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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2010
In his recent work on the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy stresses the importance of Great Britain's colonial empire in establishing its credentials as the most imposing ofthe great powers in the decades before the First World War. Britain not only possessed ‘the greatest empire the world had ever seen’, but its status as the great global power appeared to be enhanced by the fact that in the last three decades of the nineteenth century ‘it had added 4.25 million miles and 66 million people to the empire’. Other key ‘indicators of British strength’ marshalled by Kennedy include overseas fleets, naval bases and cable stations, which were inextricably bound up with its farflung colonial enterprises. Though empire is essential to Britain's great power status, in Kennedy's argument it has almost nothing to do with the steady decline in British power in the period before the Great War and, at an accelerating pace, throughout the twentieth century. He alludes in places to imperial crises and commitments as key contributors to Britain's perilously overextended position both before and after the war. He also concedes that resistance by colonized peoples, whether in the form of ‘tribal unrest’ or ‘western-educated lawyers and intellectuals seeking to create mass parties’ was somewhat troublesome, but ‘less threatening’ than developments within Europe itself. In Kennedy's view, Britain's retreat from imperial and global power (and, for that matter, that of France as well) can best be understood by charting the decline, relative to that of the other great powers, of its economic base, both industrial and commercial, and its incapacity, due to that decline, to meet the ever-expanding and more costly military commitments that its leaders viewed as essential to the maintenance of its positions as a great power.
1 Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York 1989) 225–226.Google Scholar
2 Ibidem, 227–228, 286–288.
3 The best of the works along these lines includes Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (New York 1972)Google Scholar, and Friedberg, Aaron, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline (Princeton 1989)Google Scholar.
4 As evidenced for example in the range of works discussed in Robin Wink's essay on the empire in Schlatter, Richard ed., Recent Views on British History: Essays on History Writing since 1966 (New Brunswick 1987)Google Scholar.
5 These works range from Marxist explanations grounded (at their best) in sophisticated analysis of the socio-economic and political situation in European states, such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Köln 1969), to Henr i Brunschwig's arguments for the primacy of strategic advantage and national pride in the calculations of the empire builders in Mythes el réalités de I'impérialisme colonial française, 1870–1914 (Paris 1961). The historiographical debate along these lines, of course, extends back at least as far as the furor aroused by John Hobson's Imperialism in the early 1900s, a debate which Lenin's reformulation of Hobson's ideas did much to give international prominence.Google Scholar
6 See Platt, D.C.M., Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1814–1914 (Oxford 1968)Google Scholar. Despite an early emphasis on the working of the ‘official mind(s)’ that produced British expansionist policies in this era, Gallagher and Robinson displayed from the outset a concern with the patterns of social and economic disruption, brought on by activities that predominated in earlier phases of European expansion, in areas like Egypt and South Africa that were being reduced to protectorates or colonies in the late-nineteenth century. This concern is apparent in both Africa and the Victorians (London 1961)Google Scholar and their influential article on ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review 4, 1 (1953) 1–15Google Scholar.
7 See Robinson, Ronald, ‘Non-European Foundation of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’ in: Owen, Roger and Sutcliffe, Bob ed., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London 1972) 117–142.Google Scholar To a certain extent works by historians of West Africa, such as K.O. Dike, G.I. Jones, and J.D. Hargreaves, anticipated the approach outlined by Robinson, without fully exploring the implications of the internal history of West Africa for our understanding of theories of imperialism. Studies such as Hopkins', A.G.An Economic History of West Africa (London 1973)Google Scholar and Owen's, RogerThe Middle East and the World Economy (London 1981)Google Scholar have laid the regional groundwork for new ways to conceptualize the process of European imperial expansion, but these works have had little effect on works in the grand synthesizing, global tradition. Works like Oliver Pollak's, B.Empires in Collision (Westport 1979), which seek to combine European and African or Asian perspectives, have as yet had little impact beyond the area specialist circles for whom they are presumably intendedGoogle Scholar.
8 Such as Holland's, R.F.European Decolonization (New York 1985)Google Scholar, and Chamberlain's, M.E.Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (Oxford 1985)Google Scholar. Holland makes use of some of the standard area-specialist works on the colonies he discusses. But works intended for a wider reading public (if their persistent appearance in the Barnes and Noble sale catalogues is any guide), such as Pocock's, TomEast and West of Suez (1986)Google Scholar and Lapping's, BrianEnd of Empire (1985), virtually ignore the issues and debates produced by decades of specialist research on the internal history of colonized areasGoogle Scholar.
9 Low, Anthony ed., Congress and the Rai (London 1977);Google ScholarGifford, Prosser and Louis, Wm. Roger ed., The Transfer of Power in Africa (New Haven 1982);Google ScholarHargreaves, J.D., Decolonization in Africa (London 1988)Google Scholar.
10 Kennedy, , Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 287.Google Scholar
11 On these struggles see especially the superb study by Bagchi, A.K., Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Cambridge 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the growing differences between colonial officials and European investors and merchants, who grew increasingly reluctant to commit themselves to heavy dependence on colonial enterprises, see Marseille, Jacques, Empire colonial et capitalisms francais: histoire d'un divorce (Paris 1984)Google Scholar.
12 Tariff and taxation policies in the colonial era have been the most thoroughly explored in the works of B.R. Tomlinson, especially his The Political Economy of the Raj (Cambridge 1979)Google Scholar.
13 Brown's, Judith studies of Gandhi and the Indian national movement provide some of a number of exceptions to this general trend. See especially Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915–1922 (Cambridge 1972) 124–140. The recent study by Hargreaves on Decolonization in Africa may also stimulate more interest in these issues on the part of area specialists, but suffers from a lack of sustained case analysis of the sort that would give it cohesion and fully satisfy those working from the area-specialist's perspective.Google Scholar
14 See especially Bloch's essay entitled ‘A Contribution towards a Comparative History of Societies’ (1928), reprinted in J.E. Anderson ed., Land and Work in Medieval Society (New York 1967) 44-81.
15 Sewell, William, ‘Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History’, History and Theory 6, 2 (1967) 208–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Skocpol, Theda and Somers, Margaret, ‘The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosociological Inquiry’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, 2 (1980) 174–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 A good sense of the size of the literature involved can be gained from a perusal of Miller's, JosephSlavery: A Worldwide Bibliography, 1900–1982 (White Plains 1985), as well as the supplements that Miller and David Appleby have provided since that publicationGoogle Scholar.
17 The more influential of these studies include Klein, Herbert, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago 1967);Google ScholarDegler, Carl, Neither Black nor While: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York 1971)Google Scholar and Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass. 1982). Comparative studies have played a similar role in the equally well-developed sub-field that has grown up around the study of protest and revolutionGoogle Scholar.
18 Skocpol, and Somers, , ‘Uses of Comparative History’, 178–181.Google Scholar
19 Bloch, ‘Comparative History of European Societies’, 45–48.
20 Sewell, ‘Logic of Comparative History’, 215–216.
21 A procedure that Skocpol and Somers dub the ‘Parallel Demonstration of Theory’ approach to comparative analysis. See Skocpol and Somers, ‘Uses of Comparative History’, 176–178.
22 Ibidem, 214–218.
23 Secretary of State for India to Lord Chelmsford, 18 December 1917, Chelmsford Collection, E 264, European Manuscripts Collection, vol. 3, India Office Records.
24 On the background and Indian responses to the August Declaration, see Danzig, R., ‘The Announcement of August 20th, 1917’, Journal of Asian Studies 28, 1 (1968), 19–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the essay by Judith Brown in Ellinwood, CD. and Pradhan, S.D. ed., India in the. First World War (New Delhi 1978) 19–39Google Scholar.
25 Cf. Luc Garcia, ‘Les movements de résistance au Dahomey (1914–1917)’, Cahiers d'Etudes africaines 10 (1970) 144–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and d'Almeida-Topor, Helene, ‘Les populations dahoméen-nes et le recrutement militaire pendant la premiére Guerre mondiale’, Revue française d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer 60 (1973) 196–241CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a contemporary account on the Punjab see Leigh, M.S., The Punjab and the War(Lahore 1922)Google Scholar; and more recent coverage of recruiting patterns, S.D. Pradhan, ‘Indian Army and the First World War’, and Saini, ‘Economic Aspects of India's Participation in the War’ in: Ellinwood, and Pradhan, ed., India in theFirst World War, 49–67 and esp. 141, 144–146 respectivelyGoogle Scholar.
26 See for example the testimony of the Sardar Amar Singh to the Government of India, Disorders Inquiry (Hunter) Committee, ‘Lahore and Kasur’, 270–275.
27 Bloch, , ‘Comparative History of European Societies’, 48–51, 72–76.Google Scholar
28 Excepting, of course, those like Eric Wolf who adopt the historian's approach.
29 Skocpol, and Somers, , ‘Uses of Comparative History’, 180–181.Google Scholar
30 Here the works of the so-called Cambridge School on South Asia are particularly note worthy. But see also the great majority of the essays of the often opposing ‘Subaltern School’.
31 Ranger's essays on the ‘Connections between “Primary Resistance” Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East Africa’, in the Journal of African History 9 (1968)Google Scholar and Crowder's, West Africa under Colonial Rule (London 1968)Google Scholar represented pioneering efforts to bridge the two traditions and encompass the whole of the colonial experience in different parts of Africa. More recently Sumit Sarkar has built a synthesis of decades of area specialist research into an overview of the process of decolonization in Modern India 1885–1947 (Madras 1983)Google Scholar, thereby extending the effort to span the two traditions to the study of another major center of colonization. The more important collections on anti colonial resistance of varying kinds include Crowder, M. ed., West African Resistance (London 1971)Google Scholar and Crummey, Donald ed., Banditry, Rebellion, and Social Protest in Africa (London 1986)Google Scholar.
32 Bihar was in many ways an extreme case of the latter type, since it represented an extension of the patterns of penetrationand conquest employed by the British further east in Bengal for a period of nearly half a century from the mid-1750s. These are discussed in Peter Marshall's recent volume in The New Cambridge History: Bengal, The British Bridgehead 1740–1828 (Cambridge 1987) vol. 2/2Google Scholar. Though the revolt led by Urabi Pasha in Egypt in 1882, rendered the British conquest a violent and destructive affair, the clash was brief and lopsided in the British-favour in contrast tothe numerous campaigns and bitter defeats the colonizers had to endure before the Sikh kingdom was Finally annexed in the mid-nineteent century. Differing patterns of conquest resulted in significant variations in collaborative arrangements in the colonial era.
33 Fox, , Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley 1989) esp. 15–18.Google Scholar
34 Percival Spear's study of The Nabobs (London 1932)Google Scholar remains the best introduction to these patterns. It can be combined with recent works, such as Race, Kenneth Ballhatchet's, Sex and Class under the Raj (London 1980)Google Scholar, that chronicle the decline of the high degree of cultural and social symbiosis characteristic of the late-eighteenth century in the middle decades of the nineteenth.
35 These trans-cultural associations have been the most fully explored by Guha, Ranijit, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of a Permanent Settlement (The Hague 1963)Google Scholar.
36 The Europeans' manipulation of these vestiges of the old order is wonderfully illustrated by many of the photographs in Nijs's, E. Breton deTempo Doeloe; Fotographische Docummten uit het Oude Indië, 1870–1941 (Amsterdam 1961)Google Scholar.
37 For an account of the adventures of this key symbol of Asante political authority, see Smith, Edwin W., The Golden Stool; Some Aspects of the Conflict of Cultures in Modem Africa (London 1926) 1–12Google Scholar.
38 For one of the most detailed and revealing accounts of the rationales behind and the techniques employed for ruling throughthe indigenous ‘chiefs’ in West Africa, see Forgeron, Jean-Baptiste, Le protectorat en Afriqueoccidentale francaise et les chefs indigènes (Bordeaux 1920). The writings of Lord Lugard are, of course, the standard sources on the British side of these issuesGoogle Scholar.
39 These issues have been perhaps the most thoroughly explored by scholars working on British India. See, for examples, Frykenberg's, Robert pioneering study on Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford 1965)Google Scholar; and the more recent and painstaking investigations of Clive Dewey, especially ‘Patwari and Chaukidar. Subordinate Officials and the Reliability of India's Agricultural Statistics’ in: Dewey, C. and Hopkins, A.G. ed., The Imperial Impact in Africa and South Asia (London 1979)Google Scholar.
40 See for examples, ‘From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23,2 (1981) 217–247Google Scholar; and ‘Market Demands vs. Imperial Control: Colonial Contradictions and the Origins of Agrarian Protest in South and Southeast Asia’ in: Burke, Edward, III, ed., Global Crises and Social Movements (Boulder 1988)Google Scholar.
41 Fox, , Lions of the Punjab, 21–24.Google Scholar
42 See especially Foucault, M., Discipline, and Punish (Harmondsworth 1982) 135–169Google Scholar.
43 Breman's, Jan essays on India and Java have provided some of the best insights into this process. See The Village on Java and the Early Colonial State (Rotterdam 1980)Google Scholar and The Shattered Image: Construction and Deconstruction of the Village in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam 1987)Google Scholar.
44 Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York 1969) esp. 289–294.Google Scholar
45 See for examples the essays by Cohn, Bernard and Ranger, Terence in Ranger, T. and Hobsbawm, E.J. ed., The Invention ofTradition (Cambridge 1983)Google Scholar; Fox, Lions of the punjab, chapters six and eight; and the more detailed studyof these patterns at the micro-level in Dirks, Nicholas, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohislory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge 1987) esp. chapters eleven and thirteenGoogle Scholar.
46 On the colonial origins of early anthropological work, see Leclerc, Gérard, Anthropologie et colonialisme; Essai sur I'hisloire de L'africanisme (Paris 1972) 43–52Google Scholar; and the essay in Asad, Talal ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London 1973)Google Scholar. On the concept of recapitulation, see Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York 1981) 114–122. Other social and intellectual currents had significant effects on the effort to reconstruct ‘native’ traditions, including important, butneglected, trends in Europe itself, such as the craft revival and the British fascination with things medieval that was applied to Indiain the form of Henry Maine's Gemeinschaft vision of precolonial Indian societyGoogle Scholar.
47 Hopkins', A.G.An Economic History of West Africa (New York 1973)Google Scholar esp. chapters three and four, ably provides an overview of these efforts.
48 Ranger, T., ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ in: , Hobsbawm and , Ranger ed., Invention of Tradition, esp. 247–252.Google Scholar
49 The impact of colonial rivalries on alliance formation has been stressed by Turner, L.F.C., Origins of the First World War (New York 1970)Google Scholar. The importance of the rise of German power - particularly naval power - in British diplomacy in the decades before the war has been explored in great depth in Kennedy's, PaulThe Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London 1980)Google Scholar; and its impact on the pre-war crisis in the summer of 1914 is discussed by Steiner, Zara in Britain and the Origins ofthe First World War (London 1979) esp. 229–232Google Scholar.
50 See Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca 1989) chapter sixGoogle Scholar.
51 The Khilafat agitation in India in the years after the war, for example, owed much to German propaganda among the Muslim peoples of the British and Ottoman empires.
52 The latter's impact as a result of the war has been treated in depth by Johnson, G. Wesley in The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal (1900–1920) (Stanford 1971) 190 ffGoogle Scholar.
53 For sample explorations of many of these themes, see the essays in the special issue of the Journal of African History 19, 1 (1978)Google Scholar; Page, Melvin ed., Africa and the First World War (New York 1987) and Ellinwood, and Pradhan, ed., India in the First World WarCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 See especially Pouchepadass, J., ‘Local Leaders and the Intelligensia in the Champaran Satyagraha (1977): A Study in Peasant Mobilization’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 8, 1 (1974) 67–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robb, Peter, ‘Officials and Non-Officials as Leaders in Popular Agitation: Shahabad, 1917 and Other Conspiracies’ in: Pandey, B.N. ed., Leadership in South Asia (New Delhi 1977)Google Scholar.
55 These strategies are no more blatantly enunciated than in the 1920 Address by Sir Hugh Clifford, the Governor of Nigeria. See Council, Nigerian, Address by the Governor (Lagos 1920) esp. 18–32Google Scholar.
56 For a discussion of some of the cultural roots of Gandhi's satyagraha strategy and tactics, see Spodek, Howard, ‘On the Origins of Gandhi's Political Methodology: The Heritage of Kathiawad and Gujarat’, Journal of Asian Studies 30 (1971) 361–372CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 I borrow this very apt term from Arno Mayer's writings on the post-war settlement in Europe.