p. 60- “Ernest Jones and Chartism became synonymous in the mid-1850s.”… long taken an interest in Indian affairs, writing stinging polemics in the People’s Paper about the management of the East India Company in 1853, when its charter came up for renewal before parliament. In these, he had described a ‘mighty and magnifient country’ turned into ‘a nest for the most profligate nepotism’ by the greed of a ‘race of harpies’. .. When by August it had become clear that what was unfolding in India was indeed a large-scale uprising, Jones… set himself to deciphering the text of the rebellion against the grain of the interpretation provided by The Times and the other organs on the side of the East India company. He found … evidence of a will to resist, an insurgent consciousness exhibiting an ‘internal drive’ to transform historical circumstances.. He went on openly to attack The Times – the ‘dishonest’ and ‘unprincipled’ organ of the ‘Leadenhall Moneymongers’ for parroting the line that events in India constituted a military mutiny rather than a national insurrection. It was clear to him that the ‘independence’ of India had to be recognised… Once the full scale of the bloody uprising became clear however, Jones would read events more in terms of their own implications – clearly enthused, even surprised, by what seemed to be an even more powerful revellion than he claimed to have anticipated. … reform was not too little, too late, since the claims of the insurgents themselves had to be central”.
p65 Jones “If they massacre us, we taught them how.”
p. 88 Morant Bay 1865 “The ‘Jamaica affair’ was one of the few Victorian crises of empire in which there is a record expressed British working class cympathies for victims of violent colonial repression… not invoked simply out of generosity or a colour-blind egalitarianism, but in response to a self-assertion which made claims upon workinhg-class solidarity. We know, for cintance, that in earlty September 1866, by which time the Royal Commission had reported back very fully on events leading up to the rebellion, Eyre was burned in effigy on Clerkenwell Green. Funerary decorations used in some condemnatory working class protect meetings hailed Gordon’s death as that of a martyr… Dickens complaining in a letter to a friend: “So we are badgered about New Zealanders, and Hottentots, as if they were idenitical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell, and were to be bound by pen and ink accordingly”.
p. 94 In her influential work on the Eyre controversy, Catherine Hall has suggested that slave emancipation itself provoked a hardening in the typologies of racial difference … it “raised the spectre of black peoples as free and equal”… of what the Spectator magazine correctly described as “the demand of negroes for equal consideration with Irishmen, SCotchmen, and Englishmen”… shapes the ideological fault line that became visible in its wake. .. The presence of colonies, writes Linda COlley, made inescapable the question of whether colonial subjects, ‘those millions of men and women who were manifestly not British but had been brought under British rule by armed force.. have any claim on those vague but caluable freedoms so many Britons considered to be peculiarly their own”.
p. 107″For the white properties class of Jamaica and their supporters in Britain, the perceived refusal of freed blacks and their descendants to submit to the regimes of plnatation labour in favour of tilling their own blocks of land threw their self-serving idea of ‘freedom’ into crisis. The liberty of black Jamaicans to sell or withhold their labour power as they pleased was as much an economic problem as a political one.
p. 121 in the Bee-Hive, a regular columnist “Plain Dealer”
“Plain Dealer warns against allowing sympathy and solidariy 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 their community.”… 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.”
p. 133 “Some historical scholarship has dismissed [Wilfrid] Blunt as an “anti-imperialist British gadfly’ even as many scholars of that period of Egypt’s history have drawn on his copious notes of what unfolded during the Urabi uprising. Yet no study of British anticolonialism can ignore this figure… Blunt’s criticism was frequently more radical and textured than that produced by Positivists, including Harrison, and that this was in no small part due to his regular contact with anticolonial figures from the Arab world… Blunt sought to provide an alternative voice to British establishment discoure on empire, and self-consciously construct a counter-history delineating “the truse condition of things”. This he opposed to what he called the “manipylation of the organs of public news in the interests of our diplomacy”, including the presence in Cairo and elsewhere of what we might today call “embedded journalists” – a fact he cautions future historians to bear in mind when consulting newspaper files in search of information.”
p. 141 “Urabi’s nationalism was focused on land rights and economic grievances rather than on exlcuding racial or religious outsides… the fellah leader exuded an open attitude to “humanity at large without distinction of race or creed”. It is really at this point that Blunt’s growing understanding that freedom from bondage could be thought of as a shared human aspiration rather than one unique to European thought appears to have crystallized into a clear insight.”
p. 145 “The Blunts returned to an England in the spring of 1882 where the political landscape had changed significantly and for the worse. The Liberals, now in power, had abandoned their “enthusiasm for Eastern nationalities and Eastern liberty” and were full of ideas of “imperial coercion” in relation, not least, to Ireland. Answering hostile parliamentary questions after the bombardment of Alexandria, Gladstone insisted that, without European intervention Urabi “would have become dictator of the country”… Blunt’s work was cut out for him: to undo the myth-making of imperial self-justification alongside the concomitant demonizing of Island and Muslims, itself a legacy of the 1857 uprising, which the British authorities blamed largely on Indian Muslims.”
p. 157 Positivist intellectual and writer Frederick Harrison. “If the colonial enterprise was indeed to be understood as one based on spreading liberal values, as Gladstone was claiming, how strange was it that “the Egyptians grew sulky at so much civilisation”? Perhaps the answer lay in more grossly material realms: “A native pays tax of 12% annual value on his house; the European lives tax free. The native fly-driver pays a heavy tax on his carriage; the European banker drives his pair tax free. Next, the civilisers having obliged the country with some 115 millions sterling at 7 and 10 per cent, obtained “concessions” for about 35 millions more. Then they kindly exempted themselves from taxation, were good enough to set up local courts in which they had the right to bring their civil and criminal affairs to a judge of their own nation. An army of European judges, and secretaries, and assessors, and barristers were called in at very liberal salaries, who kindly undertook to do the law for the Egyptian people.”
p. 177 “the Swadeshi movement in Begal threw up a decisive ideological fault line within the Congress, signalling the first turn to radicalizing and consolidating anti-colonial resistance in the Indian subcontinent. The bitterly opposed Partition of Bengal in 1905, aimed at diffusing growing militancy in the region, resulted instead in the emergence of the figure of the ‘Extremist’, whose militant agitational tactics were the counterfoil to the more traditional petitioning mode of those deemed “Moderate”… While the term self-emancipation” would not explicitly appear on the rhetorical horison of British anti-colonialism until the 1930s, the idea that the governed would claim the reins of governance for themselves – and not just wait for them to be offerred – would from this point on become an increasingly significant dimension of critizques of empire in Britain.”
p. 216 Shapurji Saklatvala “sought actively to force a language of opposition to empire that would at once undo the pretences and prevarications of gradulaist reformism and make clear that resistance to empire was in the interest of both the Indian and British working classes. Where Hardie, MacDonald and others who visited India during the Swadeshi years came back to make the case for reforms that might defuse the ‘unrest’, Saklatvala was arfguably the first MP to make a sustained case in parliament against reformism and ‘liberal’ approaches to colonial governance in themselves. … To the later dismay of the British Communist Party he was also committed to retaining something of his Parsi cultural and religious heritage. Described later by George Padmore as the “most independent-minded Communist ever”, during his parliamentary carrer Saklatvala … put in place an unbridgeable antagonism between empire and democracy, refused to accept that reforms or ‘trusteeship’ were possible in the context of political subjugation, identified the centrality of capitalism to the imperial project, and stressed the revolutionary agency of the oppressed out of which common ground would emerge”.
p. 272 League Against ImperialismGeorge Lansbury MP “no communist by a long shot… was vociferous in defending thwt he called the ‘spontenaity; of the gathering in Brussels against charges of following a Comintern line.. apostrophized the enormous diversity … the first [organisation] “specifically and without qualifications [to challenge] the right of the white races to dominate, control and exploit races which are described as backward.” The organisation’s constitutive repudiation of paternalism was clearly pivotal here – with a remarkable degree of self-reflexivity, Lansbury acknowledges that, even among socialists, the historical tendency had been to go along with the claim that ‘white men organise and control coloured people for the good of those controlled”.”
p. 284 “the London Manifesto made visible a fault line that would haunt metropolitan anticolonialism and debates on the left over the next decades. In the excevution of capitalist crime, where the project of empire was inextricable from the project of capital, could it be that white labour ‘is particeps criminis with white capital?.. how could and should white labour assess its role in the project of imperialism given thhe extent to which, both consciously and unconsciously, not least through its share of the vote in modern democracies, it had “been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes”.
p. 297 Nancy Cunard “already something of a celebrity as a poet, writer, journalist, collector, artistic muse, music aficionado and publisher, Cuard had written to solicit a contribution for her anthology, Negro, originally titled Colour… wanted to curate a panoramic work that would at once function as a cultural history of African and Acrican-American life and as a forum for black liberation globally… rooted in Cunard’s friendships with black musicians, writers, artists, and photographers, and her sense that any resolution of the “Negro question” would require engagement with the histories and struggles of black peoples across the globe.”
p. 324 Mussolini’s invasion – “Emperor Haile Salassie (Ras Tafari), croowned only a few years elrier, in 1930, would take the fateful but hugely important decision not to follow the path of appeasement urged by Britain, but to lay his case before the League of Nations, stating categorically that, as the maps showed, Wal Wal lay well inside soverign Ethiopian territory. In doing so, he was boldly staking Ethopia’s claim to equality of status with soverign European nations and, equally significantly, challenging the league to show that its vaunted universal principles – collective security, peace and order – would be applied beyond Europe.His attempt to hold them to their stated universal commitments would fail signally, and that failure, which enabled Italy to invade his kingdom unchallenged, would reverberate across an outraged West Indies and Africa”
p. 385 “The war had afforded colonial governments the chance to further repress resistance and suspend civil liberties in the name of security. Censorship prevailed widely and interning agitators was commonplace. This included two Irish women who had come to Trinidad to help organise the labour movement there. Padmore’s tribue to Kathleen Donnellan, who died attempting to escape, and her comrade E. Cahill, was eloquent with anger…”I am sure West Indian workers will remember them with affection and gratitude long after the little Hitlers who now sit on their backs have been relegated to the dustbin of history.”
p. 389 “The Manchester Pan-African Congress… on 15 and 16 October 1945 … had about 200 delegates and several observers.. of historical significance for the case of characters it brought together, for the analyses and resolutions which emerged from it, and, not leasy, for apotheosizing the currents of black self-assertion and radical anticolonialism that had emerged so powerfully in the previous decade.”
p. 399 “The movement that came to be known as ‘Mau Mau’ was the culmination of many years of resistance by those dispossed of their lands and put to work on European farms. At the heart of their grievances – which also included low wages, racist passbooks known as kipande, and lack of electoral representation – was ‘land hunger’, large swathes of arable land coming under settler occupation while poor Kenyans, mainly Kikuyu, lived economically deprived lives in ‘Reserves’ or on tiny plots on settler land which they worked.. the roots of the uprising lay in the post-war intensification of fear and anxiety among ‘squatters’ – the misleadingly named communities of farm labour who worked settler plantations and faced intensidication of pressive measures to contain them – and the resistance they frequently put up to exploitative regimes of labour extraction.”
p. 405 “When Seretse Khama of Bechuanaland was infamously deposed from his chieftainship by a Labour government for the crime of marrying a white Englishwoman – for fear of offending South Africa, where ‘miscegenation’ was illegal – Brockway stood agains his own party’s ministers in support for Khama.” (Labour) “Brockway would also attempt strenuously to slough off his paternalist tendencies in order to become what he called a ‘world citizen’.”
p. 414 “A 16-year-old African boy is taken into custody as a suspected insurgent. The bext day his body is returned to his family; he had been shot “while trying to escape”. When his father tries to find a lawyer, he and his friends are also taken into detention. A young boy shins up a tree in terror; though not an insurgent, he is shot by the security forces, wounded he falls to the ground. A third young man is being made to ‘confess’ that he is Mau Mau. Tied up with his dead between his knees, dirt forced down his throat, he is left out in the cold night air and refused foor as he slowly slumps to death. These were a few of the shocking stories Daily Mirror readers encountered in the run-up to Christmas 1955, in a syndicated set of articles focusing on the Emergency in Kenya. They were authored by Labour MP Barbara Castle who, commissioned by the tabloid, had undertaken a ‘one-woman probe’ into allegations of widespread acuse by British forces in Kenya during the Emergency.”
p. 439 “Perham’s Reith Lectures were not precisely a defence of anticolonialism, they were certainly a stringently honest account of how it had shaped the present… Why, Perham asked, had the official world of Britain been so myopic, made such serious miscalculations on the basis that anything resembling African independence was a long way off? “perhaps the reason for this degree of blindness is that British people do not understand nationalism, do not recognise it, or at least its strength, in others.” This was not because Britain was immune to nationalism; on the contrary “the confidence arising from our former power, may have bred in us an unconscious kind of nationalism, one that seldom neeeded to assert or even know itself.”
p. 444 “As Christopher Hale has noted, though Malaya has long been used as an example of a thoughtful and #benign’ counterinsurgency on Britain’s record, unlike thos in Cyprus and Kenya, “The Emergency War in Malay as a nasty and brutal business,” involving, as it had in Kenya, subterfuge, illegality, collective punishment, forced resettlement and unjustifiable civilian bloodshed, which along with the lethal consequences of colonial divide and rule, manifests malign consequences even today: the paper trail itself may well only be partial.”
p. 447 “It has been the argument of this book that British public life and political discourse have been mired in a tenacious colonial mythology in which Britain – followed by the remainder of the geopolitical West – is the wellspring of ideas of freedom, either ‘bestowing’ it on claves and colonial subjects or ‘teaching’ them how to go about obtaining it. The assumption does not restrict itself to the undoubtedly copious body of writing on the idea of ‘liberty’ which is certainly a notable feature of British and American intellectual history; it extends… to the very impulses that drive human beings to make their own history, in circumstances not of their own choosing. It is this mythology which has enabled two successive 21st century Labour prime ministers to make historically dubious promouncements – in one case with lethal consequences:
The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over … We should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.
If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer.
To undo this myhology systematically, then, remains a project of the highest interllectural and political importance.. In Insurgent Empire, I have tried to show not only that insurgencies were frequent during British colonial rule, but that resistance to empire and the crises it generated shaped dissent around the imperial project within Britain. Put another way, the resistance of the periphery helped radicalize sections of the metropole. In the process, ideas of freeom that were not reducible to Obama’s ultimate “triumph of a system of free enterprise that unleashes the full potential of individual men and women” did make their claims heard, even if they were not always heeded… Tracking the lines of dissent and opposition within Britain and the ways in which these frequently emerged as part of a diaological and transational process is one way in which Britons today can both interrogate the seamless national mythologies they are routinely invited to consume. It enables Britons to lay claim to a different, more challenging history, and yet one that is more suited to a heterogeneous society which can draw on multiple historical and cultural resources.”
p. 454 “Rohes was of course far from being a lone imperial ideologue. But was he so very completely endorsed in his time and by his peers? Here is another distinguished classicist writing in his memoirs about his return to Oxford where he had studied and taught for a number of years: “I cannot say that I saw with pleasure my old University made a pedestal for the statue of such a man as Rhodes.” Goldwin Smith, who wrote this, was not a revolutionary, but he had been a member of the Jamaica Committee, which had sought unsuccessfully to bring Governor Eyre to book. By the end of the 19th century, even a few literary works which had begun to ask troubling questions about the imperial project and white supremacy more broadly were well know: Joseph Conrad’s very different novels Almayer’s Folly, set in Dutch South East Asia, and The HEart of Darness, set in the Belgian Congo, and Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, set in southern Africa. In the interwar period emerged Forster’s A Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days. Dissenters from the imperial status quo may not have carried the day, but they were no lone wolves either, as we have seen…. Fenner Brockway and the Movement for Colonial Freedom, for instance, became deeply involved with the ultimately successful battle to end apartheid in South Africa, to which boycotts on the part of an international community were essential. Brockway was also the initiator, working together with ethnic minority groups in Britain, of legislation to end racial discrimination in public places, successful only at the eighth attempt. In the face of disdainful dismissals and active silencing from various quarters of the establishment, it is these lines of resistance and geneaologies of dissent that must continue to give heart and hope to those who look togwards a more fully decolonized future for both Britain and the postcolonial world.”
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