Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  What emerges in Mill’s and the Jamaica Committee’s contentions as a bland constitutionalism insisting on equality for all the ‘Queen’s subjects’ (not to be treated lightly, either, in an atmosphere inclined to justify colonial and racial violence) should be understood, in crucial ways, as a distillation and reframing of a more thoroughgoing criticism from below. It is possible in one sense to read the more careful phrasing of John Stuart Mill, quoted below, and his colleagues on the Jamaica Committee as translations (with due elisions) of radical outrage into parliamentary discourse:

  If officers of the Government are to be allowed to take the lives of the Queen’s subjects improperly – as has been confessedly done in this case – without being called to a judicial account, and having the excuses they make for it sifted and adjudicated by the tribunal in that case provided, we are giving up altogether the principle of government by law, and resigning ourselves to arbitrary power.197

  Nonetheless, ‘the people’, an entity which emerges as a constitutively transnational, cross-racial collectivity in radical working-class discourse on Morant Bay, is also invoked in Mill’s speech when he notes that the ‘great public duty’ of holding the executive to account was ultimately a democratic one; it ‘may be discharged without the help of the Government: without the help of the people it cannot’.198 As Pitts suggests, while Mill’s contributions on the Jamaica affair stressed the importance of upholding the rule of law there, two weeks after news of the rebellion reached England, he expressed his support for black enfranchisement through suffrage in America, observing: ‘What has just taken place in Jamaica might be used as a very strong argument against leaving the freedmen to be legislated for by their former masters’.199 Certainly, after 1865, Mill appeared to have moved in more radical directions, even without repudiating the colonial enterprise per se, beginning in 1866 to reflect on the ‘universal colonial question’ and the consequences of Britain’s treatment of its colonial subjects, including in India during the 1857 uprising.200 The Eyre episode may have prompted Mill to struggle ‘with concerns about colonial violence towards non-European subjects as he never had in his Indian career’; his faith in colonial benevolence was no longer unquestioning.201 But the question is, why? Could it have at least something to do with the ways in which the voices of the oppressed and the rebellious resonated in parliament through the Royal Commission’s report, among other documents, in a far clearer way than had occurred during the 1857 uprising? Were they becoming, not least through Gordon’s representations, recognizable as political subjects voicing unanswerable claims? As Semmel observes, Goldwin Smith too had been a votary of British paternalism in the colonies; news of Morant Bay would change his mind.202 Eyre had to be brought to book to ‘vindicate humanity’, and ‘to prove that all British subjects, black or white, were under the protection of British law’.203 In this, Goldwin Smith tellingly notes, echoing the assertions made in public meetings, they were ‘defeated by the sympathy of the Tory upper classes with arbitrary and sanguinary violence’.204

  My father died in a morphia-dream, the subject of which was the high-handed action of Governor Eyre in Jamaica … the Eyre-prosecution, then pending, greatly occupied his mind. His last audible words concerned the controversy which was raging at the time.

  So wrote Herbert Spencer in his memoirs. In the end, Eyre successfully faced down attempts at prosecution by the Jamaica Committee, but lived out his days quietly in the Devonshire countryside, in possession of a government pension attained after some campaigning; his career as a civil servant, to the outrage of his defenders, was over. Jamaica passed to direct Crown rule as its Legislative Assembly – fearful of an eventual black majority – fell on its sword and dissolved itself in December 1865. It was an action that many, including the Jamaica Committee, saw as a public admission, if an honourable one, of ‘incapacity to rule’.205 But the reverberations of both the Morant Bay rebellion and the Governor Eyre controversy would be felt in both colony and imperial motherland for several decades to come, provoking debate and analysis well into the twentieth century. Thomas Huxley, who joined the Jamaica Committee, in opposition to friends of his like Kingsley and Tyndall, was right to say that ‘men take sides on this question, not so much by looking at the mere facts of the case, but rather as their deepest political convictions lead them’.206 He also pointed out that the affair acted as a clarifying lens to ‘help a great many people to find out what their profoundest political beliefs are’.207 I have argued here that this moral crisis, engendered by the rebellion and suppression, cannot be read in isolation from the figure of the rebel who instigates it in the first place. G. W. Gordon, Paul Bogle and many others made their voices heard in the metropole through the documents of insurgency and counterinsurgency and elicited in response both deep hostility and a sense of common cause. Like the uprising of 1857, but far more intensively and explicitly, the Morant Bay uprising raised questions and concerns which, in causing debate and self-reflection, formed the seedbed for oppositional discourse on imperial questions to emerge. In the next two chapters, I will explore how travel and contact opened up fresh modes of dialogical engagement between anticolonial movements in Egypt and India and British travellers of a dissident bent. While it was not until well into the twentieth century, during the interwar period, that something like transnational anticolonial alliances would emerge, these several chords of criticism and crisis in the nineteenth century constitute a vital backstory which teaches us that it is out of a struggle over the meanings and scope of freedom that solidarity emerges.

  3

  The Accidental Anticolonialist:

  Egypt’s ‘Urabi’ Rebellion and Late

  Victorian Critiques of Imperialism

  In the year 1876 I too, as I have said, was a believer in England, and I shared the common idea of the beneficence of her rule in the East, and I had no other thought for the Egyptians than that they should share with India, which I had not yet seen, the privilege of our protection.

  Wilfrid Blunt, Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt

  Surely, on the contrary, we should hide our heads in shame, if we had any national conscience after these hundred years of violent fraud and crime? You will say, Sir, that out of all this good will come! But good to whom? Not surely to the nations we have devoured!

  Wilfrid Blunt, The Shame of the Nineteenth Century

  The British diplomat, traveller and poet Wilfrid Blunt was somewhat anxious as he set out from his Cairo lodgings to the Kasr-el-Nil barracks on a delicate mission. His brief was to convince the popular Egyptian leader, Colonel Ahmad Urabi, that the ‘Joint Note’ issued by Britain and France three days before, on 6 January 1882, far from being hostile to the Egyptian nationalists, was in fact a favourable missive.1 Blunt was on excellent terms with Urabi, and it had made eminent sense for the British consul, Sir Edward Malet, to entrust him with the job. The problem was that Blunt himself was unconvinced by the interpretation he was supposed to advocate. The note had made abundantly clear that the two European powers would back, not the Egyptian representatives in government, led by Urabi, but Khedive Tewfik, the Turkish viceroy, through whom Britain and France exercised controlling power in Egypt. Tewfik was in conflict with Egyptian nationalists in the government, and the note was categorical and deliberate in stating its commitment to him:

  The two Governments, being closely associated in their resolve to guard, by their united efforts, against all causes of complication, internal or external, which might menace the order of things established in Egypt, do not doubt that the assurance publicly given of their fixed intention in this respect will tend to avert the dangers to which the Government of the Khedive might be exposed and which would certainly find England and France united to oppose them.2

  Clearly, there was not much room for ambiguity here. Convincing Urabi that what the British government really meant was that it would not permit Egypt to be harmed by either the Turkish sultan or the khedive would take some doing.

&nbs
p; Blunt was right to be worried about being the ‘bearer of such rubbish’, as he himself put it.3 He writes that he found Urabi, also the Egyptian under-secretary for war, alone in his office and angry, his face ‘like a thunder-cloud’ and a ‘peculiar gleam in his eye’.4 Blunt delivered his message, but the colonel’s response was scathing. ‘Sir Edward Malet must really think us children who do not know the meaning of words’, he thundered. ‘In the first place … it is the language of menace. There is no clerk in this office who would use such words with such a meaning’.5 Urabi carried on parsing the note, pointing to sentences he interpreted, quite correctly, as threatening his government. He noted that the unanimity of France and Britain on the matter could mean little other than that they would invade Egypt in much the same manner as France had recently annexed Tunis. Urabi then spoke for his countrymen: ‘Let them come … every man and child in Egypt will fight them. It is contrary to our principles to strike the first blow, but we shall know how to return it.’6 Dismissing Blunt’s services, Urabi took the Englishman by the arm and, in a softer manner, invited him to come home for a visit. Blunt, promising to return with better news, reported to Malet that the note had seriously damaged Anglo-Egyptian relations; instead of frightening the Egyptians, it had enraged and united them. His warnings were of little avail: the British government did not provide the kind of clarification or reassurance that might have calmed tensions. Within six months the British invasion and occupation of Egypt would commence, and by the following year Urabi would commence a long exile from his homeland, after a trial which found him guilty of treason.

  I begin with this anecdote, taken from Blunt’s memoirs, because it tells us something about the nature of encounters between a certain kind of British ‘political traveller’, and anticolonial figures who emerged from the crucible of late-nineteenth-century resistances to imperial incursions in Asia and Africa.7 While, on the face of it, there is little in this scene that signifies much more than another failed informal attempt at rapprochement in the months leading up to Britain’s invasion of Egypt, we might note here an inversion of familiar prototypes: it is the white man, emissary for the colonial powers, who remains silent as the Arab leader offers a lucid critique of his message and the infantilizing discourse that underpins it. Blunt represents himself in his own account as a silent interlocutor who takes the lesson back to his fellow Britons to try to persuade them to act otherwise; in this he would fail. The significance of this brief encounter also derives from a compelling backstory that tells us something not only about the age of British imperialism in North Africa, but also about how resistance to that imperialism emerged, and in turn influenced criticism of empire in Britain. If the occupation of Egypt inaugurated the modern phase of British high imperialism – the infamous ‘scramble for Africa’ would begin shortly thereafter – Egyptian resistance to it also generated early and important British counterpoints to anthems of empire. Blunt’s would be one of the loudest voices, but by no means a lone one, in a growing chorus of dissent from within Britain. The resistance in Egypt, which came to be known as ‘the Urabi revolt’, was integral to the development of his critique – as well as those articulated by the likes of Fredric Harrison, A. M. Broadley, J. S. Keay, William Gregory and Wilfred Lawson, a learning process in which British liberals found their assumptions and ideals challenged, complicated and reshaped by witnessing anticolonial rebellion and engaging with Egyptians involved in it. The story of Blunt’s relationship with Urabi, and with other significant figures on the scene of Egyptian resistance to both Turkish and European incursions – and the manner in which he changed over time from champion of English benevolence to a self-professed Egyptian nationalist – constitutes, I argue, a key strand in the story of the development of British anti-colonialism partly as a critical dialogue between anticolonial figures in the periphery and their metropolitan interlocutors.

  In this and the following chapter, I examine the role played by travellers to ‘antique lands’ in forging critical perspectives on imperial rule, as they journeyed through outposts of empire during the last phase of European imperial consolidation, from the 1880s onwards. Travelling with the intent of trying to understand what was going on in Egypt and India, these were explorers who sought to map geopolitical rather than geographical terrain, but found their categories and assumptions disrupted and reframed in the ‘contact zone’ of insurgency; indeed, as in Blunt’s case, they themselves often underwent quite dramatic political transformations.8 Episodes of insurgency such as those in 1857 and 1865 were read largely through news reportage, letters and the documents of counterinsurgency, which yielded glimpses of affinities and connections. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, some Britons sought to understand the growth of what was called ‘unrest’ – anticolonial and nationalist movements – through personal engagement and witnessing. While ‘contact zones’ involve the establishment of relations between peoples with very different histories and cultures in a context of ‘radically asymmetrical relations of power’, the narratives I examine here and in Chapter 4 frequently speak to a performative role reversal in which it is the traveller who becomes a tutee, sometimes willingly and at others more reluctantly, while insurgency itself becomes a teaching text of sorts.9 The act of reverse tutelage, in which the disparities of power were not ignored but their abolition imagined, would itself become significant in the emergence of metropolitan anticolonialism. The ‘seeing man’ was seen, and the tutor became taught. Moreover, the political landscape is not yielding or available for possession: it must be engaged with and allowed to transform. As the self-activity of the colonized becomes more visible or audible, the Empire itself comes under scrutiny.

  Six months after Blunt and Urabi met in the latter’s offices – they would continue to correspond after Blunt returned to England and resumed his efforts to mediate between the British and Egyptian governments – the fateful British bombardment of the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria began. Shortly after dawn on 11 July 1882, ten ironclads and several smaller gunboats belonging to the British Mediterranean Fleet began firing at Egyptian forts. It took just over ten hours for them to decimate the latter, which were struggling with their obsolete weaponry and returning weak fire. Nine days later, the British cabinet authorized the arrival of an expeditionary force under the command of Sir Garnet Wolsey. His troops met Urabi’s forces at the famous battle of Tel el-Kabir on 13 September 1882, after violating the neutrality of the Suez Canal, honoured by Urabi and accordingly left undefended, and seizing it at both ends.10 Striking without warning at 4.30 a.m. on 13 September, Wolsey’s infantry routed Urabi’s irregular forces, slaughtering ill-clad Bedouins by the thousands. By 6 a.m. the British forces had declared victory. Two days later, Colonel Urabi surrendered and was imprisoned pending trial. The formal British occupation of Egypt, which would last well into the twentieth century – longer than anyone had anticipated – had begun. Urabi, along with several others, was charged with acts of mutiny and rebellion. He was accused of exciting the Egyptians to arm against the khedive (who changed sides and sought the protection of the British halfway through hostilities), fomenting civil war, and overseeing the conflagration in Alexandria pursuant to the bombardment in July.11 The British government, now headed by Liberal prime minister William Gladstone, hoped that the tricky matter of Colonel Urabi’s fate – rebellion carried the death penalty – would go away quickly and quietly once he was handed over to Khedive Tewfik, who remained under British counsel.12

  Matters did not unfold quite that way. While there had been a sustained negative campaign against Urabi in the British political sphere and newspapers over the months leading up to the invasion – he was painted as a fanatical military despot – the bombardment of Alexandria did not go unchallenged, and Urabi’s fate generated some debate, with a few strong voices raising questions on his behalf.13 Had there in fact been a rebellion in the strict sense of the term, an uprising against a legitimate head of state? Had there been a natio
nal movement which had been widely supported with cries for Urabi’s triumph ringing across the streets of Cairo? In other words, who represented Egyptian popular feeling, and could that feeling be described as ‘national’? With Britain now an occupying power, should Urabi not be afforded a fair trial rather than the summary court martial that had been planned? In the end, a reluctant British government gave in. There was a nominal but highly publicized trial, albeit with the outcome negotiated ahead of time, Urabi having agreed to plead guilty to the charge of rebellion in return for having his death sentence commuted to exile on the island of Ceylon – a location of the British government’s choosing. The key to Urabi’s reprieve was not, in fact, the belatedly awakened conscience of British officialdom, but Blunt’s decision to mount a legal campaign on the Egyptian leader’s behalf. The Englishman would champion Urabi’s cause with extraordinary passion and tenacity, putting not only sharp words but also large sums of his own money into the cause. Thanks to Blunt’s efforts, Urabi would be defended by the British barrister A. M. Broadley, who would also articulate the case against the British presence in Egypt in his published account of the trial. The collective defence of Urabi was itself the culmination of a longer campaign by Blunt and a small handful of allies and sympathizers to make the case for Egyptian nationalism in Britain, an endeavour – and it is important not to underestimate the importance of this – in which they were not entirely unsuccessful.14 His own radicalized position inspired by Egyptian resistance to both Turkish and European control, Blunt was a significant contributor to fomenting metropolitan dissent from British foreign policy. He and others associated with events in Egypt helped forge a language of critique that not only ran determinedly against the ascendant ideology and rhetoric of imperialism, but also put Egyptian resistance to foreign rule at its centre. The trenchant critiques of imperialism which emerged out of the Egypt crisis of 1881–82 – early versions of colonial discourse analysis – would be voiced only in a distinctly minor key for many years to come, but were important in paving the way for the eventual development of a more pronounced criticism of empire within Britain. The crisis was arguably one of the first in which the terms of criticism were very distinctly shaped by direct personal interaction between some British dissenters and forces of resistance within the Empire; indeed, by the witnessing of a revolution at close quarters.