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| Oct 29, 2004
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The old saying that the reason the sun never set on the British Empire was because God doesn't trust the British in the dark can be read by many Chris
The old saying that the reason the sun never set on the British Empire was because God doesn't trust the British in the dark can be read by many Christians as an expression of ingratitude. This is because among the empire’s many legacies is the spread of Protestantism throughout much of the world. As early as the seventeenth century, emigrants from England planted religiously-inspired colonies in North America. In the eighteenth century, missionaries began to appear on the imperial frontier, where they sought to convert both unchurched colonists and Native Americans. By the nineteenth century the clerical collar was a common sight in many places not far from where the Union Jack flew, with a few missionaries becoming not just religious but national heroes as well. The growth of Protestant missionary work alongside imperial expansion has led many to assume that there was a symbiotic relationship between the two. Andrew Porter challenges this view in a wide-ranging survey that examines over two centuries of missionary activity in the British empire. It’s a work that is impressively ambitious in scope, encompassing a wide range of missionary activity by multiple organizations across the empire. Much of this, Porter acknowledges, was indelibly intertwined with the imperial project. Yet the overall picture he paints is far too nuanced for easy conclusions, as in their pursuit of their goals the missions could find themselves working against imperial interests as often as they could be seen as working on their behalf. Porter begins his examination by looking at the eighteenth-century antecedents to the classic era of missionary activity. In doing so, he shows how the unjustified neglect of this era led many to miss important influences on what followed. While scattered activity can be found as early as the seventeenth century, it was the formation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701 that such efforts were centrally organized and funded. With activities among the enslaved people on the plantations restricted or barred by nervous slaveowners, the SPG focused their efforts on the white colonial population. Support for their efforts from the imperial government proved fitful, however, and as the century drew to a close the missionaries had little to show for their labors. The evangelical movement soon gave a second wind to missionary efforts. During the 1790s, a host of new societies were formed, many of which built on the connections missionaries had developed over the previous decades. While these groups struggled at first due to their insufficient resources and a lack of volunteers, by the early nineteenth century their efforts began to bear fruit. Fired by enthusiasm, this new wave of missionaries set out to spread the Gospel in Britain’s rapidly-expending possessions abroad, only to come up short against the sins of the empire. Porter sees little affection among the missionaries for the capitalism that drove the slave trade, the opium trade, and the acquisition of new lands. Nevertheless, appreciation of the benefits of allying with commercial interests led many missions to become more involved with business interests, which influenced the development of the missions that did so in a variety of ways. One of the greatest strengths of Porter’s book is his coverage of the missionaries themselves as individuals rather than as just interchangeable parts of an overall movement. As he notes, their particular motivations and interests were often the most important factor in the development of their missions. Avoiding romanticization of these individuals, he notes the strain they suffered from their demanding responsibilities, which left them isolated from the communities with which they were familiar. The tedium of everyday work in the stations, which typically was consumed with such mundane activities as building maintenance, often proved disappointing for many of them, especially when contrasted with their expectations of what such work would be. Some to reject the day-to-day operation of a mission for the more adventurous � and heroic � challenge of undertaking individualized “faith missions� as far as possible from Western influence. These individual expressions of dissatisfaction were paralleled by a decline in enthusiasm for missionary efforts during the middle of nineteenth century. There as well the idealistic vision of spreading the Gospel overseas crashed against the reality of growing costs, irregular financial support, indigenous resistance, and opposition from local imperial interests. In response, missionary organizations devised new strategies and targeted previously untried regions. China and the outlying regions of the Ottoman empire in the Near East and Egypt became the focus for new evangelization efforts. The energy generated by these new directions was welcomed by the established missions, albeit with a degree of skepticism born from the experience of coping with the challenges of missionary campaigns. While these missions often turned to imperial institutions for support for their activities, Porter emphasizes the conflicted nature of this relationship, with missions often finding that their goals set placed them in opposition to secular imperial interests. The conclusion that he draws from his examination reflects the complex relationship between mission and empire, which he recounts with both nuance and understanding. It is a remarkable book, one that rests on an impressive mix of primary sources and the considerable contemporary and modern literature on his subject. While Porter draws heavily upon his prior work on African missionary efforts, his command of his subject ensures that efforts in other regions receive their due attention. While this can lead him to assume a degree of familiarity with British Protestantism and the empire for the reader that may not be warranted, his study more than rewards the patience of anyone seeking to learn about his complex and oft-misunderstood subject. ...more |
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| 4.24
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| Mar 26, 2019
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As befitting its name, today Jallianwala Bagh in the Indian city of Amritsar is a verdant memorial park framed by closely-packed buildings. In the ear
As befitting its name, today Jallianwala Bagh in the Indian city of Amritsar is a verdant memorial park framed by closely-packed buildings. In the early 20th century, though, the location was a barren plot of land approximately 200 yards by 200 yards in size where open-air meetings were often held. It was during one such meeting, on April 13, 1919, that a mixed force of fifty Gurkhas and men from the 54th Sikh Frontier Force and 59th Scinde Rifles under the command of General Reginald Dyer entered the enclosed space through one of the narrow passages to the enclosure and, without warning, opened fire on the unarmed crowd. For the next ten minutes, the soldiers fired an estimated 1,650 bullets into the terrified civilians. By the time the shooting stopped, hundreds lay dead, with hundreds more suffering from gunshot wounds and injuries sustained during the panicked efforts by people to escape the square. In the months that followed, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre became an empire-wide controversy, with Indian nationalists condemning the unwarranted brutality of Dyer’s actions while many British imperialists celebrated the general for his willingness to employ the violence necessary to maintain order. In these debates, the massacre was treated as a discrete event, or one shaped entirely by immediate events. In this book, Kim Wagner challenges such perspectives by identifying within the British response their longstanding assumptions about the people they ruled, assumptions that Dyer brought within him into the square on that fateful day and which informed how many Britons responded to the news of his actions both then and since. Those beliefs, Wagner explains, were born from the trauma of another event in the history of British India, that of the Mutiny six decades earlier. Though the rebellion by sepoy soldiers was suppressed, the memory of it colored British attitudes for decades afterward. Fears of a second outbreak fueled a resolve to meet such emergencies in the future with overwhelming force. Events such as the Kuka outbreak in the Punjab in 1872, in which British officials faced anti-Muslim violence by a revivalist Sikh sect, were dealt with using summary executions, deportations, and other measures designed to quash threats to British rule before they spiraled beyond the control of local authorities. As British India entered the twentieth century, such an approach was increasingly out of step with the direction of policy. In 1909, the British took the first modest steps towards granting India self-government by expanding Indian representation on the governing councils. While the passage of the Defence of India Act during the First World War led to the curtailment of many freedoms for Indians, the scheduled expiration of its restrictions after the war’s end led them to regard it as a temporary expedient only, as many of them believed that their wartime loyalty would be rewarded with greater autonomy. Instead, even before the war was over, the British sought to make many of the wartime restrictions permanent by passing the Rowlatt Act. This was justified with claims that the scattered anti-colonial activities throughout the subcontinent were manifestations of a single revolutionary movement, one that had been held in check only by the draconian provisions of the Defence of India Act. Fears of a coordinated rising were never far from the Anglo-Indian consciousness. News of the Rowlatt Act were greeted with outrage by Indian nationalists, who saw it as a betrayal of the promises of self-government. In response to its passage on March 18, 1919, Mohandas Gandhi, then a marginal actor still finding his footing in Indian politics, announced a hartal, or a combination of general strike and spiritual cleansing, by his satyagraha movement throughout India. Amritsar was among the many places where Indians closed up shops, refused to show up for work, and attended mass meetings to denounce the legislation. Such actions fed the paranoia of British officials, who feared that the hartal was merely the first step of a general conspiracy that would end with bloodshed. In response, the lieutenant governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, ordered the arrest of two local leaders of the satyagraha organization, Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr. Satyapal, who were taken into custody on April 10 and expelled from the city. Upon learning of the arrests, the remaining satyagraha leaders gathered a crowd to march to the house of Miles Irving, the deputy commissioner in charge in the city, and present a faryad, or petition, asking for the release of the detained men. In response, Irving sought to bar the protestors from the administrative sector, only for the pickets he posted to panic before the advancing mass of people. The gunfire of the soldiers turned the crowd into a mob that rioted throughout much of the city. Amidst the unchecked violence, three British bank managers were killed when their banks were stormed, and two women were among those attacked by the rioters. As British residents fled for the safety of nearby Govindghar Fort, troops poured into the city from across the region. Among them was Dyer, who, on his own initiative, traveled to Amritsar and assumed authority from the grateful officials on the scene. Given its importance to events, Wagner expends considerable effort parsing Dyer’s actions and subsequent explanation of them to discern his motivations, which he concludes were driven throughout by a determination to reassert British authority by whatever means necessary. This included enforcing Irving’s ban on further meetings, though the poor dissemination of the proclamation announcing this meant that many in Amritsar were unaware of the ban, let alone of Dyer’s intention to carry it out. While Amritsar was now quiet, with rumors rampant and unrest continuing elsewhere in Punjab British anxieties were reaching feverish levels. Upon learning on April 13 that the members of the satyagraha movement were planning a meeting at Jallianwala Bagh in defiance of his warnings, Dyer decided to act. Treating the city as enemy territory, he posted pickets at the gates of the old city while moving towards Jallianwala Bagh with a column and two armored cars equipped with machine guns. Though the armored cars were unable to navigate the narrow entrances of the square, the rifles of the soldiers proved more than sufficient for his purposes. Wagner invests considerable effort to untangle the events of the massacre itself, a task made more difficult by the confusion of evidence and the rumors that quickly accumulated around it in its aftermath. He notes that the assault quickly became a show of brute force intended to terrorize the population into submission. After ten uninterrupted minutes of firing, the officers gathered up the cartridges � which became one of the metrics used as evidence � and withdrew from the square, leaving behind hundreds of dead and wounded. While the total number of people killed at Jallianwala Bagh will unlikely ever be known, Wagner regards the 379 figure on which the British settled to be a considerable underestimate. In its wake, martial law was declared and used to inflict further punishment on the populace in the form of arrests, floggings, and other demeaning treatment designed to reassert British control over the city. In the interrogations that followed, however, the British struggled to find evidence of the mass conspiracy that would justify the measures they had used. After June 9, the pressure on them increased as the lifting of martial law on that date allowed Indian nationalists to travel to the region to discover what happened for themselves and to support the accused. Their investigation was soon joined by an official inquiry that, while critical of Dyer’s actions, made him a scapegoat for the broader failings of British rule. Their conclusion proved too mild for the Indians who made up a minority of the commission, however, and their scathing criticism of the general in their report undermined the legitimacy of the official inquiry. Already the massacre became a litmus test of British rule, with the debates that followed in Parliament full of speeches praising Dyer, even as the government struggled to manage the backlash they had created. Wagner argues that the enthusiasm with which many Britons defended Dyer’s actions ultimately did far more damage to the Raj than the massacre itself. Their endorsement of his actions turned Dyer into a representative of Britain’s attitudes towards India rather than an unfortunate outlier, accelerating the alienation of Indians from British rule. Given the author’s argument, such disillusionment was probably inevitable. And while Wagner exaggerates his case somewhat by downplaying the subsequent efforts by the British to constrain their use of force in an effort to prevent such massacres in the future, his argument is nevertheless one that is well made thanks both to his focus on the mindset of the British and his meticulous reconstruction of events. Reading it will make it impossible for all but the most diehard supporter of the British empire to believe in the myth of its benevolence. ...more |
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| 9780198224815
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it was amazing
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By the turn of the 19th century, the British were in the process of securing their dominance over India. With their defeat of the Maratha Confederacy
By the turn of the 19th century, the British were in the process of securing their dominance over India. With their defeat of the Maratha Confederacy in a succession of wars, the East India Company had vanquished the last polity in the subcontinent capable of checking their forces. Now as the Company extended their control over the region, their search for threats to their growing empire turned outward. First France and then Russia were eyed warily as possible challengers to their expanding dominion, leading both Company officials and British politicians to consider ways that these threats from the northwest might be curbed. Malcolm Yapp’s book is a study of the strategies they adopted during the first half of the century in response to these threats. He divides this study into four parts. The first of these focuses on Britain’s attempts to develop a “forward defense� in Iran against European interests in South Asia. Yapp dates these efforts to 1798, as until then Britain’s interests in the area were mainly commercial. Mounting reports of French interest in Iran, however, led the Governor-General in India, Marquess Wellesley, to pursue a political alliance with the shah. Such an aspiration, which also offered the prospect of diverting Afghan threats to India’s security, took shape in 1809 after years of tortuous negotiations in the form of a Preliminary Treaty that committed Iran to opposing any European force transiting through their territory towards India, and promised British mediation and support in any conflict they might face with a European nation. The changing geopolitical situation in Europe soon made the treaty something of an embarrassment for the British. Upon allying with Russia against Napoleon in 1812, Britain pressured Iran to end their ongoing war with their northern neighbor, even at the cost of ceding most of their territory in the Caucasus to the tsar. After Napoleon’s defeat, interest in defending Iran’s territory faded before worries that such a commitment might drag Britain into an unwanted war with Russia. With concerns for European relations trumping those of imperial security, the government in Britain eventually asserted their control of Anglo-Iranian relations and ended a policy that risked conflict rather than delivered protection. The gradual abandonment of the Iranian buffer forced the British government in Calcutta to look instead to their options in the Indus valley, which at that time was controlled by a number of independent states. Yapp’s examination of British security policy in northwestern India forms the second part of his book. As elsewhere throughout it he emphasizes the role played by the East India Company’s frontier agents in developing imperial strategy, which often was driven not by adherence to an overarching plan but the personal interest of these men. Increasing British authority in the areas where they were stationed meant both extending their influence and improving their prospects for career advancement. The cumulative effect of this was to institutionalize expansion, which in the 1830s meant securing the region around the Indus and turning it into British India’s new western border. Inevitably this shifted the focus of Britain’s forward defense westward into central Asia as well, leading to efforts to transform Afghanistan into British India’s new buffer state. Yapp’s description of Britain’s intervention in Afghanistan is not just the focus of the third part of his book, but the centerpiece of his overall narrative. Unsurprisingly the agents sent to secure British interests in the kingdom found cause to establish direct control over it. The result was the first Anglo-Afghan War and the restoration of Shah Sujah to the throne, who the British intended would handle internal matters while they controlled foreign affairs. These plans foundered on the twin shoals of poor local administrators and inadequate revenue, prompting the development of a shadow administration run and financed by the British. While the advance into Afghanistan opened up Turkestan as the next possible region from which to pursue a strategy of forward defense, an uprising by Afghan chiefs in Kabul in November 1841 forced the British to withdraw from the mountainous kingdom the following year, bringing a dramatic end to their system in the country. Britain’s retreat from Afghanistan returned their focus on Indian security to the regions directly on their frontier, leading to the annexation of first Sind in 1843, then the Punjab six years later. This takeover, the subject of the final part of Yapp’s book represented an abandonment of the buffer strategy in favor of a focus on securing the subcontinent from within, which was regarded as a far more attainable goal than that of establishing a forward defense in regions where the British presence was more tenuous. It was also an approach that reflected ultimate concerns that were less of outright invasion than of a more insidious suborning of British India’s internal security by hostile European powers. As with the other arguments in his book Yapp grounds these points in the fruits of his exhaustive research in the official records and private papers of the main British officials of the era. While his employment of Russian and Persian materials is much more limited, he nonetheless uses his findings to inform a highly detailed analysis of the evolution of British strategic policy in southern and central Asia. It is a masterful work that is necessary reading for anybody interested in the history of British India or their fabled "great game" in the region. ...more |
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| 0141018445
| 9780141018447
| 0141018445
| 3.72
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| Dec 26, 2006
| Dec 26, 2006
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Nigel Dalziel’s contribution to Penguin’s historical atlas series from the mid-2000s provides a useful overview of the history of the empire from its
Nigel Dalziel’s contribution to Penguin’s historical atlas series from the mid-2000s provides a useful overview of the history of the empire from its beginnings in the sixteenth century to its demise at the end of the twentieth. Easily the best part of it are its many colorful maps, which provide clear visual presentations of the empire from a variety of aspects. These address topics ranging from the slave trade and investments to migration and independence, providing visual support for the basic facts and figures in a way that underscores their significance. Each of these maps are accompanied by textual descriptions that offer plain summaries of their respective subjects, providing the basic facts with little elaboration or analysis. The latter is reserved for the books listed in the “Further Reading� section which, while dated and not as comprehensive as the book itself still guide readers to useful works elaborating on many of the aspects of empire covered in the text. In all, it’s a handy starting point for anyone new to the subject, while the maps offer informative perspectives for those who are already familiar with it.
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| 9781445696805
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| Jan 15, 2024
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Anyone writing a general history of the British Empire undertakes a formidable task. Between its size and its duration, any summary of it requires mas
Anyone writing a general history of the British Empire undertakes a formidable task. Between its size and its duration, any summary of it requires mastering an enormous amount of information about an organization that lasted for centuries. Even subdividing such an examination into a narrower period still requires incorporating coverage of territories on continents across the globe into its coverage, the conquest and administration of which involved goals and challenges very different from one another that elicited different approaches. To seek coherence risks oversimplification; to describe everything in detail threatens to overwhelm the author and the reader. In this regard, John Oliphant manages to strike an effective balance. Focusing on the emergence of the British Empire from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, he divides his examination into six parts preceded by an introduction that considers the problem of definition. As he notes, Britain’s empire did not emerge sui generis, but evolved out of their imperial efforts in Europe during the Middle Ages. It was only after the fall of their final outpost on the continent, in Calais, in 1557, that England turned definitively towards overseas ventures, many of which drew upon their ongoing experiences expanding their kingdom’s dominion over Ireland. While these experiences informed how the English approached questions of colonization, they were only intermittently applicable, as conditions and circumstances overseas often proved very different. To detail them, Oliphant begins each part providing an overview of events during that period from Britain’s perspective, then moves to detail the situation in various regions. His coverage is political and military in its focus, summarizing the efforts to build and maintain the burgeoning empire in the face of resistance from both indigenous populations and other imperial powers. While England (and Britain after 1707) surmounted these problems, their confrontation with their own settler population in North America in the 1770s, one in which the settlers were aided by Britain’s European foes, proved too great to overcome, necessitating a restructuring of the empire’s focus in its aftermath. Oliphant ends his survey in 1815, with Britain’s victory over Napoleonic France and the cementing with it of their status as a world power. In doing so, he provides an effective summary of the rise of a vast empire. Doing so required him to go far beyond his own prior focus on imperial encounters on the North American frontier, to include coverage of imperial development in the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and Australia. It’s a useful introduction, though one hampered by a dependence on secondary sources for much of his information, many of which are surveys themselves that only provide cursory coverage of the topics he addresses. Many of the important works on the empire during these centuries go unmentioned, which further highlights the limitations of his effort. For those seeking an introduction to the start of the British Empire Oliphant’s book is quite serviceable, but the dry recitation of events he provides lacks the analysis that would make it a truly valuable account of his subject. ...more |
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really liked it
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In 1919 the British Empire reached the greatest extent of its territorial growth. Thanks to its acquisition of Germany’s former colonies in Africa and
In 1919 the British Empire reached the greatest extent of its territorial growth. Thanks to its acquisition of Germany’s former colonies in Africa and their assumption of new mandates in the Middle East, their writ extended over 13.7 million miles of territory, or nearly a quarter of the world. Yet this achievement came at the very moment when Great Britain was burdened with the enormous costs of the war in which they won them. Facing a massive wartime debt and political pressure to economize in every way possible, the British were desperate for ways to control their enormous territorial holdings as cheaply as possible. One solution to which they turned was the airplane. Though barely a decade and a half old, heavier-than-air craft offered a means of policing vast expanses of sparsely settled territories and punishing rebellious factions both swiftly and efficiently. Dazzled by the possibilities, the British increasingly employed the newly-formed Royal Air Force (RAF) to overawe, intimidate, and suppress subjects throughout their empire, to such an extent that “air policing� � the use of aircraft to maintain the empire’s internal security � was as significant a role for it during the interwar era as was the defense of Great Britain. As David Omissi explains in this highly informative study, it was a role that not only aided imperial control, but helped to justify the RAF’s existence as an independent service, saving it from the budgetary axe and the efforts of the other branches to reclaim its roles. Omissi identifies the genesis of the air policing concept with the employment of airplanes in Afghanistan in 1919, at a time when the RAF was still in its infancy. The war there provided Hugh Trenchard, the first Chief of the Air Staff, with an opportunity to justify his claim that aviation could play an important role in controlling the overseas empire. While the challenges of operating over the mountainous territory often hampered the airplanes� use, their achievements became the first examples used to justify Trenchard’s vision. Airplanes were soon sent to Somaliland as well to deal with an uprising there, and came into their own in operations in Iraq. Championed by such figures as Winston Churchill, who served first as Secretary of State for Air and then Colonial Secretary during this period, the use of airplanes to exert control over distant regions of the British Empire quickly became commonplace. As air power was used increasingly to control remote parts of the empire, the RAF encountered its limitations. Some of these were defined by the internecine battles between the services, the cooperation of which limited the effectiveness of airplanes. With the War Office reluctant to cede control of its ground forces to the RAF, the air service resorted to raising its own armored car companies to support its operations. Geography also posed numerous challenges, as weather and the environment often hampered operations, and forced pilots to experiment with unusual measures � such as flying with spare parts strapped to their planes in case of emergencies � to adapt. Indigenous populations exploited their local geography effectively to frustrate reconnaissance and interdiction missions, using the terrain and their guile to counter the advantages that airplanes provided. Such responses demonstrated the limits of another advantage supposedly conferred by airplanes, which was their psychological impact on indigenous populations. With human flight still a novelty for many in the 1920s, it was argued by many advocates of air policing that the mere sight of airplanes would overawe rebellious subjects. While this proved true in some places at first, locals quickly overcame their awe and learned how to fight back. Pilots found themselves uncomfortably exposed to rifle fire at low altitudes, necessitating flying at higher levels that decreased the accuracy of both their bombs and their observations of the territory. This could prove a challenge as time went along, as the RAF relied heavily on planes from the First World War that suffered increasing wear from the various climates and their heavy use within them. New models were introduced, but the need to balance imperial missions with those of other military missions often resulted in designs that, thanks to specifications that would allow them to perform a range of duties, left them poorly suited to excel at any one of them. Perhaps surprisingly given the argument made by many of its proponents that air policing offered valuable training and experience with employing air power, Omissi concludes that its influence on the RAF’s preparation for another European conflict was minimal. Instead, its legacy lay in both its role in the survival of the RAF itself and the development of doctrine that would guide the counter-insurgency efforts in the postwar era. While his argument for the subsequent decline of air power’s effectiveness as a tool for policing requires reevaluation in the era of drone warfare, the persistence of such usage only adds to the value of his work as a study of the origins of the practice. Grounded in a formidable amount of archival research that was only then becoming available as Omissi wrote his work, it has since proven a seminal study of its subject, and one that has yet to be equaled. For anyone interested in the history of the RAF or in the use of air power to maintain imperialism, this book remains essential reading. ...more |
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| 1855323524
| 9781855323520
| 1855323524
| 3.52
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| 1994
| Oct 17, 1994
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it was ok
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Today the battle of Plassey is regarded as one of the decisive battles in modern world history. With their defeat of the army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the
Today the battle of Plassey is regarded as one of the decisive battles in modern world history. With their defeat of the army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, in June 1757, the British East India Company secured control over Bengal, marking the start of their country’s rule over the Indian subcontinent. From their new base in its northeast, the British were able to draw upon the resources of the region to assert their dominance over other Indian rulers and gradually force out their French and Dutch competitors, ensuring that the predominant European influence in South Asia would be a British one. Yet for all of this surprisingly little is known about the battle, as the few accounts of it that survived leave only the basic course of it understood. Such are the limits of the available information that Peter Harrington struggles to fill even the limited number of pages of this book with enough details about the battle and the men who fought in it, forcing him to compensate in a variety of ways. There is a generous supply of the maps and illustrations that are a feature of the Osprey Campaign series, so many that some elude captioning. Harrington also devotes a half-dozen pages to the siege of Arcot six years before, which is relevant only for the role it played in the rise of Robert Clive, the eventual commander of the East India Company forces at Plassey. Such space could have been devoted more profitably to covering the complex Indian politics that determined the battle, most notably the factors that led to Mir Jafar’s decisive defection from the Nawab to Clive. As it is, Harrington’s book is best treated as a British-centric sketch of the battle, one that serves as only the most basic of introductions to it for a reader new to the subject. ...more |
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| Sep 10, 2019
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it was amazing
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On 21 June 1757, Robert Clive, the commander of British forces in India, held a council of war with the officers of his army. Seven months earlier, Cl
On 21 June 1757, Robert Clive, the commander of British forces in India, held a council of war with the officers of his army. Seven months earlier, Clive had launched a campaign against Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, which had retaken Calcutta from the Nawab’s forces and captured the French colony of Chandernagar. Ahead near the town of Plassey, though, lay the Nawab’s army of nearly 50,000 soldiers, a force that vastly outnumbered the 3100 men under Clive’s command. While the Nawab’s general, Mir Jafar, promised to switch sides, Clive feared he was being led into a trap, a concern shared by a majority of the council. Yet after voting to end the campaign, after a night’s rest Clive set aside his caution and resolved to press onward. The next day, Clive’s forces won a victory over the Nawab’s army, one that proved among the most pivotal in world history. Thanks to it, the British became the preeminent military and political power in Bengal, with the authority of the Nawab fatally undermined in a pattern that would soon be repeated elsewhere in India. Yet this shift was driven not by the British state but by a private entity: the British East India Company (EIC), a joint-stock company that had been created a century and a half before with the innocuous goal of trading commodities between England and the Indian Ocean region. How the EIC went from a trading company to the dominant governing force in the subcontinent is the subject of William Dalrymple’s engrossing book, who sees in this evolution a forerunner of emerging forms of global power today. Dalrymple argues that the transformation of the EIC from a mercantile venture into a governing power was a reaction to the changes which took place within India during the 18th century. When the company was originally chartered in 1600, Mughal India was among the world’s most powerful and prosperous realms � indeed, it was that very prosperity which inspired a group of merchants and explorers to seek a charter to trade with them. By the end of the 17th century, however, Mughal resources were increasing overstretched thanks to the Emperor Aurangzeb’s campaigns to conquer the Deccan. Instability followed his death in 1707, as succession disputes plagued the imperial court and regional governors began to behave autonomously, inaugurating an era that gives Dalrymple the title of his book. Among those who sought to exploit this situation were the European trading companies, who began to recruit and train their own private armies. These “sepoys� were organized along Western lines, and the tactics they employed gave them a disproportionate impact on the battlefields of the subcontinent. When Britain and France went to war in the 1740s, their respective companies began fighting one another in the Carnatic region in defiance of the restrictions of the local rulers. Dalrymple regards these wars as pivotal in the militarization of both the British and French East India companies, both of which started to collect taxes, hold lands, and provide military assistance to the highest bidder. It was in the Carnatic Wars that gave Clive, previously an obscure EIC official, his opportunity for wealth and glory, making him a model which Company servants would aspire to follow. While Clive’s victory at Plassey inaugurated a shift in the balance of the relationship between the EIC and the subcontinent’s rulers, Dalrymple emphasizes that it was far from an irreversible one. For the remainder of the century the company’s power rested primarily on the ability of its representatives to exploit the divisions between the various nawabs. The increasingly predatory activities of EIC officials certainly gave Indians cause to unite against them. Yet the ongoing slow collapse of Mughal authority deprived Indians of a central figure around which to rally. Instead, local rulers often preferred to employ Company forces in their own bids for power, which they financed by assigning the EIC a greater role in taxing and managing their realms. Though a few such as Warren Hastings pushed back against some of the excesses of this exploitation, the profitability of such activities proved too tempting for most Britons, be they agents in India or stockholders back home. Ironically, Hastings became the scapegoat for the EIC’s rapacity in India, and was impeached in the House of Commons in 1786. His replacement as governor-general by Charles Cornwallis, a career army officer rather than a Company employee, signaled the growing importance of India to the British. Sent to consolidate the Company’s position, Cornwallis expanded its territorial holdings and instituted a series of reforms designed to prevent the establishment of a settler class that might challenge British control. It was, however, his successor, the aggressively expansionist Marquess of Wellesley, who proved in Dalrymple’s view the key figure in the shift towards greater state control. Determined to make political authority throughout the subcontinent dependent on British power, it was during Wellesley’s tenure that the EIC completed their domination of India by driving out the remaining French influence in the region and defeating the last indigenous Indian power militarily capable of opposing them. Dalrymple notes that the Company secured their ascendancy in India with just 600 civil servants and 155,000 Indian sepoys. While many Indians at the time welcomed the stability the British presence brought after years of warfare, the growing resentment over the EIC’s exactions in the decades that followed contributed to the uprising by the company’s own forces in 1857, an event that led the British to take the final steps in replacing their indirect governance of the subcontinent with direct rule by the Crown. Dalrymple stops well short of recounting these events, ending his book instead with a warning about the abuse of corporate power. Yet his book is much more than a cautionary tale about the consequences of such abuses, as it provides an absorbing account of the factors that brought about British rule in India. By drawing upon Indian sources, he restores the Indians� agency by detailing how their rulers� contest for power gave the Company the opportunities they exploited. It’s a dramatic tale that Dalrymple tells grippingly, making his book one that will be devoured by anybody interested in his subject. ...more |
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Dec 22, 2024
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Dec 22, 2024
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| 0465023290
| 9780465023295
| 0465023290
| 3.93
| 9,484
| 2003
| Apr 14, 2004
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it was ok
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Niall Ferguson is a financial historian who made a name for himself in the 2000s as a prominent spokesperson for the then-ascendant neo-conservative m
Niall Ferguson is a financial historian who made a name for himself in the 2000s as a prominent spokesperson for the then-ascendant neo-conservative movement. He is also, as he details in the introduction to this book, a proud son of the British Empire, one with relatives scattered across three continents thanks to his country’s imperial past. It’s an identification that clearly helps to inform his perspective on his subject. For while he openly acknowledges the brutality and exploitation that were an indispensable part of the empire, his book is nonetheless a celebration of what he terms its “signal virtues,� declaring that “no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire over its long history. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.� Ferguson’s ostensible purpose is to tell the story of this “Anglobalization,� to show how such things as commodity, labor, and capital markets came to be globalized by the British Empire from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. It is here, however, that we encounter the first of the unstated assumptions in his book: that this process was not already underway prior to Britain’s arrival on the global scene. The Spanish and Portuguese empires that preceded Britain’s are presented in his text as nemeses and targets rather than mercantile competitors who were already globalizing the world through their expanding trading networks. It is of a piece with another unstated assumption, which is that the other European powers that competed with Britain simply would not have delivered the same outcome. This is particularly questionable when it comes to the Dutch, who not only embraced many of the same values as their counterparts across the English Channel, but who, as Ferguson acknowledges, were beating the English at their own game prior to their “merger� in 1688. Such inconvenient details demonstrate that globalization was an ongoing process being driven by multiple interests rather than something that only the British could have accomplished. And perhaps Ferguson himself is aware of this, as the further one reads into his book the more it becomes not about demonstrating how the British globalized the world but about providing a selective history of its rise and fall. To his credit he does not deny the existence of red on the empire’s ledger, acknowledging its embrace of slavery, the brutality of its conquests, and the economic exploitation of the millions it ruled. Yet he weighs this against the civilizing mission that he describes, of their efforts to “modernize� non-Western civilizations, to suppress the slave trade, to educate indigenous populations. That the scope of these efforts does not even come close to the damage done goes unmentioned, creating an assumption of a fair trade off: the deaths of millions through conquest and exploitation in return for teaching the colonials how to beat the English at cricket. And this gets to what is perhaps the most glaring of the unstated assumptions in Ferguson’s book, which is that the “Anglobalization� he praises was more than a side-effect of the centuries of conquest and control. The free markets he credits the British with introducing often emerge despite the restrictive fiscal and trading policies he describes rather than because of them. Ideas of the rule of law were often violated rather than upheld when it came to the violent treatment of colonial subjects. And most glaring of all is Ferguson’s citing of “liberty� as “the most distinctive feature of the Empire,� especially as, by his own admission, the British did everything within their power to prohibit it. In the respect, the most the British did to promote political liberty in their empire came in giving indigenous populations someone from whom to demand their freedom, which makes giving British the credit for this seem perverse. Ferguson does not delve too deeply into this, as he prefers to rush through Britain’s long and regrettable history of resisting decolonization to focus instead on the lessons their empire has to offer to the United States in the early 21st century. Ferguson was hardly the first to posit the United States as a successor to the British Empire, nor is he unique in regarding this as a good thing. But the lamentable history of America’s engagement in the Middle East in the years following the initial publication of Ferguson’s book underscores the fallacies of his assumptions. Instead of securing the triumph of liberal capitalism that the author so clearly adores, the civilizing mission of the United States has bred only disillusionment and a backlash against globalization. This makes Ferguson’s book less of a still-useful history of the British Empire than a relic of a hubris which demonstrated not the success of such advancements, but the discrediting of many of its ostensible achievements. While Ferguson himself may blame the United States for this for denying its true destiny, perhaps the real lesson is that the British Empire’s success in spreading its values via conquest was in the end more myth than reality. ...more |
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| 0307272427
| 9780307272423
| 0307272427
| 4.26
| 1,055
| Jan 18, 2022
| Mar 29, 2022
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really liked it
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Caroline Elkins’s history of the British empire offers a critique of it on two levels. The first of these is advertised prominently in its title, whic
Caroline Elkins’s history of the British empire offers a critique of it on two levels. The first of these is advertised prominently in its title, which is in how the British maintained their empire through a regular employment of brutality that was refined over the course of decades. Though this violence is far from unknown, with infamous atrocities in places like Ireland, India, and Kenya well remembered today, what Elkins describes is a far more systematic practice of it than is commonly appreciated. In the process, what she demonstrates is that, contrary to many of the empire’s defenders, the use of violence by British personnel on subject populations was not the actions of a few bad actors, but a tool frequently employed to maintain British control. This violence belies of both the imperial rhetoric of the time and national memories today. As polls frequently demonstrate, many Britons remain proud of their empire and its legacy. That they enjoy such golden memories of their empire is thanks in considerable part to a deliberate campaign undertaken over decades to hide the truth, which forms the second and less overt part of Elkins’s critique. It is a campaign with which she had firsthand experience as a participant in the 2011 case brought by five Kenyans seeking compensation from the British for the torture they experienced while in captivity during the Mau Mau uprising. During that trial, over a million pages of documents from former colonial possessions that were previously thought lost were made public and transferred to the National Archives in Kew. Prior to the discovery of the “migrated archives,� it was a lot easier for Britons to pretend that their empire was a force for good than was the case. Such mythmaking played an integral role in the empire’s self-image long before decolonization. This Elkins represents with the phrase “liberal imperialism,� which embodies the idea of an empire built on capitalist values that was dedicated to progress and reform. From the start, however, this “civilizing mission� ran headlong into the frequent extralegal use of state violence throughout the empire, from Ireland to Jamaica and the Cape Colony. While these episodes contradicted claims that British rule represented the rule of law, they were rationalized as necessary compromises, with the justification interwoven into the public perceptions of the empire as providing order as a precondition for advancing the liberal goals. Though this was strained by British campaigns against the Boers during the second Boer War, what exposed fully the hypocrisy of the claim was the British response to the outbreak of nationalism in the aftermath of the First World War. The embrace of nationalist self-determination at the Paris peace conference sparked movements throughout the empire, with India and Ireland at the forefront. Wartime promises of Indian sovereignty went unfulfilled, prompting protests which were met by the state with bloodshed. Yet it was Ireland which demonstrated the hollowness of British claims. The spark of Irish nationalism set off a conflagration which soon swept through much of island, prompting a ruthless campaign of repression. With the indigenous police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, undermined by assassinations and community pressure, the British brought in wartime veterans � soon to become infamous as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries � who brought an unprecedented brutality to their task. Though this failed to prevent Irish independence, Elkins sees in their activities the seedbed of the imperial response to independence movements elsewhere. In the wake of Irish independence, the veterans of imperial enforcement were redeployed to positions in other parts of the empire, where they employed many of the same tactics in their efforts to maintain fraying British rule. One such place to where many of the Irish war veterans were sent was Palestine. There the British inherited a newly-created "mandate" to govern the former Ottoman territory, which their politicians had promised to more parties than they could deliver. This proved only one place, however, where the increasingly straitened empire was attempting to impose its rule. In response the British doubled down on their use of the military as an imperial constabulary, with the recently formed Royal Air Force advancing liberal imperial goals from the air with bombs and machine guns. These could pacify populations, but any degree of control required some level of participation from indigenous communities, which was achieved after the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine with the aid of Jewish supernumeraries and a faction of the old Arab leadership, both of which aided British forces not out of any commitment to the liberal imperial vision but as a means of cementing their own power in the Mandate. The tenuous control the British maintained over their empire was shattered by the Second World War. The all-encompassing demands of the conflict gave a short-term license to any means necessary to maintain British dominance over an empire the resources of which were needed desperately to defeat the Axis powers. Yet the war undermined fatally the British presence in many places, as Japanese conquest disrupted Britain’s control over their possessions in Southeast Asia. More generally, the rhetoric of freedom demanded by their American allies further eroded Britain’s hold, as increasingly it was clear that Britain’s ability to project their power was contingent on the support of an ally who did not share the vision of a British-dominated liberal imperialism. Even before the war ended, violence in Palestine foreshadowed the fate of the postwar empire, as restive populations increasingly pressed for freedom. These demands clashed with British plans for postwar recovery. With their country devastated and their economy indebted to the United States, the newly-elected Labour government pinned their hopes for restoring prosperity on imperial exploitation. Instead, the empire became a fiscal sinkhole as ever-more personnel and military resources were poured into it simply to maintain some semblance of control. As the aspirations of imperial imperialists eroded under the onslaught of religiously- and sectarian-driven violence, the British doubled down on their use of force. Police in Palestine were overwhelmed by a determined campaign of Jewish terrorism, against which even a constrained response met with international condemnation. The British enjoyed a freer hand in Malaya, where many Mandate veterans were transferred after the mandate was surrendered. Their success against the communist insurgency in that valuable colony ensured that many of the personnel were transferred later to suppress the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Thus was the throughline of violent practice established: Ireland to Palestine, Palestine to Malaya, Malaya to Kenya, in each of which the increasingly hardened veterans resorted to tactics of intimidation, coercion, and torture to extend the life of their ailing empire. By the 1950s, these efforts faced growing criticism from many in the public and in Parliament. In response, officials at home and abroad increasingly sought to cover up their activities. The daily practice of violence was denied, with the irrefutable reports of abuses treated as outliers unrepresentative of the whole. To complete such efforts, hundreds of thousands of files were burned or otherwise disposed of by departing authorities. This helped the British perpetuate for themselves the belief that theirs was a benevolent empire long after it was rejected by its supposed beneficiaries. Elkins’s book delivers a fatal blow to such fantasies. It is a passionate work, filled with contempt for imperial doublespeak and sympathy for the empire’s victims. Its scope is impressive, and while digressive at points it never feels wasteful. If anything, the book proves a little too short, as by addressing only fitfully the legacy of such violence for both the newly independent nations and their former imperial overlord, Elkins leaves underexamined the point raised by her title. As she suggests, the violence did not end once the British lowered their flags, but often was continued by Britain’s successors. It is an inheritance that requires further exploration than she provides, both to complete her accounting of the legacy of Britain’s empire and for the coda it would offer of the success of the liberal imperialist vision it supposedly advanced. ...more |
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Sep 28, 2023
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Oct 08, 2023
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Sep 28, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1596986298
| 9781596986299
| 1596986298
| 3.64
| 291
| Jan 01, 2011
| Oct 24, 2011
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did not like it
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The British Empire has never wanted for defenders. For centuries men in uniform spent their careers and even their lives to preserve its existence, wh
The British Empire has never wanted for defenders. For centuries men in uniform spent their careers and even their lives to preserve its existence, while others confined their sacrifice to the expenditure of ink. H. W. Crocker III is in the latter category, and he undertakes his task at an inopportune time. Today the British “Empire� is a sad remnant of its former self, consisting of little more than some isolated leftovers that are maintained at considerable expense either out of nostalgia for past greatness or simply because nobody else wants them. When they do go, it will undoubtedly be with a whimper rather than a bang. Yet so long as these isolated patches still fly the Union Jack, Crocker will continue to take heart. “The British Empire still exists, thank goodness,� he declares at the start of his paean to it, adding that it was “incontestably a good thing.� Sure, he admits, it was built through conquest of other people, it arbitrarily established boundaries to suit their interests, and it was responsible for a “portion� of the slave trade, but all of this in his view is a small price to pay for introducing to subjugated populations “their ideas about the rule of law, liberty, and parliamentary self-government,� as well as British sports and their concept of fair play. I’m sure he would have added warm beer to the list if he had a taste for it. All of this, of course, is based on a host of assumptions, all of which go unaddressed. Foremost among them is that none of things would exist in the world but for the British, which would have come as quite a surprise to all those places in the world that enjoyed the rule of law, organized games, and ideas of fairness long before the British showed up on their lands to “introduce� them. And of course, introducing them was far from the goal of the empire in the first place, as Crocker reluctantly acknowledges before moving on quickly to the more fun parts of his tale. For someone who likes to bang on throughout the book about “Bolshies� and other right-wing boogeymen, he certainly doesn’t like to spend much effort defending the profit-seeking goals of the empire that merited their attacks on it. The second assumption is that all of the British Empire’s wonderful contributions to the world could only have been brought to it through conquest and subjugation. Crocker certainly had no shortage of opportunities to address this throughout the book, as the bulk of its pages are devoted to a “boys� own� retelling of the conquest of empire, complete with entire chapters offering potted biographies of some of the most famous conquerors. It’s an approach that conveniently skips past any examination of the conquered, which evidently is necessary for Crocker to do to construct his claims for the “incontestable� goodness of the empire. After all, what do their lives matter when weighed against the introduction of tennis to the survivors? And this gets to the biggest assumption of all in Crocker’s book, which is that British rule was incomparably superior to what preceded it, and that any positive aspects of independence was because of their legacy. This he argues through his region-by-region examination of the British Empire, which provides a curated selection of the highlights that support his arguments. Yet even in his presentation of his examples he excludes important details in order to make his case. Perhaps the best example of this is his chapter on America’s own period as an imperial possession, which he presents as largely a laissez-faire rule during its existence. Of course, it’s easy enough to declare that “there were no shackles on the Americans� if one ignores the effort by James II to introduce the Dominion of New England, an attempt to impose centralized administrative control that was only thwarted by the Glorious Revolution and William III’s focus on his wars with France. Exclusion of this episode is minor, though, compared to Crocker’s glossing over of the events leading to the American Revolution (or, as the British and Crocker prefer to call it, the American War of Independence), which he rushes through in a paragraph that only succeeds in conveying a sense that the author feels that the wrong side won. Crocker’s belief in the ingratitude of imperial subjects is even greater when it comes to the Irish. As he presents it, the debt owed by the Irish to the English is vast, whereas the debt owed by the English to the Irish is negligible (with the author even pointedly reassigning any credit for Ireland’s contribution to medieval civilization to the Catholic Church). Tinted as it is by his use of rosiest of rose-colored glasses, Crocker’s portrait of Britain’s rule over the Emerald Isle is so discolored as to be unrecognizable. His celebration of the English for introducing “law and order� during the Middle Ages, as well as a parliament, leaves out that these were employed to extend English control at the expense of the Irish themselves. His summary of the Act of Union, which he presents as a failure due to the “charismatic� distractions of Daniel O’Connell, leaves out that his appeal was directly tied to the failure of the British to deliver on their promises of Catholic emancipation after the act’s passage. The “hazard� of the Irish potato famine leaves out that the tragedy was a consequence of the Irish peasantry’s British-imposed dependence on the crop. And so on. It is only thanks to such omissions that Crocker’s view of an ungrateful Ireland casting off British rule has any traction, and even he is forced to acknowledge without elaboration that by the end it was only maintained in the empire’s “second capital� by British soldiers patrolling in armored cars. By this point perhaps the greatest flaw in Crocker’s argument is obvious, which is that among the greatest grievances of imperial subjects was that those concepts of “the rule of law, liberty, and parliamentary self-government� which he is so eager to credit the British Empire for spreading were in fact denied to them by the British throughout most of the empire’s existence. Here Crocker relies upon his reader’s ignorance of the details, such as the role the perceived loss of sovereignty played in motivating the American Revolution, or that the Irish parliament represented the Anglo-Irish minority rather than the Gaelic majority. This distortion only gets worse as he moves on to the Asian and African parts of the empire, as he ignores completely the British resistance to introducing rights and representative self-government whenever they feared it might become an impediment to their control. Claiming that “British policy was to lead India to becoming a self-governing dominion� omits that such a policy came only after a half-century of agitation by Indian activists and broken promises on the part of the British, and even then was hedged with provisions that allowed the British to rescind self-government whenever they decided it was necessary. And his description of British rule in Africa as a demonstration of “their usual facility for development, civilization, and self-rule� is an outright howler that requires complete ignorance of the structures of local governance imposed by the British in those colonies and the restriction of voting to white settlers to be believed. It is this level of intellectual dishonesty that undermines Crocker’s effort to make a positive case for the British Empire. Only by providing the most superficial of overviews of British rule with cherry-picked examples to support his interpretation is it even remotely possible for him to make such a claim in the first place. And if the best defense that can be offered for events such as the use of torture by British security forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya that “some� of the accounts have been “hysterically exaggerated� while excusing the rest as being unauthorized, then the reader is well within their rights as to question the supposed incontestability of the empire as a “good thing.� If there is argument to be made that in the end the contributions of the British empire were more positive than negative, it certainly isn’t to be found in this lazy and misleading book. ...more |
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Jun 06, 2023
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Jun 06, 2023
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Jun 06, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1107439485
| 9781107439481
| 1107439485
| 3.00
| 1
| Feb 28, 2022
| Dec 16, 2021
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liked it
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The Malayan Emergency is the name given to the twelve-year-long campaign by British imperial forces and their Malayan successors against the Malayan C
The Malayan Emergency is the name given to the twelve-year-long campaign by British imperial forces and their Malayan successors against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and their military arm, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). Originating with a guerrilla campaign launched by the MCP against the colony’s extraction industries and the government forces defending them, at its peak tens of thousands of soldiers and police officers battled an insurgency that, though never numbering more than 8,000, were supported by a substantial swath of the minority ethnic Chinese population. Over the course of the conflict, thousands were killed and the lives of hundreds of thousands more were disrupted by forced relocation into internment camps in an effort by government forces to separate insurgents from their supporters. As a result of these efforts, by 1960 the MCP’s campaign had been defeated, with much of Malaya changed permanently as a result of that effort. In the years that followed, soldiers and academics pointed to the Emergency as an archetype of a successful counterinsurgency campaign, with numerous articles and books written in order to parse the factors in its success. In Karl Hack’s estimation, most of these analyses suffer from the flaw of an incomplete examination of the Emergency, as too often they favor the British imperial perspective and fail to factor in the insurgents� side into their explanation of events. His book is an effort to provide a comprehensive history of the Emergency that, by examining the MCP’s strategy and their response to the government’s efforts to suppress their campaigns, provides a more effective assessment of the British counterinsurgency efforts and why they proved victorious in the end. An important part of this examination is Hack’s inclusion of developments at the local level, as doing so allows him to identify the events that led to the government’s declaration of the state of emergency in June 1948. In particular, he focuses on postwar conditions in Malaya, showing how the choices that led to the MCP’s decision to embark upon an insurgency were shaped by their shrinking space for political and labor activity. Empowered by both the example of the Communist victories in China and their own wartime resistance campaign against the Japanese, the MCP saw an insurgency as the best available response to attacks on their union power and their exclusion from post-reoccupation political planning. As Hack details, this campaign of violence began at the grassroots in response to the authorities� growing crackdown on MCP labor-related activism. The problem for the MCP leadership was that the British response was less restrained than they anticipated. The result was a campaign of terror and counter-terror, with violence and property destruction inflicted by both sides. As early as 1949, however, the British began experimenting with “hearts and minds� measures intended to separate the MNLA from the population of sympathizers who provided them with vital logistical support, an effort that expanded with the introduction of efforts at what Hack terms “geodemographic control,� or the forced resettlement of peasants into the “new villages� in order to isolate physically the insurgents from the larger population. This strategy, Hack argues, proved key to the eventual defeat of the MCP. It was particularly important because the grassroots violence in 1947-8 forced the MCP’s leaders to launch their guerrilla effort before they had established adequate logistical support for it. By 1951, the MCP had to adopt a new strategy that reflected a reconceptualization of the insurgency as a longer-term struggle than they previously envisioned. In accordance with the directions outlined in the October Resolutions, units were moved deeper into the jungle to establish plots that could support the MNLA insurgents, while attacks on plantations and officials were reduced in favor of infiltration of towns and community organizations. It was a plan that, while reflecting the reduced opportunities for the MCA, had the practical effect of giving the British the initiative in the conflict. And once the British gained the initiative, they exploited it for all it was worth. From 1952 onward Hack sees the British as employing an increasingly nuanced approach based on whatever was proving most effective. The growing success of the Malay Alliance political movement in elections led the British to abandon their efforts to create a cross-communal political environment in favor of one dominated by the Malay, giving the majority of the population a greater investment in maintaining a status quo that was moving towards independence. An emphasis in anti-insurgent propaganda on the positive treatment of MNLA captives increased the rate of surrender. The clearing out of areas caused by the decline in the MNLA’s numbers allowed security forces to concentrate their resources on the regions with the strongest MCP support, increasing the pressure on them. By 1958, the increasingly hopeless position of the MCA, reflected in a skyrocketing of surrender rates, led their leadership to focus on politics and a negotiated solution, leaving their remaining forces to decline to only a residual threat by the time the emergency declaration was ended. As a history of the Malayan Emergency, Hack’s nuanced analysis sets a new standard thanks to its comprehensiveness. By expanding its scope to include the MCP’s strategies and responses and by examining their impact at the local level, he shows how events were driven as often by their choices as they were by British leaders. Yet Hack’s description of events is often dry to the point of bloodlessness, which excludes any sense of the emotional aspects of the conflict from the text. This is exacerbated by an unnecessarily dense writing style that is excessively burdened with jargon and cumbersome words. Better editing would have aided greatly the communication of Hack’s arguments in this book, which offers a well-rounded examination of one of the most famous yet poorly understood counterinsurgency conflicts of modern times. ...more |
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May 22, 2023
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May 27, 2023
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May 22, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0393059863
| 9780393059861
| 0393059863
| 4.06
| 365
| Jan 01, 2005
| Jan 01, 2005
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it was amazing
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On the evening of March 26, 1953, the local Home Guard unit of the town of Lari in the British colony of Kenya was summoned to investigate reports of
On the evening of March 26, 1953, the local Home Guard unit of the town of Lari in the British colony of Kenya was summoned to investigate reports of a body found an hour’s journey from the town. Arriving at the location, they found the disfigured corpse of a man left nailed to a tree next to a footpath so that he would be easily discovered. No sooner had they found him, however, then they saw fires breaking out in the direction of Lari, which they had left undefended. Hastening back to the town, they were horrified to discover dozens of people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, murdered by the armed gangs who had used the corpse to lure them out of town so they could attack the vulnerable community. In the end, nearly a hundred people were killed in the Lari massacre, making it the bloodiest single incident in Kenya’s “dirty war� between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, commonly known as Mau Mau, and the British authorities. To David Anderson, the event was a product of far more than a struggle for independence from colonial rule, reflecting as well the deeper changes that had taken place in native African society as a consequence of British imperialism. Not the least of his achievements in this absorbing book is in showing how these larger and more relevant factors made the Mau Mau revolt not just a war of insurgency against an imperial power but a civil war among the native peoples, one that, while overlooked in popular conceptions of the conflict in contemporary Western coverage, still haunts Kenya to this day. To demonstrate this, Anderson spends considerable space detailing the socioeconomic development of Kenya in the years leading up to the rebellion. Much of this was shaped by the land hunger of the British, who found in the highlands both fertile farmland and a climate very much to their liking. Britons unable to afford the gentry lifestyle back home could replicate it in Kenya at a fraction of the cost, thanks to the support of a colonial regime that crafted policies that favored their interests. The influx of white settlers drawn to this opportunity marginalized the indigenous Africans, who were forced into “reserves� and reorganized tribally to suit British expectations. Resentment of British rule, coupled with population pressure and declining agricultural income, proved a fertile mix for resentment among the Kikuyu people, one of the ethnic groups native to the region. Anderson identifies three distinct political blocs within the Kikuyu community. Foremost among them were the chiefs, headmen, and Christian elders whose authority was based on their collaboration with the British colonial state. They faced opposition from two groups: Westernized moderate nationalists, and a more militant nationalist group that would serve as the foundation of the Mau Mau. Empowered by an influx of ex-servicemen from the Second World War, the latter group seized control of the moderates� Kenyan African Union political movement in the late 1940s, turning their oath from a pledge of loyalty to a pan-ethnic movement into a commitment of support to more radical action. The first acts of violence took place among the Kikuyu, as workers on white farms who refused to take the oath were beaten. Police investigations alerted the colonial state to the existence of the Mau Mau, who in the summer of 1950 moved to ban it. The government’s efforts to downplay the extent of the Mau Mau, however, placed the burden of the response on the conservative Kikuyu leadership in what became a contest for control over their community. Local leaders and police informers were assassinated and witnesses to these crimes were themselves murdered or intimidated into silence, frustrating legal prosecution. It was not until the murder of the first European and the assassination of a senior chief in October 1952 that the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, requested permission from London to declare a state of emergency in the colony. What followed fully justified the label “dirty war.� The growing violence against terrified white settlers fed a dehumanizing vision among them of Mau Mau members as possessed of some form of mental illness, and added to their demands that the authorities be given a blank check to fight the insurgency. Despite priding themselves on “knowing� the Kikuyu, they erased in their minds any distinctions between the Mau Mau and the moderate nationalists, which warped what had started as an internecine conflict into a simplistic Manichean struggle over white rule that only confirmed the settlers� unwillingness to compromise. Confessions obtained by the police from Mau Mau suspects were subsequently recanted in court as the product of torture, yet the judges generally discounted such claims (even when confronted with visible proof) and accepted the initial statements as genuine. The Home Guard militia, formed by the authorities out of a nascent vigilante movement among loyalist Kikuyu, often abused their power and sometimes behaved as little more than sanctioned criminal gangs. By the time General George Erskine, a career army officer with counter-insurgency experience, took command of operations in June 1953, the security forces were out of control, with vengeance rather than justice the goal of many of their members. After restoring a measure of discipline to his ranks, Erskine launched Operation Anvil, which detained thousands of Mau Mau, disrupted their presence in the capital, Nairobi, and broke up the supply lines for the Mau Mau fighters in the forests. Though two more years of campaigning lay ahead, the reassertion of British authority weakened the Mau Mau’s ability to terrorize the Kikuyu populace and allowed the loyalists to reassert themselves. By the end of 1956, relentless operations aided by intelligence from Mau Mau detainees had broken up the forest armies, with the survivors scattered throughout the Kenyan countryside. For the British the price of this success was high, as the “Emergency� in Kenya lingered on until 1960, while news of the detention of thousands of Mau Mau in harsh and unsanitary conditions sparked outrage at home, fueling the drive towards independence. By 1963 the British were gone, replaced by an elected government dominated by the former loyalists and moderate nationalists. For the Mau Mau who fought to achieve it, independence mainly brought disappointment, as instead of rewarding them for their sacrifice the country’s new president, the moderate nationalist Jomo Kenyatta, preferred to bury a divisive past. Anderson’s framing of the conflict as a Kikuyu civil war makes this understandable, as he demonstrates the lingering political sensitivity over the conflict even decades later. Drawing upon police reports, court records, and other largely untapped archival holdings in both Kenya and Britain, he constructs a comprehensive description of a conflict from which few emerged with their honor intact. His reliance on them lends a legalistic focus to his account, which exposes the hollowness of British claims for the benefits and superiority of their rule, and adds to the power of his account of the collapse of their empire in the 20th century and its legacy for the newly independent nations that emerged. It should be read by everyone interested in the history of the “dirty war� and its legacy for Kenya today. ...more |
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During the second half of the 18th century, the various rulers on the Indian subcontinent faced a growing challenge for control from the British East
During the second half of the 18th century, the various rulers on the Indian subcontinent faced a growing challenge for control from the British East India Company (EIC). Branching out from his original role as a mercantile operation, the EIC began asserting administrative control over several Indian states. Their power rested on the three “presidency armies,� forces consisting of a mixture of Europeans and local levies, all trained in the Western way of fighting. In response to their success in recent conflicts, starting around 1805 the Sikh Maharaja, Ranjit Singh, began remodeling his army along European lines. Downplaying the traditional reliance of cavalry, Ranjit Singh built his forces around a Western-style infantry backed by a strengthened artillery arm. Thanks to his assiduous efforts, by the time of his death in 1839 the Sikhs possessed what many regarded as the most capable local army in the Indian subcontinent. The problem for Ranjit Singh’s successors was that it was an army that was too powerful for them to control. As discipline broke down and rival figures began bidding for the throne with extravagant promises of pay, the army became an unstable force dominating Sikh politics. Fortunately a solution was at hand for the kingdom’s elite: the British annexation of Sind to the south in 1843, provided them with a convenient rock against which to break the Sikh army. The result was the first Anglo-Sikh War, quite possibly unique in human history, as David Smith notes in this book, in that the leaders of both sides went to war with the shared aim of the destruction of the Khalsa, as the Sikh Army was known. To demonstrate this, Smith highlights the otherwise inexplicable decisions made by the Sikh generals, who often shared information with their British counterparts and whom seemingly did everything possible to help British forces defeat their enemy. Much of Smith’s argument is based on inference, for understandable reasons. As he notes, the Khalsa had become increasingly ungovernable thanks to a breakdown in discipline, with many units electing their own officers. Yet while the Khalsa was no longer the force it had been in Ranjit Singh’s day, its sheer size made it a formidable opponent for the EIC’s forces. From the perspective of the Sikh aristocracy, war with the British was a no-lose proposition, as victory promised an expansion of the kingdom’s territory and the wealth needed to defuse tensions with the army. That the Sikh forces operated so defensively, often against the desire of their own men, however, suggests that defeat was preferable to a victory that would only prolong the army’s dominance of Sikh politics. Even so, victory did not come easily for the British. Smith demonstrates that, for all of the decline in their training and the conspiring of their generals, the Khalsa fought with a tenacity that cost the British dear. Smith sees a contributing factor in this the preference of the commander of British forces, Sir Hugh Gough, for bayonet charges, which ensured that British wins were bloody ones. Though the British were severely challenged in key battles, their greater numbers and the active conniving of their counterparts in the Sikh leadership ensured that the final outcome was never in doubt. Less than three months after Sikh forces crossed the River Sutlej the war was over, with the Sikhs signing a series of treaties that expanded British control in the region and which sowed the seeds for a second, much more debilitating war that would break out just three years later. Despite (or perhaps because of) the efforts of the Sikh generals to undermine their own side, the British maintained a healthy respect for Sikh troops, who would become a visible part of the Indian Army in the decades that followed. Smith’s slim study makes such views understandable, as he notes throughout it how close the Khalsa came to victory in a number of battles. In the end, it took the combined efforts on both sides of the war to defeat the Sikh forces. In that respect the war was a testament to the canniness of Ranjit Singh’s strategic assessment, as his concerns about British dominance proved well founded. What he didn’t anticipate in the end was that the solution he devised would prove so unmanageable that his successors would view the threat it had been created to defeat as the lesser evil. It was a decision many of them may have subsequently regretted, and probably sooner than they anticipated. ...more |
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On 24 October 1860, Prince Gong, a younger son of the Daoguang Emperor, signed a treaty in Beijing on behalf of his father’s government with represent
On 24 October 1860, Prince Gong, a younger son of the Daoguang Emperor, signed a treaty in Beijing on behalf of his father’s government with representatives from the Western nations of Great Britain and France. Known as the Convention of Peking, it was a formal ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin signed two years before, in which the import of opium was legalized, more Chinese ports were opened to Western trade, and foreign legations were authorized in the Chinese capital for the first time. Though the signing of the treaty brought an end to the Second Opium War, it also symbolized the end of an era in China’s relations with the West, as the Middle Kingdom was now forced to treat the victorious powers as equals rather than as the inferior states that they previously had been regarded. Britain’s success in winning these concessions seemed unimaginable a generation ago. For years the British struggled to establish formal commercial relations with the Qing, with the two embassies sent to do so rejected for failing to perform the proper submission. Though British merchants were still able to buy and sell goods in China despite this, often they faced arbitrary disruptions of their activities by Chinese officials with virtually no means of settling disputes. How this situation was reversed so dramatically is the subject of Gerald Graham’s book. Drawing upon a wealth of official correspondence and personal papers, he describes the evolution of relations between Britain and China during a pivotal era, one that proved of lasting consequence not just for the two empires but for the entire region as well. What stands out most in British policy during this period is the lack of coherence, While promoting trade with China was the most consistent element in it, there was little certainty as to how this was best achieved. Complicating matters was the insecurity of Britain’s position in China, as the lack of a concession from the Qing left them dependent on Portuguese-controlled Macao as a base of operations. It was from there that merchants from the East India Company engaged in a highly profitable trade in goods, most notably in opium. Largely an unknown commodity in China before the late 18th century, by the end of the 1820s it was becoming a major source of revenue for British India and a growing concern for the imperial court. Matters came to a head in 1839. Determined to stop the growing problem of opium smoking, the Daoguang Emperor appointed a minister, Lin Zexu, to end the trade. Lin’s destruction of over 20,000 chests turned over to him by the British superintendent of trade in China, Charles Elliot, promoted Britain’s bellicose foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, to retaliate. With a military conquest of China out of the question, Palmerston settled for a punitive expedition that would force the Chinese to make concessions. Known as the First Opium War, the description of this campaign forms the heart of Graham’s book. His account of British operations underscores the technological advantages, particularly the use of shallow-draft steam gunboats, that helped the British to defeat numerically superior Chinese forces and force the Qing government to seek terms. The concessions the British received quickly proved ephemeral, however. While the British were granted a sparsely populated island off the southern China coast (which became the city of Hong Kong), the Chinese began to undermine the other concessions made in the Treaty of Nanking, most notably the right to direct diplomatic relations with the imperial court. Britain spent the next decade engaged in a futile effort to revise the treaty to clarify their rights in China. Yet both sides soon had bigger problems to deal with, as the Qing faced the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion in 1850 while Britain was preoccupied after 1854 with the Crimean War. An incident in 1856 involving the Chinese seizure of a British-flagged ship sparked the combustible tensions, however, triggering a new punitive campaign by the British, this time in conjunction with the French. Though hobbled by the demands for troops to quell the concurrent rebellion in India and frustrated by the Chinese refusal to ratify the initial settlement, ultimately the British won through force of arms the official recognition they desired for the foothold they had established in China. As Graham notes, the Convention of Peking established a peace between Britain and China that lasted until the Boxer Rebellion at the end of the century. Yet in opening the door to the predatory interests of other Western powers, Britain contributed to the unraveling of the imperial government that took place over the course of the century. That this was the opposite of their intent reflects the policymaking muddle that Graham details throughout the book. This is one of its great strengths, yet its exclusive focus on the British perspective also dates it as a study of relations between the two empires. In many ways it is a very old-fashioned work, most notably with its use of Wade-Giles romanization, its purple-shaded prose, and the occasional lapses into stereotypical portrayals of the Chinese that Graham’s dependence on British-centric sources accentuates. Yet these flaws should not deter interested readers from what is otherwise a well-researched study of the development of British policy towards China at a watershed in the history of their relations, one that remains of ongoing relevance to it even today. ...more |
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