Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  When the negroes obtained their nominal freedom, they very naturally preferred to work for themselves. They desired to be their own masters … But, because they have done this – because they declined to work for the white planters as slavishly and cheaply as when they were slaves – they have been denounced as lazy, sensual, and insolent creatures, unfit for freedom and incapable of sustained industry.156

  The piece quotes extensively from various depositions, as well as the ‘St Ann’s Address’, which it attributes to Gordon, offering a different reading from that articulated by the British authorities. ‘Phrases deemed inflammatory and exaggerated’ such as ‘ “Naked people of St Ann’s”! … “Starving people of St Ann’s!” ’ were, it argued, ‘words descriptive of facts which are not less terrible than true’.157 Any form of speaking out by Jamaicans came up against a pernicious interdict: ‘If the negroes complain of this treatment, they are at once charged with rebellious and murderous designs.’158 This suppression of voices found a direct parallel in Britain, noted the chair of another public meeting, held to protest the welcome banquet held for Eyre upon his return to a country where ‘the working men could not make themselves heard in the House of Commons because unrepresented’. The ‘only way left to them to show that they took an interest in the affairs of the nation was to hold public meetings’.159

  The struggles of the Jamaican blacks and the violent repression they subsequently faced not only found expressions of identification or outrage back in Britain, but also offered opportunities for the practice of democracy. The meeting alluded to above took as its purpose expressions not just of solidarity with blacks struggling for their due, but also of distancing the English working classes from the white ruling classes, for ‘it behoved the people of England to demonstrate … that they did not identify themselves with acts which had disgraced the British name’.160 This reclaiming of nation was in stark and deliberate opposition to Charles Kingsley’s bombastically imperialist and much-resented ruling-class encomiums to Eyre at his welcome banquet as an embodiment of ‘the English spirit of good-nature, of temper, of the understanding of human beings, of knowing how to manage men … that English spirit which had carried the Anglo-Saxon tongue round the world, and which had made us the fathers of the United States and the conquerors of India’.161 If the Jamaica controversy had indeed set into motion a struggle over the very meanings of Britain/England, it was one to which the question of democracy and economic justice as posed by the Afro-Jamaicans was central. The expropriations of land and labour were, in fact, issues that resonated for both white and black working classes, as ‘the chief end and object of all royal and aristocratic governments is to enslave the masses of mankind’ – an insight from ‘Northumbrian’ that directly echoed Jamaican peasant views of wage labour on plantations as slavery in another form.162 Gordon’s death was deemed exemplary of the lengths to which the ruling classes would go to preserve this state of affairs. Wearing a black armband like the others, and standing on a wagon draped with a flag bearing the name ‘G. W. Gordon’ in white letters surrounded by wreaths, one speaker pronounced:

  George William Gordon … was murdered without a trial, although the charges brought against him were inquired into by the foppish striplings of an odious and dangerous aristocracy. (Hisses) And, need he say that the same aristocracy would treat John Bright – (loud cheers) – and Edmond Beales – (cheers) – in a similar manner to-morrow if they had the chance? (Cries of ‘They would if they dare.’)163

  Another speaker would note that ‘it had always happened that the aristocracy of England were opposed to the rights and liberties of the people’.164 The common condition of exploitation, and not race, had to be the basis of kinship.

  Even as these radical responses, and the distinctly more moderate line taken by the Jamaica Committee, differed in their approach to the question of how resistance should be undertaken, there are clear lines of connection between them. One can be traced through Edward Beesly, a Positivist like Harrison, and also a member of the Jamaica Committee. A student of Richard Congreve’s at Oxford, a labour campaigner and close associate of Karl Marx in the run-up to the First International, Beesly, also a London university professor, became a familiar voice speaking and writing on the Eyre controversy. He was one of the few writing in the pages of Reynolds to maintain a racial hierarchy in discussing the Jamaicans: ‘The treatment of uncivilized races by Englishmen is a subject that demands far more attention from workmen than it gets.’165 Beesly’s racial hierarchy finds a parallel in his delineation of a class order in which the working classes must be represented by educated middle-class men. For him, Gordon’s death was not so much a story about the Jamaican poor as one of the disciplining of those more elevated individuals who spoke for the margins: ‘Every one [sic] who makes himself … conspicuous by pointing out to the lower orders the political and social evils under which they suffer will do so at a terrible risk.’166 Here too, however, Gordon is a cautionary tale for what might just as well happen in England with liberal leaders:

  Take care of Mr Bright or Mr Beales. They have both of them repeatedly used much stronger language than any that was proved against Gordon. If the reform struggle should become more embittered; if the Tories, by their insane management should bring about a riot, attended with loss of life … what will there be to prevent Mr Bright and Mr Beales from being treated as Mr Gordon was? The cases would be exactly parallel.167

  Beesly shares with his radical working-class readers a developed sense of the implications for democratic agitation in Britain of allowing repression in the colonies to go unchallenged. Indeed, he suggests, the key bone of contention in Jamaica may also have an exact parallel:

  But political privilege is not the dearest possession of the upper classes. Touch their monopoly of the land and you will see their teeth. When Mr Bright said in Glasgow that half Scotland belonged to a dozen proprietors, and half England to a hundred and fifty, he put his finger on one of the most frightful blots on English civilization.168

  There is no reason to assume, he points out, that the violence exercised against a different race in Jamaica will not be reprised at home should the same kinds of challenges to power – and land-ownership – be issued by white working people. To allow ‘the Jamaica precedents to remain unchallenged’ is to ‘furnish our oligarchy with a weapon’ that can be turned against white Britons.169

  Beesly was writing this in a letter to Reynolds, as he puts it, because ‘your journal is read by a very large number of workmen who never look at any other’. He himself was a more regular contributor to the Bee-Hive, the trade union journal for the ‘industrial classes’ which also covered the Morant Bay uprising extensively – though slightly differently from Reynolds, in that its emphasis was on the consequences of the repression for organized British working-class agitation against systemic exploitation. In the pages of the Bee-Hive on 25 November 1865, Beesly argued that the punishments inflicted on the Jamaicans were self-evidently severe, but that the real point was ‘that they have been inflicted to maintain an abominable system which it behoves our working men here to do their best to tear up the roots’.170 At stake were the relations between labour and a parasitical planter class, eager to sit on its hands doing nothing, ‘a burden on the land’, that prioritized profits at the cost of both wages and the public purse. Beesly is at his polemical best when, in a series of reversals, he attacks those in power, using the same terms Thomas Carlyle famously deployed when polemicizing against freed blacks as ‘lazy’: ‘The emancipation of the blacks left all the land in the possession of the whites, a lazy, vicious, bankrupt class, filled with hatred for their late slaves; too proud to work, though not ashamed to beg in a genteel way.’171 The charges of ‘laziness’, he observes, are also deployed at home against strikers. Beesly notes that, in response to demands for better wages from black workers, white Jamaican planters ‘sent half round the world for shiploads of “Coolies” to do the work cheap – a trade which, if the truth
be told, is not much better than the old slave-trade’.172 He was, of course, referring to indentured labour. While Beesly famously distances himself from the black man as such – ‘I protest I am no negro-worshipper’ – and remains unshaken in his assumption of black inferiority, it is precisely this protestation that makes his call for solidarity and parity of rights worth examining.173 Indeed, it is because he shares a wider liberal sense of racial hierarchies that Beesly’s call for ‘vigorous and indignant’ cross-racial and international solidarity is striking. His advice is that the trade unions draw up a petition to parliament which would make it clear that the petitioners as ‘labourers look on the cause of the labourers in Jamaica as their own’. Thus, ‘when the upper classes see how such injustice to labour, even in a distant colony, is resented by the working men of England, they will be careful how they trifle with similar interests at home’.174 Comparing events in Morant Bay to the Hyde Park riots, he notes in another piece: ‘In both instances wealth and respectability employed the executive apparatus to put down the lower orders.’175

  Other articles in the Bee-Hive, however, did engage directly with the question of race. A regular columnist, ‘Plain Dealer’, would put it with absolute clarity: ‘Yes, there are working-men in Jamaica. Though their skin is black, their hair woolly, their noses flat, and their lips thick, they are entitled to the same consideration and sympathy as working-men of fair complexion.’176 For Plain Dealer, Morant Bay was a case of outright repression in response to legitimate agitation where, he would write a year later, ‘agrarian discontent and political aspiration among the people of Jamaica were extinguished in their own blood and in that of good men who acknowledged to them that they had cause for complaint and did well to speak up for them-selves’.177 Again, speech is the key issue, the writer observing that repression along the lines of what took place in Jamaica ‘would be an excellent device … for silencing the voice of the working men of England claiming the rights of industry, and soliciting a share in the constitutional franchise of their country’; they too could be ‘hunted down or hanged up or shot as the negroes were’.178 Race hierarchies are operative, but whiteness will not in itself protect English agitators. Sympathy for Eyre, he opined,

  may be attributable to the habit of setting a lower value upon the lives of black or coloured men than upon those of the white. But, while no such distinction is to be for an instant allowed, neither must we delude ourselves with the vain imagination, that it makes, in the minds of those who entertain it, the least difference in favour of the working men of England over the field negroes of Jamaica.179

  Where Beesly relies on a certain abstraction to emphasize that the same system operates in both metropole and colony, which leaves agitating labour vulnerable across the board, Plain Dealer warns against allowing sympathy and solidarity to emerge solely on race lines: ‘Those of our countrymen who, in any dispute between white and black, confine their fellow-feeling to that side where they find complexions like their own, are not to be trusted, let them protest ever so loudly their devotion to the cause of public freedom and to the interests of the community’.180 Racists, in short, cannot be depended upon for solidarity along class lines either, Plain Dealer cautions, also denouncing littérateurs like Kingsley for failing to develop sympathies with their fellow humans of a different hue.181 The Bee-Hive columnist is clearly attuned to the clash of freedoms in Jamaica, warning that the whites of the West Indies are the ‘sworn enemies’ of all liberty ‘but that which would give them license to work out their own will’.182 Real freedom is necessarily universal, so that its violation in one place constitutes its violation in another: ‘Most certainly the only way to preserve the liberties of our country is, to assert and vindicate them wherever they are assailed and violated.’183 In the killing of Gordon and the harm visited upon the Jamaican blacks, ‘our rights as Englishmen, the rights of every one of us, have been outraged and endangered’. If the Jamaicans stood up for their rights, so must Englishmen, duly inspired – shades of Ernest Jones here – ‘make a stand for your rights’ rather than sitting ‘quiet with our hands before us and our mouths closed’.184 The test to which Emancipation was put by the Jamaicans is not irrelevant in England, for the ‘time has come when we must make it seen whether English freedom is a real fact or a mere fancy’.185

  Another prominent member of the Jamaica Committee writing in the Bee-Hive, the Oxford classics don Goldwin Smith, also picked up on the distinction between ‘public liberty’ and the planter class’s liberty to oppress at will by warning that, for the plantocracy, race bonds did not actually extend across class: ‘Do we flatter ourselves that the Eyre party would regard the English workman or peasant as their own flesh and blood, and that they would not … do to him what they glory in having done to the negro peasantry of Jamaica?’186 Noting that Gordon’s lighter skin had not ultimately protected him, Smith also suggests that if an agitation similar to that in Jamaica were to arise in England and create class ‘panic’, a sense of racial kinship would not stop ‘the planter party here’ from implementing ‘Jamaican measures of oppression’, referencing once again the Peterloo massacre and bloodshed in Ireland. For Smith, the violence visited upon light-skinned, chromatically liminal figures like Gordon and the Irish is evidence that race is no ring-fence when it comes to ‘oligarchic vengeance’; resistance must therefore also be forged across race lines. ‘Startling’ and ‘extravagant’ though it may sound, the prospect of a real war is ‘a hard struggle between the enfranchised and the unenfranchised, between capital and labour’.187 The most developed account of the wider implications of the ‘fatally chronic’ exercise of arbitrary power ‘to maintain our vast unresting empire’, however, came from Harrison, who, though he had declared himself to be politicized by the Indian uprising, really emerged as an oppositional voice on colonial issues with his work for the Jamaica Committee, in which he clearly drew on the emergent identification of the Jamaican peasant with English working-class causes.188

  For Harrison, whose Martial Law: Six Letters to ‘The Daily News’ was collated and published by the Committee as a single work with their imprimatur on it, there could also be no impermeable border which would prevent the wave-like contagion of a repressive counter-insurgency from rebounding on the colonial motherland. ‘We cannot make rules for negroes’, he would note pointedly of the ‘reign of terror’ in Jamaica, ‘without baiting them like traps for Europeans … Whose turn, be it colony or citizen, might not come next?’189 His comparison of the Jamaica insurgency and those historical rebellions in England is explicit: ‘The sacred principles for which the English people once fought and struggled we now invoke for the loftier end of checking the English people themselves from imitating the tyranny they crushed.’190 For all that Harrison repeatedly invokes the principles of English ‘liberty’, his language also evinces an acknowledgement that, in the face of a struggle for rights, the ‘rebel’ and ‘repressor’ are shifting subject positions, one capable of turning into the other. At the time he was writing, the place where these liberties were being asserted was the colonies, and the person who had become the symbol of that assertion was the executed Gordon, now carrying ‘in himself all the acts of wrong which his race has endured’. With the end of slavery, Harrison notes, ‘all separate rights of colour’ have been ‘utterly extinguished’.191 Empire and motherland, imperial subject and domestic subject, are now inextricably linked: ‘Every citizen in that empire, black or white, is perilled by the sanction of outrage on any other.’192 For Harrison, it is 1857 which is in danger of becoming a precedent: ‘It called out all the tiger in our race. That wild beast must be caged again.’193 In a metaphor familiar from the rhetoric of antislavery, he expresses a particular disquiet at the civilizational inversions implied by the exercise of absolute power and arbitrary violence: ‘We know that African slavery has bred in white men a spirit more devilish than any that has ever defiled human nature – cannibalism only excepted. That spirit is yet rampant. It mastered the late
governor.’194 The idea that whereas rebellion humanized, power bestialized, was given more blunt polemical force at a working-class meeting where an effigy of Eyre was burned, one placard suggesting he should be thrown to the lions in the London Zoo to devour.

  Given the existence of this range of radical readings of the Morant Bay uprising, how do we situate the relatively cautious – if nonetheless controversial – response to it of the Jamaica Committee? In her assessment of J. S. Mill’s engagement with Eyre and the Jamaica Committee, Jennifer Pitts has speculated that ‘Mill’s motives in avoiding public mention of the racial and colonial context were in part strategic: he feared that he would lose the sympathy of the British public if he were to insist on the racial aspect of the crimes.’195 Pitts notes rightly that, despite his efforts to bring Eyre to book representing ‘his most determined criticism of the British Empire … Mill’s response fell short of a thoroughgoing interrogation of the premises and systemic failures of British rule over populations that Mill, like most of his countrymen, considered civilizationally inferior’.196 Mill, of course, had famously defended the East India Company’s rule and denied that the British had provoked the 1857 uprising. My own argument here is not that Morant Bay 1865, any more than India 1857, resulted in a discursive rejection of the imperial project as such. There can be little doubt, however, that it constitutes a significant moment of ground-clearing in which oppositional tendencies emerged, not least from within working-class and labour movements, which in turn put pressure on political liberals. In 1865, this took the form not so much of a rejection of empire, but of what might be regarded as an incipient internationalism – one in which there was a self-conscious identification of the causes of black and white people against the depredations of the ruling classes. Given the dominant and increasingly polarized view of non-whites as inferior, and therefore not deserving of parity, these early forms of theorized solidarity – in response to black resistance – are both radical and remarkable.