A happy moment this afternoon reading this just published book — Myles Lavan, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture — on the new books shelf of CUP bookstore (haven’t yet decided to splash £60 on it!). It is is a fascinating study of the Roman rhetoric of empire, and argues that the way the Romans thought about the people in the provinces (the ‘socii’, roughly speaking ‘allies’) was drawn from the vocabulary of the “natural” subordination of children, women, ‘clients’, animals, and in particular slaves. The Master- Slave relationship, Lavan argues, was the key metaphor for the relationship of Rome to its colonial peripheries. Its very interesting to put this together with J. Richardson, **The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire** (2008) which argues that between the 2nd century BC and 2nd century AD, the Roman idea of empire changed from a language of power-by-conquest to one of power-by-possession. We are reminded (if we needed to, after the work of Jairus Benaji) how the ideas of empire and slavery not only interpenetrate each other, but are interwoven too with various incarnations of the idea of property. We need to pay more attention to the ideas of human relations to animals and weaker people which emerge with the invention of agriculture in the neo-lithic revolutions. We are still in their grip.

my review of

Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt London: Verso, 2011.

(Guardian.co.uk on December 7, 2011, print edition December 10, 2011)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/07/britains-empire-richard-gott-review?

“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So the Liberal politician David Lloyd George explained the British government’s demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.

Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.

Gott’s achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire. This vivid and startling book embarks on a journey through the origins of Queen Victoria’s Pax Britannica. Except that Gott shows in 66 short, gripping chapters, which take us from North America to the Caribbean, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Asia, that the span from 1750 to 1860 was never peaceful. Not a year passed, he shows, without conflicts, large and small wars, uprisings, repression and reprisals of astonishing brutality. This kind of study is newer than it seems: while in France there has been Rosa Plumelle-Uribe’s La férocité blanche (2001) and Marc Ferro’s Livre Noir de Colonialisme (2003), only John Newsinger’s shorter The Blood Never Dried (2006) has ever portrayed with such system the dark side of the British empire, or told so fully the stories of those who resisted it.

Imperial history is so often viewed with triumphalism, nostalgia or regret, luring the reader into a patriotic investment in a fictional national past. Gott instead always writes from the perspective of the victims and rebels. We are introduced to a dazzling series of extraordinary men and women – Pontiac in North America, Tacky and Nanny in Jamaica, Papineau in Quebec, Wickrama Sinha in Ceylon, Myat Toon in Burma, Lakshmi Bai in India – who stood at the centre of communities in revolt. Gott shows the injustices that pushed them on the dangerous road of resistance, and makes us partners in their moments of victory and defeat. Yet he is always precise in explaining the British imperial interests at stake, and readers with interests in grand strategy and war, or students searching for vignettes to anchor essays, will derive as much pleasure and benefit from Britain’s Empire as those reading for the drama of situation and personality.

Resistance, he shows, was not merely a detail. While most rebellions ended in defeat, North Americans in 1776-83 won their independence, the slave rebels of Haiti by 1798 forced the humiliating surrender of General Maitland, and the Javanese prevented the realisation of Raffles’s dream of a British south-east Asia. Gott further punctures the “Jewel in the Crown” idea of the empire by reminding readers, as Linda Colley did in Captives (2002), that it was a very unpleasant place for most British people who went to the frontier as convicts, forced labourers or press-ganged soldiers and sailors. The rebellions of white settlers were as constant a fact of the regime as indigenous resistance.

What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.

Gott has done well to remind us that violence was always at the centre of the “empire story”. But this is not a book to make any British person feel guilty. For guilt could arise only if the reader made a narcissistic identification with the past of the British empire. Gott shows instead that today’s Britons can, if they dare, choose to identify with the rebels rather than the conquerors, and to claim Lakshmi Bai and Gandhi, rather than Victoria and Churchill, as spiritual ancestors.

When in the decades after 1945, Britain and France came to recognise that they could not keep colonies, their political priority became the manipulation of decolonisation. The European powers, with the support of the United States, sought to ensure that the right kinds of nationalists came to power.¹ The ‘right nationalists’ were those leaders who would give the West full access to their resources, would keep their independent countries safe from communists, from such Pan-Arab or pan-African “ultranationalists” as Nasser and Nkrumah, and would not nationalise the land and mineral resources which Europeans had seized during the colonial era. The British and French did not care if their successors were kleptocrats, Islamicists, or thugs, so long as they promised not to change the colonial social and economic arrangements.

This could often be done easily and cheaply: many were the ambitious lawyers and doctors educated in Oxford or Paris who wanted nothing more than collaboration with the former colonial masters. But in many places— such as Malaya and Kenya or Cameroon and the Congo — to ensure that the West got what it wanted in the post-colonial world required brutal interventions, campaigns of bombings, the mass internment of tens of thousands of people, torture, the assassination of key leaders of the wrong kind, and even small and large massacres. Most of this was done in secret, covered up at the time and for decades afterwards. We are only gradually discovering the scale of violence and human rights abuses which were part of the secret history of decolonisation. This deserves our attention because, as we have learned, there is a direct line of descent in terms of personnel, tactics, and strategy, from the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau nationalists in Kenya and the regime of Idi Amin (veteran of the King’s African Rifles) in the 1970s, from the shoot-to-kill orders given to paratroopers in Aden and the Bloody Sunday Massacre in Northern Ireland in 1972, and from the extermination of the Bamileke rebels in Cameroon c. 1960 to the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.

In April 2011, the British government admitted that it had a secret archive of over two thousand boxes of files which had been brought back from former colonies when they became independent. They were and are held at Hanslope Park, a Foreign Office base which is also part of the British intelligence community (it is an important centre for electronic communications and surveillance). These files should, with the rest of local colonial government’s documents, have remained in Palestine, Malaya, Nigeria, Kenya, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana, Cyprus, Aden, and another twenty-five territories when they became constitutionally independent. Instead, those papers which might have lead to the criminal prosecution of British officers for crimes of murder or torture or other abuses, would have exposed local collaborators and informants, and would embarrass Britain, or all three, were secretly removed and returned to Britain.

Only the archival ingenuity of the historian David Anderson forced the British government in court to come clean. He was able to find  

enough evidence in open archives of some of the hidden documents, and of the process of hiding, to allow the lawyers of alleged victims of British human rights abuses in Kenya to force their release through the courts, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13044974.  A few years ago, when the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins had written about the scale of torture she was accused of wild exaggeration, and of depending on unreliable oral testimony. But we now have in black-and-white detailed accounts of beatings, torture, death squad killings, even “murder by beating up and roasting alive” of one captive (Top Secret telegram of January 17, 1955, http://www.scribd.com/doc/52818586/eight-offices-implicated-in-murder-and-abuse-in-Kenya?in_collection=2964763).

On October 31, 2011, Anderson gave a paper on “Rule of fear: Col. Arthur Young, state violence and the Kenya Emergency, 1953-55” to the Imperial and World History seminar that I co-convene at the Institute of Historical Research in London. What was striking about his paper, one of the most important ones given to our seminar in recent years, was not just the scale and range of violence, but the layers and layers of cover-ups, with officers on the ground, colonial officials in Kenya, and ultimately politicians and civil servants in London putting a blanket of silence over the most extraordinary atrocities, while granting amnesty and protection to their perpetrators. We may hear much more when the matter comes before the British courts in 2012.

The Hanslope Park papers, if they are ever released as was promised by William Hague, will force us to rewrite the story of decolonisation. Only 300 of the 2,000 boxes concern Kenya. What else do they contain? The lawyers for the victims of a 1948 atrocity in Malaya, when the Scots Guards allegedly murdered 21 villagers, forced the survivors onto trucks and burned villages to the grounds, are suing to find out what the secret records say about the incident? Will the Nigerian papers tell us how the independence census was manipulated to the benefit of the more pro-British Muslim North and of British oil companies? Will the British Guiana papers tell us how much the British government knew about who was organising strikes and terror bombings in Georgetown, and about the involvement of the CIA? And what really happened in the SAS suppression of the Dhofar insurgency?

It is interesting to consider these British cases in the light of the recent revelation of the scale and violence of French counterinsurgency activity in Cameroon in the 1950s. This weekend I have been reading a remarkable new book— Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa, Kamerun!: Une Guerre Cachée aux Origines de la Françafrique, 1948-1971 (Paris: La Decouverte, 2011). It tells the story of the dirty war fought by France to destroy the Union des Peuples Camerounais (UPC). Key leaders in particular Reuben Um Nyobe and Felix Moumie were murdered— Moumie poisoned with radioactive thallium by a French spy in Geneva, while hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes, thousands of people tortured. British diplomatic sources in the 1960s estimated that 70,000 civilians were were killed, but noted that the exact number of deaths was difficult to calculate because the French army frequently burned entire villages, often by dropping incendiary bombs from planes. Credible estimates run over 120,000, and less reliable estimates go much higher. As in Kenya, many deaths resulted from the system of mass detention of insurgents and their supporters, especially among the Bamileke. But Kamerun! is also a portrait of “the origins of the French neo-colonial system in Africa”, showing how the promise of oil and uranium in the territory made its destiny a priority for French geostrategy, and how during and after decolonisation France worked through local collaborators to preserve its interests. The authors note in particular how the French army created a model of counter-insurgency which would later be applied, with its help, by African politicians seeking to maintain power by force. The “French school of counter-insurgency”— the systematic use of propaganda, psychological warfare, mass surveillance, torture, targeted killing, punitive reprisals —- found a post-colonial afterlife.   The photographs of the severed heads of nationalists make clear the reign of terror which these “techniques” involved. While these methods applied in Algeria failed, in Cameroon they were judged a success, and from the bloody Central African Republic of Bokassa in the 1970s to Rwanda in the 1990s, the authors argue that we may see how African soldiers were trained in methods of eradication of the “internal enemy” forged and diffused by French military and political figures in the era of decolonisation. As the journalist Patrick de St-Expury wrote about Rwanda: “we instructed the killers, we furnished the technology, our theory, we supplied the method, our ‘doctrine’” of counter-insurgency.

From the “successes” of colonial counter-insurgency in the 1950s, the rivers of blood continue to flow across Africa. 

1For which see R. Robinson and W. Roger Louis, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonisation’, Jl of Imperial and Commonwealth History (1994).

So what did Braudel think about French colonialism on the other side of the Mediterranean?  Its almost as if no one notices that he became perhaps the most important single historian of his age at exactly the time when France is fighting a dirty war to crush Algerian nationalism….

Fernand Braudel’s two-volume The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (1949) is one of the monuments of twentieth-century historical writing.  Braudel and his friends in the Annales school are famous for having told historians that they need to look at longer time frames, 500 or 1000 years or more, and not just at 10, 20, or 50 year periods of time. The Med is a great three-tiered wedding cake of a book in which the first bottom layer is a long discussion of geography—  mountains, sea, desert —- and how it shaped those  ancient, very slow moving structures of life which constituted that slow time, the “longue durée”  (always makes me think of The Long Goodbye….)  on top of which lay those lighter layers of social and individual time.  Here’s the dude himself near the end of his own histoire événementielle: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM1hSYnj4vA   

Now it was well known that Braudel conceived the book mostly in Algeria during the period it was a French colony, and there have even been some speculations about what difference that made.  But a recent article by the distinguished historical geographer Florence Deprest  suggests that French colonial ideas about North Africa played a central role in shaping the Annales school’s idea of time (the essay I am commenting on is ‘Fernand Braudel et la géographie algérienne: aux sources coloniaux de l’histoire immobile de la Mediterranee’ but you follow some of the threads also in her article in the April 2011 issue of the Journal of Historical Geography).  

Deprest suggests that we examine the influence of the colonial geographer Émile-Félix Gautier (1864-1940) on both Braudel and Lucien Febvre. Gautier, a generation before them, had insisted that geography was the discipline which linked geology and history, and who argued that one could understand the long run history of North Africa by studying its soils.  He traced a line in the geological structure and grandly proclaimed that the pattern of 2,000 years of human history could presto! immediately be discerned. Numidians and Moores, Zenetes and Sinhaja, Arabs and Kabyles were only “different names, applies successively, to those more profound entities the nomads and the sedentary peoples, these indestructible entities, like the soil itself”. Every attempt to unify the Maghreb collapsed under the weight of this natural division, and this had made necessary and inevitable the successive domination of foreign powers in North Africa, successively carthaginian, roman, byzantine, arab, turk, and ….. French.  At the heart of his work was an argument for the manifest destiny of French colonial rule and settlement in the Maghreb, and a regret about the “terrible task of trying to occidentalise a piece of the orient”.

 Gautier’s idea of geography imposing an immobile history, a physical destiny on human history, deeply impressed Braudel, and Gautier’s Maghreb became Braudel’s Meditteranean.  Gautier had argued that that Islam was received easily in Tunisia, Andalusia and Sicily because the Cathaginians had long before seeded these soils with oriental culture and civilisation.  Examine Braudel’s parallel flourish “Is it by chance that the Islamic conquest was so easily accepted in the Near East and in the double domain of Carthage, North Africa and a part of Spain?”  Thus too Braudel’s aside, popular now with a certain kind of islamophobe, that “Islam with respect to the Occident, it is the cat with respect to the dog”, which echos clearly Gautier’s epigram that “The Orient and the Occident, this is like the cat and the dog…”.   Long after Gautier’s kind of geography had gone out of fashion with the geographers, Braudel and Febvre were citing his work.  

The Annales school project not only took a vision of the relationship of history and geography from the French colonial social sciences. Deprest notes the active political sympathy which Braudel had for Algérie française during decades when both many Algerians fought against the French for their independence and many French denounced the colonial order.  Writing about the Algeria he knew as a young man Braudel wrote “colonial Algeria never presented itself to my eyes as a monster”, and in 1966 angrily wrote of North Africa having “betrayed” the West (although he located the moment of that betrayal, in the spirit of Gautier, in the Carthaginian conquest, millenia earlier).

The sting in the tail of Deprest’s essay is that Braudel’s writings were explicily cited by Henri Guaino who was the speechwriter for Nicolas Sarkozy’s infamous Dakar discourse of July 26, 2007 where the little man spoke of “the African peasant who for thousands of years lived with the seasons.. knowing only the eternal recommencement of time rhythmed by the repetition without end of the same gestures and speech…man [here] remains immobile.” The Maghreb of Gautier, the Mediterranean of Braudel, the Africa of Sarkozy: so a colonial imaginary survives into our own time. 

Once the department meeting ended at 12, I read a chunk of my colleague Toby Green’s new book: The Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589  (CUP, 2012). It is a masterpiece, a field changer.  Green changes what we understand about the early history of the slave trade in four big ways. First, he shows the scale of the trade from  the Upper Guinea coast in the 16th century was a multiple of Curtin and Eltis’s estimates.  Second, he shows how this depended on creolised eastern-Atlantic merchant networks which had emerged in the 14th and 15th centuries, which spanned the Cape Verde archipelago and the northwest Atlantic coast of Africa, into which ‘new christian’ refugees from Spain and Portugal became enmeshed.  Third, he shows how Spanish demand for slaves for the Americas lead to the thickening of these diasporic networks, as ‘pan-Atlantic’ flows of migrants and trade tightened around this Cape Verde centred axis. Fourth, he argues for a cultural approach to the slave trade, as against the brutally quantitative focus of the last 40 years which has involved so much systematic undercounting (dependent as it is on European archives) and also more importantly a lack of attention to the human experience of the slave trade in Africa and the Americas.  It is based on a remarkable range of research, archival and oral, done in Spain, Portugal, Cape Verde and west africa, and Colombia.  

On the train home, in a coincidence I only clocked later, I finally got a chance to start reading solidly through Volume XI of THE MARCUS GARVEY AND UNIA PAPERS (Duke, 2011), which is on Garvey in the Caribbean diaspora, 1910-20.  It was just published this summer and the editor, the indefatigable Bobby Hill kindly had Duke send me a copy.  It is an amazing collection, offering an unprecedented view into the radical political world of the Caribbean diaspora in the early 20th century— soldiers mutinying in Palestine, Jamaicans in Costa Rica and Barbadians in Panama learning politics, mysterious waves of strikes in Antigua and British Guiana which leave the colonial government wondering what was going on, anxious cables from British military intelligence to the Americans asking for them on information on Garvey’s correspondence with servicemen, Arab sailors thrusting copies of the Negro World into the hands of Africans, tiny newspapers, friendly societies.  Many history books and many novels could be written on the basis of this collection.  

Read together both books remind us of what is now one of the critical subjects in transnational history— the role of diasporas as forces constituting new kinds of ethnicity and political community, and as bridging space.  To which I would add that in a context of imperial expansion we will always find diasporic systems: in which a dominant elite diaspora (for the British case, white, propertied, Anglican), is intertwined with subordinate shadow diasporas of class, religion, race, national identity.  It is impossible to understand Pan-Africanism in the 20th century without understanding its relationship to the undeclared pan-europeanism/white separatism of the late 19th century for which Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Cambridge, 2008), about which I will write another day if you like, is the most valuable guide.