up with imperial relations. Examining education, parliamentary debates, newspaper coverage (selectively) and other media through which imperial matters were debated explicitly in Britain, Porter argues that ‘the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad’, and that therefore empire ‘had no appreciable impact’ on metropolitan Britons’ thinking.29 Hall and Sonya Rose responded to this challenge, arguing that it was not so much explicit discussion of imperial affairs of the kind that Porter had studied which indicated the effects of imperial relations in Britain, but rather the ways in which colonial relations were ‘lived through everyday practices – in church and chapel, by readers at home, as embodied in sexualities or forms of citizenship, as narrated in histories’. Their contributors ‘assess how people thought imperially, not in the sense of political affiliations for or against empire, but simply assuming it was there, part of the given world that had made them who they were’.30 [ 123 ]

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As Andrew Thompson notes, ‘there was not, and never could be, a monolithic response to imperialism [in Britain]. Rather, the empire markedly extended the boundaries of British domestic society, and its meaning was contested by different social groups.’31 Much of the resolution of the debate about Britain and Britishness within empire probably now hinges on studies that narrow down their focus in one respect, to follow particular sets of trajectories and relationships across imperial space, but broaden them in another respect, analysing the ways in which these trajectories and relationships join up with and reshape social relations in each place that they connect. One recent example is Douglas Hamilton’s study of the flexible associations made by particular Scottish clan members, offering employment opportunities and outlets for investment in the Caribbean. By tracing the people, capital and goods propelled by these kin across the Atlantic, he assesses the changes resulting in both Scotland and the Caribbean. Capital accumulated through trans-Atlantic trade and through investments on the Caribbean islands extended the landholdings of certain families in Scotland, pushing up land prices and funding agricultural revolution and proto-industrialisation in lowland Scotland. An integrated commodity chain with Scottish companies overseeing the production of cotton on West Indian plantations and its manufacture in the mills of the west of Scotland meant that ‘people in all walks of life, and in all parts of Scotland, were in some way affected by Caribbean involvement’.32 The ‘new imperial history’, together with a key part of the Studies in Imperialism series, then, has been significant in recasting Britain’s national history. This, of course, was the intention for scholars who remain primarily historians of Britain, and whose work is informed by the politics of that location.33 However, when the ‘new imperial history’ is taken as a paradigm for colonial studies in general, as it undoubtedly has been, its limitations need to be recognised. First, despite Sinha’s intervention, the onus is still on history and identity in Britain rather than on the spaces, places and experiences that colonial relations (re) created in other sites of empire.34 Second, the repositioning of Britain as a nation constituted through empire has not necessarily resulted in a more thoroughgoing adoption of a relative conception of space, place and scale in imperial studies.35

Space The conventional way of escaping the confines of a singular spatial unit in order to gain broader perspective in the writing of history has been the comparative method. Julie Evans et al., for example, tell the story [ 124 ]

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of the betrayal of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ during the nineteenth century through the parallel histories of racial exclusion from the franchise in each of the settler colonies.36 Unless these different spaces had been brought into a common narrative, the trans-imperial scale and nature of that betrayal, and the way in which it was experienced and dealt with by multiple indigenous societies, could never have been appreciated. Lynette Russell’s edited collection, Colonial Frontiers, also ranges across a number of specific, self-contained, colonial sites.37 Both of these volumes help to demonstrate the strengths of the comparative method. Neither of them, however, focuses on geographical as well as temporal chains of causation between their sites. Rather, both tend to adopt a view of space and place that has recently been critiqued by Massey. In this view, places are seen as discrete, bounded entities, like billiard balls placed upon a table.38 Both of these volumes have their ‘tables’, providing a broader spatial context for the specific regional studies (the ‘billiard balls’). Evans et al. begin by outlining the metropolitan-centred humanitarian model of colonialism with which settlers in each specific colony had to contend. Russell ‘offers a series of geographically distinct studies which all share one common feature, and that is the settler society formation within which they occur’.39 In each case, the overreaching spatial context, whether a specific humanitarian discourse or a general conception of the structure of settler society – the ‘table’ – is an analytically discrete entity from the specific places – the ‘billiard balls’ – ranged upon it. Within the more relative conception of space and place advocated by Massey, the distinction between ‘billiard ball’ and ‘table’, between place and space, becomes blurred. Specific places are seen as emergent from the very same mobilities and relations that constitute space in general. Networked approaches have been one way in which this more relative conception of space and place has infiltrated imperial history. These approaches emerged explicitly as a way of circumventing the a priori imposition of any particular spatial container, such as the nation. The network, as both a descriptive and an analytical device, allowed nodal points to exist at a variety of scales, from individual people through institutional spaces such as the mission station or the laboratory, to agglomerations such as towns, cities and regions, to countries. The phenomena that the historian is interested in – discourses of Aryanism in Tony Ballantyne’s early work, and humanitarian, settler and governmental discourses and projects in my own – can be seen as constituted by flows of capital, movements of people, objects or organisms, and the communication of ideas in textual or visual form, between these nodes, via the physical and imaginative routes connecting them.40 The image of the web or network ‘captures the integrative nature of … cultural [ 125 ]

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traffic, the ways imperial institutions and structures connected disparate points in space into a complex mesh’.41 In other words, it allows for causative geographical connections to be traced, rather than simply comparisons to be made, between sites. It also allows for the analysis of multiple nodal points beyond the rather static category of the British metropole, as in Thomas Metcalf’s recent analysis of British India as a sub-imperial metropole dominating an Indian Ocean arena.42 A vital contribution to this kind of spatially interconnected narrative was made by Zoë Laidlaw’s volume.43 She showed how the governance of Britain’s colonies relied for its existence and functioning to a great extent on informal contacts, patronage, nepotism and politicking, especially through contacts in London. Her main sites were the Colonial Office in London and the Government Houses of New South Wales and the Cape Colony. But between these nodal points moved intricate trajectories of correspondence, through which the successive governors and more minor officials of New South Wales and the Cape sought to further their policies, interests and careers. Their success depended greatly on their ability to manipulate these communications.44 Laidlaw’s book showed that examining the interconnections between places by no means suggests the elision of their differences. In fact her account allows us to understand better what was distinctive to each colonial society as well as what they had in common. Related to this sensitivity to specificity as well as connection is the attention to the differences that there were between the various kinds of network linking her three sites, for example those based on military experience, on family, on scientific enquiry and on political lobbying. In late the 1830s and 1840s, she argues, the influence of governors’ personal and informal connections at the Colonial Office as a whole was supplanted by the rise of a new order of information founded in more ‘impersonal’ statistics. When they caution against too casual a use of the network as descriptive and analytical device, Gary Magee and Thompson are advising precisely this sort of differentiation between different kinds of networks and the people and technologies that facilitate them.45 Such work is particularly challenging. Developing a multi-sited analysis involves an awful lot of reading, first to comprehend the historiographies of each place which, after many decades of nationbound history writing, tend to lack cross-referencing, and then to track the webs of correspondence across separate state archives. The mobility required of the researcher means that it can be prohibitive at certain stages of an academic career. Nevertheless, the approach has been followed by a number of other historians both within and outside the Studies in Imperialism series to great effect in recasting our understandings of interconnected imperial worlds.46 [ 126 ]

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Most of these works are forced to recognise the heightened significance, even within the most extensive imperial networks, of metropolitan British spaces, rendering an escape from the spatial language of core and periphery, often more a linguistic than a substantive shift – a point that we will return to below. But some of the recent work in the Series highlights the significance of intercolonial relations, within which metropolitan spaces play more transitory or transmissive roles. Kate O’Malley, for example, ‘reveals an extraordinary set of connections among the personnel of Irish and Indian nationalism’.47 Focusing on shared experiences, techniques (boycott, for example), methods of agitation, the use of publications and the press, and the encouragement of joint Irish-Indian organisations, O’Malley indicates the paradoxical ways in which activists who sought new national states actually conducted their struggle through trans-‘national’ networks. Increasingly, historians are becoming aware of the relationship between networked cultural and political activity and technologies of communication and mobility.48 Gordon Pirie’s volume, for example, contains useful lessons about the often unanticipated effects of innovations introduced within the complex assemblages of empire.49 Because of its ‘superior speed and geographical reach’, aviation promoters saw the technologies of civil aviation as ‘perfectly suited to the maintenance of a modern British Empire’. Briefly, during the early twentieth century ‘aviation became the new imperial heroic; brave, dashing pilots became icons and were invested as the new Knights of the British Empire … [and] Continuities with Britain’s glorious maritime empire were manipulated avidly’.50 Indeed, there were continuities with maritime technologies, since the challenge of trans-Atlantic flights meant that air routes were developed more readily linking Britain to India and Australia, and crossing British colonial Africa, leaving Canada on a separate circuit. However, new technologies are inserted unevenly within social formations and they can be appropriated to various ends. ‘Aerial communication facilitated contacts among nationalists and the rapid connections needed for the whole decolonisation process’ as much as they did contacts among supporters of empire.51 These volumes are selected examples from within the Studies in Imperialism series highlighting the insights that can be gleaned from tracing causative connections wherever they lead one within a British imperial frame. The question of where to follow such trajectories and where to leave off the pursuit, however, remains indeterminate. Not all of the trajectories of people, ideas, objects and organisms constituting imperial domains traversed only formally imperial spaces. We might think of empires as containers of particularly dense webs of communicative technologies, patterns of mobility and politics of domina[ 127 ]

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tion. But as we have long known, these technologies, patterns and politics, as well as the British ethnic diaspora, spilled beyond imperial containers. They also enabled the incorporation of regions of China, the Middle East and Latin America within an informal empire that was considerably more expansive than Britain’s formal domain.52 Recognition of the existence of a British diaspora beyond empire has prompted a rather different spatial expansion and reorientation of networked imperial studies within the concept of an Anglo-world.53 Perhaps the most influential book here has been James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth, which adds the (British) Setter Revolution to the French, American and Industrial Revolutions as one of the most profound transformations to have shaped the modern world.54 As Laidlaw puts it, ‘By switching his frame of reference from “imperialism” or “colonialism” to “settlerism”, Belich makes a persuasive case for bringing the independent United States back into explanations for, and taxonomies of, European settler-colonialism.’55 That case is strengthened by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds who demonstrate that the conversation on how to uphold white privilege in the face of indigenous economic advancement and Asian migration was conducted not just between and among the settler colonies and Britain, but also with interlocutors in the USA.56 Beyond both the expanded frame of the formal-plus-informal empire, and the reoriented framework of the Anglo-world, Christopher Bayly and John Darwin have made sustained interventions (re)locating the history of the British empire alongside other European empires, and all set within the broadest context of global transformations between the early modern period and the late twentieth century.57 Their work, alongside the more populist writings of Niall Ferguson, has been informed, at least in part, by the current geopolitical agenda of gauging how the ‘Great Divide’ between the West and China was first established and has now been bridged.58 What is perhaps most striking about these various ways of conceiving the proper framework and scale for imperial history is that historians are yet to settle on an appropriate methodological description. Each of the terms currently in use is inadequate in some way. The term ‘transnational’ fails to deal with pre-national territorial entities and mobilities within empire, while ‘trans-imperial’ conceptually hinders the tracking of trajectories beyond empire, for instance to and from the USA. ‘World history’ or ‘global history’ have different connotations and traditions and while ‘interconnected’ history, or perhaps even ‘networked’ history provide a cover-all, they lack a useful ­delimitation. More fundamental than the nomenclature that we employ, though, is the charge that spatially informed, networked histories of any kind [ 128 ]

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are inattentive to power relations. As Bayly puts it, ‘An emphasis on networks and connections interlinking different cultures and peoples might seem to conceal the dominant and often racialistic power of Europeans and Americans.’ However, there appears no intrinsic reason why ‘Interconnections and networks seem to speak of dialogue and accommodation, rather than of dominance.’59 The examples from the Studies in Imperialism series mentioned above all illustrate the point that power of all kinds operates more effectively through networked interaction than through individual intention. This point will be taken further as we turn to examine the nature of place within networked space.

Place While some critics allege that networked analyses overlook power relations, others have argued that they are more about space (associated with mobility) than place (associated with immobility). However, any division between things that move through networks and things that remain static is problematic. Places are defined no more authentically by stasis than by mobility. In any sophisticated networked account, places are never simply interchangeable nodal points in an abstract system. Rather they are rich and complex intersections of components with varying trajectories and mobilities.60 Much of the move towards a networked view of space within and outside of historical geography has been propelled precisely by the desire to capture that difficultto-define bundle of characteristics that define specific places. We can begin by redefining what we mean by immobility. If we take a long view, there is actually no such thing. As Massey points out, even those characteristics of any given place that are most immutable, such as mountains, hills, lakes and rivers, are temporally limited assemblages of mobile components.61 Going beyond Heraclitus’ supposed observation that ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice’, we can observe that in the longer term it is not only the body of water that renders a river, for example, a dynamic entity, but also the course of its channel as sediment is eroded and deposited in ever-shifting patterns (this is to let alone the point that the ‘man’ himself will have changed between immersions). Massey is driven to make this point about the mutability of both human society and what we conventionally see as geographical context partly to fulfil a desire to bridge the disciplinary divide between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geographies. However, the point that all of the characteristics of place are comprised of mobilities of one kind or another, even if they may be imperceptible to the inhabitants at any given time, has [ 129 ]

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relevance to historians of the imperial world too. Let us take imperial cities as an example of specific places. Frederick Jameson used the example of London to highlight the disjuncture between individual experience of place and the energies, forces and movements that had created it: The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies … in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.62

It is the derivation of these seemingly God-given ‘structural coordinates’ of place that Driver and David Gilbert’s Imperial Cities seeks to explain.63 This volume examines not only the built, architectural form that historians often take as an unexamined backdrop to events, but also activities conducted in relation to that form, that are just as much a part of the character of place. They include displays, ceremonies, exhibitions, engineering, clothing and gardening. Very much in line with the early intent of the Series as a whole, Driver and Gilbert ‘illuminate some of the ways in which empire made a difference “at home”: in the streets, offices and homes of Europeans themselves’.64 But what distinguished their approach was an understanding that ‘the identities of urban places, as much as those of individuals or nations, are multiple and complex; they are formed and reformed through networks of relationships across space and time. In this perspective, a place is less an origin than a meeting point; the city as a whole becomes less a centre than a crossroads.’65 The extrinsic spatial network and the intrinsic character of place thus become inseparable. In the case of London, ‘there was always a number of [imperial] sites rather than a single pivot, each reflecting a rather different version of empire’.66 This observation, about the peculiar character of a place – London – which became the locus of ‘metropolitan rule’, brings us back to the point raised briefly above: even in networked histories which seek to transcend the division between core and periphery, many scholars find it hard to avoid the language of spatial supremacy. It is easy, even within the ‘new imperial history’, simply to substitute the words ‘metropole’ for core and ‘colony’ for periphery without analysing what these constructs tell us about spatial unevenness. Here, I think we need to be more careful to draw a distinction between a desire to critique Western epistemological dominance on the one hand, and the recognition of historically and geographically uneven distributions of power on the other. The [ 130 ]

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former involves the eradication of taken for granted core–periphery binaries as part of a move to decolonise knowledge and understanding of the world (as the ‘new imperial history’ seeks to do in undermining an insular island story of Britain). The latter entails more precise empirical attention to how locales and power have been and are interrelated such that social privilege and material wealth accrue at certain sites and marginalisation at others. Exploring the relationship between power and place empirically means, in part, identifying the different kinds of imperial power located at different sites within a place such as London – how administrative rule and policy making were concentrated at the Colonial Office in Downing Street; how missionary and humanitarian lobbying was conducted at Exeter Hall, the various mission society headquarters or intimate spaces such as Anna Gurney’s study; and how magnates such as Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit networked to realise imperial projects at clubs like the Athenaeum and in Park Lane, for example. Of course particularly significant meeting places could serve to subvert as well as reinforce imperial power relations. While, as we have seen, O’Malley’s account deals largely in Irish-Indian trajectories, it cannot avoid noting that ‘the existence in London and other centres of Irish and Indian migrant communities, presented radicals from both with plenty of opportunities to interact and exchange ideas’.67 We should therefore see ‘The metropolis … as a heterogeneous but material space’, in which imperial activities ‘shape, and are shaped by, the locations in which they take place ... The imperial city, in other words, had a geography which mattered’.68 By the same token, the shifting relationships between London and other British cities, each of them networked with colonial spaces in some way or another, mattered to empire as a whole. To take Pirie’s example again, aviation not only brought certain far flung (from a British perspective) places into closer relation while distancing others across the world; it also helped ‘sculpt a new imperial geography within Britain. Unlike Britain’s maritime Empire that had several home anchors, the new air Empire was centred in London. Bristol, Liverpool and Clydeside only ever had a maritime imperial profile. For most of the inter-war period, the new engine of Empire was effectively landed in the imperial capital. It would be run from there for twenty years.’69 One positive move that we can make towards disaggregating our notions of core and periphery, or metropole and colony, then, is to appreciate the complex heterogeneity of metropolitan space. Places within any metropolitan space, designated at a variety of scales, can be seen as relating to one another in various dynamic ways as well as to other places across the globe. The same, of course, goes for particular colonial [ 131 ]

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places. Lindsay Proudfoot and Diane Hall’s recent volume is the first in the Studies in Imperialism series to take the nature of specific colonial places as its primary focus, examining Australian colonial localities as products of broader networked relations in the same way that Driver and Gilbert’s volume examined urban metropolitan locations.70 Proudfoot and Hall also add a more explicit place-based dimension to the Series’ impressive track record of ‘ethnicising’ British colonialism.71 Seeing certain Scottish and Irish settlers as subaltern within British settlement processes, they focus on the ways that settlers from these peripheries within the British Isles ‘imbued the landscape with their own sense of self’ in certain local sites in Victoria and New South Wales during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scots and Irish ‘ethnic performances’, they argue, ‘were integral to some at least of the settler place-narratives created’ by colonisation.72 The relation between Driver and Gilbert’s sites within London and the whole that is London, between London and the rest of the United Kingdom, and between the United Kingdom and the wider empire, brings us to this next question of scale.

Scale At first glance, a networked approach to empire might seem to by-pass the question of scale. If we follow trajectories across space and through points of intersection regardless of where they lead us, we might weave at will through conventional scalar units ranging from the household to the globe. In much of the literature the concept of the network is seen to operate horizontally, while scale is considered to be more vertical and hierarchical. In this section a case will be made for considering scale rather as the product of networked relations. Scales are frequently seen as simply existing, naturally occurring entities in their own right. Within geography and broader political economy, however, it is only since the 1970s that a shift has occurred from a broadly horizontal imagination of global divisions, informed by Immanuel Wallerstein’s model of core–semi-periphery–periphery (which mirrored the spatial thinking of imperial history), to a vertical and more scalar understanding of the local–urban–regional–national– global.73 Furthermore, new scales of relevant analysis have been added, for example by feminist historians and geographers drawing attention to the home as a significant site of social reproduction.74 This malleability of thinking about scale has been explicitly examined of late in work inspired by Bruno Latour.75 In a range of disciplines, what might seem to be naturally occurring scales of analysis, from the household to the global, are being seen as the products of [ 132 ]

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particular projects, pursued through networks of varying geographical reach and involving combinations of human and non-human agency. Scales are being understood as ‘the provisionally stabilized outcomes of scaling and rescaling processes; the former can be grasped only through an analysis of the latter’.76 In the Studies in Imperialism series, as we have seen, there has been considerable attention to networks that operated at a global scale, connecting disparate nodal points around the world. But there has been relatively little examination of the concept of the global scale itself. If we consider the emergence of this apparently natural, but actually manufactured scale as something worthy of investigation in its own right, it is obvious that imperial forms of government had much to do with it. In Stephen Legg’s analysis of the divisions of sovereignty between British India and the League of Nations, institutions such as states, leagues and federations are ‘considered as assemblages kept together by the practices of scalar apparatuses [while] the impression ­ ierarchical is created that these scales are exclusive (non-overlapping), h (nested and tiered) and ahistorical’.77 It is not only governmental projects that create scale in this way. Legg gives the further examples of postal organisations and private and public ­bureaucracies of various kinds that create tiers of internal regulation, and the apparatuses of capital accumulation and civil society also manufacture scalar activity.78 Rather than assuming that networked analyses render scalar analysis redundant, then, we need to appreciate that scale is ‘so normativized … as to make it impossible to think space without it’.79 Like gender, race and class in post-structuralist historical thinking, we might productively think of scales as entities constructed through particular projects with real effects in the world. These are the ‘effects of networked practices’.80 Perhaps the most influential of analytical scales in imperial history is that of the nation. Indeed, so influential is the assumption that the nation is the ‘natural’ scale of most historical analysis that much of the recent work pursuing long distance trajectories across constructed borders is described as ‘transnational’, even when it concerns periods and places where there was no nation.81 Massey conveys both the constructed nature of this national scale and its real effects: The boundaries of nation-states are temporary, shifting phenomena which enclose, not simply ‘spaces’, but relatively ephemeral envelopes of space-time. The boundaries, and the naming of the space-time within them, are the reflections of power, and their existence has effects. Within them there is an active attempt to ‘make places’.82

There is perhaps no better example of the way that the constructed spatial delimitations of the nation can have very real effects than [ 133 ]

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the partition of India. As Lucy Chester explains, this act ‘marked the beginning of a global trend towards decolonization’ and ‘inaugurated Indo-Pakistani tension’ leading to three wars and the threat of a subcontinental nuclear war.83 Chester’s study of the processes through which Radcliffe’s partition line came to be drawn across the Punjab in 1947, cutting through the routinised, networked mobilities that had long made that region a meaningful entity to its inhabitants, serves a broader purpose too. It shows that the concepts of space, place and scale have to be thought of relationally. In order to develop her focus on the genesis of a boundary line between new nations in the Punjab, she begins her narrative in London during the hard winter of 1946–47, drawing a picture of coal and food shortages, of many families’ fathers, brothers and sons dispersed across the empire awaiting demobilisation, of a recognition on the part of governing men that the Palestinian-Zionist conflict was proving irresolvable, and of the pressure that they faced from both Indian nationalists and the anti-imperial USA, to which their government was now hugely indebted. This complex of pressures and trajectories confronting both ordinary people and men in government in London is the starting point for explaining the rush to decolonise in India while maintaining a facade of planned order and consultation. The narrative then crosses between locations in India and Britain, but also ranges up and down conventional scales of analysis from the global and trans-imperial considerations of officials in London to the experiences and expectations of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in villages on either side of the eventual dividing line. Each scale of analysis in this account is integral to developments at another scale. What Chester achieves in her history of the Radcliffe line is thus ‘a human geography with scale’, but with ‘scale … critically con­sidered as a narrative device, a measure of distance and a technique of governmentalities … rather than a plane at which structural processes operate’.84 The book shows how, at the end, as well as at the beginning of empire, historians must move across space, up and down through constructed but effective scales from the household to the global, becoming intimate with selected and often dispersed locations, to tell the most meaningful stories. The resulting narrative can combine ‘the intrigue of high politics with the tragedies experienced by those on the ground and the influence of the rapidly transforming international scene with the role of local society, culture and tradition’.85

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Where next? This final section will be used to speculate upon, and perhaps to advocate, four incipient trajectories of thought on space and place that run unevenly through the Studies in Imperialism series and that may inform colonial scholarship more broadly in the coming years. First, there is the development of spatial conceptions that build upon and exceed the foundations outlined above. In a recent gathering of historical geographers of empire, the question at issue was how geography should respond and continue to engage with the new imperial history – whether there is and should be such a thing as ‘the new imperial geography’?86 One of the points of consensus was that, although the spatial turn in the new imperial history had incorporated and further developed spatial concepts of networks and scale, these notions do not exhaust all the ways of conceiving space, place and imperial relations. Laura Benton’s recent A Search for Sovereignty, for example, was identified as moving beyond networked geographies of empire to recognise more determinedly the patchy and non-linear ways in which imperial sovereignty was created in certain spaces.87 Benton’s study, spanning a 500-year period and multiple European empires, shows, as Legg puts it in a perceptive review, how ‘territorial complexity increased over time’ as Europeans carried subjecthoods of various kinds ‘along thin corridors of imperfect control across oceans, connecting ports, coasts, garrisons, and islands’; and thence along rivers and around mountains as empires became territorial. As they moved in these delimited and uneven ways, so European colonists remembered and interpreted ‘the law’, as learned by rote and systematically applied. Benton thus ‘charts evolving understandings of the physical geography of the wider world, through which long and thin jurisdictional nets were spun – though with their holes and tangles, they failed to ensnare vast zones into their legal order’.88 Second, this appreciation of the patchy, fragmented and unevenly interconnected nature of colonial space might be more systematically accompanied by a similar appreciation of colonial time. Giordano Nanni’s recent contribution promises much in this respect.89 As Nanni argues, the restructuring of social time was as significant in the ‘civilizing mission’ of British colonialism in the colonies of Victoria and the Cape as was the reshaping of places such as the mission station, the farm and the city. Nanni examines the contests and debates among Britons over how to change indigenous temporalities, and also the range of responses that indigenous societies adopted to reject or appropriate ‘British time’. Despite its overwhelmingly obvious importance for the restructuring of everyday life, and a small tradition of work on [ 135 ]

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this in a British context, few have systematically analysed the imposition of British concepts of time on indigenous societies, nor the ways that temporal restructuring was inextricably bound up in the more familiar colonisation of space.90 Perhaps this is one area in which fuller historical geographies of empire focused on transformations in timespace might emerge. Third, both the complicating of colonial sovereignties with the physical geographies of empire in mind, and the appreciation of socially constructed temporality, might be components of a far more ambitious endeavour that is occupying a range of natural and social scientists. Much of the foregoing discussion hints at the desire for a more syncretic approach to the past and present, to society and nature, to the individual and the collective. With the struggle of some imperial historians to draw hermetic boundaries around their sub-discipline receding, incipient trajectories in imperial history writing will continue to be most productive when positioned within such broader interdisciplinary endeavours. One example may be the merging of socio-political and environmental histories of empire in line with attempts to rethink the boundaries between humanity and nature at large.91 Imperial historians might come more instinctively to see human and non-human mobilities combining to reshape colonial place, space and experience.92 At its broadest, the interdisciplinary endeavour potentially leading to this outcome derives from Spinoza’s observation ‘that things are never separable from their relations with the world’, the world itself of course being comprised of a multitude of such things.93 It follows that virtually any entity at any scale might reasonably be thought of as an assemblage – something with a relatively coherent presence in its own right comprised of the temporally specific coming together of various components, be they human/animal, biotic, non-organic elements of ‘physical’ geography, textual, pictorial or digital. These observations have been incorporated into English language social science largely as a result of the influence of French writing post-structuralists.94 However, as Nick Bingham points out, the English translation of their agencement into the more solid ‘assemblage’ ‘tends to make it sound more static, rational and calculated’. Although regulative governmental apparatuses might seek and fail to render assemblages ‘static, rational and calculated’, the original term conveys ‘the sense of an aggregate with a certain consistency being created from an active, ad hoc and ongoing entanglement of elements’. It is this fluidity, relativity and complexity, with its capacity for new phenomena and processes to be emergent from new juxtapositions and encounters that ‘has made the notion so attractive to authors working in a post-structuralist vein’.95 [ 136 ]

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By taking time-space specific assemblages of empire as their focus, scholars of colonialism might work towards reconnecting environmental, cultural and economic relations, as they have British, national and imperial histories. Finally, and before we can make too much progress towards any such ‘unified field theory’ of empire, there is a much longer standing issue on which far too little progress has yet been made. This is the incorporation of indigenous and other ‘subaltern’ human perspectives, knowledges, experiences and epistemologies in our understandings of empire.96 Both the ‘new imperial history’ and any incipient ‘new imperial geography’ are far from post-colonial in their sites of production, publication, consumption and range of reference. As Clayton notes, the problem of bringing ‘western and native evidence together in ways that bridge the intersubjective spaces of contact’ without subordinating these ‘other voices’ to secular Western academic discourse remains intractable.97 Although the criticism may be a little harsh given the feminist trajectories of the new imperial history plotted above, it is noteworthy that, in their review of the geographers’ meeting, Joanna Barnard and Jake Hodder allege that ‘Most New Imperial History literature still remains bounded in a conversation about the role of wealthy, white men alongside often apologetic discussions of the limitations of the archive.’98 In particular, from the perspective of this chapter, what is most pressing is the challenge to appreciate much more about the spatialities of the pre-colonial and colonised societies with which Europeans engaged, as they forced their patchworks of sovereignty into ‘new’ terrains. It is striking how little sustained empirical work has so far regarded indigenous spatial relations as just as significant a starting point for analysis as forcibly imposed European ones.99 We need to see invading settlers and imperial sojourners conjoining with indigenous peoples and immigrants from elsewhere to form new assemblages of people, organisms, materials, places and landscapes. We need to appreciate that colonial places and societies became distinct through those very juxtapositions, encounters and accommodations, while remaining interrelated components of the larger scale assemblage that was empire. And we need to recognise that violent interventions continue today to create beneficiaries and victims whose varying mobilities, and whose locations within heterogeneous places, both ‘metropolitan’ and ‘colonial’, condition their experiences.

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Notes  1 Sincere thanks to Clare Anderson, Tony Ballantyne, Felix Driver, Catherine Hall, Zoë Laidlaw, Steve Legg and Andrew Thompson, whose comments considerably improved the first draft of this chapter.  2 F. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 (London, 1987), quoted by R. Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (Manchester, 2006), p. 6; A. Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC, and London, 2011), pp. 14–15.  3 T. M. Simmons, ‘Conceptualizing the Geography of Empire’, Journal of Historical Geography, 37: 1 (2011), 127.  4 F. Driver, ‘Colony and Metropole: Locating the Victorians Session Commentary’ (unpublished paper, Imperial College London, July 2001). My thanks to Felix Driver for allowing me to use this. For a review of core–periphery distinctions in imperial history see David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’ in D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 1–31.  5 D. Fieldhouse, ‘Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12: 2 (1984), 18–19.  6 J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), p. 2.  7 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘General Editor’s Introduction’ in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, 1999), p. xi.  8 F. Driver, ‘Imperial History: In Series and in Parallel’, contribution to a roundtable discussion on Studies in Imperialism after Twenty Years, unpublished paper (University of Southampton, 2004), p. 5. Thanks to Felix Driver again for a copy.  9 S. Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (London, 2009). 10 See Burton, Empire in Question, pp. 1–26; F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and London, 1997), pp. 1–58. 11 C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge and Chicago, 2002); E. W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). 12 C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London, 1992); Hall, Civilising Subjects; K. Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004); A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture (Chapel Hill, 1994); S. Marks, ‘History, the Nation and Empire: Sniping from the Periphery’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), 111–19. 13 D. Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), 186. 14 F. Driver and R. Samuel, ‘Rethinking the Idea of Place’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), p. vi. 15 Driver, ‘Imperial History’, 6–7. 16 Ibid. p. 6; See D. Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post‐Colonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24: 3 (1996), 345–63. 17 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990), p. 2. 18 J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), pp. xi–xiv. 19 F. Driver, ‘Geography’s Empire: Histories of Geographical Knowledge’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10 (1992), 23–40; M. Bell, R. Butlin and M. Heffernan (eds), Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester, 1995). 20 J. D. Sidaway, ‘Postcolonial Geographies: Survey-Explore-Review’ in C. McEwan and A. Blunt (eds), Postcolonial Geographies (London, 2002), pp. 11–28. 21 F. Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001); D. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, 1992).

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spatial concepts and historical geographies 22 D. Clayton, ‘Colonialism’ in D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. J. Watts and S. Whatmore (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edn (Oxford, 2009), p. 95; R. Butlin, Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies, c. 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1–46. 23 See A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London and New York, 2001). 24 M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). 25 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘General Editor’s Introduction’ in Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, p. vii. 26 Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, p. 2. 27 C. Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998). 28 Among many others, see B. Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003); K. Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2007); M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester, 2005). 29 B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004), back cover. 30 C. Hall and S. Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006), back cover. 31 A. S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005), back cover. 32 D. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005), p. 216. 33 Hall, Civilising Subjects, pp. 1–22; Burton, Empire in Question, p. 15. 34 The ‘British world’ initiative provides an exception to this metropolitan focus, focusing on the settler colonies/dominions. See C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, 2003) and P. Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005). 35 T. Ballantyne and A. Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago, 2009). 36 J. Evans, P. Grimshaw, D. Philips and S. Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s–1910 (Manchester, 2003). 37 L. Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous – European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester, 2001). 38 D. Massey, For Space (London, 1995). 39 L. Russell, ‘Introduction’ in Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers, p. 3. 40 T. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2002); Lester, Imperial Networks. 41 Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, p. 39. 42 T. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007). 43 Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005). 44 For the relationship between individuals and networked processes see also Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives; K. McKenzie, A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Cambridge, 2010) and A. Lester, ‘Personifying Humanitarianism: George Arthur and the Transition from Humanitarian to Development Discourse’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming). 45 G. B. Magee and A. S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 45. 46 See for example, within the Studies in Imperialism series, Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire; and outside it, K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009) and Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation. The Series has been especially strong on tracing trans-imperial commercial and commodity chains: G. Stewart, Jute and Empire: The Calcutta

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59

60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire (Manchester, 1998); B. M. King, Silk and Empire (Manchester, 2005); F. Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism: The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire from its Origins to 1867 (Manchester, 2006); E. Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009). J. MacKenzie, ‘General Editor’s Introduction’ in K. O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire (Manchester, 2008), p. x. S. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 621–46; J. Berland, North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (Durham, NC, and London, 2009). G. Pirie, Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 2009). See also F. Steel, Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870–1914 (Manchester, 2011). Pirie, Air Empire, p. 2. J. MacKenzie, ‘General Editor’s Introduction’ in Pirie, Air Empire, p. xii. See, for example, D. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990) and R. Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture, Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester, 1999). Bridge and Fedorowich, The British World; Buckner and Francis, Rediscovering the British World. J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloWorld, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009). Z. Laidlaw, ‘Breaking Britannia’s Bounds? Law, Settlers and Space in Britain’s Imperial Historiography’, Historical Journal, 55: 3 (2012), 807–30. M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008). C. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004); J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009). Belich also does this. See also A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002) and A. Burton, ‘Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History’, History Workshop Journal, 64 (2007), 323–8. N. Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest (London, 2012). Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 475. Bayly himself concludes that ‘it is possible to describe … a complex of overlapping networks of global reach, while at the same time acknowledging that vast differentials of power which inhered in them’, p. 476. Lester, Imperial Networks, was certainly an attempt to understand how the violent, racialised colonisation of the Xhosa people in the eastern Cape Colony had come about despite the lack of a coherent, metropolitan-centred, expansionary driving force. Consider, for example, the ways in which various migration networks, ranging from peripatetic harvest workers through workers following trade cycles to longerterm family emigrants, reconstituted both the places they left and those at which they arrived: Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, pp. 78–85. Massey, For Space. F. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago, 1988), p. 349, quoted in Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire, p. 11. Driver and Gilbert, Imperial Cities. F. Driver and D. Gilbert, ‘Imperial Cities: Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’ in Driver and Gilbert, Imperial Cities, p. 3. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. p. 14. O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, p. 3. Driver and Gilbert, ‘Imperial Cities’, 15; M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998); J. Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial

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spatial concepts and historical geographies Metropolis (New Haven, 2001). 69 Pirie, Air Empire, p. 242. 70 L. Proudfoot and D. Hall, Imperial Spaces: Placing the Irish and Scots in Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2011). 71 See K. Jeffrey (ed.), An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996); J. M. MacKenzie with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007); A. McCarthy, Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand Since 1840 (Manchester, 2011). 72 Proudfoot and Hall, Imperial Spaces, p. 44. 73 S. Legg, ‘Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages: The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34: 2 (2009), 234; I. Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, 1974). 74 See A. Blunt and R. Dowling, Home (London and New York, 2006). 75 S. Marston, ‘The Social Construction of Scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2000), 219–42; B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork Theory (Oxford, 2005), pp. 183–4. 76 N. Brenner, ‘Restructuring, Rescaling and the Urban Question’, Critical Planning,16 (2009), 71. 77 Legg, ‘Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages’, 238. 78 See N. Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Oxford, 1984); D. Featherstone, Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks (Oxford, 2008). 79 J. P. Jones III, K. Woodward and S. A. Marston, ‘Situating Flatness’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32: 2 (2007), 271. 80 Legg, ‘Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages’, 234. 81 A. Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation (Durham, NC, 2003). 82 Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, 189. 83 L. P. Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of the Punjab (Manchester, 2009), pp. 6–7. 84 Ibid. p. 235. 85 Ibid. p. 3. 86 For a conference report, see J. Barnard and J. Hodder, ‘New Imperial Geographies?’, Journal of Historical Geography, 38 (2012), 90–1. 87 M. Ogborn, ‘Talking Empire’, unpublished paper presented at the New Imperial Geographies Symposium (Royal Holloway University of London, 30 August 2011); L. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010). 88 S. Legg, ‘Legal Geographies and the State of Imperialism: Environments, Constitutions and Violence’, Journal of Historical Geography, 37 (2011), 507–8. See D. Kirkby and C. Coleborne (eds), Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester, 2001). 89 G. Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester, 2012). 90 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38: 1 (1967), 56–97. For a colonial exception see K. E. Atkins, ‘The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money’: Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic in Natal, c. 1843–1900 (London, 1994). 91 There is now a strong tradition of specifically imperial environmental history, including J. M. MacKenzie’s, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), and (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990), which I have not referred to above. 92 For example, R. Drayton, ‘Maritime Networks and the Making of Knowledge’ in D. Cannadine (ed.), Empire, the Sea and Global History (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 72–82; K. Greer, ‘Red Coats and Wild Birds: Military Culture and Ornithology Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire’ (PhD thesis, Queen’s University, 2011).

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writing imperial histories 93 Quoted in N. Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’, Geografiska Annaler, 86B (2004), 62. 94 C. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, 2004); Latour, Reassembling the Social. 95 N. Bingham, ‘Assemblage’ in D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. J. Watts and S. Whatmore (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edn (Oxford, 2009), p. 38. See also M. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London, 2006), pp. 32–3; and for an attempt to situate an individual governor within governmental assemblages, Lester, ‘Personifying Humanitarianism’. 96 T. Ballantyne, ‘The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and Its Historiography’, The Historical Journal, 53: 2 (2010), 451–2. 97 D. Clayton, ‘Imperial Geographies’ in J. Duncan, N. Johnson and R. Schein (eds), Companion to Cultural Geography (Blackwell, 2004), p. 460. 98 Barnard and Hodder, ‘New Imperial Geographies?’, 90–1. See C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, 2012). 99 Although see B. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Singapore, 1996) and M. McKenna, Looking for Blackfella’s Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney, 2002).

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C hap t e r s ix

Policing the colonial crowd: patterns of policing in the European empires during the depression years1 Martin Thomas Over the summer of 1927 retired British Army officer, Colonel Verney Asser, got very upset with his War Office paymasters. The Colonel was concerned about two things: his pension and his right to wear a particular military campaign medal. Asser typified a certain type of austere Victorian, a recurrent figure in Manchester’s Studies in Imperialism series; one for whom imperial soldiering was as much a habit of mind as a career choice.2 Like many of his peers, he had spent much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century planting and protecting the Union Jack in various outposts of empire. His path to promotion was a long one. He joined the Regular Army in 1899. But he had first donned a security force uniform fifteen years earlier, when he joined the Rhodesian Police militia as a sergeant. His first job as a police officer involved him in the pacification of Matabeleland, an operation led by a dashing young cavalry officer, the future Viscount Allenby, commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the First World War. After this and other, similar police operations, Asser’s sideways move into the army seemed a logical next step.3 Asser’s experience was not untypical. During the European scramble for African and Asian colonies, paramilitary colonial police officers were seconded to military operations when the need arose. In the early 1900s the reverse more often applied, with soldiers supplementing colonial police numbers to stifle dissent. It is no exaggeration to talk of an early twentieth-century transition from imperial soldiering to imperial soldiers’ policing. The new ‘guardians of empire’, henceforth, devoted greatest energy to suppressing internal disorder and protecting rebellious frontiers.4 So commonplace were both expedients that one of Victorian Britain’s leading African conquistadors, General Redvers Buller, convinced the War Office to accept the principle that policementurned-soldiers in imperial campaigns should receive the same entitlements as their Regular Army brethren: service in the colonial police [ 143 ]

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Figure 1  ‘The Mad Dog’

[ 144 ]

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should count as ‘war service’.5 Here was Asser’s grievance in a nutshell. He might not technically have been ‘in’ the British Army in 1884, but it had certainly felt that way to him both at the time and ever afterwards. War Office secretaries saw the force of his argument, even its natural justice; but they refused to give ground. To allow Asser additional pension rights and a Rhodesian campaign medal would open the floodgates to similar claims. The shires of the British Isles, they feared, concealed thousands of elderly colonial policemen who thought that they, too, had been fighting for the British empire rather than just policing it. For most, like Asser, making rigid distinctions between the two occupations flew in the face of their own experience.6 The irascible Colonel personified the connections between empire and nation that, from its inception, have been central to Manchester’s Studies in Imperialism.7 Series contributors, in line with wider trends in the new imperial history, have convincingly demonstrated that colonial and metropolitan cultures must be treated in the same analytical field.8 So, too, Asser’s conflation of soldiering and imperial conquest, policing and colonial control, reminds us that, within modern empires, repressive security force activities rarely conform to neat patterns of jurisdiction or simple vertical models of colonial violence. His story, then, raises interesting questions. Legal niceties aside, what was the difference between colonial policing and military activity in the European empires of the early twentieth century? Was there a clear distinction between imperial policing in the classic ‘conquest’ period of the late nineteenth century and the later, and supposedly more peaceful, decades of colonial consolidation? Or are we better advised to view colonial police services (of which there were forty-three separate forces by 1948), not as unique institutions, but as lesser-armed variants of a military occupation force, more black-andtan than boys in blue?9 Behind the imagery lies a bigger, more basic question: what did colonial police do? This chapter tries to answer these questions by focusing on significant changes in the styles and objectives of colonial protest policing during a period of tremendous economic distress: the years straddling the global depression of the early 1930s. Building on the outstanding work on colonial policing published in the last twenty years – much of it within the Studies in Imperialism series, it suggests that we might learn something from a political economy approach to the forms and practices of colonial policing across the European empires. By political economy I refer to the interaction between the changing political priorities and institutional forms of what scholars increasingly term the ‘late colonial state’ and those colonial economic activities that most concerned that state, usually some degree of export [ 145 ]

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10

production. The point I wish to develop here is that police actions reflected, not just the political order, but also the economic organisation prevailing in their colony. Both their operations and their internal structures were driven by this combination of the political and the economic, of what the colonial state needed to combat internal threats on the one hand and what export producers and other key economic actors required to enhance their output on the other. Using political economy to explain the ordering of colonial ­priorities and the differing roles of colonial administrative services is far from new. It was central to arguments advanced by dependency theor­­ists about the colonial roots of African under-development.11 Furthermore, some thirty years ago, Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, subtle analysts of colonial implantation, noted that ‘most analysts of the colonial state agree on its most salient feature: its centrality in the political economy of a colony through the unusual scope and intensity of its intervention into colonial social and economic life’.12 For all that, using political economy as an analytical tool has since fallen out of historical fashion, eclipsed by culturally derived ideas of moral economy – the value systems and normative standards of colonial communities – as a better indicator of the causes of dissent and repression. As Samuel Popkin demonstrated long ago, empire brought with it fundamental changes in authority relations that ruptured the moral economies of peasant societies, provoking ‘defensive reactions’ that were often violent and which typically required police intervention.13 My point is that the nature of these colonial demands, their local variations and the responses they triggered were typically rooted in economic requirements. Perhaps when, as analysts, we choose our ‘economies’ the political deserves reinsertion alongside the moral. The contention that police – and especially the more repressive kind – did not serve the interests of the people but those of what Fred Cooper dubbed ‘the gatekeeper state’, part of an institutional apparatus designed to minimise external interference and maximise internal control, seems self-evident.14 Promoting the commercial interests of the businesses, banks and foreign investors operating within their territorial jurisdiction was central to the work of colonial government, albeit conducted with marked enthusiasm and effectiveness. Historians of colonial policing have been remarkably silent about the imperatives of political economy nonetheless. The key reason for this lies in a primordial concern with the origins of local colonial policing styles and a consequent preoccupation with the transmission of institutional practices from one police force to another. Quite understandably, analyses of institutional forms, cultural underpinnings and presumptive attitudes of colonial police have mirrored imperial histo[ 146 ]

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ry’s long-standing preoccupation with centre and periphery, whether as discrete but interacting elements of empire or, alternatively, as mutually constituted fields within it.15 Put simply, the most incisive work on colonial police methods and actions has been dominated by two linked questions: ‘Where did the colonial police come from, and how far may this explain the whys and wherefores of what they did?’ These are important enquiries and historians have benefitted tremendously from the answers offered. But they also reveal a blind spot: the relative neglect of larger economic factors in shaping colonial security – and insecurity. How did the dominant characteristics of particular colonial economies influence collective manifestations of internal dissent within them? This question lends itself to crudely instrumental answers derived from the acute economic disparities and resultant social iniquities readily observable in most colonial societies. One way to look beyond these manifestations of economic inequality is to explore the interaction of colonial economic structure and state organisation, and this brings us back to political economy. Of the many aspects of colonial economic structure that helped shape institutional forms of state repression, three stand out: first, the dominance or otherwise of a narrow range of primary goods produced for export within the colonial economy, which, in turn, is closely linked to the matter of goods prices and local wage levels; second, the principal forms of waged employment within the local economy, a factor that obviously bore on types and degrees of worker organisation; third, the relationship between private capital (in some colonies a shorthand for settler interest), the state and the indigenous workforce. Clinical separation of these factors is artificial. Falling market prices for colonial exports such as during the depression years of the early 1930s typically led to pressure from business managers, plantation owners or external investors for heightened output alongside cutbacks in workforces and wage levels. These, in turn, catalysed new forms of worker organisation and protest.16 Meanwhile, colonial state involvement, while variable between territories, was generally apparent at all stages of the production process whether the government acted as economic watchdog, major employer or police enforcer. From the regulation of export prices and fiscal support for corporate interests, to the determination of minimum wage levels and the policing of worker dissent, colonial government identified its interests with expanding or, at minimum, safeguarding the export economy of dependent territory.17 Seen in this light, the mechanics of state repression were integral to the political economy of colonialism. To return to the opening remarks, this chapter explores these issues by focusing on changing colonial policing priorities of Colonel Asser’s [ 147 ]

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successors in British, French and Dutch territories as the depression began to bite. Its aim is to demonstrate the worsening difficulties experienced by local forces as they struggled to balance the requirements of political containment, preventive policing and labour control. The key argument is that several colonial forces devoted more time to policing the workplace, serving as adjuncts to labour market ­regulation, than has been appreciated hitherto.

Trends in the historiography Disintegration of the European colonial empires in the twentieth century has led historians to analyse the internal protest that convulsed them in terms of its impact, first on processes of socio-political reform and, second, on the development of organised nationalist groups, many of which assumed power when imperial governments collapsed or withdrew. Neither approach places significant emphasis on political economy as a determinant of colonial police work, a third perspective and the one this chapter proposes. Within the existing broad narratives, colonial policing – including the internal security operations of colonial militaries – has become a story with two main themes. The first theme examines the discrete institutional cultures born of the dominance of certain ethnic groups within individual forces: Irish­­ men in Palestine and elsewhere; Corsicans, often of Italian descent, in the French North African territories of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia; and, at the rank-and-file level, Punjabis, Moroccans, Malians, Ambonese and other so-called ‘martial races’ that were prevalent in British, French and Dutch colonial police ranks.18 In this depiction of colonial policing questions of identity construction and cultural transmission provide the key to understanding operational activity and institutional cultures.19 By the start of the twentieth century European colonial police offi­­ cers were, like other officials, enmeshed in a series of ‘imperial circuits and networks’.20 Britain’s interwar colonial policemen were early users of the ‘air empire’, the civil aviation network built up by Imperial Airways to serve imperial territories.21 And policemen’s appeals for support were equally critical to the deployment of the military aviation increasingly prominent as an agent of colonial repression after the First World War.22 Perhaps because their work was frequently so dirty, Britain’s colonial police forces, especially those reconfigured into paramilitary gendarmerie, were never embraced by the British public as emblematic manly servants of empire and nation, akin to the sailors of the Royal Navy.23 Assuredly, though, white colonial police officers in the British and [ 148 ]

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French empires in particular sometimes travelled as widely as their maritime colleagues. Sustained by the movement of personnel from one location to the next, the resultant connections between colonial police forces were also the product of shared institutional experiences and career formation. Policemen, especially senior officers, transferring between colonies disseminated prevailing ideas about permissible and impermissible behaviour. The personnel of the Algerian gendarmerie, technically army personnel serving in a provincial location on equivalent terms to their counterparts in Brittany or the Corrèze, were very definitely colonial policemen nonetheless. Everything from the size of their patrol ‘patches’ to their lingua-franca of mixed French and pidgin Arabic, and their central role in maintaining order within Algeria’s stratified agricultural economy, set them apart from the metropolitan force of which they were a part.24 The career of Sir Charles Tegart, hammer of Bengali terrorists and Palestine Police innovator, stands as exemplar of the British empire’s quintessential security force hybrid, an Irish soldier-cum-policeman more at home in Kolkata or Tulkarm than in Britain.25 So it was that the influx of police and army officers from other locales – Ireland to Palestine, the Gold Coast to Sierra Leone, India to Malaya – shaped prevailing attitudes about police work, subject peoples and the requirements of social control.26 The resultant ‘coercive networks’ that linked itinerant colonial policemen underpinned the institutional learning of differing forces as presumptions, procedures and prejudices flowed between territories.27 Ironically, despite the underlying narrative of cultural transmission, these arguments pivot around ideas of exceptionality. Local iterations of the ‘classic’ colonial police force model of rigidly vertical organisation were to be found within and between empires: white officer leadership, paramilitary-style formations and, in major urban settlements, cantonment in barracks apart from the local community. But each colony’s police, it is suggested, was also distinctive. Aside from the ethnic mix unique to individual forces, each was shaped by a combination of imported practices, local requirements and recruiting cultures.28 This combination of ideas and personnel, networked transnationally to generate particular policing styles, also figures in scholarship suggesting that we should look to the institutional setting for explanations of the forms and scale of repressive action among colonial militaries. For David French, British predilection for ‘counter-insurgency by committee’ conducted under the veil of adaptive legal procedure cleared a path for repressive population control.29 To Isabel Hull, whose study of police actions against the rebellious peoples of German South West Africa makes the argument persuasively, organisational culture was the root cause of extreme military violence.30 Here, too, a [ 149 ]

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security force’s characteristics reflect distinct national traits, this time measured in colonial legal forms and organisational norms, more than in terms of ethnic composition and cultural borrowing. The second theme relates to the first. It concerns what is presumed to have been the growing preoccupation of colonial police forces almost everywhere: their struggle to contain organised political opposition to imperial control. In this interpretation, policing and political violence are symbiotically linked.31 Both fed off each other with increasing appetite as resistance to colonial incursion persisted or, to telescope forward to the post-1945 years, as the momentum for decolonisation increased. Colonial policing was necessarily political and frequently violent because its principal targets were oppositional groups that threatened colonial supremacy.32 As a result, the study of popular dissent and of the repressive strategies adopted to contain it has been embedded in broader narratives of the expansion and contraction of empires, from conquest to decolonisation and post-colonial state formation. Using political economy allows us to dig deeper, offering alternate perspectives on colonial policing or the government priorities implicit in it. From the 1910s to the 1940s the most common call on colonial security forces was not to defend the state against imminent overthrow. It was more prosaic: to police internal industrial disputes, whether organised strike actions by industrial workers or spontaneous work stoppages by plantation labourers. This begs another question. Beginning from this observation, the next step is to consider what was the relationship, if any, between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of colonies? To answer this we need to dwell on certain features of colonial states. A combination of three factors was common to numerous dependent territories, particularly the larger ones. First were their sheer geographical extent and the consequent unevenness with which thin police resources were spread. French Algeria, the Sudan Condominium and the Belgian Congo: these were, by some margin, the three biggest administrative units on the African continent. Each dwarfed the nation-states of Western Europe that governed them. Britishruled Nigeria and French Indochina, both federated territories, were also geographically large and, next to the earlier trio, more densely populated.33 They each became sites of quintessential experiments in styles of colonial governance – ‘indirect rule’ in Nigeria, ‘associationism’ in Indochina, with the promise of ‘assimilation’ for a naturalised Vietnamese elite.34 In practice, their status as laboratories of colonial rule reflected two things above all: their ethnic heterogeneity and the practical difficulties of governing such complex, resistant [ 150 ]

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places on a tight budget. Linked to problems of geographical scale and resilient, impenetrable cultures was a second factor evident in each of the territories mentioned thus far. This was the patchy administrative presence and limited infrastructural development characteristic of colonial rule. Imperial governance – and police regulation – was, in consequence, absent much of the time. Being ruled or repressed were phenomena that colonial populations experienced fitfully, often when economic expropriations, labour exactions or fiscal demands were made, rather than constantly as part of their daily lives. Occasional they may have been, colonial demands could nonetheless be highly disruptive: forcible relocation, military recruitment, labour service or, less visibly, incorporation into an expanding wage economy. The nature of these demands, and their variation between territories, raises the third distinctive factor: the ties between a colony’s economic organisation and the form and scale of repressive policing within it. The widespread colonial turn away from subsistence agriculture and towards waged labour in the early twentieth century was not matched by industrial diversification. Imperial bureaucrats on both sides of the Channel remained deeply ambivalent about the consequences of colonial industrialisation. Most were hostile. They warned of sprawling city slums, juvenile delinquents and angry, proletarianised labourers.35 Uprooted from their conservative rural milieus, colonial industrial workers would lose the moral compass of traditional cultures.36 Less alarm was expressed about attracting further investment into existing colonial export industries. That is not to say that administrators regarded big colonial business as unproblematic or benign. And funds for longer-term investment evaporated with the onset of the depression.37 Demands for free labour did not diminish. Most colonial administrations in black Africa and Southeast Asia maintained corvée systems tied to discriminatory legal codes, despite pledging to dispense with them.38 Some massive projects started in more propitious economic circumstances also continued into the early 1930s: the Office du Niger cotton irrigation project in French West Africa; an equally ambitious scheme for cotton cultivation in Portuguese Mozambique; the completion of coastal rail links in the Belgian Congo; and the construction of an arterial road system in Vietnamese Indochina for instance. These became more coercive in their labour recruitment practices as state funding dried up.39 Meanwhile, the ties between European-run businesses and district officers (or their French and Belgian equivalents: respectively, commandants de cercle and Territoriale agents) tended to multiply. Closer cooperation made sense. It minimised clashes between them in their quest for workers. And it allowed government [ 151 ]

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and larger industrial concerns to pool resources in securing migrant labour to work large-scale agricultural, industrial or mining enterprises. These ties were also part of a longer-term regulatory trend. New quotas, passport controls, travel permits and other legislative instruments restricted internal economic migration and large-scale movements of workers within and between colonial territories.40 White police officers were integral to these networks. All colonial governments assigned police to help maintain order on plantations, in processing plants, factories, mines and other European-controlled workplaces. Their presence – or the threat of it – helped impose the very measures of standard time – of a working day and of working weeks – that, as Giordano Nanni has shown in one of the latest additions to Studies in Imperialism, were central to colonisers’ conceptions of labour discipline and the work ethics that came with it.41 Police worked alongside government labour inspectors in monitoring the inflow of workers, their assignment to employers and, in some cases, their eventual return home. Policemen got to know estate managers, business owners and other senior commercial staff in their area; indeed, it was their job to do so. Locally, these relationships were mediated through the networks of association between administrators, traders, managers and police officers. Put differently, the coercive behaviour of colonial states, as well as the cultural practices of European police officers with limited resources spread across huge geographical expanse, reflected a distinct political economy of colonialism.42 The political priorities and security practices of colonial rule were thereby attuned to its economic organisation. It is important here to distinguish between colonial police forces, whose involvement in supporting economic activity was more or less constant, and colonial militaries, for which it was not. Despite their engagement in internal repression or pacification, the business of colonial armies was never, first and foremost, to enhance the economic output of colonies. Admittedly, military operations were often justified in terms of ‘clearing a path’ for commercial activity or putting down unrest to facilitate its resumption. Even so, it is difficult to view organised military formations employed to destroy rather than to administer as the handmaidens of economic policy.43 Police, by contrast, were intimately involved with the day-to-day fortunes of colonial industries, labour markets and workforces, whether in times of peace or internal revolt. It is thus possible to view colonial police as a pillar of colonial economic activity to which military support was, on occasion, added. Where does this leave us in trying to understand the practices of colonial policing? Richard Price, reflecting on recent trends in imperial [ 152 ]

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history, has posed the following question: ‘Is it possible to write a history of empire without considering political economy or without some notion of the “state” as a historical actor in the imperial process?’ Price’s question begs an affirmative answer. But he added an important rider to it, stressing what he calls the ‘untidiness’ of cultural transmission and patterns of colonial rule. Ultimately, he rejects a hegemonic view of imperial power, which, by extension, would identify the police and the colonial laws they upheld as its primary agents.44 Price’s point is well taken. Treading warily and recognising local variation, it seems reasonable to suggest that colonial police forces promoted revenue collection and labour practices conducive to heightened commercial exploitation. This was neither their sole purpose nor their avowed aim. ­ onetheless. It appears to have consumed a large part of their time n We also have the benefit of a number of outstanding studies that have integrated political economy into their analysis of other, related aspects of colonial life. These range from investigations of industry, banking and economic output in French Algeria and French Vietnam to studies of public health and the organisation of plantation agriculture in British Malaya and Dutch-ruled Sumatra.45 Others have unpicked the threads that bound together colonial state authorities with major trading companies or public sector conglomerates in imposing harsher labour regimes in African settings as geographically diverse as Portuguese Mozambique, French West Africa’s interior territories and the Congo basin.46 And contributors to Manchester’s Studies in Imperialism have explored the formative commercial connections between metropolitan port cities and particular colonies and trades.47 Finally, historians of colonial labour have perhaps gone furthest in situating disorder and consequent repression within the context of changing labour markets, new patterns of economic migration and the development of organised labour movements in colonial territories.48 The fact remains that political economy has rarely been given much of an airing of late. Like other more wholly economic approaches, it has scarcely featured within the many innovative works of new imperial history.49 Nor has it figured large in the imperial and international histories of European empires and European colonial rivalries in the twentieth century. David Edgerton cuts to the heart of things: ‘Most accounts of international relations in interwar Britain ignore its crucial political-economic aspects, both in relation to actual political-economic relations, but also to the political-economic mode of thinking about international relations ... Although some historians have noticed the continuing significance of political economy, its full importance in the interwar years has clearly not been appreciated; it has been seen as at best a curiosity.’50 Historians of colonial policing [ 153 ]

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have also been remarkably silent about the imperatives of political economy. There are several reasons for this but, as mentioned earlier, they are essentially reducible to a primordial concern with the origins of local colonial policing styles and a consequent preoccupation with the transmission of institutional practices between places and police forces.

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Political economy and forms of repression Depression-era events make the case for considering political economy as an explanatory tool for colonial police action. It bears emphasis, however, that levels of colonial collective violence in the early 1930s remained relatively low. Even revolts with lasting political fallout, such as the Yen Bay mutiny in northern Vietnam and the accompanying rebellion in northern Annam during 1930–31, counted overall deaths in the hundreds and not the thousands.51 The same could be said of other well-known episodes of interwar unrest. Next to the political killings of civil war Spain, Stalinist purges, the rape of Nanking or the horrors of Nazi mass murder to come, the colonial empires of the 1930s rank lower as sites of lethal state repression, at least until Italy’s murderous conquest of Ethiopia between 1935 and 1940.52 What should we read into this relative absence of violence and the appearance of order only briefly disturbed within colonies?53 Violent disorder or order sustained by threat of violence; do these apparent opposites reveal a single constant: that violence – either actual or potential – was integral to colonial politics? It is vital to remember that levels of violence in differing colonial territories varied markedly, despite certain similarities in forms of colonial rule. Was this a matter of the contrasting national traditions, forms of government and imperial aspirations of the European colonial powers? Was it more a reflection of the legal codes, police powers, judicial institutions and administrative practices of particular colonies? Ann Stoler is a capable guide here. Her study of the fear of violence, and the repression that such fears generated, among the planters, officials and policemen of the Deli region of Dutch Sumatra provides empirical evidence to explain how non-violent worker protest could be construed as something very threatening. By the 1920s, it seems that colonial officials and Dutch estate managers of Deli’s rubber plantations were obsessively nervous that the tables between rulers and ruled could be turned. Fear of violence thereby underpinned employers’ behaviour and Dutch colonial policy.54 How might this be explained? The key, according to Stoler, is that official attention was gripped less by attacks on the estates than by political activity and [ 154 ]

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violent dissent outside them; in other words, by increasing levels of nationalist, communist and anti-colonial protest in the 1920s. In her words, ‘this blurred administrative vision of what comprised political agitation, economic grievance, and ergo criminal offence provided a base for government repression of anticolonial resistance’.55 Historians are divided over the use of colonial state records as useful indicators of actual conditions within the plantations of colonial Southeast Asia. Some of the most interesting debates relate to the Deli region of Eastern Sumatra, the most extensively studied area within Dutch Indonesia’s plantation economy.56 Argument has centred on the usefulness as sources of the reports regularly filed by the Dutch labour inspectorate. For Jan Bremen, such records are problematic, their contents inevitably skewed by their authors’ presumptions about the fundamental validity of the colonial project and their prejudices about Indonesian labour and the Europeans in charge of it.57 For other specialist scholars, labour inspectorate records, while necessarily demanding dispassionate treatment, offer the best insight into the day-to-day workings of the plantation economy.58 Looked at obliquely by reading against their narrative grain, they even reveal the institutionalised discrimination and low-level violence suffered by coolie workforces.59 Such records, moreover, indicate that the colonial state was no monolith. Well-intentioned labour inspectors might rail against maltreatment of workers without eliciting much reaction, either from the colonial authorities in Batavia or from the Dutch government in The Hague.60 Mention of maltreatment is not to suggest in a literal sense that all colonial state intervention was necessarily and ruthlessly exploitative. By the 1920s the Dutch colonial authorities were, for instance, embarked on numerous and widespread proto-development schemes devised to improve foodstuff crop yields, to provide water purification for village communities and to extend credit facilities to peasant smallholders.61 Major irrigation projects and free clean water supplies, physical manifestations of the so-called ‘Ethical policy’ initiated at the turn of the century, were also the envy of other colonial powers in southern Asia. But the combination of rising population pressure and the inability to achieve any major breakthrough in the production of rice, Indonesia’s staple food, suggested that these early development projects had failed to raise living standards in any fundamental way.62 Furthermore, it is no coincidence that the public works, public health and other welfarist initiatives pursued in fulfilment of ethical colonial policy ran parallel to rigid enforcement of the Coolie Labour Ordinance which, until 1930, guaranteed the flow of cheap imported labour to plantations and mines, most notably in East Sumatra. And [ 155 ]

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this returns us to the underlying political economy of policing in the region. Severe punishment for runaway labourers, hierarchical punishment regimes for ‘lax’ work and habitual brutality by overseers and police were the flipside of the welfarist coin. What the Dutch laid claim to give with one hand, they could take with the other in order to keep the apparatus of colonial state control in place.63 Anne Booth’s careful analysis of taxation payments, food-crop production and dietary patterns among Indonesians suggests that plantation labourers fared especially badly in the 1930s, squeezed by worsening income disparities, falling real wages and declining calorific intake. With less rice cheaply available to the poorest in society, corn and cassava became staples in daily diets already severely lacking in protein. Booth’s conclusion is damning: by the time the Japanese descended on Java in 1942 the local population was probably living on a more meagre diet than when Raffles departed in 1815.64 Even by colonial standards, the rubber-producing region of Dutch Sumatra was an exceptionally ‘tense society’. The severity of its labour regime was harsh by Southeast Asia standards, less so by those pertaining in some parts of black Africa, particularly the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Africa where forced labour persisted throughout the 1930s as British and French colonial administrations began, albeit tentatively, to reject it.65 It was surely no coincidence that the repressive structures of the police in the African dependencies of Salazar’s Portugal took shape in the depression years. The Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado (PVDE, or State Security Police; widely cited as the PIDE) was established during 1932–33 by the amalgamation of Portugal’s International Police and the police information service under the directorship of a professional army officer and Salazar-confidante, Captain Agostinho Lourenço. Theoretically, only the PVDE’s Vigilance and Defence section was responsible for political policing while other branches of the new organisation took charge of CID-type criminal investigation, border control and counter-espionage. But, in these roles, too, the regime’s demands that social order and colonial hierarchy be upheld inevitably politicised the PVDE still more. To seal their identification with Salazar’s state, PVDE officers administered the jails and camps to which its political opponents were sent, including the notorious Tarrafal detention centre in the Cape Verde Islands.66 Although police behaviour in Salazarist Africa stood at the extreme end of the repressive spectrum, political scientist Christian Davenport suggests we may find some measure of consistency across national locations and historical settings. One is that the objectives of those challenging – or deemed to be challenging – political authority are [ 156 ]

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central to state threat perceptions. Activities thought to endanger the very existence of the state are – not surprisingly – assigned greater risk than actions taken in support of particular grievances, as, for example, in industrial disputes.67 The problem within some colonies, as Stoler’s analysis of Deli indicates, was the conflation of the two. In these circumstances, officials, planters, overseers and police were liable to treat any protest or worker unrest with acute severity. Hence the mass arrests and other signs of disproportionate repression that followed an abortive communist rebellion in West Sumatra in November 1926 and another in Java two months later.68 There was nothing unique to the Dutch colonies about this.69 Indeed, these Indonesian uprisings triggered similar alarm and heightened security measures in neighbouring British Malaya and French Indochina. Furthermore, where settler colonialism was most entrenched in black Africa during the interwar period, panic, moral or otherwise, lurked beneath the calm exterior of colonial rule.70 Imagine, for a moment, an episode common to several colonies between the wars: a strikers’ march that descended into a violent confrontation in which protesters lost their lives in clashes with the police. Thus did industrial protest become identifiable with something profoundly menacing – an inter-ethnic riot in which the forces of order were targeted because they personified colonial authority and employer interest.71 Events of this type, increasingly commonplace in the depression years from British India to French Algeria, raise a deeper question, namely, the extent to which systemic public violence mirrored the economic structures of the territories in question.72 Framed in this light, economic iniquities, coercive labour regimes and working conditions become the primary determinants of dissent and the repressive violence meted out in response to it. Albeit important, the particular form of the colonial state – its institutions, its administrative ethos and its local collaborators – were less critical than the underlying socio-economic structure of the territory in question. Put differently, the economics of the colony made its political culture and not the other way round. Let me use two examples, one from the British empire, the other from the French, to illustrate this process at work in the years of the interwar global crisis. To judge from the events in the British West Indies during the 1930s, colonial policing of strikes, riots and other civil emergencies actually connoted the end of ‘normal’ policing and resort to desperate and violent expedients. Labour unrest in the 1930s stemmed, in a familiar Caribbean pattern, from poverty, under-employment, rural land hunger and the return of migrants [ 157 ]

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from overseas. It was intensified by frustration over the lack of labour reform, absence of political rights and rage over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.73 Every island territory also had its own, more immediate socio-economic causes of dissent in the depression years. Jamaica’s, for example, included a crisis in the profitability of banana production, changes to working practices in the sugar industry, the rapid growth of Kingston and its outlying shanty towns, the radicalisation of the urban workforce, particularly dockworkers, and the influence of Garveyism.74 In the years 1935–38 colonial police forces faced with mass opposition and organised protest in Kingston, Jamaica, in British Guiana and, above all, in the towns and oilfields of Trinidad and Tobago proved unable to cope. Their practices and procedures in response to civil disorder were woefully inadequate and frequently degenerated into the use of firearms, more often out of panic than as part of a planned escalation of coercive force. Once police lines were broken or uniformed constables injured or killed, the colonial authorities of the British Caribbean turned to the military or, as was more geographically feasible, to the Royal Navy, to provide armed personnel to stifle public protest, enforce curfews, patrol the streets and guard government buildings. In other words, there was no intermediate point between civil policing of industrial disputes or political protest and recourse to state repression through the use of armed forces in conditions analogous to martial law.75 This, however, was far from the whole story. The geographical isolation of island territories and the shortage of locally available police or military forces sharpened the governing elite’s distrust of the black majority population. Most important, the political culture of the British Caribbean was warped by the institutional memory of slavery and the inability or reluctance of the colonial state to come to terms with the ethnic divisions that the slave economy had first put in place.76 Abiding racial tension and the acute inequalities that pervaded these former slave colonies deepened the rift between whites and non-whites once protests began. Fears of a general uprising, of racial killing and of sexual violence against the white minority nurtured the sense of embattlement and shared interest between colonial authorities, white estate managers and business owners. One consequence was that white employers, settlers and managers took up arms as police auxiliaries and vigilantes whenever industrial unrest erupted. Thus, into the mix of civil police and naval squadrons we must add the white irregulars prepared to use force to defend homes, businesses, plantations and other commercial interests against mob violence.77 As a result of this dual recourse to military coercion and white vigilante [ 158 ]

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repression, in the British West Indies of the 1930s it is hard to find a dividing line between colonial policing and the maintenance of white racial and economic dominance through violence. In times of civil unrest, the two were one and the same. Turning now to a French case, the intersection between political economy and political violence is starkly illustrated by events in the French protectorate of Tunisia during 1937, a critical year of political reform and industrial unrest. By the late 1930s official fears of disorder and colonial breakdown in French North Africa were sharpest among those organisations charged with upholding imperial authority: the security services and police agencies such as city Sûreté commands and the riot control specialists of the gendarmerie’s Garde Mobile Républicaine.78 In Tunisia especially, their anxieties were not without foundation. Militancy among Tunisian workers, and mineworkers above all, was fired by an explosion of trade union activism in the territory from the mid-1920s onwards.79 In these circumstances, explanations for the use of riot police and army units against Arab strikers may be better found by analysing the prevailing culture of state violence within the Tunisian administration and its security forces. The colonial policing of public gatherings and worker protests reveal a dangerous mix of racial stereotyping, belief in external agitation and a pseudo-psychology of Muslim crowd behaviour that made the use of armed force near inevitable.80 The tragic climax of these events was the killing of sixteen strikers at the Metlaoui mining complex in southern Tunisia in early March 1937. Only in the aftermath of Metlaoui did the emphasis in protest policing shift unequivocally from the industrial arena to the party political one as the country’s leading nationalist party, the Neo-Destour, was first outlawed, then severely repressed.81 The distinction is perhaps academic. Officials and security analysts in Tunisia increasingly melded material hardship, industrial strife and popular nationalism into a single threat. Strikes arising from conventional demands about terms and conditions were swept up in the onward march of Tunisian nationalism because the same police, gendarmerie and troops called out to contain them also policed the mass demonstrations organised by Neo-Destour activists.82 The result was a single narrative of anti-governmental protest in which striking miners and nationalist radicals became indistinguishable as targets of police repression.83 The point is that in French Tunisia as elsewhere, protest policing had for years been driven by the actions of local ­populations as economic actors rather than nationalist supporters.

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Conclusion The study of popular dissent and of the repressive strategies adopted to contain it has been embedded in broader narratives of the expansion and contraction of empires, from conquest to decolonisation and post-colonial state formation. Historians of colonial police forces have also shown particular interest in administrative networks of empire security, producing fascinating accounts in which the movement of police officers and the cultural transmission of ideas about policing predominate. While acknowledging the importance of these interforce connections, this chapter has suggested that other networks were perhaps as significant if not more so in the years of interwar economic crisis addressed here. To be specific, the chapter has identified a triangular connection – at once political, economic and cultural, between government, police and key industrial concerns as the critical determinant of protest policing. Put differently, the protests that took up most colonial police time after 1918 were more industrial than political in origin. Policing decisions about such protests in individual territories reflected the ways in which networks of influence between officials, managers and police authorities operated locally. The depression was a catalyst here. It weakened the export sectors on which most colonial Treasuries relied. Life became significantly harder for waged workers and the social relations that police were required to maintain were, to varying degrees, destabilised. This does not mean that manifestations of anti-colonial sentiment were unaffected by cultural conflicts and social dynamics unique to particular communities. Nor does it imply that collective violence was always instrumentally tied to the material condition of those involved. But, at the macro-level of comparison between colonies and empires, it does indicate that the link between changing economic conditions and consequent treatment of colonial workforces is the most recurrent marker of European colonial policing between the two World Wars.

Notes  1 This chapter draws on my Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers, and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge, 2012), the research for which was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.  2 A type described most vividly in Edward M. Spiers, The Victorian Soldier in Africa (Manchester, 2004). Chapter 7 is especially relevant for Aster’s case. In similar vein, see Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854–1902 (Edinburgh, 2006); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994); Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London, 2000), pp. 83–91.  3 National Archives (NA), London, WO 32/2970, Verney Asser file 26/AL/115, 1927.

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policing the colonial crowd  4 Another shift analysed in detail within a Studies in Imperialism volume: David Killingray and David Omissi (eds), Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964 (Manchester, 1999).  5 One of Britain’s leading Victorian generals in Africa, Buller knew that regular troops often relied on auxiliary forces, see Spiers, The Victorian Soldier in Africa, pp. 48–9, 52–3, 162–5.  6 NA, WO 32/2970, War Office minutes for PUS, ‘Colonial Policing Service Counting as War Service’, 1927.  7 This approach has been evident ever since the publication of John MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire in 1984, a point recently acknowledged by Sonya Rose in her, ‘Who Are We Now? Writing the Post-War ‘Nation’, 1948–2001’ in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds), Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester, 2010), pp. 158–9.  8 See, for instance, Geoff Eley, ‘Imperial Imaginary, Colonial Effect: Writing the Colony and the Metropole Together’, in Hall and McClelland (eds), Race, Nation and Empire, pp. 220–8; Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and London, 1997), pp. 1–56; and, more generally, Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006).  9 The organisational evolution of Britain’s colonial police forces is nicely described in Georgina Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame, 1945–80 (Manchester, 2006), pp. 55–65. 10 The ‘late colonial state’ phenomenon was examined comparatively in the journal Itinerario, 23: 3–4 (1999), 73–209; the essential introduction to which is John Darwin, ‘What Was the Late Colonial State?’, Itinerario, 23: 3–4 (1999), 73–82. 11 For critical reflections on dependency theory, see Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43: 4 (2001), 651–64. 12 Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, ‘Crises of Accumulation, Coercion and the Colonial State: The Development of the Labour Control System in Kenya, 1919–1929’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 14: 1 (1980), 56. 13 Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 74–83, 243–6. 14 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996), p. 465; and, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge, 2002), chapters 7–8. 15 Most ‘new’ imperial histories eschew the ‘old’ centre–periphery debates, following Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler’s decisive call to treat metropole and colony more subtly as mutually constructed. See their ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and London, 1997), pp. 1–40. Stoler has recently refined the argument further in, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009). 16 Jacques Frémeaux, Les Empires coloniaux dans le processus de mondialisation (Paris, 2002), pp. 126–33. 17 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (Harlow, 1993). They expand their arguments about the interactions of British commerce, City finance and imperial rule in British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (Basingstoke, 2002). 18 The literature on the British empire is strongest here. The classic articulation of the exceptionalist view is Sir Charles Jefferies, The Colonial Police (London, 1952). More nuanced studies include Anthony Clayton and David Killingray, Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in British Colonial Africa (Athens, OH, 1989); David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority

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and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester, 1991); Georgina Sinclair, At the End of the Line. For consideration of the concept of martial races as pivotal to the composition of Britain’s colonial armies, see Heather Streets, Martial Races and Masculinity in the British Army, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004). For French and Dutch colonial parallels, see Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH, 1990); Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2006); Jaap de Moor, ‘The Recruitment of Indonesian Soldiers for the Dutch Colonial Army, c. 1700–1950’ in Killingray and David Omissi, Guardians of Empire, pp. 53–68. Georgina Sinclair and Chris A. Williams, ‘“Home and Away”: The Cross-Fertilisation Between “Colonial” and “British” Policing, 1921–85’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35: 2 (2007), 221–38; Gad Kroizer, ‘From Dowbiggin to Tegart: Revolutionary Change in the Colonial Police in Palestine during the 1930s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 32: 2 (2004), 115–33; Martin Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1928–1935 (London, 1994), pp. 93–100. Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass, 4: 1 (2006), 124–41. Gordon Pirie, Air Empire: Britain’s Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 2009). David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control. The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990); David Killingray, ‘“A Swift Agent of Government”: Air Power in British Colonial Africa, 1916–1939’, Journal of African History, 25: 4 (1984), 429–44; Jafna L. Cox, ‘A Splendid Training Ground: The Importance to the Royal Air Force of its Role in Iraq, 1919–32’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 13: 2 (1985), 157–84; Priya Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia’, American Historical Review, 111: 1 (2006), 16–51. Mary A. Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester, 2009), especially chapter 5. Martin Thomas, ‘The Gendarmerie, Information Collection, and Colonial Violence in French North Africa between the Wars’, Historical Reflections, 36: 2 (2010), 76–96. For a near-British imperial equivalent, Army political officers in India, see Christian Tripodi, ‘Peacemaking Through Bribes or Cultural Empathy? The Political Officer and Britain’s Strategy towards the North-West Frontier, 1901–1945’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31: 1 (2008), 123–51. India Office Library, Mss EUR C235: ‘Charles Tegart of the Indian Police’, u ­ npublished biography by Lady Tegart; Michael Silvestri, ‘“An Irishman Is Specially Suited to Be a Policeman”: Sir Charles Tegart and Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’, History Ireland, 8: 4 (2000), 40–4; Kroizer, ‘From Dowbiggin to Tegart’, 115–33. Sinclair, At the End of the Line, pp. 13–19; and for a different perspective on the Royal Irish Constabulary, Richard Hawkins, ‘The “Irish Model” and the Empire: A Case for Reassessment’ in Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire, pp. 18–32; Richard Rathbone, ‘Political Intelligence and Policing in Ghana in the late 1940s and 1950s’, David M. Anderson and David Killingray (ed.), Policing and Decolonisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police 1917–65 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 92–5. Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean’, History Compass, 7: 3 (2009), 659–77. Georgina Sinclair has also shown how these personnel transfers, and the cultural transmissions they stimulated, worked in the final decades of the British empire; see her At the End of the Line, pp. 72–8. Especially useful here are two pieces by David Killingray, ‘The “Rod of Empire”: The Debate over Corporal Punishment in the British African Colonial Forces, 1888–1946’, Journal of African History, 35: 2 (1994), 201–16; ‘Securing the British Empire: Policing and Colonial Order, 1920–1960’ in Mark Mazower (ed.), The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives (Providence and Oxford, 1997),pp. 167–90. See also David M. Anderson and David Killingray, ‘An

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Orderly Retreat? Policing and the End of Empire’ in Policing and Decolonisation, pp. 4–6. David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford, 2011), chapters 3–4. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2005), parts I and II. See, for instance, Matthew Hughes’ forensic re-examination of the violence intrinsic to Palestine policing: ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39’, English Historical Review, 124: 507 (2009), 313–54; and his ‘Lawlessness and the Law: British Armed Forces, the Legal System and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–1939’ in Rory Miller (ed.), Britain, Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years (Farnham, 2010), pp. 141–56. These connections are tackled in Robert A. Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945 (London, 1994); Frank Furedi, Colonial War and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London, 1994); Anderson and Killingray, Policing and Decolonisation. Christopher Goscha provides two innovative treatments of the connections between Vietnam’s geography, its colonial politics and regional economic networks: Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, 1887–1954 (Oslo, 1995) and Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 1885–1954 (Richmond, 1999). For the sympathetic insider’s view of the Nigerian case, see Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (Oxford, 1937). For more sceptical local studies of southern and northern Nigeria, see Adiele E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (London, 1972); Chima J. Korieh, ‘Hegemonic and Negotiated Encounters: Reflections on Indirect Rule and Protest in Colonial Eastern Nigeria’ in Femi J. Kolapo and Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry (eds), African Agency and European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiations and Containment (Lanham, 2007), pp. 111–14; Peter K. Tibenderana, ‘The Irony of Indirect Rule in the Sokoto Emirate, Nigeria, 1903–1944’, African Studies Review, 31: 1 (1988), 67–92. On Indochina, see: Patrice Morlat, Les Affaires politiques de l’Indochine (1895– 1923) (Paris, 1995), pp. 61–77; Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina : An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley, 2009), pp. 71–6, 83–91, 105–15. For discussion of the broader French shift towards associationism in the early twentieth century, see: Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize (Stanford, 1997). Andrew Burton, ‘Urchins, Loafers and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization and Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961’, Journal of African History, 42: 2 (2001), 206–8. The colonial industrialisation debate was particularly virulent in 1930s France, see; Bernard Mouralis, Anne Piriou and Romuald Fonkoua (eds), Robert Delavignette, savant et politique (1897–1976) (Paris, 2003), pp. 79–80, 95–8; Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français. Histoire d’un divorce (Paris, 1984), pp. 240–56; Andrew Hardy, ‘The Economics of French Rule in Indochina: A Biography of Paul Bernard (1892–1960)’, Modern Asian Studies, 32: 4 (1998), 807–48. For long-view analyses of a British case, see M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge, 2004); Simon Mollan, ‘Economic Imperialism and the Political Economy of Sudan: The Case of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, 1899–1956’ (PhD dissertation, University of Durham, 2008); Peter Cross, ‘British Attitudes to Sudanese Labour: The Foreign Office Records as Sources for Social History’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 24: 2 (1997), 217–60. Even the capital-rich Bank of Indochina felt constrained to reduce its running costs by eleven million francs as the depression worsened in 1932–33. As examples, see: David M. Anderson, ‘Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1939’, Journal of African History, 41: 3 (2000), 459–85; Gregory Mann, ‘What Was the Indigénat? The “Empire of Law” in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, 50: 2 (2009), 331–53.

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writing imperial histories 39 Régine Levrat, Le Coton en Afrique occidentale et central avant 1950. Un exemple de la politique coloniale de la France (Paris, 2008), pp. 65–7, 119–38 passim; Alan Isaacman, ‘Peasants, Work and the Labor Process: Forced Cotton Cultivation in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961’, Journal of Social History, 25: 4 (1992), 487–526; Allen Isaacman and Arlindo Chilundo, ‘Peasants at Work: Forced Cotton Cultivation in Northern Mozambique’ in Allen Isaacman and Richard R. Roberts (eds), Cotton, Colonialism and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1995), pp. 149–60; Osumaka Likaka, ‘Forced Cotton Cultivation and Social Control in the Belgian Congo’, and Cotton, Colonialism and Social History, pp. 201–11; Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, pp. 128–9. 40 As Adam McKeown observes, ‘miners and agriculturalists in Southeast Asia and Africa, and railroad laborers in Siberia, Manchuria, and California [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] all undertook their work in the context of financial, political, and military power concentrated in the hands of Europeans and Japanese’. See A. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008), pp. 64–5, quotation at p. 65. 41 Giordano Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester, 2012), pp. 27–54. 42 To stress the political economy dimension of these relationships is not to deny the importance of what Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson describe as the ‘cultural economy’ of transnational connections between Europeans living and working in the colonies, see Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 14. Their discussion of imperial networks (pp. 45–63) is also instructive. 43 Hull, Absolute Destruction, p. 140. 44 Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45: 3 (2006), 603, 624–5. Price’s viewpoint is borne out by Benjamin Brower’s study of colonial violence in Algeria: A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York, 2009), pp. 21–6, 31–2. 45 Daniel Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie. Comptes et mécomptes de la tutelle coloniale 1930–1962 (Paris, 1997); Pierre Brocheux, The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy and Revolution, 1860–1960 (Madison, WI, 1995); Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge, 1996); Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven, CT, 1985). 46 Allen Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1928–1961 (Portsmouth, NH, 1996); Richard L. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Soudan, 1800–1946 (Stanford, 1996); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des grands compagnies concessionaires, 1898–1930 (Paris, 1972); D. K. Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization: The United Africa Company 1929–1987 (Oxford, 1994). 47 See, for instance, the essays in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, 1999), and in Sheryllynne Haggerty, Anthony Webster and Nicholas J. White (eds), The Empire in One City? Liverpool’s Inconvenient Imperial Past (Manchester, 2008). 48 Essential works among a substantial literature include Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern (eds), Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (London, 2000); Carolyn A. Brown, We Were All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (Portsmouth, NH, 2003); Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, NH, 2005). 49 A. G. Hopkins, ‘The New Economic History of Africa’, Journal of African History, 50: 1 (2009), 155–62.

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policing the colonial crowd 50 David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 48–9. 51 Martin Thomas, ‘Fighting “Communist Banditry” in French Vietnam: The Rhetoric of Repression after the Yen Bay Uprising, 1930–32’, French Historical Studies, 34: 3 (2011), 611–48. 52 Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 15–21; Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge, 2010). 53 Introduction to Christian Davenport (ed.), Paths to State Repression: Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1–17. 54 Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, pp. 62–3. 55 Ibid. p. 64. 56 The pioneer here remains Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, especially pp. 43–90 passim. See also Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Kettle on a Slow Boil: Batavia’s Threat Perceptions in the Indies Outer Islands, 1870–1910’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 31: 1 (2000), 70–100; Wim F. Wertheim, ‘Conditions on Sugar Estates in Colonial Java: Comparisons with Deli’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24: 2 (1993), 268–84; Margo Groenewoud, ‘Towards the Abolition of Penal Sanctions in Dutch Colonial Labour Legislation: An International Perspective’, Itinerario, 19: 2 (1995), 72–90; Alec Gordon, ‘The Agrarian Question and Colonial Capitalism: Coercion and Java’s Colonial Sugar Plantation System, 1870–1941’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27: 1 (1999), 1–34. 57 Jan Bremen, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1989), pp. 193–5. 58 V. J. H. Houben and J. Thomas Lindblad reply to Jan Bremen’s review article on ‘New Thoughts on Colonial Labour in Indonesia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 33: 3 (2002), 559–60. 59 A point proven by Ann Stoler almost twenty-five years ago: ‘Perceptions of Protest: Defining the Dangerous in Colonial Sumatra’, American Ethnologist, 12: 4 (1985), 642–58. 60 Houben and Lindblad reply, 559–60; V. J. H. Houben, ‘Profit Versus Ethics: Governments Enterprises in the Late Colonial State’ in Robert Cribb (ed.), The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880–1942 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 191–211. 61 Marc Frey, ‘Control, Legitimacy, and the Securing of Interests: European Development Policy in South-East Asia from the Late Colonial Period to the Early 1960s’, Contemporary European History, 12: 4 (2003), 397–8. Rural development projects of this kind came to an abrupt halt in the depression years, plans for further investment only resuming at the very end of the 1930s. 62 Anne Booth, ‘Living Standards and the Distribution of Income in Colonial Indonesia: A Review of the Evidence’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 19: 2 (1988), 322. 63 Angus Maddison, ‘Dutch Income in and from Indonesia, 1700–1938’, Modern Asian Studies, 23: 4 (1989), 656. 64 Booth, ‘Living Standards’, 327–33. 65 Luis Rodríguez-Piñero, Indigenous Peoples, Postcolonialism, and International Law: The ILO Regime (1919–1989) (Oxford, 2005), pp. 17–35; Catherine B. Ash, ‘Forced Labour in Colonial West Africa’, History Compass, 4: 3 (2006), 404–5. 66 Douglas L. Wheeler, ‘In the Service of Order: The Portuguese Political Police and the British, German and Spanish Intelligence, 1932–1945’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18: 1 (1983), 1–6. The PVDE’s organisational structure was modelled on a hybridised version of Britain’s MI5 and MI6. 67 Davenport, Paths to State Repression, pp. 3–5. 68 Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, NC, 2010), pp. 27–30. 69 As Elizabeth Collingham notes in regard to Britons in colonial India, ‘sensitivity to the slightest hint of a challenge to their dignity or authority meant that they frequently met any act which suggested insolence with physical violence’. See

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77 78 79 80 81

Elizabeth M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947 (Oxford, 2001), p. 142; also cited in Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial (Cambridge, 2007), p. 7. As David Anderson, ‘Sexual Threat and Settler Society: Black Perils in Kenya, c. 1907–1930’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38: 1 (2010), 47–74, quote at p. 66. Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, 2001), p. 11. Subho Basu, ‘Strikes and “Communal” Riots in Calcutta in the 1890s: Industrial Workers, Bhadralok Nationalist Leadership and the Colonial State’, Modern Asian Studies, 32: 4 (1998), 949–83; A. P. Kannangara, ‘The Riots of 1915 in Sri Lanka: A Study in the Roots of Communal Violence’, Past and Present, 102 (1984), 130–65; David Arnold, ‘Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India’, Past and Present, 84 (1979), 111–45; David Arnold, ‘Police Power and the Demise of British Rule in India, 1930–47’ in Anderson and Killingray (ed.), Policing and Decolonisation; Joshua Cole, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Situation in Interwar Algeria: The Anti-Jewish Riots in Constantine, August 1934’ in Martin Thomas, The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism ( Lincoln, NE, 2011), pp. 77–111; Samuel Kalman, ‘Le Combat par tous les moyens: Colonial Violence and the Extreme Right in 1930s Oran’, French Historical Studies, 34 (2011), 125–53; Howard Johnson, ‘The Anti-Chinese Riots of 1918 in Jamaica’, Immigrants and Minorities, 2: 1 (1983), 50–63. Jason C. Parker, Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962 (New York, 2008), pp. 18–19; Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘The War in Ethiopia and Trinidad 1935–1936’ in Bridget Brereton and Kevin A. Yelvington (eds), The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Cultural and Social History (Gainesville, 1999), pp. 191–2. O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934–39 (Kingston, 1995), p. 132. Caswell L. Johnson, ‘The Emergence of Political Unionism in Economies of British Colonial Origin: The Cases of Jamaica and Trinidad’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 39: 2 (1980), 151–64; Kelvin Singh, Race and Class Struggles in a Colonial State: Trinidad 1917–1945 (Calgary, 1994). For the Jamaican example, see: Howard Johnson, ‘Patterns of Policing in the PostEmancipation British Caribbean, 1835–95’ in Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire, pp. 71–91; Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led Nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston, 2004), p. 6; Mary Turner, ‘The 11 O-Clock Flog: Women, Work and Labour Law in the British Caribbean’, Slavery & Abolition, 20: 1 (1999), 38–58; and, more generally, Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Problems of Race, Labour and Politics in Jamaica and Britain (Baltimore, MD, 1991). O. Nigel Bolland, The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy in the Labour Movement (Oxford, 2001), pp. 71–5. Service Historique de la Défense-Département Armée de Terre, Vincennes, série Tunisie, 2H59, ‘Instruction règlent l’exercice des pouvoirs de police de l’autorité militaire sur la territoire de la Régence en état de siège.’ Ahmad Eqbal and Stuart Schaar, ‘M’hamed Ali: Tunisian Labor Organizer’ in Edmund Burke, III, Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (London, 1993), pp. 191–204. Thomas, ‘The Gendarmerie’, 76–96. Service Historique de la Gendarmerie Nationale, Vincennes, carton 49563, no. 582/2 CSTT-GN, Compagnie de Tunisie, Lt-Colonel Vallon circular to Commandants de Section, 17 May 1938; SHD-DAT, 2H59, no. IGCC/933, Armand Guillon circular to Contrôleurs civils, ‘A.S. de la dissolution du Néo-Destour’, 27 April 1938; SHGN, carton 745, 19e Corps d’armée, Colonel Maria note, ‘Organisation actuelle de la Légion de Gendarmerie et de GRM de l’Algérie’, 1 March 1937.

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82 Archives Nationales, Paris, F60 749, no. 119, Tunis Resident Armand Guillon to Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos, 20 January 1938. 83 SHD-DAT, 2H59, Commandant Supérieur des Troupes de Tunisie (CSTT – General Hanote) ‘Note de service: maintien de l’ordre’, 10 May 1938.

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Whatever happened to the Third British Empire? Empire, Nation Redux1 Mrinalini Sinha

Long before it became quite de rigueur, John M. MacKenzie was making the case, both in his own scholarship and in the Studies in Imperialism series, which he launched in 1984, for the domestic impact of empire on the nation in Britain. He thus inaugurated what has been, arguably, the most significant post-Robinson-Gallagher development in British imperial historiography: the rethinking of the relationship between empire and nation.2 In the inaugural volume in the Series, for example, MacKenzie invited scholars to consider a more ‘centripetal’ analysis of imperial influence to replace the dominant ‘centrifugal’ analysis of the radiation of imperial influence from Britain to the colonies overseas.3 To be sure, there were early precursors to MacKenzie’s call to scholars to reconsider the hermetic separation between empire and nation as well as the unidirectional understanding – from metropole to colony – that had underpinned much British-empire historiography.4 Yet a more concerted exploration of these insights – and the concomitant expansion of British imperial historiography to take seriously questions of culture – had to await the launching of the Studies in Imperialism series. The tremendous success of the initiative is reflected in the fact that almost three decades later – and some one hundred volumes in the Series – the original iconoclasm of its intervention has now become a historiographical commonplace. What, in the wake of the successful publishing history of the Series, is there still left to say about the relationship between empire and nation?5 This chapter both builds on, and takes in a somewhat different direction, the contemporary historiographical preoccupation with the relation between empire and nation. My concern, however, is not with the impact of empire on the nation (as was the case in the inaugural moment of the Studies in Imperialism series), but the other way around: the impact of nation on the empire. How was the British empire transformed – and with what consequences – as a result of a [ 168 ]

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growing emphasis on the ‘national’, which acquired increasing legitimacy in the post-First World War period at the dawn of the so-called American century? This exploration of the contours of an increasingly ‘national’, as opposed to an ‘imperial’, British empire in the early decades of the twentieth century is undertaken very much in the spirit of the Studies in Imperialism series. The latter taught generations of scholars to question received accounts of the relationship between empire and nation. By the same token, the Series also re-animated the category of ‘empire’, as both a subject and an analytics, in an era when nations provided the proper and natural locus for organising different histories. The attempt to mark a moment when ‘national’ ways of thinking came to predominate in the thinking of the British empire, follows in, even as it tries to extend, the tradition begun by the Studies in Imperialism series: that is, of complicating the relationship between empire and nation. This chapter, indeed, charts the steps by which an erstwhile imperial conception of empire was decisively defeated in the interwar period in favour of a national conception of the empire. The reasons for, and implications of, this shift have been obscured in British imperial historiography for a variety of reasons. For one, the idea of a ‘Third British Empire’, in contrast to the First and Second British Empires, never quite caught on in imperial historiography; and, even when it did, it has been confined largely to the history of the Dominion colonies and of the Commonwealth or, in more recent times, to British-diasporic studies now re-christened as the ‘British World’.6 The relative neglect, and tendentious hijacking, of the concept of the Third British Empire – in reference primarily to the Dominion colonies – has tended to obscure the fact that the triumph of the new nationalising vision of empire was not merely the natural outcome of an evolutionary process. Rather, it constituted a radical break. The impact of twentieth-century decolonisation, moreover, ended up giving an air of inevitability to the seemingly natural trajectory – from empire to nation-states –that has further contributed to the neglect of the break that was inaugurated by the Third British Empire. The interwar debates on the claims of British Indians as British subjects provide a window on the nature and consequences of the ‘national turn’ in imperial thinking. The contours of these debates, stretching from India to Australia, Canada and South and East Africa and culminating at the Imperial Conferences in London, demonstrate how certain imperial rights acquired by British Indians as British subjects were progressively stripped over the course of the twentieth century to a more restrictive understanding of rights to be guaranteed only within national territorial units.7 This, then, is an argument for [ 169 ]

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bringing together once again the history of the Dominions and of the dependent parts of the British empire in understanding the contours of the Third British Empire; it is, as well, an argument for a refusal to read the ‘national turn’ in the history of the interwar period retroactively: that is, from the perspective of the nation-state outcome of twentieth-century decolonisation. The subject of this chapter takes us, seemingly, full circle historiographically: from imperial history through the numerous recent ‘turns’ in imperial studies and then back again. It makes a case, in effect, for a return to certain kinds of traditional historical questions – borrowing at least a page or two from the kind of work pioneered by an earlier generation of imperial historians – to push the field of imperial studies at this juncture in some potential new directions. This chapter, therefore, has a two-part agenda, one substantive and the other historiographical. On the substantive side, its aim is to flesh out the distinctive contours of a Third British Empire in the post-First World War period as a separate phase in the evolution of the British empire. The particular grounds for the rehabilitation of the terminology of the Third British Empire – alongside the more enduring references to a First and a Second British Empire – also carries with it historiographical implications for studies of the British empire: the possibility of taking empire seriously, once again, in its own terms. This means also acknowledging the different ways – beyond the national – in which its critics sought to make the empire serve the needs of redistributive justice. A brief overview of the historical trajectory of the nomenclature of the Third British Empire might be in order. The phrase was popularised contemporaneously by the British historian and public intellectual, Alfred Zimmern, in a series of lectures that he delivered in the 1920s – quite aptly as we will see shortly – across the Atlantic at Columbia University, New York. The lectures were subsequently published under the eponymous title.8 Zimmern, who was a fellow traveller with Lionel Curtis of the Round Table Group and co-founder of the Institute of International Affairs (or Chatham House) in London, has been the subject of recent studies by Paul Rich and Frank Trentmann as a League-of-Nations idealist and as a ‘new internationalist’.9 Zimmern’s vision of a post-First World War international order included a role for the British empire – in an idealised, if nevertheless paternalist, reincarnation – as an antidote to the narrowness of nation-state politics that had stood exposed during the war. By the end of the decade, however, Zimmern himself had played out the concept to its limit. He came now to the logical conclusion that the Third British Empire, even as an idealised construct, had serious limits as the kind of supranational organisation required by the times. The League of Nations, which was, [ 170 ]

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in effect, a League of Nation-States, seemed better equipped than the British empire to serve the needs of the kind of new international order that Zimmern had envisioned.10 To be sure, Zimmern’s notion of the Third British Empire rested on a perversely selective understanding of the realities on the ground of either the pre- or post-war empire. But, more importantly for our purposes, is the way in which his formulation of the Third British Empire was quite indistinguishable, except perhaps by its more limited membership, from the principles that underlay the formation of the League of Nations. Indeed, it is quite apposite that Zimmern and Curtis were also popularisers of another term, the Commonwealth, in connection with the empire.11 This latter, especially in its subsequent guise as the Commonwealth of Nations, had an even greater affinity with the conception of the League of Nations. And, as such, it eventually supplanted the more candidly paternalistic term, the Third British Empire, and, ironically, also led in due course to a challenge to the very conception of the empire itself whose preservation had been the motivating force behind both Zimmern’s and Curtis’s reformulations. The collapse of the term the Third British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations provides a signal to how the triumph of a particular ‘national’ conception of the empire came to be seamlessly naturalised. The post-war recasting of the British empire in keeping with the spirit of the League of Nations, as a hierarchical confederation of current and potential nation-states, however, was already the product of a radical and far-reaching reversal of earlier conceptions of the British empire. It entailed a remaking of what had once been an empire-state into a congeries of existing and potential national states that were, nevertheless, still constituent parts of a single empire.12 The case for the revival of the terminology of the Third British Empire rests precisely on the recovery of this radical discontinuity in the post-war conception of empire. The designation of the post-First World War British empire as a Third British Empire never did quite catch on in the writings of contemporaries and historians alike. The relative neglect of the terminology of the Third British Empire, of course, does not mean that historians of empire have been unmindful of the changes that occurred in the wake of the two World Wars, such as the shift in global dynamism westwards and eastwards to the United States and the Soviet Union; the expansion of the traditional boundaries of public politics, both formal and popular; and the mounting pressure exerted by anti-colonial nationalism.13 This has not amounted, however, to a synthetic or comprehensive understanding of the nature of the post-First World War empire – certainly nothing comparable to what exists, for example, for the [ 171 ]

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First British Empire and for the Second British Empire exists for the Third British Empire. To give just one example: the last volume of the five-volume authori­­ tative Oxford History of the British Empire on historiography contains two synthetic essays, one each on the First and Second British Empire, but no such comparable entry on the Third British Empire.14 The postFirst World War empire is treated instead in three separate chapters, one on the World Wars; another on decolonisation; and a third on the Commonwealth. The closest we come to anything like what P. J. Marshall and C. A. Bayly accomplish in the series for the First and Second British Empires respectively comes in the penultimate volume of the series on the twentieth century in John Darwin’s tentatively titled essay, ‘A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Politics’.15 Notwithstanding the question mark in the title of Darwin’s essay, his contribution comes closest to making the case in the Oxford History of the British Empire for a new empire-wide system following the end of the First World War. Although the Victorian empire, he suggests, was flexible enough to accommodate both the burst of imperial expansion after the 1870s and the changes of the Edwardian era, it could not withstand the rapid succession of changes in the immediate post-war period. This period progressively shattered the contours of the Second British Empire to pave the way for a whole new imperial system – an argument that is a far cry, indeed, from the kind of piecemeal post-war changes in the British empire acknowledged elsewhere in the volume. These include, for example, the general redefinition of Dominion status, the transformation of the political and economic foundations of the British Raj in India, the abandonment of the dogma of free trade and the articulation of a new imperial ‘trusteeship’, especially in relation to the African colonies. The crux of the new post-war empire, according to Darwin, lay in Britain’s relations with the so-called White Dominions (as the European settler colonies came to be called). Like John Gallagher, in his Ford Lectures published as The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire, Darwin credits the interwar period with a dynamism that was responsible for laying the foundations for a new imperial system – call it a Third British Empire – rather than serving merely as a prelude to the gradual dissolution of the British empire in the period after the Second World War.16 Yet the emphasis on the Dominions here also elides the full nature of the break that was the Third British Empire. This is not to paint too rosy a picture, by contrast, of the use of the parallel terms of the First and Second British Empires. There are, of course, numerous controversies and debates that surround this or that aspect of even these more popular period-designations and, at times, [ 172 ]

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even the utility of these demarcations themselves have been called into question.17 But while scholars generally concede that a significant shift did occur in the nature of the British empire starting somewhere between the Seven Years War and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and are in some agreement about the broad outlines of this shift, no such consensus exists on the changes following the First World War on the nature of the British empire. The continued tentativeness about the term Third British Empire is thus a reminder that the newness of the post-war imperial system has still not been sufficiently established to be deserving of a nomenclature of its own. The story of the gradual spread of the ‘Dominion idea’, as in the progressive evolution of the empire into what following the First World War came to be referred to increasingly as the Empire and Commonwealth of Nations, is clearly inadequate on its own to posit a rupture between the Second and the Third British Empire. And, in the absence of a rupture, the remarkably flexible contours of the erstwhile Second British Empire stretch – partly by default – beyond their terminus of 1914 or 1919.18 The recasting of the empire as a Commonwealth of Nations, however, was not merely a progressive widening and deepening of that peculiar political experiment pioneered by Canada in the 1840s, under the name of ‘responsible government’.19 If the story of Third British Empire is told simply as the story of the unfolding of the ‘Dominion idea’ from the 1840s to its acceleration in the interwar period, the post-war recasting of the empire as a Commonwealth of Nations appears merely as the natural or logical outgrowth of the entire history of the empire itself. The logic of this story derives from the contours of Commonwealth history, which have remained essentially unchanged, partly by virtue of neglect, since the publication between the 1930s and the 1950s of the classic Chatham House series on Commonwealth Affairs written by Sir Keith Hancock and Nicholas Mansergh.20 The subsequent updating of the historiography of Anglo-Dominion relations in the context of the recent interest in the British World, the focus of which is on the British diaspora in and beyond the formal empire, has expanded the scope of traditional Commonwealth history; but it still operates within the parameters set largely by the earlier Survey of Commonwealth Affairs series.21 It takes for granted a retroactively national conception of empire – and by extension a national and ethnic conception of Britishness as well – that has the effect of naturalising the post-war reconstitution of the empire. As such, a linear narrative of the transition from empire to Commonwealth of Nations persists at the cost of a more robust conception of the Third British Empire as a departure from the previous history of the British empire. [ 173 ]

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When an empire-wide as well as an international context is brought to bear on the devolution of empire into a Commonwealth of Nations, it brings into sharper focus the discontinuity in the post-war nationalising of empire. Hancock, arguably among the greatest historians of the institution of the British Commonwealth, was prescient when he described the British Commonwealth of the 1920s – a term that was as hard to define then as it is now – as ‘nothing else than the “nature” of the British empire, defined, in Aristotelian fashion, by its end’.22 A weak conception of the Third British Empire, as simply the culmination of the ‘Dominion idea’ with its roots in the 1840s, amounts, in effect, to a reading of the history of the British empire backwards – a reading, that is, from the contingent triumph of the idea of the Commonwealth of Nations, consisting of autonomous, and later even independent, national communities. A more robust conception of the Third British Empire, by contrast, allows us to see the idea of the Commonwealth of Nations for what it always was: a controversial triumph for the nation-state form – however much its realisation was deferred for large parts of the empire – over other possible futures for the erstwhile empire that were still very much in play, at least, until the interwar period.23 The triumph of a national reorganisation of empire, neither inevitable nor unambiguous, marks the sharp rupture that was the Third British Empire. The substitution of the familiar history of the Commonwealth as the progressive development of responsible government in the empire – that is, the long march from internal self-government to an independent foreign policy affirmed in the Balfour doctrine of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 – by the discontinuous history of civis Britannicus, or the status of British subjecthood, can be instructive in this context.24 The latter best illustrates the departure that was entailed by the post-war nationalising of empire. Even though the account that follows of the changing fortunes of the status of British subjects, because of the exigency of space, is somewhat schematic, it should still suffice to illustrate the larger point about the emergence of a new conception of empire in the post-1914 period. The one thing that had been hitherto shared in the various parts of the formal British empire, which were otherwise incredibly diverse, not least, in their relationship to Britain, was the common allegiance of their inhabitants as British subjects to the Crown. (A parallel argument, factoring in the distinction between British-protected persons and British subjects, could also be made for parts of the informal empire, but that line of argument must be forgone for the purposes of this chapter.) The familiar distinction between subject and citizen – which derives largely from the context of nation-states that [ 174 ]

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possessed empires, as in the case of France and the United States of America – was, at least according to the letter of the law, irrelevant in the context of the British empire. There was, as is well known, no such thing as a ‘British citizen’ – and, by the same token, no imperial citizen as well; there were only British subjects, whether natural-born or naturalised, European or non-European, in Britain or in the colonies. In fact, as Randall Hansen points out, for a country as old as Britain, the legal category of the citizen came rather late: an Act of 1948 first constituted the category of the citizen of the United Kingdom and the Colonies, and even this only after the prior emergence of Irish citizenship in 1937 and of Canadian citizenship in 1947.25 Indeed, it was not until 1981, long after most other former components of the British empire had acquired national citizenship that a fully national citizenship – for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – emerged. These otherwise well-known milestones in the history of the legal category of British citizenship, in the light of the rupture of the Third British Empire, might suggest the belatedness of the nation-state form in Britain as much as in the colonies. The status of the British subject – often used loosely and synonymously with a more pointedly political language of the rights of imperial citizenship – had already at the time of the outbreak of the First World War become extremely fraught. The status of British Indian subjects was at the heart of these debates for a variety of reasons: not least, because of the unique role of British India as the recruiting ground for an elaborate government-managed scheme that supplied indentured labour for different parts of the British empire and beyond; and the equally distinctive, if not also anomalous, status of British India, which even as a non-self-governing dependent part of the empire was represented along with the Dominions in a number of empire-wide and international forums.26 The inhabitants of British India were technically not British subjects until 1813 when sovereignty was declared over those provinces ruled by the East India Company, but the Queen’s Proclamation of 1 November 1858, which promised equal opportunity to all her Majesty’s subjects irrespective of race or creed, was widely regarded as the real Magna Carta of British Indian subjects.27 The somewhat cynical, and certainly anodyne, conception of British subjecthood in the Queen’s Proclamation notwithstanding, the interlocutions of British Indian subjects themselves had served over the decades to fill out the vague contours of the status of British subjecthood. These were, in turn, progressively affirmed and institutionalised in subsequent pronouncements and actions of the Government of India as well as of Whitehall. The shell of the Queen’s Proclamation, by the time of the early decades of the twentieth century, had been [ 175 ]

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considerably filled out, in both formal and informal ways, in the rough and tumble of imperial politics. The idea of ‘democratic iterations’, as elaborated by Seyla Benhabib, offers a model for thinking about the interaction between constitutional provisions and ordinary politics: it recognises that ordinary politics can embody forms of popular constitutionalism and can lead to constitutional transformations through accretion. In the words of Benhabib herself: A democratic iteration is never merely an act of repetition. Every iteration involves making sense of an authoritative original in a new and different context. The antecedent thereby is reposited and resignified via subsequent usages and references. Meaning is enhanced and transformed; conversely when the creative appropriation of that authoritative original ceases to have meaning for us, then the original loses its authority upon us as well. Through such iterative acts a democratic people who consider themselves bound by certain guiding norms and principles re-appropriate and reinterpret these, thus showing themselves to be not only the subjects but also the authors of the law.28

This is the kind of co-authorship of the meaning of British subjecthood that may be attributed to the interventions of British Indians. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War, the status of British subjects – and by extension the rights of imperial citizens – had accrued certain meanings both in ordinary politics and in official precedents. This accrued understanding of imperial citizenship – and, as such, not identical to the idea of imperial citizenship as invoked in two valuable recent studies on the subject by Daniel Gorman and Sukanya Bannerjee – was what was at stake in the post-war remaking of the British empire.29 It entailed the substitution of an empire that still took seriously the concept of civis Britannicus with an empire that became reconfigured as a Commonwealth of Nations. There were three critical moments in an interwar process that amounted to nothing short of the complete political evisceration of the lineaments of British subjecthood as co-authored by British Indians. The first consisted of the rolling back of a hard-won recognition of the privileges that came with British subjecthood: the right to free mobility within different parts of the British empire. The history of legislative restrictions against Indian emigration, especially under the whites-only policies of the Dominion colonies, is too well known to be rehearsed here.30 What is important for our purposes is the new assertion of national territorial sovereignty over earlier imperial understandings of British subjecthood. The Government of India, and to a lesser extent, the India Office and the Colonial Office, in keeping with an imperial understanding of their mission, had hitherto repeatedly [ 176 ]

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insisted that the right of free mobility was a basic right of every British subject. Starting from the first enunciation in 1877 of official policy towards both indentured and non-indentured (or free) Indian emigration within the empire up to the Imperial Conference of 1911 in London, the Government of India had put up a gallant fight for the principle of the ‘complete freedom for all British subjects to transfer themselves from one part of His Majesty’s dominion to another’.31 The Government of India, indeed, consistently refused to become principes criminalis in the ‘whites only’ policies of the Dominions: it had refused, for example, to adopt a system of passports or any such scheme designed to restrict the emigration of British Indians at the port of departure in India itself.32 For every diehard imperialist, such as the Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, who could barely conceal his own sympathy for the whites-only policies of the Dominions, there were other dyed-in-the-wool imperialists, such as the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who issued stinging memoranda to London challenging the policy and attitude of the Dominion governments.33 The outcome of the struggle between rival claims of racial/ethnic solidarity over imperial solidarity was still very much up for grabs. When the Viceroy Lord Hardinge announced on 8 November 1914 an official shift in Government of India’s attitude on Indian immigration, foreshadowed at the Imperial Conference of 1911, he was merely echoing the bitter wisdom gained from the struggles of British Indians themselves in the Dominions.34 Advocates for overseas Indians, such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale in India and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in South Africa, with whom the Hardinge government kept in close contact, were willing to accept restrictions on the mobility of British Indian subjects in the empire as the price for seeking better treatment of those already domiciled in the Dominions. Viceroy Hardinge’s open sympathy with Gandhi and the ongoing satyagraha or civil disobedience campaign in South Africa, along with his condemnation of General Smuts, prompted vigorous lobbying by Smuts for the Viceroy’s recall. Hardinge’s defence of his actions to the Secretary of State for India was that he had spoken from his heart on this issue of critical importance to the future of the empire.35 By the time of the Hardinge government the tide of popular opinion had shifted from defending the right of British subjects to free mobility within the British empire to the protection of the rights of those already domiciled in different parts of the empire. The acceptance of the right of the Dominions to protect themselves from unrestrained emigration, according to R. W. Gillan, a Secretary in the Commerce Department of the Government of India, was precisely to secure for Indians as British subjects, ‘no better and no worse treatment than their fellow white subjects’ in the Dominions.36 [ 177 ]

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The shifting terrain in the struggle over British subjecthood was foreshadowed in the Reciprocity Resolution passed at the Imperial Conference in 1917. By the terms of this Resolution, India was treated on a par with the Dominions: it gained the right to pass emigration legislation to control the composition of its own population and the ability to reciprocate in kind against nationals of those Dominions that discriminated against British Indians. Lord Sinha, on behalf of British Indians, accepted the sacrifice of a long-held privilege of the British subject in the hope of securing relief for thousands of persecuted overseas British Indian subjects.37 Whatever the pragmatic wisdom of this compromise may have been, the backtracking on the meaning of British subjecthood represented a first step in demarcating a narrower, territorially defined national conception of citizenship over the hitherto more expansive empire-wide understanding of imperial citizenship. The next step in the political dismantling of imperial citizenship followed on the heels of the first authoritative empire-wide pronouncement on the equality of British subjects at the Imperial Conference of 1921. The 1921 resolution on the equality of citizenship for British subjects followed up on the Reciprocity Resolution of 1917. Its passage was secured through the efforts of V. S. Sastri and the Government of India and India Office officials against the opposition of General Smuts from South Africa.38 Its successful passage was briefly threatened when the Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, sided with Smuts to include a clause exempting South Africa and East Africa (a Crown Colony) from the ambit of the resolution. Only the threatened resignation of the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, ensured Churchill’s assent and the successful passage of the resolution with only a single dissent registered by Smuts on behalf of South Africa.39 That this resolution on British Indian subjects had implications for all British subjects anywhere in the empire was quickly noted by the critics of this far-reaching declaration endorsed by the highest body of imperial political opinion. The subsequent repudiation of this first formal empire-wide elaboration of the rights of British subjecthood in 1922 by Churchill, himself a signatory to the Resolution of 1921, was arguably one of the biggest setbacks for the imperial ideal of civis Britannicus. The change in Churchill’s attitude, already evident at the Imperial Conference in 1921 where his sympathy with General Smuts’ position was unmistakable, had to do precisely with the precedence that the declaration of equal rights for British subjects held for the status of Africans in Africa. The early repercussions of the impact were already being felt in Kenya colony, where at least some indigenous Africans were mobilising on [ 178 ]

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behalf of the Indian question.40 Likewise, reports from Kenya of Indian support for Africans, especially the alliance between East African Indians and Harry Thuku of the Young Kikuyu Association, alarmed spokesmen of European-settler interests in the colony. The South African government was the first to warn against the dangerous precedent set by the resolution. It had always maintained that while the ‘Indian question’ in South Africa was in itself not a serious problem, it became so in so far as it was inseparable from the ‘native question’: ‘you could not give political rights to the Indians’, as Smuts argued, which you deny to the rest of your coloured citizens in South Africa.41 As such, the South African government threw in its lot with the white settlers in Kenya to impress upon the Colonial Office and the Prime Minister in Britain the dangers of the 1921 resolution. The ignominy of Churchill’s retreat on Kenya, a Crown Colony, was couched by his successor at the Colonial Office in nobler language. The Devonshire Declaration – named after Churchill’s successor the Duke of Devonshire – announced that imperial policy in Africa would henceforth be guided by considerations of the development of Africans.42 While inaugurating a significant new phase in Britain’s Africa policy, it only dimly concealed its origins in the attempt to deflect attention from the important capitulation on the question of the equal rights of British subjects. The Declaration barely masked the fact that there was to be no equality for the two different classes of settlers in Africa: Indians and Europeans. The ignominious denouement of the struggle to define British subjecthood – the substitution of paternalistic concerns for the development of Africans in Africa for the more dangerous principle of the equality of all British subjects – dealt a fatal blow to British Indian claims as imperial Indian citizens. Note Churchill’s consistent preference for the wording of Cecil Rhodes’s famous declaration on behalf of ‘equal rights and conditions for all civilized men’ over the less ambiguous claim for the equal rights of all British subjects in the Government of India sponsored Imperial Conference Resolution.43 Herein, rather than in the rarefied intellectual gymnastics of the Round Table Group, lay the political failure of the British empire to consolidate a formal conception of imperial citizenship. The third and final step in the demise of the long-held allure of imperial citizenship came at the Imperial Conference of 1923 where the rights of self-governing national communities were invoked to trump the rights of individual British subjects.44 Smuts submitted an important memorandum to the Conference to argue for the reversal of the 1921 resolution. His argument bears quoting at some length: [ 179 ]

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The Indian claim for equal franchise rights in the Empire outside India arise, in my opinion, from a misconception of the nature of British citizenship. This misconception is not confined to India, but is fairly general, and the Conference would do not only India, but the whole empire an important service by its removal. The misconception arises, not from the fact, but from the assumption that all subjects of the King are equal, that in an empire where there is a common King there should be a common and equal citizenship, and that all differences and distinctions in citizen rights are wrong in principle … There is no common equal British citizenship in the Empire, and it is quite wrong for a British subject to claim equal rights in any part of the Empire to which he has migrated or where he happens to be living. There is no indignity or affront at all in the denial of such equality … The newer conception of the British empire as a smaller League of Nations, as a partnership of free and equal nations under a common hereditary sovereign, involves an even further departure from the simple conception of a unitary citizenship. British citizenship has been variable in the past; it is bound to be even more so in the future. Each constituent part of the Empire will settle for itself the nature and incidence of its citizenship. The composition and character and rights of its people will be the concern of each free and equal State in the Empire. It will not only regulate immigration from other parts of the Empire as well as from the outside world, but it will also settle the rights of its citizens as a matter of domestic concern. The common Kingship is the binding link between the parts of the Empire; it is not a source from which private citizens will derive their rights. They will derive their rights simply and solely from the authority of the State in which they live … From this point of view the Indian resolution passed at last conference was a big mistake. Not only is it impracticable, but it runs contrary to the new conception of the Empire, as not a unitary State, but a partnership of equal States. It has both theoretically and practically landed us in a false position, and the sooner we get out of it the better for the future good relations of the different States of the Empire.45

In a clever move Smuts had succeeded in turning the issue of equality for British subjects into a question of equality for constituent states within the empire: a turn with important consequences for the status of the British subject and with it any lingering hope of the reconstitution of the imperial polity into anything other than a League of semi-autonomous nation-states, each jealously guarding its right to determine the fate of its own populations. It is not irrelevant here that Smuts was a leading international sympathiser of President Woodrow Wilson’s conception of national self-determination and a key player in the shape that the newly created League of Nations eventually acquired.46 He was especially instrumental in the League’s rejection of a Japanese resolution on racial equality and in the [ 180 ]

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particular Scheme for Minority Protection adopted by the League. This limited the scope of minority protection to specific kinds of collectivities, as defined by the commonality of either ethnicity or religion and to the deliberate exclusion of immigrant populations. Smuts’ 1923 resolution for recasting the British empire in the mould of a league of autonomous nation-states also stood in opposition to the rival vision of empire, articulated around the principle of the equality of British subjects, promoted by some Kenyan Indians and Africans. Consider, for example, the Kenyan Indian activist Manilal Desai’s vision of the British empire included in the Kikuyu petition to the Colonial Office in 1921: In the British Empire that wonderful conglomeration of races, and creeds and nations is to be found the only solution for the great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails then all else fails. No more potent League of Nations was ever founded … Either the British Empire must admit the equality of its different people irrespective of the colours of their skin and the place of their birth, or it must abandon its attempt to rule a mixture of people. There can be no halfway.47

The idea of the British Commonwealth of Nations represented the triumph of an ambivalent national vision of empire: Smuts American vision of a League of Nation-States over Desai’s League of Peoples centred on the claims of British subjects. The strange death of the ideal of civis Britannicus would lead British Indians, among others, to abandon eventually their earlier claims as British subjects in the British empire for rights as national citizens in the arguably more limited, and limiting, polity of discrete nation-states. The resurrection of the concept of the Third British Empire – as a distinctive phase in the history of the British empire when a national vision triumphed decisively over rival imperial visions of empire – suggests at least three directions in which British empire historiography may be pushed. First, the contours of the Third British Empire as defined through the reversal of British subjecthood invites a reappraisal of the nature of both the First and Second British Empires. Charles Maier, in his magisterial survey of empires in Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, accepts Geoffrey Hosking’s twofold distinction between having an empire and being an empire. Following conventional wisdom, he places Britain in the former category as having an empire instead of being one.48 Yet, despite the oft-cited case of the designation of Queen Victoria as Empress in India but only Queen in the United Kingdom, scholars of nineteenth-century Britain have demonstrated the tension that persisted throughout the [ 181 ]

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century in Britain between the rival pulls of national and imperial sovereignty.49 As the trajectory of British subjecthood suggests, it may be worth considering the inclusion of Britain – not unlike, say the Ottoman empire – as an example of an empire-state – one that only subsequently spawned a nation-state rather than the other way around.50 This would mean taking more seriously the nature of sovereignty and of political belonging that existed in the British empire. Consider here the somewhat flippant remark by Slavoj Zizek in the New York Times in reference to the recent American empire. ‘The tragedy of the United States’, he writes, ‘is not that it is a nation-state acting like an empire, but it is an empire acting like a nation-state.’51 And, indeed, one could argue that at stake in the interwar reversal of British subjecthood was precisely the gradual remaking of an empire into a nation-state. Second, the post-war forces that bore on the making of the Third British Empire suggest the need for a more dynamic analysis of the international order. These included, most notably, the nation-state model of American-style imperialism that was reflected in what could be considered the Americanising of the British empire into a Commonwealth of Nations.52 The contours of empire-states and nation-states, after all, derive their legitimacy in interaction with other states. The assumption of the fixity of the international order – as in the history of the nation-state from the Treaty of Westphalia into the present – fails to acknowledge the revolutionary upheaval caused by the League of Nations, and later by the United Nations, in legitimating a new global order of nation-states.53 For much of this period, in fact, Frederick Cooper reminds us, a variety of multinational and supranational polities flourished as rivals to the nation-state; these other forms of polities also rivalled the nation-state as the object of people’s political aspirations.54 The work of John Kelly and Martha Kaplan on Fiji and world decolonisation has done most, perhaps, in reminding us of the radical novelty in the era of decolonisation of the spread of the idea of the nation-state as the most, and only, optimum form of political belonging in the modern world.55 The impact of the ‘Wilsonian moment’ on anti-colonial nationalism may need to be extended to account for the reconstitution of empires – and, as such, of the imperial metropoles – as well. The attention to the changing dynamics of the international order – more so, perhaps, than simply additional case-studies of empires to compare with that of the British empire – constitutes the real challenge of bringing a global perspective to the study of the British empire. Finally, and most importantly, perhaps, consider the following implications suggested by the particular contours of the Third British [ 182 ]

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Empire: that it was the refusal and difficulty of fulfilling the expansive aspirations of citizenship rights of colonised people that prompted an imperial move towards containing the rights of citizenship within clearly demarcated nation-states – a prelude, perhaps, to a strategy that we now associate with Bantustans. Consider too the alternative histories of decolonisation such a history suggests: that national independence in the colonised world may have as much to do with an imperial deflection of these demands onto the safer confines of national-territorial space as with the aspirations of anti-colonial struggles themselves. Paul Kramer’s book on the US and the Philippines already points in this direction: support in the US for Philippines independence came in exchange for restricting the entry of Filipinos into the US. So long as they remained American nationals, albeit not American citizens, these Filipino immigrants could not be included in the laws for Asiatic exclusion. Ironically, support for Philippines independence was sometimes the strongest among those keen to keep Filipinos out of the US.56 These ideas, admittedly still only speculative, offer the possibility that the empire–nation nexus – once so productively challenged and complicated by the Studies in Imperialism series – is far from being exhausted: it still has considerable potential to point British empire historiography in further new directions.

Notes  1 I wish to thank Andrew Thompson for his incisive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I gave a version of this paper as a talk at the annual conference of the North American Association of British Studies at Cincinnati in October 2008. I remain grateful to the organisers of the conference and to the audience for the opportunity to explore the ideas here. Finally, of course, I want to acknowledge my debt to the pioneering work of John M. MacKenzie, both personally and through the Studies in Imperialism series.  2 For post-war British imperial historiography’s debt to the scholarship of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, see Wm. Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’ in Robin W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume V: Historiography (Oxford, 1999), pp. 1–3.  3 J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), p. 2. Despite certain parallels with the contributions of what have been called ‘post-colonial’ approaches, MacKenzie has remained very critical of these approaches. For a discussion of imperial history and post-colonial theory, see Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24: 3 (1996), 345–63.  4 Consider, for example, the argument made from two very different perspectives: J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883) and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth, 1967). Also relevant here is R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’ in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theories of Imperialism (London, 1971), pp. 117–39.  5 MacKenzie’s second important contribution to the empire–nation nexus, which is not considered in this chapter, is the addition of the four nations approach to

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 6

 7  8  9

10 11

12

13 14

the study of the British empire, see MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four-Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, 6: 5 (2008), 1244–63. See Phillip Buckner, ‘Whatever Happened to the British Empire?’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, n.s., 4 (1993), 3–32, www.cha-shc.ca/english/ publ/jcha-rshc/addr_alloc/ years/1993.cfm (accessed 18 April 2012). C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 31: 2 (2003); C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, 2003); P. A. Buckner and C. Bridge, ‘Reinventing the British World’, Round Table, 92 (2003), pp. 77–88; and P. Buckner and R. Douglas (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005). To be sure, in more recent iterations the analytics of the ‘British world’ has expanded considerably to include attention to non-elite Britons, indigenous populations and, even, non-white colonies. For some recent critiques and extensions of this framework, see Kurt Korneski, ‘Britishness, Canadians, Class, and Race: Winnipeg and the British Worlds, 1880s–1910’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes, 41: 2 (2007), 161–74; Saul Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37: 1 (2009), 1–27; David Killingray, ‘“Good West Indian, A Good African, and in Short, a Good Britisher”: Black and British in a Colour Conscious Empire, 1760–1950’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36: 3 (2008), 363–81; and Anne Spry Rush, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonisation (Oxford, 2011). I am drawing here from Mrinalini Sinha, ‘The Strange Death of an Imperial Ideal: The Case of Civis Britannicus’ in Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee (eds), Modernity in South Asia: Modern Makeovers (New Delhi, 2011), pp. 29–42. A. Zimmern, The Third British Empire: Being a Course of Lectures Delivered at Columbia University, New York (London, 1926). I am drawing from Paul Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace: David Davies, Alfred Zimmern, and Liberal Internationalism in Interwar Britain’, International Relations, 16: 1 (2002), 117–33; and Frank Trentmann, ‘After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930’ in F. Trentmann, K. Grant and P. Levine (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 34–53. For recent scholarship on the League of Nations in the context of the British empire, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay’, American Historical Review, 112: 4 (2007), 1091–117. See Frederick Madden and David Fieldhouse (eds), Oxford and the Idea of the Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams (London, 1982); also see, Deborah Lavin, From Empire to Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford, 1995). Historians of France have productively used the idea of the ‘empire-state’ in writing of the nation, see Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY, 2008); Frederick Cooper, ‘From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? France’s Ambiguous Post-War Trajectory’ in Charles Tshimanga-Kashama, Didier Gondola and Peter Bloom (eds), Frenchness and the African Diaspora (Bloomington, 2009), pp. 91–119; and, for a broad overview, also see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010). See Wm. Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’ in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001). P. J. Marshall, ‘The First British Empire’, pp. 43–53: and C. A. Bayly, ‘The Second British Empire’, pp. 54–72 in Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume V: Historiography.

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whatever happened to the third british empire? 15 J. Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire?’ in Brown and Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume IV, pp. 64–87. 16 John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays, ed. Anil Seal (Cambridge, 1982). 17 The idea of a First British Empire different from a Second goes back, as Marshall suggests, to the first half of the nineteenth century itself, see Marshall, ‘The First British Empire’. The thesis that a ‘swing to the east crystallized the distinction between the first and second British Empires’ was popularised most famously by Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793, vols 1 and 2 (London, 1952–64); also see P. J. Marshall, ‘The First and Second British Empires: A Question of Demarcation’, History, 49: 165 (1964), 12–13. For some recent complications of this demarcation, see P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: British India and the Americas, c. 1750–1783 (New York, 2005); and Philip J. Stern, ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections’, William and Mary Quarterly, 63: 4 (2006), 693–712. 18 The classic argument for the re-periodisation of the Second British Empire past the break marked by the so-called ‘new imperialism’ of the 1870s, for example, was made by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, 6: 1 (1953), 1–15. 19 The roots of the Commonwealth have been traced typically to the Durham Report of 1839 and to responsible government in the 1840s in Canada, see D. George Boyce, Decolonization and the British Empire, 1775–1997 (London, 1999), pp. 49–50; also see Elizabeth Mancke, ‘Early Modern Imperial Governance and the Origins of Canadian Political Culture’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 32 (1999), 3–20. 20 Keith Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 2 vols (London, 1937–42); and Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth and the Nations: Studies in British Commonwealth Relations (London, 1948) and Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 2 vols (London, 1952–58). For an appraisal, see Wm. Roger Louis, ‘Sir Keith Hancock and the British Empire: The Pax Britannia and the Pax Americana’, English Historical Review, 120: 488 (2005), 937–62; Jim Davidson, A ThreeCornered Life: The Historian W. K. Hancock (Sydney, 2010); and Norman Hilmer and Philip Wigley (eds), The First British Commonwealth: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Mansergh (London, 1980); and W. David McIntyre, The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907–1948 (London, 2009). 21 See Bridge and Fedorowich, The British World; and Buckner and Douglas, Rediscovering the British World. 22 Cited in W. David McIntyre, ‘The Commonwealth’ in Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume V: Historiography, p. 561. 23 For one British example, see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007); also see Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indian Mode’, Modern Asian Studies, 38: 3 (2004), 703–44; and Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Edinburgh, 2012). 24 The idea and meaning of British subjecthood in the empire has been explored with considerable potential for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see P. J. Marshall, ‘Presidential Address: Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century, IV: The Turning Outwards of Britain’, Transaction of the Royal Historical Society,11 (2001), 1–15; Christopher L. Brown, ‘From Slaves to Subjects: Envisioning an Empire without Slavery’ in Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkin (eds), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series) (Oxford, 2004), pp. 111–40; and Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore, MD, 2004). For the later period, also see M. Paige Baldwin, ‘Subject to Empire: Married Women and the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act’, Journal of British Studies, 40: 4

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(2001), 522–56. For the ambiguity of the meaning of British subject right until the 1948 citizenship act, see India Office, Public and Judicial Department, L/P & J/8/4, British Library, London. Randall Hansen, ‘British Citizenship after Empire: A Defense’, Political Quarterly, 71: 1 (2000), 42–9. For discussion of British nationality and citizenship, see Ann Dummett and Andrew Nichols, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London, 1990); and Baldwin, ‘Subject to Empire’. Also see R. Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain (London, 2002). Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (Oxford, 1974); S. R. Mehrotra, India and the Commonwealth, 1885–1929 (New York, 1965); and D. N. Verma, India and the League of Nations (Patna, 1968). See Marshall, ‘Presidential Address’. M. K. Gandhi famously called the Queen’s Proclamation ‘the Magna Carta of India’ that assured Indians ‘full privileges and rights as British subjects’, see Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony Parel (Cambridge, 1997), p. xviii; also see Miles Taylor, ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837–1861’, Victorian Studies, 47: 2 (2004), 264–74. See Seyla Benhabib, ‘Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations: Dilemma of “Just Membership” and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Federalism’, European Journal of Political Theory, 6: 4 (2007), 445–62; the quotation is from Benhabib, ‘The Legitimacy of Human Rights’, Daedalus, 137: 3 (2008), 98–9. Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester, 2006) and Sukanya Bannerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late Victorian Empire (Durham, NC, 2010). See Robert A. Huttenback, ‘The British Empire as a “White Man’s Country”: Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of Settlement’, Journal of British Studies, 13: 1 (1973), 106–37; and Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies (Ithaca, NY, 1976). Government of India, Commerce and Industry Department, Emigration Proceedings, A, July 1909, 1 and 2, National Archives of India, New Delhi. For this history, see Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Hindus, Aryans, and Caucasians: How Indians Became Black’, unpublished manuscript. Government of India, Commerce and Industry Department, Emigration Proceedings, A, February, 1904, 22–35; March 1906, 17–22; April 1909, 1–12; September 1916, 12–14. This view differs from Radhika Mongia, ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport’, Public Culture, 11: 3 (1999), 527–55. I am persuaded here by Radhika Singha, ‘A “Proper Passport” for the Colony: Border Crossing in British India, 1882–1920’, www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/colloqpapers/16passportill.pd (accessed 18 April, 2012). For Curzon’s opposition to the export of ‘indentured labor’ from India, see, Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 327–30. Of course, Britain itself was not immune to the hostility of a perceived influx of ‘non-white’ British subjects, see Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Resistance and Racism in Imperial Britain (Liverpool, 2009); and, for a later period, Kathleen Paul, ‘“British Subjects” and “British Stock”: Labour’s Postwar Imperialism’, Journal of British Studies, 34: 2 (1995), 233–76. Government of India, Commerce and Industry Department, Emigration Proceedings, A, September 1914, 18–20. Gandhi acknowledged the support from the Viceroy, see M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, trans. Valji G. Desai (Ahmedabad, 1950 [1928]), ch. 46. Government of India, Commerce and Industry Department, Emigration Proceedings, A, September 1914, 18–20. The Dominions use of immigration regulations to map nationality and territory was duplicated, as Radhika Singha provocatively suggests, in India’s Emigration Act of 1922 that restricted emigration of unskilled labour from India, see Singha,

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whatever happened to the third british empire? ‘A “Proper Passport” for the Colony’. See also Sunil Amrith this volume. 38 Sinha, ‘The Strange Death of an Imperial Ideal’. 39 Ibid. The most comprehensive discussion of these maneuverings remains, Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire, 1890–1939 (Oxford, 1971). 40 See Sana Aiyar, ‘Empire, Race and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s Contested Public Political Sphere from 1919 to 1923’, AFRICA: The Journal of the International African Institute, 81: 1 (2011), 132–54; and for an example of African opposition to the Indian claims, see M. Twaddle, ‘Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa’, History in Africa, 24 (1997), 309–36. 41 Quoted in Sinha, ‘The Strange Death of an Imperial Ideal’, p. 38. 42 See Gregory, India and East Africa; also Robert M. Maxon, ‘The Devonshire Declaration: The Myth of Missionary Intervention’, History in Africa, 18 (1991), 259–70. 43 Gregory, India and East Africa. 44 I am drawing in the following discussion on rights of states versus rights of individuals from Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008). 45 Quoted in Sinha, ‘The Strange Death of an Imperial Ideal’, pp. 38–9. 46 See Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. Jan Christian Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion [1918] cited in George Curry, ‘Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts and the Versailles Settlement’, American Historical Review, 66: 4 (1961), 968–86. 47 Quoted in Gregory, India and East Africa, pp. 224–58. Also see Zarina Patel, Manilal Ambalal Desai (Nairobi, 2010). I owe this distinction to Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. 48 Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People, Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA, 1997). 49 See Duncan Bell, Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2007). 50 For the Ottoman empire, see Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley, 1997); I owe the reference and the idea of a possible comparison with the British case to C. A. Bayly, ‘Distorted Development: The Ottoman Empire and British India, circa 1780–1916’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27: 2 (2007), 332–44. 51 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth’, New York Times (5 January 2007), http://nytimes.com.2007/01/05/opinion/05zizek.html (accessed 6 December 2012); also see Ann Laura Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture, 18: 1 (2006), 125–46. 52 For a more benign view of impact of the US, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford and New York, 2007). For an account attentive to the international system, see Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2005). 53 See David Philpott, Revolution in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Ithaca, NY, 2001). 54 This point is made most notably in Frederick Cooper, ‘States, Empires, & Political Imagination’ in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), pp. 153–203. 55 John Kelly and Martha Kaplan, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago, 2001). 56 Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).

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Chandrika Kaul

Introduction That media is central to John MacKenzie’s intellectual interests is apparent from any reading of his first two foundational books in the Studies in Imperialism series, as well as from his subsequent writings (and indeed the works of several other contributors to the Series). It is also explicitly acknowledged in early mission statements, where we read how the Series ‘seeks to develop the new socio-cultural approach which has emerged through cross-disciplinary work on popular culture, media studies …’.1 But if media is seminal to MacKenzie’s perspective, his is not a media-centric approach. Instead, in the best traditions of interdisciplinary scholarship, his sophisticated integration of differing media within studies of empire and culture has created, in the process, a template, not only for a fresh approach to imperial history, but also – I would suggest – a novel genre of integrated media history. Overall, the Series exemplifies the writing of a history fit for purpose in the twenty-first century, where communications and media are ubiquitous as well as definitive markers of the contemporary age. One needs, of course, to qualify terminology: the term ‘media’ is used here broadly to encompass all forms of communication media with respect to content and institutional structure, as well as the ways in which these have affected society, politics and culture in both temporal and spatial dimensions, and in terms of ideology and perception. Indeed, as Raymond Williams has remarked, communication is culture and the way we communicate is the way we live: it is who we are.2 Recent revisionism by media scholars has attempted to reassess its methodology, content and value, a process that has interesting parallels with the revitalisation of the genre now known as the ‘new imperial history’ (of which the Series itself forms a part). This process marked a welcome break from post-war conditions in Britain, where historians of empire operated in relatively marginal[ 188 ]

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ised corners of history departments during a period when, as Keith Hancock remarked, imperialism was ‘no word for scholars’, or they functioned under cover in area-study enclaves. Further, India itself, despite being a key component of Britain’s empire, has generally been treated as a ‘special case’ within Western historiographical traditions. The complex explanations for this phenomenon need not concern us here, except so far as to acknowledge the relative intellectual isolation that ensued from it. From the start MacKenzie’s Series addressed these issues with its emphasis on imperialism as a cultural phenomenon that had a significant impact on both dominant and subordinate societies and indeed in the interrelations between them. One fifth of its output to date is either entirely or substantially devoted to the sub-continent and/or specifically to India; with a much higher percentage of books also featuring it in a meaningful manner. India is thus no longer regarded as the awkward relation in the imperial family. The eclectic range of Indian subjects, covered from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, further contributes to the vibrancy of the Series and offers methodological models for future and transnational research. There are book length studies of the Radcliffe Boundary Commission in Punjab in 1947; the institutional and personal context of marriage and gender politics from the late nineteenth century; the Church Missionary Society and Christian discourse in the sphere of Western medicine and tribal India; Indo-Irish radical connections in the twentieth century; economics and empire explored through a focus on jute and the links between Dundee and Calcutta from the 1830s to the 1940s, to name but a few.3 In addition, thematic studies of the military, monarchy, environment, music, race, sexuality, juvenile literature and advertising also give due prominence to India within their purview. MacKenzie’s work on museums and empire, for instance, explores the relationships between natural history, human cultures and colonial identities, including the distinctive imperial museums in Asia such as in Bombay4 and Calcutta, as well as in some of the Indian states where they served to establish the Princes as ‘forward-looking, modern rulers in a supposedly European style’.5 In regard to the subject of media and history, one of the central achievements of the Series has been to demonstrate the value of integrating media history more fully with the growing field of the new imperial history. Until recently, these avenues of research functioned in isolation from each other in respect of archival focus and pedagogic approach. However, when explored in conjunction, as they have been in the Series, they offer a reassessment of not just the relationship between media and imperial culture, but the development trajectories of media forms as well as more meaningful appreciations of their wider [ 189 ]

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socio-political and economic impact. The new imperial historians have approached the media from different disciplinary – and indeed, interdisciplinary – perspectives, and utilised a variety of media sources traditionally undervalued or ignored by historians, including, popular newspapers, periodicals, photography, advertisements, juvenile literature, art, cinema, radio, music and the theatre. In the process, they offer persuasive critiques of the role of the media in the creation of value systems and the propagation of the imperial idea, and by this means have helped to evaluate its popularity. Their research throws fresh light upon the processes whereby journalists and the media were embedded in societies, in the political process and in the formation of public opinion within Britain and throughout its global empire. It was this movement that MacKenzie himself initiated with his first book of the Series, Propaganda and Empire, underscoring the importance of an ‘implicit’ and popular imperialism that formed a core ideology in British society from the 1880s, and which found expression in the ‘potent media of printing, photography, spectacle and pageant’.6 This association continued into the twentieth century, being especially important, claims MacKenzie, in the interwar years, when popular imperialism secured ‘dramatic new cultural and institutional expressions. Music hall was replaced by even more powerful media in the cinema and broadcasting.’7 Thus imperial themes achieved ‘greater cultural penetration’ and ‘prolonged their shelf life’ until the 1950s.8 Simultaneously, the book also interrogates the manner in which these symbiotic relationships served to define the nature and impact of differing media and coloured their development. Or, to take another example from MacKenzie’s oeuvre, twenty-three years and several books later, he delineates the nature and impact of print and newspapers in the creation of a public sphere and forms of cultural imperialism through the exceptionally active role of the émigré Scots within South Africa between 1772 and 1914.9 As such the Series has gone far towards realising the vision of prominent media and communication scholars who have insisted on the need for media studies to shift away from an approach marked by over theorised arguments divorced from empiricism and a sense of history. As Nicholas Garnham argues, ‘all theories of the media rest upon historical theories as to the process of historical development of media institutions and practices and their relationship to the development of modernity’.10 Contributory factors include the slow acceptance of media history as a legitimate field of enquiry in its own right – as Nicholas Hiley felt compelled to highlight as late as 1996 – as well as general problems of definition, of methodology and of determining the relative importance of different media.11 Among the [ 190 ]

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pioneers of this shift, and with an emphasis on multidisciplinarity, were Asa Briggs, in his monumental studies on broadcasting and the BBC; Nicholas Pronay, with his innovative approach to the use of film in history as well as the history of film; and Boyce, Curran and Wingate’s collection of essays on the press from the seventeenth century onwards.12 To conclude in the words of James Curran who is one of the most vociferous proponents of the importance of developing ‘a new history’ of British media by ‘inserting’ this within mainstream studies, which would enable a ‘contextualisation’ of media development that is ‘liable to produce a more contingent view of ebb and flow, opening and closure…’.13

Press freedoms and the British empire A significant legacy of Britain’s global empire, whose consequences are still with us, concerns the liberal conception of the role of the press and its associated freedoms in civil society. This includes the development of one of the fundamental elements of the Western democratic concept of human rights, i.e. freedom of speech and expression, specifically, the freedom of communication and freedom of the press. However, despite nearly 600 years of living with the printing press, the debate over such fundamental concepts as the ‘freedom of the press’ appear to need periodic redefinition. One such period of re-constitution of a press and media culture was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The nature of press freedom as it came to be conceptualised in these years of increasing internationalism, the formation of the United Nations, the onset of the Cold War and rapid British decolonisation forms the focus of attention in this chapter. At this critical juncture, within the space occupied by Britain and its current and former colonies, stood the Empire Press Union, a pan-imperial organisation that provided a platform for debating complex issues of press standards and responsibilities, new media technologies, as well as the flow of intra-imperial news and the wider communication environment. One of the foundational principles of the EPU was an unswerving adherence to a free press and a suspicion of government regulation, a doctrine which remained largely unchallenged until the Second World War. Utilising the institutional framework provided by the EPU, we can juxtapose differing attitudes within the imperial press family to the concepts of a free public sphere and journalistic freedoms. What judgements can be made about media, India and the Raj within this comparative framework? What does this reveal about the wider imperial culture of communications by the mid-twentieth century? [ 191 ]

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The ­transforming context of communications within Britain and the Indian subcontinent, and expansion of the media linking Britain and India, were key catalysts for change in the first half of the twentieth century. The consequences of these developments were varied, impacting as they did on the nature and institutions of politics and journalism, on public opinion and on the growth of Indian nationalism and the rise of a modern nation-state. These processes, in turn, elicited differing responses from the Raj as they affected freedom of the press while posing serious political challenges in the wider context of expanding imperial communications and technological change within Britain’s worldwide empire.

Empire Press Union and the formation of a transnational information community Founded in London in 1909, the EPU brought together – under the aegis of the British press – journalists and news agencies of India, the Dominions, the Crown colonies and protectorates. The initiative was designed to harness the influence of communication and media technologies to the cause of imperial unity and to encourage intraimperial cooperation and cultural interchange with the overall aim being to create a transnational information community. The ethos of the EPU was unashamedly imperial. As the proprietor of The Times, J. J. Astor, commented upon taking over its Chair in 1929: ‘I am told that the word “Empire” is out of fashion. With us, the Empire is not a fashion, but a faith, and our faith is quite undiminished.’14 Its operations were imbued with a libertarian rationale for the mass media, as adopted in England after the Glorious Revolution, which metamorphosed from the philosophy of natural rights and rationalism.15 According to this, the chief objective of the press was the search for the truth, a social responsibility which included acting as an extraparliamentary watchdog of government. Its regulation was limited to wartime control in the interests of national security and to issues of public decency, while subject only to the strictures of the law and the court of public opinion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideology of press freedom constituted a shared secular tradition within the English newspapers of the empire. The expansion of popular and overseas press readerships was part of the information revolution which accompanied a wave of new imperialism allowing Britain to implement a strategy of conquest through knowledge allied to the rule of the sword. The EPU was founded upon an Anglo-Saxon model of press freedom, a model [ 192 ]

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it believed was of universal applicability. In terms of its relevance for a liberal vision of empire, such a view assumed that empire and free enquiring journalists were compatible, even mutually self-reinforcing. With the inclusion of India, its position of equality within the empire was realised at an early stage in the press sphere. This reflected, to an extent, the speed at which Indian journalism had matured to acquire both political and commercial importance. India had embraced the idea of the modern newspaper with alacrity, and by the mid-nineteenth century in Bengal, for instance, ‘46 presses produced over 250 books and pamphlets in Bengali, with print runs of 418,000; in addition, there were 19 Bengali-language newspapers, producing 8,000 issues, many daily’.16 By 1905, nearly 1,400 newspapers and periodicals were being published in British India.17 From its inception the EPU had welcomed Indian participation with its first Chair, Lord Burnham, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, claiming that the organisation ‘knew no distinction of race, religion, or colour. It embraced within its folds newspapers of all opinions.’18 Yet, India remained a subject colony characterised by a stringent press censorship as well as a growing anti-empire journalistic culture, and its membership threatened always to raise profounder questions about the imperial-press nexus.

The Raj and freedom of the press The contradictory dynamics of imperial ideology were mirrored in the emergence and rapid expansion of print culture in India. Within India the role of a responsible informed press in the creation of a liberal political culture was recognised early, with Macaulay’s influential advocacy of English language instruction in its educational system in the 1830s. However, the ambivalence of this state of affairs was also laid bare in a Minute of April 1822 wherein Sir Thomas Munro wrote: ‘A free Press and the dominion of strangers, are things which are quite incompatible and which cannot long exist together; for what is the first duty of a free press? It is to deliver the country from a foreign yoke.’19 As Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, it was ironic that the British ‘became political liberals at home at the same time as they became imperialists abroad. British policy in India was forever haunted by this contradiction.’20 The freedom of the press, however enshrined in British political culture, was therefore not for imperial export. Divide and rule was the first law of media control. Utilising a rhetoric familiar in mid-Victorian Britain to curb opposition, the empire builders classified the Anglo-Indian press as ‘responsible’ while their Indian counterparts were ‘irresponsible’. Hence the former were cultivated as bulwarks against the rising tide of nationalism, whereas the Raj controlled the [ 193 ]

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operation of the indigenous media through censorship, punitive legislation, extortionate fines, forcible closures and imprisonment. The Utilitarian school of thought as it developed over the nineteenth century emphasised the Raj’s responsibility for inculcating Western attitudes towards freedom of expression and participation in selfgoverning institutions – the Viceroy Lord Ripon’s attempts to introduce local self-government in the 1880s represented the epitome of this ideology. The support of Western education in English from the 1830s, the establishment of universities and colleges of higher education from the 1850s, the general development of printing and newspapers, electric telegraphs, steamships, metalled roads and railways, were also appropriated as key constituents of this approach, though undoubtedly advances in communication also served as a seminal tool of imperial consolidation.21 Overall, the complex and multifaceted response to the freedom of the press ebbed and flowed largely as a reactive process. Some administrators encouraged the development of the press, arguing that it might prove an auxiliary to good government, others imposed stringent measures to control all printed matter. The contradictions between liberalism and authoritarianism, which the working of this imperial experiment exposed, tended to eventuate in acts of legislative and executive fiat, on the grounds that press freedoms inevitably impacted on other institutions, and that, because the Raj was by its nature despotic, unrestricted freedom of the press was inherently incompatible with imperial governance. Such views were variously articulated throughout the nineteenth century by, for instance, Lord Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay, when supporting Lord Canning’s Press Act in 1857, or by the Viceroy Lord Lytton when defending the Vernacular Press Act in 1878. In general, these acts served to enforce a combination of regulations and restraints surrounding the publication of any printed matter: compulsory declaration of printer, publisher, editor and place of publication; pre-publication censorship if judged necessary; the priority of maintaining government interests at all times; prohibitions against fomenting inter-faith tensions. Penalties included imposition of monetary bonds, fines, imprisonment, confiscation of equipment, shutting down of presses and the deportation of journalists. Thus in 1922 Gandhi was accused of sedition in respect of articles written in his paper Young India, tried under the 1910 Press Act and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. Within this plethora of legislation, it is possible to differentiate attitudinal shifts, though these were dictated more by pragmatism than ideology. First, there was the question of distinguishing between Indian language publications and those in English. The most obvious example [ 194 ]

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Table 1: Indian press laws until 1940 (including major regulations affecting the press) 1799 Wellesley’s Regulations

1913

1823 1835 1857 1860 1867

1914 1919 1922 1923 1928

Criminal Law Amendment Act Defence of India Act Rowlatt Acts Princes Protection Act Official Secrets Act Public Safety Ordinance

1930

Indian Press Ordinance

1931

1932

Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act Emergency Special Powers Ordinance Criminal Law Amendment Act Foreign Relations Act

1934

Indian States Protection Act

1940

Defence of India Rules

Adam Press Regulations Metcalfe’s Act Indian Press Act Indian Penal Code Press and Registration of Books Act 1870 Indian Penal Code Amendment 1878 Vernacular Press Act 1884 Criminal Law Amendment Act 1889 Indian Official Secrets Act 1898 Indian Penal Code amendment 1903 Indian Official Secrets Act amendment 1908 Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act 1910 Indian Press Act

1932 1932

of this was the Vernacular Press Act IX (An Act for the Better Control of Publications in Oriental languages), which became law in 1878. The Conservative, Lytton, contended that the very existence of British rule was jeopardised by the vernacular press as this was addressed to a largely uninformed populace who had no alternate means of information about their rulers. Restrictions were accordingly imperative for the safety of the state, and represented no more an interference with the liberty of the press than the prohibition of the promiscuous sale of deadly poisons was an interference with the freedom of trade: thus his press law was preventative.22 There were 230 press prosecutions as a result. In justifying his actions Lytton claimed that ‘neither the existence nor the freedom of the press’ in India was ‘of native origin or growth’. Rather, it was ‘an exotic which especially claims and needs, from the hands that planted it in a foreign soil and clime, protecting shelter and fostering care’.23 This Act was repealed by Ripon, his Liberal successor, in 1881 as an unjust prosecution based on racial discrimina[ 195 ]

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tion, yet, as their record reveals, it is far too simplistic to claim that Conservatives were against freedom of the Indian press and Liberals were unshakeable supporters of it. Thus two decades later we find the Liberal Lord Hardinge defending the retention of the 1910 Press Act, which enlarged the restrictions of the earlier Act of 1908 (passed by his Conservative predecessor, Lord Minto). Yet both these measures were repealed in 1922 largely due to the reforming impetus of another Liberal, the radical Jewish Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu.24 We witness a similar official justification during the 1930s when nationalism gained mass momentum, with the Indian press adopting a prominent oppositional role. In May 1930, soon after Gandhi’s launch of the Civil Disobedience movement, the Raj passed a Press Ordinance allowing for the suspension of newspapers, which duly followed in significant numbers. Several others forfeited securities and some editors were arrested, including S. A. Brelvi of the Bombay Chronicle. In defending his decision, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, claimed that, in the face of the breach of peace by the movement, he had little choice but to arm the government with special powers which in normal circumstances would be indefensible. The Press (Emergency Powers) Act passed in 1931 was initially for one year but could be extended ad infinitum with one key difference at this juncture being that ‘summary action could be taken by a magistrate on instructions from the Local Government and thus the onus of proving themselves innocent fell upon those who were prosecuted’.25 Second, by referring to interests of national security, the Raj justified the passage of various official secrets acts modelled on British measures, which applied severe censorship on the press and were most clearly witnessed during the two World Wars. In addition these were also applied when relations between India and its neighbouring states was threatened, as was the case with Afghanistan, as well as in dealings with Indian Princely States and foreign governments such as Russia. The Indian Official Secrets Act 1889 was enacted in the wake of the passage of its counterpart in England, and covered in addition all ‘Native Indian subjects of Her Majesty without and beyond British India’. This action was precipitated by the Amrita Bazaar Patrika which published what were purported to be confidential Foreign Office documents relating to Kashmir. Third, there was the policy of an even-handed approach to Indian and Anglo-Indian publications, in any language. Thus in 1835 Metcalfe retained as the only government restriction on the statute books, the clause that enjoined upon the printer and publisher of any newspaper or book to inform the magistrate about basic details of publication. During the Great Rebellion, Canning’s Press Act was applied [ 196 ]

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uniformly across the spectrum of newspapers, much to the dismay of several Anglo-Indian proprietors. Fourth, press controls were justified by referring to the violation of internal security by terrorism. For instance, during the outbreak of violence in the 1890s in the Bombay Presidency, several leading journals, such as Tilak’s Kesari, had played a prominent role, leading to the revision of the Penal code. However, the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, was at pains to emphasise that this was not a reinstitution of the Press Act rescinded in 1881. ‘We do not want a press in leading strings that can be made to dance to any tune that its censors may think fit to call. We want simply a free Press that will not transgress the law of the land. We are aiming at sedition and offences akin to it, and not at the press.’26 Another such upsurge of terrorism identified with the Bengal Presidency, and instigated largely by the Partition of the province in 1905, led eventually to the enactment of the Newspaper (Incitement to Offences) Act of 1908. Often the distinction between external threats and internal security was deliberately blurred, as with the Rowlatt Acts of 1919 when a continuation of wartime measures was sought after the cessation of hostilities. Fifth and finally, there was the supersession of legislative action by executive fiat. This sanction was built into most of the press acts, but in practice the numbers prosecuted varied greatly, and in general both Indian and Anglo-Indian publications were subject to the same treatment. However, there were only two ever deportations involving British journalists: the first in 1823 when J. S. Buckingham was punished for criticising Company officials; and the second in 1919 when the editor of the Bombay Chronicle, B. G. Horniman, was thrown out of the country for attempting to reveal the truth behind the Amritsar Massacre.27 Over the twentieth century the British could, at one level, view the vigorous press culture in India with justifiable pride. At its best, the Indian press represented the successful development of a libertarian ideal which stood in stark contrast to the fascist dictatorships in Europe. However, at worst, the attempt to inculcate freedom of the press with one hand while with the other imposing an oppressive regime inevitably created a Janus-faced relationship between government and the media. Thus the tensions created by a free press model in India could be potentially problematic for the EPU as witnessed in both the 1946 conference as well as that held in 1950 after India had become a free nation. Yet, the fight for a free press was waged in India as much by English and European journalists as by their nationalist counterparts, with journalism becoming a key weapon in the anti-colonial struggle. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this [ 197 ]

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was epitomised in their leading role in attacking the malpractices of Company officials, a tradition continued under Crown rule, such as the critique of exploitative economic policies by the founder and editor of the Statesman, Robert Knight.28 This tradition of opposition found a sympathetic platform among the counsels of the EPU. Although the involvement of Indians was at first limited, we witness over the twentieth century the emergence of a distinct Indian presence, which reflected journalistic traditions critical of British rule. There was a sole Indian as part of the Raj contingent at the first conference, the moderate politician Surendranath Banerjea, an English-educated former Indian Civil Service man. Banerjea had twice been President of the Indian National Congress and was editor of the successful English newspaper, the Bengalee. Knighted by the Raj, his paper was widely acknowledged as ‘a power from one end of India to the other’.29 By the time of the 1946 conference, however, there was a marked rise in numbers of Indians as well as a shift in the complexion of the papers they represented, with 50 per cent now from the radical press. These included such trenchant critics as Devdas Gandhi, son of Mahatma Gandhi, representing the Hindustan Times, S. Sadanand of the Free Press Journal and Tushar Kanti Ghosh, editor of the Amrita Bazaar Patrika. During these years an equally significant shift was taking place in the composition of the Indian wing of the EPU. Dominated from its inception by journalists representing stalwart Anglo-Indian newspapers such as The Times of India, the Statesman, the Civil and Military Gazette, the Englishman, the Madras Mail and the Pioneer, the Indian wing slowly began to attract indigenous papers, bridging the traditional chasm between the two press establishments. However, of greater importance, was the acceptance among leading British journalists of the need to involve Indians in the decision-making process in order to make the section truly representative. This was exemplified by the endeavours of Arthur Moore, the mercurial editor of the Statesman, who ensured that in 1943 his successor as Chair was K. Shrinivasan, editor and proprietor of the influential nationalist daily Hindu. A similar impetus is witnessed in the metropolis where in the same year Indian papers accounted for one third of the members represented on the central council of the EPU.30 Thus, significantly, the EPU successfully adapted to accommodate the nationalist perspective and Indian papers elected to remain within the EPU fold – a development symptomatic of the continuities which characterised the transfer of power more generally. Though claiming neutrality, the EPU was forced to acknowledge that the operation of imperial media and communications were inherently political and subject to prevalent ideologies. The issue of freedom of the press was foundational to the ethos of the EPU and the Indian case had been [ 198 ]

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Table 2: Members of EPU-Indian press representatives in London 1939

1942

1945

1946

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INDIA Bombay Chronicle & Amrita Bazaar Patrika

Sunder Kabadi Sunder Kabadi —

Amrita Bazaar Patrika & Hindustan Standard

—

—

T. Basu Miss A. H. Hill

T. Basu Miss A. H. Hill

Blitz

—

—

—

R. A. Zakaria

Bombay Free Press Journal

—

—

—

S. Telkar V. S. Sastry

Civil & Military Gazette

E. H. Hardy C. W. Sellick

E. H. Hardy — R. C. Benham

E. H. Hardy C. W. Sellick ––

E. H. Hardy –– R. C. Benham

Fauji Akhbar

Mrs G. H. Bell Mrs G. H. Bell — OBE OBE

Hindu

L. W. Matters L. W. Matters J. B. Appasamy — K. S. Shelvankar

L. W. Matters — K. S. Shelvankar

L. W. Matters — K. S. Shelvankar H. C. Miller

Kesari

—

D. V. Tahmankar

J. M. Deb

Leader

M. H. L. Polak M. H. L. Polak M. H. L. Polak J. H. Buchi H. S. L. Polak D. Anand H. S. L. Polak — — — –– C. H. W. Baxter

Madras Mail

Sir Gilbert Jackson

—

—

—

Pioneer

H. W. Andrear C. R. Corbett Lt. Col. H. V. Stovold OBE

H. W. Andrear — — Miss J. L. Tims

H. W. Andrear — — Mrs. G. D. Vanplew

H. W. Andrear — — Mrs. G. D. Vanplew

Statesman

E. R. Mackie A. E. Ellings Miss J. Locke

E. R. Mackie — Miss J. Locke

E. R. Mackie — Miss J. Locke

E. R. Mackie — Miss J. Locke

Times of India

W. T. Coulton, — S. T. Sheppard — Sir S. Reed MP Sir S. Reed MP A. H. Byrt CBE

— — Sir S. Reed MP A. H. Byrt CBE

— — Sir S. Reed MP A. H. Byrt CBE

D. V. Tahmankar

Sunder Kabadi

—

Source: Compiled from L/I/I/88, India Office Records, British Library

[ 199 ]

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aired in its forums from its inception. Banerjea had alluded to the need for equality in Commonwealth relations, and utilised the opportunity provided by the conference and his subsequent tour of England under its aegis to highlight the importance of maintaining the momentum towards self-government recently inaugurated, albeit in small measure, by the 1909 Indian Councils Act. Urging action towards making India an equal partner in the Commonwealth, Banerjea observed: ‘India in the enjoyment of the blessings of self-government … will be the most valuable asset of the Empire … And the Empire, thus knit together upon the basis of common civic rights and obligations, may bid defiance to the most powerful combination that may be formed against it.’31 With the onset of war in 1914, such imperial cooperation was severely tested and Indian support was not found wanting. The interwar years were to witness rising imperial tensions with the onset of mass nationalism and increasing communalism. During the 1930s, this issue of ‘common civic rights’, as raised by Banerjea, continued to be a recurring theme in the context of the empire’s press community. Thus, the EPU took up the question of censorship in India at its first annual conference in 1936,32 in the wake of the spate of press restrictions discussed above. The disquiet in Indian press circles at these developments found support among the EPU central executive, which reiterated its conviction via a resolution sent to the Indian government that any censorship ‘should be in accord with definite, reasonable and known rules, and that as little room as possible should be left for interpretation by individual officials’. It pointed to the wireless ‘revolution’ of recent years and urged officials not to ‘ban the printed word when the air is filled with rumour’. Finally, it affirmed the EPU’s belief that the ‘most useful’ form of censorship was ‘free co-operation’ between officials and the press.33 The fourth annual conference in 1939 just before the outbreak of war condemned, once more, the recent legislative encroachments on the freedom of the Indian press. It argued that this freedom was ‘an inseparable part of the liberty of the individual’.34 Overall the EPU did, therefore, achieve a certain political profile over the first three and a half decades of its existence, during which time the Indian critique of censorship and punitive restrictions could not be discounted, running, as they did, counter to its very ideal of a free imperial press union.35

Press freedoms and post-war India: London 1946 The Second World War helped transform the imperial landscape, leav­­­ing India on the threshold of independence. The decision to hold the ­conference ‘in the ravaged heart of Empire’, was intended to reiterate [ 200 ]

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36

the price of freedom. Meeting under such conditions in the summer of 1946, journalists, proprietors and media organisations were inevitably faced with challenging re-evaluations of their raison d’être. Government propaganda and its corollary, censorship, had become significant tools of modern warfare. Within Britain moves were also afoot – unbeknown to the EPU conference – to re-evaluate the role and responsibilities of the press, eventuating in the first Royal Commission on the Press 1947–49, initiated by the National Union of Journalists and not the recently elected Labour government. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that the thorny issues of press freedom, censorship and political control were prominent subjects for debate. Significantly, the conference was inaugurated by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, with the sessions on press freedom opened by his Press Relations Adviser, Francis Williams, who prior to the war had been the distinguished editor of the Daily Herald. During the conflict, he had assumed responsibility as Controller of the Press and Censorship divisions of the Ministry of Information, as had another guest speaker, Brendan Bracken, whose tenure as the Minister of Information was not without its detractors in the press. Thus the EPU ensured that the ensuing debates were truly representative. Attlee paid ‘a specially warm welcome’ to the Indians, noting ‘the fighting qualities’ of its soldiers: ‘They covered themselves with glory wherever they fought.’ He also expressed the hope that the ‘close ties’ that linked its press with that of Britain and the Dominions ‘will never be relaxed’.37 Despite occasional disagreements, politicians and journalists were ‘natural allies’, he contended, and ‘no freedom was more important’ than that of the press for it was ‘a freedom which belongs … to the public whose agents in this matter the newspapers are’.38 Surprising, given his recent role in public relations, Williams was more forthright in his demand for ‘freedom from any form of Government control’.39 Meanwhile Bracken gave credit to the ‘candid correspondents’ of the empire press, who ‘never hesitated to tell us when and why they thought us wrong’.40 Given that news was universal, Bracken also questioned whether press freedoms were divisible: ‘How can the Press anywhere be wholly free if in wide regions of the world every obstacle is placed in the way of gathering news?’41 Such perspectives found a welcome echo within the EPU collective. As Chair, Astor accepted that freedom of the press was ‘not a privilege’ but ‘the fundamental liberty of the subject’, and the continuing struggle for press freedom was in effect waged on their behalf: ‘What was really at stake was the right of people to read what they liked.’42 Further, he accepted that this freedom was coupled with responsibility: ‘We enjoy liberty so long as we do not use it to injure our fellow citizens.’43 This language of social responsibility would come to the fore in controver[ 201 ]

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sial circumstances at the subsequent conference and will be discussed later in the chapter. Meanwhile, the dominion press agreed with Sir Keith Murdoch, Chair of the Australian delegation, who like Bracken, championed the indivisibility of press freedoms. Yet the Australians were also much more forthright in asserting their rights, claiming, ‘A candid Press demands that freedom is not a passive enjoyment of non-interference but a condition of that active and constructive criticism of events, persons and ideas which it is a primary duty of journalism to practise...’.44 Indians took an active part in these debates. The veteran editor of the Times of India, Sir Francis Low, reminded the EPU about the ‘two Indian Divisions which defeated the whole of the Italian army in North Africa … a feat of arms unsurpassed in the whole Empire’, and urged that they deserved ‘all the help, encouragement and sympathy which British people could now give them’.45 The contrast between Indians fighting and dying for freedom abroad, yet restrained with censorship and imprisonment at home, could not have been more stark. Thus Ghosh argued that ‘they enjoyed hardly any freedom of the Press during any crisis’. For instance, during the great Bengal famine in 1943, newspapers had anticipated the catastrophe and regularly sought to intimate to the Raj the impending peril. Officials, however, ‘did not heed us but passed an order telling us we must not refer to the food situation at all. We were even asked not to refer to this order, thus preventing us from continuing our editorials on the food situation.’ Distortions of events went unchallenged because they were not allowed to be contradicted by the press. He demanded that the delegates pass a firm resolution in support of the beleaguered Indians which was accepted by the EPU, formally affirming that: ‘Freedom of thought and expression is the right of all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire. The Press is a principal instrument for the people’s exercise of this right and on their behalf is therefore entitled to all the liberties necessary for the discharge of its duties.’46 Indians deserved the ‘freest access’ to news and means of production and the government was urged to desist from privileging journalists of the home press. The EPU also reiterated that governments had ‘no right’ to forbid the publication of news except for reasons of ‘military security in time of war’. It deplored, in particular, the curtailment of overseas news by undue censorship ‘on grounds of political expediency’. The imperial press community, in turn, was urged not to bow to ‘official pressure or obstruction’ in the pursuance of their duty of ‘fair criticism’.47 Thus the concept of a free and open press proved hardly reconcilable with the principles of imperial domination. As the case of the [ 202 ]

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sub-continent demonstrates, the British, while frequently presenting their governance as a progressive and liberalising force for the benefit of the governed, and while exporting a press tradition to India, were confronted with the problem of a critical press furthering nationalist campaigns. They responded with censorship and closures, with press laws and detention. But they responded, as well, through organisations like the EPU, in an attempt to incorporate and mediate conflicting views, expressing sympathy for complaints of censorship and endeavouring to keep radical journalists within the fold rather than see a potential schism.

Press freedoms in post-colonial India If journalists occupied an equivocal place within the empire, what about their position in the newly independent India? It might be expected that this ambivalence would have ceased as a free press took its place in a free India – especially as so many nationalists were campaigning journalists themselves.48 However, the reality was more problematic and the essential ambivalence remained. Indian politicians at Independence accepted, in principle, that the prerequisite of democracy was the democratisation of communications, the creation of a free public sphere as well as the role of the press in creating and shaping civil society. The logic of post-colonial realities, however, appeared to temper the ardour of even the most strident supporter of press freedom. Scrutiny by a modern media was both unfamiliar and unwelcome to the relatively inexperienced poacher-turned-gamekeeper government, and solutions to domestic economic hardships and political instability, following Partition and the creation of Pakistan in August 1947, were often sought at the expense of press liberties. For the press, too, Independence entailed a move away from their self-imposed role as an anti-imperial crusader, as the face of journalism changed to one of a partnership in national development. Under political pressure, the role of constructive opposition to the ruling class was insidiously relegated under the rhetoric of social and political responsibility and loyalty to the emergent nation-state. Government and politics during the immediate post-colonial years was above all about one man, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister, and one party, the Indian National Congress. Nehru enjoyed ‘unlimited, indeed, virtually unchallenged power’, as Wolpert writes, and was ‘the darling of India’s people, the hero of his party, the unrivalled leader of his government’.49 He was also ‘a man of two worlds’50 and despite a strong attachment to Indian traditions, he never completely rejected the Western cultural sensibilities that had shaped his outlook. In [ 203 ]

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conversation with Galbraith, Nehru reportedly once described himself as ‘the last Englishman to rule in India’.51 Judith Brown contends that he remained ‘a patrician, despite his commitment to democracy’.52 His liberalism and belief in secular nationalism and the validity of the nation-state owed a great deal to the precedents established under the British. His attempt at an East–West fusion and his determination to carve a niche for India on the international stage helps to explain his commitment to the Commonwealth, as well as his championing of the Non-Aligned movement.53 Chakrabarty has argued that modern day India retains a strong centralising tendency that was ‘most powerfully expressed’ in Nehruvian consensual ideology.54 This ideology included a concept of secularism which relied heavily on Western liberal heritage to argue for a separation between religion and politics. Yet, in India, the ‘religious idiom’ was omnipresent, so this ideology did not approximate to political praxis. However, as long as the nation was run by ‘a tiny elite reared in and respectful of the British traditions of politics’ this dichotomy could be preserved. Indeed, it was visible in the unity of the Congress in which Nehru ‘always remained the Bonapartist figure’.55 However, as one recent biographer aptly notes, this unity was often very challenging to maintain because, on a number of fronts, he ‘found himself deeply frustrated by the party he ostensibly led’.56 Edwardes is more forthright: ‘The alliance between Nehru and Congress was an alliance of weaknesses.’57 Nehru was sensitive to public opinion and the eloquence of his spoken and written word was widely acknowledged. Michael Foot, hearing Nehru talk at a rally in support of the Spanish Republic in London during 1938, was moved to note: ‘He could speak the word freedom better than they [the British] could, and no small part of that gift he had learnt in England.’58 This had served him well as an antiimperialist propagandist and his family had long-standing associations with the press. His father Motilal Nehru, a successful lawyer and a prominent Congress politician, was the first Chair of the Board of Directors of the Leader in Allahabad, before launching his own daily the Independent in 1919. Jawaharlal went on to found, in turn, the National Herald in Lucknow in 1938 (where later his son-in-law Feroze Gandhi was managing editor). Both before and after Independence Nehru took a keen interest in the Herald, writing frequently in its pages. Nehru also made adept use of broadcasting and was invited to contribute to a range of overseas journals and newspapers in America and Europe. Upon assuming the premiership, he continued to be perceived as a defender of civil liberties and the public sphere, both by contemporaries and in popular consciousness, as well as subsequently by historians.59 [ 204 ]

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However, the more orthodox approach to Nehru as an unswerving champion of free speech and expression sits somewhat uneasily with his attitude towards the freedom of the press after 1947, and is therefore in need of some revision. Even before the ink was dry on the Indian Independence Act, Nehru threatened to impose censorship on the foreign media during a press conference on 28 August, for what he deemed unfair criticism of his government. Appealing to national pride and nationalisation as acceptable demands of a fledgling democracy, Nehru saw to it that all remaining foreign-owned newspapers were transferred to Indian hands and the Cabinet finally passed a resolution in 1955 banning foreign participation in the print media. International conglomerates such as Reuters had conceded to the logic of post-colonial realities which made Indian ownership inevitable and its controlling interests in Associated Press of India were transferred to the newly formed Press Trust of India in February 1949. However, what is instructive is the response of the then Minister for Information, Sardar Patel, who argued that, ‘The sole test by which the new agreement should be judged is whether it has advanced the cause of India’s Freedom and Independence.’60 The role of a ‘free’ news agency serving nevertheless the national cause has had its share of critics, but news and information were a potent symbolic weapon by which to assert Indian identity. Thus, just as imperial ideology justified press restraint, so too did nationalist beliefs and, in each case, freedom of discussion was regarded as subordinate to the higher goal – imperial hegemony or nationalist cohesion. Nehru’s obsessive monitoring of press coverage reveals not just a regard for the influence of the media, but also an acute sensitivity to criticism. Operating as he was in the context of a virtually one party democracy, the absence of a viable opposition gave the press a heightened profile. Nehru, much like his British predecessors, came to view sections of the press in adversarial terms. In his strictures to chief ministers, he repeatedly urged control and censorship including closure of papers.61 Faced with severe socio-economic challenges and escalating tensions with Pakistan, any criticism of the government could be, and often was, interpreted as an attack on the stability of the nascent nation-state. Thus as he argued: ‘I am and have been a believer in civil liberty and the democratic process, but it is absurd to talk of democracy when the very basis of it is challenged by terrorist activities; it is equally absurd for civil liberty to be granted to those who wish to seize power by murder and violence.’62 He was convinced that ‘a good part of our troubles are due to a thoroughly irresponsible press … they spread hatred, communal bitterness and the cult of violence. This must be ended.’63 Publication of a number of English, Hindi and [ 205 ]

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Urdu dailies in Delhi was accordingly banned in February 1948. Ironically, Nehru’s language bears a striking resemblance to that used by his British predecessors. For instance, Hardinge supporting the 1910 Press Act argued: ‘We have taught the Indians much, but we have not taught them journalism, and I am quite convinced in my opinion that the flames of sedition are fanned by the press.’64 While such an attitude on Nehru’s part was especially striking in the context of worsening Indo-Pakistan relations and after a period of conflict over Kashmir, he was also sensitive to reception in overseas media. For example, newspapers such as the Economist and the New York Times were singled out as being ‘grossly unfair to us both factually and otherwise’. He blamed a fair amount of this on Pakistani propaganda and ‘hysterical’ coverage in its press, but also wondered if India’s publicity apparatus abroad was ‘not good enough’.65 Nehru had to build a new Foreign Service and his almost obsessive concern with international affairs and foreign policy is widely accepted. Thus he urged barely a year after Independence: We function on the world stage today in a glare of publicity. If anything happens in India which is criticized or condemned outside, it will react very much to our disadvantage … As a democratic government, we are the servants of the public and must give effect to their wishes. But this does not mean that we should permit wrong things to be done because members of the public unthinkingly ask us to do them.66

The Constitution of an independent Indian republic, which came into force in January 1950, borrowed as many as 250 articles from the Government of India Act of 1935, thus ensuring a significant continuity in ideological and institutional terms. It is instructive to note that the Indian Constitution did not explicitly guarantee freedom of the press. Instead, it was subsumed under the general directive of freedom of speech and expression, which was protected legislatively as a Fundamental Right. The authority of the state to enforce restrictions was allowed for the control of ‘public order’ and in the interests of national ‘security’. However, the Supreme Court in a landmark jurisdiction shortly afterwards drew a distinction between the two, allowing government no rights to interfere with press freedom in the case of the former. This resulted in a dramatic move by Nehru’s government which passed the First Amendment Act, 1951, considerably abridging the freedom of expression as contained in the Constitution, and giving the state rights to enact new legislation covering a very wide spectrum of interests. The only safeguard to the press under this Act was that all executive action would be subject to the decision of a court of law. Between 1 February 1952 and 31 October 1953, 134 [ 206 ]

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cases were brought against newspapers. This Act was similar to the legislation passed during the Raj as detailed above. As Nehru justified it: ‘We should not only give the press freedom, but make it understand that freedom.’ Even if we allow for the continuing myriad of problems besetting the new democracy, it is questionable if, at this juncture, Nehru himself fully appreciated the attributes of freedom. The passage and implementation of this Act brought enormous protest from journalists across the country. Nehru’s excuse for requesting the amendment was the scurrilous reporting in a few scandal sheets. However, as the All-India Newspaper Editors Conference (AINEC) – which had been established during the Second World War on the initiative of the Indian press including European journalists – pointed out, there was nothing to prevent the government from using its new powers against the legitimate press when and if it chose. Finally, largely in response to mounting public criticism, Nehru announced the formation of a Press Commission to consider these and related issues in 1952.

From empire to Commonwealth: Ottawa 1950 It is against this backdrop of post-colonial realities that we need to situate the response of the Indian journalists at the next EPU conference convened in Ottawa during June 1950. The highly charged international context of the developing cold war and decolonisation combined to give the debates over journalistic liberties a greater intensity. It became apparent very quickly that a chasm had begun to emerge between British and Dominion sentiments on the one hand, and those of the emergent post-colonial nations of South Asia on the other. The transition to a new world order was apparent at the outset with demands for a change in the name of the organisation – to Commonwealth Press Union (CPU) – being mooted by the Indian delegation ‘in keeping with the spirit of the times’.67 Sir Harry Brittain, the originator of the conference series and the EPU, opened the response with a warm endorsement: ‘1950 is not 1909. We meet to-day as a series of independent sister nations’, and ought to ‘bring our name up-to-date’.68 Nevertheless, there was an element of nostalgic regret from the Dominions, especially Canadians, who felt, like E. J. Robertson representing the London Express group, that ‘The Empire has had a wonderful and honourable history … We are dropping the word “Empire” as though it had an unpleasant smell. It has not.’69 C. R. Srinivasan (Swadesamitran) was swift in response urging members ‘to have regard to the fact that the word “Empire” carries certain implications to which some members object’.70 Within India there was: [ 207 ]

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a certain amount of acrimony, because it was felt that this Union was a British institution; that it was allied to the Empire; that those who participated in the proceedings should subscribe to British membership and British citizenship … the term ‘Empire’ represented something more than a geographical unit – men who were carrying on the British tradition, British standards of paternalism, in the outposts of the Empire.71

A hundred people would be willing to join the Indian section, he claimed, but for this ‘controversy’. In urging acceptance of the new name, he added that the empire’s ‘main claim for credit is that it has been a dynamic unit … moving from step to step in order to free the peoples throughout the Empire …’.72 In the event, the resolution was passed by general consent. That the ambivalence of the British legacy continued to colour press response, however, is revealed by an interesting angle to deliberations on press training during the conference. While keen to shake off any remnants of taint by imperial association, as witnessed in Srinivasan’s peroration, his colleague, Durga Das (Hindustan Times) lamented the disappearance of all but one British owned paper and the consequent absence of British journalists on their staff as well as the regular practice of bringing in new journalists from overseas. ‘We no longer have contact with British journalists trained in the practice of journalism and skilled in the English language.’73 He claimed that the English they used in the future would ‘become somewhat different. It will mean translation from an Indian language into English, and maybe we will put into the English language our own idioms in place of yours. This may lead to different ideas, concerning similar things.’ While he welcomed the inevitable rise of the Indian language press, he wanted a system whereby Indians gained experience on a British newspaper and trained in the UK. ‘I think’, he concluded, ‘a great responsibility rests on you in the matter.’74 Debates on freedom of the press encompassed issues such as war­­­ time restrictions, censorship, government publicity, bureaus of information, news agency independence and newsprint controls. The response of the Indian journalists revealed a conviction that the class­­ical free press theory was tainted by association with Western hegemony, but arguably, it also reflected a combination of political sagacity and self-interest. Prominent journalists such as their Chair, M. N. Cama (Bombay Chronicle), Das and Srinivasan, along with their sole Pakistani counterpart, Altaf Husain representing Dawn, urged greater press restraint and advocated the need for regulation, even ­self-­censorship, if justified on the grounds of preserving communal and religious harmony. The arguments were couched in the ideology of press responsibility as opposed to inalienable rights. ‘Just as we in [ 208 ]

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the past protected democracy from aristocracy’, contended Das, ‘we to-day have to protect it against “mobocracy” on the one side and dictatorship on the other.’ It is precisely because some of our tribe have maligned a whole country or a whole people, and have always preferred the dramatic and the picturesque to sober narration, that the question has arisen whether some remedy should be found in the right of government correction. I agree that the right of correction offends against our ideas of professional selfrespect, but I suggest that we must accept responsibility … The remedy lies very much in our hands.75

It would be hard to find blue water between such sentiments and those expressed repeatedly by Nehru as argued above. Accepting as inevitable an increase in government intrusion within India, Srinivasan felt that it would be ‘wise to come to some understanding with the government to make sure that any controls or correctives do not spoil the pitch for the press’. Indian delegates also viewed with favour self-regulation through press councils, and several examples were cited when official action against a recalcitrant newspaper was supported by their own central committees and conferences. The justification for this development was provided by the actions of organisations such as the AINEC which sought ‘to preserve the freedom of the press against unintelligent and uninformed interference by a government in a moment of pique … governments have not dared to ignore the advice we have given’.76 Urging political cooperation, Srinivasan also accepted the principle that in emergencies governments would need to make decisions unhampered by press critique.77 Additionally, the changing international context and the threat of communism and ‘sabotage’ were cited by Cama as justifying greater government control: ‘The ‘cold war’’, he contended, ‘is getting hotter every day and, in the face of that, complete freedom of the press might in practice do more harm than good’.78 Similarly, government in Pakistan was not ‘inevitably wicked’ in the words of Husain, and with a fragile democracy, cooperation with officials was essential: ‘until the government forfeits our trust we will give it’.79 He also declared that, ‘we of the Pakistan press do not subscribe to the view that there can be absolute freedom of the press’.80 Instead, journalists had a duty to assist the government, citing a recent example of when the Pakistani press colluded to act against a fellow editor who it was felt had transgressed the prevailing norms. Such views ran contrary to Dominion and British sentiments. Ronald Horton, President of the New Zealand contingent, dissociated himself from press advisory committees. ‘The idea of other newspapers [ 209 ]

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sitting in judgement on anything that we publish is abhorrent to me … The press function is to give information, and it should never become executive.’81 Likewise, Frank Packer laid out the Australian opposition: ‘I do not think the conception of freedom of the press can go hand in hand with any form of outside control’, he maintained. ‘Our friend from Pakistan rather frightened me when he described how a group of rival newspapers arranged to close down a rival paper … It is not our conception … of the way in which the press should be conducted.’82 The British also took exception to the visions of journalism painted by their former colonists. For example, R. P. T. Gibson, while appreciating the ‘very difficult’ conditions in Pakistan, urged nevertheless that ‘our principle should … remain the same’: government and the press must be ‘absolutely independent from one another’.83 Astor, backed by both The Times and the EPU, noted that though freedom of expression was widely acknowledged, it was always qualified. However, he reiterated the long-standing conviction of the E/CPU (Empire/Commonwealth Press Union) that ‘the power to suppress is a dangerous one and certainly not to be abused’.84 Unlike the Indians, Astor was convinced that ‘our most persistent and recurring menace will come from government’ and therefore ‘every fact withheld is an injury inflicted on the right of the people to know’. And in a direct challenge to the South Asian model he concluded: ‘But it offends against first principles to attempt to take away from us a universal right because of the fear that we may misuse it.’85 This British response needs to be situated within the widespread reaction to the recent Royal Commission recommendations which had served to divide opinion still further in the aftermath of the war, and were seen by many as a peacetime strategy to constrict press freedom by exploiting the emerging doctrine of social responsibility. Thus a national debate was, to an extent, being aired on an international stage. Yet given Britain’s pre-eminent role in the CPU, there is no gainsaying the potential impact of its response on wider developments within the Commonwealth. The Commission claimed that the concentration of ownership linked to rising proprietorial powers had served to emasculate editorial initiative and led to a decline in press standards. In acknowledging the role of official legislation, it nevertheless recommended self-regulation by the industry through the establishment of a ‘General Council of the Press’ which would act as a press watchdog.86 However, nothing had been formally devised by the time the CPU met in conference in Ottawa. The United Nations’ proposed Convention on Freedom of Information also proved a dividing line between the two opposing blocs within the CPU, though a degree of ambiguity remained. The UN proposals, though expanding upon the [ 210 ]

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classic free press doctrine, were nevertheless intended to cover a much broader remit to include televisual and international news agency purveyors of content. While space does not permit a detailed exposition of the UN proposals, as Cryle has demonstrated, the Australians were the most vociferous in opposing such moves which they regarded as ‘a dangerous precedent likely to perpetuate war-time controls’. They were particularly against a requirement for press correction of published errors and the imposition of regulatory codes of conduct.87 The Indians, on the contrary, supported the UN perspective which Das argued included nations ‘in various stages of political development … Since the strength of a chain depends on that of each link, we cannot blame the United Nations … when it is trying to evolve a code which will lay down the minimum standards of ethics on the part of the press and the government.’88 It is instructive, however, that in its final resolution the CPU dissociated itself from the South Asian ideology and restated with vigour its belief that the press ‘should enjoy by right the full freedom of expression’ and restrictions should ‘only operate in time of national emergency, and then only under safeguards to ensure (a) minimum interference with Press freedom; (b) immediate and complete restoration of that freedom at the end of the emergency; and (c) protection of the courts for defendants’.89

Conclusion December 2008 saw the CPU fold its operations after ninety-nine eventful years, though it continues to maintain an internet presence today. At its height, it represented thousands of journalists from over fifty countries. The E/CPU provides an early example of the functioning of a transnational organisation with the specific remit of incorporating and articulating the varied interests of members differently situated in terms of power, resources, geography and media context. As such it represented a paradigm for the development of kindred organisations, including the Commonwealth, which has shaped the global context of political and cultural exchange during the twentieth century. However, to what do we attribute the plurality and contradictions inherent in the varying conceptions of the freedom of the press that the E/CPU conferences did so much to lay bare? Were they a reflection of the inevitable nature of a post-colonial power struggle? How far can they be explained by the changing balance of world power and the weakness in the debates on internationalism? Or were they more due to the contradictions inherent in the liberal ideology of the freedom of the press, especially when exposed to the pressures of more dictatorial regimes, whether in the shape of fascist or communist ideology or in [ 211 ]

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the post-colonial context? The answer lies, in some measure, between all of these competing explanatory frameworks and is deserving of further reflection. India’s engagement with the E/CPU represents an important test case of Indians taking their place alongside representatives of Britain and the Dominions in the forums of international journalism and the public sphere, and, as such, it prefigured, by several decades, the realisation of India’s equality of status as a self-governing state within the Commonwealth. The logic of the ideal of a free press and an uninhibited interchange of information within the empire contributed to developments in this direction. Further, the contradiction inherent in an organisation that viewed itself both as a partner in the project of imperial consolidation, yet which retained an unswerving adherence to autonomy as a press body, meant that it inevitably reproduced on an empire-wide scale the reciprocal yet problematic relationship between government and the Fourth Estate. The position and role of Indians also reflected the speed at which Indian journalism matured, with its participation conferring a certain legitimacy on the EPU. With the transmutation of the EPU into the CPU, and with the transformation of the Commonwealth itself after India’s admittance as a Republic, the contentious debates at the 1950 Ottawa conference marked an inevitable hiatus. A decade later the CPU met for the first ever conference in Asia, which was jointly hosted by India and Pakistan in 1961. Finally, what of the contemporary media? India today is a leading global player: it has the fastest growing media network, lucrative media conglomerates and the telecommunications sector is the third largest recipient of Foreign Direct Investment.90 The press has more than held its own in a multimedia environment, with a veritable explosion in the number and circulation of papers over the last few decades, especially the regional press, at a time when the industry is in decline world-wide. Though newspapers in English have long been overtaken in circulation by Indian language publications, the Times of India is the highest selling English daily in the world.91 This embarrassment of media riches is combined with India’s lauded status as the world’s largest democracy, having a population of 1.21 billion.92 Yet, despite the fact that historically a critical feature of the move towards democracy has been the democratisation of communications, we need to avoid equating the media with democracy itself. Instead, in the light of continuing intrusions into media freedoms as a result of official and more recently also market forces, it can be argued that the immediate post-colonial decades, as well as the British legacy, have left their mark and continue to exert an influence, if occasionally a rather invidious one. [ 212 ]

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Notes  1 See mission statement in J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988).  2 See R. Williams, Communications (London, 1976); Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York, 1983).  3 For full references see list of the Series included in this book.  4 To ensure coherence, I have retained the original spelling of Indian place names throughout, so Bombay and not Mumbai.  5 J. M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identity (Manchester, 2009), p. 242.  6 J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), p. 3.  7 Ibid. p. 10.  8 Ibid. p. 256.  9 J. M. MacKenzie with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007). 10 N. Garnham, Emancipation, the Media and Modernity (Oxford, 2000), p. 38. 11 N. Hiley, ‘The Problems of Media History’, Modern History Review, 7: 4 (1996); H. F. Dahl, ‘The Pursuit of Media History’, Media Culture and Society, 16: 2 (1994). 12 See, for example, A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volumes I and II (London, 1961 and 1965); N. Pronay was the founder of the InterUniversity History Films Consortium in 1968; G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978). 13 J. Curran, ‘Media and the Making of British Society, c. 1700–2000’, Media History, 8: 2 (2002), 149. 14 EPU newsletter no. 3, June–July 1929, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, ICS/121/2/2. 15 For the classic exposition see Siebert in F. S. Siebert, T. Peterson and W. Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Chicago and London, 1973). 16 B. Stein, A History of India, ed. D. Arnold (Oxford, 2010 edn), p. 258. 17 C. Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922 (Manchester, 2003), p. 101. 18 Lord Burnham, India and the Empire, ICS/121/6/3. 19 G. R. Gleig, The Life of Major General Sir Thomas Munro (London, 1830), vol. II, p. 107. 20 D. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago, 2002), p. 85. 21 See Kaul, Reporting the Raj, chapter 2, for a detailed discussion of communications and the Indian empire. 22 W. C. Wordsworth, ‘The Press’ in L. S. S. O’Malley (ed.), Modern India and the West (London, 1941), p. 206. 23 Cited in M. Barns, The Indian Press (London, 1940), pp. 280–1. 24 For a detailed evaluation of Montagu’s vision and the press, see Kaul, Reporting the Raj, pp. 135–257. 25 Barns, The Indian Press, p. 384. 26 Ibid. p. 305. 27 See Kaul, Reporting the Raj, chapter 8. 28 See E. Hirschmann, Robert Knight (New Delhi, 2008). 29 E. Cotes, ‘The Newspaper Press of India’, Asiatic Review, 19 (1923), 419. 30 L/I/1/88, India Office Records, British Library, London. 31 S. Banerjea, A Nation in Making (London, 1927), p. 266. 32 The annual meetings were an innovation introduced to supplement the main quinquennial conferences. 33 EPU Resolution sent to Secretary of State, Lord Zetland, 16 July 1936, National Archives, New Delhi, Home Political, 161/36. 34 EPU monthly newsletter, July 1939, ICS 121/2/2.

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writing imperial histories 35 For a detailed analysis of Indian participation in the early decades, see C. Kaul, ‘India, the Imperial Press Conferences and the Empire Press Union’ in C. Kaul (ed.), Media and the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 125–44. 36 Foreward to H. E. Turner (ed.), Proceedings, The Sixth Imperial Press Conference (London, 1946), p. i. 37 Turner, Proceedings, Sixth Conference, p. 2. 38 Ibid. pp. 3–4. 39 Ibid. p. 33. 40 Ibid. p. 34. 41 Ibid. p. 35. 42 Ibid. p. 42. 43 Ibid. p. 42. 44 Ibid. p. 46. 45 Ibid. p. 149. 46 Ibid. p. 119. 47 Ibid. pp. 119–20. 48 See Kaul, Reporting the Raj; Barns, The Indian Press; S. Natarajan, A History of the Press in India (London, 1962); C. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge 1996); M. Israel, Communications and Power (Cambridge, 1994). 49 S. Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (New York, 1996), p. 457. 50 J. K. Galbraith, ‘A Man of Two Worlds’ in S. Dikshit, K. N. Singh, G. Parthasarathi and R. Kumar (eds), Jawaharlal Nehru Centenary Volume (Delhi, 1989), pp. 232–5; S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Delhi, 1976), 3 vols. 51 Galbraith, ‘Man of Two Worlds’, 233. 52 J. M. Brown, Nehru (Harlow, 1999), p. 185. 53 See B. R. Nanda (ed.), Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years (London, 1990); Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru. 54 Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p. 93. 55 Ibid. 56 J. M. Brown, ‘Nehru – the Dilemmas of a Colonial Inheritance’ in J. Dulffer and M. Frey (eds), Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 182. 57 M. Edwardes, Nehru: A Political Biography (London, 1971), p. 245. 58 M. Foot, ‘The Nehru of 1938’ in Dikshit et al. (eds), Jawaharlal Nehru Centenary Volume, p. 224. 59 See B. R. Nanda, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rebel and Statesman (Delhi, 1998); H. Mukerjee, The Gentle Colossus (Delhi, 1986 edn). 60 Cited in K. P. Viswanatha Ayyar et al. (eds), The Indian Press Year Book for 1949 (Madras, 1949), p. 85. 61 G. Parathasarathi (ed.), Nehru’s Letters to Chief Ministers (Delhi, 1985–90, 5 vols), Vol. 1, 9 September 1948, p. 203–4; 16 November 1948, p. 223; 16 April 1949, pp. 325–6; 3 June 1949, p. 366; 1 July 1949, p. 399; 15 August 1949, p. 440; 16 September 1949, p. 468. 62 Parathasarathi (ed.), Nehru’s Letters, Vol. 1, 5 February 1948, p. 57. 63 Ibid. p. 60. 64 Cited in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, pp. 107–8. 65 Parathasarathi (ed.), Nehru’s Letters, Vol. 2, 1 March 1950 and 6 April 1950, pp. 39–40 and pp. 57, 76, 81, respectively; 2 June 1951, p. 406. 66 Parathasarathi (ed.), Nehru’s Letters, Vol. 1, 1 September 1948, p. 200. 67 H. E. Turner (ed.), Proceedings of the Seventh Imperial Press Conference (London, 1950), p. 15. 68 Ibid. p. 16. 69 Ibid. p. 18. 70 Ibid. p. 19. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid.

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media, india and the raj 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Ibid, p. 30 Ibid. Ibid. p. 92. Ibid. p. 100. Ibid. pp. 50–1. Ibid. p. 98. Ibid. p. 94 Ibid. p. 96. Ibid. p. 51. Ibid. pp. 98–9. Ibid. pp. 96–7. Ibid. p. 55. Ibid. p. 56. See Royal Commission on the Press 1947–9 Report (London, June 1949). D. Cryle, ‘A British Legacy? The Empire Press Union and the Freedom of the Press’, History of Intellectual Culture, 4: 1 (2004). Turner, Proceedings, Seventh Conference, p. 93. Ibid. p. 147. C. Kaul, ‘Media and Telecommunications’ in A. P. Kaminsky and R. D. Long (eds), India Today, 2 (2011), 450. C. Kaul, ‘The Times of India’, India Today, 2 (2011), 706. Census of India, 2011.

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Empires, diasporas and cultural circulation1 Sunil S. Amrith

The Studies in Imperialism series has pioneered a comparative and connected approach to imperial history. The Series has been at the forefront of the study of imperial networks: from personal and professional networks, to networks of steamships and aircraft and lines of communication. Migration has always been a central concern. To begin with, the volumes focused on primarily the history of European emigration; more recently, other routes of movement, both free and unfree, have featured more prominently. This chapter aims to reflect on the circulation of peoples, ideas and cultures across empires, and to probe the challenge that the study of diasporas poses for writing imperial histories. Like the Series as a whole, this chapter focuses primarily on the British empire, but not exclusively so; diasporas crossed imperial boundaries and their journeys might provide the basis for an interimperial history. Particularly fruitful directions emerge when we interweave the Series’ concerns with two other recent approaches. The first is the tradition of connected history, alternatively dubbed ‘world’ or ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ history: the distinctions are a matter of semantic debate, this chapter groups them together here for what they have in common. The second is the tradition of diaspora studies, which draws heavily from anthropology and sociology. From the outset, a central tenet of the Series has been that imperialism is a cultural as much as a political phenomenon – a cultural phenomenon that can and should be studied historically. This gave the Series its distinctiveness, and put John MacKenzie’s work, and the Series more broadly, in productive tension with the primarily literary concerns of post-colonial theory, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s.2 Some of that distinction remains. Works in this Series have tended to privilege the empirical over the theoretical; their authors have mainly been historians and the interdisciplinary links they forge look as much to geography, perhaps, as towards cultural studies. But [ 216 ]

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the gap has narrowed in other ways. Moving beyond sharp distinctions between metropole and periphery, moving beyond diffusionist models of cultural contact, scholars from a range of perspectives have addressed the question of how culture travels. In his groundbreaking essay on ‘Travelling Culture’, James Clifford pointed out that ‘many different kinds of people travel, acquiring complex knowledges, stories, political and intercultural understandings, without producing “travel writing”’. Cultural circulations of many kinds held empires together. Ideas and cultural practices were transformed, appropriated, and adapted as they moved, and they never moved in just one direction (from core to periphery).3 If, as Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker note, ‘identity’ was the most (over-)used concept of the 1990s, the idea of the ‘network’ might now have displaced it. A recurrent set of metaphors – networks, webs, flows, encounters, exchanges – dominate recent discussion of empires and the movements they made possible or forced into existence. In part this vocabulary draws on studies of social networks and social capital – it is often forgotten that some of the earliest research in the area stems from anthropological studies of urban Africa in the 1960s.4 But evidently, too, these ideas have resonance in our digital present; their expanded use stems from the vocabulary of globalisation that has moved into popular as much as scholarly usage.5 To the extent that they enable shared understanding, to the extent that they allow us to imagine movements that are neither linear nor easily grasped, these metaphors have been useful. But the limitations of the concepts, and of the processes they seek to describe, are very real: networks break; flows are blocked or weakened by leakage; webs unravel; threads become tangled. As such, this chapter highlights the fractures in, as much as the reach of, the cultural circulations and diasporic networks that spanned empires.

Two models of diaspora The history of diaspora is entwined with the history of imperialism in the modern world, though the study of diasporas has only recently received significant attention from imperial historians. Diasporas – people who have spread or been displaced from their homeland – have long been agents of global connection, maintaining contact with their lands of origin and with their counterparts settled elsewhere.6 In C. A. Bayly’s view, the study of transnational history is inextricable from the study of diasporas, since they act as conduits of capital, cultural practice, trust and information; diaspora networks have been at least as important as states and official agencies in stimulating mass migration [ 217 ]

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in the modern world.7 As expansive and ethnically diverse polities, large empires have often depended on diasporas for their specialised skills, their labour power or their facility with cross-cultural communication and exchange – in this respect, the British empire was perhaps home to more diasporas than any other. Diasporas crossed, and perhaps undermined, imperial boundaries even as they held empires together. The British empire is a case in point. In the nineteenth century, a vast Indian diaspora dispersed around the world, but almost entirely within the British empire; at the same time, Chinese, German, Spanish, Jewish and Armenian diasporas encompassed and exceeded the empire’s limits – their movements disregarded imperial boundaries and created new, inter-imperial connections. One of the largest diasporas in the British empire was the last to be identified as such: the British diaspora.8 On the estimate of American demographer Kingsley Davis, writing in the early 1950s, approximately eighty-five million people of British origin (including migrants and their descendants) lived outside the British Isles by 1940; by comparison, only six or seven million people of Chinese origin, and a similar number of people of Indian origin, lived overseas. As a proportion of the population of the home country, the emigration of Britons was of an order of magnitude greater than most – though not all – other peoples, though the contrast weakens if we compare Britain with regions of similar size (for instance, parts of coastal southern China).9 Between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War alone, something like 13.5 million Britons emigrated – forming around a quarter of the total of European emigration in that period.10 The movement of ideas through imperial networks shaped many of the key institutions of the modern world. The British diaspora was, in Engseng Ho’s terms, a ‘composite’ in the process of movement across the Atlantic, a disparate group of settlers who forged a common identity. A sense of collective identity coalesced around key institutions: private property, Protestantism, the yeoman right to bear arms. The masculine, patriarchal ideology of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ circulated within and beyond the boundaries of the British empire, providing a progressive narrative of freedom that often contrasted the opportunities of the New World with the oppressions of the old. The ideological ballast for the trans-Atlantic settler world owed much to religious networks. Following in the footsteps of the Catholic Church in Spanish America, Protestant institutions spanned the Atlantic and gave shape to visions of common identity and a sense of collective purpose. Bernard Bailyn points out that it was in fact the Quakers ‘who of all the English created the most perfectly integrated and welldisciplined pan-Atlantic religious organization’.11 So successful was [ 218 ]

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the diaspora in shaping the political institutions of the lands where it settled that its very presence was naturalised. Settlers developed and imposed on North America ‘a distinctively English emphasis on patriarchal control of land and labour’.12 The question asked of most other diasporas was seldom asked of the British – how well did they integrate into their ‘host societies’? – though in the United States this began to change after the Civil War. For the most part, English settlers took their political institutions with them; they built states and displaced or subsumed the peoples and polities in their way. ‘In their very success’, Ho writes, ‘such diasporas may also take on universalist ambitions … and become hard to identify as diasporas.’13 By the late Victorian period, consciousness of an Anglophone cultural community gave rise to expansive visions of a ‘Greater Britain’, of an imperial federation of English-speaking peoples. It was the high point of self-consciousness of an English-speaking diaspora around the world, of ‘kith and kin’ separated by great distance, but united by common ‘values’ and legal and political institutions: in J. R. Seeley’s words, ‘a homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion, and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space’.14 But ideas travelled not only through the process of settlement and colonisation, but also in the multiple circulations of administrators, lawyers and officials around the ‘British world’, and more generally through the British empire – this has been a theme that the work of Zoë Laidlaw, in the Series, has highlighted with particular clarity.15 This greater connection over vast distances was enabled by the revolution in communications and transportation that allowed people, news and ideas to move further, and more cheaply, than ever before.16 The Anglophone diaspora shared the Atlantic world – unequally, brutally – with the diaspora of enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic. Slavery, in Orlando Patterson’s formulation, was ‘social death’. Uprooted from land, community and kinship, subjected to the rupture of the Middle Passage, enslaved Africans were forced into an Atlantic world in which they were property. Markus Rediker has described vividly the process through which West African slaves were inducted into a ‘new order’ before embarking on the slave ships: an order designed to ‘objectify, discipline, and individualise the labouring body through violence, medical inspecting, numbering, chaining’.17 However brutal the conditions of slavery, however traumatic the Middle Passage, the cultural break between Africa and the New World was never absolute. ‘Cultural survivals’ were evident to those who looked closely, a theme developed in the work of the pioneering American anthropologist Melville Herskovits.18 ‘Ethnic clustering, and the intense bonds of friendship and fictive kinship’ of the Middle [ 219 ]

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Passage, Daniel Richter writes, provided the ‘building material for human community’ across the Atlantic.19 Already in the early nineteenth century, African-American intellectuals voiced their visions of the kinship that linked North America with Africa, inspired by the utopian ideals that, in different ways, Haiti, Liberia and Sierra Leone evoked. By the late nineteenth century, these ideas had taken more concrete form. The first Pan-African conference was held in London in 1900, organised by the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester-Williams. ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness’, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the Souls of Black Folk: ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder’.20 Not until the mid-twentieth century did the term ‘African diaspora’ come into widespread use, though the concept was evident much earlier. By the 1970s, the African diaspora had attracted significant scholarly and political attention, taking its place alongside the Jewish Diaspora (with a capital ‘D’) as the ideal-type of a diaspora formed by forced exile, and reconstituted in the imagination and through social institutions abroad. Work on the African diaspora was essential to the development of diaspora studies as a field of scholarship, which came into new prominence in the 1980s and 1990s – often in response to the politics of multiculturalism in North America and Western Europe. Paul Gilroy helped to define the field with the publication of Black Atlantic, which sketched a black ‘counterculture of modernity’ forged through the experience of displacement and resistance in the Atlantic world.21 Together these two models – the settler colonial diaspora, and the African diaspora – have shaped the debate on diaspora and cultural circulation across empires. First, the British language of colonisation and civilisation was appropriated, by the turn of the twentieth century, by both Indian and Chinese nationalists, keen to show that their peoples, too, were brave colonists in hostile territory, bringing order to the untamed wilderness of eastern Africa or Southeast Asia, and so meriting the rights of citizenship that English settlers had appropriated to themselves. Conversely, the language of slavery loomed large in debates over labour migration in the world. Drawing directly on the language of anti-slavery campaigners, scholars and activists have continued to view indentured labour as a ‘new system of slavery’.22 The direct line from slavery to indenture – from African to Asian migration within and beyond European empires – has dominated scholarship. For decades scholars believed there was a categorical difference between European migration across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, and migration across the Indian Ocean and the China seas which was [ 220 ]

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more akin to slavery. One recent survey, for example, compares the ‘voluntary and self-bound migrations in the Atlantic system’ with Asian migration that ‘involved a minority of free migrants, large numbers of self-bound migrants, and forced moves’.23 Asian migration, on this view, was by and large a product of European imperial intervention and coercion. By contrast, scholars have argued recently that Asian and Atlantic systems of migration both formed part of a spectrum of interconnected migrations. Asian and European migrants alike were responding to the underlying forces of globalisation. Adam McKeown points out that indenture played a relatively insignificant role in Chinese migration overseas, and shows that the vast majority of Chinese migration remained under Chinese control. Alongside other historians of Chinese migration, he emphasises instead the power of family networks in channelling people from particular villages in China to distant but specific destinations overseas.24 This is, perhaps, truer for Chinese than for Indian migration, where the role of force – including the force of British laws of contract – was clearly crucial; but the point remains, that our perspective on empires and cultural circulation shifts if we move beyond the dominant British and African models of diaspora.

Indian diasporas in the British empire In the nineteenth century, Indian and Chinese workers in the world were known as ‘coolies’. Some linguists believe the term has its origins in the Tamil kuli – payment for menial work: a kuli-al or kuli-karan was a day labourer. Others traced it to the Urdu quli, again denoting labour or service; still others suggested that ‘coolie’ is a Portuguese rendering of the name of the indigenous Koli people of Gujarat, whom early European observers associated with hard labour. Finally, some suggest a root in the Chinese ku-li: ‘bitter labour’. Whatever its origins – perhaps an aural conflation of these different roots – the label reduced the social and political lives of Chinese and Indian workers to their labour power alone. It was a term of denigration, even dehumanisation. It held that Indian and Chinese ‘coolies’ were inherently suited for hard labour in the tropics, and that, in contrast to free white workers, they needed coercion to make them work. The vast movement of Indian labour within the British empire began in response to abolition. As political pressure mounted for slavery’s abolition, sugar planters began to look elsewhere for other kinds of unfree labour. The demands of sugar underpinned the nineteenth century’s worldwide shift from enslaved African to indentured Asian labour. That shift would in time outstrip the needs of [ 221 ]

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sugar, and it would transform far more than the sugar industry. It was neither easy nor direct: slavery, licit and illicit, fed sugar production until the end of the nineteenth century.25 The first Indian workers departed for the sugar colonies of the Indian Ocean and the West Indies in 1834. Between 1834 and 1839, Mauritius alone received 25,469 Indian labourers. They went under contracts of indenture, reviving a form of bondage that had taken many poor white workers to North America two centuries earlier. But where white indentured servants held reasonable hopes of working to achieve plots of their own in the New World, Indian emigrants departed with different expectations. ‘We agreed to the terms and signed them’, an early Indian emigrant to Mauritius declared, ‘because we are poor men of this place, or else we would not have gone on board ship, or to a foreign land, from fear of losing caste.’26 With the planters’ lobby clamouring for labour, and humanitarians demanding the emancipation of slaves, British officials had to tread carefully as they unleashed a new movement of Indian workers to the cane fields of the empire. In 1835, the government of India decreed that ‘intending emigrants’ must ‘appear before a magistrate to satisfy him of their freedom of choice and knowledge of the circumstances of the case’.27 The Protector of Emigrants emerged as a new office, executed by a local magistrate at each of the major ports of emigration. The ‘freedom’ of the Indian emigrants – in a strictly legal sense – was carefully constructed. Critics charged that freedom was a useful fiction. Before long, English abolitionists, fresh from their victory, asked whether indentured labour was but a ‘new system of slavery’. Indentured emigration to the sugar colonies was banned in 1839. It resumed three years later under pressure from the planters’ lobby. Humanitarian concerns were assuaged with assurances that migration would receive the closest supervision – supervision that was also another layer of intrusion by the state. In his novel of indentured migration, Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh evokes the emigrants’ first sight of the camp as their convoy arrives in Calcutta: ‘Beyond lay a newly cleared stretch of shore, still littered with the stumps of recently felled trees.’ On this ground, ‘three large, straw-thatched sheds stood in a circle at the centre of the clearing; a short distance away, next to a well, was a modest little shrine, with a red pennant flying aloft on a pole’.28 The camp is makeshift; it is hastily constructed; it aims, with its ‘modest shrine’, to provide some sense of continuity to the lives of migrants, radically disrupted. The camp was where the indentured workers’ journeys began. On arrival at the camp, Hugh Tinker writes, ‘the labourer was ready to begin the process of becoming an indentured coolie’; within, ‘he was just one of many human parts in a vast assembly process’.29 [ 222 ]

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The next stage in the journey, for those who passed the medical inspection and the legal examination, was the voyage out. This was the indentured workers’ experience of the Middle Passage. ‘The girmitiyas were in a trance of fear’, Ghosh writes as he describes the Ibis’s departure for Mauritius: ‘it was as if they had just woken to the realisation that they were not only leaving home and braving the Black Water – they were entering a state of existence in which their waking hours would be ruled by the noose and the whip’.30 In the reminiscence of an Indian migrant to Fiji, ‘we were given a space of one and a half feet wide and six feet long each to stay in’; ‘how many people’, he recalled, ‘were crying oceans for their fathers, mothers, siblings…’.31 A medical officer in Trinidad put it simply: ‘over a period of eight years more than eleven times as many immigrants died on board Calcutta ships going to Trinidad than on board English ships going to Victoria’.32 Conditions on the voyage improved by the turn of the twentieth century. Emigrant ships carried medical inspectors; sanitary facilities improved. But the trauma of the voyage remained. And across the sea, in ‘Mareech’ or in the West Indies, the suffering continued all too often. An Indian work song from Mauritius is a lament for expectations confounded: Having heard the name of the island of Mauritius, We arrived here to find gold, to find gold. Instead we got beatings of bamboos, Which peeled the skin off the backs of laborers We became Kolhu’s bullocks to extract cane sugar, Alas! We left our country to become coolies.33

The final line (‘Alas! We left our country to become coolies’) underscores the transformation. The experience of the early Indian indentured workers weighed on later scholarship. Hugh Tinker’s majestic account of Indian indentured labour drew on the humanitarian commentary of the nineteenth century: his prose, moving and indignant, imbibed the rhetoric of antislavery activists and Indian nationalists. The archive of indenture is shaped by successive British official attempts to justify, to inquire into, to regulate indentured labour: commissions, depositions, petitions and investigations contain the ‘voices’ of Indian workers overseas, or of those who had returned to India. But the profusion of contracts in the archive – contracts of indenture, signed or imprinted with a mark or a thumbprint – led others, of more legalistic inclination, to the opposite conclusion: Indian indentured labourers, unlike slaves, were free in the eyes of the law; they were free to enter into their contracts and free to return home upon their contracts’ expiry. Indenture, in this view, was a rational choice for people with few options.34 [ 223 ]

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The brutality of indentured labour was insistent: it was a form of legalised bondage. The demands of plantation production killed countless workers, exhausted and brutalised many more. Unlikely slavery, however, indenture was neither perpetual nor hereditary. A proportion of indentured workers did return home each year; others moved off the plantations and found their livelihoods in petty trade or in thriving commerce. The cultural rupture was less complete and less permanent than that which the Middle Passage tried to impose on Africans, though even that rupture was less complete than at first it appeared to be. Indentured labourers travelled with fellow villagers, to whom they were bound by caste and kinship; they shared a language; they preserved or recreated forms of community: social resilience was as common an experience as ‘social death’.35 With the indentured migrants, forms of Hindu and Muslim religious culture from South Asia were transplanted over long distances. Wherever South Asian migrants went, they took their sacred landscapes with them – sometimes these began as small tree shrines on the plantations, miniature recreations of familiar symbols in a strange new place. In time, they developed into living places of worship, often taking on aspects of local cultures in both their physical design and in the rituals they hosted. Within the Indian diaspora, as within so many others, the tension between preservation and innovation was ever present; if diasporic cultures appear frozen in time, change is – paradoxically – inevitable and constant. The transformation of the Shi’a Muharram celebration as it travelled to Trinidad with the indentured labourers is a case in point. The Muharram procession in Trinidad – known locally as ‘Hosay’ – developed as a hybrid of local and diasporic influences, shaped by the context of labour relations on the cane fields. In Prabhu Mohapatra’s compelling account, the annual procession, in which Hindus played a leading role, became increasingly charged as a means of resistance against the regimented world of the plantations. In Trinidad, and in other parts of the empire, including in Penang, the carnivalesque elements of the Muharram celebration provided a means to undermine the prevailing order.36 In Trinidad and elsewhere, Hindus celebrated the Muharram festivities as actively as did Muslim labourers. As indentured labourers from diverse origins in South Asia found themselves thrown together on the plantations, their practices developed from combinations of both ‘high’ and folk religious culture from different Indian regions. Of the canonical texts of the Hindu tradition, the Ramayana was especially popular in the diaspora; its ‘central text’ – in Bhikhu Parekh’s view the Ramayana’s narrative of exile and return, suffering and redemption – had obvious resonance among those who had journeyed across [ 224 ]

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the world to work. Public readings and performances of the Ramayana were common on the plantations of Trinidad or Natal. But the epic, throughout its history open to innovation and appropriation, changed as it moved – just as it did over space and time in India.37 Enthusiasts for emigration among the British Indian government pointed to the propensity of migration to weaken ‘caste prejudice’. ‘Emigration is a great teacher of self-respect’, the Indian census commissioner wrote in 1931, ‘for caste is to a large extent put away when the Indian emigrant crosses the sea’.38 The reality was more complicated. Caste has proved persistent in the diaspora; European planters, among others, paid careful heed to the boundaries of purity and pollution in the design of the plantation barracks and in the allocation of different kinds of work. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that if caste did not disappear, it certainly changed in the process of migration – marriages beyond caste lines were, for instance, common on the plantations of Malaya and Ceylon by the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Indian communities overseas were not immune from the wave of social and religious reform sweeping India. Reformist organisations including the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission – both aimed for a purified, standardised and more scriptural Hinduism – moved overseas, seeking to reform the religious and cultural practices of Indian workers in Mauritius, Trinidad and Fiji.39 The disproportionate attention in recent scholarship to the experience of Indian migrants in the sugar colonies of the Indian Ocean and the West Indies risks blinding us to the reality that far more Indian migrants crossed the Bay of Bengal than any other part of the Indian Ocean, and that a relatively small proportion of them were under contracts of indenture. Between 1834 and the late 1930s, over 90 per cent of those who left India’s shores travelled to just three destinations: Burma, Malaya and Ceylon. Although indentured labour was used initially in Malaya, other forms of recruitment soon superseded it; it was never used in Ceylon or Burma. Because of their proximity to India, and because of the historical connections across the Bay of Bengal, Malaya, Ceylon and Burma all stood in different relation to India than did the distant sugar colonies of the Caribbean or Indian Ocean. Even indentured workers moved back and forth between India and Malaya; the image of Indian communities marooned far from home held little sway across the Bay of Bengal. New migrants arrived in societies where their fellows had already transformed land and landscape.40 To a greater extent than with the sugar colonies, the connections between south India and Southeast Asia were characterised by constant circulation. Migrant workers travelled back and forth, often crossing the Bay of Bengal several times in their lives, alternating between [ 225 ]

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periods of time spent labouring overseas and periods at home.41 With them moved a constant flow of goods, ideas, cultural practices, words and dreams. And alongside the plantation workers, there was a constant flow of other migrants – diverse in their outlook and origins – to the port cities. Overlapping communities of Tamil Muslim and Hindu traders, mariners, dockworkers and labourers moved through the port cities of Southeast Asia and returned frequently to south India. Working-class south Indian migrants travelled in large numbers to Singapore, Penang, Colombo, Rangoon and smaller towns in Southeast Asia. They worked on the railways, in the Public Works Department, laying cables and building roads. The majority of Colombo’s and Rangoon’s rickshaw pullers and dockworkers were migrants from India. Migrants to the cities came from a wider region than the plantation workers, including many Malayalis from south-western India, Punjabi Sikhs, many of whom worked as policemen, and Hindi-speakers from northern India, prominent in Singapore’s milk trade. In the early stages of mass migration diasporas were in flux, infused with new ideas, institutions and, not least, new arrivals from their lands of origin. By the early twentieth century, the Indian diaspora in Malaya and Ceylon assumed a more stable character. It developed sharper internal and external boundaries and more permanent institutions: schools, newspapers, chambers of commerce and cultural associations. Sojourning turned gradually to settlement, and societies shaped by circulation coalesced into locally rooted diasporic cultures with firmer contours.42

Chinese diasporas between empires ‘The story of the Chinese in the various Far-Eastern countries in which they have settled … provides the same picture, varying shades of an “imperium in imperio” seeking to establish itself.’ So wrote a Malayan civil servant in 1940, viewing with alarm the rising tide of labour unrest sweeping the territory.43 It was an old fear. Half a century earlier, the traveller and photographer John Thomson wrote that the Chinese, were ‘the most successful traders and most patient toilers in the East’, whose ‘love of combinations, of the guilds and unions in which all Chinamen delight, tempts them too far’.44 Unlike South Asian migrants, who remained almost entirely within the British empire, Chinese migrants moved more freely across imperial boundaries in Asia, North and South America and the Pacific. Chinese labourers worked primarily for Chinese employers in Southeast Asia, unlike the Indian migrant workers who toiled for the most part on European-owned plantations. [ 226 ]

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The circulation of ideas accompanied the movement of millions of Chinese across the South Seas – the world of the Chinese overseas represented a vital, if often unrecognised, part of the fabric of British imperial networks.45 At stake was the contention of different ways of being Chinese, and being modern, in a world of strangers. Underlying the different positions taken in this debate was the sheer diversity of the ways in which Chinese experienced travel and mobility, the richness and tension of their encounters with other Chinese and with other peoples. It is no coincidence that the mass migration of Chinese beyond their shores happened at the same time Chinese politics underwent a period of intense ideological ferment. From the 1880s, Chinese politics – both reformist and revolutionary – forged closer links with the Chinese overseas. Reforming Qing officials and anti-Manchu activists alike began to see the overseas Chinese as a fruitful source of financial support and investment, with resources and expertise to contribute to their competing efforts to modernise China. For their part, many Chinese in the diaspora began to see that a strengthened, modernised China, with a stronger position in the world of nations, would improve their position as Chinese minorities in foreign lands. Chinese intellectuals in the diaspora had already been exposed to a range of ideas about race and nationality – not least those of the European powers under whose authority they lived – which shaped their understanding of the Chinese revolutionary message. Overseas Chinese support was crucial to several attempted uprisings in the southern provinces in the first decade of the twentieth century. Soon after the revolution of 1911, overseas Chinese contributed their resources, finances and skills to building a new China. But the debates that took place in the Chinese public spheres of Southeast Asia outstripped the boundaries of nationalism, to encompass a much broader range of questions and anxieties surrounding what it meant to be Chinese in plural societies. Mobility brought with it encounters with cultural difference; the confirmation or the questioning of prejudice; the experience of exclusion and discrimination. A central point of contention surrounded the position of culture, broadly speaking: how far could (and should) Chinese culture adapt to being practised in a world of non-Chinese, during a period of rapid political and economic transformation? The work of Dr Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957) is symptomatic of the conflicting imperatives facing Chinese elites living under European imperial rule. Tim Harper has written of the ‘ambiguous identifications and self-definitions’ of Lim and his contemporaries. They were ‘complex figures’ that do not fit easily within conventional categories distinguishing between nationalists and colonial compradors.46 Lim [ 227 ]

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was a third-generation ‘Baba’ (local-born, creolised Chinese), and the beneficiary of a distinguished education at Raffles Institution, Singapore’s elite English school. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, on a Queen’s Scholarship. Lim’s conversion to Christianity, and later apostasy, took place alongside his discovery of Confucianism and his struggles to learn classical Chinese. Back in Singapore, Lim was a founder of the Straits Chinese Literary Association, dedicated to the revival and discussion of Chinese classics, as well as the Straits Philosophical Society, where Singapore’s literati debated all manner of subjects, from the work of Herbert Spencer to doctrines of political liberalism and constitutional government. Lim’s eloquence and influence were exceptional, but the breadth of political and intellectual influences that shaped his world-view was common among his community. In The Great War from a Confucian Point of View, Lim penned one of the most fervent declarations of imperial loyalty of that age – at the moment in world history when empire loyalism began to wane, as the shock and carnage of the First World War called the ‘civilising mission’ into question. But Lim’s was a utopian view that looked forward to a more equal ‘imperial brotherhood’ that would follow the purifying sacrifice of war.47 The Chinese maritime world was at the heart of nineteenth-century globalisation. It also intersected with the world of the British empire and with other European empires. In their intersection lies a fruitful new field of scholarship in imperial history. Focusing on Chinese maritime networks helps us to see the limits of the European, and especially the British, ability to control older paths of Asian migration – or, conversely, the ability of those networks to adapt to economic opportunity and technological change. The Chinese diaspora was also the source, as much as the recipient, of the ideas that animated the colonial public sphere. The radical ideas of the May Fourth Movement in China were at least as influential as Western liberalism in the debating societies and journals of the diasporic worlds of Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s.48

Cosmopolitanism and its limits ‘Because of their sheer size and diversity’, Anthony Pagden writes, ‘most empires have in time become universal, cosmopolitan societies.’49 As recent scholarship has shown, the cosmopolitanism of the British empire was both fractured and fragile. Imperial cosmopolitanism was never limited to the upper echelons of imperial administration; unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, the British empire created the conditions for cosmopolitan exchange that undermined the very ideology of [ 228 ]

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empire, not least by affirming the importance of national identity. The coercive force of colonial states combined with the uprooting force of colonial capitalism to throw large groups of strangers together, creating societies – from Trinidad to Malaya – that were polyglot, multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Labourers and journalists and clerks of diverse origins had to learn to speak to one another, often for the first time: their voices clamoured to be heard within the colonial public sphere. Tim Harper’s essay on the uneasy embrace of empires and diasporas marked a quiet revolution in the study of imperial history. Harper showed that the late nineteenth century saw the flourishing of many varieties of globalism, most of them ungoverned by imperial states – a world in which the interaction of diasporas produced new modes of communication and global political imaginations. A decade on, the field of imperial history is still addressing the analytical possibilities in Harper’s path-breaking intervention.50 At the elite level – though ‘elite’ in this case included many middling sorts – this exchange took place within the ‘ocean of letters’ that linked the port cities of the Indian Ocean and beyond. Spurred by the imperial postal service and the steamship, communication did not simply follow the conventional axis from metropolis to colony; lateral movement – from Singapore to Rangoon, from Bombay to Durban – was at least as important. As Mark Frost has shown, this was a world of journals and debating societies, of intellectuals engaged in constant conversation about social and religious reform, about political legitimacy, about economic change and about the condition of living in diaspora. Newspapers and printing presses crossed oceans along with migrant journalists, print-setters and intellectuals on lecture tours; the practice of citation and republication linked newspapers and journals across a wide area. ‘Entrepots like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, western educated professional class’, Frost shows; and the English language is what this multi-ethnic group shared. Based on a study of Singapore’s public sphere, Chua Ai Lin has argued that English-language newspapers allowed, for instance, Indian and Chinese elites to engage in debate and dialogue over questions of race, nationality and empire.51 The imperial public sphere was never confined to the Anglophone world. As Isabel Hofmeyr has shown, the International Printing Press, founded in Durban in 1898 under the leadership of Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) Gandhi, worked in ‘Gujarati, Tamil, Hindu, Urdu, Hebrew, Marathi, Sanskrit, Zulu and Dutch’, and its staff was similarly polyglot in its composition.52 In colonial Southeast Asia, too, new technologies stimulated older worlds of print and communication. A distinct circuit of reading, writing and publishing in the Malay world – much [ 229 ]

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older, yet enabled and facilitated by the transformation in transport and communications – made Singapore also the cultural centre of the Malay-speaking world. ‘Students converged on Singapore’, historian William Roff writes, ‘where they met and sat at the feet of itinerant scholars from the Hadramaut, and from Patani, Acheh, Palembang, and Java – most of whom had themselves studied in Mecca.’53 Nile Green has written of the cosmopolitan and dynamic ‘religious economy’ of the Indian Ocean, centred on what he calls ‘Bombay Islam’ – a constant circulation of texts, goods, teachings, pilgrims and religious paraphernalia that linked western India to South Africa and Iran.54 Popular culture, the culture of the street, stimulated the interaction of many migrant groups. They converged in the performance and observation of religious processions and rituals, or in places of popular entertainment. On the street, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, the oral and the literate, blurred into one another: quotidian gatherings of large groups of (often illiterate) men to hear the daily newspaper being read aloud in coffee shops exemplify this process. Cities, and particularly port cities, were the meeting point for different diasporas. Asia’s metropolitan centres – Singapore, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Calcutta, Jakarta, Rangoon – were precociously cosmopolitan. Their populations were much more ethnically and culturally diverse, and much more mobile, than those of the European cities of that era. As Anthony King observed, ‘the culture, society and space of early twentieth century Calcutta or Singapore prefigured the future in a much more accurate way that that of London or New York’.55 It is an irony of late twentieth-century history that, with regard to migration, metropolis and colony switched places: imperial metropolises such as London became ‘hyper-diverse’ cities, while the entrepôts of the former empire often retreated into greater ethnic homogeneity under new nationalist governments. Imperial cosmopolitanism had distinct limits – limits that became clear in the years between the wars, but which were already clear at the turn of the twentieth century, not least in South Africa. Undoubtedly these limits owed something to the pervasive sense that non-Europeans did not truly have the capacity to be full members of civilised society, underpinned by a sense of the natural inequality of peoples – all embedded in the language of race. Almost everywhere, a hardening of racial boundaries could be observed in the early twentieth century; and the language of race was now deployed in many contexts – including by Asians, against other Asians.56 Encounters with diverse others in the imperial port cities could open space for intercultural communication; but it could also, and it did, sharpen a sense of ethnic or racial distinctiveness. During and after the First World War, imperial authorities clamped down on what they saw as subversive, transna[ 230 ]

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tional networks; ‘the closing of political possibilities after 1914 seems to have been very far-reaching’, Harper observes, though others would date that closing later.57 Making their way in a world of mass political participation – moving from the salon to the hustle of the street – the cosmopolitan intellectuals of the port cities found their cosmopolitan political language had little resonance.58 The convergence of internal and external constraints on imperial cosmopolitanism emerges sharply from the history of the idea of imperial citizenship, which suffered successive defeats in the 1910s and 1920s.59 It was in defence of a conception of imperial citizenship that Mohandas Gandhi launched his political career in South Africa. His initial concern was not with the freedom of India, but with the freedom of Indians in South Africa to travel free from pass laws and to conduct their business where they pleased. Gandhi’s subsequent journey from champion of the specific rights of Indians overseas as subjects of the British empire, to leader of the Indian independence movement, reveals much about the shifting relationship between imperial loyalism and anti-colonial nationalism. The political tide was tied, more than historians of imperialism have recognised, to changing patterns of mobility, migration and settlement around the empire. Arguably, the very population movements that imperial administrators encouraged and orchestrated in the nineteenth century began, in the twentieth, to expose the strains in ideas of imperial citizenship. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Gandhi was among the large number of intellectuals in colonised parts of Asia and Africa who remained loyal to the British empire, and in particular to the promise of equal imperial citizenship under the Crown. Gandhi was an itinerant imperial exile. His political consciousness was formed in London, where he trained as a barrister, and was cemented by his experience of discrimination in South Africa. In the course of his experiments with non-violent civil disobedience (satyagraha), Gandhi declared that ‘our existence in South Africa is only in our capacity as British subjects’, declaring that it was on that basis that he claimed equal rights for Indians in South Africa. From the chambers of the imperial legislative council in Delhi, Gandhi’s mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the liberal leader, made a wider argument for the abolition of indentured labour, again emphasising the rights of Indians as imperial subjects. Addressing in the imperial parliament in 1912, Gokhale spoke of the ‘vast and terrible amount of suffering’ caused by the system of indentured labour, the ‘personal violence’ and ‘bitterness’ that continued to be reported from all the regions of Indian settlement in the British empire. Beyond suffering, however, ‘disgrace’ in the eyes of the world was the greatest concern of the Indian elites who [ 231 ]

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condemned indentured labour. Indentured labour, Gokhale declared in 1912, was ‘degrading from a national point of view’, for ‘wherever the system exists, there the Indian are only known as coolies, no matter what their position might be’.60 Visions of imperial citizenship foundered on the shoals of white supremacy. The settler colonies made nonsense of the equality of subjects across the British empire by passing racially discriminatory immigration legislation starting in the late nineteenth century, and with increasing vigour by the turn of the twentieth century.61 As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have shown, governments in Canada, South Africa and Australia drew the ‘global colour line’ in close connection with exclusionary legislation in the United States. From then on, the global history of migration control advanced as an extension of the specific practices and technologies of racially discriminatory immigration restriction that originated in the settler colonies and the United States.62 A dramatic illustration of the limits of imperial citizenship met the passengers on the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamer chartered by Gurdit Singh to transport Sikh immigrants to Vancouver. The passengers were refused permission to disembark and the vessel was forced to return to India, escorted out of Vancouver harbour by battleships. The humiliation of the experience fuelled the flames of the Ghadr movement – a radical anti-colonial network that developed in North America and sought German aid during the First World War to mount an armed insurrection in India. Immigration restriction represented, in Lake and Reynolds’ view, a form of ‘racial segregation on an international scale’.63 This was exactly how Indian nationalists saw it. While they continued to campaign for the rights of Indians overseas, Indian nationalists were increasingly of the view that the best solution to the problems of emigration – discrimination in the settler colonies and abuse on the tropical plantations – would be to stop them from migrating altogether. The government of India took some steps in this direction in 1922, passing the Indian Emigration Act that controlled more closely the emigration of Indian labour; a flurry of press commentary focused on the desirability of controlling emigration from India, in response to immigration restriction elsewhere. ‘Hereafter at least the emigration of Indians to other countries should be put a stop to’, a Telugu newspaper wrote in 1923, ‘it is all the more shameful for India to see her people, who are already dependent, suffering all kinds of hardships in foreign countries’.64 From Lahore, another newspaper insisted that the only solution to the ‘moral degradation’ of Indians abroad was ‘that Indians should stop going to foreign countries’.65 Others, however, made a direct link between discrimination abroad and social reform at home. N. C. [ 232 ]

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Ganguli, who wrote extensively on the Indian diaspora, declared that ‘if Anti-Asiatic laws are regarded as an invention of racial arrogance, equally so is the caste organisation of the Brahmin hierarchy. If our countrymen are segregated in the British colonies and Dominions, we should regard the treatment as a just nemesis which has overtaken us for the crime of untouchability.’66 As early as 1930, the Indian economist Lanka Sundaram argued that the government of India should invoke the legal provisions governing migration within the British empire, as well as ‘India’s membership of the League of Nations’ for the purposes of ‘retaliation and arbitration respectively in the case of unjust treatment of her nationals overseas’.67 In the public sphere, a growing hostility to emigration found expression in widespread coverage of the citizenship debate in Malaya. The normally pro-British newspaper, The Pioneer, posed the question pointedly: ‘are Indian emigrants to Malaya a mere labour force or have they the option of settling there permanently with full citizenship rights?’68 The Congress’s Searchlight newspaper lamented the resumption of emigration to Malaya after the depression. India, they argued, risked becoming ‘the great suppliers-general of black coolies for European plantations’, where they would be treated ‘as mere beasts’ and denied ‘all rights and privileges – economic as well as political – that belong … to other emigrants or settlers – be their skin black or white’.69 If Indian labourers overseas could not live in dignity, Indian journalists suggested, then they should not go at all; and if need be, the state would have to intervene to prevent them from emigrating, for their own protection and for the protection of India’s reputation abroad. As John Kelly and Martha Kaplan has shown, Indian nationalist commentators took a harsh view of the ‘colonial-born’, seeking to discourage them from returning to India and putting distance between the citizens of the future nation and the ‘coolies’ overseas.70

Post-colonial diasporas The borders that divided the post-colonial world were, in almost every case, colonial borders; they were arbitrary and often they were not designed for anything other than administrative convenience. But the late colonial period also shaped a debate over territory and mobility that would bedevil new nation-states the world over: what was the relationship between ethnicity and citizenship? Could the descendants of migrants ever truly belong within a national political community? The imperial borders that mobile peoples had crossed with relative ease, now became international borders, policed by passports and new visa regulations. Yet imperial administrators in some ways anticipated [ 233 ]

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this transformation on the eve of the Second World War, bringing in new restrictions governing movement within the British empire in Asia. In the aftermath of war, large parts of the Asian continent witnessed an often bloody contest over sovereignty, between European imperial powers and Asian nationalist movements.71 Yet there was also a convergence on all sides around the norms of the international system of nation-states. Colonial administrators, too, began to see their task in terms of nation-building, even as they retained a commitment to maintaining imperial control.72 Many of the architects of the post-war order came around to the view that active citizenship was difficult to foster in a ‘plural society’. Within the post-war imagination of social citizenship, diasporas and migrant groups were agents of destabilisation – and potential disloyalty – rather than guarantors of cosmopolitanism and openness. Post-war nation-building sought to affirm an entirely new relationship between ‘birth, residence, migration, and citizenship’.73 Politically, too, the war and the process of post-war reconstruction marked a rupture in the connections between South and Southeast Asia. Speaking in India’s Constituent Assembly in March 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru indicated the attitude that his government would take towards the question of Indians overseas: But the real difficulty is the question of citizenship. How, these Indians abroad – what are they? Are they Indian citizens? Are they going to be citizens of India or not? If they are not, then our interest in them becomes cultural and humanitarian, not political … This House wants to treat them as Indians and, in the same breath, wants complete franchise for them in the countries where they are living. Of course, the two things do not go together.74

Nehru’s essential question – ‘what are they?’ – was faced by a great many of the empire’s diasporas in the years after 1945; diasporas that had long lived across the boundaries of colonial territories, and often crossed the boundaries between different empires. The Jews of Southeast Asia, the Armenians and many creole (‘Eurasian’) communities found themselves, literally, homeless; they became the ‘orphans of empire’ in the new age of nation-states.75 Writing of the Hadrami Arab diaspora that lived across the British and Dutch empires of the Indian Ocean, Engseng Ho has shown that as ‘diasporic persons became minorities within new nations, some were then expelled to homelands they had never known; others became permanently stateless’.76 Yet, as Ho has argued, diasporas have often outlasted states and empires; they have long memories and their networks have been [ 234 ]

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submerged rather than suppressed. The legacies of the imperial history of diaspora and cultural circulation can be seen almost everywhere in the world today – and new connections build on older ones, seen in the mass influx of labour from South to Southeast Asia, again, in the 1990s. As David Ludden observed in his 2003 presidential address to the Association of Asian Studies, the routes that take workers back and forth from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan to and from jobs in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia recall ‘old sites and routes around the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean. These spatial coincidences indicate that very old histories of mobility animate the Asia that South Asia inhabits today.’77 The living legacies of old migrations are inscribed on the land and the landscape, around the world. ‘Consider the scale of Asia reduced to these fragments’, Derek Walcott intoned in his Nobel Lecture of 1992: ‘the small white exclamations of minarets or the stone balls of temples in the cane fields, and one can understand the self-mockery and embarrassment of those who see these rites as parodic, even degenerate’. Walcott disagreed with that diagnosis, as would most theorists of diaspora: what he saw in the cane fields was not simply a historical artefact but a living tradition – a tradition that had gained new life from its origins in a global history of migration, displacement and diaspora formation. I misread the event through a visual echo of History – the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants – when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boys’ screams, in the sweets-stalls, in more and more costumed characters appearing; a delight of conviction, not loss.78

And as the diasporas of the age of empire have taken root in distant places, and created new connections in fact and in the imagination, so they have transformed the old metropolis. The Studies in Imperialism series has, from the outset, insisted on the inextricable links between metropolitan and colonial history, between British and imperial history – the empire’s many diasporas make this point amply; their history will remain fruitful ground for a new generation of imperial historians to take the Series in new directions in its next twenty-five years.

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Notes  1 I would like to thank Andrew Thompson for his incisive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.  2 John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995).  3 James Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’ in Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 34.  4 For a discussion of networks, see Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010); J. Clyde Mitchell, Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analysis of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns (Manchester, 1969).  5 A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalisation in World History (London, 2002).  6 For the semantic debate, see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas (London, 1997), and Stephane Dufoix, Diasporas (Berkeley, 2008).  7 C. A. Bayly, in ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111: 5 (2006).  8 Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson, ‘Introduction’ in Empire, migration and identity in the British world (Manchester, forthcoming).  9 Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton, 1951). 10 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, p. 1. 11 Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 95–7. 12 Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA, 2011), p. 6. 13 Engseng Ho, ‘Empire through Diasporic Eyes: The View from the Other Boat’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (2004), pp. 210–46. 14 Seeley quoted in Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007), p. 1; J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883). 15 Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005); Alan Lester and David Lambert, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2006). 16 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation. 17 Orlando Patterson, Slavery as Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1985); Markus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London, 2008), p. 265. 18 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941); Vincent Brown, ‘Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery’, American Historical Review, 114: 4 (2009), 1231–49. 19 Richter, Before the Revolution, p. 351. 20 W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (London, 1905), p. 3. 21 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (New York, 2009); Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africa’, African Affairs, 99: 395 (2000), 183–215. 22 For strongly contrasting perspectives on indentured migration, compare Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (Oxford, 1974); and David Northrup’s Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995). 23 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002), p. 366. 24 Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History, 15: 2 (2004), 155–89; Philip Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Singapore, 2008). 25 C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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Revolution [1938] (London, 1963, 2nd edn), pp. 10–11; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, 43: 3 (1983), 635–59. Marina Carter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Migrants in the British Empire (Leicester, 1996), p. 66. Parliamentary Papers, 1874, XLVII, 314, ‘Report by Mr. Geoghegan on Coolie Emigration from India’, p. 2. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (London, 2008), pp. 258–9. Tinker, A New System of Slavery, pp. 111; 137. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 405. Carter, Voices from Indenture, p. 95. Ibid. p. 45. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 372; Carter, Voices from Indenture, pp. 45, 80, 95. Tinker, A New System of Slavery; cf. Northrup, Indentured Labour; Carter, Voices from Indenture, pp. 2–3. Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–74 (Delhi, 1995), and Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labour in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998); Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham, NC, 2005), pp. 253–76; Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker (eds), Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley, 2007). Prabhu Mohaparta, ‘The Hosay Massacre of 1884: Class and Community among Indian Labourers in Trinidad’ in Marcel van der Linden and A. N. Das (eds), Work and Social Change in South Asia (New Delhi, 2002). Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Some Reflections on the Hindu Diaspora’, New Community, 20: 4 (1994), 603–20; A. K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition (Berkeley, 1991). Census of India 1931, Vol. XIV, Madras, Part 1: Report (Madras, 1932), p. 91. John D. Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Counter-Colonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago, 1992). The following discussion draws on Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Tamil Diasporas Across the Bay of Bengal’, American Historical Review, 114: 3 (2009); and on material from my forthcoming book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA, forthcoming). A similar circulatory pattern can be seen with certain skilled British migrants globally, and also in the case of Italian migrants to Argentina. For a further development of this argument, see Amrith, ‘Tamil Diasporas’. ‘Labour Unrest in Malaya, 1940’ [undated], TNA, CO 273/662/10. John Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China, or Ten Years’ Travels, Adventures and Residence Abroad (London, 1875), pp. 12–14. This discussion draws on Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 2. T. N. Harper, ‘Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: The Making of a Diasporic Public Sphere in Singapore’, Sojourn, 12 (1997), 261–92. Lim Boon Keng, The War from the Confucian Point of View (Singapore, 1917); Michael Adas, ‘Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilising Mission Ideology’, Journal of World History, 15: 1 (2004). On enduring loyalism, see Hilary Sapire, ‘Ambiguities of Loyalism: The Prince of Wales in India and Africa 1921 and 1925’, History Workshop Journal, 73: 1 (2012), 37–65. This is the subject of work in progress by Dr Rachel Leow of Harvard University. Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York, 2001), p. xxiii. T. N. Harper, ‘Empire, Diaspora, and the Languages of Globalism, 1850–1914’ in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalisation in World History (London, 2002), pp. 141–66.

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writing imperial histories 51 Mark Ravinder Frost, ‘“Wider Opportunities”: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1872–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, 36: 4 (2002), 937–67; Mark Ravinder Frost, ‘In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse: A Historical Journey Across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to South Africa, 1870–1920’ in Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (eds), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria, 2009), pp. 75–96; Chua Ai Lin, ‘Nation, Race and Language: Discussing Transnational Identities in 1930s Colonial Singapore’, Modern Asian Studies, 46: Special Issue 02 (2012), 283–302. 52 Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Gandhi’s Printing Press: Indian Ocean Print Cultures and Cosmopolitanisms’ in Kris Manjapra and Sugata Bose (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke, 2010). 53 William R. Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven, 1967), p. 43; more recently, Joel S. Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World (Singapore, 2006). 54 Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge, 2010). 55 Anthony D. King, ‘Introduction: Spaces of Culture, Spaces of Knowledge’ in Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (London, 1991), p. 8. 56 Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi, 1995). 57 Harper, ‘Empire, Diaspora, and the Languages of Globalism’, p. 158. 58 Frost, ‘“Wider Opportunities”’. 59 See Mrinalini Sinha, pp. 176–7. 60 John S. Hoyland (ed.), Gopal Krishna Gokhale: His Life and Speeches (Calcutta, 1933), pp. 176–7. For further discussion, see Kale, Fragments of Empire, pp. 167–71; Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 231–61. 61 On this question, see also Sinha, pp. 178–9. 62 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 4–5. See also Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008). 63 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 5. 64 Cited in Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, August 1922, British Library, Asian and African Studies Collection, India Office Records, L/P&J/12/103. 65 Ibid. 66 Cited in Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Tamils and Greater India: Some Issues of Connected Histories’, paper presented at conference on Penang and the Indian Ocean, Penang, September 2011. 67 Lanka Sundaram, ‘The International Aspects of Indian Emigration’, Asiatic Review (October 1930), 37; for further discussion, see Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas?’ 68 The Pioneer, 14 May 1934 [n.p.]. 69 The Searchlight, 16 May 1934 [n.p.]. 70 John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, ‘Diaspora and Swaraj, Swaraj and Diaspora’ in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi, 2007). 71 This discussion draws on, Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Reconstructing the “Plural Society”: Asian Migration Between Empire and Nation, 1940–1948’ in David Feldman, Mark Mazower and Jessica Reinisch (eds), Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949, Past and Present Supplement Series, Oxford (2011), 237–57. 72 T. N. Harper, End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge, 1998); Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005). 73 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York, 2007), p. 106. 74 Jawaharlal Nehru, speech in the Indian Constituent Assembly (Legislative), March

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8, 1948, in Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi, 1962), pp. 128–9. Robert Cribb and Lea Narangoa, ‘Orphans of Empire: Divided People, Dilemmas of Identity, and Old Imperial Borders in East and Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46: 1 (2004), 164–87. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, 2006), p. 307. David Ludden, ‘Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies, 62: 4 (2003), 1057–78. Derek Walcott, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory’, Nobel Lecture, 1992, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html (accessed 20 March 2012).

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C hap te r ten

Decolonisation, space and power: immigration, welfare and housing in Britain and France, 1945–1974 Jim House and Andrew Thompson If the figure of the migrant is a defining feature of our own times, migration also has a very long history. The profound changes wrought by the diasporic expansions of Western and non-Western peoples loom large in recent histories of globalisation.1 From its inception, the Studies in Imperialism series was quick to recognise how imperial migrations had caused a significant shift in the distribution of the world’s population, and were therefore integral to an understanding of the complex dynamics of empire. At a time when the study of the imperial past was fragmenting into its respective regions, the general editor, John MacKenzie, argued persuasively for the value of migration scholarship in ‘illuminating the social and economic, political and ideological, cultural and institutional histories of various states sharing the colonial experience’.2 The Series’ reputation for promoting the study of imperial migrations was anchored by an early collection of essays, Emigrants and Empire. This volume highlighted the role of state-sponsored schemes of overseas settlement ‘as part of a greater imperial economic and welfare strategy’.3 It conveyed very powerfully the ways in which hopes for the new world, and frustrations and dissatisfactions with the old, were yoked together by improving ideologies of emigration. Subsequent publications explored other facets of the migrant experience. Prominent among these is the fashioning of identities within the new landscapes in which migrants settled. Consistent with MacKenzie’s commitment to four nations historiography, close attention is given to how the Irish, Scottish and Welsh sought to preserve and adapt their ethnic identities when overseas.4 The Series has, moreover, rescued key aspects of the migratory process from previous neglect, such as the under-researched issue of return migration,5 while other monographs have tackled diverse subjects including soldier settlement,6 child migration7 and convict labour.8 [ 240 ]

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Scholarship in the Series is nonetheless weighted towards European emigration. Less emphasis is placed on other migratory regimes, including the 14.5 million Indian and Chinese indentured and contract labourers, spread across Asia and the Pacific rim, who are discussed by Sunil Amrith (Chapter 9). Studies of immigration are likewise fewer in number. The long history of the South Asian presence in Britain is examined by two recent works,9 while an outstanding contribution to the study of West Indian immigration is made by Bill Schwarz and others in a survey of the major Caribbean thinkers who came to live in twentieth-century Britain.10 This chapter takes one of the foundational themes of Studies in Imperialism – the reciprocal influences and complex connections that arose from the traffic of people between metropolis and colony – to explore immigrant welfare systems during and after decolonisation. It is explicitly comparative, framed around the experiences of Britain and France, and focuses on the crucial matter of immigrant housing, an issue at once economic, political, social and cultural in nature. We argue that, notwithstanding significant national differences in public discourse, there was a deeper, underlying similarity or convergence in assumptions and outcomes as both countries confronted the process of decolonisation and rapidly increasing immigration in a period of housing shortage between 1945 and 1974. Housing affords an unparalleled viewpoint on the politics of immigration and the making of Britain’s and France’s multicultural urban experiences. We explore how and why housing emerged as the key aspect of immigrant welfare and indeed, at times, the very immigrant ‘question’ itself. The availability of social housing conditioned access to other local state services such as schools and health, and was also linked to debates about employment and the types of jobs immigrants were required for and directed towards. Housing therefore provided an outlet for some of the most sensitive and potentially explosive social issues associated with colonial and post-colonial migrations. Within both countries, housing policy was formulated and delivered within specific constraints – real and imagined – especially the fear of being perceived to promote social housing for (post)colonial migrants above longer-established locals. A complex dynamic existed between local and national governments – the latter often more concerned with increasing border controls and seldom willing to provide the financial support needed. This facilitated local-level politicisation of the housing issue that could then in turn rebound onto the national political arena in unpredictable ways. The housing question, moreover, tested the limits of the espoused inclusiveness promoted by both French and British states towards colonial [ 241 ]

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and post-colonial citizens. State intervention, when forthcoming, fed off recurrent official concerns regarding ‘integration’, ‘assimilation’ and ‘dispersal’ which were often common to both countries. Informed by fears of ghettoisation, these concerns emerged from structural, largely unresolved tensions in policies designed to control the spatial distribution of immigrants. By identifying these intersecting themes, our comparative study calls into question the general historiographical tendency to separate European imperialisms into discrete national entities, with the emphasis placed on competition among Europe’s imperial powers rather than areas of confluence or even collaboration between them. More specifically, our study has purposefully sought to examine national and local policies without being tied by the dominant and pervasive idea that France and Britain operated two entirely distinct national models for the period from 1945 to the later tightening of immigration controls.11 Indeed, the archival material that has become available over past years suggests a far more nuanced story at both national and local levels, and casts doubt upon many of the assumptions underlying such analyses based on the notion of national exception. The chapter’s tripartite structure is intended to enhance this comparative focus: starting with France during the process of decolonisation, the analysis continues with the British case, covering the main period (until 1974) of colonial and post-colonial migrations on which the housing debate largely came to rest. The analysis then returns to the post-colonial French context to assess the continuities with the pre-1962 situation and compare and contrast these developments with the British case.

France, 1945–62 The process of decolonisation differed in Britain and France. The French case was marked by the centrality and visibility of Algerian migration in official discussions of immigrant welfare and housing. The main policies initiated in response to these preoccupations arose because of the Algerian war of independence (1954–62): this war constituted an important laboratory for policies subsequently applied to other migrant groups.12 Already well established between the world wars, Algerian migration resumed in earnest after 1947 to contribute to post-war construction. Although Algerians’ living conditions were judged ‘dramatic’ by Andrée Michel’s pioneering study in 1956, throughout this period housing was discussed mainly due to the post-war housing crisis.13 From a state perspective, welfare policy centred on the need to foster [ 242 ]

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conditions in which the 300,000 Algerian migrants resident in Metropolitan France by 1954 would identify with French colonial rule through a positive experience of their time there. Migration is fundamentally a comparative experience, and Algerians were highly aware that many foreign migrants (notably Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), while experiencing challenging housing circumstances, suffered less discrimination. In this sense, Algerians occupied a liminal space: theoretically full French citizens, they were nonetheless subjected to a distinct administrative classification (‘French Muslims of Algeria’), in addition to their unequal treatment throughout French society. By the early 1950s, the central authorities were increasingly concerned by the conditions affecting Algerian migrants.14 Specialised personnel were brought over from colonial North Africa in 1952 since they were judged to ‘know’ the migrants. These Technical Advisors for Muslim Affairs (CTAM) worked to better coordinate the existing provision regarding housing, employment and social security.15 Slowly, because of the war of independence, ‘parallel’ administrative structures specifically for Algerians developed alongside existing universalistic housing and welfare provision to which Algerians theoretically already had access. Of course, welfare colonialism was never disinterested: policies often aimed to limit residential segregation, felt by officials to be self-chosen rather than the result of discrimination and low incomes. This segregation, visible in both inner-city and suburban districts, was considered to perpetuate forms of Algerian sociability and thus to impede ‘integration’.16 The nature and forms taken by colonial social welfare policies also responded to anti-colonial resistance, giving rise to what has been termed a ’social war’ between the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French state that would take on overtly spatial dimensions.17 Indeed, post-1945 there was considerable continuity with how various ministries had ‘imagined’ and dealt with colonial migrations in the interwar years.18 Rentals, employer-provided accommodation and hostels While it is easy to concentrate on hostels and shanty-towns, deliberately given prominence to support an image of benign state intervention, in reality the initiatives for (re-)housing Algerians were always limited, and most Algerians continued to live in the private sector.19 Officially, this sector was left to be more or less self-regulating. Due to discrimination from potential European landlords, Algerians often lodged with fellow Algerians, mostly in low-quality furnished accommodation, long-stay hotels or even cafes: many Algerians were unable to obtain rental contracts due to job insecurity and low pay. To maximise profits, landlords deliberately rented out over-crowded [ 243 ]

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accommodation to Algerians. From the state’s perspective, the private sector was only a ‘problem’, politically speaking, when it led to segregation, deemed to constitute a political threat. Another sign of initial official reluctance to develop housing pro­­­ grammes for Algerians was the relatively high number of immi­­­grants renting from their employers, albeit in poor-quality hostel-style accommodation.20 Since 1950, the French, like the British, state had largely derogated responsibility for hostel provision to many statefunded private associations; in France strict discipline was imposed via former colonial personnel.21 This system was preferred since it avoided any direct interaction between state agencies and Algerians, while ensuring considerable input from the CTAM officials. In reality, however, the hostel setting could in fact provide a spur to nationalist activities, thereby subverting official objectives. This somewhat paradoxical situation formed part of a wider spatial problematic: the ethnic concentrations characterising colonial cities could stem from either interventionist or laissez-faire policies (or indeed both).22 There was a considerable time lag between the existence of a serious housing problem and the decision to address it in 1956. The creation of a specific housing agency for Algerians, SONACOTRAL, aimed to ensure greater provision for single male Algerian workers living in run-down private-sector housing and shanty-towns. Providing low-cost housing, with affordable rents, organised through centralised services but also drawing on private funds, the SONACOTRAL sought to free up land for urban regeneration.23 This initiative was nonetheless beset with considerable problems. Although SONACOTRAL espoused an integrationist ethos, it only made timid attempts to have Metropolitan French and foreign workers living alongside Algerians (termed ‘mixing’, or brassage).24 Furthermore, the subsequent extent of the hostels network is generally viewed to have hindered, rather than fostered, greater incorporation of single Algerian men into French society, and underlined these men’s temporary status in France. From 1958, the CTAM officials played a key role in the overseeing of the SONACOTRAL foyers run with ‘authoritarian paternalism’.25 Shanty-towns, social and transit housing: contested  spaces The SONACOTRAL met very real local opposition when it planned to build hostels. Consequently, from 1959 it also started to build for a new policy priority, as Algerian families, often fleeing the war in Algeria, started to move to France in greater numbers. Under this agency’s auspices, family accommodation for Algerians generally came in two types: first, low-quality temporary re-housing in transit estates (cités de transit); second, social-housing flats. [ 244 ]

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Like the SONACTROAL’s initial remit for single men, these centrally driven attempts regarding the shanty-towns came directly from the Algerian crisis. The logic of political control drove the official desire to address segregation for families in particular. Indeed, it was perhaps unsurprising that the SONACOTRAL’s first initiative for families took place in Nanterre, an industrial suburb in north-west Paris whose extensive shanty-towns had become centres of FLN activism.26 The FLN’s increasing strength, and its opening of a second armed front in Metropolitan France in 1958, had brought intensified repression of Algerians and the strengthening of links between social policy and policing.27 In the new institutional context of the Fifth Republic, the formation in December 1958 of the Social Action Fund (FAS) to provide more coordinated social provision for Algerians, was designed to re-establish a separation (only ever partially achieved) between welfare and policing under an Overseer of Social Welfare Policy for Algerians, Michel Massenet.28 Henceforth, housing policy for Algerians in Metropolitan France was integrated within De Gaulle’s ambitious Constantine Plan for socio-economic reform for Algerians, and the FAS was to help by ‘tear[ing] the workforce of Algerian origin away from the destitution of the shanty-towns’.29 In fact, shanty-towns had increased in France since the early 1950s. No one housing form better symbolised the tensions between colonial rhetoric and Algerians’ lived experience. Officials continually underestimated the problem, even if the proportion of the total numbers of Algerians who lived in shanty-towns as opposed to other housing types probably never exceeded 15–20 per cent. There was also considerable official reluctance to think through the difficulties that, for many residents, constituted the core of the shanty-town experience: danger of fire, the cold, poor water supply, sanitation, mud and social stigma.30 Yet there was no policy per se to provide mass social housing for Algerian families, who constituted the majority of shanty-town residents. As with the run-down private rental neighbourhoods, the key aim of the FAS and SONACOTRAL was arguably to get rid of the shanty-towns rather than to ensure adequate re-housing. In many respects, the local authorities shared this perspective, since they often wanted to disperse ‘problem’ inhabitants considered damaging to their urban regeneration projects, as well as a drain on resources.31 Dispersal could therefore be simultaneously driven by an avowedly integrationist aim regarding Algerian families, and by a perceived need by local authorities to relocate the ‘problem’ elsewhere. The destruction of shanty-towns led to a minority of Algerian families being immediately allowed into social housing (HLM). The [ 245 ]

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CTAM, social workers and local housing officials selected families (triage) judged to be most ‘assimilated’. Particular attention was paid to Algerian women’s perceived levels of assimilation.32 To further facilitate the shift to new accommodation, and to ensure dispersal, it was thought necessary to apply a policy of mixing, so that there were no majority-Algerian estates, a policy that indirectly served to limit the numbers of Algerians accessing social housing by avoiding a ‘North African Haarlem [sic]’, as one report put it.33 ‘Good practice’ involved the use of a quota system – strongly supported by the CTAM – for those Algerian families able to access social housing.34 While the typical maximum percentage of Algerian families allowed into social housing estates ranged from 15 to 20 per cent, in at least one town, a 10 per cent rule was applied.35 Usually viewed as an invention of the 1960s, in fact the so-called ‘tolerance threshold’ (seuil de tolérance) was implicitly present much earlier, at both central and local levels, once the issue of access to social housing for Algerian families was initially raised.36 When a shanty-town was bulldozed, the majority of the remaining Algerian families were re-housed in the low-cost transit housing units, as they were deemed in need of a transitional period (stage) to adapt to social housing.37 As we will see for the British case, access to social housing for migrants was often constructed as a competition for scarce resources, and there was real reluctance to be perceived to ‘prioritise’ Algerian families (who were French citizens). Massenet described as ‘scandalous’ the action of the municipal HLM in Saint-Étienne, a city with a long-standing Algerian population, where 4,000 housing units had been built and only two allotted to Algerian families.38 Yet while state officials like Massenet criticised such inertia, the criteria elaborated by the CTAM actually hindered Algerian families’ access to social housing. As a result, Algerians’ segregation was often simply displaced from the shanty-towns to transit estates, as well as to the hostels, i.e. spaces theoretically more easily controlled by the a­ uthorities.39 Moreover, these building programmes were insufficient. After 1956, the acuteness of this problem, and its possible political consequences, brought more centrally driven intervention, yet the state was starting from a very low base: in 1962, only an estimated 5 per cent of Algerians (the vast majority families) lived in HLM.40 As the war progressed, refugee migration to Metropolitan France further compromised re-housing efforts, and repression in both Algeria and France severely undermined welfare programmes. In contrast, the French state prioritised the million or so Europeans from Algeria fleeing the colony upon independence, for whom considerable efforts were expended to reserve new social housing.41 [ 246 ]

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Britain, 1945–62 The British case is marked by the salience of West Indian and South Asia migration in post-war discussions of immigration. Although the British Nationality Act of 1948 reaffirmed the right of colonial people to settle permanently in the United Kingdom, and this ‘open door’ policy survived until the controversial Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, there were considerable misgivings in government circles about the immigration of black and Asian people well before the point at which they began to arrive in greater numbers. By the early 1950s estimated net immigration from the so-called ‘new Commonwealth’ – a rhetorical device that served to distinguish these migrants from white people returning from the ‘old’ dominions – numbered no more than a couple of thousand.42 Yet as early as 1949 a Royal Commission on Population expressed a preference for continental European immigrants, who were officially ‘aliens’ rather than British subjects. It stated that immigrants should be accepted only when they ‘were not prevented by their race or religion from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged with it’.43 The previous year a Working Party on the ‘Employment in the UK of Surplus Colonial Labour’ had gone so far as to reject the possibility of recruiting West Indian migrants partly on the grounds that ‘assimilating’ them posed too many problems.44 By 1952, the discourse had shifted. A Consultative Group on the ‘Problems of Coloured People in the United Kingdom’, convened by the Colonial Office, while stating that immigrants ought as far as possible to be discouraged, nonetheless accepted that it was incumbent on government to help ‘coloured workers’ from the colonies to ‘adapt to social conditions in Britain’.45 The essential features of the discursive framework within which immigration policy was to be developed were thus already emerging. A succession of ministers and officials from the Colonial and Home Offices openly referred to ‘colonial migration’ as a ‘problem’, a problem which was placing undue strain on welfare services, causing resentment among the host population and which could only be resolved if the total number of immigrants was checked – these would also become essential components of the French immigration issue in the 1960s. The various working parties and interdepartmental committees set up during the 1950s to investigate immigration and its impact upon public order were charged with constructing a case to justify immigration controls. Housing was felt to be the best basis for such a case: from a very early stage, it was apparent that large-scale immigration would add to the already severe accommodation shortages faced [ 247 ]

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by local authorities. And yet the effects of urban overcrowding and poor housing conditions, as detailed by these investigations, did not yield the hoped-for evidence. Rather calls for controls were, for the moment, tempered by wider considerations. Chief among these was ‘Commonwealth sentiment’. It was feared that excluding immigrants from the West Indies, India and Pakistan would be seen as an overtly racist measure by their governments. Moreover, until the early 1960s the Commonwealth Relations Office shared a belief, widely held in liberal political circles, that the longer immigrants stayed the more likely they were to assimilate to the host society, a natural process that unfolded over time – the so-called ‘convergence hypothesis’. Post-war housing and state welfare Immigrants were the victims of Britain’s chronic post-war housing shortages. While they may have added to the problem of inadequate housing, it would still have been acute even if they had never arrived. Yet housing soon became the greatest single source of friction between immigrants and the wider population, as it was in France. Within less than a decade after the Second World War, the competition for scarce but desirable housing had been inscribed into racial conflict and urban decay. In the 1940s infrastructural social investment, particularly in hous­­ ing, had not kept pace with population growth. The destruction of property during the war, and the rise of the net birth rate afterwards, constituted an unpromising context for newly arrived immigrants, as in France. Post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, had little choice but to give housing construction a much higher priority.46 Harold Macmillan, Minister for Local Government and Planning in Churchill’s third government, inherited a pledge to build 300,000 houses a year; a target he tackled with relish. The first Wilson government also had a manifesto commitment – to raise construction to a new high of 500,000 homes a year – although this proved elusive. As a result of these efforts the proportion of the total housing stock owned by local authorities steadily increased during the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike in France, dominated before 1962 by the Algerian dimension, from the outset it was declared in Britain that there would be no special welfare services for immigrants. Rather, they, like everyone else, were to benefit from the measures undertaken to rectify the general housing shortage. This was the position adopted by both political parties.47 The exceptions were few. A network of welfare agencies, led by the Colonial Office, worked alongside local authorities to improve immigrant welfare. But they operated on a small scale, and included the reception, information and community d ­ evelopment [ 248 ]

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services provided by the West Indian, Indian and Pakistani High Commissions. There were a number of hostels for immigrants run by voluntary organisations for the Ministry of Labour. Hostels tended to be regarded with suspicion, however. Their wardens complained of the unruly and drunken behaviour of residents; their residents complained of the heavy-handed paternalism of staff. Although the possibility of expanding hostel provision either as reception centres or to accommodate single male workers was repeatedly raised, it was never with much conviction.48 It was felt that hostels were only likely to increase local ill-feeling and to hinder the absorption of immigrants into the rest of society (as proved to be the case in France). As a result of central government’s reluctance to become directly involved in immigrants’ housing problems, much of the pressure fell upon local authorities and the voluntary sector – as we have seen, this was also true of France, even when greater state initiatives were forthcoming. There was, however, a close and continuing dialogue between central and local government concerning the living conditions of post-colonial immigrants, which is carefully documented in a series of hitherto largely unnoticed local authority submissions, representations and delegations to the Colonial and Home Offices. From these reports emerge the main tropes of Commonwealth migration during decolonisation, namely: local authority vexation with a perceived inadequate response at national level to immigration; resentment at interference from central government when local authorities decided to implement policies of their own; and, on both sides of the fence, a deep-seated and sometimes almost debilitating fear on the part of politicians and officials as to how voters would react to ‘liberal’ policies towards immigrants. Discrimination, owner occupation and   private  ­­  rented  ­accommodation If local authorities feared the consequences of being seen to discriminate against established residents in favour of recently arrived immigrants, the reality was somewhat different. West Indian and South Asian people had little access to council housing. By the time they arrived waiting lists for municipal properties were already very long. Many councils also operated a three to five year residence requirement in the borough; and, since they were obliged to find alternative accommodation for families displaced by slum clearance, only a small percentage on the waiting list were actually re-housed. Hence West Indian and South Asian immigrants were not so much at the back of the queue for public housing, as rarely in the queue at all. This situation was compounded by discrimination in the private [ 249 ]

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rented sector. Stories are legion of immigrants carrying their suitcases from one street to another, only to be turned away when the landlord or landlady saw they were Asian or black. Unable to obtain private lodgings, many West Indian and South Asian immigrants preferred to purchase their own properties in decaying inner-city neighbourhoods – the so-called ‘twilight zones’. They were only able to buy older, dilapidated houses, approaching the end of their life, on soon-to-expire leases. Paying over the market value, often with irregular forms of finance, immigrants were under considerable pressure to pay off their loan or mortgage quickly. They subdivided properties to maximise their rental income and it was not unknown for beds to be double let. Some immigrant houses thus looked more like hostels than family residences.50 Once this kind of segregation started, it perpetuated itself; future immigrants preferred to rely on and remain in close contact with people from their own community, where they felt protected.51 By the early 1960s, in Birmingham, London, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield, the prospect of the development of ‘coloured quarters’, observed in America, was considered to be less and less remote, as the immigrant presence came to be equated with urban deterioration and decline.52 This, then, was the context in which newspaper coverage of racial unrest in Nottingham and Notting Hill, in August and September 1958, painted lurid pictures of immigrants ‘flooding into’ slum areas, fostering antagonisms with poor whites already resident there, and contributing to a ‘ghetto style of living’ in which crime and gangsterism easily bred.53 Cases of friction between West Indian landlords and white tenants were frequently reported in the local press.54 Calls for border controls from Conservative backbenchers such as Cyril Osborne, who had a high profile in the Leicester Mercury, were explicitly linked to stories of the anti-social habits of immigrants who were causing distress to whites living with or near them.55 In this collision of customs and cultures, the English – depicted as an inherently reserved, private and domesticated people – were said to be threatened by the noise, late hours and drunkenness especially of West Indian households.56 Even early sociological enquiries into the impact of immigration, many published by the Institute of Race Relations, tended to narrate the migrant as a ‘stranger’, repudiating scientific racism yet arguably reifying cultural differences.57 New Commonwealth migrants were expected to adjust their behaviours to the ‘host’ society. Yet the social distance posited between the English and the migrant left little grounds for optimism that, even had they wished to ‘assimilate’, migrants would have been able to do so.58 By 1962, therefore, the labelling of immigrants as ‘outsiders’ was commonplace, and the subject of housing policy and [ 250 ]

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provision was intrinsic to the discursive practices which explain why this came to be so.

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Britain, 1962–74 This was a period of vigorous slum clearance programmes and the building of high-rise estates which, although inspired by visions of architectural modernity, would later become a by-word for the breakdown of community and tenant dissatisfaction.59 Immigrant access to council housing remained restricted, however. The number of immigrants who were owner-occupiers grew, with several councils noting how rental housing was the least used of the services they offered, whereas local authority house purchase schemes were particularly popular among immigrants.60 Councils also expressed anxiety about what would happen if immigrants were to turn in significant numbers to state provision.61 This was also a decade marked by increasingly restrictive immigration legislation. Following the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which introduced an employment voucher scheme, a 1965 White Paper, while recognising the United Kingdom to be a ‘multiracial society’, rejected any form of special housing provision for immigrants. It argued that the social tensions arising from competition for housing could only be resolved if the entry of immigrants was more tightly controlled. The number of employment vouchers was thus further reduced.62 Additional legislation followed in 1968 (under a Labour government) and 1971 (under a Conservative government), further embedding the notion that there was what one commentator described as a ‘threshold of safety’, below which ‘absorption’ could be achieved, and above which lurked the danger of a persistent conflict between immigrant and host, paralleling the ‘tolerance threshold’ notion used in France.63 A further consequence of this legislation was that pressure from civil society on behalf of immigrants was to be directed as much at assisting families arriving in Britain as at relieving the hardships of those who had already settled.64 Thus the pressure from social advocacy movements to improve immigrant welfare does not appear to have been quite as strong as in France; it did not partially re-frame official discourses, nor did it (yet) change the terms of public debate. The foundations of the British ‘multicultural state’ Alongside restrictive border controls, the two other central features of Britain’s ‘multicultural state’ were an increasing emphasis on ‘integration’, devolved to a succession of non-statutory, quasi-official [ 251 ]

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bodies and mediated by representatives of immigrant communities; and anti-discrimination legislation, championed by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD).65 CARD singled out housing and employment as the major problems and anticipated they would grow worse over the coming years. However, the Race Relations Act of 1965 dealt solely with the refusal of services in places of public accommodation and with incitement to racial hatred. It said nothing about housing or employment. A subsequent Act of 1968 widened the scope of the legislation to make it unlawful to insert a discriminatory clause when advertising accommodation to let, albeit landlords were still able let to a person of their choice and to refuse another.66 Thus while adverts saying ‘no coloureds’ may have virtually disappeared by the end of the 1960s, more subtle forms of discrimination persisted.67

Maurice Foley: Parliamentary Under-Secretary with  responsibility for immigration Perhaps politically the most important, yet a largely and strangely neglected figure in immigration policy in the 1960s is Maurice Foley, Labour MP for West Bromwich (1963–73).68 Passionate about Africa, and a leading junior minister in Harold Wilson’s first government, Foley was given the tricky post of Under-Secretary at the Home Office with special responsibility for immigrants (1965–67) at a time when the functions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council (CIAC) had just been taken over by the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI). Both CIAC and the NCCI, neither of which generated significant immigrant support, reported extensively on the housing difficulties faced by immigrants. Their recommendations centred on ‘patching’ (temporary improvements to inner-city housing); the expansion of home purchase loans by local authorities; greater flexibility in terms of the residence qualification for council housing; the expansion of the role of voluntary local housing associations; and the provision of housing information and interpreter services. This was the situation into which a young Foley stepped. Declaring the integration of immigrants to be one of the ‘great questions of the age in which we live’, he spoke tirelessly to societies up and down the country, wrote numerous articles for the press, lobbied civil servants and ministers and received delegations. For Foley, as for many politicians of his era, the word ‘integration’ carried a dual meaning. It was partly about shared beliefs, values and goals – in other words, an impulse to assimilate persisted well into the 1960s. There is thus [ 252 ]

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a danger of exaggerating the extent to which, during this decade, assimilationism was displaced by ‘multicultural’ proclamations of mutual toleration and the acceptance of difference: to posit a stark contrast between ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’ as successive phases in British attitudes towards immigration is misleading. Yet Foley actually showed much more interest in another, related dimension of ‘integration’, namely the trend towards residential concentration. Here Foley’s language was hard-hitting. He spoke of the thousands of Commonwealth immigrants ‘herded together in ghettos’ and ‘ignored and abandoned’ in many parts of the country. He stated very starkly that most immigrants were not integrated and barely tolerated. He repeatedly expressed a fear of the social tensions around immigration becoming ‘a good deal more acute’, and of the growth of ‘extremism’, ‘white racialism’ and ‘labour militancy’.69 Foley’s hands were, however, in many ways tied. If immigrants must no longer be treated as ‘second class citizens’, neither, he acknowledged, could they be treated as a ‘special’ or ‘privileged’ class. After a visit to Holland in 1965, where he studied the Dutch government’s approach to integrating immigrants from Indonesia, he was quick to dismiss the suggestion of setting aside a proportion of council houses for immigrants. Thus what one senses in Foley’s speeches is a liberal decolonising establishment desperately trying to accommodate newcomers to Britain’s shores, yet equally reluctant to contemplate the type of interventionist policies that might threaten to provoke the hostility of white workers. Debates over dispersal, segregation and repatriation By the mid-1960s, Foley and others were warning of the dangers of residential concentration hampering mutual acceptance between what was being described as the ‘two sections of the population’. For the rest of the decade the archives throw up case after case of friction around landlord–tenant relations, and deputations from residents calling for restrictions to the right of settlement.70 These years were of course marked by spectacular outbreaks of racial violence in North America, where the spread of vast white, middle-class suburbs, the abandonment of inner cities to black Americans, and the breakdown of the black family, were causing Lyndon Johnson’s administration considerable concern.71 Sensitive to developments in the United States, anxiety grew in Britain over ‘white flight’, self-segregation and the emergence of ghettos; it also served to draw attention to systems for allocating council housing. Many local authorities retained waiting lists based on residence requirements. They also often avoided selecting areas for slum clearance with high proportions of immigrants as residents, [ 253 ]

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so they did not to have to re-house them. Among housing officials [visitors], meanwhile, there was a tendency to allocate immigrants ‘clearance houses’ or less desirable properties in the inner cities rather than better properties in the outer suburbs.72 While some local authorities operated, openly or quietly, dispersal policies – Bristol and Nottingham, for example,73 Birmingham moved in the opposite direction. Determined no longer to turn a blind eye to overcrowding, in 1965 the Corporation availed itself of powers for the compulsory registration of lodging houses. The effects of this controversial measure were to stop the spread of multi-occupation beyond existing central zones of the city, thereby formalising the division between its ‘twilight’ and more ‘respectable’ areas.74 At a national level, there was a vexed debate over ‘concentration’ and ‘dispersal’ which produced plenty of cross-voting.75 Liberals could support dispersal on grounds of assimilation, while there were also those on the right who sought to prevent the ‘decay’ of estates by limiting the numbers of black people who lived there. Other liberals, however, felt uncomfortable with a policy of forced dispersal (which there was plenty of evidence to show was resented by immigrants), while there were also those on the right who thought it best to concentrate immigrants in a few areas and avoid putting them in white suburbs at all. Behind these debates lay the difficult issue – that remains with us today – of how far segregation was self-chosen. As a 1968 Home Office paper remarked: ‘How far, particularly in view of some more recent expressions of public opinion, it is felt by the immigrants that there is safety in numbers, is impossible to prove; but it certainly seems likely that anxiety and fear play some part in continuing the concentrations, and might play a part in preventing their dispersal.’76 In fact, even in suburbs where immigrants had purchased houses, there is evidence to show that insecurity was causing them to sell property and move back into inner city areas.77 Nowhere was the racialisation of the quotidian more evident than in Enoch Powell’s attack on immigration in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 20 April 1968. Powell spoke of the intimate spheres of the family and neighbourhood, and of his constituents being overwhelmed by ‘uncivilised’ Commonwealth immigrants.78 His post bag after the speech – by early May he had received over 43,000 letters – was similarly full of such stories.79 A recurring theme – as in France – was the doubt cast over the capacity of certain immigrants to integrate.80 This concern was by no means new to 1968 and had in fact been intensifying since the middle of the decade. In a high profile by-election in 1964, the Labour MP and Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, dared to suggest to Smethwick’s voters that it was they who should make the [ 254 ]

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social adjustments necessary in order to integrate ‘coloured citizens’. His Conservative opponent rounded upon him, calling instead for a ‘homogenous’ Britain, ‘peaceful co-existence’ with black immigrants and a complete ban on further immigration.81 Walker lost his seat. The political fallout of Powell’s anti-immigrant rhetoric can be clearly traced in official discourse, as the Home Office spoke more openly of ethnic segregation perpetuating an image of the immigrant as a ‘separate kind of person’ – ‘a kind of coloured slum dweller’ associated with poverty and overcrowding. The prejudice faced by immigrants was also now more explicitly linked to experiences of empire82 – to what have lately been termed ‘memory traces’ of a ‘never quite forgotten’ imperial past.83 These latent memories were often activated by the very practical issue of housing. When a Conservative party official accused some black landlords of enjoying evicting and humiliating white tenants ‘after being treated like natives back where they came from’,84 we get a glimpse of the backwash of Britain’s rapidly receding empire, and of how ‘unappeased memories’ of a colonial past could combine with the housing problems of a post-colonial present to raise the prospect of serious social unrest. The Home Office’s response was to launch the Urban Programme of 1968–72. While a policy of direct dispersal targeted at immigrants was rejected, the Home Office nonetheless saw scope, as part of a general anti-poverty campaign, for central government to come to the aid of local authorities struggling to contend with urban overcrowding and social deprivation. Among those identified as having ‘special social need’ were ‘persons born in the Commonwealth’.

France, 1962–74 From Algerian independence (1962) to the officially announced ‘end’ of primary immigration in 1974, immigrant housing in France continued to be constructed as a problem to be addressed with restricted resources.85 But immigrant housing conditions were also politicised due to greater pressure from civil society at certain key moments (1964–66, post-1968). Several important changes occurred to the institutional parameters informing such action after 1962. In particular, policies initially elaborated exclusively for Algerians were soon extended to other migrant groups and beyond.86 As migration from France’s former colonies diversified, with Moroccans and Tunisians, as well as Senegalese, Malian and Mauritanian immigrants arriving in greater numbers, the existing specialised personnel henceforth had their remit extended: for many state actors, all groups from France’s former African colonies were problematic and likely to live ‘closed [ 255 ]

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off’ from wider society.87 Furthermore, according to state actors, such groups were open to socio-economic and political exploitation, their social conditions a potential political embarrassment. The priorities of sending countries, and bilateral diplomatic relations, also framed decision-making. During the 1960s, immigrant housing, and welfare more generally, were increasingly to be addressed for all immigrants (i.e. non-nationals). The preferred official option was to encourage greater European immigration and to improve housing conditions for all, including French nationals living in slum dwellings, for example. Such changes brought considerable modifications to the titles of the agencies and personnel responsible for such provision.88 However, these apparent changes did not abolish the specificity of the Algerian dimension. There was a striking continuity in welfare agency personnel, which in turn explains the long-lasting practices of both dispersal and – where deemed necessary – state-approved segregation that had accompanied the pre-1962 initiatives, as seen by the career of Michel Massenet, who remained the most significant institutional actor in immigrant welfare.89 Certainly, as the 1960s progressed, Algerians were increasingly talked about as foreigners and not colonial citizens: yet this meant that they were no longer potential electors, reducing their political voice. Furthermore, Algerians continued to attract considerable public hostility.90 Shanty-towns, re-housing and dispersal After 1962, particular forms of housing provision were more prominent at some moments. The shanty-towns, for example, were made a priority, illustrated by the Debré Law of 1964 that facilitated land expropriation in urban zones, hinting again that re-housing was less the issue than freeing up land and eliminating the material problem.91 Slow to be implemented, this law was complemented by the Nungesser Law in 1966, when re-housing initiatives started in earnest, and were ‘institutionalised’, but remained slow.92 Indeed, some have argued that it was the shanty-town issue that enforced a return of the immigration question itself.93 These measures arose partly out of concerns about increased Algerian migration repeatedly expressed by Prefects, Massenet and other officials.94 All officials argued that such immigration should be restricted and that the new arrivals compromised efforts to tackle the shanty-town problem.95 For Maurice Papon, Paris Police chief: ‘the shanty-towns surrounding the capital are a plague that cannot be got rid of as their occupants cannot be re-housed’.96 Measures to control shanty-towns often ensured a constant police presence and increased [ 256 ]

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the population density therein.97 For the authorities, shanty-towns always remained problematic spaces. Albeit notoriously unreliable, official figures from the mid-1960s certainly suggested a grave problem. Nationally, at least 75,000 people were in shanty-towns in 1966.98 By this time, France’s largest shantytown, south-east of Paris, contained 14,000 residents who were Portuguese; the lesser social and political visibility of Portuguese migrants had kept Champigny off the national agenda before media reports in 1964–66.99 By 1966, the term shanty-town (bidonville), while remaining heavily marked as ‘Algerian’, was therefore opening out to include other nationalities.100 The policy responses that emerged in 1966 also occurred because of political pressure. The French Communist Party (PCF) highlighted the absence of meaningful state funding and financial contribution from employers. As previously, however, some communist mayors continued to prioritise a higher-earning (French) working-class electorate, underlining the need, as we saw in the British case, for historians to address the specificities of the municipal dynamics of immigrant housing. Such potential ambivalence towards immigrants culminated in the well-documented case of the Declaration of Communist Mayors of the Paris Region of 1969. In this Declaration, these mayors denounced the potential creation of ghettos in their districts, the PCF calling for the greater dispersal of immigrants across different council areas.101 Once again, dispersal could be driven by objectives other than integration. By this time, the question of the shanty-towns and slum housing was increasingly being seized upon by the far left.102 This, combined with these communist-inspired declarations, allowed a second – and more consequential – wave of politicisation of the immigrant housing issue, after that of 1964–66. Following the student and worker protests of May 1968, the far left tried to attract what it considered the most potentially ‘revolutionary’ sectors of the workforce, such as shantytown residents.103 Certainly, in the late 1960s, immigrants from across the African continent continued to face especially serious housing problems, reflecting the extremely mixed results of the post-1962 initiatives. Shanty-town clearance was slow: for example, in Saint-Denis in the Paris suburbs, 20 per cent of foreigners lived in shanty-towns in 1970.104 As previously, some central authorities had in fact urged caution in providing social housing for foreign families.105 However, both within and cutting across this well-established Republican distinction between foreigners and nationals, the sliding scale of perceived cultural difference most acutely disadvantaged North Africans. In some cases, Massenet advised local authorities not to mention that [ 257 ]

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North Africans might benefit from re-housing initiatives in order to facilitate such schemes’ local acceptance.106 As previously, re-housing for families also involved a process of selection. After 1962, on the ground, state officials, often in conjunction with private associations, were just as likely to oppose the re-housing of North Africans as those staff from the local authorities. Indeed, ever more detailed selection criteria appear to have been applied, the transit estates’ ‘educational’ role featuring prominently in discussions about how poorly housed immigrant families needed to be ‘trained’ before accessing social housing elsewhere.107 It was rare for enough better-quality social housing to be made available even to the minority of Algerian families judged able to move straight into HLM during shanty-town clearance: HLM authorities continued to use the ‘tolerance threshold’. Termed ‘temporary segregation’, the transit estates showed how such selection reconfigured and displaced, but did not end, ethnic segregation.108 Combined with the problem of high rents, a blockage emerged in the re-housing process. A senior official from the Ministry for Equipment and Construction concluded after his visit to Lyon in 1967: ‘These transit estates aren’t playing their role. Often pretty makeshift, they were only supposed to be a very short-term stage during re-housing ... the HLM organisations in the Lyon region house practically no shantytown families; some transit estates have had the same residents for ten years now.’109 This was confirmed in a letter from the Prefect of the Rhône département (Lyon) to the Secretary of State for Housing soon afterwards: ‘Both at town and département level, HLM authorities provide re-housing for French families, sometimes foreign families, but never North African ones.’110 A dual housing sector thus appears to have developed, with standard HLM housing remaining out of the reach of most immigrant families before the 1970s.111 February 1970 saw Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas conduct a much-publicised shanty-town visit, and brought another promise to eradicate those that remained. The Vivien Law of July 1970 and the Inter-Ministerial Group for Slum Clearance (GIP) clearly targeted the shanty-towns, although only in 1976 was this eradication finally achieved. In the early 1970s, as French families increasingly moved out of HLM and into owned accommodation, larger concentrations of immigrant families (notably North African), who were increasingly present in France, belatedly acceded to HLM accommodation.112 This apparent urgency to address poor housing signalled a more interventionist central response. The Prime Minister’s February 1970 visit had arisen because of the national public outcry following the asphyxiation of four Senegalese and one Mauritanian in their rented [ 258 ]

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accommodation in suburban Paris the previous month, highlighting the inadequacy of national-level intervention concerning immigrant housing. Occurring, as they did, in the context of the post-1968 mobilisations by far-left groups and the PCF’s vocal – albeit ambivalent – stance, these deaths caused a public debate on the social conditions faced by immigrants and on immigration itself, partly shifting the focus away from Algerians.113 Beyond the shanty-towns: shifts in the immigrant housing debates After January 1970 the debate over immigrant housing extended to cover run-down rentals. Official initiatives – as the GIP’s title indicated – also included slum housing in France’s central city districts: for the authorities, clearing slum housing (like shanty-towns) aimed not just to alleviate poor housing, but also to free up urban space, often for the building of public offices or for private investment. For some on the far left, however, such as the Arab Workers’ Movement (MTA), these initiatives were part of a concerted plan to drive out immigrant groups, themes that would continue for several decades.114 Concurrently, the question of the immigrant hostels (notably SONACOTRA) emerged as never before, an issue brought almost exclusively into the public arena due to pressure from social movements. These mobilisations, like those regarding conditions in the shantytowns, achieved a partial and temporary re-framing of the national debate, by challenging a public discourse increasingly dominated by the problems that immigrants were deemed to cause, and, instead, attempting to focus on the everyday problems that immigrants faced. Hostel tenants, both West and North African, mobilised with the support of the far left, immigrant rights groups and trades unions, to protest against high rents and poor material conditions. The hostels’ draconian management style was also highlighted: in 1972, some 95 per cent of the 151 SONACOTRA hostel directors were ex-military, many with colonial army experience.115 The hostels issue, marked by many successful rent strikes between 1969 and 1979, also came to represent the wider migrant experience.116 These mobilisations are a reminder of the lasting centrality of this form of immigrant housing in the French context, and the spatial and indeed ethnic segregation that such housing provision often maintained.

Conclusion The question of how the racism of today may be differently constituted from that of the past, as well as the parallels between them, is explicitly raised by Douglas Lorimer in a forthcoming book in the [ 259 ]

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Studies in Imperialism series focusing on the Victorian language of race relations.117 The Series has of course long been concerned with patterns of racial thinking and their re-framing in different historical contexts – including contrasting notions of assimilation and separate development. We have sought to show how constructions of race and racial identities, inflected as they were by experiences of decolonisation, were deeply embedded in debates about immigrant welfare in general and immigrant housing in particular. Housing provision and residential patterns tell us much about how central authorities, local politicians and public opinion came to view particular immigrant groups as problematic. They also reveal how immigrants’ social visibility was constructed in relation to the physical spaces they inhabited, processes that, in certain respects, played out differently in various cities across Britain and France. Certainly, there existed different types of housing provision in each country, with the prominence of hostels and the presence of shantytowns in France not seen in Britain. The links between reform and repression due to the Algerian war also make France singular in comparison with Britain. In Britain an explicit discourse of ‘race relations’ developed; official French discourse was publicly different, yet still informed by clear distinctions between different migrant groups. Indeed, there were many strikingly similar, if hitherto overlooked, underlying structural tensions in the practices and policies adopted by Britain and France as they confronted the difficulties of decolonisation, leading us to emphasise the areas of convergence in assumptions and outcomes as much as the more obvious and arguably overstated differences in policy. These tensions were multiple: between interventionism itself and a better-established laissez-faire approach, as central authorities were often reluctant to become directly involved in welfare provision; between the desire to integrate families and policies that served to reinforce, reconfigure and displace, rather than diminish, segregation; between the espoused championing of better living conditions and the considerable reluctance to provide adequate resources; between policies encouraged at central level and the impossibility of their local implementation; between the desire to re-house, involving a number of complex issues, and the more straightforward – and arguably paramount – question of removing the political threat (and public eyesore) that poor housing represented. The legacies of colonialism – most strikingly the Algerian war of independence – that had often animated such policies, were most clearly felt during the period 1962–74. Furthermore, this latter period anticipated many of the issues of ethnic and residential segregation seen in the inner-city areas of Britain and poor banlieues of France [ 260 ]

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today, as run-down and overcrowded private dwellings and, to varying extents, low-standard social housing, became the main recourse for immigrant families, the latter a marked change from the period before the 1970s when social housing had been extremely difficult to access.118 The decades examined in this chapter therefore form the pre-history of many later debates. Rather than being a recent development, what emerges from both the British and French cases after 1945 is a recurrent debate on the segregation and dispersal of immigrants, reworked with each new context. Housing was and remains a key terrain of racial prejudice and discrimination in both countries. While giving due attention to local and national specificities, transnational histories of European imperialism can thus shed important new light on the essential unities and continuities across Europe’s empires, including, in our case, the often under-estimated common assumptions underpinning post-imperial understandings of integration and their relation to immigrant housing policy.119 And other countries may well have acted as models – or indeed counter-models – for such measures: the archives on Lisbon, Amsterdam and Brussels, as well as those on London and Paris, are arguably equally vital to a deeper appreciation of how the post-war and post-colonial history of Europe was remade through migration as the boundaries of (former-) colony and metropolis became increasingly porous. In the spirit of Studies in Imperialism, we can therefore hope that this chapter anticipates new, transnational and archival-based research agendas, just as it builds on the considerable body of knowledge on imperial migrations contained in previous volumes in the Series.

Notes  1 See, for example, J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009); G. Magee and A. S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010); A. McKeown, A Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008).  2 J. MacKenzie, introduction to S. Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester, 1990).  3 Ibid., back cover.   4 M. Harper, Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars (Manchester, 1998); A. McCarthy, Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand Since 1840 (Manchester, 2011); J. MacKenzie with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa. Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007); D. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005); L. J. Proudfoot and D. P. Hall, Imperial Spaces: Placing the Irish and Scots in Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2011).  5 M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester, 2005).  6 K. Fedorowich, Unfit for Heroes: Reconstruction and Soldier Settlement in the

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writing imperial histories Empire Between the Wars (Manchester, 1995).  7 S. Swain and M. Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire. Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1914 (Manchester, 2010).  8 K. Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2007).  9 A. Martin Wainwright, ‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914 (Manchester, 2008); and S. Sen, Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji (Manchester, 2004). See also John Herson’s investigation of the social impact of immigration on Liverpool and the treatment of the city’s small but residentially concentrated, and thus more visible, Chinese community: ‘“Stirring Spectacles of Cosmopolitan Animation”: Liverpool as a Diasporic City, 1825–1913’ in S. Haggerty, A. Webster and N. J. White (eds), The Empire in One City? Liverpool’s Inconvenient Imperial Past (Manchester, 2008), pp. 55–74. 10 B. Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003). See also Shompur Lahiri’s ‘South Asians in Post-Imperial Britain: Decolonisation and Imperial Legacy’ in S. Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001). 11 For an analysis of such ‘models’ in the 1980s and 1990s, see A. Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (Basingstoke, 1998). 12 See V. Viet, La France immigrée: construction d’une politique, 1914–1997 (Paris, 1998), pp. 163–217. 13 A. Michel, Les Travailleurs algériens en France (Paris, 1956), p. 103. See also Rose­­ mary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–1958 (Chicago, 2009), pp. 131–52. 14 See Centre des Archives Contemporaines (hereafter CAC) 860271, Article 2, Minutes of meeting held at Interior Ministry, 24 February 1951. 15 See F. de Barros, ‘Contours d’un réseau administratif « algérien » et construction d’une compétence en « affaires musulmanes » . Les conseilleurs techniques pour les affaires musulmanes en métropole (1952–1965)’, Politix, 76 (2006), 97–117. 16 A. Lyons, ‘The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Immigrants in France and the Politics of Adaptation during Decolonization’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 32 (2006), 489–516. 17 V. Viet, La France immigrée, 203. 18 See E. Blanchard, La Police parisienne et les Algériens (1944–1962) (Paris, 2011). 19 Michel, Les Travailleurs algériens, pp. 104–5. 20 Ibid. pp. 104–6. 21 See Lyons, ‘The Civilizing Mission’, 504–6. 22 See J. House, ‘L’Impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale? Casablanca, décembre 1952’, Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire, 86 (2012), 79–104. 23 On SONACOTRAL, see M. Bernardot, Loger les immigrés: la Sonacotra 1956–2006 (Bellecombre-en-Bauges, 2008); V. Viet, ‘La Politique du logement des immigrés (1945–1990)’, XXè siècle. Revue d’Histoire, 64 (1999), 91–103. 24 Centre Historique des Archives Nationales (hereafter CHAN), F1a 5010, Head of Department for Muslim Affairs and Social Welfare (SAMAS Interior Ministry) to Interior Minister, 23 July 1958. 25 Choukri Hmed, ‘« Tenir ses hommes » : la gestion des étrangers « isolés » dans les foyers Sonacotra après la guerre d’Algérie’, Politix, 76 (2006), 11–30, 15. 26 See M. Hervo, Chroniques du bidonville. Nanterre en guerre d’Algérie 1959–1962 (Paris, 2001); M. Cohen, ‘Les Bidonvilles de Nanterre: entre « trop plein » de mémoire et silences?’, Diasporas,17 (2011), 42–62; E. Blanchard, ‘La Police et les « médinas algériennes » en métropole: Argenteuil, 1957–1962’, Métropolitiques, 8 February (2012), http://metropolitiques.eu/La-police-et-les-medinas.html (accessed 30 March 2012). 27 On this, see J. House and N. MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford, 2006), pp. 80–7.

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decolonisation, space and power 28 See Viet, La France immigrée, pp. 190–213 and Bernardot, Loger les immigrés, pp. 34–43. 29 CHAN, F1a 5056, SAMAS, Esquisse d’un programme d’action sociale pour les travailleurs originaires d’Algérie et leurs familles, December 1958. 30 See A. Sayad and É. Dupuy, Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bidonvilles (Paris, 1995). 31 O. Masclet, ‘Une municipalité communiste face à l’immigration algérienne et marocaine: Gennevilliers, 1950–1972’, Genèses, 45 (2001), 150–63; Cédric David, ‘La Résorption des bidonvilles de Saint-Denis: politique urbaine et redéfinition de la place des immigrants dans la ville (années 1960–1970)’, Histoire urbaine, 27 (2010), 121–42. 32 Lyons, ‘The Civilizing Mission’, pp. 511–12. 33 CHAN, F1a 4813, Le Problème des Algériens en France (Institut des hautes études de la défense nationale), 1956. 34 CHAN, F1a 5014, Synthesis of CTAM reports, second trimester 1962, 27. 35 CAC 770391, Article 6, letter from Massenet to head of SONACOTRAL, 22 March 1962, on Le Havre, where sixty Algerian families had been housed, limited to 10 per cent of each housing block. 36 The ‘tolerance threshold’ idea held that, beyond a certain percentage of a particular group in housing, problems of inter-ethnic relations would be created. Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard dates the emergence of the quota idea to 1952 (‘Les Immigrés et le logement en France depuis le XIXè siècle: une histoire paradoxale’ in B. Stora and É. Temime (eds), Immigrances: l’immigration en France au XXè siècle (Paris, 2007), pp. 66–96, here 85, n. 3). On the ‘tolerance threshold’, see Neil MacMaster, ‘The “Seuil de Tolérance”: The Uses of a “Scientific” Racist Concept’ in M. Silverman (ed.), Race, Discourse and Power in France (Aldershot, 1991), pp. 14–28. 37 CHAN, F1a 5014, Synthesis of CTAM reports, third trimester 1959, 20. 38 CAC 770391, Article 6, Note concernant les problèmes posés par l’habitat des familles musulmanes de souche algérienne (undated, 1959). 39 M. Bernardot, ‘Chronique d’une institution: la Sonacotra (1956–1976)’, Sociétés contemporaines, 33–34 (1999), 39–58, 47. 40 CHAN, F1a 5014, Synthesis of CTAM reports, first trimester 1962, 7. 41 Y. Scioldo-Zürcher, Devenir Métropolitain: politique d’intégration et parcours de rapatriés d’Algérie en métropole (1954–2005) (Paris, 2010), pp. 211–47. The other main population group to have come from Algeria upon independence – the several hundred thousand-strong harkis (Algerians having worked for the French security forces) – were often placed in camps, in rural zones. See F. Besnaci-Lancou and G. Manceron (eds), Les Harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites (Paris, 2008). 42 For the different attitudes towards migrants from ‘new’ and ‘old’ Commonwealths, see W. Webster, ‘The Empire Comes Home: Commonwealth Migration to Britain’ in A. Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012), pp. 123–4. 43 See E. Passmore and A. S. Thompson, ‘Multiculturalism, Decolonisation and Immigration: Integration Policy in Britain and France after the Second World War’ in K. Fedorowich and A. S. Thompson (eds), Empire, Identity and Migration in the British World (Manchester, forthcoming). 44 Ibid. 45 Consultative Group on the Problems of Coloured People in the United Kingdom (1952), NA, CO 1028/25. 46 For an overview, see J. R. Short, Housing in Britain: The Post-War Experience (London, 1982). 47 E. Passmore, ‘Migrant Entitlement Regimes in Britain and France, c. 1945–70’ (MA by Research, University of Leeds, 2006). 48 For the debate on hostels, see Report by Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council (July 1963), Cmnd. 2119, 4–5; Fourth Report by Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council (October, 1965), Cmnd. 2796, 7. 49 For a seminal study of the way in which race and housing questions became

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53 54 55 56

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entwined, and the operation of discrimination in the private rental market, see John Davis, ‘Rents and Race in 1960s London: New Light on Rachmanism’, Twentieth Century British History, 12 (2001), 69–92. For examples of such discrimination, see: Minutes, Papers and Reports of the London Housing Survey Committee (Milner Holland Committee), 1962–65, NA, HLG 39. G. S. Aurora, The New Frontiersmen. A Sociological Study of Indian Immigrants in the United Kingdom (Bombay, 1967), p. 52. J. Rex and R. Moore, Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook (Oxford, 1969). J. A. G. Griffith, J. Henderson, M. Usborne and D. Wood, Coloured Immigrants in Britain (Oxford, 1960), p. 21. P. Rich, ‘Black People in Britain: Response and Reaction’, History Today, 36: 1(1986), 6, 14–20. S. Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (London: 1963), pp. 203–4. L. Chessum, ‘Race and Immigration in the Leicester Local Press, 1945–62’, Immigrants and Minorities, 17: 2 (1998), 42–7. Webster, ‘The Empire Comes Home’, 145–6. See, for example, Elspeth Huxley, Back Street, New Worlds: A Look at Immigrants in Britain (London: 1964), pp. 46–7. Huxley acknowledged that Britain needed immigrant labour, that intermarriage must increase and that West Indians were more likely to assimilate than Asian migrants, while nonetheless supporting the restriction of immigrant numbers. C. Waters, ‘“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies, 36: 2 (1997), 217–38. See also R. Desai on how members of the ‘host’ society expected a certain degree of minimum cultural adjustments on the part of immigrants before they were willing to modify their attitudes and behaviours towards them: Indian Immigrants in Britain (Oxford, 1963), p. 20. P. Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain 1945–75 (Oxford, 1981); P. Shapely, The Politics of Housing (Manchester, 2008). By 1966, 6 per cent of all immigrants had council tenancies, compared with 28 per cent of Irish immigrants and a third of the English-born population: E. J. B. Rose, Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (Oxford, 1969), pp. 142, 144, 147. In 1966–67, approximately 50 per cent of all mortgages granted by the GLC were to immigrants: C. Hill, Immigration and Integration: A Study of the Settlement of Coloured Minorities in Britain (Oxford, 1970), pp. 68–9. See, for example, Report on Coloured Immigrants in Manchester, NA, HO 344/41 (1962); and the newspaper reports in ‘Integration of Commonwealth Citizens into Britain’ (1964–65), DO 175/203. Immigration from the Commonwealth (August, 1965). Cmnd. 2739, esp. Part III, ‘Integration’, pp. 10–18. Huxley, Back Street, New Worlds, p. 158. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, formed in 1967, is a case in point. Its two founder members were Michael Dummett and Vishnu Sharma. When serving in Malaya in 1945–47, Dummett had been enraged by the settlers’ sense of racial superiority. An eminent Oxford philosopher, he was an early campaigner on race relations who drove his battered old van from Oxford to Heathrow airport day after day to take up the cases of immigrants threatened with deportation. B. W. Heineman, The Politics of the Powerless: A Study of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (Oxford, 1972). Hill, Immigration and Integration, p. 67; G. P. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experience, 1945–75 (Princeton, 1979), p. 141. It would later be argued that, by taking several hundred potential Asian and West Indian leaders out of their communities to work for government-sponsored welfare organisations, these organisations actually retarded the development of independ-

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ent political activism by immigrants themselves. See J. Rex, The Ghetto and the Underclass: Essays on Race and Social Policy (Avebury, 1988), pp. 35–6. See, especially, Maurice Foley’s Speeches and Papers (1965), NA, EW 4/54, and Commonwealth Immigration Committee (1965), NA, HO 376/139. Ibid. Speech made by Foley at Foreign Press Association, London, 10 November 1965; Extract from speech by Foley at Open Conference of the Manchester Area Co-operative Party, 11 September 1965; speech by Foley to Annual Conference of the National Institute of Adult Education, Leicester, 12 September 1965; speech by Foley to Commonwealth Writers’ Association, 5 August 1965; speech by Foley to International Co-operation Year, Birmingham, 22 May 1965. In Southall, a Residents’ Association supported a local estate agent who said property bought through the Association should only be sold to white buyers; in Deptford the local authority purchased several large estates to modernise and let to local white people, in order to contain the expansion of the ‘Caribbean quarter’; at the Labour party conference in Blackpool in 1965, a Lambeth councillor received both applause and strong protests when he said that giving preference to coloured people on the housing list would be to ‘create the most grievous racial disturbances ever seen in London’. See S. Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations in Britain 1960–7 (1969), pp. 225–6, 229–31; ‘Election Results in Some Constituencies with Substantial Commonwealth Immigrant Settlements’, Area Reports, Deptford and the 1964 Elections (Alfred Sherman)’, NA, DO 175, 203; ‘Representations from Local Authorities Regarding Immigration, Report of the Town Clerk on Immigration in Leicester’, 31 May 1968, NA, HO 344, 246. See, for example, J. T. Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama (New York, 2010), pp. 56–7. Hill, Immigration and Integration, pp. 64–6, D. Lawrence, Black Migrants, White Natives: A Study of Race Relations in Nottingham (Cambridge, 1974), p. 94; J. Rex and S. Tomlinson, Colonial Immigrants in a British City: A Class Analysis (London, 1979), pp. 140–1, 155–6. On Bristol, see Anthony Richmond, Migration and Race Relations in an English City (London, 1973), pp. 138–40. On Nottingham, see ‘Note of a Visit to the City of Nottingham on 2/4/1970’, Representations from LAs Regarding Immigration, NA, HO 344/248. ‘City of Birmingham: Immigration’, Representations from LAs Regarding Immigration, NA, HO 344/248. For the controversy the policy provoked: ‘Houses for Brummies’, Guardian, 24 August 1965, which argued Birmingham’s initiative was ‘likely to lead to the effective segregation of immigrants from normal society’. Rex and Tomlinson, Colonial Immigrants, p. 142. ‘Voluntary Dispersal of Commonwealth Immigrants’, Working Party on Immigration and Community Relations (1968), NA, AT 81/16. ‘Urban Areas of Social Need. Visit by Mr D. Ennals to the Borough of Slough, 10th June 1968’, NA, AT 81/15; ‘Working Party on Immigration and Community Relations, 1968’. See Stuart Ward, p. 33. S. Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London, 2006), pp. 452–5, 462–3, 466–7. B. Schwarz, Memories of Empire. Volume 1: The White Man’s World (Oxford, 2011), p. 43. R. Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries, 1932–1971 (London, 1991), pp. 412–13. See, for example, Richmond’s study of Bristol: Migration and Race Relations, p. 272. Schwarz, Memories of Empire, pp. 6–9, 29–31. Cited in Patterson, Dark Strangers, p. 207. On immigration policy after 1962, see Viet, La France immigrée, pp. 231–95.

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writing imperial histories 86 See Françoise de Barros, ‘Des « Français musulmans d’Algérie » aux immigrés: l’importation de classifications coloniales dans les politiques du logement en France (1950–1970)’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 159 (2005), 26–45; Alexis Spire, Étrangers à la carte: l’administration de l’immigration en France (1945–1975) (Paris, 2005). 87 See CAC 770391, Article 9, Paris Police Chief to Massenet, 30 December 1965. 88 For example, in 1965, the CTAM were renamed chargés de mission (CM), but their political as well as social role remained. The SONACOTRAL lost its Algerian specificity, being renamed SONACOTRA (1963), as did the FAS which, by 1966, came under the Social Affairs Ministry. 89 CAC 760133, Article 16, Note concernant l’évolution des administrations chargées des problèmes de l’immigration algérienne – juillet 1963 (Massenet), p. 1. In 1966, Massenet headed the Population and Migrations directorate, overseeing all aspects of immigration policy and welfare provision: see S. Laurens, Une politisation feutrée: les hauts fonctionnaires et l’immigration en France (Paris, 2009), pp. 92–8, 152–63. 90 CHAN, F1a 5010, Synthesis of CTAM reports late 1964, pp. 27–8 and F1a 5105, Synthesis of CM reports, 1966–68. 91 See David, ‘La Résorption’, 133. 92 De Barros, ‘Des « Français musulmans d’Algérie »’, 40. 93 M.-C. Volovitch-Tavares, Portugais à Champigny, le temps des baraques (Paris, 1995), p. 109. 94 Under the Évian agreements ending the independence war, Algerians obtained relatively favourable entry conditions into France. French governments thereafter looked to limit these provisions: see Laurens, Une politisation feutrée, pp. 135–204. 95 See CHAN, F1a 5014, Synthesis of CTAM reports, 1962–64. Although, for economic reasons, immigration would not be significantly curtailed at this point, the idea that successful integration was dependent on tighter immigration policy had already been seen prior to 1962, and also pre-figured policy from the early 1970s. See M. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London, 1992), pp. 78–89. 96 CAC 770391, Article 9, letter to Interior Minister’s Office, 1 April 1963. 97 A letter from residents of La Campa shanty-town in La Corneuve (Paris suburbs) to the Interior Minister in March 1966 complained of the permanent insecurity of never knowing when their homes could be destroyed at short notice (CHAN F1a 5120). 98 CHAN, F1a 5116, A. Giudicelli, Bidonvilles – France Métropolitaine (1966). 99 See Volovitch-Tavares, Portugais à Champigny. 100 See de Barros, ‘Des « Français musulmans d’Algérie »’, 30. 101 The Declaration nonetheless appealed for the ‘humane re-housing of immigrant workers’. See Olivier Masclet, ‘Du « bastion » au « ghetto » : le communisme municipal en butte à l’immigration’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 159 (2005), 11–25 (here 16, 20–2). 102 CHAN, F1a 5010, Prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône to Interior Minister’s Office, 19 February 1968. 103 D. A. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ‘68 and the Rise of Anti-racism in France (London, 2012). 104 David, ‘La Résorption’, 122–7. 105 CAC 760140, Article 6, Programme d’action sociale du FAS pour1965, FAS governing council, 3 February 1965. For a critical assessment of policies on shanty-towns, see M. Hervo and M.-A. Charras, Bidonvilles: l’enlisement (Paris, 1971). 106 CAC 770391, Article 6, letter from Massenet to Secretary General of Seine Préfecture, 17 June 1964. 107 See Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, pp. 387–402. 108 CHAN, F1a 5116, Secrétariat d’État au logement, État actuel de la résorption des bidonvilles, 2 February 1966. 109 CHAN, F1a 5121, Bidonvilles: visite des 19 et 20 janvier 1967 à Lyon.

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decolonisation, space and power 110 CHAN, F1a 5119, Résorption des bidonvilles, 16 February 1967. 111 Masclet, ‘Du « bastion » au « ghetto »’, 20; Viet, ‘La Politique du logement’, 98. 112 Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Les Immigrés et le logement’, 85–8. See also Viet, ‘La Politique du logement’, 94–8. 113 See Y. Gastaut, L’Immigration et l’opinion en France sous la Vè République (Paris, 2000), pp. 52–66. 114 On the MTA, see R. Aissaoui, Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France (London, 2009), Part III. 115 M. Ginesy-Galano, Les Immigrés hors la cite: le système d’encadrement dans les foyers (1973–1982) (Paris, 1984), p. 129. 116 On these strikes, see Ginesy-Galano, Les Immigrés hors la cité, pp. 159–279. 117 D. A. Lorimer, Science, race relations and resistance, Britain, 1870–1914 (Manchester, forthcoming). 118 Blanc-Chaléard, ‘Les Immigrés et le logement’, 92–6. 119 A point that emerged strongly from Richard Drayton’s ‘Masked condominia: collaboration vs competition in the trans-European history of imperialism’, New Angles on Empire workshop, University of Oxford, 11 May 2012.

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John M. MacKenzie Frontiers used to be thought of as a readily defined concept, a ‘contact zone’ between territories, peoples, cultures. Even in that sense, it did not necessarily mean something distant or remote. In the celebrated theory of Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier could both influence and even define a society at its core. Thus the geographical frontier can itself be not only tremendously complex, but also ‘reflexive’ – the so-called periphery radically influencing the centre. The word can moreover also be used in many other contexts, including notions of political and policy frontiers, of economic influence, penetration and behaviour, as well as the spiritual frontiers of individuals, of missionaries and of indigenous religious systems. Another extensive category embraces environmental phenomena: the limits of ‘exploration’, hunting, human settlement, agricultural or pastoral land, of forests and other natural and man-made forms, of the incidence of specific species of animals or birds, of the presence of particular types of infrastructure, and much else. Cities and their constituent zones also have frontiers, such that what may be considered a distant frontier can be reconstituted in local space (so-called ‘Third World’ immigrants to Europe would be a good example). Outer space has a conceptual frontier as envisioned by inhabitants of this particular world. Scientific research has any number of frontiers, from various areas of medicine to the Higgs boson or ‘god particle’. Very importantly, we also think of mental and intellectual frontiers, of both empirical and conceptual explorations and writing within and between disciplines, of the ever-shifting limits of ideas and language, of literary forms and other cultural phenomena. Such limits are of course not brick walls, but highly fluid. Frontiers can thus be both tangible and imaginary, at once apparently definable and utterly nebulous. Whatever else can be said about them, they are always porous and constantly mobile. But their existence has ever been a source of fascination, stimulation and inspiration. The notion of frontier, wherever located, always implies a drawing outwards, a pull to investigate.1 The relationship between this reflection on frontiers and the Studies in Imperialism series, as well as the essays in this book, should be apparent. There is a sense in which all the books in the Series, as well as the chapters above, are about frontiers in one way or another. But as scholars are drawn inexorably outward in their investigations, it is apparent that they are necessarily selective, that however many [ 268 ]

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frontiers they explore, others continue to exist, or at least are capable of formation, for frontiers are never finite, either in number or in their character. Thus, to use an increasingly common phraseology, the Series has been truly concerned with many aspects of a ‘cultural economy’, with diverse routes into a gendered, religious, artistic, moral and environmental economy as well as much else. Hence, it has rightly been said that the Series has had less to say about political economy than it should have done. This is perhaps a just criticism, although it may be said that the political economy of empire seemed to be a very well-trodden field when the Series was begun. What is now apparent is that these cultural, gendered, religious, artistic, environmental and other ‘economies’ require to be integrated much more successfully into a political economy. The economies of countries, colonies, regions and cities, together with the politics through which they are configured, are in a constant state of interaction with such surrounding cultures, influencing them and being in turn influenced. Many have argued for explorations of a new economic/cultural frontier and a few have begun to establish just such fruitful explorations. That is certainly one new route that the Series might take. Indeed, general editors may have some influence in commissioning books that help to guide the directions in which a series travels. This was true in the early days of this Series when books flowed in slowly or not at all (it should be remembered that it was an era before electronic communication when correspondence was conducted by mail and all submissions were in hard copy). I therefore found myself keen to commission work that would help expand the frontiers of imperial history. Consequently I urged colleagues to produce books on migration, gender, the environment, education, science and medicine, to name but a few.2 But as a series becomes more successful and books are attracted to it in large numbers, the possibility of such guidance becomes more limited. That too has been the experience of the Series, for it was soon able to select from a positive embarrassment of riches. A series then becomes the ‘property’, in a sense, of the many authors who approach it, recognising the masthead under which it was founded, but still taking it, perfectly appropriately, in their own directions. That then raises the question, what is the point of a series? For one thing, it has always seemed to me that the general editor has a role in encouraging younger scholars (sometimes those whose doctoral dissertations he has examined); to comment on their work and, in the case of all submissions, watch out for obscurities, missed opportunities or errors. Perhaps a more important answer is surely that it brings together a number of books, in this case a large number, which are attracted to it by the particular intellectual positions through which it was founded. [ 269 ]

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They then unquestionably spark off each other and build up to a situation in which the whole, to use the well-worn cliché, becomes more significant than the sum of its parts, and certainly more significant than its individual components – however fine and notable each may be. Moreover, general editors’ introductions provide an opportunity to pull at least some of the parts together, to reflect on the stage reached in the exploration of various frontiers and the fresh directions that may be taken in the future. However inadequately achieved in execution, that has certainly been my intention in the many (well over one hundred) introductions that I have written.3 These have always set out to demonstrate openness to ideas of all sorts. As has been abundantly apparent throughout the Series, as well as the essays in this volume, there has never been any desire to privilege history over other disciplines. On the contrary, forms of multidisciplinarity have shone from almost every page. Nor has there been any interest in defending the ‘nation’ or any form of chauvinistic nationalism. The Series has always proceeded on the basis that it is open to all, that it has no hard ideological position. The main criterion (apart from appropriate subject matter) has been quality, and decisions have been based solely upon a combination of editorial decision and the recommendations of readers. The next question that arises is just how influential has the Series been? So far as British history is concerned, it is surely now axiomatic that it can no longer be viewed in isolation from the imperial world with which it has interacted, nor is it possible any more to deal in the language of ‘exceptionalism’. For example, there can be little doubt that a number of works in religious history, in the history of minorities, of immigrants and of the formation of urban communities in Britain and elsewhere, have all accepted the need to reconfigure empire and metropole in the same intellectual sphere – though it may be said that in all of these cases it was perhaps impossible to do otherwise. Migration histories have also become much more broadly based. It may be said that they used to be severely statistical in form, perhaps also concentrating on the economic imperatives of the push-pull factors. They certainly had a tendency to deal in collectivities rather than individual cases. More recently they have become much more cultural. There have been considerations of the events and travails of migration through diaries and letters, of the experiences (in travel and settlement) of individuals and families, including women, of return migration and of the maintenance (or otherwise) of different forms of identity. And the growing field of four nations history as defined through the imperial experience has certainly been influenced by some works in the Series. This is apparent in the several works on [ 270 ]

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Ireland that have appeared in it,4 as well as in the recent edited collection on Wales and books (often published elsewhere) on Scotland.5 In each of these fields, perhaps not an exclusive list, the Series’ influence in bringing empire and metropole into the same discursive field has clearly been considerable – though, as Ward, Thompson and others have rightly demonstrated, there were of course many other publications that were setting about the same project at roughly the same time. Yet even if only parallel developments, still the simultaneous move away from both structuralist metanarratives and rather introspective approaches to social, cultural and other forms of history has been apparent. What is clear is that during the almost thirty years of the Studies in Imperialism series, terminologies have moved forward (or at least outwards), metaphors have proliferated and a demand has arisen for new ways of characterising where we are now, whether post-postcolonialist, post-post-modernist, post-post-structuralist, or what have you. We certainly need a new term to encapsulate the turn towards globalisation and its attendant histories, the arguments for and against the ‘British world’ concept (or at least its widening). As the experience of the British empire sinks beyond the historical horizon, the need to place it in the wider history of empires, both European and global, recent and more distant, has become obvious.6 This Series has certainly contributed to (although the degree of that contribution may be open to debate) the major intellectual movements in history and related disciplines (that is not intended to imply any seniority for history), hopefully helping to bring them together. In doing so, it has set out to blend the empirical with the theoretical, defining empirical not as an excessive adherence to a factual exposition of events (the ‘one damn thing after another’ school), but as an approach which dances with ideas and insights that excite, stimulate and illuminate rather than obfuscate. Thus in this approach ideas, modes of analysis, interpretative insights are firmly based upon the observable phenomena of history, particularly those secured from a whole range of sources, written, visual, aural, and not just those in official archives. To achieve these objectives, historical writing should, above all, be accessible, written in a style which can draw in students and, in an ideal world, perhaps even members of the general public. This has been the approach in all my work, not least in my Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Though published by MUP, this was not part of Studies in Imperialism, though I always intended that it should be. Nevertheless, it does represent many of the things the Series stands for, a considerable breadth of perspective, an openness to interdisciplinarity and a concern with many of the arts as providing [ 271 ]

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both historical evidence and intriguing insights into wider issues. It was also intended to be a passionately radical book and it is hugely ironical that some considered it ‘conservative’. For me the Orientalist debate required an injection of class analysis, which it had hitherto mysteriously lacked, of some consideration of market forces (the appeal to political economy?), some examination of actual ‘texts’, even some kind of ‘vision from below’.7 Moreover, it was written out of a genuinely held commitment to the mutual understanding of different cultures, not their allegedly binary oppositions. Some more recent scholarship seems to be following a similar path.8 It also represented my interest in synoptic rather than particularist histories and it continued to represent my interest in the interplay of agency and power, of reaction and response, of economic and cultural activity which started with my early research in African labour migration. It is interesting that after its publication, the Series was not checked in any way, but on the contrary moved rapidly forward, although no argument about cause and effect is intended! Finally, it is perhaps necessary to consider where we go from here. I have already proposed that we must set about revisiting the political economy of imperialism, hopefully illuminating it from various directions, but also receiving the reflected light of insights to be derived from new research and writing. My commitment to four nations history in respect of imperialism is now well known. So is my concern with comparative insights across the various European empires, such that I very much agree with the contention of Andrew Thompson that we must think much more about the cooperative aspects of imperialism rather than the competitive that have so often been highlighted in the past. (There is an analogy here with evolutionary thinking, which used to stress competitiveness in biological evolution and then later came to recognise the significance of cooperation as a further operating force.) We must also think about the interaction of the local and the global and we should continue to connect up insights from all the creative arts which have always been such a source of stimulation and enlightenment for me.9 The connecting of the history of science, of environmental history, of related disciplines such as anthropology and geography to imperialism remains an exceptionally significant programme. We need to benefit from the anthropological turn which focuses upon dominant imperial peoples as well as subordinate ones. This can feed into another less fashionable interest, that is work on the multiple biographies – and the working conditions – of individuals connected with the imperial project. Recent books are taking the Series in this direction, in stimulating ways.10 The study of missionaries and their mission stations has always been important, [ 272 ]

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for a number of reasons. They, supremely, involved the activities of both men and women (as well as children). Above all they were vital zones of contact with indigenous peoples, as well as of a whole range of studies, linguistic, religious, environmental and cultural, in addition to collecting activities (in the sense of ethnic artefacts, often finding their way into museums). And the mention of missions and museums introduces the realisation that we need far more work on the whole range of institutions through which Western and local cultures came into contact throughout all the European empires, both in settler territories and those sometimes described as ‘dependent’ – that is libraries, intellectual societies, art galleries, museums, botanic gardens, zoos, schools and universities, and, again, the Series is beginning to make a contribution here.11 It has also been noticeable that comparisons between areas of different continents have become more common (see the Series list) and we need more of these comparative studies of different sites of empire. In all these ways, we should be moving towards those trans-imperial and cross-national comparisons which should be a vital part of the way forward.12 Above all, I must end by expressing my admiration and gratitude to all the many authors who have contributed to the Series and to whom any credit it deserves should be attributed. That also holds true for the remarkably high-quality essays to be found in this volume together with the expert and insightful editing of Andrew Thompson. Andrew will be succeeding me as the new general editor of the Series. This is a most welcome development because few have extended the language and content of imperial studies more effectively than he has done, not least in the area of connecting cultural and political economies. All I can do is express the hope that he will receive as much stimulation, intellectual satisfaction and sheer pleasure from dealing with authors, their research and their books as I have done. Manchester University Press little expected that this Series would develop as it has done when it was founded in the mid-1980s. Indeed, the help and encouragement of a series of publisher’s editors, including Ray Offord, Jane ThornileyWalker, Vanessa Graham, Alison Welsby and Emma Brennan, has been an important component of its success. As a result of their efforts (and of course the research and writing of historians around the world) we are already well into the second set of a hundred volumes. I suspect that, given the wave of books that continues to come to the press, number two hundred will arrive rather more rapidly than one hundred did. The frontiers are still drawing us inexorably outward.

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Notes  1 See John M. MacKenzie, ‘Scots and Imperial Frontiers’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 3: 1 (2009), 1–17; also MacKenzie, ‘Scotland and Empire: Ethnicity, Environment and Identity’, Northern Scotland, New Series, 1 (2010), 12–29.  2 See the list of books at the start of this volume.  3 I estimate that I have written well over 80,000 words of general editor’s introductions, a book in itself!  4 The pioneering work edited by Keith Jeffery was commissioned by me after fruitful discussions with him.  5 T. M. Devine, one of the most influential historians of modern Scotland, has acknowledged this influence, and other scholars working on Scotland have also done so. They have been kind enough to incorporate me into the ranks of Scottish historians in a variety of stimulating ways.  6 A significant work here is Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010). My own work is heading in this direction, ably assisted by my partner and indefatigable research associate, Nigel Dalziel, to whom I owe a considerable debt. Beyond this, I have several projects in hand and hope, Andrew, MUP and readers permitting, to continue publishing in the Series.  7 One scholar has recently referred to my ‘unreciprocated’ debate with Said. I am now able to reveal that after the publication of my book, a BBC producer contacted me to ask if I would be prepared to fly to New York to indulge in a debate with Edward Said. I readily agreed, for it would have given me great satisfaction to meet him properly (there had been only one fleeting encounter at a conference) and talk to him in ways that would have revealed my considerable respect. However, Said, to my great disappointment, declined to participate. Of course, it must be said that he may have been unwell at the time.  8 For example, among a growing literature, Avril A. Powell, Scottish Orientalists and India (Woodbridge, 2010) and Robert Irwin, The Lust of Knowing (London, 2006). The latter may well be dubbed a ‘conservative’ work, but it nonetheless constitutes in some respects a devastating critique. It did not acknowledge my contribution!  9 My greatest passion has always been music and it is encouraging to see the work of musicologists and others proceeding in these directions – I would only mention the writings of Nalini Ghuman as an excellent example. 10 Catherine Ladds, Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854–1949 (Manchester, 2013); Christopher Prior, Exporting Empire: Africa, Colonial Officials and the Construction of the British Imperial State, c. 1900–1939 (Manchester, 2013). 11 Tamson Pietsch, Universities and Empire: The British Academic World, 1880–1939 (Manchester, forthcoming). 12 The influential work of Ann Laura Stoler in connecting her research on Dutch Indonesia to much wider imperial issues is significant here.

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bold type=extended discussion or term emphasised in text f=figure; n=endnote; t=table Abercrombie, N. 42, 48(n92) Absent-Minded Imperialists (Porter, 2004) 14, 24(n5), 25(n25), 29–30, 44(n5–6), 59–60, 69(n2), 71(n59), 123 ‘further thoughts’ (2008) 51, 69(n5, n11) advertising 86, 93 Afigbo, A. E. 163(n34) African-Americans 40, 220 agencement 136 agency 13, 16, 55–6, 57–62, 63, 64, 67, 71–2, 75, 80, 133, 272 Aissaoui, R. 267(n114) Aiyar, S. 187(n40) Akerman, J. R. 116(n26) Aldrich, R. vii, 5, 8, 14, 74–99 Alexander, P. 164(n48) Algeria 148–50, 153, 157, 164(n44) Algerians migrants in France 242–6, 255–9, 262–3, 265–7 Allenby, Viscount 143 Among Empires (Maier, 2006) 181, 187(n48) Amrita Bazaar Patrika (newspaper) 196, 198, 199t Amrith, S. S. vii, 10–11, 14, 22, 187(n37), 216–39, 241 Amundsen, R. 114(n3) Anderson, B. 35 Anderson, C. 138(n1), 142(n98) Anderson, D. M. 86–7, 161–2(n18), 162–3(n28), 163(n32, n38), 166(n70) Anderson, W. 117(n42) Andrews, B. 92, 98(n61) Anghie, A. 187(n52)

Annales school 5, 74 Antarctic/South Pole 100–1, 112 anthropology/anthropologists 55, 63, 67, 71(n58), 101, 216, 217, 219, 272 Anyone for England? (Aslet, 1997) 41, 47(n87) Arango, J. 27(n65) archives 96, 137, 223, 242, 253, 261 Arctic/North Pole 92, 101, 112, 117(n44) Arctic in British Imagination (David, 2000) 105 area studies 3, 101, 102, 118, 189 armed forces 85, 86–7, 92 Arnold, D. 6, 112, 117(n42) Arondekar, A. 94, 99(n65) art 86, 97(n45) arts, the 58, 271–2, 274(n9) Arya Samaj 225 Asia in Western Fiction (Winks and Rush, eds., 1990) 85, 97(n38) Aslet, C. 41, 47(n87) Asser, Colonel V. 143, 145, 147–8, 160(n3) assimilation 21, 242, 246–8, 250, 253–4, 264(n56) Astor, J. J. 192, 201, 210 At Duty’s Call (Reader, 1988) 77 Atkins, K. E. 141(n90) Attenborough, R. 39 Attlee, C. R. 201 Australia 17, 40, 47(n82), 82, 87, 94, 98(n65), 103–4, 115(n17), 127, 132, 141(n70), 142(n99), 169, 202, 210, 211, 232 Baden-Powell, Lord 76

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Bailyn, B. 218, 236(n11) Baldwin, M. P. 185–6(n24–5) Balfour doctrine (1926) 174 Ballantyne, T. 94, 99(n65), 125, 138(n1), 139(n40) Ballhatchet, K. 24(n9), 75 Banerjea, Sir Surendranath 198, 200, 213(n31) Banks, Sir Joseph 101, 116(n23) Bannerjee, S. 98(n65), 176, 186(n29) Bannerji, H. 82 Baptists 120 Barbados 89 Barker, Sir Ernest 32 Barker, F. 26(n36) Barnard, J. 137, 142(n98) Barnett, A. 37 Barros, F. de 262(n15), 266(n86) Barrow, I. J. 116(n26) Barth, F. 53, 69(n19) Bay of Bengal 225–6, 237(n40) Bayly, C. A. 13, 57, 63–4, 67, 128–9, 172, 217–18 Bayly, S. 185(n23) Beckles, H. 82 Beinart, W. 66, 73(n99), 110, 117(n36) Beit, A. 131 Belgian Empire 96, 150–1, 156 Belgium 109 Belich, J. 128, 140(n54, n57), 261(n1) Bell, D. 185(n23), 187(n49), 236(n14) Bell, M. 115(n8), 116(n25) Beloff, M. 30, 44(n9) Bengal 123, 149, 162(n25), 193, 197, 202 Bengalee (newspaper) 198, 213(n29) Bengali babu 81 Benhabib, S. 176, 186(n28) Benn, T. 27(n56), 36–7, 46(n54) Benson, S. 86 Bentham, J. 31 Benton, L. 135, 141(n87) Berenson, E. 115(n18) Berger, M. T. 78 Berger, S. 25(n14) Berman, B. J. 146, 161(n12) Bernardot, M., 262(n23)

Besnaci-Lancou, F. 263(n41) Bhabha, H. 83 Bickers, R. 88–9, 93, 98(n51–2), 140(n52) bidonvilles (shanty-towns) 244–6, 256–9, 260, 262–3, 266–7 Bingham, N. 136, 142(n95) biography/biographers 94, 102, 114, 142(n98), 272 Birmingham 120, 250, 254, 265(n74) Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) 220, 236(n21) black-and-tans 144f, 145 Blanc-Chaléard, M-C. 263(n36) Blanchard, E. 242, 262(n18, n26) Blitz (newspaper) 199t Blundell, M. 32 Boddy, J. 63, 72(n87) Bombay 83, 107, 194, 197, 229 Bombay: imperial museum 189, 213(n4) Bombay Chronicle 196, 197, 199t, 208 Bombay Free Press Journal 199t Bombay Islam (Green, 2010) 230, 238(n54) Booth, A. 155, 165(n62) Boyce, G. 191, 213(n12) Bracken, B. 201 Brantlinger, P. 65(n71) brassage (‘mixing’) 244 Bratton, J. S. 42, 47–8(n89), 48(n94), 92, 98(n61) Brazza, P. S. di 106 Break-Up of Britain (Nairn, 1977) 4, 35 Brelvi, S. A. 196 Bremen, J. 165(n56) Brennan, E. 273 Bridge, C. 139(n34), 184(n6), 185(n21) Briggs, A. 191, 213(n12) Bristol 131, 254, 265(n73, n82) ‘Britain as Colony’ (Benn, 1972, 1981) 36–7, 46(n54) Britain’s Experience of Empire in Twentieth Century (Thompson, 2012) 30

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British Army 143, 145 British diaspora 218–19, 237(n41) British Empire 53, 94, 96, 127–8, 130, 145, 148–9, 157, 162(n27), 218 Americanisation into Commonwealth of Nations 182, 187(n52) ‘British identity’ 47(n77) ‘unmaking’ (Samuel) 41 British Nationality Act (1948) 247 (1981) 38 British subjecthood 174–83, 186(n33), 247 British World 17, 18, 53, 139(n34), 169, 173, 184(n6), 185(n21), 219, 263(n43), 271 Britons (Colley, 1992) 52 Brittain, Sir Harry 207 Brocheux, P. 163(n34) Brower, B. 164(n44) Brown, C. A. 164(n48) Brown, C. L. 185(n24) Brown, J. 204, 214(n42) Brubaker, R. 217 Bryder, L. 78, 97(n11) Buckingham, J. S. 197 Buckner, P. A. 139(n34), 184(n6), 185(n21) Buller, General Sir Redvers, VC 143, 161(n5) Burbank, J. 27(n51), 184(n12), 274(n6) Burke, E. 31 Burnham, Lord 193 Burton, A. 24(n11), 69(n2), 94, 99(n65), 120, 138(n10), 140(n57) Burton, Sir Richard 104 Bush, B. 82–3 Butler, J. E. 80, 91 Butlin, R. 115(n8), 116(n25) Cain, P. J. 161(n17) Calcutta 11, 149, 189, 223, 229, 230 Caldwell, D. R. 89 Cama, M. N. 208, 209 Campaign Against Racial Discrimi-

nation (CARD) 252, 264(n65) Campbell, C. 92, 98(n61) Canada 17, 34, 94, 103, 127, 169, 173, 175, 232 Canadian Identity (Morton, 1961) 40, 47(n78) Cannadine, D. 28(n67), 30, 36, 72(n67) Canning, Lord 194 Cape Colony 126, 135, 140(n59) Cape Town 107 Cape Town: South African Museum 115(n9) capital/capitalism 56, 124–5, 133, 147, 228 Caribbean/West Indies 40, 121, 124, 157–9, 166(n73–7), 222–3, 225, 248 West Indian intellectuals 41, 262(n10) West Indians 247, 249–50, 264(n56), 265(n70) Carter, P. 104 cartography 107–8, 109, 116(n26–7), 117(n34), 122 Casement, Sir Roger 79 Casey, Lord 32 caste 222, 224, 225, 233 Castle, K. 92, 98(n62) Centre des Archives Contemporaines (CAC) 262(n14) Centre Historique des Archives Nationales (CHAN) 262(n24) centre-periphery 17–18, 130–2 Chaban-Delmas, J. 258 Chaillu, P. du 108, 116(n28) Chakrabarty, D. 193, 204, 213(n20) Challenge of Continents (Kennedy) 117(n48) Chamberlain, J. 177 chargés de mission (CM) 266(n88) Charras, M-A. 266(n105) Chatham House 170, 173 Chaudhuri, N. 69(n16) Chester, L. P. 134, 141(n83) Childhood and Society (Erikson, 1950) 40

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China 68, 86, 88, 128, 220 Chinese diaspora 10–11, 218, 221, 226–8, 237(n43–8), 241 Christianity 56, 80, 103, 189, 228 Chua Ai Lin 229, 238(n51) Churchill, W. S. 178–9, 248 cités de transit (transit estates) 244 ‘citizen’ versus ‘subject’ 174–5, 186(n25) citizenship 123, 208, 220, 233–4 ‘imperial citizenship’ 174–6, 178–80, 183, 186(n29), 231–2 Civil and Military Gazette 198, 199t ‘civilising mission’ 125, 135, 228, 237(n47) Civilising Subjects (Hall, 2002) 120, 138(n11–12) civis Britannicus 174, 176, 178, 181 class 16, 55, 60, 62, 71–2(n65), 75, 89, 121, 133, 226, 272 Clayton, A. 161(n18) Clayton, D. 122, 137, 139(n22) Clifford, J. 217, 236(n3) climate 77, 92, 111–13, 117(n43) ‘coercive networks’ 149 Coetzee, F. 26(n37) ‘cognitive mapping’ (Phillips) 83, 87 Cohen, R. 236(n6) Colley, L. 37, 52 Collingham, E. M. 165–6(n69) Colls, R. 47(n86) ‘colonial bridgehead’ concept 18, 27(n47) Colonial Frontiers (Russell, ed., 2001) 125, 139(n37) Colonial Masculinity (Sinha, 1995) 5, 77, 81–2, 123 Colonial Office 126, 131, 176–7 colonial records history 155 Colonialism and Homosexuality (Aldrich, 2003) 80, 97(n20) ‘colonialism’s geographies’ (Clayton) 122, 139(n22) ‘colonisation of consciousness’ (Comaroffs) 43, 64 Columbus, C. 100 Comaroff, Jean 64, 73(n93)

Comaroff, J. L. 65–6(n71) Comaroff, John 64, 73(n93) commandants de cercle 151 commodities 17, 124 Commonwealth 4, 32, 169, 171–4, 181, 184(n11), 204, 207–11, 214–15 Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council (CIAC) 252 Commonwealth Immigration Act (UK, 1962) 247, 251 Commonwealth Press Union (CPU) 207, 211–12 comparative approach 8, 25(n12–14), 59, 68, 96, 124–6, 216, 242, 272 Conklin, A. L. 163(n34) Conley, M. A. 48(n90), 87, 97(n48) conservatism ‘method of enquiry’ versus ‘set of assumptions’ 14 Conservative Party 33, 248, 250–1, 255 Constantine, S. 42, 48(n89) ‘contact zones’ (Pratt) 104, 113 Contagious Diseases Act 83 contested spaces 244–6 ‘convergence hypothesis’ 248 convicts 83–4, 94 Cook, J. 100, 105, 116(n23) Cooper, F. 30, 60, 62, 71–2, 146, 182, 217 corvée systems 151 cosmopolitanism 11, 35, 228–33, 237–8 Counterblaste to Tobacco (James I, 1604) 31 Craig, D. 69(n1) Crewe Circular (1909) 78, 80 Crosby, A. W. 110, 117(n37) Cross, P. 163(n36) cross-cultural encounters 105, 108–10, 113, 116–17 Cryle, D. 211, 214(n87) cultural circulation 10–11, 14, 22, 31–2, 216–39 ‘cultural economy’ (Magee and Thompson) 164(n42), 269

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Cunningham, A. 92, 98(n61) Curran, J. ix, 191, 213(n12) Curry, G. 187(n46) Curtis, L. 170–1, 184(n11) Curzon, Lord 177, 186(n33) Daily Herald 201 Daily Telegraph 193 Daly, M. W. 163(n36) Dalziel, N. 51, 69(n9), 88, 274(n6) Darwin, C. 111 Darwin, J. 128, 172 Das, D. 208–9, 211 Davenport, C. 156–7, 165(n53) David, C. 263(n31), 266(n91) David, R. G. 98(n61), 105 David Livingstone and Victorian Encounter with Africa (MacKenzie, ed., 1996) 103–4, 115(n10) Davidson, J. 185(n20) Davies, R. R. 35 Davis, J. 264(n49) Davis, K. 218, 236(n9) Davis, M. 113, 117(n46) Dawn (newspaper, Pakistan) 208 de Gaulle, C. A. J. M. 245 Debré Law (1964) 256 Declaration of Communist Mayors of Paris Region (1969) 257, 266(n101) Decline, Revival and Fall of British Empire (Gallagher, 1982) 172, 185(n16) decolonisation 9–10, 20–1, 240–67 DeLanda, M. 142(n95) Deli (Sumatra) 154–5, 157, 165(n56) democracy 203–5, 208, 212 ‘democratic iterations’ (Benhabib) 176, 186(n28) Depression years 3, 9, 143–67 Desai, M. 181 Desai, R. 264(n58) Devine, T. M. 46(n43), 56, 69(n16), 70(n40), 274(n5) diasporas 10–11, 22, 216–39 post-colonial 233–5, 238–9

two models 217–21, 236 discrimination 249–51 dispersal 242, 253–5, 256–9 Dodds, K. 46(n67, n69) ‘dominant ideology’ thesis (Abercrombie, Hill, Turner) 42, 43, 48(n92, n94) domination 61, 63, 65, 67 Dominions 119–20, 169–70, 172–5, 176–8, 186–7(n37), 201–2, 207, 209–10, 212, 247, 263(n42) Douglas, R. 184(n6) Dowd, G. E. 185(n24) Drayton, R. 141(n92), 267(n119) Driver, F. 116–17(n33), 119, 120–1, 130, 132, 138, 140(n64), 164(n47) Du Bois, W. E. B. 220, 236(n20) Dubow, S. 25(n28), 26–7(n42), 53, 56, 61, 69(n16), 70(n23–4), 184(n6) Dummett: Ann, Lady 186(n25) Dummett, Sir Michael 264(n64) East Africa 169, 178, 187(n39–40) East India Company 175, 197, 198 Echenberg, M. 162(n18) Ecological Imperialism (Crosby, 1986) 110, 117(n37) Economist (UK) 206 ‘ecstasis’ (Fabian) 109 Edgerton, D. 153, 165(n50) Edney, M. H. 116(n26) Edwardes, M. 204, 214(n57) Eley, G. 44(n4), 69(n2), 161(n8) Elgin, Lord 197 elites 18, 85, 89, 102–3, 150, 158, 204, 229, 231–2 Elphinstone, Lord 194 ‘empire and metropolitan culture’ paradigm (MacKenzie, 1980s) 4, 29, 30, 36, 38–9, 41, 42, 45(n14), 145 Empire of Nature (MacKenzie, 1988) 6, 65, 102–3, 141(n91), 213(n1) Empire Press Union (EPU, 1909–) 12, 191, 192–3, 197–200, 213(n14– 18)

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first annual conference (1936) 200, 213–14(n32–5) Indian representatives in London 199t London conference (1946) 200–3, 214 Ottawa conference (1950) 12, 207–11, 212, 214–15 ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’ (Hyam, 1986) 78 Empire and Sexuality (Hyam, 1990) 5, 74, 75, 77, 78–81, 96–7 Empire Strikes Back (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982) 38, 47(n71) Empire Strikes Back? (Thompson, 2005) 30, 44(n2), 48(n100) empire-states 9, 171, 182, 184(n12) Empires in World History (Burbank and Cooper, 2010) 274(n6) empiricism 190, 216, 268, 271 England 33, 36, 47(n86), 49, 52–3, 61, 175 English Historical Review 24(n5) Englishman (newspaper) 198 environment 65, 105, 110–12, 113, 117, 269, 272 Environment and Empire (Beinart and Hughes, 2007) 110, 117(n36) Environment and History (MacKenzie, ed.) 66 epistemology 6, 17, 64, 104, 108, 110, 113, 114, 130, 137 Erikson, E. 40, 47(n79, n85) Etherington, N. 116(n26) ‘Ethical Policy’ (Netherlands East Indies) 155–6 ‘Ethiopia’ [Abyssinia] 154, 158 ethnicity 11, 36, 52–3, 56, 60, 69(n19), 89, 148–50, 157–8, 173, 177, 181, 219–20, 233, 240, 244 ethnography 94, 103, 112 Europe 4, 6, 8, 9, 53, 89, 107, 119, 204, 220 European Empires and People (MacKenzie, ed., 2011) 8,

24(n10), 68 European Vision and South Pacific (Smith, 1960/1985) 105, 115(n16) Evans, J. 124–5, 139(n36) Evans, R. J. 71(n48) Expansion of England (Seeley, 1883) 32 exploration 2–3, 6, 100–17 Express group (London) 207 Fabian, J. 109, 116(n31) Falklands War (1982) 4, 31, 36–8, 46(n51) Fanon, F. 183(n4) Fauji Akhbar 199t Faulkner, W. 19, 27(n52) Favell, A. 262(n11) Featherstone, D. 141(n78) Fedorowich, K. 98(n61), 139(n34), 184(n6), 185(n21) feminism 5, 14, 16, 74, 79–80, 82, 91, 120–1, 123, 132, 137 Ferguson, N. 128, 140(n58) Fieldhouse, D. K. 24(n8), 31, 45(n15), 119, 120, 184(n11) fieldwork 106–7, 110, 111 Foley, M. 252–3, 265(n68–9) Fonkoua, R. 163(n36) Foot, M. 204, 214(n58) ‘forgetting of present’ 23, 28(n66) Forman, R. 99(n66) Forster, E. M. 86 Foucault, M. 56, 74, 78 ‘four nations history’ 35–6, 46(n50), 183–4(n5), 240, 270–2 France 10, 21, 34, 52, 115(n18), 163(n36), 175, 184(n12), 241, 248–9, 251, 254, 260 France: immigration, welfare, housing (1945–62) 242–6, 262–3 rentals, employer-provided accommodation, hostels 243–4 shanty-towns, social and transit housing: contested spaces 244–6

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France: immigration, welfare, hous­­­­ing (1962–74) 255–9, 265–7 shanty-towns, re-housing, dispersal 256–9 shifts in immigrant housing debates 259 France: Inter-Ministerial Group for Slum Clearance (GIP) 258, 259 Francis, R. D. 139(n34), 185(n21) Free Press Journal 198 French, D. 149, 163(n29) French Communist Party (PCF) 257, 259 French Empire 94, 96, 148–9, 153, 157, 162(n18) frontiers 53–4, 55, 57, 84, 93, 143, 268–70, 273 Frost, M. R. 229, 238(n51) Furedi, F. 163(n32) Gaitskell, D. 92 Galbraith, J. K. 203–4, 214(n50–1) Gallagher, J. A. 11, 168, 172, 183(n2), 185(n16, n18) Gandhi (Attenborough, 1982) 39 Gandhi, D. 198 Gandhi, F. 204 Gandhi, M. K. 177, 186(n27, n35), 194, 198, 229, 231, 238(n52) Ganguli, N. C. 232–3 Garnham, N. 190, 213(n10) Garton, S. 96(n2) Gastaut, Y. 267(n113) Gaudí, A. 67 Gellner, E. 34 gender 62, 68, 75, 79, 94–5, 121, 133, 189, 269 Gender, Crime and Empire (Reid, 2007) 5, 77, 83–4 Gender and Empire (Levine, 2004) 78, 97(n13) Gender and Imperialism (Midgley, 1998) 5, 73(n113), 77, 82–3, 97(n26), 123 geography 67, 83, 101, 107, 108, 272 Geography and Imperialism (Bell, Butlin, Heffernan, eds., 1995)

103, 115(n8) Ghosh, A. 222, 237(n28) Ghosh, T. K. 198, 202 Ghuman, N. 274(n9) Gibson, R. P. T. 210 Gikandi, S. 44(n4) Gilbert, D. 130, 132, 138(n7), 140(n64), 164(n47) Gillan, R. W. 177 Gilroy, P. 220, 236(n21) girmitiyas 223 Gissibl, B. 25(n17) Gleason, P. 47(n85) ‘global chauvinism’ 16 ‘global migration crisis’ 22, 27(n65) globalisation 29, 35, 45(n1), 114, 217, 228, 240, 271 Gokhale, G. K. 177, 231–2, 238(n60) Gordon, A. 165(n56) Gordon, C. G. 63, 76, 87 Gorman, D. 48(n90), 176, 186(n29) Goscha, C. 163(n33) Gott, R. 28(n67), 45(n35) Government of India 222, 232 Government of India Act (1935) 206 Graham, Colonel J. 57 Graham, V. 273 Gramsci, A. 42, 48(n96), 56, 62 Grant, K. 25(n15), 72(n84) Great War from Confucian Point of View (Lim, 1917) 228, 237(n47) ‘Greater Britain’ idea 36, 119, 219, 236(n14) Green, E. H. H. 26(n37), 28(n67) Green, J. R. 32 Green, N. 230, 238(n54) Green Imperialism (Grove, 1995) 111, 117(n38) Greer, K. 141(n92) Gregory, R. G. 187(n39, n42) Groenewoud, M. 165(n56) group identity 40, 47(n79) Grove, R. H. 103, 111, 117(n38) Guardians of Empire (Killingray and Omissi, 1999) 87–8, 143, 161(n4) Gurney, A. 131

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Haggerty, S. 48(n90), 164(n47), 262(n9) Haggis, J. 82, 97(n30) Hall, C. 120, 123 Hall, D. 132, 141(n70) Hall, S. 38 Halpern, R. 164(n48) Hambly, G. 85 Hamilton, D. 123, 139(n32) Hancock, Sir Keith 173, 174, 185(n20), 189 Handlin, O. 47(n85) Hanham, H. J. 35 Hansen, R. 175, 186(n25) Harcourt, F. 140(n46) Hardinge, Lord 177, 196, 206 Hardy, A. 163(n36) harkis 263(n41) Harley, J. B. 108, 116(n26) Harlow, V. T. 185(n17) Harper, M. 88 Harper, T. N. 227, 229–30, 237(n46, n50) Harrison, B. 25–6(n30) Hastings, A. 55, 70(n36) Hawkins, R. 162(n26) health 111–12, 117(n40), 153, 155 Heffernan, M. 115(n8), 116(n25) hegemony theory (Gramsci) 42, 48(n96), 56, 63 Hémery, D. 163(n34) Henriot, C. 88–9, 98(n52) Heraclitus 129 ‘Heroic Myths of Empire’ (MacKenzie, 1992) 104, 115(n12) Herskovits, M. 219, 236(n18) Herson, J. 262(n9) Hervo, M. 262(n26), 266(n105) Hesse, H. 86 heuristics 113 Hiley, N. 190, 213(n11) Hill, C. 37, 264(n60) Hill, S. 42, 48(n92) Hilmer, N. 185(n20) Hindu (newspaper) 198, 199t Hindustan Times 198, 208

historical geography 3, 6–7, 103, 107, 118–42 historical legacy 19, 21, 27(n52) ‘replications’ versus ‘survivals’’ 27(n61) historiography 3, 5, 56, 59, 61, 77, 94, 110, 119, 126, 168, 170, 172–3, 189, 242 colonial policing 148–54, 161–5 future directions 181–3, 187 History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1976–84) 74 Hitchberger, J. W. M. 86, 97(n45) Ho, E. 218–19, 234–5, 236(n13), 239(n76) Hobsbawm, E. 35, 36 Hobson, J. A. 32, 45(n21) Hodder, J. 137, 142(n98) Hofmeyr, I. 229, 238(n52) Holland, R. A. 163(n32) Holmes, K. ix Holt, T. 166(n76) homosexuality 74–87 passim, 94–5, 98(n65) Hong Kong 89, 93, 130 Hooker, Sir Joseph 111, 116(n23) Hopkins, A. G. 140(n57), 161(n17) Hoppen, T. 25(n30) Horniman, B. G. 197 Horton, R. 209–10 Hosay (Shi’a Muharram celebration) 224, 236(n37) Hosking, G. 181, 187(n48) ‘having empire’ versus ‘being empire’ 181 hostels 244, 249–50, 259–60, 263(n48) House, J. vii, 7–8, 9–10, 20–1, 240–67 housing 9–10, 21, 240–67 ‘key aspect of immigrant welfare’ 241 Houston, R. A. 47(n86) How British Saw their Empire (Cannadine, 2001) 30 Howe, S. 8, 25(n25, n28), 36–7, 39, 46(n59) Hughes, L. 110, 117(n36)

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Hughes, M. 163(n31) Hugo, G. 27(n65) Hull, I. 149, 163(n30) Hulme, P. 26(n36) humanitarianism 18, 125, 131, 142(n95), 222, 234 Humboldt, A. von 111, 117(n39) Humphreys, E. 47(n86) Huntford, R. 114(n3) hunting 65–6, 73(n99), 76–7, 102–3, 113 Husain, A. 208, 209 Huttenback, R. A. 186(n30) Huxley, E. 264(n56) Huxley, T. H. 111 Hyam, R. 5, 30, 48(n89), 74, 75, 77, 84–5, 91 and critics 78–81, 96–7 hybridity 54, 56, 61–2 identity 10, 11, 18, 31, 39–40, 51–7, 69–70, 121, 124, 148, 270 Johnson’s definition (1755) 47(n79) identity crisis (Erikson) 40 Ilbert Bill (1883) 81 ‘imaginative geographies’ (Said) 104 Imagined Communities (Anderson, 1983) 35 immigrant welfare 7–8, 9–10, 240–67 immigration 20–1, 38, 252–3, 255 immigration control 241, 242, 248, 250, 264(n56) ‘imperial circuits and networks’ (Lester) 148, 162(n20) Imperial Cities (Driver and Gilbert, 1999) 130, 138(n7), 140(n64) Imperial Conferences (1911–23) 12, 169, 177–81 imperial culture 9, 42, 50, 56, 59–60, 62–9, 72–3 Imperial Eyes (Pratt, 1992) 104 imperial history 3, 14–15, 31, 50, 57, 71(n46) comparative approach 8, 25(n12– 14) ‘search for more productive framework’ 7

imperial ‘impact’ factor 41 imperial legacies 18–22, 27 Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Arnold, 1988) 6, 112, 117(n42) imperial ‘networks’ (Laidlaw) 41 imperial powers ‘co-operation’ versus ‘conflict’ 8–9 ‘imperial social formation’ (Sinha) 41 imperialism 8, 16–17, 32, 49–50, 56–7, 69(n2), 182, 189 Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Richards, 1989) 42, 48(n94) Imperialism and Natural World (Mackenzie, ed., 1990) 6, 66, 77, 103, 114(n7), 115(n25), 141(n91) Imperialism and Popular Culture (MacKenzie, 1986) 1, 34, 57, 76 indentured labour 175, 177, 186(n33), 220, 221–5, 231–2, 236(n22), 241 Independent (newspaper, 1919–) 204 indexing 85–8, 92 India ii, 2, 5, 33, 37, 81–2, 85, 88–9, 93–4, 103, 111–12, 120–1, 123, 127, 130–1, 133, 140(n67), 149, 157, 165(n69), 169, 172, 175, 180, 220, 235, 248, 249 media 11, 12–13, 21–2, 188–215 press laws (1799–1940) 195t India: Government of India 176–8, 186 India: press censorship/press freedom EPU conference (London, 1946) 200–3, 214 post-colonial 203–7, 214 Raj era 193–200, 213–14 India: Supreme Court 206 India’s Search for National Identity (Embree, 1972) 40, 47(n83) Indian diaspora 10–11, 218, 221–6, 236–7, 241 Indian Ocean 22, 126, 139(n42), 142(n98), 220–2, 225, 229–30, 235 Indian Partition (1947) 134, 141(n83), 203

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Indian Republic: Constitution (1950) 206–7 Indo-Irish radical connections 127, 189 Indochina 34, 85–6, 150–1, 157, 163(n33) Indonesia 253 informal empire 119, 128 ‘information systems’ 56 Ingram, B. 47(n86) ‘integrated media history’ (Kaul) 188 integration 21, 242, 244, 251–3, 261, 266(n95) interdisciplinarity 24, 49, 58–9, 68, 118, 123, 136, 188, 190, 216, 270–1 ‘internalised imperialism’ 43, 59, 64 internationalism 16–17 Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) 35 Ireland 30, 47(n86), 131, 140(n67), 149, 175, 271, 274(n4) Irish 148, 264(n60) Irwin, Lord 196 Irwin, R. 274(n8) Italy/Italians 148, 154, 202, 237(n41) Itinerario (journal) 161(n10) Iversen, M. 26(n36) Jamaica 120–1, 130, 158, 166(n76) James I 31 Jameson, F. 130, 140(n62) Japan 86, 94 Jeal, T. 114(n3) Jefferies, Sir Charles 161(n18) Jeffery, K. 274(n4) Jenkinson, J. 186(n33) Jewish Diaspora 218, 220 Johnson, H. 166(n76) Johnson, L. B. 253 Johnson, M. A. 166(n76) Johnson, S. 47(n79) Jones, C. 90, 98(n55) Jones, L. 116–17(n33) Journal of History of Sexuality (1990–) 74

Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 78 Journal of Southern African Studies 52 Kahn, J. S. 238(n53) Kaplan, M. 182, 187(n55), 233, 238(n70) Karatani, R. 186(n25) Kashmir 196, 206 Kearney, H. 35 Kelly, J. D. 182, 187(n55), 233, 238(n70) Kenya 92, 163(n38), 178–9, 181, 187(n40) Kaul, C. vii, 11, 12–13, 21–2, 24(n6), 48(n90), 188–215 Kayali, H. 187(n50) Kennedy, D. viii, 2–3, 5, 6, 14, 77, 100–17, 138(n16), 183(n3) Kesari (journal) 197, 199t Killingray, D. 86, 87–8, 143, 161(n4), 161–2(n18), 162–3(n28), 163(n32), 184(n6) King, A. D. 230, 238(n55) King, B. M. 140(n46) King, C. 111 Kirk, N. 73(n114) Kitchener, Lord 76 Knight, R. 198, 213(n28) knowledge 62–7, 72–3, 95, 101, 107, 122 ‘knowledge in transit’ (Secord) 106, 115(n22) Komagata Maru 232 Korieh, C. J. 163(n34) Korneski, K. 184(n6) Kouaouci, A. 27(n65) Kramer, P. 183, 187(n56) Kumar, D. 103 Kumar, K. 26(n34) labour 9, 16, 151, 153, 157–8, 177, 186–7(n37), 226, 237(n43) labour history 55–6, 70(n33–4) Labour Party 46(n54), 248, 251, 265(n70)

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Ladds, C. 68, 73(n116), 274(n10) Lahiri, S. 262(n10) Laidlaw, Z. 41, 48(n91), 126, 128, 138(n1), 139(n43), 219 Lake, M. 82, 128, 140(n56), 187(n44, n47), 232, 238(n62) Lambert, D. viii, 138(n4), 139–40(n44–6) Lancaster University 49, 57, 68 language 136, 149, 193, 194–5, 196, 205–6, 208, 212, 221, 229 Language of Empire (MacDonald, 1994) 42, 48(n95) Late Victorian Holocausts (Davis, 2002) 113, 117(n46) Latin America 104, 111, 128, 218 Central America 112 Latour, B. 132 Laurens, S. 266(n89, n94) Lavin, D. 184(n11) law 68, 75, 84, 92, 95, 135, 175, 176, 192 Lawrence of Arabia 87 Leader (newspaper) 199t, 204 League of Nations 12, 89, 133, 170–1, 180–1, 182, 184(n10), 233 Lean, Sir David 39 Legg, S. 133, 135, 138(n1), 141(n73, n88) Leicester Mercury 250 Leinster-Mackay, D. 92 Leonardi, C. viii, 3, 13–14, 15, 16, 49–73 Leow, R. 237(n48) Lester, A. viii, 3, 5, 6–7, 14, 27(n42– 3), 118–42 Levine, P. 25(n15), 94, 98(n65) Levitt, T. 35, 45(n1) Lim Boon Keng, Dr (1869–1957) 227–8, 237(n47) Little Englanders 23, 28(n67), 33, 45(n35) Liverpool 41, 48(n90), 131, 164(n47), 262(n9) Livingstone, D. (1813–73) 64–5, 103–4

Livingstone, David N. 108, 116(n29) lobbying/lobbies 18, 131, 222 Lobengula, Prince 76 local authorities 241, 248–58 passim, 265(n70) London 130–2, 200–3, 214 Lonsdale, J. M. 55, 70(n35), 146, 161(n12) Lorimer, D. A. 259–60, 267(n117) Loti, P. 86 Louis, W. R. 42, 48(n99), 183(n2), 184(n13), 185(n20) Lourenço, Captain A. 156 Low, Sir Francis 202 Loxley, D. 26(n36) loyalism 228, 231, 237(n47) Ludden, D. 235, 239(n77) Lyons, A. 262(n16) Lytton, Lord 194–5 Macaulay, Lord 193 MacDonald, R. H. 42, 48(n95) MacKenzie, J. M. i-ii, 6–7, 23–4, 34, 44–5(n13), 268–74 ‘leader of revolution in imperial history’ 13–14, 49, 69(n3) and natural world 102–5, 114–15 ‘sexuality and colonial history’ 76–7, 80 and study of imperialism 3, 13–14, 49–73 MacKenziean moment 3–5, 29–48 MacMaster, N. vii, 262(n27), 263(n36) Macmillan, H. 32, 248 Madden, F. 184(n11) Madras Mail 198, 199t Magee, G. B. ix, 126, 139(n45), 140(n60), 164(n42), 236(n4), 261(n1) Maier, C. S. 181, 187(n48) Major, Sir John 28(n67) Making Imperial Mentalities (Mangan, 1990) 77 Malaya 149, 153, 157, 225–6, 229, 233, 264(n64) Manceron, G. 263(n41)

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Manchester 54, 250, 264(n61) Manela, E. 25(n22), 187(n52) Mangan, J. A. 42, 47(n89), 48(n94), 76, 77, 92, 96(n8) Mann, G. 162(n18), 163(n38) Mansergh, N. 173, 185(n20) Marks, S. 50–1, 71(n61) Married to Empire (Procida, 2002) 89–90, 98(n54) Marseille, J. 163(n36) Marshall, P. J. 44(n2), 172, 184(n14), 185(n17, n24), 186(n27) Marxism/Marxists 55, 60, 71–2(n65) Masclet, O. 266(n101) masculinity 66, 77, 85, 91–4, 103, 123 Massenet, M. 245–6, 256–8, 266(n89) Massey, D. 121, 125, 133, 129, 138(n13), 139(n38) Massey, D. S. 27(n65) ‘maximalism’ versus ‘minimalism’ debate 15, 29, 43, 44(n2) Mbeki, T. 57 McAleer, J. 105 McClintock, A. 94, 99(n65) McCook, S. 116(n28) McIntyre, W. D. 185(n20, n22) McKenna, M. 142(n99) McKeown, A. 11, 25(n20), 164(n40), 221, 236(n24), 238(n62), 261(n1) McKibbin, R. 26(n30) McLynn, F. 114(n3) ‘means of mental production’ (Gramsci) 62–3 media 11, 12–13, 21–2, 85, 123, 188–215 medicine 67, 73(n111), 74–5, 77, 92, 109, 112, 228, 269 Mehta, U. 26(n36) memory 19, 27(n57) Metcalf, T. 126, 139(n42) methodology 15, 42–3, 57–8, 91, 128 métissage 94 Michel, A. 242, 262(n13) Midgley, C. 5, 73(n113), 77, 82–3, 84–5, 97(n26), 123

migration 121, 128, 140(n60), 152–3, 157–8, 176–7, 180, 183, 216, 220–1, 225, 231–2, 235, 240, 269–70, 272 ‘minimal impact’ thesis 32 Minto, Lord 196 Mintz, S. 17 Mirrors and Masks (Strauss, 1959) 47(n78) miscegenation 76–7, 79, 89–92, 94 missionaries ii, 18, 54, 64–5, 80, 83, 100–1, 120, 131, 272–3 Mitchell, J. C. 236(n4) mobilities 129, 134, 136, 176–7 Mohapatra, P. 224, 236(n37) Molesworth Commission (1830s) 84 Mollan, S. 163(n36) Mongia, R. 186(n32) Montagu, E. 178, 196, 213(n24) Moor, J. de 162(n18) Moore, A. 198 Moore, B. L. 166(n76) Moore-Gilbert, B. 58–9, 69(n4) ‘moral ethnicity’ (Lonsdale) 55 moral purity campaign 80, 83, 91, 93 Morgan, P. D. 54, 70(n29) Morlat, P. 163(n34) Morris, J. 44(n11) Morton, W. L. 40, 41, 47(n78) Mouralis, B. 163(n36) Muir, J. 111 Mukerjee, H. 214(n59) multiculturalism 220, 241, 251–2 Munn, C. 89 Munro, Sir Thomas 193 Murchison, (Sir) Roderick 101 Murdoch, Sir Keith 202 museums 107, 273 Museums and Empire (MacKenzie, 2009) 6, 63, 103, 115(n9) Muslims 85, 138, 159, 243 Nairn, T. 4, 35 Nanda, B. R. 214(n59) Nandy, A. 27(n56) Nanni, G. 19, 27(n55), 135, 141(n89), 152

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nation-state 11, 12, 35, 101, 118, 133, 150, 169–71, 174–5, 180–3, 203–4, 234 national exceptionalism 8, 17, 270 National Herald (1938–) 204 national identity 33, 37, 40, 47(n77, n86), 52–3, 205, 229 nationalism 12, 32, 35, 37, 40, 54, 60–1, 82, 121, 127, 148, 155, 159, 171, 182, 193, 196, 198, 200, 203–5, 220, 223, 230–4, 270 Nations and Nationalism (Gellner, 1983) 34 natural world 102–5, 114–15 Nehru, J. 12, 203–7, 209, 214, 234, 238–9(n74) Nehru, M. 204 Netherlands 253 East Indies 274(n12) Empire 148, 153, 162(n18) networks 17, 62, 125, 126–35, 139–41, 148–9, 152, 160, 164(n42), 216–17, 221, 227–8, 231, 234–5 new imperial geography 135, 137, 141(n86) new imperial history 3, 7, 13, 14, 15, 24(n7), 75, 118, 120–4, 130, 135, 137, 138(n9), 145, 153, 161(n15), 164(n48), 188–90 New York 230, 274(n7) New York Times 182, 206 New Zealand 17, 32, 94, 103, 209–10 Newman, J. L. 116(n28) newspapers/press 12, 36–7, 106, 123, 127, 194–7, 200–3, 205, 207, 229, 232 self-regulation 208–9 Nichols, A. 186(n25) North Africa 34, 148, 149, 162(n24), 202 ‘North Atlantic archipelago’ 35–6 Northern Ireland 34, 35, 175 Northrup, D. 236(n22) novels 85–6 Nungesser Law (1966) 256

O’Malley, K. 127, 131, 140(n67) ‘ocular authority’ 6, 108, 113 Office du Niger 151 Offord, R. 273 Omissi, D. 87–8, 140(n52), 143, 161(n4) ‘One Big Thing’ (Price) 42, 48(n97) Onselen, C. van 27(n42) Ordering Africa (Tilley, ed., 2007) 67, 73(n112) Orientalism (Said, 1978) 4, 26(n36), 34, 104 Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (MacKenzie, 1995) 13, 57–9, 63–4, 72(n88), 97(n38), 104, 115(n15), 122, 236(n2), 271–2, 274(n7) ‘orphans of empire’ 11, 234, 239(n75) other, the 14, 23, 52, 58, 86, 96, 120 Osborne, C. 250 Osborne, M. 85–6 Owen, N. 26(n35) owner-occupation 249–51 Oxford History of British Empire 44(n4), 69(n2), 172, 184–5(n14– 15) Oxford History of England 25(n30), 33 Packer, Sir Frank 210 Pagden, A. 228, 237(n49) Pakistan 134, 203–12 passim, 235, 248–9 Palestine 138, 148–9, 163(n31) Papon, M. 256 Parekh, B. 224, 237(n37) Paris 245, 256–7, 259, 261, 262(n26), 266(n93, n97) Paris, M. 160(n2) Parkyns, M. 104 Parsons, T. 88 Passmore, E. 263(n43) Patel, S. 205 Patel, Z. 187(n47) patriarchy 81, 93, 218–19 patriotism 36–7, 46(n54), 102

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Patriotism (Samuel, 1989) 37, 40, 47(n77) Patterson, J. T. 265(n71) Patterson, O. 219, 236(n17) Patterson, S. 265(n70) Paul, K. 186(n33) Paxman, J. 30 Pedersen, S. 184(n10) Peers, D. 87–8 Pellegrino, A. 27(n65) Pels, P. 54, 70(n31) Perham, M. 163(n34) Pettitt, C. 115(n18, n21) Phillips, R. 5, 77, 80, 83, 84–5, 95, 115(n15) Philpott, D. 187(n53) Phimister, I. 24(n5), 25(n25), 44(n6) Pickles, K. 89, 98(n53) Pietsch, T. 274(n11) Pioneer (newspaper) 198, 199t, 233 Pirie, G. 127, 131, 140(n49) Piriou, A. 163(n36) place 129–32, 140–1 plantations 150, 152–3, 154–6, 224–6, 233 Pocock, J. G. A. 32, 35 Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado (PVDE/PIDE) 156, 165(n66) policing 3, 7–8, 9, 86–7, 143–67, 226, 256 historiography 148–54, 161–5 ‘pillar of colonial economic activity’ 152 Policing the Empire (Anderson and Killingray, 1991) 86–7 political economy 3, 9, 132, 145–7, 150, 152–4, 164(n42), 269, 272 and forms of repression 154–9, 165–7 Popkin, S. L. 146, 161(n13) popular culture 42, 49, 50, 59, 63, 69(n2), 93, 104, 105–6, 110, 115(n18–21), 121, 230 Popular Imperialism and Military (MacKenzie, ed., 1992) 87, 97(n46), 115(n12)

port cities 153, 229–31 Porter, B. 14, 24(n5), 25(n25), 29–30, 32, 42, 44(n5–6), 45(n27), 49, 50, 53, 59–60, 63, 69(n2, n11), 123 Portuguese Empire 153, 156 post-colonial context 19, 20, 22, 33–4, 40–1, 47(n85), 83, 160, 203–7, 211–12, 214, 241–2 diasporas 233–5, 238–9 literary de-contextualisation 59, 71(n58) post-colonial scholars 56, 57–8, 115(n17) post-colonial studies 13, 25(n24), 31, 104, 183(n3) post-colonial theory 14, 16, 50, 82, 113, 122–3, 138(n16, n20) post-colonialism 52, 63, 75, 120 post-modernism 14, 75, 80, 81, 92, 96 post-structuralism 74, 120, 133, 136 Powell, A. A. 274(n8) Powell, E. 28(n67), 33, 254–5, 265(n79) power 13, 50, 56, 62–7, 72–3, 78, 82, 93, 101, 129, 131, 133, 272 and agency 57–62, 71–2 ‘decentred’ approaches 57 power of culture 3, 49–73 Pratt, M. L. 104, 105 press freedoms 191–2 Price, R. 27(n42), 30, 42, 44(n10), 48(n97), 152–3, 164(n44) Prior, C. 274(n10) private-rented accommodation 249–51, 263–4(n49) ‘Problems of Coloured People in UK’ (Consultative Group, 1952) 247, 263(n45) Procida, M. A. 89–90, 91, 93, 98(n54) Pronay, N. 191, 213(n12) Propaganda and Empire (MacKenzie, 1984) 1, 30, 34, 37, 42, 44(n13), 57, 60, 62, 63, 71(n60, n62), 76, 106, 115(n18), 119, 161(n7), 183(n3), 190

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prostitution 75, 79–80, 83–4, 86–7, 88–9, 94–5 protest 147–8, 155, 157, 159–60 Proudfoot, L. 132, 141(n70) psychology 3–4, 12, 20, 40, 47(n78), 59, 74, 87, 159 public opinion 106, 148, 177, 192, 204, 254, 260 Public Service Commission (India, 1886) 81 Pyne, S. J. 112, 117(n45) Queen’s Proclamation (1858) 175–6, 186(n27) Quest for Identity (Wheelis, 1958) 47(n78) race/racism 4, 11, 16–17, 20–1, 38, 52, 55, 60, 62, 71–2(n65), 78, 82, 88–9, 92, 94, 112, 121–2, 125, 129, 133, 140(n59), 158, 175, 177, 181, 186(n30, n32–3), 187(n40), 195–6, 227–33 passim, 247–8, 259–61, 263–4(n49), 264(n64) Race Relations Acts (UK, 1965, 1968) 252 Race, Sex and Class under Raj (Ballhatchet, 1980) 75, 96(n3) Radcliffe Boundary Commission (1947) 134, 141(n83), 189 Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford 156 Ramakrishna Mission 225 Ramamurthy, A. 48(n90), 86 Ramayana 224–5 Ramnath, M. 185(n23) Ranger, T. 35, 50 Rathbone, R., 162(n26) Reader, W. J. 77 Rediker, M. 219, 236(n17) Reid, K. 5, 77, 83–4, 84–5 religion 18, 64–5, 75, 123, 175, 181, 208, 224, 247, 270 rentals 243–4, 245, 259 repatriation (debates) 253–5 Replenishing Earth (Belich, 2009) 128, 140(n54)

Representing Africa (McAleer, 2010) 105 repression 146–8, 151, 153 political economy and 154–9, 165–7 ‘responsible government’ 173, 174 return migration 240, 261(n5), 270 Rex, J. 265(n67) Reynolds, H. 128, 140(n56), 187(n44, n47), 232, 238(n62) Reynolds, J. N. 111 Rhodes, C. J. 76, 79, 131, 179 Rich, P. 170, 184(n9) Richards, J. 42, 44(n4), 48(n89, n94), 76, 92, 96(n4) Richmond, A. 265(n73, n82) Richter, D. 220, 236(n19) riots 157, 159 Ripon, Lord 194–6 Road to Botany Bay (Carter, 1987) 104 Robbins, K. 35 Robertson, E. 86, 97(n43), 140(n46) Robertson, E. J. 207 Robinson, R. 183(n4) Robinson, R. E. 11, 168, 183(n2), 185(n18) Robinson-Dunn, D. 91, 98(n60) Roff, W. R. 230, 238(n53) Rose, E. J. B. 264(n60) Rose, S. 123 Round Table Group 170, 179 Royal Navy 87, 148, 158, 162(n23) Rush, A. S. 184(n6) Rush, J. R. 85 Rushdie, S. 4, 39 Russell, C. 35 Russell, D. 87 Russell, L. 125, 139(n37) Russia (Tsarist) 81, 196 Sadanand, S. 198 Said, E. 4, 31, 34, 57–9, 62–3, 71(n47), 83, 97(n38), 104–5, 115(n17), 120, 122, 274(n7) Saint-Étienne 246 Salazar, A. 156

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Samuel, R. 28(n67), 37, 40, 41, 47(n77) Sapire, H. 237(n47) Sastri, V. S. 178 Satanic Verses (Rushdie, 1988) 4 satyagraha 231 Saunders, C. 45(n22) scale 7, 132–4, 135, 141 Schmidt, E. 164(n48) Schneider, W. H. 116(n25) Schomburgk, R. 107 Schwarz, B. 20, 27(n57–60), 33, 39, 48(n90), 241, 262(n10) science 6, 18, 65–6, 101–2, 114, 136, 269, 272 scientific institutions 103, 107, 113 scientific instruments 107, 115–16(n23) scientific practice 105, 106–8, 110, 115–16 Scotland 33, 35, 40, 47(n86), 49, 52–3, 124, 175, 271, 274(n1, n5) Highland-Lowland divide 54 Scotland and British Empire (MacKenzie and Devine, eds, 2011) 56, 70(n40) Scots in South Africa (MacKenzie with Dalziel, 2007) 50–1, 51–7, 60, 64, 69–70, 88, 190 Scott, P. 46(n59) Scott, R. F. 106, 114(n3) Sea of Poppies (Ghosh, 2008) 222, 237(n28) Search for Sovereignty (Benton, 2010) 135, 141(n87) Searchlight (newspaper) 233 Searight, K. 80 Searle, G. 25(n30) Seeley, Sir John Robert 32, 183(n4), 219 segregation 253–5 Sen, S. 262(n9) settlers 3, 4, 18, 32, 94, 101, 103, 125, 128, 132, 137, 139(n36), 147, 157, 158, 172, 179, 219–20, 232, 264(n64), 273

seuil de tolérance (tolerance threshold) 246, 251, 258, 263(n36) sex in colonial history 93–6, 98–9 Sex, Politics and Empire (Phillips, 2006) 5, 77, 83 sexuality further research 95–6 and gender 81–5, 97 and writing of colonial history 5, 8, 74–99 Sharma, V. 264(n64) Shepard, T. 184(n12) Shephard, B. 76 Sherman, T. C. 162(n27) Short History of English People (Green, 1874) 32 Shrinivasan, K. 198 Siebert, F. S. 213(n15) Sierra Leone 83, 149, 220 Silverman, M. 266(n95) Simmons, T. M. 119, 138(n3) ‘simultaneous existence of competing historical times’ (Schwarz) 20, 27(n59), 39 Sinclair, G. 161(n9), 162(n18, n27) Singapore 11, 89, 142(n99), 226, 228–30 Singh, G. 232 Singha, R., 186(n32), 186–7(n37) Sinha, Lord 178 Sinha, M. viii, 5, 11–12, 27(n51), 48(n91), 72(n67), 77, 80, 81–2, 84–5, 123, 124, 168–87 Skidelsky, R. 31, 45(n17) slavery/slave trade 82, 85, 89, 91, 93, 103, 120, 158, 219–24, 236(n17) Smith, Adam 31 Smith, Andrew 115(n9) Smith, Anthony 53 Smith, B. 104–5, 111, 115(n16–17) Smith, N. 141(n78) Smuts, J. C. 177, 178, 179–80, 187(n46) Social Action Fund (FAS, France, 1958–) 245, 263(n28), 266(n88) ‘social death’ 224

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social history 51, 55, 59, 68, 71(n61), 74, 163(n36) social housing (HLM) x, 245–6, 258, 261 quota system 246, 263(n36) social responsibility 12–13, 201–2, 203, 210 sociology 40, 47(n78), 216, 250 SONACOTRAL 244–5, 262(n23, n39) re-named SONACOTRA (1963–) 259, 266(n88) Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 220, 236(n20) South Africa 17, 18, 27(n48), 53–4, 60, 70(n33), 83, 92, 103, 169, 177–8, 186(n35), 230–2 ‘Indian question’ 179 South African War 30, 37 South West Africa 149, 163(n30) Southeast Asia 109, 112, 151, 156, 164(n40), 220, 226–30, 234–5 Southern Rhodesia 50, 94 space 7, 124–9, 134, 137, 139–40 spatial concepts and historical geographies 3, 6–7, 118–42 trajectories 135–9, 141 Spencer, H. 228 Spiers, E. M. 86, 97(n45), 160(n2), 161(n5) Spinoza, B. de 136, 142(n93) Spire, A. 266(n86) Spivak, G. 83 Sri Lanka/Ceylon 86, 225, 226, 235 Srinivasan, C. R. 207–8, 209 Stanley, Sir Henry Morton 76, 100, 104, 106, 109, 114(n3), 116(n28) state welfare 20–1, 248–9 Statesman 198, 199t Statute of Westminster (1931) 174 Steel, F. 140(n49) stereotypes 82, 85–6, 91–2, 159 Stern, P. J. 185(n17) Stewart, G. 139–40(n46) Stoler, A. L. 60, 69(n14), 71–2, 78, 97(n12), 94, 98(n65), 138(n10),

154–5, 157, 161(n8, n15), 164(n45), 165(n56, n59), 187(n51), 274(n12) Strauss, A. 47(n78) Streets, H. 90–1, 98(n58), 162(n18) Strobel, M. 78, 96(n11) Studies in Imperialism series i-ii, 1–3, 34, 44–5(n13), 74–99, 240–1, 261–2 British and imperial history (re-connected) 23–4, 270–1 ‘commodity’ histories 17–18 ‘conservative historical empiricism’ 13–14, 34, 49, 52, 55, 57–8, 113 future directions 268–74 general editor’s introductions 68, 73(n113), 80, 234, 240, 261(n2), 270, 274(n3) influence 270–1 launch 30–1, 39, 40 MacKenziean moment 3–5, 29–48 Sudan 63, 150, 163(n36) sugar 17, 158, 221–2, 225 Sumatra 154–6, 157 Sundaram, L. 233, 238(n67) Sweetness and Power (Mintz, 1985) 17 Sylvester-Williams, H. 220 Tagliacozzo, E. 165(n56) Taylor, A. J. P. 33 Taylor, J. E. 27(n65) Taylor, M. 28(n67) Taylor, Miles 186(n27) Technical Advisors for Muslim Affairs (CTAM) 243, 244, 246, 266(n88, n95) Tegart, Sir Charles 149, 162(n25) Tensions of Empire (Stoler and Cooper, eds., 1997) 60, 69(n14), 71–2 Territoriale agents 151 Thackeray, D. 26(n37) Thatcher, M. H. 28(n67), 34–43 passim, 79–80, 46(n51) Third British Empire 11–12, 168–87

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First British Empire 169, 170, 172, 181, 184(n14), 185(n17) further research 181–3, 187 overview of nomenclature 170–4 Second British Empire 169, 170, 172–3, 181, 184(n14), 185(n17– 18) Third British Empire (Zimmern, 1926) 170, 184(n8) Thomas, M. viii-ix, 3, 7–8, 9, 143–67 Thompson, A. S. ix, 1–28, 42–3, 124, 126, 240–67, 271–2, 273 Thompson, E. P. 141(n90) Thomson, J. 226, 237(n44) Thorniley-Walker, J. 273 Thuku, H. 179 Tibenderana, P. K. 163(n34) Tilak, B. G. 197 Tilley, H. 67, 73(n112) time 19–20, 135–6, 137, 141(n89), 152 Times (London) 192, 210 Times of India 198, 199t, 202, 212, 214(n91) Times Literary Supplement 24(n5) Tinker, H. 186(n26, n33), 222–3, 236(n22) trade unions 60, 159, 259 ‘trans-national history’ 216, 217–18, 236(n7), 261 ‘trans-nationalism of empire’ (Howe) 8 ‘transculturation’ (Pratt) 104 Travellers in Africa (Youngs, 1994) 104, 115(n13) ‘Travelling Culture’ (Clifford, 1997) 217, 236(n3) Trentmann, F. 25(n15), 170, 184(n9) triage (France) 246 Trinidad 158, 220, 223–5, 229 Tripodi, C. 162(n24) Tunisia 148, 159, 166–7 Turner, B. A. 42, 48(n92) Turner, F. J. 268 Turner, M. 166(n76) Twaddle, M. 187(n40)

Ulster 40, 47(n86) ‘unified field theory’ 137 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 101, 171 United Kingdom domestic versus imperial influences 4, 6, 7, 15, 23, 120–1, 123–4, 235 and empire 119–24, 138–9 United Kingdom: Colonial Office 179, 181, 247, 248, 249 United Kingdom: Home Office 22, 247, 249, 252, 254–5 United Kingdom: immigration, welfare, housing (1945–62) 247–51, 263–4 discrimination, owner-occupation, private rented accommodation 249–51 post-war housing and state welfare 248–9 United Kingdom: immigration, welfare, housing (1962–74) 251–5, 264–5 dispersal, segregation, repatriation (debates) 253–5 Foley and immigration 252–3 foundations of ‘multicultural state’ 251–2 United Kingdom: India Office 176–7, 178 United Kingdom: War Office 143, 145 United Nations 12, 101, 182, 191, 210–11 United States ‘empire acting like nation-state’ (Zizek) 182 University of British Columbia 55 Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 83–4 Vaughan, C. 69(n1) venereal disease 83, 87–8, 92, 94–5 Vernacular Press Act (India, 1878) 194, 195t, 195 Victorian Soldier in Africa (Spiers, 2004) 86, 97(n45)

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Viet, V. 262(n12, n23), 265(n85) Vietnam 150, 153, 163(n33) violence 150, 154–5, 157–8, 160, 163(n31), 165(n69), 197 Vivien Law (1970) 258 Voeltz, Richard A. 78, 96–7(n11) Volovitch-Tavares, M-C. 266(n93) waged labour 147, 151 Wainwright, A. M. 90, 98(n56), 262(n9) Wakeman, R. 262(n13) Walcott, D. 235, 239(n78) Wales ii, 35, 40, 47(n86), 175, 271 Walker, P. G. 254–5, 265(n81) Wallace, A. R. 107, 111 Wallerstein, I. 132, 141(n73) Ward, K. 139(n46) Ward, S. ix, 3–5, 9, 14, 15, 24(n4), 25(n25), 29–48, 63, 122, 271 Warner, M. 86 Warren, A. 42 Waterhouse, F. 115(n9) Watson, G. J. 47(n86) Webster, A. 48(n90), 164(n47), 262(n9) Webster, W. 263(n42), 264(n56) welfare 21, 26(n41), 240–67 Welsby, A. 273 Wertheim, W. F. 165(n56) West Africa 108, 116(n27), 151, 153, 163(n38) What Ruling the World Did to British (Paxman, 2011) 30 Wheelis, A. 47(n78) White, N. J. 48(n90), 164(n47), 262(n9) Whitting, R. 46(n51) Wiener, M. J. 166(n69) Wigley, P. 185(n20) Wilder, G. 184(n12) Williams, F. 201 Williams, G. A. 35 Williams, R. 188, 213(n2) Wilson, H. 248, 252

Wilson, W. 180, 187(n46) Wilsonian moment 12, 25(n22), 182, 187(n52) Wingate, P. 191, 213(n12) Winks, R. W. 85 Wittenberg, J. 27(n52–3, n61) Wollstonecraft, M. 91 Wolpert, S. 203, 214(n49) women 20, 76, 80, 82, 85–6, 89, 93–4, 246, 270, 273 women’s history 74, 78 Woollacott, A. 78–9, 94, 97(n14) working class 30, 44(n10), 59, 121, 257 World Bank 101 ‘world history’/’global history’ 128, 216 World War I 32, 143, 171–2, 175–6, 196, 200, 218, 228, 230–2, 237(n47) inter-war years 11, 131, 148, 153, 160, 162(n24), 169–74, 176, 182, 190, 200, 243 World War II 38, 171, 172, 191, 196, 200, 202, 207, 234 post-war era (1945–) 10, 21–2, 101, 121, 150, 172, 188–9, 191, 200–3, 210, 214, 234, 242, 243, 248–9, 261 Worsthorne, P. 38 Yen Bay mutiny (1930–1) 154, 165(n51) Yeoh, B. 142(n99) Young, R. 25(n24) Young India (newspaper) 194 Young Kikuyu Association 179 Youngs, T. 86, 97(n41), 104 Zambezi 107 zenana 89, 91 Zimmerman, A. 114, 117(n47) Zimmern, A. 170–1, 184(n8) Zizek, S. 182, 187(n51) Zoological Society (UK) 107

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