New York Review of Books, July 1, 2021 issue
Imperial Delusions
by Fara Dabhoiwala
Reviewed:
Time’s Monster: How History Makes History
by Priya Satia
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 363 pp., $29.95
Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
by Mahmood Mamdani
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 401 pp., $29.95
Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
by Adom Getachew
Princeton University Press, 271 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper)
In the summer of 1932 Eric Williams arrived in England from the British
colony of Trinidad. Like most of the island’s population, his family was
so poor that he and his eleven siblings had rarely tasted milk. But from
his earliest youth his father, a disillusioned postal clerk, obsessively
pressured him to achieve academic success. There were no universities in
the West Indies; few Trinidadians progressed beyond primary school, and
almost all professions were reserved for whites. Yet Williams won a
coveted government scholarship that enabled him to continue studying
beyond the age of eleven, then an even rarer bursary to complete his
secondary schooling, and finally, after three years of trying, one of
the island’s two annual scholarships to a British university. He sailed
for Oxford to take an undergraduate degree in history.
The white Englishman in charge of Trinidad’s Board of Education
recommended him to one of the university’s colleges, the rich, ancient
centers of its intellectual and social life. “Mr Williams,” he wrote,
“is not of European descent, but is a coloured boy, though not black.”
This did not help. He entered Oxford as a member of St. Catherine’s
Society, the decidedly déclassé association for students who could not
afford the high costs of a college. From then on, Williams flourished.
He read insatiably, graduated at the top of his class, and entered the
competition for a fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford’s greatest
prize. He also embarked on research for a doctoral thesis about the
ending of British slavery in the West Indies. This was a deeply
unfashionable subject. Even in Trinidad, Williams had only ever been
taught about the European past. A handful of Oxford’s faculty studied
colonial history; the rest regarded it, he observed, with “general
contempt.”
Yet in every other respect the university was not just proud of the
empire but instrumental in sustaining it. Its lecturers taught of the
“unseen superintending Providence controlling the development of the
Anglo-Saxon race,” exhorted “reverence before the majestic fabric of
British [imperial] development,” and, above all, inculcated the
uplifting message that, whatever its past or present shortcomings, the
British Empire was a profoundly moral undertaking whose spread benefited
its countless subject peoples. Across the globe, Oxford’s graduates
filled the upper ranks of colonial administrations. Its professors often
had backgrounds in overseas service and were influential in
policymaking. More than any other university, it actively promoted
imperialism, from the corridors of government down to the indoctrination
of schoolchildren. Between 1911 and 1954, Oxford University Press’s
best-selling History of England, by Rudyard Kipling and C.R.L. Fletcher,
a fellow of All Souls and Magdalen, explained to girls and boys that the
settlement of Australia had been easy because it contained “nothing but
a few miserable blacks, who could hardly use even bows and arrows,” that
in Africa “the natives everywhere welcome the mercy and justice of our
rule,” and that West Indians were
lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement, or of work
except under compulsion. In such a climate a few bananas will sustain
the life of a negro quite sufficiently; why should he work to get more
than this? He is quite happy and quite useless.
No corner of Oxford was more devoted to the imperial mission than All
Souls. Its grand eighteenth-century buildings were dominated by the huge
Codrington Library, named after the West Indian slave owner whose
benefaction enriched his old college. Its recent and current fellows
included cabinet ministers, senior imperial administrators (including
three viceroys of India), and the longtime editor of The Times, an
immensely influential and energetic agent and proponent of colonialism.
It was also the home of Oxford’s professor of colonial history, Reginald
Coupland, whose acclaimed writings perpetuated the dominant view of the
British Empire as a great civilizing enterprise. Through its benign,
nurturing “trusteeship” of less developed peoples, Coupland explained,
the empire would in due course evolve into a “Commonwealth” of mature,
self-governing nations—headed, naturally, by the British. In 1931, when
Gandhi visited Oxford after inspiring a mass campaign of civil
disobedience across the Indian subcontinent, Coupland duly reminded him
of the historical logic of imperial destiny, which decreed that only
cooperation and patience, not defiance, could lead to eventual
self-rule. (While he was only a peasant, not a professor of history, the
Mahatma responded coolly, that was not his understanding of how either
the Americans or the Irish had, in fact, obtained their independence.)
Like other colonial historians, Coupland also helped shape British
imperial policy. In 1937 his report for the Royal Commission on
Palestine concluded that Arab–Jewish conflict was “irrepressible”
because the two “races” were intrinsically antagonistic; it recommended
territorial partition as the only solution. In the early 1940s he
participated in failed government efforts to persuade Indian
nationalists to support the British war effort and suspend their calls
for independence. Analyzing “the Indian Problem” in depth for his All
Souls colleague Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, he was one
of the first to raise the notion of partition; when this idea was
hurriedly implemented in 1947, it was another fellow of All Souls—a
barrister who’d previously never traveled east of Paris—who was put in
charge of hastily drawing the fateful lines that separated Pakistan from
India, resulting in 10 to 20 million refugees and mass carnage.
In 1935 the fellows of All Souls interviewed Eric Williams. More than
thirty years later, he still smarted at the memory—not of losing out to
better candidates but of being treated as a racial inferior. What was
his opinion, he was asked, on “whether advanced peoples have any right
to assume tutelage over backward peoples?” One fellow defended the
recent Italian occupation of Ethiopia, the only free black African
nation besides Liberia; another openly stared at Williams in the street
because of the color of his skin. It was clear that “natives” didn’t
belong there. The warden of All Souls advised him to serve his own
people by returning to Trinidad. So did the dean of St. Catherine’s:
“You West Indians are too keen on trying to get posts here which take
jobs away from Englishmen.” For the English to transplant themselves
around the world and rule over others was a natural right, but for a
darker-skinned colonial to presume to do the reverse was insupportable.
He did eventually return home, convinced that a people’s grasp of their
own history was the key to their sense of identity. Before long his
educational mission of addressing open-air crowds on the history of
slavery and the Caribbean morphed into a political campaign for freedom
from British rule. But he never lost sight of the link between
contemporary politics and understandings of the past. Soon after leading
the new nation of Trinidad and Tobago to independence in 1962, he noted
that Britain’s condescending modern treatment of its former West Indian
colonies derived principally from “the fact that for so many centuries
they have been regarded as satellites and subjected to the most
humiliating propaganda”—the most pernicious of which were “the shams,
the inconsistencies, the prejudices of metropolitan [i.e., British]
historians.” Independence should mark a fresh beginning, a reimagining
of national identity. It was not, as the British liked to pretend, a
consummation of the imperial project, a vindication of their benevolent
tutelage of “subject races.” That theory of history “sought only to
justify the indefensible and to seek support for preconceived and
outmoded prejudices.” Singling out Coupland, he savaged the idea of the
empire’s moral justification: “British historians wrote almost as if
Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of
abolishing it.”
But old mental habits die hard. “I was…all in favour of the British
Empire,” reminisced another All Souls historian, sixty years after he’d
interviewed Williams for the fellowship—after all, “weren’t Africans and
Indians happier, prevented from massacring each other, in those better
days?” That is still a mainstream view. In 2016, when African and other
antiracist student activists at Oxford began a (still unrealized)
campaign to remove a statue of its great imperialist benefactor Cecil
Rhodes, the university’s leadership responded belligerently. Its
chancellor, Chris Patten, who’d studied history at Oxford in the 1960s
and served as Britain’s last colonial governor of Hong Kong, told the
BBC that if people weren’t prepared to show “generosity of
spirit…towards Rhodes and towards history,” they didn’t belong at
Oxford: “Maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere.” In
other words: If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where
you came from?
As someone else once said, if studying history mainly makes you feel
happy and proud, you probably aren’t really studying history. Over the
past year, amid a new wave of critical scholarship, Britain’s imperial
legacy has become one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds of
its culture wars. In September, when the National Trust, the charity
that owns hundreds of the United Kingdom’s best-loved historic
buildings, released a report detailing some of their connections to
colonialism, it was greeted with outrage by Britain’s right-wing press
and Conservative government. In the tabloid Mail on Sunday, Baroness
Stowell, the Conservative chair of the Charity Commission, the official
regulator of philanthropies, warned them not to “stray into party
politics” or be “drawn into the culture wars.” Soon afterward, the
commission opened an inquiry into whether the Trust’s research had
constituted an illegal misuse of charitable funds. Meanwhile, Oliver
Dowden, the secretary of state for culture, publicly instructed all UK
museums that they must “defend our culture and history from the noisy
minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down.”
Most recently, in an attempt to push back against the wave of anger and
activism that has been building since last summer’s Black Lives Matter
protests, the prime minister’s office rushed out a shoddy, historically
illiterate report on racial disparities in modern Britain that sought to
downplay their deeply rooted, systemic character. It chided nonwhite
Britons to acknowledge that “the UK had become open and fairer,” scolded
them to “help themselves through their own agency, rather than wait for
invisible external forces,” and lauded the UK as “a model for other
White-majority countries.” Dismissing “negative calls” to decolonize the
nation’s teaching of history, and the misguided motives of “people in
the progressive and anti-racism movements,” it clumsily proposed instead
a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave
period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally
African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain.
Modern British attempts to defend the empire and its legacies invariably
take a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, there’s a disingenuous
ethical claim: no one in the past realized that what they were doing was
contentious, so we cannot criticize them. (Even leaving aside questions
of retrospective judgment, men like Rhodes turned to educational
philanthropy precisely to launder their dubious reputations—imperialism
was never uncontroversial, even at its height.) On the other hand,
there’s the fiction of “balance”: imperial unease is minimized by
reducing public debate to the inane question of whether, all things
considered, the empire was “good” or “bad.” Did Britain’s abolition of
slavery not cancel out the sin of its previous participation in the
slave trade? Shouldn’t the introduction of railways to India count
against the horrendous death toll of the many famines aggravated by
British economic policies? Surely imperial rule prevented indigenous
conflict and helped lesser nations “develop”? Lumping together all
ethical, economic, political, and other considerations, and squinting
hard to avoid questions of responsibility and viewpoint, was the empire
not beneficial on the whole?
None of this is new: such balance-sheet historical apologetics have
always been central to imperialism. In Time’s Monster, her impassioned,
searching new book, Priya Satia explores how they were used to justify
the unmistakable violence of Britain’s long rule over India, the crown
jewel of its later empire. From the late eighteenth century onward,
supporters of imperialism vindicated colonial actions by reference to a
continually updated ideology of historical necessity. It had several
components—the old Protestant idea of God’s providential guidance of the
British nation; the more recent valorization of personal conscience,
which made intent (rather than outcome) the ultimate ethical standard;
and a new Enlightenment faith that all human societies passed through
stages of development, from the “primitive” to the “civilized,”
measurable by such criteria as their systems of agriculture, forms of
government, and treatment of women. History was determined by
providence, destiny, and natural laws of social development. Compared to
these large, inexorable forces, human agents, especially if they were
well-intentioned, could hardly bear much culpability for misfortune.
What’s more, because the arc of history was supposed always to bend
toward progress, even apparently destructive or immoral actions could be
exculpated as likely to be “vindicated by history.” In the ethics of
imperialism, final judgment is always deferred to the future.
Synthesizing an abundance of more specialized work by others and
revisiting the subjects of her two previous books—on the
eighteenth-century English origins of the global arms trade and on
British spying in the interwar Middle East—Satia examines where these
ideas came from and how pervasive they were. Even some of the severest
nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of colonialism shared the
presumption that human history moved unstoppably forward along a single
path, and that mere individuals could only enact what was predetermined.
The effects of English rule in India were “devastating,” Karl Marx
observed in 1853, yet this “dragging [of] individuals and people through
blood and dirt, through misery and degradation” was also a historical
necessity, for “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one
destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic
society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in
Asia.” To Occidental eyes, Satia wryly observes, the suffering of
subjugated peoples was invariably good for them: “merely birthing pain
in the cause of some greater epochal labor.”
Yet as Time’s Monster shows, the idea of historical vindication
originated in a deep sense of British guilt. In the late eighteenth
century, faced with mounting evidence of imperial corruption, bloodshed,
and misrule, Britons faced a crisis of conscience about the effects of
their overseas endeavors. The origins of European empires were shameful,
Adam Smith observed in 1776: mere “folly and injustice” toward “harmless
natives” who had been brutally exploited, massacred, and enslaved. It
was to redeem such sins, and the embarrassing loss of their American
colonies, that the British after 1800 developed the idea that their
global imperial mission was driven by a moral purpose. By eradicating
slavery, freeing peoples from mental and physical bondage, spreading
liberty, Christianity, and free trade, and replacing corrupt local
manners and culture with their Western equivalents, they would extend
civilization across the world.
In his huge, best-selling History of British India (1817), the tireless
utilitarian reformer James Mill pronounced—without ever having set foot
there or learned any of its languages—that the subcontinent was plainly
a stagnant, ignorant, “barbarous” place, where time had stood still for
centuries. True, its past colonial government by the East India Company
had been a tragedy of stupidity and greed—but now, at last, going
forward, the British had a great opportunity to replace India’s
degenerate culture with modern norms and laws that would allow Indians
to progress. Mill’s text became the leading handbook for British
imperial officials in India as they set about that task; he himself, as
well as three of his sons (including the eldest, the philosopher John
Stuart Mill), entered colonial service.
The great Indian uprising against British rule in 1857, together with
other mid-nineteenth-century indigenous rebellions across the empire,
forced a rethinking of this optimistic historical script. What had
caused such horrendous violence? Was it evidence of yet more imperial
misrule? If not, why had the locals so willfully rejected British
benevolence? In the late nineteenth century, most Britons settled on
what seemed to them the most obvious answer: history, it appeared,
proved not just that certain societies were superior to others, but also
that “native” cultures were inherently primitive, violent, and resistant
to progress. That not only justified their subordination but made it
historically inevitable.
This outlook was buttressed by the rise of Social Darwinist and racist
theories of societal development. Winston Churchill, for one, had long
believed that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” As home secretary
in 1910, he proposed the mass sterilization and incarceration of
“degenerate” Britons in order to strengthen their “race.” In a similar
vein, he told Coupland’s Royal Commission on Palestine in 1937:
I do not admit…that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of
America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong
has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a
higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come
in and taken their place. I do not admit it.
As prime minister in 1943, while millions of Bengalis were dying in a
famine caused by British grain policies, he explained his refusal to
send aid by invoking the vision of “Indians breeding like rabbits.”
The presumption that indigenous societies were intrinsically
bloodthirsty, static, and backward gave imperialism a different but
deeper ethical justification. The moral basis for colonial rule now
became that it was the best way of preventing carnage and anarchy.
Imperialism was, in Kipling’s phrase, “the White Man’s burden,” a noble
duty to protect and tutor lesser peoples. Rather than trying to civilize
them against their nature, the British after 1857 switched from “direct”
to “indirect” forms of governance, preserving rather than replacing the
seemingly atavistic religions, customs, and enmities of their colonial
subjects. In addition to subordinating them as a whole, imperial rulers
also increasingly subdivided indigenous populations into different
castes, tribes, religions, and races. Each of these groups’ supposedly
unchanging “native” traditions was now codified into a separate system
of customary law and authority, through which it was to be governed.
The belief that non-European cultures were fixed in an alien, changeless
moral universe also licensed further violence toward them. Orientals had
different standards of ethics, a senior military officer assured
Parliament in 1930: “The natives of a lot of these tribes love fighting
for fighting’s sake…. They have no objection to being killed.” The
aerial bombardment of Iraq was an entirely moral action, his colleagues
concurred, for “life in the desert is a continuous guerilla warfare”:
the martial Bedouin “do not seem to resent…that women and children are
accidentally killed by bombs.” Their sensibilities, mused T.E. Lawrence
(another interwar fellow of All Souls), were simply “too oriental…for us
to feel very clearly.”
Meanwhile, because the British both benefited from indigenous disunity
and presumed its timeless character, their imperial policies often
exacerbated social conflict. By ordering fluid communal relations into
fixed caste, tribal, and religious identities, and giving such sectarian
labels greater legal and territorial significance, they politicized them
in disastrous new ways—for example, by writing caste into Indian
censuses and inserting rigid identity categories into law. One great
champion of such efforts was the colonial administrator and
anthropologist Herbert Risley, whose influential definitions of caste
portrayed it as a racial category, corresponding to particular nose and
head sizes. In 1905 he also masterminded the division of Bengal into two
separate provinces, in order to weaken the nationalist movement. “One of
our main objects,” he advised the viceroy, “is to split up and thereby
weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.”
Whenever colonial violence subsequently erupted, it was blamed on
ancient hatreds, rather than the insidious effects of such imperial
interventions. And as ethnic and cultural homogeneity became central to
European notions of nationhood, it further justified the designation and
displacement of “minority” populations in the colonies, and the
wholesale division of their territories: hence the similar partitions,
for example, of Ireland and India. Once again, the moral responsibility
for any resulting bloodshed lay not with the dispassionate, benevolent
colonial custodians but with the hot-headed, irrepressibly antagonistic
“natives.”
Satia regards these changing imperial ideologies primarily as ways in
which the British “suppressed” their “bad conscience about empire,”
rather than as the untroubled rationalizations of people operating
according to moral codes different from our own. One of the unresolved
tensions running through Time’s Monster is how far it’s possible or
helpful to conceive of conscience, and the ethical problems raised by
imperialism, as timeless and essentially ahistorical. The book also
grapples with the legacy of Anglophone history as an imperialist
discipline. How should postcolonial historians approach their task?
Perhaps, Satia suggests, it’s time to jettison our modern presumptions
about the flow of time and the centrality of human endeavor altogether
and “reconsider history as cyclical, if not aimless.” Not all these
meditations are entirely convincing, but they usefully highlight what is
at stake, even today, in writing about the empires of the past.
As a political scientist rather than a historian, Mahmood Mamdani is
chiefly interested in how imperial legacies continue to shape our
present world. Much of his previous work has analyzed the effects of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism on modern African
politics. His provocative, elegantly written new book, Neither Settler
nor Native, restates and extends those arguments across a wider timespan
and geography, with the aim of understanding the sources of the extreme
violence that has plagued so many postcolonial societies. Mamdani traces
its roots to the Western invention of the nation-state itself—a polity
of a majority-ethnic or religious “nation” in which alien minorities are
merely tolerated. In much the same way, he contends, colonial power
invariably distinguishes the superior nation of settlers from the
backward “natives” around them. As he notes, the first overseas
population the English attempted to “civilize” were the Irish, and
large-scale ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, expropriation of
their land, and the establishment of settler plantations took place
across the British Isles and the Americas as well as in Asia and Africa.
The pathologies of postcolonial civil wars and genocide are directly
connected to the history of what “civilized” nations have long done at home.
To make this case, Mamdani begins in the West. As he points out, the US
was not founded as a nation of immigrants but of colonial settlers, who
willfully exterminated the territory’s indigenous peoples, stole their
land, defined them in ethnic terms, subjected them to inferior legal
status, and confined them to arbitrarily assigned “tribal” territories,
justifying all this in exactly the same ways as European powers did in
their colonies. Even today, American Indians and their reservations are,
both ideologically and practically, perpetually trapped in the same
subordinate status that was imposed on “native” peoples under British
imperial rule. (Mamdani eschews the term “Native American” for
falsifying their true relationship to the settler nation—casting them as
the original inhabitants of a political community that in fact has never
treated them as equal members.)
Reginald Coupland and other members of the Royal Palestine Commission
Derek Berwin/Fox Photos/Getty Images
Reginald Coupland, left, and other members of the Royal Palestine
Commission leaving for Palestine from Victoria Station, London, 1936
In Europe, he maintains, the aftermath of World War II created a
pernicious template for how to deal with state-based extreme violence.
Instead of acknowledging that the Nazi genocide was a deeply political
project, the Nuremberg tribunal, dispensing hypocritical victor’s
justice, merely treated it as an accumulation of war crimes by
individuals. Meanwhile, the Allies continued their own efforts at
European and colonial ethnic division and expulsion, in order to create
homogeneous nation-states out of territories with multiethnic and
multinational populations. In the late 1940s they systematically
expelled tens of millions of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary, and embraced the foundation of Israel on similar
ethno-nationalist grounds. The “disentanglement of populations” in
Europe would be a huge task, Churchill told the House of Commons in
1944, but a necessary one: henceforth, “there will be no mixture of
populations to cause endless trouble…. A clean sweep will be made.”
Cleansing and purifying have always been the preferred euphemisms for
ethnic and religious dispossession and bloodshed.
These days, the standard response to extreme violence, whether in
Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Sudan, is to focus on restoring the rule of law
and pursuing individuals for crimes against human rights. That
Nuremberg-inspired model, widely criticized in its own time but
resurrected after the end of the cold war, not only perpetuates the
poisonous politicization of racial, ethnic, and religious identities, as
Mamdani points out, but is also futile in situations of civil war. Its
ahistorical approach only reinscribes identity-based divisions while
ignoring their political causes—not least the national character of the
state that is supposed to guarantee justice. To illustrate the
limitations of the crime-focused approach to postcolonial conflict,
Neither Settler nor Native explores the histories of Sudan and of
Israel/Palestine. In the former, ethnic identities that were
politicized, territorialized, and internalized through colonial rule
continue to dominate violent postcolonial struggles for power. In the
latter, the persistence of essentially colonial laws and attitudes
toward nationhood has entrenched the legal, territorial, and political
subordination of non-Jewish citizens and inhabitants.
In contrast, the book holds up the inspiring trajectory of South Africa
from racist heartland to truly postcolonial state. That transformation
came about not through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
Mamdani dismisses for its “perverse” Nuremberg-like focus on individual
culpability, but because the ending of apartheid was achieved through a
process in which colonial ethnic identities were, for once, not
sharpened but gradually depoliticized. By at least partly dismantling
the many legal and political distinctions between settlers and
“natives,” and reforming their constitution and laws accordingly, South
Africans have been able to begin reimagining their shared community not
as one of victims, perpetrators, bystanders, or separate nations, but as
a collective of survivors. That, Mamdani suggests, offers a hopeful
model for how to overcome the legacies of colonialism. (Though it goes
unmentioned, the Northern Irish peace process presumably would also fit
his model of political decolonization.)
One limitation of Neither Settler nor Native’s penchant for bold but
selective abstractions is that its argument implies that postcolonial
politics have always been dominated by the colonial ideologies of race,
tribe, and nation-state. Yet this approach itself reinforces a
particular nationalist teleology. Internationalist ideologies hardly
feature in the book, even though they have been central to the postwar
European endeavor to prevent resurgences of ethno-nationalist
violence—and were equally important to the leaders of many newly
independent postcolonial territories. Instead of the tired national
structures of the past, Eric Williams in 1959 urged the soon-to-be
independent peoples of the Caribbean, they should seek above all to
forge regional and global associations, “in these days of Bandung, Pan
Africa, Arab League, British Commonwealth, Pan America, United Nations,
European Common Market.” His inspirations were not colonial but
cosmopolitan, not primarily national but transnational.
That was partly because European and American imperialism was itself a
preeminently international system. Through the long centuries of its
existence, it brought into being a profoundly unequal legal, economic,
and political global order, based in part on the invention of racial
hierarchies. Whatever the exact mechanisms of control, the ultimate
purpose of colonial territories and their indigenous populations was
always to sustain the power and status of their colonizers’ homelands
and wider empires. And whenever Western powers collaborated to create
new systems of international law, they perpetuated such inequities.
For example, Woodrow Wilson, the great champion of the new League of
Nations after World War I, is often portrayed as having been motivated
by an egalitarian, essentially anti-imperial conception of national
self-determination. But as Adom Getachew argues in her astute and
incisive first book, Worldmaking After Empire, that is pretty much the
opposite of the truth.
In Wilson’s eyes, preserving “white supremacy on this planet” was the
ultimate postwar goal. Just as African-Americans were unworthy of
national citizenship, so, too, for colonized and other lesser peoples
across the world self-government was not a right but a stage of
development for which they were inherently unfit or, at best, woefully
underprepared. After 1917 the Bolsheviks and their allies had put
forward “self-determination” as a revolutionary, anti-imperialist
principle, inviting colonized peoples to cast off their bondage. To
forestall this challenge, Wilson and his collaborator, the Afrikaner
statesman Jan Smuts, appropriated the term, but recast it as a
racialized ideal that justified imperial rule as a permanent feature of
the international order.
The League’s aims and mechanisms were explicitly modeled on those of the
British Empire. Its definitions of nationhood were hierarchical and
based on notions of differential development. A new system of
“mandates,” whereby the former territories of the German and Ottoman
Empires were divided up between the victorious Allies, perpetuated the
principle of imperial tutelage for backward “native” populations (the
acquiescence of their local rulers being enough to signify their
self-determination). Though Liberia and Ethiopia were nominally full
members of the League, their governments were treated as inferior and
subjected to repeated racist and hypocritical “humanitarian”
interventions—setting the stage for Italy’s invasion and annexation of
Ethiopia in the autumn of 1935, and the other imperial powers’
endorsement of its colonization.
After 1945, even though formal European empires were gradually
dissolved, the hegemony of imperialist systems of global economic and
political dominance did not end, nor was it meant to. That was what the
transition from empire to “commonwealth” was all about, as far as the
British were concerned, even when it was forced upon them by
anticolonial resistance. (This was why it was so maddening that
Churchill refused to accept the inevitability of any kind of postwar
“Indian self-government,” Amery confided to his diary in 1943: “I tried
to suggest that modern nationalism in the East could not be met with
mere resistance and that by giving way on the form we could maintain
much of the substance, by treaty and otherwise, but he just refused to
continue the discussion.”)
Worldmaking After Empire shows how black Anglophone anticolonialists on
both sides of the Atlantic responded to this reality in the early
decades of decolonization. In order to achieve true self-determination,
they believed, it was not enough simply to free people from alien rule.
Their full liberation from external domination, both economic and
political, would also require a radical reconstitution of the
international order. Decolonization had to be a project of worldmaking
as well as nation-making.
The book focuses mainly on a loosely connected group of seven figures:
the pathbreaking American activist W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the earliest
and most influential black critics of imperialism; the African statesmen
Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius Nyerere; and the West Indian
leaders and thinkers Eric Williams, George Padmore, and Michael Manley.
As Getachew emphasizes, their visions were part of a much broader
political tradition. International solidarity against imperialism had
been central to socialist and Communist activism since the late
nineteenth century, and many other transnational movements flourished
across the decolonizing postwar world: Pan-Africanism, Francophone
internationalism, the Non-Aligned Movement. But one distinctive feature
of her subjects’ thought was its stress on how centuries of Atlantic
slavery and forced labor had been fundamental in creating the modern
international order: imperialism itself, they argued, was a global form
of hierarchical, racialized bondage.
The older members of this group, like Williams, had been radicalized by
the treatment of Ethiopia in the 1930s, and they viewed the foundation
of the United Nations in 1945 as a dispiriting continuation of the
status quo. The new organization’s charter paid only lip service to
self-determination, the Nigerian nationalist Azikiwe noted in dismay:
“Colonialism and economic enslavement of the Negro are to be
maintained.” “We have conquered Germany,” agreed Du Bois, “but not their
ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their
place and lying about democracy when we mean imperial control of 750
millions of human beings in colonies.”
Each of Getachew’s three brisk yet richly detailed central chapters
describes a particular project of anticolonial worldmaking that sought
to overcome these structures of domination. The first was the long and
ultimately successful postwar campaign to transform self-determination
from a vague principle to a firm legal right, and to convert the UN
General Assembly into a platform for advancing decolonization. In 1960,
despite the resistance of the United States, Britain, France, Belgium,
Spain, Portugal, and South Africa, UN Resolution 1514, “Declaration on
the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,”
established that “the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation,
domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human
rights” and was contrary to the UN Charter. Despite its specification of
“alien” rule, which seemed to exculpate settler colonialism, this was a
legal watershed. Here, and throughout the book, Getachew’s analysis
brilliantly reveals how legal and political changes that conventionally
have been interpreted as the natural, inevitable extension of
preexisting Western ideals were only achieved, in the face of deep
opposition, through the innovative (and historically contingent) efforts
of non-Westerners. Internationally and domestically, decolonization was
never freely granted by the powerful: it had always to be wrested from
them by their subalterns.
Changing international law was only meant to be a beginning. But as the
book’s two other case studies illustrate, the efforts of black Atlantic
anticolonialists to create a more egalitarian global political and
economic order were less practically successful. In both the West Indies
and Africa, the postcolonial leaders of the 1950s and 1960s created
regional federations to enhance the international clout of their new
nation-states and enable them to gradually escape what Nkrumah described
as a “neocolonial” trap, in which an imperial power, despite losing
direct political control, “retained and extended its economic grip” over
formerly colonized territories. Even more ambitious, but also abortive,
was the push in the 1960s and 1970s for a “New International Economic
Order.” Among other reforms, this would have given the UN’s General
Assembly the power to mandate an equitable rebalancing of the world’s
wealth and trading conditions toward the nations of the global South,
whose workers and natural resources had for centuries been so ruthlessly
exploited by the countries of the North.
Getachew is clearsighted both about the intellectual and political
limitations of these schemes and the reasons for their eventual failure,
though she could have said more about how the USSR and China fostered
anticolonial movements, and the overarching dynamics of the cold war in
shaping them. But her achievement is not just to have illuminated a set
of postcolonial ambitions that came to an end in the mid-1970s. It is to
have restored an important dimension of what decolonization stood for at
its inception and can still aspire to in the present: the forging of a
more just and equal international legal, economic, and political order.
As each of these impressive, urgent books reminds us, to envisage a
better future, we must start by looking properly at the past.
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