Notes
Introduction
1. Frederick Douglass, ‘West India Emancipation, Speech Delivered at Canandaigua, New York, 3 August 1857’. Available at University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Project, at rbscp.lib.rochester.edu. All other quotations from Douglass refer to this source, unless otherwise stated.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), pp. 240–1, emphasis in original.
5. Cited in John Oldfield, Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 102.
6. David Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (London: Penguin, 2002), p.26
7. John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 5.
8. Joanna de Groot, Empire and History Writing in Britain since 1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 105.
9. The term is Niall Ferguson’s, from his paper ‘British Imperialism Revised: The Costs and Benefits of “Anglobalization”’, Stern School of Business, New York University: Development Research Institute Working Paper Series 2 (April 2003).
10. Victor G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes Towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Serif, 1995), p. 2.
11. Many of these are detailed in Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) and John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, 2nd edn (London: Bookmarks, 2013).
12. Burton, The Trouble with Empire, p. 1.
13. Ibid. Burton also notes rightly that ‘while imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, wide-ranging accounts of those who struggled with and against imperial power … have failed to materialize’. Ibid., p. 2.
14. See Roberto Fernández Retamar, ‘Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’, in Robert Fernández Retamar, ed., Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
15. Darwin, End of the British Empire, p. 91. As Michael Goebel notes in the French context, this was not always a simple process: French republican slogans – liberté, egalité, fraternité – ‘graced the entry gates of Indochinese prisons’ in which anticolonialists often found themselves interned. They too, however, like many in the British Empire, would address the gap between rhetoric and reality, ‘instead of outright dismissing these ideals altogether’. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 222.
16. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London: Pluto, 1990), p. 361, emphasis in original.
17. ‘What happens when, in the spirit of dialectics, we turn the tables, and consider Haiti not as the victim of Europe, but an agent in Europe’s construction?’ Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 80.
18. There are presently five substantial historical studies that address British domestic critiques of empire at particular historical moments as their main subject: Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mira Matikkala, Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late Victorian Britain (London: I. B. Taurus, 2011); Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Taurus, 2008 [1968]); and Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-imperialism 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
19. Newsinger, Blood Never Dried, p. 17.
20. Timothy Brennan, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 3.
21. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxii.
22. Ibid., p. 240.
23. Ibid., p. 241.
24. Ibid., p. 240.
25. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995), p. 96.
26. Ibid., p. 27.
27. Ibid., p. 98.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 99.
30. Ibid., p. 95.
31. As Newsinger notes, ‘the handful of books arguing an anti-imperialist case are completely swamped by the massive sales of the books of Niall Ferguson and company, some of which have been conveniently accompanied by successful television series’. ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, in Blood Never Dried, pp. 7–8.
32. Despite important contestations, not least from historians of post-colonial polities, the ‘imperial initiative school’ of British imperial history has been influential, with debates about decolonization restricted to which British policy effected it.
33. Cited in Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, Report of the Committee of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions: Read at the General Meeting of the Society Held on the 25th Day of June 1824, together with an account of the proceedings which took place at that meeting (London: Richard Taylor, 1824), p. 76.
34. Darwin, End of the British Empire, p. 87.
35. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 1.
36. Burton, The Trouble with Empire, p. 5.
37. Ibid., p. 2.
38. Stuart Ward, ‘Introduction’, in Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 4.
39. Ibid., p. 5.
40. Ibid., p. 6.
41. Ibid., p. 10.
42. Ibid., p. 12.
43. Martin Lynn, ‘Introduction’, in Lynn, ed., The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 1.
44. John M. Mackenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, in Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire, p. 24.
45. De Groot, Empire and History Writing in Britain, p. 183.
46. Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 10.
47. Ibid.
48. Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 9.
49. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October 34 (1985), p. 75. See also ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry 12: 1 (1985), p. 144. In the latter, Bhabha makes the influential case for ‘mimicry’ as marking ‘those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance’ (p. 162).
50. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, p. 133.
51. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 3.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., p. 12.
54. Ibid., p. 26.
55. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, pp. 74–5, 74.
56. Satya P. Mohanty, ‘Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism’, New Formations 8 (Summer 1989), p. 73.
57. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 241.
58. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 191.
59. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. 146.
60. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siécle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 7.
61. Ibid.
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br /> 62. Ibid., p. 5.
63. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London/New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 103.
64. Gandhi, Affective Communities, p. 5.
65. Ibid., p. 8.
66. Ibid., p. 2.
67. Ibid., p. 2–3.
68. Ibid., p. 6.
69. Ibid., p. 7.
70. See David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed, 2012), p. 5.
71. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 284.
72. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, transl. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 89.
73. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, 2nd edn (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 29.
74. Ibid., p. 34.
75. Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 241.
76. Ibid., p. 240.
77. Ibid., p. 241.
78. Ibid., pp. 242, 243.
79. Ibid., p. 242
80. Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate not Gradual Abolition, or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1824). For a magnificent discussion of this image and Heyrick’s reinterpretation of the Abolition Seal, see Marcus Wood’s brilliant work, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Repression of Emancipation (Athens/London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), where he notes that the ‘tremendous sentence … in one daring move decimates the interrogative double negative of the original slogan’ (pp. 75–7).
81. Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation, p. 368.
82. Ibid., p. 379.
83. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, ‘Introduction: Minority Discourse: What Is to Be Done?’, Cultural Critique 7: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II (Autumn 1987), p. 14.
84. Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality’, Cultural Studies 21: 2 (2007), p. 453.
85. Ibid.
86. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 23.
87. Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation, p. 380.
88. Ibid., p. 381.
89. Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press), 2010, p. 59.
90. Ibid., p. 66
91. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 28.
92. Ibid.
93. Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation, p. 380.
94. Ibid., p. 368.
95. Abdul Janmohamed and David Lloyd, ‘Introduction: Towards a Theory of Minority Discourse’, Cultural Critique 6: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (Spring 1987), p. 8.
96. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 89, emphasis in original.
97. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 289.
98. Porter, Critics of Empire, p. 1.
99. Ibid., p. 32.
100. Ibid., p. 333.
101. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 290.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., p. 291.
104. Ibid., p. 292.
105. Darwin, Unfinished Empire, p. 293.
106. Ibid.
107. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 241.
108. Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 46.
109. Ibid.
110. Frederic Harrison, ‘Egypt’, in National and Social Problems (London: Macmillan & Co., 1908), p.201.
111. D. Mackenzie Wallace, Egypt and the Egyptian Question (London: Macmillan & Co., 1883), p. 369.
112. Brennan, Borrowed Light, pp. 2–3.
113. Ibid., p. 13.
114. See Newsinger for a fairly comprehensive survey of nineteenth-and twentieth-century insurgencies.
115. Burton (The Trouble with Empire) has an extended discussion of the years leading up to Indian independence, and Newsinger (Blood Never Dried) discusses labour unrest in colonial India, including the famous naval-ratings mutiny.
116. See ‘Professionals and Amateurs’, in Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 73–83. Said defines ‘amateurism’ here as the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.
1. The Spirit of the Sepoy Host
1. Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), p. 10.
2. Ibid., p. 25.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 27, 30.
5. Ibid., pp. 27–8.
6. Ibid., p. 32.
7. Ibid., p. 36.
8. John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–58, vol. 3 (London: W. H. Allen, 1876), p. 654.
9. Jill C. Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 132.
10. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 1, emphasis in original
11. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacre (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007), p. 37.
12. Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. viii.
13. Ibid., p. ix.
14. Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 179.
15. Ibid., p. 180.
16. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 2, emphasis in original.
17. Ibid., p. 9.
18. ‘A vast literature has grown up around the Uprising, so vast that the bibliographies themselves have become a book,’ writes Rosie Llewellyn-Jones. See The Great Uprising in India, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and British (Woodbridge : Boydell, 2007), p. 21.
19. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, in Bhattacharya, ed., Rethinking 1857 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), p. ix. See also Crispin Bates, ed., Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Vol. 5: Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2014).
20. Ibid., p. xv.
21. Bender, 1857 Indian Uprising, p. 5.
22. William Cooke Stafford, cited in Donald Featherstone, Victorian Colonial Warfare: From the Conquest of Sind to the Indian Mutiny (London: Cassell, 1992), p. 105.
23. See ‘Introduction: The Nature of 1857’, in Biswamoy Pati, ed., The 1857 Rebellion (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2007), p. xxii; Mukherjee, Spectre of Violence, 53.
24. Kim A. Wagner, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017), p. 80.
25. ‘Appendix: The Azimgarh Proclamation: 25 August 1857’, in Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Year of Blood: Essays on the Revolt of 1857 (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2014), pp. 25–6.
26. Biswamoy Pati, ‘Common People, Fuzzy Boundaries and 1857’, in Pati, ed., The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). Pati also lists many tribal and peasant uprisings that took place in the decades leading up to 1857. He notes that ‘the 1857 Rebellion neither started nor ended in 1857–8’ (p. 58). The volume as a whole does an excellent job of mapping the multiple sites of insurgency.
27. See Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, The Great Uprising in India.
28. Mukherjee, Spectre of Violence, p. 58.
29. Ibid.,
p. 23.
30. Cited in Rebecca Merritt, ‘Public Perceptions of 1857: An Overview of British Press Responses to the Indian Uprising’, in Major and Bates, Mutiny at the Margins, Vol. 2, p. 13.
31. Cited in Mukherjee, Spectre of Violence, p. 24.
32. Cited in ibid., p. 43.
33. Quotation used by John Kaye, cited in ibid., p. 32.
34. Cited in Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 230.
35. Major and Bates, ‘Introduction’, in Major and Bates, Mutiny at the Margins, Vol 2, p. xv.
36. See Merritt, ‘Public Perceptions of 1857’.
37. House of Commons Debate, ‘India – State of Affairs’, 27 July 1857, vol. 147 cc. 440–546 (c. 475).
38. Malik, ‘Popular British Interpretations of “the Mutiny” ’, in Mutiny at the Margins, Vol 2, pp. 30, 32.
39. Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 33.
40. Ibid., pp. 1, 16.
41. Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 2–3.
42. Ibid., pp. 28–9.
43. Ibid., pp. 16–17.
44. Ibid., p. 16.
45. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 4.
46. John Bruce Norton, The Rebellion in India: How to Prevent Another (London: Richardson Brothers, 1857).
47. Michel-Rolph Touillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995), p. 88.
48. Norton, Rebellion in India, p. 2.
49. Ibid., pp. 95–6. ‘Banchat’ is an Anglicization of a Hindustani word translating to ‘sister-fucker’.
50. Ibid., p. 96. The speech itself, of one rebel Puttawallah, is reported thus: ‘Listen, all! As the English people hurled the Rajah from his throne, in like manner do you drive them out of the country … Sons of Brahmins, Maharattas, and Musselmen, revolt! Sons of Christians, look to yourselves!’. Ibid. p. 97, emphasis in original.
51. ‘Preface’, in ibid., p. v.
52. Ibid., p. 3.
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