Boycotts Past and Present

From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel

David Feldman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319948720
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

In this book historians and social scientists examine boycotts from the eighteenth century to the present day.Employed in struggles against British rule in the American colonies, against racial discrimination in the United States during the Civil Rights movement, and Apartheid in South Africa, today it is Israel that is the focus of a campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
Boycotts have featured in campaigns undertaken by labour, consumer and nationalist movements. Jews were the focus of some boycotts instigated by nationalist movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Jewish businesses were targeted by the National Socialist regime in Germany. In this collection, contributorsexplore the history of past boycott movements and examine the different narratives put forward by proponents and opponents of the current BDS movement directed against Israel: one which places the movement within a history of struggles for 'human rights'; the other which regards BDS as the latest manifestation of an antisemitic tradition.

© The Author(s) 2019

David Feldman (ed.)Boycotts Past and PresentPalgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Boycotts: From the American Revolution to BDS

David Feldman¹

(1)

Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck College – University of London, London, UK

David Feldman

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

For more than a decade the drive for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) has been at the front of a global campaign directed against Israel. Formally launched on 9 July 2005 by more than 170 Palestinian non-governmental organisations, the movement’s stated goals are: the end of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Arab lands, dismantling the security wall, full equality for Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, and recognition of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.¹ Most supporters of BDS cast their movement as the latest iteration of a boycott conducted in the cause of human rights and in opposition to racialised inequalities. The British charity War on Want explains its support for BDS citing the ‘Israeli repression and human rights abuse’ that Palestinians have suffered for more than 60 years.² The campaign presents itself both as an expression of Palestinian civil society and as a legatee of the international campaign against apartheid in South Africa. BDS is ‘the South Africa strategy for Palestine’, one of the movement’s founders, Omar Barghouti, asserts.³ In stark contrast, several of the movement’s opponents denounce it as the most recent manifestation of antisemitism. Speaking in Jerusalem in March 2016, Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, did just this, stating that ‘BDS is nothing more than a dangerous new strain of an age-old disease. And that disease is anti-Semitism.’⁴ According to the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the letters B, D, and S, ‘really stand for bigotry, dishonesty and shame’, and represent ‘simply the latest chapter in the long, dark history of anti-Semitism.’⁵

These divergent interpretations have shaped academic work on the boycott of Israel, yet it is precisely because these interpretations emerge directly from the battle over BDS that they are at once significant and limited.⁶ They reproduce the conflict as much as they illuminate it. They do not generate fresh questions or a new framework of analysis. If we are to move beyond this impasse, we should take account not only of the perspectives of the foes and advocates of BDS, but also try to move beyond them. Boycotts are neither an invention of European antisemitism nor of campaigns for racial equality. They have a history that antedates and extends beyond both these movements. This volume’s premise, and the premise of this introductory chapter, is that by locating BDS within this larger history of political mobilisation we will be better placed to develop a productive understanding of the phenomenon.

Historically, boycotts have been remarkably diverse, both in the forms they take and the goals they pursue. We tend to think of boycotts as a form of activity that focuses on markets. These boycotts aim to banish goods, purchasing power, labour, or services associated with a particular target. Yet at other times boycotts have pursued other forms of exclusion. For example, some artists, musicians, and Green activists currently campaign for art galleries to refuse sponsorship from oil companies such as Shell and BP.⁷ Not only do many boycotts operate within markets but sometimes they are pursued with the aim of changing the ways in which markets operate. In Chap. 9 of this book, Lori Flores’ account of the consumer boycott of agricultural produce in the United States, instigated in support of a campaign for the unionisation of farmworkers, provides a narrative and analysis of one such boycott. However, in many cases, the goals of boycotts have been positioned beyond the marketplace. The boycotts of apartheid South Africa and of Israel, analysed in Chaps. 10, 11, 13, 14, 15 and 16, by Yehonatan Alsheh, Lee Jones, Dave Rich, Philip Marfleet, John Chalcraft, and Jeremy Krikler respectively, are instances of boycotts of this sort. Other boycotts have shared economic and political goals. The boycott of Jewish businesses in East European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ostensibly sought to improve the lot of the peasantry and of non-Jewish enterprises but, as Michael Miller and Grzegorz Krzywiec demonstrate in Chaps. 3 and 4, they were closely bound to nation-building political movements. The same hybridity is found in the initiatives in interwar Palestine inspired by Zionism and examined by Hizky Shoham in Chap. 5.

All the movements we have so far mentioned emerged from civil society, yet this defining feature does not mean that the state has been unimportant in the history of boycotts. As Alexander Sedlmaier reminds us in Chap. 7, the state, and specifically the law, plays an important role in determining what sorts of boycott activities are legitimate. More broadly, as Frank Trentmann argues in Chap. 2, ‘the political space and ambition of boycotts have evolved in relation to the state’s capacity to act on behalf of its citizens’. Yet we should distinguish boycotts generated from within civil society from actions that are initiated by the state and its agents.⁸ From time to time, states impose sanctions upon other states that they seek to punish but occasionally, as Christoph Kreutzmüller shows in Chap. 6, they sponsor boycotts against their own subjects. The attack on Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany provides one notorious example of this sort of action. This campaign was not only violent but also, crucially, was supported and condoned by public agencies and parts of the apparatus of the governing National Socialist Party. As Kreuzmueller argues, it was not a boycott in the usual sense of the term.

The term ‘boycott’ was not coined until 1880. Nevertheless, the kind of collective action analysed in this volume can be traced to the eighteenth century and, most dramatically, to events that culminated in revolution, war, and the founding of the United States of America.⁹ The most famous pre-revolutionary act of defiance became known to posterity as the Boston Tea Party. On the night of 16 December 1773, the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships and threw 342 chests of tea overboard. This was not only a highly theatrical rejection of British goods but was also just one episode in a longer history of the use of a boycott in the colonists’ struggle with imperial authority. The role of boycotts in the American Revolution is well known. Our aim here is not to rehearse that narrative but to ask how these events can shed light on the subsequent history of boycotts.

The disposition to boycott was present from the very beginning of the crisis of colonial governance in North America. In 1765 the British parliament in London introduced the Stamp Act: a new tax on printed materials used in the British American colonies, including the legal documents and other papers that merchants required in order to import goods. It met with protest, riot, and widespread non-compliance. Campaigners argued that the new tax was a violation of the colonists’ rights because it had been introduced without the consent of local legislatures.¹⁰ Merchants joined the protest movement, first in New York and then elsewhere. They entered into agreements to retaliate against the Stamp Act by refusing to import British goods. In present-day parlance we would say they decided to boycott British goods. In March 1766 the British government repealed the Stamp Act, but further attempts to raise revenue from the colonies soon followed. In Feb 1768 the Massachusetts legislature sent a circular to 12 other colonies urging them to unite in protest against the new duties. The merchants in that colony signed an agreement vowing not to import anything from Britain except necessities. By the end of 1769 all the colonies, with the solitary exception of New Hampshire, had agreed to either the non-importation or the non-consumption of British-made goods.¹¹

The tactics of non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation that developed in the late 1760s became more forceful in the following decade, and were proclaimed as policy by the First Continental Congress in October 1774. The Congress called for the creation of local associations to watch over and enforce the boycott. Policing the boycott brought political conflict and political identity into everyday life. As Tim Breen argues, ‘the non-importers of the 1760s and 1770s were doing more than simply obstructing the flow of British-made goods. They were inviting the American people to reinvent an entire political culture.’¹² As far as the British government was concerned, the boycott was tantamount to treason. Within a few years it developed into a violent and ultimately successful revolution.

The anatomy of boycotts in the American Revolution reveals features that recurred in the centuries that followed. First, boycotts were both expressive and instrumental. Meetings of merchants, traders, and freeholders, as well as press reports and broadsides, represented these disparate protests as a single ‘public’ resisting ‘enslavement’ and promoting freedom. Boycotts were tactics pursued with the aim of achieving concessions from the imperial government, but at the same time the practice helped to constitute and consolidate a political identity. Second, boycotts provided a way to extend political mobilisation. It was a form of propaganda by deed that permitted anyone with spending power to express their political commitment in everyday life. Third, the boycott had an ambivalent relationship to the rule of law. It was enforced not only by argument and persuasion but also by intimidation and violence. Newspapers exposed merchants who refused to sign non-importation agreements or who, having signed them, subsequently broke their promise. The public humiliation of renegade merchants was essential if the embargo on British trade was to hold.¹³ However, the pressure applied to merchants who broke the embargo, and who profited by continuing to trade with Britain, sometimes led to the destruction of property and interpersonal violence, including the application of feathers and tar. Fourth, boycotts were pursued in defence of the rights of local legislatures, and were...