Subverting Empire

Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World

Will Jackson, Emily Manktelow, Will Jackson, Emily Manktelow

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137465863
• eBook ISBN: 9781137465870
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

Across their empire, the British spoke ceaselessly of deviants of undesirables, ne'er do wells, petit-tyrants and rogues. With obvious literary appeal, these soon became stock figures. This is the first study to take deviance seriously, bringing together histories that reveal the complexity of a phenomenon that remains only dimly understood.

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Introduction: Thinking with Deviance

Will Jackson and Emily J. Manktelow

Nothing in the whole history of our Empire in the East is likely to make a greater impression on our Indian fellow subjects than the splendid demonstration that is now in progress at Delhi.... The Delhi Durbar is a splendid proof that British rule in India has not only been successful, but has become popular... The VICEROY, speaking in the name of the SOVEREIGN, impresses the Oriental imagination, but even this is not the most important element in the effect of the Durbar at Delhi. The Princes and the population of India have learned to understand the solid power and the steady policy of the British Empire... In Delhi, at all events, the East, which always recognises the reality of power, can heartily welcome an Empire which, after centuries of strife and terrorism, has brought pacification to a dominion almost as large as Europe.

‘Nothing in the whole history of our Empire’, The Times of London, 30 December 1902.

We do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness; but an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire.

The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook:, Flora Annie Webster Steel (1904).

Performing and Subverting Power

Colonialism was invested in the performance of power – from the pomp and ceremony of the imperial durbars to the everyday interactions of performed superiorities. The basic legitimating idea behind empire was the notion that the colonisers were superior to the colonised, whether that be in the form of unique access to the means of production, supposedly democratic systems of governance or those racial and cultural registers of difference that justified rule and interlaced it with high-minded ideals of imperial benevolence. These were not de facto truths, but synthetic, constructed ideologies. Imperialism was invested in its own performance of pre-eminence and colonial powers believed themselves uniquely capable of harnessing their ascendancy for the benefit of themselves and others.

The key to understanding this ideology of superiority lies in its recognition not as mere ignorance or self-delusion but as a studied and manufactured set of common senses that legitimised imperial rule and became the implicit assumptions underpinning colonial interactions. Recognising this performative aspect need not blind us to the very real violence and coercion of colonial systems however. From wars of pacification and conquest via rebellions and their suppression, to the everyday cruelties, humiliations and exactions of colonial regimes throughout the world, colonialism was invested in the strategic deployment of force. Such deployment was itself demonstrative. The exercise no less than the symbolism of power was performatively conveyed.

There are few better examples of the performative quality of colonial violence than the events surrounding the Amritsar massacre in 1919. On 11 April, at a time of intense anti-British feeling in Amritsar and elsewhere across India, an English missionary, Marcella Sherwood, was pulled from her bicycle by a crowd of Indians and assaulted. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, in charge of British troops, was outraged. Having issued a command ordering all Indians passing the site of the assault to crawl the length of the street on their bellies, Dyer explained, ‘some Indians crawl face downwards in front of their gods. I wanted them to know that a British woman is as sacred as a Hindu god and, therefore, they have to crawl in front of her too.’¹ In his attempt to restore order, Dyer knew the value of racial symbol. Sherwood, the white lady missionary, embodied civilisation: if Indians would not recognise her sanctity, then they would be forced to perform their own self-abasement. Whenever colonial hierarchies were subverted, the forces of law and order were called upon to restore at least the appearance of racial deference and white prestige.

This book seeks to move beyond and behind these performances to the ‘lived realities’ of colonial life by looking at those individuals who subverted, deviated from or were marginalised by European, specifically British colonialism. As Clare Anderson has shown, constructing subaltern life histories of empire can place more obviously apparent aspects of colonial history under revealing new light. By piecing together fragments of marginal lives still recoverable from European and colonial archives, it becomes possible to see not only how global forces impinged on ‘ordinary’ lives but how ‘ordinary’ actors shaped and, indeed, constituted such forces.² Anderson’s work is typical of a turn towards a biographical frame of analysis in colonial history as well as an invigorated interest in colonial subalternity.³ Several historians, in emphasising the complexity of movement across imperial networks, have highlighted the flexible, permeable quality of spatial borders.⁴ Boundaries were weak, but dextrous too and easily repositioned – a point elaborated upon in several of the chapters that follow. Borders and boundaries were never merely spatial or cartographic, however, and some of the most interesting work to appear in the field in the past ten years has taken up the idiom of the boundary in metaphorical, discursive or figurative ways. Conceptualising boundaries less in terms of lines that were crossed than as sites of encounter or ‘contact zones’, typically this work has foregrounded the liminal and the in-between – the margins and interstices, the fringes and frontiers.⁵ A corresponding stream of work, influenced by the field of critical whiteness studies, has focused on poor or failed whites: those ‘low and licentious Europeans’ in the words of Harald Fischer Tiné, whose insalubrious circumstances attracted the interventions of the colonial state at the same time as they evaded its control.⁶ The embodied, performed quality of colonial common sense meant that those ascribed the identity of ‘coloniser’ were imbued with the reputation of their racial and cultural affiliations. Those who failed to adhere to social norms sabotaged the guiding logic by which the costs and rewards of empire were distributed according to a schema that meshed together hierarchies not just of gender, race and class but of culture, respectability and ‘civilisation’ as well.

Deviance and Empire

As a concept applied primarily in twentieth century social science, it is unsurprising that the term ‘deviance’ is entirely missing from the colonial lexicon. Yet, there is no shortage of discursive equivalents and colonial archives are replete with talk of undesirables and rogues, ne’er do wells and bad characters. Empire was depicted as dangerous and degrading as often as it was uplifting or exultant. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonial world represented for many in Europe the prospect of corruption and decay, the site where ‘Europe’ was undone.⁷ Degeneration is customarily viewed as an anxiety of the later nineteenth century but the corrosive potential of empire was a much older concern. Power was justified by the myth of the superior character of those who discharged it but it was no less likely to be seen as a self-destructive force. As Nicholas Dirks and James Epstein have eloquently shown, empire was a potent site of scandal. The trials of Warren Hastings and Thomas Picton, Governors General of Bengal and Trinidad respectively, demonstrated the scope for corruption inherent in an expanding imperial presence in both East and West.⁸ Hastings’ trial highlighted a culture of self-enrichment amongst the nabobs of the East India Company; Picton’s trial for torture revealed the violence of West Indian Slavery.⁹ In both cases, scandal served to articulate domestic constituencies of feeling. Outrage, either at the self-serving spirit of Company rule or at the tyranny of lawless violence served the rhetorical means for liberals, abolitionists and humanitarians to advance their own political agendas and to claim ‘Britain’ as their spirit. If we reasonably posit scandal, then, as ‘deviance exposed’, we can certainly see the value of the construction of deviance for the pursuit of quite particular ideological or political goals. However, in its most literal sense – meaning a deviation from that which is judged to be morally right and good – deviance could take any direction. Slavers in the American South saw the Enlightenment as the most monstrous deviance of all. It is a curious genealogy that links postcolonial intellectuals, with their critique of the enlightenment as intellectual fuel for empire, to the slave-owners of the American South.¹⁰

Kirsten McKenzie took the study of colonial scandal further. In tracking the lives of people who discover in empire the opportunity to reinvent themselves – to quite literally ‘leave the past behind’ – McKenzie demonstrated the power of inversion that colonial spaces contained.¹¹ Not just in port cities but in trading and mission stations, on settler farms, at government bomas and on board the very vehicles of migration – the train, the plane, the safari, the ship – hierarchies dissolved, identities slipped. Throughout the nineteenth century, and with a deepening pessimism by the century’s end, the world beyond Europe presaged the possibility for things to be turned upside down. In populating empire, Europeans both exercised and exposed their racial prowess. Empire was a place of uncertainty. Identities could be forgotten or forged; fortunes were lost as well as made; power was redistributed and realigned.

Empire then, no less in the early twentieth century than in the early nineteenth century, should be recognised as a world of turbulence. Its iconography drew on the solemn march of the durbar but outrage at colonial deviance – be it aimed at sex, violence or incompetent misrule – was a no less constant strain. As functionalist accounts of deviance argue, however, the labelling of certain people, situations or behaviours as deviant can serve a vital social function: constructing transgression invokes the very boundaries that, while appearing to have been undermined, are in fact reinstated. Egregious offenders such as Hastings, Picton or Dyer only proved the rules that they had broken. Hence, the value of the criminal trial or the government commission, for these provided the vital rhetorical and ritualised spaces by which deviance was simultaneously repudiated and invented.¹² By constructing certain individuals and their actions as evil the greater undertaking that was colonial rule itself could be redeemed. Throughout the British century, the scandals of the later eighteenth century were recursively replayed: the cast had changed but the message was much the same. Governor Eyre’s suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, the passing of the Ilbert Bill in India in 1882 and the ‘red rubber’ scandal in the Belgian Congo all seemed to repeat the lesson that empire was always about moral strength and goodness – and its dereliction.¹³

If the evidence of the Hastings trial was that empire was itself corruptive, what various branches of colonial discourse achieved subsequently was to shift the culpability from person to place. It was not the deviant white man that was aberrant (less still the historical phenomenon of which he was a part) but the alien environment into which he had entered. To conquer was also to stray. Settlers and expatriates harboured a culture of distance from the places and peoples over whom they ruled but they could never escape the fact that their dominion unavoidably meant contact. As Ann Stoler has shown, across the European colonial empires the boundary lines separating ‘coloniser’ from ‘native’ were far from self-evident. These were never ‘given’, Stoler argued, but ‘a shifting pair of social categories’. For many of those ‘new’ or critical colonial historians writing in Stoler’s wake, the key task has been to focus on those shifts and slippages, on the precarious movement by which those categories were both realigned and undermined.¹⁴

Much of this work has centred on questions of colonial sexuality and procreation – what Stoler called the ‘dense points of transfer’ for colonial relations. What better way to think about the blurring of boundaries, after all, than in the sexual act and its potential consequences? There now exists a considerable literature documenting the cultural and social history of racial mixing: on inter-racial marriage and inter-racial sex, on concubinage, prostitution and miscegenation.¹⁵ This is a field notably dominated by women, much of its initial impetus spurred by a broadly felt dissatisfaction with Ronald Hyam’s Sexuality and Empire.¹⁶ Feminists, Hyam later observed in a defence of his book, did not like his lack of theory – and he pointed it out for those who had missed it.¹⁷ But has there ever been a work of imperial history to include the phrase, ‘some men spurt, others dribble’? One thing Hyam’s critics failed to note is that the book was itself deviant in its way and it is worth reflecting on the nature of the discomfort that, for some, the book gave rise.¹⁸ In any case, if Sexuality and Empire is now irrelevant analytically, it undoubtedly remains empirically rich. Hyam’s problem was to be delivering his material to an old, white, male historiography, an historiography primarily concerned with the geopolitical phenomenon that was ‘the British Empire’.¹⁹ Mechanistic accounts of empire read as phallocentric now; students of colonial studies rarely allude to ‘the British Empire’ in any sort of monolithic terms. But how might Hyam’s material look to those of us concerned with colonial deviance? The field awaits its book on paedophilia and empire, on the sentimental history of decolonisation or on the racialised dimensions to self-loathing, sadism or rage.²⁰

Hyam wrote primarily about what white men did to others. Not only feminist historians have recognised that intimacy might be considered in broader or more complicated ways than that. Esme Cleall, in her book Missionary Discourses of Difference, offered ‘religion, sibling relationships, and platonic friendships as alternative “critical arenas of intimacy”’. Keen to ‘emphasise that there are many “intimate spaces” and “dense points of transfer” where ambiguous relations occurred’, Cleall is just one of a number of scholars to take the colonial family as ground on which to explore the contested, contradictory interplay of public good and private feeling.²¹ As several of the chapters collected here show, the policing of colonial deviance can be as effectively explored in the mundane settings of the day-to-day – on the veranda, the back step, on the street or on the beach – as on the more conspicuous stage of political scandal.

What recent scholarship on scandal has affirmed is the basic premise of the ‘new imperial history’: that metropole and colony cannot be divided. Hastings’ and Picton’s trials reverberated through British society; deviance brought the empire ‘home’. In more nebulous ways, ideas of the colonial world as threatening or unknown animated to a great extent the domestic British understanding of empire overseas. Much of the cultural history of empire ‘at home’ has focused, significantly, on its appeal. Be it heroic or romantic, nostalgic or escapist, we tend to think of empire’s resonance for the British public as essentially attractive. School boys recited lines of Newbolt, explorer-heroes were the celebrities of the day, jingo crowds thronged the city squares.²² For many, however, the world not just of Africa or ‘the East’ but of the Europeans who dwelt there was one of uncertainty and misgiving and the literary canon reflects this. In Conrad and Kipling, the leading high and low brow authors of the ‘high’ imperial phase, deviance was signalled by the fraying outpost, the racial mutability of the hinterland and the final expiration (in Conrad most evocatively, up the great Congo river) of colonial power. In the 1920s, the reputation of British settler and expatriate communities conjured a range of salacious associations. Britons on the Nile, on the China coast and in Kenya’s Happy Valle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Thinking with Deviance
• 2 From Pawns to Players: Rewriting the Lives of Three In digenous Go-Betweens
• 3 ‘Washing the Blackamoor White’: Interracial Intimacy and Coloured Women’s Agency in Jamaica
• 4 ‘The Starched Boundaries of Civilization’: Sympathetic Allegiance and the Subversive Politics of Affect in Colonial India
• 5 ‘Base and Wicked Characters’: European Island Dwellers in the Western Pacific, 1788–1850
• 6 Thinking with Gossip: Deviance, Rumour and Reputation in the South Seas Mission of the London Missionary Society
• 7 Producing and Managing Deviance in the Disabled Colonial Self: John Kitto, the Deaf Traveller
• 8 Expelling and Repatriating the Colonial Insane: New Zealand before the First World War
• 9 Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c. 1900
• 10 Not Seeking Certain Proof: Interracial Sex and Archival Haze in High-Imperial Natal
• 11 Empire and Sexual Deviance: Debating White Women’s Prostitution in Early 20th Century Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia
• 12 R. v. Mrs Utam Singh: Race, Gender and Deviance in a Kenyan Murder Case, 1949–51
• Bibliography
• Index