Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohe-6E2L3ks.

  4 Patricia Lorcin, Algeria and France, 1800–2000. Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006); Claire Eldrige, ‘“Le symbole de l’Afrique perdue”: Carnoux-en-Provence and the pied noir Community’, in Kate Marsh and Nicola Frith (eds.), France’s Lost Empires. Fragmentation, Nostalgia and la fracture coloniale (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 125–30.

  5 Charles-André Julien and Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (2 vols., Paris: PUF, 1964, 1979).

  6 Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition Coloniale de 1931. Mythe républicain ou mythe impériale?’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire I. La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 561–91.

  7 Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation. An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London: Methuen, 1969), 93, 97.

  8 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians. The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1967), xi, 5.

  9 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Rise of Christian Europe’, The Listener, 70/1809, 28 Nov. 1963, 871, republished with small qualifications in The Rise of Christian Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), 9.

  10 Niall Ferguson, Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Niall Ferguson, Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

  11 See for example Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger. A Life between Two Islands (London: Allen Lane, 2017); Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish). On Race, Identity and Belonging (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018); Nedjib Sidi Moussa, La Fabrique du Musulmam (Paris: Éditions Libertalia, 2017).

  12 Chris Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Chris Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

  13 Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

  14 Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (eds.), At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5; Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire. The White Man’s World (Oxford University Press, 2011), 13; Todd Shepard, ‘Thinking between Metropole and Colony: The French Republic, “Exceptional Promotion” and the “Integration” of Algerians, 1955–1962’, in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind I. Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 300.

  15 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

  16 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

  17 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided. Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition. Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge University, 2007); Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais, The Bengal Diaspora. Rethinking Muslim Migration (London: Routledge, 2015).

  18 Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag. The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005). See also Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia. A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2012).

  19 Richard Drayton, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46/3 (2011), 685.

  20 Pascal Blanchard and Armelle Chatelier, Images et colonies, 1880–1962. Nature, discours et influence de l’iconographie coloniale liée à la propagande coloniale et à la représentation des africains et de l’Afrique en France, de 1920 aux indépendances (Paris: Association Connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine/Syros, 1994).

  21 Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La Fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).

  22 Achille Mbembe, ‘La République et l’impensé de la “race”’, in Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire, La Fracture coloniale, 139–50 (139); see his On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).

  23 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), xv.

  24 Paul Gilroy, After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004); Gregory, The Colonial Present, 110.

  25 John Darwin, ‘Memory of Empire in Britain’, in Dieter Rothermund (ed.), Memories of Post-Imperial Nations. The Aftermath of Decolonization, 1945–2013 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 32.

  26 Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005); Schwarz, Memories of Empire; Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley, CA: Universary of California Press, 2012); Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan (eds.), Legacies of Empire. Imperial Roots of the Contemporary Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sèbe and Gabrielle Maas (eds.), Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015); Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire. Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

  27 Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi (eds.), La Guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004); Benjamin Stora with Alexis Jenni, Les Mémoires dangereuses, suivi d’une nouvelle édition de Transfert d’une mémoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016).

  28 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006); Marsh and Frith, France’s Lost Empires.

  29 See below, pp. 198, 251, 259.

  30 Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation. Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  31 John Newsinger, ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’, Race & Class, 58/2 (2016), 70–8.

  32 Anthony Lemon, ‘“Rhodes Must Fall”: The Dangers of Re-writing History’,The Round Table, 105/2 (2016), 217–19.

  33 www.qub.ac.uk/schools/happ/Discover/WilesLectureSeries/WilesLectures2013.

  34 David Andress, Cultural Dementia. How the West has Lost its History and Risks Losing Everything Else (London: Apollo, 2018), 2, 29.

  35 Sigmund Freud (1914). ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XII (1911–1913) (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1914).

  36 Jacques Bigeard, Pour une Parcelle de gloire (Paris: Plon, 1975), 229–30.

  1 Empires Constructed and Contested

  1 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, 1 (London: Dent, 1977), 389; John Darwin, The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112–43.

  2 Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6/1 (1953), 1–15; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 37–67.

  3 K. N. Chaudri, ‘The East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational Organisation’, in Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (eds.), Companies
and Trade. Essay on Overseas Trading Companies in the Ancien Regime (Leiden University Press, 1981), 31.

  4 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938); Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Sea Power. The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 149–217; J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires. Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 242–58. Sudhir Hazareesingh is writing a new biography of Toussaint Louverture.

  5 www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders.

  6 Henry Weber, La Compagnie Française des Indes, 1604–1875 (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1904), 346–79; Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-Goldzeigeur and Jacques Thobie (eds.), Histoire de la France coloniale I. Des origines à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991), 140–3; P. J. Marshall, Bengal. The British Colonial Bridgehead, 1740–1828 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 49–93.

  7 C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 79–105.

  8 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 343–7.

  9 James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 58–72.

  10 Saint-Arnaud, letter to his brother, 15 Aug. 1845, in Lettres II (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1855), 37; Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace. The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 35–47.

  11 Ferdinand de Lesseps, Souvenirs de quarante ans (2 vols., Paris: Nouvelle Revue, 1887), II, 31–2, 223–45, 759–67.

  12 André Demaison, Faidherbe (Paris: Plon, 1932), 17.

  13 Jonathan Spence, In Search of Modern China (New York and London: Norton, 1999), 122.

  14 Spence, In Search of Modern China, 149–66, 180–3.

  15 Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale I, 487.

  16 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8/4 (2006), 387–409.

  17 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Letters from Sydney [1829] in M. F. Lloyd Pritchard (ed.), The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (Glasgow and London: Collins, 1968), 165–6.

  18 Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010), 41–54.

  19 Lyndal Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia and London: University of Queensland Press, 1981), 112, 174, 265–76.

  20 Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plough. France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 278–95.

  21 A. Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868), 415–19.

  22 Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 77–93.

  23 Olive Patricia Dickason with David T. McNab, Canada’s First Nations. A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times (Oxford University Press, 2009), 186–200, 229–35; Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, 11–24.

  24 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 229–34; Dickason and McNab, Canada’s First Nations, 215–20.

  25 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past & Present, 200/1 (2008), 212–18.

  26 Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah. Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 119–33.

  27 Bayly, Indian Society, 120–7, 183–95; David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828–1914 (London: Methuen, 1977), 43–133; Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Rethinking Authority in Victorian India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165–209.

  28 McDougall, History of Algeria, 118–25, 95–100; Avner Ofrath, ‘Demarcating the cité française: Exclusion and Inclusion in Colonial Algeria under the Third Republic’ (Oxford DPhil thesis, 2017), chs. 1 and 2.

  29 Jules Ferry, preface to Le Tonkin et la Mère Patrie in Discours et Opinions V. Discours sur la politique extérieure et coloniale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1897), 555.

  30 Félix Ponteil, La Mediterranée et les puissances depuis l’ouverture jusqu’à la nationalisation du Canal de Suez (Paris: Peyot, 1964), 48–52; Jean Ganiage, ‘France, England and the Tunisian Affair’ and Agatha Ramm, ‘Great Britain and France in Egypt’, both in Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (eds.), France and Britain in Africa. Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1971), 35–72 and 73–119, respectively; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 313–17.

  31 Joseph Galliéni, Voyage au Soudan Français (Paris: Hachette, 1885); Marc Michel, Galliéni (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

  32 Winfried Baumgart, Imperialism. The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1982), 60–2.

  33 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 324–35; Darwin, The Empire Project, 227–32.

  34 Joseph Galliéni, Galliéni Pacificateur. Écrits coloniaux de Galliéni, eds. Hubert Deschamps and Paul Chauvet (Paris: PUF, 1949), 14.

  35 Roger Glenn Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered. The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in Africa, 1893–98 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Darrell Bates, The Fashoda Incident of 1898. Encounter on the Nile (Oxford University Press, 1984).

  36 Bernard Taithe, The Killer Trail. A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa (Oxford University Press, 2009). I am grateful to Rob Lemkin for this reference.

  37 Jules Ferry, speech of 31 Oct. 1883 in Discours et Opinions V, 282–3.

  38 Dennis Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1968); Pierre Brocheux and David Hémery, Indochina. An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 75–82; Spence, In Search of Modern China, 220.

  39 Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, 1825–1995 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 100–31.

  40 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 369–71.

  41 Spence, In Search of Modern China, 221–2, 229–33.

  42 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 319–20; Darwin, The Empire Project, 225.

  43 J. P. Fitzpatrick, The Transvaal from Within (London: Heinemann, 1899); Darwin, The Empire Project, 232.

  44 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 213; Darwin, The Empire Project, 239–53.

  45 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 222–6.

  46 Darwin, The Empire Project, 145–8, 155–6, 243–4.

  47 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1885), 45, 47, 185, 191.

  48 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Colour Line, 144.

  49 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Colour Line, 9.

  50 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Colour Line, 116–21.

  51 Quoted by Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen, 1974), 182–92.

  52 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Souls of the White Folk’ [1910] in Dark Water. Voices from within the Veil (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 18, 24; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Colour Line, 2.

  53 Jules Ferry, speech of 30 June 1881 in Discours et Opinions V, 20.

  54 Jules Ferry, speech of 28 July 1885 in Discours et Opinions V, 210–11.

  55 David Prochaska, Making Algeria French. Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 87, 146–53.

  56 Sylvie Thénault, ‘Les Débuts de l’Algérie algérienne’ and ‘Le code de l’Indigénat’, both in Abderrahamane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ounassa Tengour and Sylvie Thénault, Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 159–84 and 200–6; McDougall, History of Algeria, 123–8.

  57 Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 183–203; McDougall, History of Algeria, 105–6; Ofrath, ‘Demarcating the cité française’, ch. 4.

  58 Alice Conklin, A Mission
to Civilize. The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997), 77–91.

  59 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 51–119.

  60 Pierre Lyautey, L’Empire colonial français (Paris: Les Éditions de la France, 1931), 143–52; William A. Hoisington, Lyautey and the Conquest of Morocco (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 37–48.

  61 Darwin, The Empire Project, 185–201.

  62 Curzon, speech to the Royal Societies Club, London, 7 Nov. 1898, in George Nathaniel Curzon, Lord Curzon in India. Being a Selection of his Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-General of India, 1898–1905, ed. Thomas Raleigh (London: Macmillan, 1906), 8.