Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Michael Mann
(Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin)
Mark Condos (Queen Mary University of London)
- Location:
- C407
- Start time:
- 28 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Officials of the East India Company and the Raj claimed to represent liberal, humanitarian regimes, yet they continually resorted to violent measures to ensure their rule. This panel considers these contradictions and ways in which British agents who professed to govern India justly reconciled them.
Long Abstract:
Why, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did the East India Company and Great Britain - two self-professed liberal, humanitarian imperial powers - resort violently to suppressing individuals and groups that threatened their dominion? From the torture of individuals, the pacification of purportedly wayward groups and larger-scale military campaigns, the Company and Raj frequently used highly coercive and violent measures in order to ensure their continued stability. This panel investigates ways in which the British attempted to reconcile inherent contradictions between more brutal aspects of their regimes and notions of justice, civil improvement and good government for India that they also claimed to hold dear.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Derek Elliott (Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane)
Paper short abstract:
Torture as a means to extract revenue and confession from Indian subjects was an unsanctioned, yet ubiquitous mode of governance for the East India Company’s rule in India. This paper demonstrates the liberal imperial project’s contradictions of humanitarianism and maintaining empire at any cost.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout the nineteenth century under the East India Company, torture was a widespread and open secret amongst officials and inhabitants. The perpetrators were often 'native servants' of the state in the police and revenue departments, and the victims were most commonly the ryots. Torture was universally reviled by all British administrators at every level of governance - district, presidency, and metropole. Yet torture persisted, often with the collusion of officials who turned a blind eye to its application. As a universally condemned practice, torture when perpetrated by Indians, functioned as a hallmark for the savagery of native customs and justified the need to expand British law, justice and other institutions of good governance within the subcontinent. Simultaneously, the use of torture served the state as an object of stark imperial control through its use to collect revenue. The contradiction of liberal governance perpetrated under a corporate regime is laid bare through the persistence of torture, occurring under a company state that was responsible ultimately to its self rather than its subjects. This is the fundamental problem of a company masquerading as government. Scholars of the East India Company have frequently separated the trading from governing aspects of the Company. This paper argues instead that the governing of subjects was carried out under the same principles as trade, and that the structures created by the Company led to a stark contradiction between needing to appear as a good government while maintaining their corporate responsibilities. Torture demonstrates this was not readily accomplished.
Mark Condos (Queen Mary University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces how the taint of military conquest in colonial India was rehabilitated by British military officers by the mid-nineteenth century into a theory of governance, known as "military despotism," which openly embraced coercion and conquest as fundamental to colonial rule.
Paper long abstract:
Traditionally, the British Empire has been viewed primarily as a civilian-dominated empire of liberalism and free trade. As opposed to its supposedly more nefarious, military-dominated imperial counterparts like Germany and France, the British Empire has been partially absolved of its imperial sins by some due to its supposedly benign influence as a force of moral and civilizational progress. This paper re-assesses the nineteenth century British Empire in India, not as an empire of civilizational development based on liberalism and free trade, but as a "belligerent" empire, undergirded by militarism and conquest. It traces how a self-purported liberal empire, which was haunted by the taint of military conquest throughout much of the eighteenth century, was able to reconcile and even come to embrace conquest and coercion as not only legitimate, but absolutely necessary tools of imperial rule by the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, the proliferation of increasing amounts of military power and influence within the British Empire more generally during this period certainly helped normalize this shift. Perhaps, more importantly, however, the reason for this embrace of militarism and conquest was the high degree of militarization within the colonial state's governing structure in India itself. With such a high proportion of military officers serving at different levels of government, political discourse in India also became, in a sense, "militarized," and a distinctly militarized theory of governance, known as "military despotism," emerged in order to justify the conquest and continued subjugation of India by the sword.
Faridah Zaman (Corpus Christi, University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
To study the progress and dissemination of ideas often requires study into moments of epistemological repression. This paper will look at the censorship, internment, and high-profile court trials of two prominent Muslim intellectual leaders of the 1910s and 1920s, Muhammad Ali and Abul Kalam Azad.
Paper long abstract:
Any attempt to write an intellectual history for early twentieth-century India without figuring in the presence of the colonial state is futile. The potency of ideas and the men who espoused them might well be measured by the very notoriety that the colonial regime ascribed to them. This is not to say that Indian intellectual currents were produced solely in reaction; rather, it is to recognise the contextual realities that shaped them, and to further recognise that instances of repression in particular afforded platforms on which ideas were developed and contested, and from which they were disseminated both to an Indian audience and for the benefit of the colonial state, which often had the very language of liberal imperialism quoted back to it. In trying to assemble a picture of what some of the most vocal contenders for the leadership of Muslim intellectual opinion in the 1910s and 1920s were thinking and why, I will turn to moments of confrontation with the juridical violence of the colonial state, looking specifically at two prominent individuals, Muhammad Ali and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. It will be argued that the process of censorship, internment, and the high-profile court trials of men like Ali and Azad were formative to a more uncompromising approach of Muslim politics to the colonial state, which was in exactly such moments revealed in all its illiberal guises.