Abstract
‘I have a much darker picture of the empire’, Richard Gott remarked to Kwasi Kwarteng. ‘A huge amount of extermination went on, seizure of land – it’s a very bleak picture.’ Kwarteng replied, in some reproach (and perhaps some hyperbole as well), ‘That’s fuelled, if I may say, by your ideology – you’re one of the few self-avowed Marxists left in public life. That class struggle and power … ’The conversation between the two historians of empire, published in the London Guardian (20 April 2012), took place in response to the revelations of the ‘migrated archives’ of thousands of files from the waning years in dozens of colonies of Britain’s empire, from Kenya and Cyprus to Malaya. The documents had long been languishing in the Foreign Office’s facility at Hanslope Park, variously (according to equally varied sources) mislabelled, neglected, concealed, denied, even awaiting possible incendiary destruction – or now, equally if differently incendiary, subpoenaed by litigants demanding reparations for atrocities committed against them by ‘Britain’s empire’.
Britain’s Empire is the title of Richard Gott’s most recent book, but the volume’s subtitle, ‘Resistance, repression and revolt’, suggests a different narrative from the age-old storyline of the empire’s ‘civilising mission’. It offers, that is, according to Gott, a ‘long story of empire’ more consistent with that exposed in these ‘migrated archives’, an unremitting saga that is ‘littered with outbreaks of rage and fury, suppressed with great brutality’. Although the cache of ‘migrated’ files now being gradually released for public, legal and scholarly scrutiny might not have provided additional documentation for Gott’s specific recounting of the episodes of ‘resistance, repression and revolt’ occasioned by ‘Britain’s empire’ (after all, its 500-plus pages account for but one century, that from 1755 to 1858), their disclosures do dramatically reinforce the historian’s introductory argument that the ‘subject peoples of empire did not go quietly into history’s good night’. Indeed, it could well happen (as has now occurred with the Mau Mau litigators’ subpoena) that the ‘rulers of the British empire will one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale’.
Organised into ten chronological sections, each further divided into sixty-six chapters, the meticulously researched, minutely detailed, scrupulously documented Britain’s Empire looks beneath the ‘veneer of the official record’ to provide historical evidence of sundry instances over time of persistent revolts against the imperial sway: the revolts of indigenous peoples, of people ‘reluctantly dragooned’ into the imperial sphere, against British rule by white settlers, and of the workforce in the colonies. These seemingly sporadic, more often co-ordinated revolts, examples of exemplary resistance, concatenate around the globe and provide separate narratives, told in the succeeding chapters, through the volume’s sections. For example, slave revolts in the Caribbean; tribal and princely resistance in South Asia; Irish rebellion; Australian aboriginal uprisings; violent recalcitrance among the Xhosa in South Africa’s Cape Colony – these lineages figure importantly among the chronicled history of ‘outbreaks of rage and fury, suppressed with great brutality’ that Gott narrates. Indeed, a reader, a student of that ‘rage and fury’, of the attendant ‘great brutality’, could well find a single geospecific trajectory through the heavy-duty volume, focusing on one or another of these instances, beginning with Tipu Sultan, for example, in the late eighteenth century (whose famous tiger adorns the book’s jacket), to the ‘great rebellion in India’ in the mid-nineteenth century. Alternatively, another critic with an especial interest in slave revolts could read through a century of West Indian history, or an advocate for indigenous people’s rights might just as well follow the lineaments of that intersecting storyline from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand. As described, for instance, in the summarising introduction to ‘Britain expands its counter-revolutionary empire during the war against revolutionary France, 1793–1802’ (Section 4), ‘Indian princes tried to keep their states free from the British embrace; black slaves in the West Indies, as well as Maroons and Caribs, rose up to demand their freedom or their traditional lands; Dutch farmers in South Africa imagined a Republican and Jacobin future, and so too did the Defenders in Ireland, the United Irishmen of Dublin and Belfast.’
It is in the lucidly brief synopses introducing the ten sections that Gott, in chronologising the genealogical geographies of ‘resistance, repression and revolt’, the history of ‘the conquered’ (or maybe not so ‘conquered’, after all), contextualises the accumulated evidentiary grounds for his indictment of the ‘nonsense of the imperial version of what went on’. From the very first section, ‘The challenge to imperial power’ (1755–1772), Gott lays out the ‘background of a global struggle between Britain and France, the first “world war” of modern times’, through Britain’s domestic shortage of prisons in ‘The loss of America creates a need for new prisons abroad and a place to settle Black “empire loyalists”’, in which the empire’s exploits in, and exploitations of, Malaysia and Sierra Leone are described (Section 3). Gott later moves on to the post-Napoleonic period (1803–1815), when the ‘personal and public wealth of Britain created by slave labour was a crucial element in the accumulation of capital that made possible both the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of empire’ (Section 5). By the 1830s, with the 1832 Reform Act, the abolition of slavery and the formation, in 1837, of the Aborigines Protection Society, ‘humanitarian issues were on the agenda, but the perceived cost of Empire was also of major concern’. That agenda was destined to expand – and imperial ‘humiliation’ to intensify – as the ‘arrival in London of information [such as those ‘migrated archives’?] about British atrocities, often provided by missionaries, began to chip away at Britain’s self-confidence in its imperial project’ (Section 8). Then came the Opium wars and the Afghan wars. And so on …
As Gott describes them in the epilogue to his ‘darker picture of the empire’, the cast of characters, the dramatis personae, in the grand scenario of Britain’s Empire, represent an ‘array of rebels and resistance fighters’; or, in other words, ‘those who did not wish to participate in the imperial project’. Many of them (and their descendants, too) would like, however, and presumably not unlike Gott himself, to have access now to those more lately ‘migrated archives’, documents that tell at least a part of the story and the staging of the sequels to their predecessors’ struggles between 1755 and 1858, of the ends of the imperial persecution – and the means for a humanitarian prosecution of Britain’s empire before the courts of world opinion, if not in international tribunals.