If, in addition to the ‘language’ of force, anticolonial rebels also deployed the ‘language of conscience’, their purpose was ‘breaking down the strategy of dehumanization’, or the ‘thingification’ that Jan Pieterse so bitterly ascribes to colonialism.81 In forcing a moral confrontation, insurgents were not merely claiming a shared humanity, but also pushing open the boundaries of what it meant to be human in a global frame: ‘In thus creating political facts, setting limits, and placing beacons, emancipation movements recreate our collective environment and collective awareness, in a process of social creation from below.’82 They were, in other words, participants not just in what Lloyd and JanMohamed call ‘a viable humanism … centered around a critique of domination’ but also ‘a utopian exploration of human potentiality’.83 Here it is worth noting that while the subjects of resistance often drew on cultural resources and social practices of their own that were not derived from the regime of the colonizer or his language, these rarely translated in any simple sense into radical difference, or what the influential theorist of ‘decoloniality’ Walter Mignolo calls ‘other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics’ – or ‘pluriversality’.84 Claims to radical alterity are, in fact, rarely to be heard in the language of resistance, even as there is often a fierce insistence on cultural specificities. Even as the vocabulary of some forms of resistance drew on spiritual and religious frameworks that were clearly situated outside the European Enlightenment, there was no self-evident repudiation of ‘reason’ (in the lower case). The capacity for reason could be conceded to the colonizer no more than ‘freedom’ or ‘humanity’, whatever the claims he made for their provenance. Challenging the ‘pretended universality’ and the pseudo-humanism of the colonizer involved enriching and reconstituting universality through multiple strands of experience and engagement, rather than conceding the logic of absolute difference. Indeed, it might even be regarded, in the face of the dehumanizing gestures of colonialism, as a rehumanizing of the metropole. For anticolonial insurgents, there was no simple opposition between the logic of ‘emancipation’ (which for Mignolo belongs to ‘Europe’) and the claims of ‘liberation’ (the ‘decolonial’ option); Europe had to be forced to make good its moralizing claims even as the struggle for self-liberation pressed inexorably on. ‘De-centering the universal emancipating claims in the projects grounded in the liberal and socialist traditions of the European enlightenment’ did not, contra Mignolo, always entail a rejection either of emancipation per se or of the possibility of universally applicable values.85 Mignolo is right to suggest that ‘emancipation’, as it was figured in European liberal discourse, is different from ‘liberation’ as it is conceived of in ‘decolonial’ discourse, deriving as it does from the provenance of revolutions in France, Britain and the United States. Events such as the Haitian revolution and the decolonization of Africa and Asia – two examples Mignolo uses – brought different dimensions to both liberalism and Marxism/socialism. At the same time, a disproportionate emphasis on radically different ‘categories of thought’ obscures the extent to which many ‘liberation’ struggles were committed to universalism – and not only because they were part of the dominant language or the colonizer’s categories of thought. Indeed, rather than offer sutured, self-contained alternatives to the idea of universal freedom, resistance often deliberately showed up the colonizer’s version of universalism to be anything but universal. Universals had to be embodied through experience and resistance, not refused as ‘European’. This often entailed working with the ‘logic of modernity’, decolonizing rather than repudiating it, teasing out its revolutionary promises.
If, as Edward Said has argued in his posthumously published set of lectures, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, we would do well to be attentive to the ways in which all language ‘exists to be revitalized by change’, then the dialogical role of struggles for liberation in enacting that revitalization needs to be taken seriously.86 They did so, not least, by forcing a process of ‘self-definition, self-examination, and self-analysis’ in the metropole. It is in that sense that Britain today is itself as much the product of anticolonialism as it is of the imperial project. Many of ‘the achievements of emancipation enter into the mainstream by being assimilated by elites’, Pieterse has argued; this turning of yesterday’s struggles into ‘today’s institutional frameworks’ holds true not only for postcolonial contexts, but also for Britain.87 The making of an empire that was forced over time to make concessions, offer reforms, attend to human rights (if only notionally), embrace ‘humane’ considerations, and even regard itself as an emancipator in the first instance, must be read as a response to resistance. We know that history records ‘the achievements of empires and imperial civilizations more than it does the humanizing and civilizing contributions of emancipation movements’.88 It is now something of a commonplace that a certain kind of narrow, self-regarding and narcissistic humanism was exported to the colonies by the colonial project. Yet it is also the case that the resistance of the colonized expanded the scope of humanism in the metropole. As Paul Gilroy notes in his eloquent case for reconsidering the scope of ‘humanity’ and ‘human rights’, historical struggles in the ‘Black Atlantic’ against racial hierarchy have come up with radical understandings of the category of the ‘human’ and developed ‘twentieth-century demands for a variety of humanism that would be disinclined to overlook Europe’s colonial crimes’.89 He notes too that the formation of transnational ‘moral communities’ – which registered in European cultures – often relied on ‘the dissemination and refinement of an idea of the human which was incompatible with racial hierarchy’.90
Resistance and the Archive
Insurgent Empire is written with Said’s insight in mind that what makes cultures and civilizations interesting is ‘not their essence or purity, but their combinations and diversity, the way they have of conducting a compelling dialogue with other civilizations’.91 This means returning to ‘what has long been a characteristic of all cultures, namely, that there is a strong streak of radical antiauthoritarian dissent in all of them’.92 Dissent, when it has an effect, often becomes invisible once absorbed into institutional frameworks.93 Part of my effort here is to make it – and its dialogic nature – visible again. The materials examined here are not unknown to historians; I make no claims to unearthing an entirely new archive – though some materials are perhaps less well known than they might be. Rather, to a rich set of historical materials that have yet to be fully interpreted, this study brings some of the tools of literary criticism – in particular, attention to voice, allusion, quotation, influence, intertextuality and translation. The word in British anticolonialism, I suggest in a Bakhtinian spirit, was half that of those who rose up against the Empire and of those who sought actively, as anticolonial writers and intellectuals, to ‘manipulate the self-understanding of the oppressor’.94 The effect of non-European strands of thought – Hindu ‘theosophy’ and l’art nègre on art, music and spirituality on fin de siècle and modernist avant-garde cultural formations – has largely been documented. I want to suggest that attention also be paid to the effect of anticolonial resistance from outside Europe and America on British dissident discourse.
To study the texts of British imperial dissidents and critics of empire in relation to the texts of anticolonial resistance is, in one sense, to study a minoritized literature – that is, to reflect on them as texts that ‘have been and continue to be subjected to institutional forgetting’, to borrow Abdul JanMohammed and David Lloyd’s words once again.95 Through close textual analysis of an assemblage of texts – accounts of trials, speeches, manifestos, journalism, essays, memoirs – Insurgent Empire tracks the different ways in which resistance in colonial contexts was variously received, refracted or reframed, and allowed to revise and radicalize existing dissenting tendencies in the metropole. Works by individual metropolitan figures such as Wilfrid Blunt, Fre
deric Harrison, Nancy Cunard, Fenner Brockway and Arthur Ballard are examined in relation both to the anticolonial insurgencies (and rebel voices) they read and assimilated into their work, and, where relevant, to their personal engagement with such oppositional figures who emerged from milieus of ‘unrest’ as Jamal-ud-din al-Afghani, Colonel Ahmad Orabi, Aurobindo Ghose, Claude McKay, George Padmore, C. L. R James and others. Even as the emphasis here is on close textual reading, in such a way as to cast light on influence and engagement, the account which follows insists on the worldliness of oppositional discourse, whereby individual voices and texts of insurgency and dissent are not only profoundly imbricated with each other but also shaped by the practice of struggle and the collectivities forged through it. If the tale here is told through texts and individual authors, it is with a deep awareness of the wider collective context that produced these utterances. In the language of dissenters and opposers, we frequently see something like the creative ‘process of assimilation – more or less creative – of others’ words’ that Bakhtin describes.96 The metropolitan language of liberty and justice often manifested, I suggest, an assimilation, reworking, and re-emphasis of the languages – in the broadest sense – of anticolonial insurgency.
Examining how their actions, their voices and their words were in fact assimilated and refracted in metropolitan oppositional discourse, we can re-vision colonial subjects as agents whose actual resistance put critical transformative pressure on British claims to cherishing freedom, and on those Britons who spoke and campaigned in its cause. In doing so, these subjects may themselves have drawn, as Haiti’s rebels had done, on the languages of revolution and emancipation that came to them from Europe (although there was arguably a difference between appealing to French republican values and to the benevolence of the British monarch). However, they also drew on other cultural resources, as well as on their own historical and material circumstances. ‘Freedom’ and ‘equality’ were not abstractions derived from the Enlightenment (itself hardly a homogeneous intellectual formation) – they were real and present aspirations shaped by the condition and experience of subjection and exploitation. If we take seriously, as we surely must, the testimonial insights of a campaigner like Douglass, who combines a clear admiration for British abolitionism with an unequivocal sense of the contribution of the enslaved to their own liberation, then it seems necessary to think somewhat differently about the emergence and circulation of emancipatory ideals in the context of slavery and colonialism. It would necessitate focusing more centrally than the British historiographical tradition has done on the shaping influence of struggles against British rule, and on the role played by rebellious slaves and colonial subjects in fomenting dissensus at the heart of empire. ‘Opposition to a dominant structure’, as Said observes, derives from an awareness ‘on the part of individuals and groups outside and inside it that, for example, certain of its policies are wrong’.97 Insurgent Empire seeks to elucidate the relationship between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ in opposing empire.
One of the first scholars to work on British ‘critics of empire’ was the historian Bernard Porter, who noted rightly that ‘in Britain the imperial theme had always had its counterpoint of protest’.98 Porter’s important early work examines what he calls a ‘body of disaffection’, and covers a range of contributing factors including pacifism, internationalism, humanitarianism, free trade, the ‘rule of morality’ and arguments about economic unprofitability. Symptomatically, however, the role played by anticolonial insurgency in inspiring some of this disaffection is missing. Take, for example, Porter’s discussions of the Positivist Richard Congreve, and the Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald, both of whom explicitly engaged with anticolonial resistance at different points in their careers. While noting that Congreve called for a sympathetic and respectful approach to India, Porter speculates that this might be due to the philosopher’s ‘cultural relativism’ and a related ‘dissatisfaction with European civilisation’.99 As we shall see in Chapter 1, Congreve’s position on India also had much to do with his reading of the events of the summer of 1857, which, by his own admission, caused him to shift from an earlier, more supportive, position and criticize British rule on grounds that were far from relativist. Similarly, Porter reflects on MacDonald’s travels to India as simply confirming the politician’s existing ‘ethical’ viewpoint, whereby it was wrong to force native races into British thought and perspectives. While he does acknowledge that MacDonald’s Awakening of India spoke of England having ‘as much to learn from Asia and Africa as they from her’, Porter again attributes this to the Labour leader’s personal disposition of ‘humility’ rather than to the pedagogical process to which the latter explicitly alludes. By his own account, the evolution of MacDonald’s critical views on the imperial project in India owed something to his encounters with Indian anticolonialism in the political travels he undertook just before the First World War, as I show in Chapter 4.100 The vital significance of such pedagogical engagements throughout the latter half of the British imperial era, where the direction of teaching was from insurgent colony to imperial metropole, is one of the central concerns of this book.
From the eighteenth century onwards, runs Said’s argument, there was a lively European debate on the merits and defects of colonialism drawing on earlier positions to do with the rights of the native peoples and the abuses of those rights by Europeans. During the nineteenth century, with some rare exceptions, there emerged a much more limited discussion on profitability, management and mismanagement, and on free trade versus protectionism. There are two things to say here. The first is that his correct assessment of J. A. Hobson’s very limited critique of empire notwithstanding, those whom Said terms ‘liberal anti-colonialists’ were also a rather more diverse group than it may seem at first glance.101 Secondly, what is interesting about many of these liberal critics of empire – say, Henry Nevinson or Frederic Harrison – is that where they might have begun with a simple ‘humane position that colonies and slaves ought not too severely to be ruled or held’, their positions did not remain static. They could be radicalized by anticolonial rebellions such that some, like Wilfrid Blunt (Chapter 3), did in fact come to seriously challenge European domination of non-Europeans, and precisely ‘dispute the fundamental superiority of Western man’ or white supremacy.102 Even Ramsay MacDonald, whom Said correctly describes as ‘a critic of British imperialist practices but not opposed to imperialism as such’, would come, albeit only for a brief period, to have more serious doubts about its viability.103 These individuals, and earlier moments that entailed crisis and connection, certainly do not have the weight we might more justifiably accord to anticolonial struggles and international coalitions in the era of decolonization. Yet they constitute, I believe, a vital strand of the larger story not just of anticolonialism in a global frame, but also of the ‘overlapping and intertwined’ histories of some forms of British dissidence and global resistance. In that sense, they form an important part of the backstory to the twentieth-century ‘common anti-imperialist experience’ which enabled ‘new associations between Europeans, Americans, and non-Europeans’, transforming disciplines and giving voice to new ideas in the process, as Said suggests.104
While I hope that, in the course of this study, the importance of certain forms of dissent in their own right becomes clear, it is also worth noting that the question of ‘significance’ or ‘influence’ is a necessarily circular one when it comes to dissident traditions. Dissent from regnant ideologies and discourses is, of course, never in and of itself marginal; it emerges as (often, constitutively) marginalized discourse that must articulate itself against the grain of the dominant. We must also be alert to the ways in which sidelining dissent involves the circular argument that such dissent was only to be heard from the sidelines, and must therefore be consigned to insignificance. There are also other compelling reasons to study dissent independent of what ‘impact’ it may or may not have had on the mainstream. For one, we do learn th
at not everyone ‘back in the day’ thought that the imperial project was unproblematic, as is widely believed – hence the charge of ‘historical anachronism’ when imperial depredations are judged by what are wrongly claimed to be only present-day moral yardsticks. John Darwin is correct to suggest that we might think about empire as ‘a cockpit or battleground where different versions of Britishness competed for space’, but he seems curiously resistant to the idea that those versions were themselves shaped by the imperial encounter – an engagement which necessarily included resistance to the imperial project.105 What we are left with is a curiously abstracted and ahistorical British heterogeneity which is hermetically sealed from reverse influence: ‘It was in the end the protean nature of empire as a political idea, the extraordinary range of interests and purposes to which it could be rhetorically harnessed (including preparing colonial peoples for self-rule) that allowed its demise amid a mood of public indifference.’106 What if it was, in fact, the resistance of the colonial peoples which prepared Britain ‘to relinquish or modify the idea of overseas domination’?107 Here, the narratives produced by British dissidents and critics of empire have something to teach us.
Chapter Overview
In the archives that Insurgent Empire examines, capturing exemplary moments rather than recounting a narrative history, insurgency variously registers with, reanimates and radicalizes dissenting individuals, tendencies and groups in Britain. In the first section, ‘Crises and Connections’, I discuss two exemplary nineteenth-century crises of rule, in which insurgencies of ‘sepoys’ and freed blacks impacted in different ways upon British oppositional tendencies. While each crisis – the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ in India, and the 1865 ‘Governor Eyre affair’ – had specific resonances back in Britain, awareness of these early insurgencies, and interpretations of them, broadly prepared the ground for the dialogical expansion of the moral imagination of British dissent to incorporate the consciousness of the rebel as ‘an entity whose will and reason constituted the practice called rebellion’.108 In these early crises, the ‘voice’ of anticolonial resistance could only be accessed, of course, by reading what were essentially hegemonic representations of rebellion, either in the form of dispatches or what Ranajit Guha famously termed ‘the prose of counter-insurgency’.109 From the outset, as we shall see, insurgencies within the Empire threw gradualist narratives of freedom into crisis. They helped to create the understanding among liberal campaigners in Britain that that people share a human tendency to resist injustice, whatever their context; self-emancipation itself then entered the frame of discussion as a precondition for real liberation, though at this stage more as distant counterpoint than distinct keynote.
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