Imperial History and the Global Politics of Exclusion

Britain, 1880-1940

Amanda Behm

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137546029
• eBook ISBN: 9781137548504
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Examining the rise of the field of imperial history in Britain and wider webs of advocacy, this book demonstrates how intellectuals and politicians promoted settler colonialism, excluded the subject empire, and laid a precarious framework for decolonization. History was politics in late-nineteenth-century Britain. But the means by which influential thinkers sought to steer democracy and state development also consigned vast populations to the margins of imperial debate and policy. From the 1880s onward, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists erected a school of thought based on exclusion and deferral that segregated past and future, backwardness and civilization, validating racial discrimination in empire all while disavowing racism. These efforts, however, engendered powerful anticolonial backlash and cast a long shadow over the closing decades of imperial rule. Bringing to life the forgotten struggles which have, in effect, defined our times, Imperial Historyand the Global Politics of Exclusion is an important reinterpretation of the intellectual history of the British Empire.

© The Author(s) 2018

Amanda BehmImperial History and the Global Politics of ExclusionCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54850-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: British Imperial History and Its Antecedents

Amanda Behm¹

(1)

Department of History, University of York, York, United Kingdom

Amanda Behm

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In or around 1912, the British Empire overtook history. Rising demands for representation and rights in the ‘subject empire’ clashed with Dominion assertions of primacy in matters of immigration and defense. Anti-Asian and anti-black discrimination in settler societies belied talk of unity and the equality of subjects. The Empire could not hold. Or so feared Lionel Curtis and Sidney Low as they watched the British state’s halting response to the ferment, and as each contemplated a wholesale reworking of historical and strategic studies to avert deeper crisis. In his feverish research for the Oxford Round Table’s first policy manifesto, the recently returned Milnerite Curtis thought he had stumbled across the roots of contemporary struggles in ‘the main essential outlines of world history’: the East-West impasse into which the Empire had fatefully stumbled, with Anglo-Saxondom alone positioned to mediate between ‘primitive society’ and the ‘top rung of civilization’. ‘England has thus undertaken a vast two-fold mission’, Curtis exhorted colleagues, ‘in which the task of regulating the inevitable effect of European on Asiatic civilisation is not the smallest part’. ¹ The well-connected London journalist and author Low, meanwhile, pleaded that same year before the British Academy for the introduction of a holistic ‘Imperial Studies’ at empire’s nerve center that would finally address the breadth and diversity of British realms. Neither scholars nor the public, Low argued, could afford any longer to ‘omit from [their] consideration of the dynamics of Empire the processes by which Englishmen have become responsible for the government of a quarter or a fifth of the population of this planet’. ²

The Edwardian era thus drew to its close on a daunting realization: the British Empire was a vast, polyglot, multiethnic entity riddled with conflict and inequality. It may seem incredible now that this fact could have escaped serious minds in the early twentieth century, or that those minds could have ‘omitted’ from the ambit of imperial theory and policy the Raj, the occupation of Egypt , African annexations, or the beleaguered Caribbean . But as this book will explain, a much different conception of empire prevailed at the zenith of British world power from that presumed by subsequent generations looking backward. In the early twentieth century, mainstream British political, journalistic, and scholarly opinion, with networks radiating across the world, held that there was not one empire under British sway but two or more. There was the self-governing settler colonial world. Then there was another space, separate and further divisible, populated by varieties of ‘alien’ or naturally dependent subjects. It was this fragmented model of empire that Curtis and Low’s campaigns sought to revise. Gravely concerned by the struggle between Dominions, ‘dependencies’, and center, and by the very means through which imperial policy was taught and advocated from the universities to Fleet Street to Whitehall, Curtis and Low took it upon themselves in 1912 to recast the study of Britain’s empires within a single, comprehensive frame—to make multiple histories one.

While later chapters will return to Curtis and Low’s initiatives at length, their twin epiphanies introduce here the fundamental questions with which this book grapples. Why and how had a divided model of empire achieved prominence in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain? And why did proponents and critics of this model, alike, fight their battles though the practice and invocation of history? This book finds that British scholars and planners, confronting the British Empire as a contested and unstable global polity from the mid-Victorian era onward, engaged in strategic intellectual sorting that both drew on and informed emergent structures of knowledge. The newly professional and ‘scientific’ pursuit of history, as it arose in and after the 1870s, provided novel and potent ways of defining difference and belonging. ³ This dynamic emerged with striking clarity around the subfield of imperial history —‘colonial’ history, as it was called by early practitioners—as it coalesced as a formal adjunct to modern history from the 1880s onward. Imperial history became a coherent albeit porous arena in which politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, in Britain and beyond, advocated for their vision of the Britannic future. As such, it serves as this book’s entry toward understanding the worldviews and political repertoires of three generations of Britons whose efforts to guide nation and empire toward their best possible ends nonetheless transmitted a precarious inheritance to the decolonizing and postcolonial world.

Imperial history took shape to champion one perceived category of empire over another—the empire of white settlement over the empire of dependent rule. Its participants’ collective aspiration, pursued through new institutions, narratives, and benchmarks, was to build a platform for settler-imperial consolidation. Their preliminary maneuver was to exclude India and dependencies from proper study. Their enduring legacy was to set questions of justice adrift in a new vastness of time . And so the trajectory of imperial history, set in wider context, reveals that rather than being a straightforward product of biological claims or basic visual ideology, racial exclusion in the late British Empire came to assume an important historical dimension. ⁴ Ideals such as constitutionalism, self-government by yardstick, and the notion of an essentially Britannic political inheritance gained their twentieth-century forms as metropolitan thinkers recognized and in turn fled from the messy and urgent realities of authoritarianism and inequality in the wider British world. For how, truly, could Britain embrace liberty, self-government, and progress while ruling over a vast, authoritarian empire? How could the metropolitan architects of imperial relations profess equality of subjecthood while unmistakably operating on the presumption of difference? While these dilemmas have informed many recent explorations of modern British and imperial history , scholars have tended to respond by deducing self-interest, contradiction, tension, or ‘blind-spots’. ⁵ This book seeks instead to understand how ‘contradictions’ could be anything but contradictory in their time , as historical actors rationalized ‘inconsistencies, failures, and unintended consequences’ and incorporated them into lasting frameworks for knowledge. ⁶

In a moment of profound anxiety about the nature of Britain’s overseas presence and domestic fitness, historians and policy minds rejigged the temporal underpinnings of imperial politics, allocating different pasts and futures to the empire’s diverse and increasingly interconnected populations. Taking cues from scholars who have observed that, far from being a ‘neutral medium’, historical time—the relation between past, present, and future—is ‘inherently ethical and political’ and constantly negotiated, this book locates the processes that made those specific moves possible and meaningful. ⁷ While histories of empire have always been with Britain, they did not bear equal authority and political coherence across generations. ⁸ History emerged as a formal academic pursuit only in the 1860s, becoming a newly prominent medium for structuring belief systems and claiming and contesting moral authority. ⁹ As for imperial history , scholars have largely missed the import of its arrival in the 1880s. Some describe it simply as by-product of ‘high imperialism’. Some overlook such a change, instead seeing empire and colonialism as coherent, even monolithic, influences on British history writing from the 1750s. If still others discern a growing historical concern for the empire of white settlement and distaste for the subject empire, they nonetheless explain those swings as ‘lapses’ or ‘unconscious racism’—the un-expunged stain of mid-Victorian pseudoscience . ¹⁰ And yet, as the opening chapters of this book will show, imperial history’s foundational voices openly and explicitly endeavored to define race in ways that were not biological. Explaining the rise of imperial history therefore raises the bigger issue of why and how influential thinkers used history to make difference in specific contexts, and the legacies of their strategies and tactics.

Taking the early field of imperial history as their backbone, and attentive to trends crosscutting the historical profession at large, the following chapters trace the rise of an exclusionary historical consciousness in Britain that promoted the white settler colonies while discounting vast populations under ‘alien’ rule. Within and around the new profession, scholars and politicians pushed agendas and institutions which celebrated the settlement and growth of Canada , Australia , New Zealand , and to an extent Southern Africa , as parts of a Greater British polity, with frequent, energetic gestures toward the United States . At the same time , they actively disqualified and then sought to ignore vast areas of empire in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Their most dexterous act of exclusion took place with regard to India. Imperial historians, following John Seeley , either portrayed the history of the Raj as a secondary formation unrelated to ‘Greater Britain’, or wrote it off as a phenomenal aberration best left to ‘India hands’ and theorists of subject empire. The latter may have protested. Lords Curzon and Cromer , for example, bemoaned their failure to generate resounding interest in their projects and legacies against the entrenched metropolitan belief that the settler colonies simply mattered more, and more immediately, than India or a wider dependent empire. But they also recognized that theirs was an uphill battle. ¹¹

Theories had consequences. Historical devices came to underpin political struggles over race , migration, and governance that pitted different imperial populations against one another and enabled the imperial center’s complicity in exclusionary settler policies which alienated vast constituencies of Asian, Caribbean, and African subjects through the 1890s and 1900s. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the combined effect of segregationist history and settler-world discrimination was to establish ‘empire’ as synonymous with ‘the color line’. ¹² Not despite but because of its pretenses, British academic and political engagement with the past both reflected and propelled the wider project of making a divided empire wherein the crucial distinction lay not between metropole and periphery, but ultimately between white and non-white. For all the platitudes of a Seele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: British Imperial History and Its Antecedents
• 2. Breaking Up the British Empire
• 3. Historical Racism Between Page and Practice, 1880–1900
• 4. Institutionalizing a New ‘Imperial’ in Turn-of-the-Century Britain
• 5. Empire in Opposition: The Stakes of History and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism
• 6. Mobilizing Pasts During and After the Great War
• 7. The Third British Empire
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter