Colonial Insurgency and Historical Silences
It was we ourselves who had supplied to our subject-races the materials which were now being used to weave the imperial winding-sheet. We had done this deliberately, not swerving from the stance adopted by Macaulay in the 1830s when he had pressed for the adoption of an English education system in India, under whose discipline Indians should be trained to become fit to take responsibility for their own affairs.
A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies
Our Empire has grown into a Commonwealth of free nations, because of Britain’s deliberate policy towards her Imperial responsibilities. What has happened today, therefore, is not a retreat but a direct fulfilment of the noble work done by our fathers and grandfathers in taking our traditions of liberal law and material progress to every quarter of the globe.
Lord De La Warr, upon the Royal Empire Society substituting the word ‘Commonwealth’ for ‘Empire’ in its masthead
In his important assessment of the historiographical place of the Haitian Revolution of 1891, the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued that it is not so much active suppression as powerful silences that determine the process of writing histories. Trouillot is not simply suggesting here that there are areas of silence in individual historical accounts, as there might be in any narrative, but that ‘cycles of silences’ pre-exist specific histories ‘to fit a world of possibilities’ already deemed to be the only ones.25 In the case of European historiography, what he calls a ‘bundle of silences’ has emerged specifically around the resistance of the colonized and the enslaved to the colonial project.26 For Trouillot, the turning into a ‘non-event’ of the Haitian revolution is emblematic of the way in which racism, slavery and colonialism have themselves been marginalized, for in spite of ‘their importance in the formation of what we now call the West … none of these themes has ever become a central concern of the historiographical tradition in a Western country’.27 In these traditions, the period from 1776 to 1843 is generally taught as an ‘age of revolution’ while essentially maintaining a silence on ‘the most radical political revolution of the age’ – that which took place in Haiti.28 Trouillot’s point about the elision of black agency can be generalized, I believe, to struggles against colonialism and slavery more generally, where we see ‘archival power at its strongest, the power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and, therefore, of mention’.29 Thus, the narratives that continue to circulate and make sense to a majority of Western observers and readers, Trouillot suggests, is one where the West – and elite white men in particular – are the prime movers of history, taking the initiative and the action necessary to propel humankind inexorably towards freedom. The rest of the world inevitably figure as passive beneficiaries of this impulse. Resistance to European imperialism fails to ‘make sense’, and, like conceptions of freedom not determined by capitalist definitions, becomes quite literally ‘unthinkable’.30 It is an understanding of history that continues to have decisive – and deleterious – consequences in the spheres of British, American and NATO foreign policy.31
Trouillot’s point about the extent to which the archives are both constructed and interpreted so as to foreground the agency of white, Western, male actors is manifest in much of the British historiography of decolonization.32 Within the ‘imperial initiative’ paradigm, decolonization emerges ab nihilo, the magical consequence of imperial policies developed in a vacuum immune to anticolonial pressures. It is manifest in the ongoing use of ‘Commonwealth’ as a euphemism for regions once colonized by Britain, enshrining as it does the cherished mythology of an Empire that ruled in order to free. The Whig politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay would famously say of Britannia’s Empire: ‘it is to her peculiar glory, not that she has ruled so widely – not that she has conquered so splendidly – but that she has ruled only to bless, and conquered only to spare’.33 Harold Macmillan, presiding over post-war decolonization over a hundred years later, ‘claimed self-government had been the intention behind colonial rule from its very beginnings’.34 When it comes to critiques of imperial activity, there has been a tendency to privilege empire as a ‘self-correcting device’ rather than one that was forced to respond not just to ‘enlightened opinion’ in Britain but to the enslaved and colonized who asserted themselves.35 These notions remain part of British common sense, along with a tenacious belief that the imperial project was, on the whole, for the good, a few blips and mishaps notwithstanding. The securing and consolidation of ‘liberty’ across the globe eventually became the official rationale for a Britannic empire that, over time, spread across swathes of North America, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean. This would be a ‘moral’ and liberal empire with a humanitarian core, which enjoined ‘improving’ subject peoples until they were fit to receive their liberty. Making the globe and colonized peoples suitable for the spread of (capitalist) freedom would mark official British colonial and foreign policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of similar claims showed, this posture would continue to inflect foreign policy in the twenty-first century as well.
The treatment of resistance as episodic, even exceptional, has consequences for the wider public sphere. Historical studies that do emphasize dissent and disruption have not ‘made their way into commonsense perceptions of the British empire’.36 What Burton describes as the absence of ‘grand synthetic counter-narratives of protest, resistance and revolution’ allows for the continued salience of imperial apologetics in the public sphere, as well as a sense – even more prominent in the wake of ‘Brexit’, or the 2016 referendum vote in favour of Britain’s leaving the European Union – that this country’s imperial role and post-imperial influence continue to be valued in the postcolonial world, or the so-called Commonwealth.37 This glow of post-imperial achievement sits alongside claims that the wider British population was largely indifferent to the fate of the Empire – the ‘minimal impact thesis’.38 Despite scant evidence, Stuart Ward has written, a ‘broad consensus that British culture and society were in the post-war era insulated against the periodic shocks that occasioned the demise of British power and prestige abroad’ has taken on the contours of ‘historiographical orthodoxy’.39 Ward argues that, on the contrary, ‘the stresses and strains of imperial decline were not safely contained within the realm of high politics’.40
Insurgent Empire examines how such stresses and strains – generated over several decades throughout the period of colonial rule rather than during formal decolonization alone – made their impact felt in periodic crises of empire, which in turn cleared the ground for more critical assessments of the imperial project. If, as Ward argues, it is ‘precisely the imperial context that underpinned contemporary perceptions of national degeneration’ and cast doubts on Britain’s place in the world, the various challenges to that supremacy throughout the centuries of imperial rule caused repeated crises of rule and of national identity.41 Anxieties about national degeneration were often occasioned by the repression deployed against those colonial others who laid claims to their own humanity and freedom. Many of the ideas of ‘British character’ that Ward enumerates as progressively weakened by the imminent end of empire – they included notions of ‘duty’, ‘loyalty’, ‘service’, ‘self-restraint’ and ‘gentlemanly conduct’ – were in fact thrown into crisis each time insurgency was followed by repression.42 The edifice of colonial rule was subject throughout its duration to implosions – and explosions – when confronted with resistance, and these registered in public and political discourse in Britain. If decolonization was a ‘complex and intermittent process that ebbed and flowed over time’, so too was the consolidation and continuance of colonial rule, punctuated as it was by resistance and repression.43
If, as John Mackenzie has argued, the ‘notion of the utterly indifferent British’ when it came to the fate of empire ‘is something of a self-justificatory and consolat
ory travesty’,44 it is worth asking how this obsessive insistence on indifference also contributes to the entrenchment of the ‘cycle of silences’ with regard to the agency of colonial subjects more generally. The mythology of a managed decolonization which owed little to anticolonial resistance also resonates more generally with what Joanna de Groot describes as a familiar ‘liberal wish to find acceptable and safe stories of reform (the theme of progressive change without conflict, going back to Macaulay)’.45 Much the same impulse would seem to animate an insistence on the marginality of British critics of empire: it is not necessary to suggest that British dissidents on imperial questions ever had the dominant hand, still less hegemony, to argue for the importance of examining connections between dissidence in a society that did not, in fact, speak with one voice on the matter of the Empire, and insurgencies which took place in distant outposts of Empire. To examine the dissident, even in the margins, is to move away from what Andrew Thompson describes as an emphasis in much imperial history-writing on ‘the official mind’, or the policy-making elite, rather than considering ‘an array of external forces working upon government’.46 This is not to say, of course, that opposition invariably had a determinate effect upon government; lines of influence are, in any case, never easy to disentangle. If, as Thompson asserts, imperial politics ‘was pre-eminently an extra-parliamentary activity’, then opposition to empire with the agitation and activism that accompanied it should also not be assessed purely in terms of effects or numbers.47 At the same time, we shall see that anticolonialism in Britain sometimes did decisively shape parliamentary and media debates.
Postcolonial Studies and Anticolonial Insurgency
While the field that has come to be known as postcolonial studies is assumed, in theory, to take a more than passing interest in the question of resistance to empire and imperialism, in its most influential incarnations it has emphasized the post-over the anti-colonial. In spite of its emphasis on analysing colonial discourse, the field as a whole has failed to challenge the tenacious assumption that ideas of ‘freedom’ – not just individualist or liberal renditions of liberty, but freedom in the broadest sense – are fundamentally Western (meaning European and American) in provenance, albeit available for appropriation. (I will come to more recent elaborations of the ‘decolonial’ later in this introduction.) In part, ironically enough, the focus on ‘Eurocentrism’ has resulted in a fixation on rejecting European thought generally – and the Enlightenment in particular – without a consideration of multiple lines of cultural and political engagement in the making of the entity called ‘Europe’. Rather than properly considering the Enlightenment as at once historically and culturally situated, drawing on resources that are not in fact just ‘European’ but are potentially universal in some of their aspirations, intersecting with ideals theorized outside Europe, the field’s most influential scholars, as Neil Lazarus suggests, ‘have written at length to condemn as naive or, worse, tacitly authoritarian, any commitment to universalism, metanarrative, social emancipation, revolution’.48 The notion of the universal – in the sense of ideas and values that might have a certain supple applicability across cultures – is itself assumed a priori to have only ever been thought of in Europe, which is guilty not only of having abused the idea – which its ruling elites certainly did – but of having come up with it in the first place. Such a sweeping repudiation of principles that might be held in common across contexts, indeed might have been forged through contact, flies in the face of the multiple historical and cultural sites where notions such as universal rights and social justice have been theorized. It also ignores a global history of human resistance to tyranny and exploitation of various kinds. Where theories of resistance are offered, the dominant wisdom of postcolonial studies has stressed what Homi K. Bhabha describes as ‘affective ambivalence and discursive disturbance’.49 Bhabha’s transmutation of the putative ambivalence of colonial elites into a general theory of imperial undoing – which posited, as Lazarus puts it, ‘a certain slippage at the heart of the colonial episteme’ – has been persuasively subjected to critique, and need not detain us unduly here.50 We may, however, wish to register the ways in which theories of psychic ambivalence shade without too much difficulty into a sanctioned, at times mandatory, ambivalence towards the brute reality of imperialism itself; this ambivalence in turn underlies and enables the popular apologetics for and defences of the British Empire, not least in the popular, and usually fatuous, ‘balance sheet’ assessments of empire’s pluses and minuses. This privileging of ‘ambivalence’ – not a million miles from ‘equivocation’ – may account for why, nearly thirty years into its disciplinary consolidation, postcolonial studies has not succeeded in definitively dislodging imperialist apologetics. In turn, this failure entrenches a narrow – indeed, triumphally capitalist – understanding of ‘freedom’ when, in fact, the history of empire is also a history of contesting interpretations of the term.
By way of situating some of this book’s own concerns, I want to pause briefly on some significant – and representative – recent work that has drawn on postcolonial approaches. (Readers who wish to proceed with the historical episodes should feel free to skip straight to Chapter 1 now.) Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) locates itself within the wider critique of European liberal thought developed by scholars such as Uday Mehta, Walter Mignolo and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, to argue that ‘liberal philosophy, culture, economics, and government have been commensurate with, and deeply implicated in, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire’.51 Lowe herself seeks to make visible in this context global connections that bring together aspects of the imperial project (including indenture and enslavement) as they unfolded in Europe, the Americas, East Asia and Africa. Her aim is to provide an ‘unsettling genealogy’ that ‘examines liberalism as a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade, as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied to others’.52 Exclusion, in other words, is built into the structure of liberalism. Concepts such as ‘reason’, ‘freedom’ and ‘civilization’ work to effect colonial divisions to which the subordination of colonized and dispossessed peoples, and the appropriation of their land and labour, are fundamental. This insight is unexceptional – indeed, familiar.
But what of those who resisted dispossession and expropriation? They do not loom large in Lowe’s study. Lowe notes that, in the case of settler conquests in the Americas, ‘native resistance to European intrusion was regularly cast as a threat to the security of settler sovereignty’ (which, of course, it was!), and that black abolitionists such as Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Prince and Olaudah Equiano were ‘often persuaded’ to use the same terms of appeal as white abolitionists – against ‘cruelty’ and ‘immorality’, and to the ideal of a ‘just, humanitarian English society’. Elided from the discussion, somewhat paradoxically, are the challenges offered by the colonized to the regimes that confronted them, including liberalism.53 Without romanticizing such agency or proposing that insurgent consciousness is easily accessed, it is nonetheless possible to assess the ways in which liberalism was in turn thrown into crisis by, and often responded to, the resistance of the colonized, in sometimes unexpected ways, including appropriating and domesticating it. The example Lowe herself gives is a case in point: drawing on the distinguished work of Thomas C. Holt, she rightly notes that ‘ “emancipation” clearly did not establish freedom for Black peoples in the British West Indies, many of whom were still confined to the plantation, and others were left bound in economic servitude and poverty’.54 At the same time, we may wish to pay attention – drawing both on the extant archives of counterinsurgency and the work of Holt and others – to the ways in which the ‘emancipated’ did not take the condition of continuing subjugation lying down; indeed, in the case of the West Indies, they were often the first to a
rticulate, through their words and actions, a refusal of the condition of wage-slavery, insisting on the right to own and farm small plots of land over working for planters. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 both enacted resistance to a post-Emancipation regime deemed to be exploitative and, through the unfolding of the ‘Governor Eyre’ controversy back in Britain, enabled this resistance to generate debate and effect deep divisions among the metropolitan bien-pensant, who had to find a way to deal with the reality of black insurgency.
In the necessary process of challenging its premises, it is vital not to repeat the elisions and silences of European liberalism, particularly those that emerged historically around the agency of the enslaved and the colonized. Otherwise, at the very moment of interrogating liberalism’s elisions and exclusions, we rehearse the ways in which it renders nugatory the agency and actions of those who put pressure on it, questioned it, or rejected it outright. Despite its formally adversarial stance, the focus of colonial discourse analysis, much like that of imperial history, has largely been on the imperial centre – ironically, to the detriment of a consideration of those who were subject to these regimes, but not necessarily (indeed, hardly ever) silently so. Colonized or enslaved people did not just create ‘the conditions for liberalism’ – they often also forced open its premises and challenged its exclusions, drawing not just on Caliban’s learning of Prospero’s language but also on their own existence, experiences and cultural resources to do so. Similarly, while their exclusion may have been constitutive of European humanism, the insistence of the colonized on their own humanity demanded, and often obtained, a reconstitution. An emphasis on the official mind, often made inevitable by the slant of the archives themselves, should not lead us to enact our own forms of forgetting, making black agency invisible or rendering resistance ‘unthinkable’ in Trouillot’s sense of the term.
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