Inside Out, Outside In Essays in Comparative History
Robert Gregg
INSIDE OUT, OUTSIDE IN
Also by Robert Gregg SPARKS FROM THE ANVIL OF OPPRESSION: Philadelphia's African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890-1940
Inside Out, Outside In Essays in Comparative History Robert Gregg Assistant Professor The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
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First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-333-74115-3
First published in the United States of America 2000 by
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ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0-312-21867-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gregg, Robert, 1958Inside out, outside in : essays in comparative history / Robert Gregg, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-21867-2 1. United States —History. 2. South Africa—History. 3. Great Britain—History. 4. India—History —British occupation, 1765-1947. I. Title. E179.G82 1999 900-dc21 98-46681 CIP
© Robert Gregg 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09 08
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
To Owen Dudley Edwards
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Contents Preface 1
ix
Apropos Exceptionalism: Imperial Location and Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States Comparatively Speaking After the Gold Rush Omaha, Somewhere in Middle America Conclusion
5 9 18 25
2
Homelands, Harlem and Comparative History
27
3
Beyond Nation. Beyond Methodism?
33
4
The Empire and Mr. Thompson: The Making of Indian Princes and the English Working Class with Madhavi Kale Prologue All About R. Tagore The Other Side of History Rallying Metcalfe Indian Princes Meet the English Working Class Epilogue
39
39 41 47 57 61 79
5
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
81
6
Beyond Boundaries, Beyond the Whale
88
7
Beyond Silly Mid-Off: C. L. R. James, Ranjitsinhji and the Boundaries of Englishness The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Cricket Sting without Stingo The Making of an Englishman Fielding Silly Mid-Off Again Epilogue: Tensions of Being an Umpire
96 97 103 111 117 121
8
The Sound of Silence
124
9
A Common Wind
127
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1
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10
Class, Culture and Empire: Making Social History Prologue: Can the 'Subaltern' Write History? My Dinner with Andre Of Mr. Edward P. Thompson ... ...and Others Exceptionalism Revisited Epilogue: Can the 'Organization Man' Write History?
132 132 136 141 149 153 155
Notes
159
References
207
Index
225
Preface Middle-man (to Author): If you do not identify your composition a history, how then do we itemize it? The rank and file is entitled to know. Author (to middle-man): Sir, I identify it a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know. Middle-man (to Author): There is no immediate demand for gestures. There is immediate demand for history. We are historical agents not free agents. Author (to middle-man): Sir, I identify it a history. Sir, itemize it accordingly. with apologies to G. V. Desani Do we have either the imagination or the courage to say 'no' to empire? William Appleman Williams1 In an essay on 'The Location of Brazil', Salman Rushdie urges us to 'Play. Invent the World.' He continues: The power of the playful imagination to change for ever our perceptions of how things are has been demonstrated by everyone from Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, to a certain Monty Python in his Flying Circus. Our sense of the modern world is as much the creation of Kafka, with his unexplained trials and unapproachable castles and giant bugs, as it is of Freud, Marx or Einstein. But there lies in this playfulness a terrible danger, what many in academe have labelled nihilism, and of which Rushdie also seems quite aware: This danger is whimsy. When there are no rules except the ones you make up, don't things get too easy? When pigs can fly, do they remain pigs, and if not, why should we care about them? Can a work of art grow into anything of value if it has no roots in observable reality? 2 Two responses to this predicament are possible, according to Rushdie. The first is to be found in the work of artists who 'put down IX
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roots within the world of dreams, the logic of whose work is the logic of the dreaming and not the waking mind'. The second is to be found in synthesizing (as Terry Gilliam, an American living in Britain, does) what Rushdie sees as the two strands of comedy, British and American: 'American comedy begins with the question, "Isn't it funny that . . . ? " whereas British comedy's starting point is the question, "Wouldn't it be funny if . . . ? " ' Kafka, neither British nor American, utilized both. In part, Rushdie continues, Metamorphosis is premised on the question, wouldn't it be funny if Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself metamorphosed into a giant insect? But in fact it derives its (very black) humour from a rather more serious question: Isn't it funny that a man's family reacts with fear, embarrassment, shame, love, boredom and relief when the son of the house becomes something they do not understand, suffers terribly and finally dies? (P- 124) Rushdie then proceeds to locate Brazil in the Kafka synthetic tradition, enabling Terry Gilliam to avoid the trap of whimsy. Further, Rushdie informs us, Brazil is also about America. 'America bombards you with dreams and deprives you of your own' (p. 124), Rushdie quotes Gilliam, clearly limiting people in America to the synthetic tradition - in their response to the danger of whimsy. Isn't it funny that people are bombarded with dreams in the land of the free and cannot articulate their own? Wouldn't it be funny if that weren't the case? Inside Out, Outside In is about the historical manifestation of Brazil and a few preliminary attempts to reforge a dreamworld outside and inside the practice of history. A few questions to begin: Isn't it funny that the most developed and professionalized academics in the world are also the most constricted by their absorption with questions of methodology and proper rules of practice; and that their fantasy world of Nations, States, Classes, Races, Sexes, Agents, is structured so as to cement dynamic people in columns of transhistorical meaning? Wouldn't it be funny if one could use comparative history to undermine the foundation of these columns? Isn't it funny, to continue with this motif, that comparative history only seems to have supplied extra layers of cement? Wouldn't it be funny if we were to consider why that is so and begin the process of toppling these columns-cum-historiographical-bunkers? And as we begin to consider comparative history it becomes
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obvious immediately that migrancy has an important role to play, particularly in the process of interrogating nationalist historiographies and the comparative histories founded on them. Rushdie has more to offer us here, too. He writes: The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves - because they are so defined by others - by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. (pp.124-5) I am a migrant, born in London and living in the United States, and would welcome the opportunity to privilege my positions, my perspectives. And one way to do so, obviously, is to invoke Rushdie here and proclaim myself a representative of the condition of migrancy. Clearly, this alone is inadequate. It would be a mistake to extoll Rushdie's and Gilliam's own positions as migrants who are able to transcend the pitfalls of nationalism and patriotism. If things were that simple then Brazil, as America, would not exist at all to be lampooned or revealed in dark satire. America, after all, is the land of migrants - the 'uprooted', the 'transplanted', whatever. By such logic it should be the one country that is able to transcend Brazil. But the need for Caesar's columns, it would appear, seems more urgent when migration is increased. Perhaps in the babble of so many dreams, there is a yearning for conformity or simplicity, for a Whale to swallow all and provide order. 3 There is a danger, then, one that Rushdie recognizes elsewhere, in assuming that migrancy necessarily differs from other forms of existence - that somehow crossing geographic boundaries is required before dreaming can begin. For we are all migrants, at least once we recognize that we go through stages in life, that educational boundaries as well as geographic ones are there to be crossed, with or without diplomas and passports. Here it is only necessary to describe the condition of many of Rushdie's women characters in The Moor's Last Sigh to make the point. Some of them do not travel far, but they all proclaim their migrancy - whether from one religion to another,
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one family to another, or (as in Midnight's Children also) from an imperial system to the Indian nation state. But if we are all migrants, how we manage such changes (or at least their psychological impact), how we control, limit and channel our dreams, will parallel the ways in which we attempt to control, limit and channel our own political aspirations. Brazil is, in effect, resident within the individual. As Rushdie points out, the ending of the movie proclaims 'the triumph of the imagination, the dream, over the shackles of actuality' (p. 121). And clearly, in many instances, no external torturer (or threat of death) is necessary to force us into conformity. More often than not, we will do the work that an external force would be powerless to achieve. And with that in mind, I offer this book as a contribution to history: I will itemize it accordingly. For, if I do not do so, if I silence myself, fearing that I might be categorized as 'no longer a historian' or 'not seriously conforming to historical methods and practice', as I have heard others described - 1 myself will do the work of censors. Migrancy (physical/geographic or otherwise) can provide vantage points from which to critique historical practice. With regard to physical migration this is particularly so when that practice revolves around nationalism and the nation state. But, with or without such migration, we may all situate ourselves simultaneously inside a system looking out, and outside looking in, and gain sufficient distance and a confusion of messages ('perspective by incongruity') 4 to allow for the questioning of nationalist and other paradigms. Such questioning is almost of necessity unsettling. We do not want to undertake it for long, because it seems to be a project of dismantling without much building going on in its place. This is certainly the warning label that accompanies each postgraduate degree. 5 Too close an inspection will ruin the eyes, or will cause early despair. It won't get you a job. Don't do it. But are the dangers as severe as the health warnings suggest? It is difficult to tell. From inside the belly of the beast, the 'academic machine', we cannot see whether the dangers on its outside are more formidable than those we face already. And if we suspend the answer to such a question for the moment, it seems that one of the reasons we wish to remain where we are, tied to categories of class and country, is that doing so affords us privileges we do not wish to lose, however much we like to believe we are railing against the system. And after a period of complacency, lodging within the walls of mortgage and mutual fund, we are no longer able to see outside; we no longer need the warning label; we are of the system.
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In this book, I make a preliminary effort to suspend myself where Ian Dury would have us all, 'in-between'. Inside Out, Outside In attempts to take the familiar and provide alternate readings for it, using comparative history as its terrain. I suggest new approaches to comparative history and endeavor to make new connections to help free us from the sometimes limiting terrain of History. Wouldn't it be funny, I ask, if E. P. Thompson's father were a historian of British India? if Populists were implicated in Manifest Destiny? if we could allow it to be considered significant that Fidel Castro played a role in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa? if the man who introduced notions of self-determination to the world stage was also a prime mover behind the movie The Birth of a Nation! if history were not just mythology and propaganda, but more akin to complicated, funny and oh-so-dismal novels like The Moor's Last Sigh ox A Son of the Circus! Of course, not all these questions can be considered here, some will have to be returned to at another time, but these are some of the questions that are there to be tackled - there are so many more worthy of, well, consideration. I have incurred many debts along the way, and have learned a great deal from many people, some of whom would disagree with a lot of what I have written in the pages that follow. 'That's life,' as they say in France. I am hoping, however, that even where this may be the case the following people will accept my gratitude for their indirect contributions to my endeavor, and for the inspiring work they have done in their own right: Jim Baumohl, Lee Cassanelli, Laurence Dickey, Bob Engs, Gary Gerstle, Andy Gregg, Jamie Gregg, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Shan Holt, Amy Kaplan, Philippa Levine, Walter Licht, and Liz Lunbeck. Among those who might be added to the above group are several others who have provided considerable feedback on various chapters. I am very grateful to Antoinette Burton (the most thorough and generous reader I have ever encountered), Rick Halpern (who made it possible for me to develop some of my ideas in papers I wrote for conferences he organized), Alan Cobley, Pramod Kale, Pratima Kale, David Ludden, Shula Marks, Carl Nightingale, Gyan Prakash, Dan Rodgers, Susan Thorne, and Mike Zuckerman. My greatest debt is to Madhavi Kale, whose own departure from American History in graduate school and whose questioning of historical narratives about slavery and freedom forced me to reconsider most of what, under my own steam, I had come to believe
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about American history and history generally. I am still learning from our wonderful kids, Nikhil and Nadia, and can't wait to learn some more. This work is dedicated to Owen Dudley Edwards, a scholar whose vast knowledge, expansive vision, and humor have always been in the back of my mind as I write and teach.
1 Apropos Exceptionalism: Imperial Location and Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States [Stanley] wanted 'to punish Bumbireh with the power of a father punishing a stubborn and disobedient son.' The method he chose was to return to Bumbireh and empty box after box of Snider bullets into the ranks of the tribesmen while staying just out of range of their spears and arrows. He claimed to have shot down thirty-three men and wounded a hundred, many fatally. 'We had great cause to feel gratitude.' The 'victory' had put everyone into excellent heart. 'We made a brave show as we proceeded along the coast, the canoes thirty-seven in number containing 500 men paddling to the sound of sonorous drums and the cheering tones of the bugle, the English, the American and Zanzibar flags flying gaily in union with a most animating scene.' Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa^ By St Mungo, is there any justice-giustizia in the Globe? Or, is it survival of the fittest and yet another man gone West? G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr2 The artist and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach has described his forebodings about the direction in which South Africa has been moving recently. In a nutshell, these stem from his fear that having concentrated their efforts on racial oppression radicals may now be unable or unwilling to combat the dangers of a centralized nation state. Breytenbach believes that the fight against apartheid and the hierarchical division of peoples on the basis of race and ethnicity in some ways allowed the notion of the State to go uncontested. The end of capturing the State from the National Party led 1
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Inside Out, Outside In
anti-apartheid forces to overlook the negatives associated with the State itself. For Breytenbach it has become necessary 'to put in my plea for doubt and questioning, diversity, the maintenance of our "Ho Chi Minh trail" of underground tunnels of memory and resistance, tolerance, mixing, blending, crankiness, existentialism, humanism, anarchism ... To avoid like the plague the tyranny of "being on the side of the angels."' 3 Living in a moment of 'historical acceleration', as Breytenbach calls the present in South Africa, still requires that power and those who wield it continue to be opposed. Breytenbach's comments represent a political shift made possible by the great transformation that has occurred in South Africa over the last 10 years and in turn reflects the potential for a reinterpretation of the history of this region. On the basis of his fears, one could argue that if the next 20 or 30 years witness a struggle over federalism in the Republic and the pitting of new groups against the centralized state, then a new interpretation focusing on state formation may gain ascendancy over one founded solely on racial categorization. 4 Certainly, the increasingly violent conflict between the African National Congress and Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha movement suggests that a more nuanced interpretation of racial division is required than one would expect, given the centrality of the white/black division enshrined in apartheid. 5 As other political transformations occur in South Africa we can expect historiographical changes similar in magnitude to those witnessed in the United States over the last 100 years in the interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction. 6 The beginnings of a reassessment of South African history can be found in the analysis of the National Party's success in the Western Cape in the first democratic election of 1994.7 William Finnegan has shown that this victory was not the result of shortsightedness among 'so-called coloureds' voting for their former oppressors simply because of their racial antipathy for black South Africans. Not only were the 'coloureds" political decisions made on the basis of National Party offerings and the failures of the African National Congress (so that their votes were as reasoned and sensible, perhaps, as any vote cast in the United States), but also there were important historical antecedents to the coalition refashioned between 'coloureds' and Afrikaners. Indeed, according to Finnegan, 'Relations between the Afrikaners, the self-consciously "white" descendants of the early Dutch settlers, and the coloureds have for centuries been both tangled and intimate.' Drawing on the recent work of historian Hermann Giliomee, he continues:
Apropos Exceptionalism
3
There is even a vivid precedent for the National Party's recent interest in the coloured vote During the 1920s, in the relatively liberal Cape province, coloured and African men who met a property qualification had the right to vote ... and 'non-whites' actually made up more than a quarter of the voters in the Cape Peninsula. The National Party, fearing an influx of immigrants from England who might eventually outnumber Afrikaans-speaking whites, embraced 'brown Afrikaners' as their natural allies, and succeeded in capturing enough of the coloured vote to win the 1924 election against the relatively pro-British South African Party of Jan Christian Smuts ... The gesture turned out to be one of pure expediency, and the Nationalists soon abandoned their coloured supporters in their pursuit of white-supremacist Afrikaners of the northern provinces.8 The point is that such events, almost forgotten, can be dredged up from the deepest recesses of historical memory to explain current trends and form the basis of new interpretations. Once such new interpretations gain ground, and shifts occur in South African historiography, the need for reappraisal of conclusions based on comparative analysis becomes imperative. For certain assumptions about change in the United States and the nature of American pluralism are founded in comparisons with nations that are believed incapable of such change. Radically transform the unchangeable, and the extent of American pluralism may need reassessment. The belief that South Africa was incapable of change along the lines of race has been shown to be false, and historians have been forced to discard the assumption that apartheid was so entrenched that only a bloody war, in which white people fought to the last ditch or nuclear weapon, would bring about its demise (along with similar theories created to explain or keep vital the continuing conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, and to account for the immovable 'Iron Curtain' in Europe). 9 Historians like Hermann Giliomee are now looking for the roots of this transformation in South Africa, the weaknesses within the system of apartheid, and the system's failure to sustain its hold on the very party that had fashioned it.10 Almost inevitably, the products of such work will lead to the reassessment of issues of race as they are understood and lived in the United States. After all, one of the most comforting things for many Americans ever since the Civil Rights transformation of the 1950s and 1960s has been the fact that they were able to bring about a 'peaceful' reformation of
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racial practices when South Africa (which, not coincidentally, became a focus of black and white American political activity once social equality began to appear more difficult to achieve in the United States) seemed so incapable of embracing such liberal change. With the potential for such interpretive shifts in mind, it is important to note the re-emergence of notions of the 'unworthy poor', 'culture of poverty', and 'blaming the poor' (particularly single mothers), as organizing principles for distributing welfare in the United States 11 . For, while South Africa undergoes rapid change, the United States seems increasingly entrenched on the issues of race, immigration and poverty. Alan Brinkley has conveyed a clear sense of the mire in which ideas surrounding welfare have always been stuck: even at moments of great optimism, unacknowledged preconceptions - about politics, about gender, and about morality - can shape and distort the boldest programs. Understanding the ways in which damaging and invidious distinctions have crept into our welfare system is a first step toward thinking about ways to remove them. 12 When one remembers that such 'damaging and invidious distinctions' about the poor are clearly delineated in Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom11* and were very much a part of both the English colonial experience and the republican experiment, one can begin to comprehend that for all the political shifts in the United States (Jacksonian democracy, emancipation, women's suffrage, and civil rights, to name a few) not much has changed for some people. And now that the heady days of November 1992 - a time when many imagined that President Clinton might bring about reform in health care and other social programs - have been replaced by November 1994's hangover, as Newt Gingrich and Co. proclaim a new war on those not welcome and those 'not pulling their weight' (using history as their most potent brew), the belief in the endurance of pluralism and the potential for liberal change in the United States appears less likely to be a rule of history than a luxury enjoyed by the lucky few.14 Thus, the rhetoric of the War on Drugs and 'the war on welfare', the respectable reception given to The Bell Curve, the passage of California's Proposition 187, and the various stages of the Rodney King incident - the beating, the initial acquittal of the police involved, and the riots throughout South Central Los Angeles - suggest that such pessimism about future political change and its impact on poor inner-city dwellers and 'illegal' immigrants wherever they reside is warranted. 15
Apropos Exceptionalism
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A larger question arises from this awareness of contemporary political and historiographical shifts: How is it that the comparative study of the United States and South Africa never revealed the possibility of such shifts? Much work has been undertaken comparing South Africa and the United States, concerned mainly with their systems of slavery, segregation, and the nature of their discriminatory labor markets. 16 This literature tends to dichotomize the two societies, emphasizing the entrenched nature of the racial system in South Africa as compared to the more malleable system of the United States. 17 While no-one can be held accountable for their inability to predict the almost unforeseeable, the extent to which the two societies have been described as moving along different trajectories does suggest that comparative methodologies need to be reconsidered. Before turning the focus onto the United States and South Africa, therefore, some discussion of one of the limitations of this process of comparison is necessary.
COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING The many wars that have been fought in Europe since 1855, and are likely to be fought during the next twenty years, have or will have for one of their causes the discovery of Sanskrit. Though in itself this is by no means a very gratifying result, still I allude to it to simply show how deeply the Europeans have been influenced by the new ideas. R. G. Bhandarkar, 'The Critical, Comparative and Historical Method of Inquiry,' 188818 The most severe limitation of comparative literature has been its national and nationalist bent. 19 The unit of analysis under comparison is, generally speaking, the nation (or proxies thereof). 20 As such, there is a tendency among comparativists to compare large social structures, ideologies, or organizations to explain the nature of the American variant. The desire is to use some other nation's history to help explain 'American Slavery', 'American race relations', 'American workingclass formation or class consciousness', and so on.21 That there might be connections between these American forms and those others being compared is either ignored or not taken sufficiently into account; nor is the fact that there might be differences within the United States that defy the label 'American' and lead one to reconsider its usage. 22
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Problems related to this national focus are compounded when nationalist assumptions are used to determine the ways in which another society is viewed. This can be explained most effectively by considering the two most common comparisons undertaken with the United States: those with Britain and South Africa - the former comparison made to highlight differences relating to class, the latter to reveal differences over race. This nation-based bifurcation of comparative analysis, with class on one side and race on the other, is particularly problematic here because for much of the period dealt with in these comparisons South Africa was a part of the British Empire. Consequently, any comparison with either Britain or South Africa ought to go beyond the boundaries of the nation state to understand the larger dimensions of the imperial system. Comparisons with either metropolitan Britain or colonies like South Africa in isolation veil as much as they reveal. First, a comparison of the United States with Britain falls victim to a category of class that is so constructed (based on free white labor) as to hide both colonized labor in the British case and slaves and Indians (among others) in the American case. 23 Not surprisingly, the class system of Britain appears 'peculiar' for its absence of ethnic divisions - its 'Englishness' - while that of the United States appears 'exceptional' for its constant addressing of racial and ethnic divisions (once slaves become freedpeople and levels of immigration rise). 24 Second, a comparison of the United States with places like South Africa, undertaken because the latter shared a system of slavery or other systems of racial discrimination, falls victim to a category of race that is so constructed as to hide free labor. Ignoring the manner in which understandings of racial slavery in both the U. S. and the British Empire changed in relation to transformations in the experiences of 'free' white male laborers (and vice versa) leads to a reliance on static, nation-centered interpretations of race. As a result, South African race relations appear unchanging, American race relations pluralistic, simply because the former society more closely resembles the rigid (and economically 'irrational') system believed to exist in slavery, while the latter society seems, for all its inequalities, to enshrine the doctrines of 'free labor'. The fact that the same assumptions about arduous and devalued labor (and who should do it) prevail in both countries can be overlooked, even when the experiences for those who do this work and the assumptions about them (that they are somehow inferior) are similar. Finally, both kinds of comparisons (constructed as they are around racial/class questions) will overlook
Apropos Exceptionalism
7
issues and connections relating to gender. The manner in which both class and race are categories with severe gender inflections will be deemed merely incidental to the larger comparative focus.25 When the United States is compared with former British colonies seen as part of an imperial framework, in other words when the existence of what C. A. Bayly calls an 'imperial meridian' is recognized, two things become apparent: American working-class formation around ethnicity, race, and gender is not exceptional; and American institutions and ideologies have developed around their own 'imperial meridian'. 26 Bayly asserts that imperialist discourse was not confined to overseas ventures, so that the manner in which a large section of the British Isles was brought together into a single political unit was very much imperial. 27 In order to understand the ways in which people were incorporated into the society of London or of England more generally, it is vital to look beyond 'the metropole'. Expatriate English, Scots, and Welsh officials and settlers moved back and forth between 'periphery' and 'metropole', and along the way were influenced and sometimes accompanied by non-'Britons' (Afrikaners, South Asians, Jews, and Africans, to name a few). Moreover, as many Scots demonstrated, movement up the metropolitan social scale often could be accomplished most easily by being recognized for achievements at the periphery. 28 Further, understandings of empire helped to shape the ways people conceived of divisions in their locality and was evident in both their consumption patterns and what they read. 29 But, if an imperial meridian is important for comprehension of British history, how much more so is it for the interpretation of the history of the United States? For, while the United States is seldom seen in imperial terms, imperialism has been as central to the development of the United States as a single, powerful nation state, as it was to the emergence of other imperial nation states - Great Britain, Spain, Japan, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Russia. All imperial nations bring together regionally and ethnically diverse peoples into political units according to a more or less hierarchical logic that privileges some sections of the state while parcelling out benefits unevenly to other sections. The American analogue for the Scottish in the British Empire has been the ScotchIrish, who very clearly saw 'the Birth of the American Nation' as a Scotch-Irish confection;30 the 'frontier' and plantations provided locations that could be easily inflected with imperial and imperialist discourse; and similar consumption and reading patterns were to be
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found in the United States as have been described by Edward Said for Britain. 31 When people, objects, and ideas are compared, not in isolation, but in their imperial contexts, differences that may at first seem stark end up being shaded by an all-enveloping imperial fog. Comparative studies, then, have not undermined exceptionalist arguments, and because they have generally compared two nations or two national types (American vs. South African slavery) they have shared an analytical frame with exceptionalist theories. Comparative studies of South Africa and the United States, like Cell's and Fredrickson's, have made explicit arguments that were already implicit because their authors have conformed to the presumption that national histories with clear, uncontested boundaries exist and should be compared. Where national histories intersect and where those boundaries are contested (where they are themselves products of particular historical and historiographical conflicts) has often remained unexplored. Thus, while we can profit from comparing nations, such comparisons have to be undertaken in the knowledge that the nations may have histories that are intertwined (perhaps shaping the way their national histories have been conceived and written), that they may be part of larger imperial systems, and that regional and institutional differences or practices may be present in both countries that make comparison at another level of analysis besides the nation more appropriate. In short, comparativists must be careful not to reify and give transhistorical character to something that is, in spite of its ability to mobilize people, only historically contingent. The remainder of this essay, then, attempts to use comparative history to broaden the outlines of American history and to move beyond the mire of nationalist exceptionalism. The comparative lens used is a variable one; now zoom, now wide-angled, never softfocused, the lens can be altered according to the objects being observed. I am not attempting to disprove American exceptionalism by undertaking a systematic comparison of the United States and another nation, showing the similarities between the two histories. Doing so would merely reify the two narratives selected, and any similarities found would still beg the question whether or not the other nation was similar only because it was also exceptional. Instead, South African history is here appropriated or exploited selectively to reveal both the connections between some American and South African historical narratives (and, by implication, those of other countries and regions), and the ways in which nationalist narratives can be broken
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down into smaller units of analysis (individuals, organizations, cities, or regions) to produce different comparative results. The next section, then, will examine a few of the areas of overlap in American and Southern African histories, while the final section will examine similarities in the imperial locations of American Populists and Afrikaner voortrekkers.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH O, my shoes are Japanese These trousers are English, if you please On my head, red Russian hat My heart's Indian for all that. Hit number 'Meera Joota Hia Japani' from film Mr 42032 In Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, Rob Nixon insists 'on the wider links between the [South African] discourses of absolute rupture, authenticity, racial purity, and ethnic nationalism on the one hand and, on the other, the idioms of cosmopolitanism, transculturation, hybridity, and internationalism'. Nixon reveals the 'diverse ties between South African culture and the world beyond its borders' during the period between apartheid's implementation in 1948 and South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, most especially the influence of Hollywood and American writers and musicians.33 This intersection of South African and American histories can be seen going back well into the nineteenth century. Two linkages that come to mind immediately are the common origins (both in ideas and sometimes in personnel) of the two regions' missionaries, and the overlapping of mining and prostitution capitalists in both countries.34 The common origins of the two regions' missionaries is not altogether surprising when one remembers that both Americans and British were captivated by David Livingstone's work in Africa, or at least Henry Morton Stanley's rendering of that work. It was Stanley, after all, who made the call for missionaries in his widely circulated articles in The Daily Telegraph in Britain and James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald in the United States, and while this did not begin missionary work in Africa, it most certainly did contribute to its increase. 35 In the process of describing contemporary views of segregation, John W. Cell has provided a very thought-provoking picture of the
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work of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Africa at the turn of the century. 36 Focusing on the work of Bishops Henry McNeil Turner and Levi J. Coppin in South Africa, Cell describes the attempts of the Philadelphia-based denomination to extend its missionary work to southern Africa, after having previously worked only in the United States' own African project, Liberia. Understanding the nature of this work in South Africa requires knowing the degree to which it grew out of the very successful expansion of the African Methodist Episcopal Church throughout the American South during and after the Civil War - work that was also spearheaded by Turner. Coppin's and Turner's attitudes towards Africa's 'raw natives' replicated their view of Southern freedpeoples, who needed to be 'uplifted' to the stage of civilization reached by African Americans in northeastern cities. 37 While there were clearly dimensions to this missionary work that made it different from similar work undertaken by white missionaries, the similarity of their attitudes to those held by white Christians should not be overlooked. The A. M. E. Church's success in its Southern endeavors contributed to the belief that it could have the same impact outside the United States, not only in Africa but also Cuba and Haiti, winning over not just heathens but Catholics. Southern successes also contributed greatly to Turner's persuasiveness when he promoted the idea of repatriation to Africa, since the Bishop could claim not only that African Americans ought to leave the United States, but that if they did so, they would become leaders in the mission to 'uplift backward peoples', fulfilling God's original purpose in bringing Africans as slaves to America. Even when enthusiasm for leaving the United States waned in the late 1890s (coinciding, for a number of reasons, with the Spanish-American War), these ideas about employing the unique experience of African Americans to give 'kindness and civilization' to their 'less fortunate' brethren remained strong. 38 Further, the A. M. E. connection with South Africa was only one of many such linkages between African Americans and South Africans. George Shepperson and Thomas Price's excellent biography of John Chilembwe shows the influence of both an English missionary and black church leaders in the United States in the lead-up to the Nyasaland uprising of 1915.39 Similarly, Brian Wilan's biography of Sol Plaatje reveals strong links between this early African Nationalist and leading African Americans. 40 Such connections reinforced social developments that were occurring simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, an example of which was the 'moralizing of leisure time'. 41
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Indeed, contact with South Africa and Liberia helped African Americans like Alexander Crummell develop an understanding of race that incorporated all 'Negroes' into one racial group, and allowed leaders like himself to 'speak for [the race]' and 'to plot its future.' Representing 'the race' was made problematic, however, by the fact that such leaders felt that African culture was, in Kwame Anthony Appiah's words, 'anarchic, unprincipled, ignorant, defined by the absence of all the positive traits of civilization as "savage"'. 42 Such impressions of race and Africa were shared by the leading African American intellectuals of the day, from African Methodist bishops who served in Liberia and South Africa (like William Henry Heard, Levi J. Coppin, Robert R. Wright, Jr., and John Gregg) to Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and even, with some modifications, W. E. B. Du Bois. 43 Race defined in this way could be employed to create a 'Black Atlantic' (as Paul Gilroy has suggested44 ) through Negritude and Pan-Africanism, or promote racial solidarity and Black Nationalism in the United States. But such negative assumptions about African culture could also divide, 'establishing' the uniqueness of African American experiences as compared to Africans, and of metropolitan African Americans as compared to Southern 'greenhorns' (who, the urbanites maintained, had not traveled so far from their African condition). 45 Ironically, without connections and the commonality of experiences, arguing for exceptionalism with regard to the experiences of African Americans would have been more difficult. Capitalists in the nineteenth century were a transitory and diverse group of people, and they often traversed large sections of the globe carrying their imperial visions of capital and labor with them. This was particularly the case among mining folk. The story of Edward Hammond Hargreaves's return to Sydney from the California goldfields in January of 1851, followed by his discovery of gold in May of that year and the beginning of the New South Wales gold rush, is well known to most Australians.46 Many other miners followed Hargreaves's example. According to Charles van Onselen, 'As the price of tin fell in Cornwall, and as some Australian goldfields faltered and failed, so many of the "hard rock men" set their sights on new targets and made their way to the Rand mines which, by [the 1890s], had been expanding for more than a decade.' 47 Migrating miners brought with them ideas and experience that would help shape economic and social developments in areas of the world from California to Australia, the Yukon, and Witwatersrand. 48 The transitory nature of this population is
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revealed in the fact that in 1912, according to C. W. de Kiewiet, only 35 per cent of the white miners had been born in South Africa.49 Given the presence of these migrants among mining capitalists, it is not surprising that groups at the lower end of the opportunity scale faced similar experiences in places as far apart as California and Witwatersrand. There were important differences in the types of deposits in the world's gold fields that made for some significant variations in experience, but these were in the initial stages of mining. The Californian and Australian gold deposits were alluvial or surface deposits, so the independent miner with a pick, shovel, and prospecting pan could make a profit at first. Soon, however, these sources were exhausted and it became necessary for miners to blast away at rock and learn methods to extract the gold. These required capital investment and encouraged consolidation of businesses. In South Africa, however, there were no alluvial deposits. Mining development on the Witwatersrand occurred without the widespread experience of individuals staking their claim and then being replaced by larger corporate entities. Whether or not the leap to 'company mining' was entirely a result of the nature of the gold deposits, as de Kiewiet argued, or the result of the later discovery of South African gold during a time of emerging monopoly capitalism (particularly in the world's mining fields), as Duncan Innes argues, is not important here. 50 What is important is that Euro-American magnates were able to establish a firm foothold in the region and could establish tried and true labor practices.51 As such, attempts by more elite miners to push out the smaller mining enterprises, to rationalize the minefields, and consolidate power in their own hands, was very similar in both California and South Africa. In the process many poor white Americans and Afrikaners (respectively) lost their footholds in this kind of production, as did the Chinese in California and Africans on the Witwatersrand. In both instances, the attempts to exclude these two 'races' were used to consolidate the power of a small minority of whites, increasing racial antipathy and competition among members of the lower classes, and leading to similar kinds of racial and nationalist politics in both regions with similar consequences. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1881, pushed for (among others) by Californian working classes, and the South African Mines and Works Act of 1911, which established the colour bar in mining, were the two most significant legislative initiatives from these connected histories.52 That one of the most successful conglomerations to emerge from
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this series of gold and other mineral rushes was the Anglo-American Corporation in South Africa is a memorial to the intersectedness of these histories. Further, the manner in which the economic boycott of South Africa had such a significant impact over the last 20 years, where in many other instances boycotts have been ineffective, is also a testament to the way in which South African and American histories have overlapped. Another view of such intersection can be found in the histories of prostitution. Van Onselen in New Babylon has been particularly illuminating in this regard, and his stories of the Bowery Boys in South Africa is worth repeating at length here. From late 1898, according to van Onselen, 'hundreds of "undesirables'", 'including scores of Jewish pimps and prostitutes', abandoned the Bowery in New York City and made their way to England. London, however, proved to be a disappointment to these migrants, owing to the fact that a welldeveloped trade for prostitution already existed and profits were therefore limited. 53 Thus, according to van Onselen, when these well-travelled Russians and Poles heard of the exciting new opportunities developing in the southern hemisphere, they did not hesitate to move yet again. While some of their colleagues in the trade opted for South America, many of the former New York pimps and prostitutes decided to make their way to the goldfields of Kruger's republic. An 'advance guard' of this American contingent was already involved in prostitution on the Witwatersrand as early as 1895, but over the next two years 'their numbers were substantially augmented by the arrival of dozens of the more professional "white slavers" and their entourages from London'. 54 Once they established themselves on the Witwatersrand, the Bowery Boys used intimidation in the form of 'blackmail, bribery and corruption, directed at the Morality Squad', to ensure that their brothels were protected while their competitors' were plagued by law enforcement. In other words, tactics that had recently been so successful on the Bowery were now used to advantage in Johannesburg. Van Onselen goes on to describe the rise of Joe Silver, a Polish-American arriving from London in 1898, who became 'King of the Pimps in Johannesburg'. By ascending to the Presidency of the American Club in 1898, Silver was able to maintain control of the Witwatersrand until his arrest and conviction a year later (when an English consortium took over prostitution). After his release from
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prison following the outbreak of the Boer War, he established his influence in other regions. Beyond the similarities in personnel there were also connections in labor markets. New York was not merely linked to Johannesburg, but was also connected with umpteen other cities around the globe. George J. Kneeland's study, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City, published in 1913, reveals this quite clearly. Appendix XIV, entitled 'Shipping Women', tells us of one person, 'X 47, alias X 47-a, who is part owner in X 46 West 25th Street'. According to Kneeland, '[He] has had his woman in England, Russia, South Africa, Dallas, Texas, and Seattle, Washington. He travels back and forth between South Africa and New York.' 55 This man was just one of many who moved prostitutes from places all over the United States to Brazil, China, and Argentina along with the places frequented by X 47-a's prostitute. Indeed, what is peculiar about the Bowery Boys locating themselves in Johannesburg is not that Americans were profiting from prostitution among the mining populations, but the fact that, as a result of Progressive squeamishness in New York, pimps were being forced to migrate to the point of production. Once in Johannesburg, they were forced to compete with pimps chased out of London and Paris. The common denominator among those places to which American pimps sent their prostitutes was fast economic growth occurring in a particular area which attracted disproportionately male populations of migrants (often indentured laborers) for whom some 'servicing' was believed necessary.56 Consequently, it is no surprise to find that California and Witwatersrand developed very similar markets for prostitution. And just as the similarities between the mining capitalists gave rise to similar experiences for the laborers in the mines, so the similarity in methods and personnel among the pimps gave rise to similar experiences for the prostitutes. A transformation is clearly evident at the end of the nineteenth century in the world of Johannesburg's prostitution. The early prostitutes, according to van Onselen, were 'daughters of South Africa's old proletariat', but soon, as the account of the Bowery Boys suggests, they would be outnumbered by new arrivals from Europe and America. 57 There is an air of the pre-industrial attached to the work habits of the early prostitutes, who 'chose to attach themselves to any one of the hundreds of canteens or hotels which abounded in the mining town'. 58 These work habits were gone by the time (what we will call) 'company prostitution' took hold in the mid-1890s. There can be
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less disagreement about the origins of this 'company' system than in the case of monopoly capitalism in the mining industry. Luise White has asserted that 'men and male control enter prostitution only after the state does', 59 and it is clear that the increasing criminalization and persecution of prostitutes forced women to seek 'protection' from pimps and brothels. 60 Before the Progressive purges of the 1890s in London and New York, pimps had bought off corrupt police officials, particularly those associated with Tammany Hall, thereby making it very difficult for the individual to ply her trade independently. 61 The profits that this system generated were such that the methods of corruption and intimidation could be transferred to 'frontier' towns with relative ease, cementing an imperial labor market that resembled those found among the miners and plantation laborers. 62 Even within this 'company' system, experiences were wide-ranging for prostitutes (as experiences for laborers have been), ranging from the worst kinds of exploitation to experiences of empowerment. Van Onselen's description of Fanny Kreslo's is clearly a case of the former, and one that Progressives dwelled on in their endeavors to bring 'morality' into the affairs of the city. Kreslo was a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl, who in 1898 was offered employment as a shop assistant in London, but on arriving in London learned that her employer had moved to the Rand. Having left Lithuania and any people who might have advised her against following her employer to South Africa, she was easily persuaded to leave London. On arrival in Johannesburg, she was pressed into prostitution, until she was 'freed' in 1899 as a result of President Kruger's crackdown on the Bowery Boys.63 But van Onselen also describes instances where women gained some sense of empowerment from prostitution, and it was not unusual for a woman to be running a brothel, working as a pimp, a 'madam', a pimp's 'prostitute/wife', a 'modiste', a 'procuress', or acting independently as 'streetwalkers' (who often were the women most despised, because they most obviously contested gender norms). 64 Historians have been reluctant to recognize these women as being empowered, even of being workers as such, but it is nevertheless the case that in the range of possibilities open to women at the fin-de-siecle, prostitution was not necessarily uniquely exploitative.65 And the stories of prostitutes in South Africa were linked to those of women outside the trade in sex, in paid and unpaid labor, and to other regions. Prostitutes' migration stories, from the most dismal to the most fortunate, were repeated for girls and young women drawn, or making their way, into prostitution all over the world. 66
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And here the limits of agency become so readily apparent. For, if prostitution is sex labor, then the prostitutes' resistance can be seen as similar to that of other laborers. And yet, as Philippa Levine has argued, the woman's identity as prostitute or potential prostitute was constructed through resistance. A prostitute woman by definition lived in defiance, in resistance - of the proper sphere of Woman, of the male order, of respectability, exposing the threat of unordered female sexuality which led to codifications of female sexuality. In short, resistance invited containment which prompted resistance and new definitions were born.' 67 As such, the act of resistance, or the 'weapon of the weak', would be the very act or weapon that aided the social worker, government official, or other interested observer to find the woman in question guilty of the charge of 'looseness', 'coarseness', and so on. If this applies to the sex laborer, then so too it can apply to the laborer on the shop floor.68 And where this is clear in the ordering of power in a city, it is even more so when the prostitute is located on the imperial terrain, and when ethnic groups endeavored to situate themselves in relation to other groups according to the character of 'their women'. The importance of prostitution in shaping migration experiences generally should not be underestimated. Not least, this was because so many migrants were engaged in prostitution. In San Francisco, for example, seven out of 10 Chinese women were recorded as prostitutes in 1870, and until around 1907 there were believed to be 22.5 prostitutes to every 100 inhabitants in Chinatown.69 If such numbers approximate the truth, then the fact of prostitution becomes central to Chinatown experience. And yet for those people who lived there prostitution may not have been considered a deviance of any sort, nor a life on the margins of respectability. 70 Once this is acknowledged, however, it becomes crucial to understand how normative experience was pushed to the margins so that it could become grist for the mills of moralizing nationalisms. For, one of the key features of nineteenthcentury nationalism was the importance of women to its definition. Not only were women seen as the bearers and reproducers of culture, but control over them was deemed central to determining the health and vitality of the group. 71 Du Bois's classic statement that the meaning of race lay in white 'ownership of women', which led to black men striving to reassert their control in this domain, can be applied to the way immigrant leaders saw 'their own' women. 72 Controlling
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'one's women' was crucial in an environment like the United States where the 'vitality' of an ethnic group was believed to depend on those women choosing a man of the same ethnicity.73 If Anne McClintock is correct that 'all nations depend on powerful constructions of gender', then control of prostitutes and any women who might be considered of 'loose morals' would almost inevitably concern those who wished to advance the cause of particular nations. 74 Nationalists continually feared that the presence of such women reflected badly on their group as a whole. Thus, indentured labour migration from India to the British Caribbean and Africa was brought to an end once nationalists like Gopal Krishna Gokhale made the argument that national self-confidence and independence would never grow in India so long as the British maintained a system that led so many South Asian women into prostitution abroad. 75 Opposition to prostitution in California shows a similar appreciation among Chinese and Japanese nationalists of the inverse relationship between the 'success' of an ethnic group and the widespread association of that group with prostitution. 76 Often, historians themselves have failed to see the contingent nature of this linkage and have readily accepted it as a barometer for determining immigrant fortunes in America. For example, Lynn Pan writes: Prostitution ... is another matter. Along with opium, the organized traffic in prostitutes was what gave the overseas Chinese such a bad name; there was scarcely an American comment on Chinatown, rarely a description of the Chinese community, that missed the chance to bring up the subject.77 And, Pan continues, 'Some of the American men really knew what they were talking about.' While it is unclear that such 'American' men could have had more than a one-sided impression of the lives and habits of Chinese prostitutes (and that controlled by the prostitute's ability to 'put something over on him' 78 ), it is certainly clear from Pan that they were capable of basing assumptions about the Chinese as a whole on these partial transcripts. Thus an imperial bond could be cemented, that might otherwise have been difficult to forge, between Progressive reformer and ethnic nationalist. The connections between histories that crossed the boundaries of the nation state often helped to define the ways in which those national histories would be perceived. African American involvement in South Africa helped contribute to American ideas about the 'backwardness' of Africans, Anglo-American capitalists' investment in the
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Republic would contribute to imperial notions about development and modernization, and the differential abilities of nationalists to control 'their' women abroad would contribute both to the way nations were perceived by Euro-American imperialists knocking at their doors and the way those migrants would be viewed by the communities around the world in which they settled. In short, determining exceptional status is most easy when one is involved, directly or indirectly, in the shaping of that other society to which one's own is to be compared. Provided, of course, one can remain out of the range of spears and arrows.
OMAHA, SOMEWHERE IN MIDDLE AMERICA Hey mister, if you're going to walk on water You know you're only going walk all over me. Adam Duritz 79 Introductory courses and textbooks in U. S. history invariably give some attention to American Indians. In the section on Westward expansion, which generally follows Reconstruction and Redemption, historians will often describe the experiences of American Indians, sometimes describing them as the ultimate victims of this expansion. The behavior of Euro-Americans may or may not be described as genocidal. Even if it is, more weight will be given to the importance of disease and the loss of the buffalo herds (whether or not their decimation is described as being undertaken deliberately to weaken Indian communities) in determining the decline of the Indians. 80 With the massacre of the Dakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890, the story of the Indians will generally come to a close.81 And with the end of this story, historians will turn to the plight of the farmers and the discussion of Populism gets under way.82 This story will be described as one of western farmers coming to terms with a nation now dominated by eastern capitalist interests. There is much disagreement among historians about the nature of Populism. Were Populist mid-westerners coming to terms with the closing frontier (Hicks), bigots fearful of blacks and Jews (Hofstadter), isolated rural dwellers in search of the camaraderie of Populist rallies and picnics (Turner), creators of a democratic movement culture (Goodwyn), the generators of a class movement in opposition to
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Capital (Pollack), or a pentecostal mix of all the above (McMath)? 83 There is enough disagreement here to provide some leeway for historians in introductory courses or textbooks to present their own view. But whatever it is, this view will never situate Populists in relation to the American Indians. None of the above-mentioned historians spared a reference for Indians (even when, in the case of Hofstadter, doing so might have strengthened his argument); why should we expect this of the generalist? 84 What is the significance of this omission and the invisibility of American Indians in discussions of mid-western Populism? Surely, the presence or recent withdrawal of Indians from those areas that were building 'a movement culture', as Goodwyn would have it, influenced their demands and their political rhetoric. 85 While Goodwyn shrugs off the racism and anti-Semitism of Populists as something that they could not escape, rather than as something fundamental to their ideology, re-establishing the imperial location of Populists (in relation to Indians and the imperial expansion of the frontier) forces us to reassess some of the radical implications of their politics. For, had Pierre-Joseph Proudhon been looking around in 1840 for proof of his famous axiom that 'Property is theft', he could have done no better than to observe the American frontier, where he would have seen the stripping of land from American Indians, followed by their relocation and the establishment of white American property in their place. 86 But Property's ultimate origins in displacement have been disguised in various legal transactions, in constitutional practices, and in the process of history itself. Frederick Jackson Turner's claim that the frontier and the irrepressible American frontier spirit were to be found wherever there was 'free' land available was just one part of this process of writing Indians out of the American narrative (and, not coincidentally, establishing the first systematic theory of American exceptionalism). 87 That some mid-western Populists endorsed ideas of imperial expansion is clear. Ignatius Donnelly, the 'Voice of Minnesota' and author of the preamble to the People's Party's most important manifesto (the Omaha Platform), and a man who amassed his wealth from land speculation, was a great supporter of the expansion of the United States into the far northern regions of the continent. In 1869, as he was completing a term in Congress, he addressed the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce about such expansion. Donnelly believed that the settlement of the Red and Saskatchewan Valleys by Americans was dictated by Minnesota's 'geographical necessities' (or 'Manifest
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Destiny'). Hoping to reorient President Grant's policy away from expansion into the Caribbean basin and towards the contested terrain of Canada, Donnelly proposed that the American government come to the aid of the population of the Red River that was resisting British domination. By supporting those fighting for independence (as President McKinley would later do in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898), 'we may,' Donnelly hoped, 'within a few years, perhaps months, see the Stars and Stripes wave from Fort Garry, from the waters of Puget Sound, and along the shores of Vancouver.' For, according to the future Populist, 'This country [Rupert's Land] belongs to us, and God speed the Fenian movement or any other movement that will bring it to us!' 88 It is not surprising, then, to find that his preamble to the Omaha Platform was founded on fundamentally imperial assumptions about the nature and destiny of American history.89 Donnelly was also author of the Utopian novel Caesar's Column, written in 1890, in which Gabriel Welstein, a man of Swiss origin, returns to New York from East Africa in 1988 to find a society controlled by corrupt moneyed interests. After seeing thousands upon thousands killed in a worldwide revolt of the masses, led by Caesar Lomellini (whose desire to destroy civilization is perhaps accounted for by his not being of Anglo-Irish descent), and in which gas was the weapon of choice, Welstein decides to fly back to his African home with a small group of friends. There, in Uganda, they hope to avoid the dangers of class struggle and to create a Utopian society centered around a town called ... Stanley. Since Donnelly included no Africans in this Utopia, it is fair to say that these migrants carried with them their own American understanding of the frontier and the invisibility of indigenous people. It was only under such conditions, with the expansion of the European race around the world and the making invisible of indigenous peoples, that Utopian goals could be achieved and metropolitan corruption held at bay.90 This involvement of Populists in the 'frontier' imperial project is further revealed in the comparison with the Southern African frontier.91 Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, for example, have described the Americans who occupied Oregon, eastern Texas, the 'arid lands of the Great Basin', and pastoral Mexican California as 'voortrekkers'. Superficially, they say, the parallels to white occupation of the Orange Free State or the Transvaal are tantalizing, for in each of these regions the local
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Anglo-American population seized lands of both Indians and Spanish-Mexicans and practiced a doctrine of 'popular sovereignty' by establishing independent provinces or republics for a time. With the exception of the Mormons in Utah, however, these American trekkers were the cutting edge of an aggressive American nationalism rather than a retreat from imperial or metropolitan authority. 92 Whether or not this last statement is exactly correct, given the extent to which American pioneers saw themselves as escaping from the clutches of the metropole and Afrikaners were participating in a form of aggressive nationalism with imperial links of their own, clearly the aggressive nationalism of the American 'voortrekkers' must have influenced the politics of the Populist movement. 93 Lamar and Thompson argue that the alliance of the Federal Government with American pioneers, so different from the opposition facing Afrikaners from their Imperial Government, made for a different political situation on the two frontiers. 94 Moreover, as Christopher Saunders points out, Afrikaners faced a far larger African population than the Indian population facing American pioneers, and the Africans were to be used as a labor force while American Indians were pushed off to the distant reservation. In his chapter on the Great Trek, in A History of South Africa to 1870, Leonard Thompson notes that three main factors affected the course of the Great Trek: 'the qualities of the Voortrekkers as individuals and as a community; the environments into which they migrated; and the reactions of the British government and its local representatives'.95 Such factors were evident in all conditions of colonization, from Fiji and New Zealand, eastward through Australia, India, Africa, the Caribbean, to the American Colonies. In the North American western 'frontier' these factors remained in place, the only change being that, for much of the region, the role of the British government had been usurped by the U. S. government and its local representatives. Once gender is inserted into the experiences and imagery of the two 'frontiers', as inevitably it must be, the differences between South Africa and the United States continue to fade. Anne McClintock has written of South Africa: In the voluminous Afrikaner historiography, the history of the volk is organized around a male national narrative figured as an imperial journey into empty lands. The journey proceeds forwards in geographical space, but backwards in racial and gender time, to what
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is figured as a prehistoric zone of linguistic, racial and gender 'degeneration'. The myth of the 'empty land' is simultaneously the myth of'virgin land' - effecting a double erasure. Within the colonial narrative, to be 'virgin' is to be empty of desire, voided of sexual agency, and passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of European military history, language and 'reason'. The feminizing of 'virgin' colonial lands also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, Africans cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights, and the white male patrimony can be violently assured.96 No wonder prostitutes would come to present such difficulties to nationalists! But more importantly, this passage could be transposed onto the American colonial and imperial frontier without any difficulty whatsoever. If any exceptionality arises from these 'frontier' comparisons, it clearly resides with the Afrikaners who, being of a different nationality from the government at the Cape, faced more significant opposition from their imperial power than was evident on other 'frontiers'. But this should not be overstated. Australian and New Zealand settlers often, for reasons of class, ethnicity, or presumed criminality, were restrained in their attempts to establish property rights. Moreover, the U.S. government also entered into treaties with American Indian nations that, while usually discounted as not valid when it mattered, still needed to be confronted, and which sometimes placed them in positions of opposition to their settlers. With regard to the second of Thompson's factors, 'the environments into which they migrated', we must be careful not to exaggerate the degree to which the large African population made for a unique experience for Afrikaners. In the comparison with the United States this is portraying the 'frontier' in a single light. There were many different peoples with different political systems that presented a wide range of dilemmas for settlers. These tribes were capable of taking alternative political stances in relation to the Federal Government, eliciting a range of support among Europeans in the United States, and making alliances with other foreign powers which, in many cases, presented opposition as intractable to settlers as those met on the South African veld. Suffice it to say, if one examines the conditions in Texas and those in Minnesota, the stories are very different. Finally, the idea that Africans would become the labor force for Afrikaners finds many parallels in the United States, where the migration of Southern plantation capitalists to the Southwestern
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states was made possible by their use of non-European slave labor, where the importance of labor importation would be seen as of paramount importance for development and labor control (internal slave trade, Chinese indentured labor), where such importation would lead to similar exclusion acts and racial job bars pushed for by white working classes, where the creation of reservations would be seen as appropriate, and where wars would be fought to determine which Europeans had authority over the territories. 97 Differences exist that make each situation unique, and each nation's 'frontier' a site of many ideologies and experiences. What we need to know, then, is not how different frontier movements differ, but how certain ideologies and experiences get privileged in the process of creating national narratives. In this instance we need to examine, not who the Populists were (there were many strands to rural protest), but how it is that aspects of their disparate ideologies have been accentuated and others elided to produce one kind of movement, while the disparate elements of Southern African frontier movements have been given a different reading. Actual or perceived differences in 'frontier' experiences may not be as important as the differences in the way historians and others have written about the ideologies that emerged from them. For example, American Populists have been valorized and the pioneer spirit has been seen as the backbone of their movement, while the same features found in Afrikaner nationalism have been vilified as products of their backwardness. While Populists can continue to be romanticized (through the invisibility of American Indians), only supporters of apartheid have done the same for the Voortrekkers, and the likelihood that this will continue uncontested even in Afrikaans-language South African historiography is slim. This difference is enshrined in Stanley's description of his massacre of Bumbireh Africans. Perhaps influenced by his reporting of fights against American Indians, Stanley revealed a certain relish at the massacre, and was shocked when his reports led to a great uproar at the British Foreign Office and the Royal Geographic Society.98 The literary conventions that led to protest against such actions in Africa and acceptance of them on the American 'frontier' have been carried over into the historiography. The comparison with the Southern African 'frontier' allows us to see the similarity between the Midwestern Populists' predicament and that of Voortrekkers in Southern Africa. Although Afrikaners opposed the British imperial control, whether from Whitehall or Cape
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Town, they did not reject imperialism altogether: they shared many traditions that arose out of their Christian, European background, and, with the opening up of diamond and gold mines, from a shared sense that the good society would be achieved by extracting minerals from the ground for themselves and not for the benefit of Africans. Theirs was a settler imperialism, that believed that more of the benefits of imperialism should accrue for those on the frontier, and those in the metropolitan centers should benefit less. The establishment of a government in the Transvaal, before and after the British occupation of 1877-80, gave concrete form to such aspirations. Many American Populists would have endorsed similar beliefs. In their minds, it was they who 'won' the west; it was they who were carrying the benefits of western civilization to the farthest corners of the North American continent. It should be they who benefitted also. The Spectator of 1893, for example, observed: 'Almost everywhere, certainly in England, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and the United States, the agriculturalists, formerly so conservative, are becoming fiercely discontented, declare they gain less by civilization than the rest of the community, and are looking for remedies of a drastic nature.' 99 Clearly, the definition of'civilization' had an imperial dimension, and in areas of expansion like Southern Africa and the American agrarian belt it would give rise to a particular kind of politics that opposed domination by the metropolitan center. Recognizing the Midwestern Populists' location in the imperial middle is crucial to understanding their ideology. To suggest, as James Turner does, that they were isolated and confused is implicitly to accept that the land which they had occupied really was 'free' and uncontested. Knowing that these people were linked to the militant expansion of American nationalism into the frontier regions and, to borrow from Takaki and Whitman, 'the masculine thrust towards Asia', provides us with an alternative source for their 'tendency to rely on scapegoats and panaceas'. 100 Rather than this tendency being the product of a 'sense of confusion' among farmers, it could have been the product of years of experience dividing the world into the forces of good (white Americans and civilization) and evil (Indians) essential if one was to participate in what Melville called 'the metaphysics of Indian hating'. 101 Incorporating eastern capitalists and Jews into this Manichean model was relatively easy, as William Jennings Bryan showed in his 1896 Cross of Gold speech. Clearly, important differences existed between frontier-informed Afrikaner nationalism and frontier-informed American Populism -
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the degree to which Afrikaner nationalism was shaped by the Dutch Reform Church, for one thing. Moreover, Populists never took up arms against eastern industrialists as Afrikaners were to do against the British in the Anglo-Boer Wars. But such events, crucial as they may be, should not blind us to the similarities between the two. The manner in which Populism dissipated after 1896, when President McKinley turned 'the metaphysics of Indian hating' into a national obsession, only to be reborn in the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, highlights this imperial aspect. Further, while the terms within which Afrikaners and Populists would be incorporated into their respective republics would differ, such incorporation would eventually take place. 102
CONCLUSION Indians are not historians; and they rarely show any critical ability. Even their most useful books, books full of research and information, exasperate with their repetitions and diffuseness, and lose effect by their uncritical enthusiasms. Such solid highways to scholarly esteem and approval as indexes and bibliographies are almost unknown to them. Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal103 Exceptionalism is, in many respects, an imperial formulation. Those who have come to see themselves as exceptions to the rules of history - the British and Americans, for example - have done so when their nations reached a position of world domination and when their interpretations of history (found in Whiggish and Progressive history, Orientalism and modernization theory, to name a few) could prevail over others. More importantly, the idea of exceptionalism depends on a description of the nation that is defined by certain parameters and narratives that, however flexible and expansive, simultaneously elide or exclude others. This is an imposition on the historical record, the privileging of some over others, the accentuation of the peculiar, and the downplaying of similarities with other nations or peoples that are described in such a way so as to make them seem unexceptional or ordinary. The kinds of narratives hinted at here - those formed around intersections with other societies and nation states, or based on the experiences of people who are generally deemed marginal (in other
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words, those people upon whom even Social Historians have had a difficulty conferring agency) - appear to contradict exceptionalist theories. Of course we will wish to impose order on the myriad narratives thrown up; we all strive towards synthesis. But as we perform this 'profoundly "worldly" activity ' - creating worlds of 'first' and 'third' varieties, establishing nations of this and that kind - we do so in the political realm, shaped by our own imperial location and our own desire to protect a world that might be lost.104 Once this is recognized it becomes apparent that widespread acceptance of the exceptionalism of the United States depended to some degree on the fact that it had 'exceptional' historians: historians whose claims to 'objectivity' were never systematically dismissed as tainted on the basis of their social/imperial location, and who had the luxury to consider all other nations' historians so tainted. Like Henry Morton Stanley on Lake Victoria, Americanists were able to 'pick off the natives' while staying out of the range of any returning missiles. They could also choose those people with whom they would share their canoes.
2 Homelands, Harlem and Comparative History Let me say something briefly about the so-called black-on-black violence in our country.... What we are confronted with here is a problem of violent resistance to democratic change, and not a situation of ethnic conflicts that are supposedly inherent in African societies. Nelson Mandela, Speech to the NAACP Convention, Indianapolis, 19931 Taking popular culture as his subject in Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, Rob Nixon reveals 'the diverse ties between South African culture and the world beyond its borders', and highlights 'the [South African] discourses of absolute rupture, authenticity, racial purity and ethnic nationalism on the one hand and, on the other, the idioms of cosmopolitanism, transculturation, hybridity and internationalism'. Nixon argues that 'the culture of apartheid and the resistance to it cannot be understood outside their international entanglements'. By focusing on the perceptions of Harlem and the United States among white and black South Africans, the countervailing images of South Africa on American screens, the transnational dynamics of cultural and sports boycotts of the apartheid state, and finally the transformation of South Africa in the aftermath of the Cold War, Nixon begins to sketch in the outlines of a new comparative history.2 This history uncovers the myriad connections existing between societies which help shape the way our comparisons are formulated. More traditional comparative studies of the United States and South Africa generally overlook the importance of such connections; by not showing how, for example, categories of race and nation in one place have been defined in reference to their meanings and applications in another, they tend to conform to 'nationalist teleologies' already firmly in place. Such teleologies, in the case of comparisons between the United States and South Africa, have been especially problematic. Firstly, they have left unquestioned both American exceptionalism, the idea that the U. S. has deviated from patterns elsewhere, and South African exceptionalism, which is the idea that 27
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South Africa's post-colonial experiences (particularly the instituting of apartheid) were different from those of the rest of Africa.3 Secondly, as Fredrickson points out in his epilogue to Black Liberation, they have been shown by recent events in the two countries to have been misguided. 4 The end of apartheid in South Africa, and increased racial tensions and inequalities in the U. S. have revealed that assumptions about the immutable South African racial code and the liberal American one were not well-founded. In responding to such transformations, however, Fredrickson does not feel it necessary to alter his traditional narrative approach to comparative history. Instead, he endeavors to fill gaps left by his 1981 study, White Supremacy, which focused on the ideologies and structures of racial domination in South Africa and the United States without considering Africans' and African Americans' relationship to these systems.5 Such an approach was not altogether valid even at the time and contributed to the sense prevailing throughout that book that race and racism were transhistorical categories, hangovers from slavery surviving into the present, and that categories of 'black', 'white', 'African', and 'African-American' were fixed rather than socially constructed. 6 Recent studies, especially those of David Roediger and Kwame Anthony Appiah, have questioned such ideas, and while not responding to either of these authors specifically, Fredrickson endeavors to provide a more dynamic picture of the career of race and racism in the two countries. 7 In addition, historians are now perhaps more keenly aware than in 1981 that the contributions of African Americans and Africans have to be given consideration before the social systems of the United States and South Africa are to be understood fully. Thus, Fredrickson endeavors to fill this lacuna as well. Black Liberation accomplishes these things by looking at the ideologies of black advancement or liberation in both countries. In the process, the work 'focuses on the thought and actions of exceptional rather than ordinary people', though, Fredrickson informs us, the book is not meant to be 'a full comparative history of black resistance to white supremacy' (p. 4). But, while the intellectual historical approach of the earlier study has been enlarged to incorporate the political and the social, the question remains whether or not the most salient intellectual historical concerns can be selected outside a framework founded on social and cultural considerations (which is Nixon's endeavor). For example, throughout his study Fredrickson makes no mention of either immigration to the United States, or the
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migration of African and Asians into South Africa during and after the opening up of the Kimberley diamond mines and the gold mines on the Witwatersrand. Given that categories of race are constructed in relational ways, and that notions of 'white', 'so-called colored', 'black', and 'African' were transformed in the cauldron of postemancipation immigration, so that such considerations likely helped shape the concept of liberation, their omission from a text on liberation is significant. Another important omission is that of sport, and here a comparison with Nixon's work provides the most clear-cut example of how the old comparative history differs from the new. In Black Liberation the word 'sport' is not mentioned, nor are the various games that helped give South African apartheid some of its form - rugby for the Afrikaners, cricket for the English, and soccer for the rest.8 In the process, the courage and conviction of people like Basil D'Oliveira, Sam Ramsamy, Arthur Ashe, and Dennis Brutus, among others, remain unexamined even though their understandings of the meanings of liberation were clearly pivotal in defining the sports boycott and, through it, the anti-apartheid movement. 9 Not only did sports help shape apartheid and the movement to overthrow it, Nixon shows us, but they were clearly present at the creation of the new South Africa. While Afrikaner and English South Africans seemed bent upon using sport as a tool for segregation and elitism, those excluded endeavored to create an ethos of non-racialism in the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) and through their control of sport in the townships. Seeming disciples of C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary at a time when, from Trinidad to India, the idea of a sporting, puritan ethos can only have begun to seem like another tool of communalism, the leaders of SANROC and ANC orchestrated the reintroduction of South Africa into international sporting arenas in such a way that Nationalist leaders like de Klerk were left with little choice but to follow in their wake. Moreover, a greater emphasis on sport (and the other cultural 'conduits' between South Africa and the rest of the world outlined in Nixon's work) might have forced Fredrickson to reconsider two aspects of his analysis: first, that the ANC moved entirely from nonviolence to violent protest (leaving a sense of mystification as to how they made their way back from the brink of all-out war to negotiation); and second, that the movement towards an increased emphasis on race in America and a de-emphasis in South Africa is a recent phenomenon. For the desegregation of sport may have come earlier
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in the United States, but it did so without the same kind of nurturing of non-racialism that has been occurring in South Africa for many years. The rather obvious legacy of race in sports is ever-present in American commercial sports today, and not just in the much-vilified pronouncements of Al Campanis and Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder.10 Comparative analysis ought to bring into consideration the presuppositions bequeathed to us by our own political system (especially if it is a focus of the comparison), yet Fredrickson's analysis seems to be very much shaped by his own location as an American advocate of liberal change. One consequence of this is found in his use of a category of race that, for all his efforts to do otherwise, is as transhistorical as that employed in his previous studies. The early part of this work discusses the significance of Victorian liberalism, and is certainly a deviation from this tendency. But by the end of the first chapter all such analysis gives way to an argument that, for example, Booker T. Washington was stymied by the virulence of American racism. He was not, as the logic of Fredrickson's analysis of liberalism might suggest, stymied by his commitment to his own deeply held notions of Victorian liberalism (a variant of Progressive imperialism). Another consequence of this location is Fredrickson's lack of attention to what Paul Gilroy has labelled 'The Black Atlantic', and which Nixon shows to be a larger phenomenon still.11 Clearly there were connections between nationalists in South Africa and the United States that were forged in cities all around the world. These were not merely people of African origin, but also included Irish and Indian nationalists, or Russian communists and American anarchists, many of whom would borrow political ideas and methods from white and black suffragists, as Gandhi would borrow from the suffragists in London. While recognizing the recent work of historians like Robin D. G. Kelley and James Campbell, Fredrickson fails to draw on this to provide a sense of a larger cross-pollination of ideas occurring.12 Indeed, the only real attempt to move beyond the South African and American frame is the inclusion of Mahatma Gandhi as an inspiration for both Martin Luther King, Jr. and the members of the African National Congress, though Gandhi's early work at the Cape makes this inclusion not altogether momentous. But Fredrickson cannot show his location more clearly, at a time of Helms-Burton and President Clinton's efforts to isolate Cuba, than when he omits any reference to Fidel Castro. Without wishing to endorse Castro's government of Cuba, it has to be noted that he saw connections that existed between the western hemisphere and South
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Africa. He, possibly more than any other government leader of the last 30 years, attempted to confront the apartheid government. And while we now talk about the effects of boycott in bringing the Nationalist government to heel, as if it were 'the work and miracle of the United Nations', there are many in the ANC who see Cuba's intervention in Angola as pivotal in the process of dismantling apartheid. 13 Harlem residents who listened to Castro's speech to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1995 apparently appreciated this fact; certainly Nelson Mandela does. Speaking in Matanzas on receiving the Jose Marti medal, Mandela, echoing Nehru's celebration inside the Lucknow District Gaol of the Turks' 1922 victory over the Greeks at the Battle of Afium Qarahisar, 14 asserted that without Cuba's defeat of 'the apartheid army' at Cuito Cuanavale, 'our organizations would not have been unbanned'. Mandela also said on this occasion, which speaks to Fredrickson's analysis of African liberation movements, that if non-violence was no longer a Gandhian creed, it remained the ANC's preferred method; it was only the 'apartheid regime that forced us to take up arms'. As soon as the Pretoria regime realized 'it would have to talk' then the ANC was ready to pursue the peace process. 15 Fredrickson's analysis of the ANC's violent struggle is paired with his evident dislike for Black Power advocates and their 'identity politics' in the United States. It is they whom he faults for 'killing the dream of integration to a color-blind society' (p. 297). Such an assessment, which betrays a bias towards one response to racial oppression, seems at odds with the narrative he describes for the ANC in South Africa. After all, if the 'dream of integration' could emerge from the soil of slavery, Jim Crow, and apartheid, and after armed struggles against these things, it seems unlikely that Black Power advocates would singlehandedly be able to kill it. What Fredrickson labels the 'tragic failure of American civic culture' turns out to be just business as usual - segregation's advocates created identity politics, not their opponents. Black Liberation, meanwhile (borrowing here from Salman Rushdie), represents the coming to the printed page of Richard Attenborough's liberal vision of the world and political transformation.16 It uses a traditional narrative approach to cast heroes and their preferred methods of protest against a background of people (either imperialists and racists or nationalists) who would pull them and us down. What it does not do is shed light on why apartheid collapsed, nor how American political discourse appeared to take the sinister course it is now evidently on.
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Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood dissects this AttenboroughFredrickson narrative to reveal the problems of director-historians establishing themselves, in Steve Biko's words, as 'go-betweens in the struggle for emancipation'. In the process of questioning such established narratives, Nixon suggests, we may detect answers to questions about the nature of current political developments and reveal new possibilities for comparative analysis.
3 Beyond Nation. Beyond Methodism? What [the mission of Methodism] is may be expressed in one brief but pregnant sentence: Patient, loving, Christlike leadership towards all that make for the salvation and uplifting to complete manhood of the backward peoples. Bishop George E. Clinton, A. M. E. Zion Church, 19121 Like Rob Nixon's work, James Campbell's Songs of Zion contributes to the new impulse in comparative history of uncovering the connections between societies under comparison. Campbell describes the conduit between two societies acting as a 'looking glass in which Africans and African Americans examined one another, and, in the process, reexamined themselves'. 2 Campbell's focus is the connection between the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and the Ethiopian Church in South Africa. Aware that historians have 'paid insufficient attention to Africa's pervasiveness in African American intellectual and imaginative life', he undertakes 'a study of transplantation, showing how a creed devised by and for African Americans was appropriated and transformed in a variety of South African contexts'. In the process, Campbell reveals a narrative range that has seldom been matched in comparative history. Partly, this derives from the fact that Songs of Zion is based upon dissertation research, so the author has not come at the study of South Africa as an addition to an already-mastered field. Also, in bringing together intellectual and social history he has needed to undertake research in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than rely on secondary literature that may be unbalanced in favor of one country or the other. 3 The work thus represents a new generation of scholarship in comparative history, one made possible by and building on that of the earlier generation, but able to depart from it because of the new vantage point attained. The work is divided into three parts. The first covers the establishment and spread of African Methodism in the United States, the growth of interest among African Methodists in the missionary enterprise both in the American South and abroad, and their increasing 33
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preoccupation with Africa as a site for emigration, colonization, and missionary work. Campbell shows that while 'African' in the denomination's title did not mean that its members identified with African forms of worship, and that these northern free men and women often conformed to the belief that slavery was a divine vehicle bringing 'benighted Africans' into the light of Christian civilization, they none the less retained a strong interest in Africa, which in times of increasing racial oppression could quickly become the focus of colonization schemes. Particularly strong in this section, I felt (and I was disappointed that it rather fell by the wayside in later parts of the book), was Campbell's analysis of women in the A. M. E. Church. Campbell shows that at the very beginning of the church's history the issues of the rights and privileges of women, and what these might signify for a people attempting to establish their collective 'manhood' at a time when people seemed particularly preoccupied with issues of masculinity, were at the forefront of the denomination's political debates. While Campbell suggests that an analogy can be drawn between the treatment of women in these early years and the response to African co-religionists at the end of the century, this is never fully developed. Given the increasing preoccupation with the intersection between gender and imperialism, this may be something that he or others will wish to expand upon in the future. The second section focuses on Ethiopianism in South Africa, the forging of a relationship with the A. M. E. Church after 1896, and the development of a 'populist' social movement around the congregations which 'sprouted' from Cape Town to Barotseland. Campbell provides a richly detailed social history of this movement, and makes a bold effort to move beyond the generalizations about the Ethiopian movement evident in the historical literature that it was merely an urban movement, appealing to the 'educated' and 'de-tribalised' (p. 141). Revealing an unusual ability, for a comparativist, to comprehend the diversity of social systems and people present in Southern Africa, Campbell shows that the social movement reached into the reserves of the eastern Cape and Transkei, and that there was a 'lively traffic between the A. M. E. Church and revanchist African chiefs, several of whom adopted the church as a kind of state religion' (p. 142). In the process Campbell rescues the Ethiopian movement from the common dismissal of being 'proto-nationalist', as merely being a precursor to the South African Native National Congress, and therefore not really worthy of consideration as a social movement in its own right. Here, most clearly, Campbell tries to move beyond one aspect of the nationalist teleology.
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The final section describes the building of a religious institution in the early years of the twentieth century, the redirection away from the social movement toward the establishment of the same bureaucratic structures on which the American church depended. This development is described in terms of a transformation from 'sect' to 'church', one that the African Methodists had gone through earlier in their history, first with the establishment of their denomination and then with consolidation of the church in the South during and after Reconstruction. Campbell's description of the work undertaken by the various bishops appointed to South Africa to rein in the Ethiopians is finely detailed, reading like a description of colonial administrators throughout the British Empire attempting to bring the benefits of 'civilization' to the unruly. Less clear, however, are the thoughts and actions of the Ethiopian churchgoers themselves. In his analysis of the transformation from sect to church, Campbell may be rescuing the Ethiopians from a 'nationalist teleology' only to subject them to an institutional one provided by the African Methodists. The theological equivalent of the dichotomy between proto-nationalist and nationalist might be the sect/church dichotomy Campbell employs. By providing a narrative which suggests that Africans were responding to the African Methodists' appearance rather than building on traditions of their own, and that an African Methodist social movement existed in time before the attempt to formalize and institutionalize the church, Campbell may be taking agency away from the Africans in the Ethiopian movement. He may also be privileging an African Methodist narrative of institutional development as opposed to others - Holiness, Baptist, and Spiritualist, for example - that the Ethiopians seem to have decided very quickly were more satisfying. Campbell further maintains that the coming together of the two churches 'began one of the most remarkable episodes in the intertwined history of Africa and black America'. Between 1896 and 1910 'African Methodism exploded across the subcontinent'. Such claims justify recounting the early history of the A. M. E. Church in the early part of the work, as if African Methodism provided the necessary seed or spark for the African social movement. The evidence from the book, however, suggests that Campbell perhaps overestimates African Methodist influence. The vital middle section, in which the author maintains that 'close to forty thousand Africans - urban workers, peasants, clerks, teachers, even disaffected chiefs - had joined the A. M. E. Church, [while] tens of thousands of others had been touched by its message', may blur African Methodism and
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Ethiopianism. For, within three years of joining the A. M. E. Church, leading members of the Ethiopian Church had defected (followed by other defections in 1904, 1906, and 1908), taking many of the 40,000 Africans, the core of the 'social movement', with them. From 1900 African Methodists like Bishop Levi J. Coppin realized that they faced a membership crisis, and yet still tried to separate themselves from any taint of Ethiopianism. While Campbell describes such developments in his last section, they surely have profound implications for the 'social movement' he describes in the second. Here, Campbell's omission from the book of Coppin's appearance in 1903 before the South African Native Affairs Commission is important. During this appearance the Bishop claimed that there had been no connection between the A. M. E. and Ethiopian churches since the defection of Bishop James Dwane in 1898.4 If, as Campbell asserts, 'for a brief historical moment, this venerable African American institution stood at the center of one of the most dynamic popular movements in Africa', this seems to have been something that its American leaders learned of after the fact and which they labored to rectify. Whether or not the Ethiopian Church could have spread as rapidly as it did without the A. M. E. connection, my sense from the book was that it was Ethiopian 'populism' and not an 'appropriation' of Richard Allen's vision of uplift and respectability that seems to have spawned this social movement. There may well have been connections between the A. M. E. Church and grass-roots movements at the Cape, but if they existed they were beyond the vision of church leaders. And if this is the case, to what extent do they deserve the title 'African Methodist social movement', and how are they connected to the development of the Church as an institutional unit? It is difficult to escape the biases of institutional narratives as well as those of nation. Clearly, by focusing on the grass-roots organizing, Campbell has endeavored to slip through the net, but in some ways, particularly with regard to the dichotomy of sect and church, he may be caught in it still. In this regard, Levi J. Coppin needs to be given a more central role in this story. As the first bishop appointed to South Africa, Coppin receives quite a bit of attention in the book. What might have been elaborated on further was the role he played in bringing about the change in attitude of African Methodists to the missionary enterprise in Africa. As editor of the AME Church Review Coppin wrote editorials on Africa and published debates on the issues surrounding emigrationism that helped forge the consensus between the more
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extreme positions of Turner and Tanner. As a Maryland-born African Methodist, Coppin could also mediate the church's internal conflict between the South Carolinian and Georgian Methodists led by Turner and the 'Old Philadelphians' represented by the Tanners. Perhaps more important still was his marriage to Fanny Jackson, the former Principal of the Institute of Colored Youth. This marriage brought Coppin far greater prominence within the church than his formidable abilities alone could have enabled him to achieve. When Levi Coppin was elected Bishop in 1900 the widespread assumption was that by elevating him the church was honoring Fanny Coppin. 5 As Campbell mentions, Fanny Coppin was an advocate of black domesticity, so the appointment of the Coppins to the South African episcopal district perhaps represented a pointed comment about what it was about 'civilization' that would be important to implant in South African soil. As a Social Gospeler, Coppin also had a profound influence on the work of the two leading propagandists within the church during the Great Migration, Reverdy C. Ransom and Richard Robert Wright, Jr. (Campbell discusses this connection, but without noting the response of these three men to the migration). Here, one part of the story may have been left from the book, namely the influence of South African events and people on the development of the church in the United States. During the 1890s the A. M. E. Church was losing its exalted position in the United States. Even by the time Du Bois was writing The Philadelphia Negro in 1897, the A. M. E. Church was no longer the largest denomination in Philadelphia. What the church was confronting in South Africa, therefore, was the question of what its role should be in black communities more generally. The response to the Ethiopian movement and the assumptions that church leaders made about rural people and their needs in urban society would be repeated in their later response to the Great Migration. As Coppin had argued in Cape Town, African Methodists should reach out to the incoming migrants and offer support to those in need, but the church itself should not attempt to change to appeal to the new arrivals. These people brought with them traditions that were not compatible with African Methodism. Far better that they should be churched by Baptists and Ethiopians, and that African Methodism be eclipsed by other denominations, than that African Methodists should radically alter their own traditions. No work of history should be considered definitive, since if it is considered so it may pre-empt the possibility that others will pursue the questions raised by it. The many strengths of Campbell's work lie
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in its new approach to comparative history, its suggestive analysis of the 'conduit' between South Africa and the United States, the delineating of a social movement developing in the 1890s (whether of an African Methodist or Ethiopian cast), and its detailed and perceptive account of the development of the A. M. E. Church. That Songs of Zion raises questions in so many other areas as well does not detract from, but rather adds to, Campbell's achievement.
4 The Empire and Mr. Thompson: The Making of Indian Princes and the English Working Class with Madhavi Kale 'England ... taking only itself as its standard.' Karl Marx1 'What do they know of England who only England know?' Kipling's mother 2 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' C. L. R. James 3
PROLOGUE As a child I had no doubt that Indians were our most important visitors: the sideboard loaded with grapes and dates was testimony of this. A little older, I would cadge postage stamps from poets and political agitators. Older again, I stood in awe before the gracious Jawaharlal, as he asked me about my batting technique. Edward Palmer Thompson 4 In 'The Nehru Tradition' Edward Palmer Thompson described how just before his death in 1946, his father, Edward John Thompson, had received a letter from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. 5 'My father read it,' E. P. Thompson wrote, 'propped on his pillows, in the evening hours when his mind was cleared of drugs. It was a letter with the warmth of an Indian wind, thanking him for his work for India. My father let the letter drop onto the sheet: "Oh Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace!" Several days later he died.' Accompanying this letter, 39
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Thompson added, 'There was [one] also for me, in the same generous terms. From this moment, I suppose, stemmed my "deviation".' 6 Here, then, is a moment of some significance in the biography of one of the most influential postwar British historians. Indian history, the life and influence of Jawaharlal Nehru, the life and work of Edward John Thompson, were all of great significance in the development of this 'deviant'. And yet this realization on E. P. Thompson's part, buried in a relatively obscure essay in one of his less-read works - indeed, in a work which is more political than historical in nature parallels the status of India in British history itself. It is a central part of the story, but seldom recognized as such. 7 Moreover, there is a distinct irony here that we wish to highlight in this paper. A man so shaped and influenced by the existence of the British Empire as it was represented in Anglo-Indian history, who described himself as having had his 'political consciousness cut its teeth on the causes of Spain and Indian Independence', and who modeled himself on his father, almost entirely denied a place for the empire and imperialism in his own historical writing. 8 While the influence of the father is clearly present in the work of the son, empire itself is conspicuous by its absence. 9 This would have a profound impact on E. P. Thompson's analysis and would consequently shape the development of social history in Britain and the United States. 10 In this essay, therefore, we intend to highlight an aspect of E. P. Thompson's work that has received minimal attention in the various articles and festschrifts produced in his honor, namely his relationship with the British Empire within which he was born. 11 To describe this relationship fully, we focus on the legacy of the father, Edward John. Further, while we do not discuss here E. P. Thompson's influence on other Anglo-American social historians, we would argue that his centrality to the emergence of Social History means that this relationship with empire helped to shape the work of a whole generation of historians who followed in the younger Thompson's wake (a point returned to in Chapter 10). To understand the genealogy of Social History and developments within the Western historical profession over the last 30 years, therefore, the lens has to be widened so that it encompasses not just someone like E. P. Thompson, but, through him, Edward Thompson, Jawarhalal Nehru, and Vinayak Savarkar as well.12 Unearthing such genealogies should make us more keenly aware of the politics of history writing, 'its conditions of production, its power to shape knowledge systems and to hide its own (in this case) orientalist origins and presumptions'. 13
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ALL ABOUT R. TAGORE 'Oyez! Oyez! Assemble, ye fellers! Hear this dreadful charge! A reducto ad absurdam! An agent-on-earth of the Governor of Hades Himself, versus one Neophyte the Bitter-One! A partnership, a Quis separabit! do, and the consequences thereof.' G. V. Desani, All About H Hatterr At the end we shall find our beginning. One of E. P. Thompson's last published works was Alien Homage, a tribute to the relationship between his father and Rabindranath Tagore, which had culminated in Edward John's study of the Bengali poet's life and work. 14 This study of Tagore was the elder Thompson's first full-length book, beginning his transition from poet and teacher in Bankura to historian and political commentator at Oriel College, Oxford. What strikes one immediately is the fact that this work was the son's attempt to come to terms with his own background and heritage. Its timing is therefore significant. While E. P. Thompson would say that he began to 'reason' in his thirtieth year, he began to consider empire when he was twice that age, and this was 'unbidden and unplanned'. He had inherited his father's papers chronicling the latter's 'long association with India,' but had made little use of them until 1986, when a conference was held in honor of the 125th anniversary of Tagore's birth. 15 This was also the moment when Thompson was in the process of returning to historical writing after many years of anti-nuclear and anti-European Community political activism; at the time, in short, when, with the events following in the wake of Gorbachev's ascent in the Soviet Union, the post-Second-World-War political alignments were beginning to crumble, taking with them many of the sureties and axioms encompassing Plato and NATO. By the time Alien Homage was published in 1993, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet bloc was no longer, and South African apartheid seemed to be on the wane. Now the empire could get back in, and perhaps (though no attribution should be given to Thompson here) its role in forestalling ethnic strife could be given some consideration. Whatever the ultimate spin given to Britain's 'colonial contributions', E. P. Thompson's own reading of his father's encounter would begin to reveal some of the imperial residue to be found in his own writings. As is the case for many historians, Edward John Thompson's ideas underwent considerable change during his life. In the simplest terms, he moved toward a more liberal position with regard to India - as his
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son would note, he would become 'a friend of India'. But this could mean any number of things: from a missionary in India bringing Christianity to benighted souls; to an avid reader, translator and presenter of Tagore and other Bengali writers (whose work could receive multiple readings); or to an advocate of Indian independence and friend of Nehru. It could also mean, at different times, an outright imperialist. After all, from one English perspective the British Empire was a civilizing mission, bringing the 'benefits of the English language and governmental traditions to India'. Clearly, both James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay perceived themselves and the Empire in this way, and Edward Thompson's partial endorsement of the latter's 'Minute on Indian Education' reveals the ambiguities of his own friendliness toward India even at the end of his life.16 But determining the extent to which Edward Thompson was a 'friend of India' is in many ways immaterial. Judging him for his views and actions is also beside the point. Compared to many of his compatriots he should be viewed positively. This is no doubt the reason for E. P. Thompson's chagrin that his father had been criticized so heavily and, in his view, unfairly. Edward Thompson certainly did attempt to cross boundaries and make 'homages' to Indians and Indian culture that relatively few Britons at the time were making. The point, though, is that in doing so he nevertheless replicated imperial models, and even while he might be described, generously, as a 'crusading opponent of British policy in India', 17 he was a great believer in the imperial system. The analyses of both Benita Parry and Allen J. Greenberger of Thompson's novels are very persuasive and almost unanswerable on this score. 'During the time of his active involvement in British-Indian politics,' Parry writes, '[Thompson's] analyses of British rule in India did not come to grips with a critique of its imperialist core.' He retained a commitment to the British idea of empire. 'Not a few Englishmen are reluctant to let India go,' Thompson had written in 1930, 'not because of the tribute foreigners believe us to draw from it, but for the entirely unpractical reason that it has fired our dreams, and the best of our manhood has gone into her service.' 18 On the basis of comments such as this, Parry concludes: Thompson's expression of respect for Indian creativity is certainly genuine, as is his opinion that there are national attainments as valuable as political power. But in accepting the boundaries of 'the Empire's life' as fixed and in conceding as valid such concepts as
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making relations 'safe', Thompson is thinking within the conceptual framework of England's dominion over India and is offering proposals calculated to ensure its continuation. 19 In spite of his best efforts to avoid doing so, E. P. Thompson's own descriptions of his father's relationship with Rabindranath Tagore and other Indian intellectuals in Alien Homage, confirm much of the picture described by Parry. E. P. Thompson believed that his father's 'hankering for a continuation in some form of the Indian-British connection - whether by the name of a "dominion" or by whatever name - has too easily been mistaken for a vestigial "imperialism".' 20 In fact, this is not the substance of Parry's argument. It is not the desire for an Indian-British connection that presents a hint of 'vestigial imperialism', it is rather the assumption on which it is based: namely that the British had brought much that was good to India and this needed to be recognized for the sake of both countries. Moreover, E. P. Thompson's analysis of his father's relationship with Tagore was, as might be expected given the nature of both his sources and his relationship to one of his subjects, distinctly biased. In some ways, it replicates Edward Thompson's analysis of Indian history and culture. 21 It sets out to be fair and to give 'both sides' of the story, but the sources and the relationship to the English side lead the author to cast that side in a more favorable light than the Indian. Tagore ends up seeming to be the man whom Edward Thompson believed he was: a great writer who was unable to maintain control over his work's representation; a man who, in spite of his spirituality, became increasingly vain and susceptible to the flattery of his followers; one who, once manipulated, was unable to accept criticism from an 'unbiased' biographer; and an artist who allowed his work, at different times, to appeal to westernized tastes or to become influenced by the politics of Nationalism. E. P. Thompson criticized his father somewhat less harshly for being naive, perhaps even for having delusions of grandeur, but never for being totally wrong, nor for having let his preconceptions about art and society shape his interpretation of Tagore and Bengali culture. He could not formulate such a critique, because he himself shared his father's preconceptions. E. P. Thompson concluded his study by suggesting that his father's relationship with Tagore provided a glimpse 'into something different to the approved views which predominate in the historical memory today' (p. 101). This was an 'interface between two cultures' and an 'authentic encounter' (p. 10). As such, the relationship and
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Thompson's accounts of it taken from his father's record move us beyond 'nostalgias for the British Raj; the sometimes simplified nationalist historiography which can see nothing but strategy and tactics of the independence struggle; the easy ex post facto "radicalism" of Western guilt which assumes that, by definition, every cultural exchange must be read only in terms of colonial exploitation' (p. 101). These three groupings would have been familiar to Edward Thompson himself. What the elder Thompson claimed throughout his life was that there was an alternative to the 'approved views', and that he presented something that was unique: an 'authentic encounter' between two cultures that could guide imperial development (after all, was not the problem with Tagore the fact that he had ceased to be authentic? Thompson could correct this for the benefit of both the English and Bengalis). E. P. Thompson ended Alien Homage by almost conceding everything to his father. Of course, something so stark would not be possible today, because of the '"radicalism" of Western guilt' that is abroad. So Thompson turned to Partha Chatterjee to provide another kind of defense for his father (and, though no such defense is needed, we use this word since E. P. Thompson was explicit about this purpose behind his work 22 ). His father 'was in a no win situation', E. P. Thompson wrote, revealing his penchant for binarisms: 'In a profoundly influential formative moment, Indian nationalism had conceded the superiority of the West in material questions: its science, technology and dedication to material progress. But in cultural matters and especially "in the spiritual aspect of culture, the East was superior - and hence undominated."' 23 He then quoted a 'private communication to me from Professor Chatterjee': There was no way Bengalis were going to allow Thompson to become a critic of Bengali literature: it was ruled out precisely by the colonial relation.... There was a large domain of 'material' activities where Western superiority was conceded.... But a supposedly 'spiritual' or 'inner' domain was proclaimed where nationalism asserted its own sovereignty. Colonial interference was forbidden in this domain. Literature was very much a part of this inner spiritual domain of national life ... and no criticisms by the West could ever be legitimate there. (p. 102) Putting aside the question of the origin of these binarisms, whether they come from E. P. Thompson's own influence on Indian historians
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or another unadulterated source, it is clear that their net effect was to save Edward Thompson from any blame for the failure of his 'alien homage'. For, in this view, his efforts would always appear to Bengalis to be patronizing, insulting, or erroneous, regardless of how close to 'the truth' they approached. Edward, his son maintained, had attempted to be 'fair', using Indian friends like Brajendranath Seal and Prasant Mahalanobis as sources for many of his assessments. Moreover, 'some of his criticisms of nationalist attitudes and Indian social conservatism may not be unfounded - they are rather close to Tagore's' (p. 103). So he was doomed to failure; and his failure, such as it was, should be seen as only a product of the post-World-War-One decline of the British Empire, the rise of Indian Nationalist sentiment - in short, the vagaries of the Indian political situation. What we should learn from this 'authentic encounter,' E. P. Thompson believed, was something that might enable us to rise above the politics of the inter-war years to something transcending the imperial context (again, this was his father's wish also). But this is all too convenient, and leaves us missing the legacies of the encounter. If we return to Partha Chatterjee's communication, we can see that Edward Thompson's problem appeared to stem from his desire to enter the Bengali world of literature on an equal footing with Bengali literati. If one takes his work on Tagore in isolation, this is indeed how it would appear. The case is made more complicated, however, by a number of facts. First, Thompson seemed to suggest that while Bengalis were indeed superior in the 'spiritual domain', they needed an outsider to remind them of this fact, to keep them on the right path so that they did not stray down the path of western materialism. Thompson would provide a middle way, attempting, as his son would later describe it, to be 'a liminal figure', understanding both cultures and mediating between them. Naturally, this privileged Thompson's own position and implicitly allowed his notions of fairness and objectivity (derived in part from idealizations of the 'West's' scientific method, which in turn were derived from the British position of political supremacy in India) to encroach on Bengali 'sovereignty'. It is not surprising that Thompson could get up the noses of Tagore and later Seal, while C. F. Andrews, whom E. P. Thompson would dismiss as being a sycophant, remained in good standing. 24 Interestingly, Edward Thompson's position with regard to Tagore, Seal, and later Gandhi and Nehru, is analogous to E. P. Thompson's relationship to the Communist Party, though no moral equivalence is intended. Both Thompsons saw themselves as being outside a
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movement shaped by irrational and unreasoning forces. Both presented their own ability to 'reason' and be 'reasonable' - in fact, their ability to use 'English method' (cricket and empiricism) - to provide an alternative to the party/nationalist line. For E. P. Thompson, situated 'Outside the Whale', his antagonists from Margaret Thatcher to Perry Anderson were Hegelians, conforming to some idealist system, whether of the left or the right. For Edward, the antagonists, both imperialists and nationalists, were mired in their own cultural assumptions, unable to enter the 'caves of forbidden history' without 'holding high the torch of... blazing hatred', whether in the name of Cawnpore or Jallianwalla. Father and son refused to concede the idealistic (Hegelian, for E. P.) basis for their own concept of reason. Second, the nature of Thompson's criticisms tended towards the generalization of Bengali culture - 'the mediocrity of the derivative "babu culture"', the spirituality of authentic culture, and so on. The very static (and, given the connection with Seal, one could say Hegelian) characterization of culture (which was then replicated in E. P. Thompson's account), could only be employed by an outsider, without fear of insult, to praise the culture of another. The notion that a group had ascendancy in a particular social or artistic arena was central to imperial discourse, so the critical generalization would immediately connect with related hierarchies. At no point could it represent, as both Thompsons felt it should, a 'free republic of universal letters'. 25 Finally, the elder Thompson's studies of Tagore were just one part of his work, which also included (outside of his teaching duties at Bankura and Oxford) the writing of novels, poetry, political tracts, and histories. In these other writings, the generalizations found in Thompson's work on Tagore were marshalled to legitimate British imperial rule. In particular, the terrain of history was crucial, as Nehru clearly understood; for if Indians were merely 'spiritual', then they were clearly not in a position to fully comprehend their own history. While Nehru would later argue in his own historical writing that such notions needed to be contested, Thompson felt that Indians' history needed to be written for them by sympathetic Englishmen trained in the art of historical thinking and methodology - 'friends of India' like himself. And it is here that we see how Chatterjee's notion of Western 'material superiority' might lead to the privileging of this historical writing (derived as it was believed to be from the West's 'science, technology and material progress'). Thompson's opposition
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to Nationalism, then, did not merely reflect his consternation at the infiltration of politics into the realm of art, though this was a position of imperial significance in its own right; it also reflected his dismissal of an Indian's ability to formulate a meaningful Nationalist politics, based, as he believed it necessarily had to be, on such a flimsy comprehension of history. All this would change, as he would be confronted with clear refutation of his belief (an Indian historian who cited Thompson's work), but in the meantime he was likely to upset Indians regardless of the friendliness of his disposition.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY To find parallels to the sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, nor even wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war, an event, so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by mandarins, but by British officers themselves. Karl Marx 26 The work that has made Edward Thompson seem most politically anti-imperial is The Other Side of The Medal.21 Seen in isolation and in light of the consternation it aroused in British circles, this work does indeed appear to cast Thompson as 'a crusader against British Imperial policy'. Once it is realized that any opposition (however minimal) to British administration in India would, at this time, cause widespread hostility, that there was room for many positions under the imperial umbrella, and once the text itself is examined closely, it becomes difficult to see Thompson as anything other than an imperialist opponent of the direction of British Imperial policy. This position is then confirmed in his biographical work on Sir Walter Ralegh and Charles Theophilus Metcalfe. These works will be considered briefly in turn, before we examine The Making of the Indian Princes and consider how the family tree may have shaped 'the Liberty Tree', to borrow from Bryan D. Palmer.
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In The Other Side of the Medal Thompson responded to the changed conditions in India that he found when he returned from his wartime service in Mesopotamia. 28 As many people at the time suggested, much of the earlier justification for British imperialism had been contradicted by the events of the First World War. European justifications for their rule of African and Asian peoples now appeared to be specious and self-serving. Thompson and Garratt later noted in The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India that, added to the war itself, the Irish Rebellion and the rise to prominence of Tilak in 1914 signified that the Empire's legitimacy was on the wane. 29 They wrote: 'From the Indian standpoint the War had finally killed the idea of European superiority, and roused new ambitions and new hopes.' Then came the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of 1919 and other events at Amritsar, precipitated by the sense of self-doubt among Europeans and the increased political self-assertion among the colonized. For Thompson, these events 'formed a turning-point in Indo-British relations almost as important as the Mutiny'. The British responded to their own increased fears by exacerbating racial discord and adding to the climate of bigotry. And Thompson felt that such events were a continuation of the reaction to the Mutiny itself, which had become so shrouded in self-serving mystery and lies that the British would continue to use it to justify future acts of repression. What was needed, therefore, the former missionary felt, was to bring the light of reason and historical objectivity to bear on the subject of the Mutiny; to cast light on the shadows that captivated English minds about the savagery of Indians; to bring to people's attention the terrible acts of men like General Neill at Allahabad; and, to make the English aware of the need to atone for their acts. Only by doing this could the British Empire be saved from its continued slide into racial discord. 30 Thompson saw 'the Mutiny' as a transformative moment in the history of Britain's empire in India as the British altered their attitudes toward the colonized. The English during the Mutiny had gone mad, and had committed acts that would earlier have been considered unthinkable. According to Thompson: the Mutiny - that nightmare of innumerable savage hands suddenly upraised to kill helpless women and children - has been responsible for the waves of hysteria which from time to time have swept the European community.... And there can be no doubt that the dramatic and heightened fashion in which the Mutiny has been
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pictured to us has been responsible for deeds that would have been impossible to Englishmen in their right frame of mind. (pp. 87-88) He further pointed to the memory of the Bibighur incident at Cawnpore as the subtext for the behavior of Englishmen in the Punjab in April 1919. 'At Jallianwala and during the outcry which our people made afterwards we see the workings of imperfectly informed minds obsessed with the thought of Cawnpore and of merciless, unreasoning "devils" butchering our women' (p. 95). But, as Vinay Lai notes, 'Thompson appeared to forget other incidents of barbarity, such as the Highland Clearances, which continued over a very long period of time, [and] were as brutal as anything that has been seen. It seems pointless to pretend that barbarism is the monopoly of a certain people and that others are exempt from such practices.' 31 Thompson's view of the Mutiny missed other precedents for English actions, the nation's invasions of Ireland, Anglo-American genocidal treatment of Indian populations in the New World, multiple atrocities in China, British involvement in the slave trade, and so on. Besides this, his analysis performed a similar function as accounts of the Nat Turner uprising in the United States, seeing the source of white barbarism (Lintch's Law) in the actions of the slaves - missing the fact that these people felt they were responding to their own sense of injustice and barbarity.32 Perhaps the most telling comment on India and Indians is Thompson's assessment that the history of the 'Mutiny' needed to be written by the English. For: Indians are not historians; and they rarely show any critical ability. Even their most useful books, books full of research and information, exasperate with their repetitions and diffuseness, and lose effect by their uncritical enthusiasms. Such solid highways to scholarly esteem and approval as indexes and bibliographies are almost unknown to them. So they are not likely to displace our account of our connection with India. They are not able to arrange their knowledge so as to gain that first essential towards a favourable judgment, a hearing. But if they know that our account of certain enormously important events is unfair - and how can they help but know, being so sensitively concerned with them? - their failure to set their knowledge forth will only deepen their resentment. (pp.29-30)
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Thompson here naturalized a linkage between scholarly methods and acceptance of conclusions, which if not so naturalized could only appear to be historically contingent and, ultimately, imperialist. But the linkage was important for Thompson, and he felt that through that educational experiment which was the British Empire, Indians would attain this ability in the future: 'And some day,' he wrote, 'a century hence, perhaps - Indian traditions and accounts of the Mutiny will be taken into the reckoning. It will be treated as history, not prejudice or propaganda. It will become a terrible but most enthralling story' (p. 105). But, while terrible, this story would not depart dramatically from Thompson's own horrific account. And, any belief that it would contribute to a Nationalist politics needed to be dispelled immediately; for Nationalist historians would rely on 'uncritical enthusiasms', unacceptable for such 'a reckoning'. As Thompson's assessment here seems to hint, his analysis of 'the Mutiny' had to contend with the fact that a very significant nationalist account of the same events had been produced more than 15 years earlier with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's The War of Independence of 1857.33 How Thompson dealt with this work is very significant, because in many respects his intention was to counteract this inflammatory text. In a letter written soon after The Other Side's publication, he wrote: it was time a cruel, lying legend, which has poisoned our minds for twenty years, was blown out of existence, and time that Indian history began to be treated in a spirit of scholarship ... I wanted to help root out of the Indian mind some of its 'inferiority complex' and sense of misrepresentation, as well as our own misunderstanding.34 One would be forgiven for assuming from this that reforming 'the Indian mind' was a more pressing need than correcting English misunderstandings. Savarkar's text, then, was not a source to be 'reckoned' with in terms of scholarship; it was rather one that had to be 'blown out of existence' as an example of the resentment that could build up among Indians owing to the kinds of treatment of the war in English histories. 'The bitterness is often most deeply felt by Indians in England,' Thompson wrote. He continued, simultaneously introducing the author of this significant study and providing the grounds for his dismissal: 'Vinayak Savarkar, now serving a life-sentence in the Andamans for complicity in the murder of Sir Curzon Wyllie, was a student in London. What made him an irreconcilable there, amid the
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frank kindliness that so many Indians have testified to receiving in England? The answer lies in what was his absorbed study,' his War of Indian Independence of 1857 (p. 122). Rather than examining the text directly and providing his own assessment of it (he may not have been able to do so), Thompson instead relied on The Times's Indian Correspondent, Sir Valentine Chirol, for an assessment of the work. Chirol had written that Savarkar's study was 'in its way a very remarkable history of the Mutiny, combining considerable research with the grossest perversions of facts, and great literary power with the most savage hatred'. 35 Needless to say, Chirol's assessment ought itself to be considered a gross perversion of fact. Savarkar's study, which employed most of the same sources used by Thompson, differed from The Other Side of the Medal because of its author's Nationalist political position - a position that Thompson found either laughable or anathema at this time. But the story does not end there. Thompson returned to his high horse to describe Savarkar further: Readers may remember his attempt to escape when being taken out of India for trial; he jumped from the ship and swam ashore at Marseilles, being handed back, after hesitation and discussion, as a man accused of a felony and not a political offence. Without palliating his crime, Englishmen may regret that our Empire can do nothing with a youth who combined such pluck with 'great literary power' but send him to penal servitude for life. He entered caves of forbidden history, holding high the torch of his blazing hatred; and he described all the deeds which we hoped would never be seen. He read our cold, insolently self-righteous accounts of that most wretched and brutal war; and a madness worked in his brain, which ended in a murder which - with some people, at any rate - shadows Indians studying in our midst to-day. (pp.122-3) Here we see the alternative imperial mission that Edward Thompson wished for, accompanied by an exceedingly uncritical assessment of the British Empire's treatment of Savarkar. Thompson ended this passage with the rather bland statement: 'Savarkar's History of the Mutiny is proscribed. It is best that it should be.' And, rather selfservingly, he then suggested that even though it was necessary to have 'a veil drawn over certain aspects of that war [by which he meant any claims to a nationalist politics], we must give the Indian case recognition in our own histories' (p. 123). We can now see from our
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post-colonial, if not quite post-imperial, vantage point that if 'fair' and 'objective' histories can only survive when compared to histories that have been created after 'a madness' has affected the author's brain, when the latter is proscribed then the objectivity of the former has to be called into question. We perhaps find it yet more objectionable that the 'fair' historian should then be in a position to certify himself as the person most qualified to speak for the person whose frames of reference have been colored by suffering the indignities of what even the 'objective' historian admits amounts to no more than racial denigration. Perhaps if this were all that there was to the Savarkar story then Edward Thompson might be let off with a mild caution. But Thompson's account, not only of the work itself but of Savarkar, is grossly inaccurate. No doubt this was due to the fact that sources were not available to him, or he did not choose to dig very far beneath the surface of a rather despicable episode in government censorship and suspension of the 'rule of law'. First of all, the charge against Savarkar, that he was complicit in the murder of Sir William Curzon Wyllie (John Morley's political secretary), while not entirely trumped up, was certainly complicated by political considerations. Whether or not Savarkar was implicated in the murder of Wyllie, he was a political prisoner, made so because of his authorship of War of Indian Independence. Moreover, the crime itself was one that without the publication of this nationalist history probably would not have taken place. 36 Originally this book had been written in Marathi in 1908, when Savarkar was about 24 years of age. A few select chapters were reproduced in English in speeches that the author gave at the weekly meetings of the Free India Society in London, where he was studying for a law degree, sponsored by Shyamji Krishnavarma. 37 Soon the volume drew the attention of the British Intelligence Department which declared the text 'revolutionary, explosive and treasonous' and proceeded to steal chapters from the original manuscript to examine. The manuscript was sent by the author and his friends to Bombay, but no printing houses dared to publish it there, until the owner of a printing firm who was a member of the Abhi Nava Bharat Secret Society (ANB) decided to publish it. The knowledge that the manuscript was being published brought on a raid of numerous printing houses by the Indian police, but the text remained hidden and was then sent back to Savarkar, who was by this time in Paris. Wyllie himself was ordered by Morley to keep the India House under his watch, and the pressure
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that this placed on Savarkar and his associates, especially in the form of informants infiltrating the organization, quite possibly led to the decision to have him assassinated. After the failure to get the Marathi text printed in Germany it was decided that an English translation should be published instead. A number of 'Maratha youths' in London, members of the ANB and candidates for the ICS Examination, volunteered to translate the work. After its completion the text was sent to Paris, since all publishers in Britain either objected to the work or feared prosecution. There similar difficulties were faced, as the recent signing of the Entente Cordiale led French police to collaborate with the British in attempting to suppress the work. Instead the ANB persuaded a Dutch printing firm to publish it, while indicating to the police that the work was being undertaken in France. 38 Losing touch with the manuscript and unable to suppress it, the British and Indian Governments took the unprecedented step of proscribing the book even though they knew it had not yet been printed. Even The Times believed that these actions proved that there must be 'something very rotten in the State of Denmark'. Following publication, the ANB smuggled hundreds of copies of the work into India wrapped in covers entitled 'Don Quixote', 'Scott's Works', or 'Pickwick Papers'. 39 In 1910, therefore, the British and Indian Governments 'launched a violent campaign of persecutions and prosecutions with a view to crushing the ANB Secret Society'. Several revolutionaries were hanged; several transported for life; hundreds sentenced to terms extending from 10 to 14 years of rigorous imprisonment. Savarkar was arrested in London on the grounds that, owing to his membership in the ANB, he was complicit in the murder of Wyllie, as well as because he had shipped 20 guns back to India. 40 The British Government was willing to play fast and loose with the question of whether Savarkar was a political prisoner or a common criminal. When he climbed through a porthole of the ship that was taking him back to India and swam ashore at Marseilles, the British claimed that he was a criminal being returned to India to face trial for murder. 41 He quickly became a cause celebre, with many Europeans recognizing the illegitimacy of the charges. Even Sir Henry Cotton, according to Savarkar, 'hoped that the International Court of justice at Hague would restore me to France and thus save itself from being the instrument of trampling under foot every man's bare right to hold his own opinions without any molestation from the State'. 42 When, however, it came time for his trial he was charged with
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'waging war against the King' and he was sentenced 'to transportation for life and forfeiture of his property'. To show overwhelming proof of his guilt, the special tribunal which sentenced him did so by quoting a statement Savarkar had made in London in 1908: 'The war begun on the 10th May 1857 is not over on the 10th of May 1908, nor can it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished and our Motherland stands free!' 43 His guilt was fabricated on political grounds; 'the rule of law' which both Thompsons cherished as one of Britain's great contributions to India was suspended, and it would be Savarkar who would be accused by English historians of gross fabrications. 44 By 1924, however, before Thompson had begun his own manuscript on 'the Mutiny', Savarkar was released from prison. Clearly the British Government felt their treatment of the author was unwarranted, but his work remained proscribed till after Independence was achieved. That Thompson remained silent about Savarkar's case, except to bemoan the Empire's failure to employ a man with such 'pluck' more fittingly, and that he should have been wrong about key facts in the case speaks volumes about his inability or unwillingness to use the historical record to contest imperial assumptions. Moreover, there are important and fundamental differences between the two authors' texts. Thompson's text is in effect the description of and protest against a lynching, or a mass lynching. Savarkar's text is more akin to an account of a slave rebellion that unfortunately did not succeed. As such, Thompson's account (while making overtures to the Indians) was focused on the misguided actions of the British. Savarkar's history sees the Indians as actors, having strong and well-articulated reasons for rebellion, and carrying through these ideas almost regardless of the nobility or ignominy of individual English men and women. The Other Side of the Medal is premised on the notion that 'the Mutiny' represented a loss of innocence. The British Empire had worked well and had brought significant benefits to the Indian subcontinent, but the events of 1857 had derailed this. Thompson asked the English to atone for sins committed in the aftermath of the mutiny; but the reason to do so was to consolidate imperial relations through greater harmony between British and Indian peoples. Savarkar cared little for such atonement and certainly found no loss of innocence. While he did not shy away from describing the horrors of the 'war', he saw these largely as either the result of war or an extension of imperial rule - this is what happens when exploiters are
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threatened. Such horrors could not be atoned for, they could only be terminated through Independence. Thompson saw the Mutiny as reflecting widespread discontent. Historians ought not to dismiss it as merely a mutiny that had been poorly managed by authorities, even if this was how it began. But, that it was poorly managed, and that the reprisals got out of hand was, for Thompson, beyond question. If it had been handled differently, if the rulers had been more sensitive to and knowledgeable about Indian customs, then perhaps the initial outbreak as well as certainly the aftermath of resentment could have been avoided. What the British did, in fact, was ignore the rule of law. Too many people, the innocent alongside the guilty, were executed; and the manner in which they were executed was barbaric. In such conclusions, however, Thompson discounted the idea that the uprising might be politically motivated, at least through a politics of Nationalism. He was also inclined to the view that many of the claims about the Indians, particularly at Cawnpore, were actually true. This is what brought his account into close proximity with that of an American lynching.45 Rather than seeing that certain actions were either invented by their opponents in order to justify vicious repression, or perhaps regrettable actions undertaken in the middle of a conflict, Thompson instead saw such actions as both true and without political merit. 46 They were the cause of a new infection affecting the British in India so severely. Savarkar would have found little difficulty labelling Thompson's text as historically biased against Indians and he would have questioned the other historian's claims that the British record was commendable apart from this one outbreak. And what of Savarkar's claim that the conflict was a nationalist war for independence? Thompson scoffed. Even later, when Thompson had to face the fact that Indians were capable of writing history, he was still unwilling to consider the idea that the Mutiny was a war of independence. In The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, he and G. T. Garratt argued that during the summer months of 1857 it did seem 'that the Mutiny might develop into a real war of independence, which would make reconquest impossible'. But, he continued, 'By September it was clear that the Indians who were in revolt were incapable of working to any settled plan, or of subordinating themselves to a national leader. Their prestige was waning, and their commanders had proved themselves incompetent except in guerilla warfare' (pp. 438-9). Their failure, in effect, defined them; as, we might suppose, the success of revolutionists in America three-quarters of a
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century earlier had defined them. But the authors then returned to the text that would not die: Paradoxically it is an article of faith amongst Indian nationalists to describe the Mutiny as a war of independence. This may be due to the proscription of Savarkar's War of Indian Independence of 1857, a book which states the Indian case with force, but with little critical acumen. It is a poor compliment to Indian courage and ability to treat this revolt as an organised national movement. It was repressed by a minute force. Its leaders, when in a position to prove their competence as rulers, were a failure. Historical accuracy, as well as respect for Indian ability, makes it requisite to stress the small part taken in the revolt by the better elements in the country. (p. 438, n. 2) Such a statement, so pregnant with historical bias and ethnocentricity, illustrates that even when Thompson was seen to be moving towards a pro-Nationalist position he was still working within the same old imperial framework: Who are 'the better elements?' What constitutes 'a minute force', when that force is organized for military conquest and is capable of using all the mechanisms of terror at its disposal? What, in a situation of warfare, can we consider competent rule - the claim used against all revolutionaries from Toussaint L'Ouverture to Maurice Bishop? And, returning to Savarkar, how does he manage to state 'the Indian case with force, but with little critical acumen'? But to be fair to Thompson, Savarkar too was concerned with some of these issues, though perhaps he need not have been. He wished to highlight Indian 'courage and ability', as well as highlight their competence as rulers. He also believed that 'the better elements' were fighting the British, and employed any number of epithets to describe those Indians who remained loyal to 'the Feringhi'. More importantly, though - and here we have to question whether Thompson's assessment was founded on an actual reading of the Indian's text - Savarkar explained the failure of the War on the grounds that the plans which had been laid for rebellion by Azimullah Khan and Nana Saheb, set for the last day of May, were upset by the mutiny in Meerut occurring on 8 May. The result, according to Savarkar, was considerable confusion on the part of the revolutionaries about whether to act immediately, and a chance for the British to regroup and prepare themselves for the possibility of widespread rebellion. Using English historians as his source, Savarkar argued that
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the ground work for that rebellion was securely laid, and that, given the smallness of British forces, had the rebellion occurred as planned the Feringhi would have been routed quickly.47 Thompson failed to engage this argument, even though the claim that 'the Mutiny' was part of a larger movement was one that many English historians had proposed as explanation for the need for British officials to perform their duty and commit widespread reprisals.48 Where 'the truth' lies is beyond the scope of this paper: it is merely important to note that Savarkar's Nationalist position was actually founded in part on the 'critical acumen' of English historians, and that eliding this genealogy involved a sleight of hand on Thompson's part that protected his own claims to reasonableness and objectivity.49
RALLYING METCALFE I remember the small society, in which hearts communed with each other and happiness never flagged; but what is past is past, and the like will never come again. Metcalfe, 16 June, 1828 Taken together, Sir Walter Ralegh: Last of the Elizabethans and The Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe describe the highs and lows of empire, and reveal Thompson's commitment to the imperial project: Ralegh, in as much as he represented the Elizabethans, was the low; Metcalfe was the high.50 Together also, the subjects of these works were to be guides for the student of British imperialism wishing to comprehend the possibilities and achievements of the British around the world, alongside the recently decried lapses of imperial vision. With Ralegh, Thompson slapped contemporary administrators on the wrist for being like the Elizabethans: 'The Pax Victoriana has vanished,' Thompson wrote. 'My own generation, from the insecurity and changes and variety of our experience, seems to me closer in sympathy to the Elizabethans than any intervening generation has been.' 51 Ralegh was the last of the Elizabethans because he paved the way for something new: [Ralegh] 'could carry on half a dozen enterprises abreast'; was historian, poet, philosopher, writer on naval affairs, courtier, statesman, soldier, admiral, privateer, shipbuilder, patriot, chemist, solonizer, empire-planner, Member of Parliament, administrator, patron of authors and scientists and unpopular thinkers, intriguer, martyr.
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He was mired in Ireland during his youth, but extricated himself from the barbarism of English treatment of the Irish to pursue grander schemes. And it is with Ireland that we see Thompson's brief most clearly stated: for Elizabethan Ireland was akin to post-Mutiny India. Echoes of India are found in his assessment of England's 'case' in Ireland: England's case ... is completed if we add that there was more justification than Nationalist idealization now admits, for the belief that the Irish were savages. Their ancient civilization did not prevent incessant civil war; and England, treating them as wild beasts, kept them in the wild beast way of living. (p. 14) But the English went too far. Quoting Froude and McFee, Thompson notes that Irish 'extinction was contemplated with as much indifference as the destruction of the Red Indians of North America by the politicians of Washington' and 'Ireland was territory to be cleared of its savage inhabitants and settled by civilised people'. 52 The problem, according to Thompson, was: 'Ethics came late to the men of Ralegh's generation, and their coming was not hastened by this using of Ireland as a finishing school to the French religious wars and the semi-piracy of privateering' (p. 16). But with Ralegh, at least, there was the dawning of the new ethics. Thompson summarized Ralegh's work in Ireland thus: It is horrible to remember Ralegh in Ireland; it is horrible to remember any Elizabethan in Ireland. And of course, by that high and noble tradition of truthfulness which distinguishes the AngloSaxon race {not in our own idealization of ourselves only, but in the general judgment of the outside world), he falls short. But this tradition has been 'British' for a very brief period [about as long as cricket, perhaps!]. It was not Elizabethan; still less, infinitely less, was it Jacobean. Yet even by this test Ralegh falls less than most of his contemporaries, though he was exposed to the temptations which beset the poet and the man whose mind stirs fiercely and always. When the worst has been said against him, he belongs to a different world from that of the Cecils and Bacons; and mankind will less and less be in any peril of confounding him with them. (p. 393) 'To remember Walter Ralegh,' Thompson concluded, 'is to remember valor, imagination, magnanimity,' a conclusion that an Irish
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nationalist, continuing to confuse Ralegh with Cecil and Bacon, might find a little hard to stomach. But whether or not 'ethics' were to be found in Ireland, they were certainly evident in India. For, in India, there was a generation of scholar-statesmen - the intellectual descendants of Ralegh 53 - who were not merely the exceptions but who ran the show. Their greatness lay in their vision, their desire for knowledge, and their pursuit of 'essential truth': Indeed, there was among them such widespread and critical reading of Persian poetry that it is strange that the taste did not communicate itself to people in England, long before FitzGerald's translation of Omar Khayyam. Men like Malcolm, Jenkins, Elphinstone, Metcalfe, and in the next generation Alexander Burnes, studied Hafiz and Saadi, commenting on them in a manner which showed they had got into their very idiom and emotion, far closer than to those of Horace and Virgil at their schools.54 (p. 24) While Metcalfe's life seemed to embody all the greatness of the generation, a conclusion that Thompson shared with Macaulay (who wrote Metcalfe's epitaph), it is the biographer's description of Archibald Seton which most clearly laid out the type: [Seton] won respect in an exceptional degree. He had shrewdness and insight; and a spirit of such generosity, patience, tolerance had hardly yet been seen in India, though it was the age of Barry Close, Munro, Malcolm, Metcalfe. Never has England been served by another such group of men operating on this high ethical and intellectual level - Plato's philosopher turned governor (for almost the first, and perhaps the last, time in imperial history) with success. Seton was in many ways in advance of them all. (pp. 66-7) The appeal of such individuals was accentuated by the 'realities' of the India with which they had to contend. For here were 'Orientals', 'a jealous untrustful race', some of whom were 'troubled in their dark barbaric minds' (p. 76). And Ranjit Singh, with whom Metcalfe had many dealings, was found to make exhalations 'from the suspicious murk that served him for a mind' (p. 85). It was also made apparent by the nobility of the British cause, when the 'Government desired no territory, having no ambition except the good of all men and of its own subjects in particular' (p. 92), and when men like Malcolm,
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Munro, and Metcalfe were administering justly with their minds 'open to the thought of the people they were serving and ruling' (p. 133). Absent from consideration, however, was the involvement of such officials in the East India Company's burgeoning opium trade with China.55 But in sustaining a commitment to the British Empire rightly conceived, Edward Thompson also retained an understanding of imperial connections, something that his son jettisoned from his historical writing. For the father, English history was very much wrapped in an imperial package: Ralegh was fashioned in Ireland and served his queen from Trinidad to Newfoundland; Metcalfe served, as Macaulay was proud to note, in India, Jamaica (at a crucial time after emancipation), and Canada. The Napoleonic Wars, a prime mover in The Making of the English Working Class, were, as the father recognized, to a large extent decided outside Europe. While the French suffered crucial defeats against the British and her allies at the Battle of the Nile and at Assaye, securing the empire in India and making possible the transfer of Arthur Wellesley to the Iberian Peninsula, Napoleon's imperial pretensions suffered an even more stunning blow at the hands of former slaves in Saint Domingue. The father was aware of such things, while the son, in spite of the significance of Saint Domingue for the establishment of a 'liberty tree', ignored them. Indeed, the father shows that at a time when many Britons were deeply ambivalent towards the English cause in the Napoleonic War, it was some relief to the Pitt administration that it could rely on the East India Company. In Calcutta, Edward Thompson wrote: under the domination of 'the glorious little man', as the imperious excited Governor-General was called, patriotic resolution blazed more fiercely than even in London. London had wide stretches of apathy, and scattered pockets of 'democrats' professed to find in the doctrines of revolutionary France those which their own land needed. But in India, where no one might land without the Company's leave, there was only one school of thought. (p. 22) And yet, even for the father Empire tended to move outwards from the center to the periphery. While Edward Thompson praised Metcalfe and his ilk with a lavishness seldom seen outside the panegyric, it may well be that their contributions to humane government, such as they were, came not from their schooling on the playing fields of Eton, but rather from their experience at the Peshwa's court in
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Poona (to borrow from the Duke of Wellington). Indeed, one of Metcalfe's greatest accomplishments even Thompson notes as being almost un-English. During his 'reign' as 'King of Dilhee' Metcalfe carried out not a single sentence of capital punishment. Yet it appears that Metcalfe may have learned this quality of mercy from the 'suspicious murk' of Ranjit Singh. And, Thompson further acknowledged, other English administrators could even learn from Indian administrators, 'the Marathas especially, [who] were on the whole ... far humaner than that of Great Britain at this time' (p. 123).56 In almost all things, Thompson believed, England was bringing light to India not vice versa. The possibility that the rule of law, or even nationalism itself, might have been heavily influenced by Indian traditions remained out of the question, unless of course they could be explained away as part of India's spiritual sphere.
INDIAN PRINCES MEET THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS As the age of decolonization is upon us, and given Bombay's infinitely greater staying power - as I write Yorkshire are at the bottom of the county championship, which they haven't won since 1968 would it not be more just to call Yorkshire 'England's Bombay'? Ramachandra Guha, Wickets in the East51 As its title might suggest, The Making of the Indian Princes incorporated certain themes that could later be carried over, implicitly or explicitly, into the son's work. The five that we will focus on here are: the idea of a crucial period of transformation in history, the notion of the 'making' of a social group during that period, the need for a new 'bottom-up' perspective, the gendering of social conflict and social history, and the recognition of the 'peculiar' English experience. 58 Both father and son shared the view that there was a transformative period falling roughly within the years 1789 and 1832 (though Indian Princes ended in 1819 with the establishment of the East India Company's paramountcy on the sub-continent). The English Working Class ends with the political reforms of the 1830s. For the father, this was also a period of 'wonderfully attractive men, vivid and eager and in the main tolerant and far-seeing'.59 Unfortunately, though, all the far-seeing men were in India, while the Benthamites and other reactionaries, whom the son decried, remained at home to plague those other attractive men, Cobbett, the Luddites, and the members of
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London's Corresponding Societies. And for the son this was the period of the great antinomian William Blake, the subject of one of his final works {Witness against the Beast) and clearly a model for E. P. Thompson to emulate. 60 The extent of the transformation occurring during this period has remained open to question. In the case of India, the idealization of Metcalfe, Malcolm et al. was all that differentiated this history from others, and even Edward John would recognize the 'personal' aspect to his intervention on Anglo-Indian history: he liked these people and what they read and wrote. 61 For The English Working Class, Hobsbawm and others have questioned the periodization of the work, and have suggested that the 'making' may have occurred at a later time. 62 In fact, though, if the imperial dimensions of class formation are taken into consideration, the period, with its assault on the slave trade and slavery, slave rebellions, the opening up of industrial production in India to pay for British goods, the establishment of the opium trade, the assault on the Irish (which Thompson writes about), and the influx of Irish laborers into the English labor market, may indeed be decidedly important - though for altogether different reasons. But in order to describe such a transformation, India (which receives no mention in the later Making) and the Irish (who receive 15 pages) have to be more than just a sideshow to the story of class formation. The second theme found in the works of both father and son was the 'making' of a social group. Here, though, the two differed also: in the case of the father Indians participated in the narrative but the actual 'making' was very much that of the English colonial authorities; in E. P. Thompson's case, the lower orders had 'agency' and contributed to their own future. Edward John's model clearly remained more instrumentalist and imperial; his son provided a more self-generative view of social change. But one of the ways Edward Palmer was able to attribute this level of agency to his subjects was by narrowing the focus so that imperial assumptions remained unquestioned. Once again, the Irish were important to this narrowing of focus. Cultural considerations were crucial for Thompson to class formation (this, after all, was one of his contributions to Marxist historiography), so determining what it was about the English that allowed for the development of working-class consciousness was extremely important: all the more so because, as he rightly noted, a great many Irish had recently entered England and had begun to fill up the lowest rungs of the labor market. How would such people be
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incorporated into the English working class? The answer was that they wouldn't be; they didn't have the experience of Methodism and Protestantism generally, they were still 'pre-industrial' in their outlooks and as yet unfamiliar with the harsh rigors of 'time-work discipline', which made them ideally suited for exploitation as cheap labor by mill owners and other capitalists.63 In proposing this argument, E. P. Thompson relied on imperial government and capitalist archives that had been established regarding potential labor sources, wherein all racial or ethnic groups were categorized according to the type of labor they were likely to provide. In this fluctuating and often contradictory hierarchy, the Chinese and the Indians were usually considered most desirable, Africans were considered desirable only if they were in the condition of slavery, while the Irish were believed to be good workers for certain kinds of unskilled jobs. The secret to all such assessments, however, was that capitalists wanted any labor that they could get more cheaply than the laborers they already had. 64 These latter had been desirable once, now they were no longer so. E. P. Thompson, therefore, fell back on many of the stereotypes employed by capitalists to describe their laborers, and failed to interrogate his sources. For example, 'The Report on the State of the Irish in Great Britain' was considered by Thompson 'one of the most impressive essays in sociology among the Blue Books of the Thirties'. It had concluded: 'The Irish emigration into Britain is an example of a less civilized population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilized community; and, without excelling in any branch of industry, obtaining possession of all the lowest departments of manual labour.' 65 By falling back on descriptions of the Irish that would have been consistent with those found in his father's chapters on Ireland in Ralegh, and consistent also with the elder Thompson's descriptions of the level of civilization of Indians (perhaps 'the Irish of the East'), cultural differences were made to account for labor-market differences and were made to seem almost irrelevant to the creation of'English' working-class culture. 66 As such, when E. P. Thompson described working-class agency he did so mainly in opposition to capitalism - and it seemed so pure. Once we take the Irish into consideration, however, class formation begins to look a lot more like the establishment of an aristocracy of labor, like the establishment of craft unions in the United States excluding blacks and immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century, or even like white workers attempting to establish color bars in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth. Clearly, the ability of a social
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group to contribute to their own formation was greater when there was another social group that could be set apart from them. Here E. P. Thompson's response to Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation is instructive.67 Thompson was troubled by Colley's apparently conflict-free description of the English working class. While he had described workers engaged in a bitter class struggle, she portrays them busily constructing the notion of the Briton. Thompson wrote: This is not to reject Colley's theses but to seek to qualify them. If they are 100% correct then my old study, The Making of the English Working Class, must be wrong. For I argued there, and elsewhere, that a significant part of the British experience in these years was the formation of the structures, oppositions and contradictory cultures of'class'. 'Class' was perhaps overworked in the 1960s and 1970s and it has become merely boring. It is a concept long past its sell-by date. Colley appears to share the prevalent view and evades any full discussion of the alienation, in the 18th century, between patricians and plebs, and in the early 19th century between, aristocracy, the middle class and the emergent working class. But I am not ready to capitulate. I cannot find one univocal nation of 'Britons'. (p. 326) But Thompson did not wish to fight over this issue. 'Perhaps we could compromise,' he wrote, 'by saying that the truth lies somewhere between my view and Colley's? I am certainly not proposing that there was an almost-revolution in Britain in the 1790s.' (p. 329) And yet without the empire brought into the picture there is no real possibility for compromise: one is likely to find either conflict or conformity (false consciousness). With the empire, and especially the Irish and Scots added to the soup as immediate examples of foreign, 'less civilized' labor, there is no need for compromise. The language and resolution of the most vitriolic class conflict revolves around the need for the assurance that the 'free-born Englishman' will not be placed in the position of virtual servitude like members of other 'less civilized races'. The third theme making its way from India to Yorkshire was that of the need for historians to turn historical scholarship on its head, to write history from the perspective of those who have been left out of the historical record. Implied within this was a political orientation and engagement for history. In the father's case this was a belated endorsement of Indian Nationalism; in the case of the son it was an
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interest in and commitment to politics defined by an understanding of working-class consciousness. If we take support for Indian Independence as the barometer of friendliness, then Edward Thompson became more of 'a friend to India' as his career developed. He moved in his earlier writings from a more reserved position with regard to India and the justifications for British presence on the sub-continent to one of outright advocacy of independence. By the time he began his final text, The Making of the Indian Princes of 1946, he could trumpet the fact that 'India's right to independence has been acknowledged'. 68 In the process of moving towards this political position, Edward Thompson became acutely aware of his own position as an English man writing the history of India. The preface to this work notes a debt to the Congress leader, for 'Jawaharlal Nehru drew my attention to matters which an Englishman, left to himself, would be bound to overlook. 69 Moreover, his bibliographical note commented on the 'really excellent Histories written before 1865' (before the Mutiny had taken its hold on historians): Such writers as Marshman, Thornton, Beveridge (whose History, 1872, is rather later), Montgomery Martin, have never had adequate recognition of their merits. They had this advantage, that they had only a public of their own people to consider, and did not have to keep glancing over their shoulder, to see if frankness and truthfulness would be overheard and have an adverse political effect. Another flaw in British-Indian historical writing is the way in which our want of interest in anything Indian has allowed such interests as we have felt occasionally to concentrate on one or two episodes, notably the Mutiny, to the almost complete neglect of other events. (p. 288) Clearly, an 'Englishman's' perspective on India was not all that it had been in the days of Mill and Macaulay. Certainly, this reflected the loss of confidence in the imperial civilizing mission witnessed and celebrated in the rise of anti-colonial movements after the First World War. Thompson noted, 'Historians of Modern India have been oppressed by the mass of detail unfamiliar to their readers, which they must handle and build into generalizations, and have not unnaturally been preoccupied with Governors-General and Commanders-in-Chief.' Consequently, 'Native India and its leaders have made only incidental appearances, their motives rarely understood or even regarded, their personalities left shadowy.' Not
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surprisingly, therefore, 'Our writing of India's history is perhaps resented more than anything else we have done.' (p. vi) Thompson proposed implicitly, then, a new kind of approach to Indian history for an English man: a kind of 'bottom-up' perspective, or at least that from 'the middle-up', which would give significance to the actions of the Indian princes, even if 'agency' would remain elusive (he used neither this term nor an equivalent). 70 In the process, it was now necessary for an outsider to turn to 'native informants' for facts and interpretations: Nehru was one, Rai Saheb Sardesai, who 'left his remote home in the Western Ghats, to help me as no other student of Maratha history could', was clearly another. The change in Seal's frosty relations with Edward Thompson may also have been a result of this change in the latter's approach to Indian history. A transformation, however minimal, had occurred in the father's work between the study on Metcalfe and this study of the Indian Princes. From absence altogether, they could now be likened to the challenging topography and the monsoon, to the Indian landscapes Britons so often retreated to describing or substituting for characters (a characteristic of Thompson's novels no less than E. M. Forster's). For the son, modeling himself on his father in this instance was certainly a worthy enterprise. By taking this position the father had aligned himself politically with Nationalists like Nehru; he had revised his dismissive assessment of Indian historians and would no longer suggest that they were incapable of writing history. Now it was important that he, as an Englishman, understood his limitations as a historian because of his inability to appreciate an Indian perspective. When it came to The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson, building upon the 'deviance' inspired by his father and Nehru, found that he could do something similar for the working class. His 'history from below', however, would attempt more self-consciously than his father's to 'recover the experience' of those 'hidden from history'.71 E. P. Thompson sought 'to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.' He would show that 'their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience' (pp. 12-13), and that he, as a product of a different class and of a time after industrialization, needed to be ever-vigilant about his own inability to understand these people whose perspectives he was 'rescuing'. In the process, however, both Thompsons retained assumptions about where that 'bottom' lay that would shape their analyses of those
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who needed to be 'rescued'. Edward had made Indian princes players in the development of the British empire in India, but rather as Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, Maharajah Jam Saheb of Newanagar, would be incorporated into a history of nineteenth-century cricket. They were there producing runs and doing some good fielding, but still the rules were being established by the M.C.C. of the early nineteenthcentury sub-continent - Metcalfe, Cornwallis and Company. Other Indians would have to wait before their perspectives would be added to the historical record. For E. P. Thompson the rescue would include the aforementioned groups, though in the case of the 'deluded follower of Joanna Southcott' Joan Scott has shown that the rescue attempt was abortive. 72 The very fact that Thompson described this follower as 'deluded' showed that there was some distance between his own perspective and the follower's aspirations that were 'valid in terms of their own experience'. Women received short shrift, as we will discuss later, but then so did non-artisanal laborers and any nonEnglish workers. In a suggestively titled chapter, 'Artisans and Others', E. P. Thompson borrowed Henry Mayhew's distinction between artisan and laborer. In doing so, he gave agency and the historian's respect to the 'Artisan', while denying it to the 'other'. Thompson quotes from Mayhew: 'In passing from the skilled operative of the west-end to the unskilled workman of the eastern quarter of London, the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.' (pp. 240-1) Often it would be the case that the observer had not entered a new land, but had indeed come into contact with people who were not born in England. 73 Thompson then added, In the South, it was among the artisans that the membership of friendly societies was largest and trade union organisation was most continuous and stable, that educational and religious movements flourished, and that Owenism struck deepest root.... We shall see how their self-esteem and their desire for independence, coloured the political radicalism of the post-war years. And, if stripped of his craft and of his union defences, the artisan was one of the most pitiful figures in Mayhew's London. (p. 241) Perhaps he then resembled someone of another race, perhaps even one in the condition of slavery! The point is that Thompson retained assumptions about worthy, artisanal working-class culture which
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needed to be valorized, and about 'deluded' culture thrown up by 'pitiful laborers' which the historian might continue to dismiss. This search for a working-class culture that could be valued would be taken up by the New Social Historians. 74 The Scots were also neglected in The Making. Thompson apologizes to his Scottish (and Welsh) readers quite reasonably: I have neglected these histories, not out of chauvinism, but out of respect. It is because class is a cultural as much as an economic formation that I have been cautious as to generalising beyond English experience. (I have considered the Irish, not in Ireland, but as immigrants in England.) The Scottish record, in particular, is quite as dramatic, and as tormented as our own. The Scottish story is significantly different. Calvinism was not the same thing as Methodism, although it is difficult to say which, in the early 19th century, was worse. We had no peasantry in England comparable to the Highland migrants. And the popular culture was very different. It is possible, at least until the 1820s, to regard the English and Scottish experiences as distinct, since trade union and political links were impermanent and immature. (p. 13) This desire to give the Scots due respect is belied by the extent of the omission, since many Scots were residing in England and their experiences were not so distinct from those of the English, not least because they were subjected to considerable taunting and invective. As Linda Colley has shown, a strain of Scottophobia motivated many defenders of the English 'Tree of Liberty'. She writes, 'Scots, so the Wilkite argument went, were inherently, unchangeably alien, never to be confused or integrated with the English.' 75 This is something that Thompson passes over, in spite of the fact that he does mention Cobbett's view of 'Scotch feelosofers' (p. 776) (and, knowing Thompson's declarations regarding the 'poverty of theory', this is a considerable slight indeed). The omission of people of African descent from English Working Class is equally telling. Thompson did mention blacks - a couple of times. He quoted from Cobbett's 1819 defense of some women who were being vilified for their unladylike support of the real strikers (men): Just as if women were made for nothing more but to cook oat-meal and to sweep a room! Just as if women had no minds! Just as if
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Hannah Moore and the Tract Gentry had reduced the women of England to a level with the Negresses of Africa! Just as if England had never had a queen ...! (p. 417) What we see here is the extent to which race and gender were held beneath the surface of both class consciousness and Thompson's class analysis. They are the two silences of class consciousness; there is no relational aspect to Thompson's definition of working class, except as it relates to the new bourgeoisie. Other relations, the fact that there might be something of value beyond a working class, either woman or slave, either inside or outside England, seems to be absent from his thought. And yet clearly these were on people's minds, as Thompson's other mention of blacks in The Making of the English Working Class unwittingly reveals. Paul Gilroy begins There Ain't No Black in the Union lack with an epigraph taken from Thompson's text: I dreamed I was in Yorkshire, going from Gomersal-Hill-Top to Cleckheaton; and about the middle of the lane, I thought I saw Satan coming to meet me in the shape of a tall, black man, and the hair of his head like snakes;... But I went on, ript open my clothes, and shewed him my naked breast, saying, 'See here is the blood of Christ.' Then I thought he fled from me as fast as a hare could run. 76 Gilroy's point, no doubt, one that he has returned to in his subsequent study The Black Atlantic, is that historians, with a few exceptions, have passed over in silence the ways in which Africans and slavery have influenced British history.77 They have made empire invisible. Certainly Thompson, who helped to shape much of the social history of the 1960s and beyond, was guilty of this. The passage that follows this quote from John Nelson's Journal further illustrates this. Not only does Thompson make no comment about the fact that Satan should take on 'the shape of a tall, black man' (as in Winthrop Jordan's work), 78 but he suggests that Nelson's 'fantasy has undertones of hysteria and of impaired or frustrated sexuality.' (p. 40) For Thompson, these were merely linked to Methodist revivalism, and he ignored both the fact that 'frustrated sexuality' often accompanied racial stereotyping (or discussion of people considered lower on the social scale) and that the context of slavery and emancipation was likely to be intimately related to the emergence of an 'English' working class.
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Once we incorporate empire into the development of class in the nineteenth century it is difficult to imagine how the idea of a working class could fail to be expressed at some level in relation to the existence of slavery and notions of unfree labor (just as it clearly was in the United States at this time). 79 The very mention of 'Negresses' in The Making of the English Working Class should lead to a discussion of how working classes in England situated themselves in relation to Capital given the existence of slaves in the labor market (albeit at a distance); how they defined a 'moral economy' as an economy beyond the exploitative forms of 'wage slavery'; and how gender and the roles of 'their' women would be crucial in defining their imperial location in society (especially given shifts in gender relations as part of the onslaught of capitalism, that Thompson mentions, and the prevailing assumptions about the emasculating nature of slavery). There is clearly a problem delineating a working class when certain groups are not taken into consideration. This is a problem within the confines of one country, but it is compounded when the attributes of that class are searched for in other countries and places. For, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown, Thompson's formulation can then be wielded to the detriment of analyses of working classes elsewhere. 80 Chakrabarty reveals that Thompson's use of culture leads to an accentuation of the Englishness of working-class formation. 'The making of the working class,' Thompson had written, 'is a fact of political and cultural, as much as of economic, history.' (p. 221) But Chakrabarty rightly notes that this emphasis on culture is bound to have important implications for the history of working class formations outside of Britain. He writes: Not being a historian of the English working class, I have no quarrel to pick with Thompson's 'facts'. But consider the wider problem that arises from the way he poses the question of culture. If the particular notions of 'free-born Englishman', of 'equality before the law', and so on were the most crucial heritages of the English working class in respect of its capacity for developing class consciousness, what about the working classes - for instance, the Indian one - whose heritages do not include such baggage? Are the latter condemned then forever to a state of 'low classness' unless they develop some kind of cultural resemblance to the English? (p. 222) Were Chakrabarty a historian of Britain, he might question such 'facts', since they are based on assumptions of 'Englishness' that are
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open to question. Was the category of 'free-born Englishman' meaningful outside of a context of the empire in which slave labor was the assumed norm for Africans, and once this was ended categories of indentured labor were established for Indians and Chinese? Was the 'equality before the law', which Thompson extolled in Whigs and Hunters, necessarily either an English contribution or an English reality? But even if these stand as 'peculiarities of the English' then, as Chakrabarty shows, culture still presents problems for the labor historian. For, how does this apply to the colonial context? Chakrabarty proceeds to show how Thompson's category of class is suspect precisely because he has neglected the empire, and if the category of class does not work with the empire in mind, it quite possibly does not work at all. Chakrabarty suggests that the question of whether Indians are condemned to '"low classness" unless they develop some kind of cultural resemblance to the English ... reveals the absurdities of our dilemma.' For if the answer is affirmative, then 'class consciousness' begins to seem like no more than one of England's 'peculiarities' (and certainly not very Marxist). 'On the other hand,' Chakrabarty continues: if our liberalism moved us to reject the question and to argue that there was no one cultural route to class consciousness, two conclusions would follow, both devastating for the argument at hand: (a) we would then make the question of 'cultural specificity' redundant to the issue of class consciousness, and (b) Thompson's highlighting of certain particular elements in English popular culture as factors specially conducive to 'class consciousness' would seem alarmingly arbitrary. For it is entirely possible that a contrary set of cultural elements could have also given rise to a similar consciousness (as indeed would be argued now for non-European working people without a liberal heritage). (p. 222) Clearly Thompson would not wish to exclude the rest of the world from his analysis, and certainly he welcomed the attempts of American labor historians following Herbert Gutman to bring American history up to speed on working-class formation, but as Chakrabarty shows, there was no way to do this without fudging over large areas of historical terrain. So Chakrabarty concludes, 'A "universalist" mode of thinking, a reading that constantly produces out of Marxism a master narrative of history, is what defuses the dangerous potential of the "exceptionalist"
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argument of The Making.' And yet, 'the dangerous potential' remains for those who choose to take a particular working class in isolation (as most labor historians have done - i.e. isolated, except from similarly situated European laborers). It also seems to have led to an uncritical acceptance of a 'universalist mode', so that those who might question the narrative of The Making, perhaps from perspectives that consider race and gender as of equal importance to class, appear to be questioning some political absolute, questioning History itself. In light of this, the reaction of E. P. Thompson to some of his critics resembles very closely the reaction of Edward Thompson to those he deemed incapable of writing history. Thompson's category of the working class is defined only in relation to other groups within England. He is attuned to cultural variations and deviations from economic divisions. Class is to be found among people, not abstractions. But those people are to be found, or recognized, only on English soil. And they will only really be men and white (Picts, Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and the odd Celt from Cornwall or Devon) to boot. But leaving aside one group from the analysis of an emergent English working class, whether it is AfroCaribbean slaves, Indians, Scots, or Irish, on the grounds that they deserve full respect means not telling the story at all. This is especially so if we accept Thompson's injunction that the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship.... We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. (P-9) If people define themselves through such relations, then surely on an imperial terrain the relations must be more than solely based on relations of production hierarchies. Thompson implies that this is so, because he gives such significance to the 'Peculiarities of the English', to the Englishness of working-class formation. But in conceding this he is inviting the question of what Englishness is if it isn't defined through historical relationships. 'We cannot have love without lovers ...' Closely linked to this theme of turning historical scholarship on its head and working from the bottom up is that of the gendering of such
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analysis. Defenders of the Thompsons might argue that theirs was a problem of omission rather than commission, women just get left out of the picture, and the analysis can stand once they get inserted. Yet, the problematic of turning the world on its head has significant implications in an imperial landscape, because manliness, masculinity, emasculation, femininity, feminization, and the like take on important dimensions in a context of labor exploitation, wealth extraction, and colonial rule. These will mean different things in different places, and how these different meanings relate will be of some significance. Always crucial, gender is especially significant for an analysis of the Thompsons for two reasons. First, there is the sense among many historians and contemporary commentators, difficult even for the most critical to challenge, that if India gained anything from its imperial association with Britain then it was with regard to the rights of women. And, not coincidentally, this is the last-ditch defense of the Thompsons employed by Palmer.81 The elder Thompson wrote a history of sati, and the eradication of such practices could be heralded by the younger as one of the benefits of taking a 'middle way' between 'nostalgias for the British Raj' and 'simplified nationalist historiography'. 82 Second, E. P. Thompson has come under heavy attack from Joan Scott and others, an attack that he found very difficult to stomach, on the grounds that his analysis of working-class formation was a gendered one. 83 Ashton from Far Pavilions refers to the eradication of sati as the foundation for Britain's achievement in India, 'Well, if we have done nothing else [and we can assume that he felt they had done a lot more], at least we can mark up one thing to our credit - that we put a stop to that particular horror.' 84 And, as historians like Edward Thompson would assure us, the record seems to speak plainly on this matter. Sati was prohibited by William Bentinck in Bengal in 1829, and then in the rest of British India in the following year. While it was an Indian, Rammohan Roy, who revealed the change of text in the Rig-Veda from 'Let the mothers advance to altar first' to 'Let the mothers go into the womb of fire' (an act that Max Muller would describe as 'perhaps the most flagrant instance of what can be done by an unscrupulous priesthood'), it was the fact that the British government turned its attention to the matter that led to the reform (p. 17). For according to Thompson, When the attention of the British Government was first seriously drawn to the rite, it was so entrenched by centuries of performance
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that the enquiry as to whether the Hindu scriptures enjoined it was irrelevant and useless. It was as well established as the habit of warfare in Christian Europe. The enquiry had a value, if only because it helped to encourage the Government at last to break through its timidity and past its promises of toleration for all religious rites. (p. 19) Without foreign intervention, reform, Thompson argues, would have been out of the question: 'It seems to me beyond controversy that Indian opinion and Indian princes would have allowed suttee, and a host of horrors besides, to continue indefinitely but for this alien vigour in the land.' (p. 83) Proof of this, Thompson believes, lies in the fact that once sati was abolished in the British-controlled region, it was 'driven into the Native States' where it continued to be practiced.85 The association between masculinity and the British ('alien vigour'), who were capable of 'defending' women within their sphere of interest, and emasculation and Indians, who were not, is quite clear. And out of this unwillingness or inability to eradicate 'this horror' could come a defense of many aspects of Imperial rule. Take Macaulay's approach to education, for example: 'If it was a mistake to set Indian education on solely Western lines, it was a mistake for which Indians had themselves to thank, for the fruits of Hinduism a century ago were bad.' (pp. 129-30) Of course, the record does not speak as plainly as Thompson imagined. 86 Regarding many of the reforms for women, the impulse towards reform came not from the Bentincks but from the Rammohan Roys. The later reform of the age of consent was spearheaded by, among others, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, not by British reformers, though Whitehall and Westminster were important sites of protest for the reform. Moreover, were the British truly knight errants in this process of reform on behalf of women then the critical response of someone like Pandita Ramabai to their efforts would be inexplicable.87 But the question is not whether the British undertook this act of benevolence and should be praised accordingly; taken in isolation, certain acts can be rendered in such a light. And, once rendered, they can be used to speak for a whole, that might otherwise more than counteract or at least complicate the benevolence of the intervention. Rather, the question should be that of how the Thompsons' visions of history were shaped by the fluctuations of gender relations
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within this imperial terrain. Here Gayatri Spivak's 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' is of particular value. 'The emergence of the feminist individualist in the West,' Spivak writes, 'cannot be an isolated development, but is, instead, achieved through an imperialist project (that of "soul making") in which the "native female" must play a role.' Thus, 'in the colonial encounter the Hindu "good wife" is constructed as patriarchy's feminine ideal: she is offered simultaneously as a model and as a signifier of absolute cultural otherness, both exemplary and inimitable'. In the process, both British government officials and feminists could, for different reasons, advance the suggestion that Indian women needed defending from their men. 88 A link between the two historiographical discussions can perhaps be found in the older Thompson's comment in Indian Princes, that 'The Men of 1800-1819, despite their coolness, tolerance, catholicity, and humanity, were every way as efficient and heroic as the men of 1857.'89 Here, a premium is placed on demonstrating a masculinity or manliness the contours, practice, and substance of which are assumed or taken for granted: humility, generosity, 'alien vigour', efficiency, poetry, reason, beauty, and honor. This is the poet-king-warriorscholar, transcending race, hovering above the rest of humanity as some sort of Superman. We should place alongside these considerations the absence of gender in The Making of the English Working Class. The peculiar English artisan takes on many of the characteristics of the British Indian administrator in his ability to combine the ideas of liberty and moral economy. But as Carolyn Steedman has noted, in the process of writing this narrative of men, Thompson 'writes the male gender out of the picture as well as the female one'. 90 In their apotheosis administrator and artisan transcend sex, and the power of gender to influence analysis is deflected and deflated (conspicuous in absences relating to the location of women, those of colonized peoples, and possible relationships between the two). The final shared theme was that of 'the worthy English', evident in The English Working Class, as the foregoing analysis would suggest, but becoming still more pronounced in the essays in The Poverty of Theory and Writing by Candlelight. For the father, as mentioned earlier, the English had made significant contributions to the world through their empire; for E. P. Thompson the 'Peculiarities of the English', from their dogged empiricism to their faith in cricket, were of cultural significance and worthy of celebration, not merely ridicule or embarrassment.
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In the conclusion to The Making of the Indian Princes, Edward John highlighted once again the English contribution to the world. This contribution was very much the gift of the men who controlled India at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 'The reader,' he wrote, cannot have failed to notice that the men who made the settlements of 1818 and 1819 held in common a body of political doctrine, which they had worked out over a course of many years. Unlike the men of Lord Wellesley's time, they were not opportunists - no men of action ever were less so. They knew their way and had a very fair guess as to its termination and goal. They built wittingly and deliberately, where both their predecessors and immediate successors did it by sheer accident and forceful blows. Owing to their 'pragmatic' philosophy, which meant that they were 'guided by the principle of workability and also by a sense of justice, often flawed and imperfectly followed out, but nevertheless present', they were able to create an empire of which any Englishman could be justly proud. Not only that, the Indians themselves could be happy with the settlements. 'Bitterness came later, in abundant measure and with frequent justification,' Thompson wrote. 'But perhaps no conquest on such a scale was ever put through with so little bitterness at the time.' This was a stunning achievement. 'The work they achieved was to stand the test of over a century, and when all empire and dominion at last are finished their work will still win toleration and sympathy, and not in their own land only.'91 If only the Elizabethans hadn't come back to the fore in 1857! In Edward Palmer's work, pragmatism reappears as 'English empiricism', (valorized in contrast to 'French flu' and 'Scotch feelosofers'), while justice returns as the rule of law. E. P. Thompson starts his essay 'The Peculiarities of the English' (written in 1965) with an epigraph taken from Marx's comments about Darwin, which reads: 'One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course.' 92 Thompson's use of this quote is ironic, naturally, and gestures to his belief that there was more than one Marx. There were texts that could lead in the direction of Anderson, Nairn, and Althusser, which were decidedly un-English; and there were the texts that contributed to sound historical materialism. Thompson's favored Marx, along with Engels (whom Thompson rescues from relative obscurity compared to Marx), would not have seen the crudeness of English method as a negative (pp. 162-4). While Anderson and Nairn, for example, 'feel themselves to be exiles from an "english
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ideology'" which 'in its drooling old age ... gives rise to a kind of twilight, where "empiricism" has become myopia and "liberalism" a sort of blinking uncertainty' (p. 245), Thompson proudly proclaims his Englishness. While these two Marxists decried English bourgeois culture, Thompson was even willing to give this bourgeoisie some credit: It is true that each national bourgeoisie has its own peculiar nastiness which it has often inherited from the class which went before; with the Germans, militarism and Statism; with the French, chauvinism and intellectual metropolitomania; with the Italians, corruption; and with the Americans, the ruthless celebration of a human nature red in tooth and law [African, Asian, and Latin American national bourgeoisies apparently remain in a stage of 'pre-nasty']. It is true also that the peculiar nastiness of the British bourgeoisie is in shameless observances of status and obsession with a spurious gentility ... [TJhere are at the same time certain strengths and humane traditions in British life which Other Countries, including those whose airports are superb, whose Marxism is mature, and whose salesmanship is high-powered, do not always display. (p. 265) Of course, the issue of whether the English bourgeoisie was as vicious as others was itself a question framed by an imperial, if post-colonial, terrain. Both E. P. Thompson's view and those of Nairn and Anderson fit within the idea that bourgeoisies could be and should be categorized according to certain cultural traits - traits which in all the above-mentioned cases could be carefully crafted in relation to colonized subjects and peoples. In each case, culture is reduced to its imperial essence and made to compete according to rules akin to a Eurovision Song Contest, certainly not Jeux sans Frontiers. But the winner in such a contest changes from year to year. On the matter of justice, E. P. Thompson reveals a great deal of confusion regarding the contributions of the English. In his conclusion to Whigs and Hunters he ends with a discourse on the rule of law: the notion of the regulation and reconciliation of conflicts through the rule of law - and the elaboration of rules and procedures which, on occasion, made some approximate approach towards the ideal seems to me a cultural achievement of universal significance. I do not lay claim as to the abstract, extra-historical impartiality of these
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rules. In a context of gross class inequalities, the equity of the law must always be in some part sham. Transplanted as it was to even more inequitable contexts, this law could become an instrument of imperialism. For this law has found its way to a good many parts of the globe. But even here the rules and the rhetoric have imposed some inhibitions upon imperial power. If the rhetoric was a mask, it was a mask which Gandhi and Nehru were to borrow, at the head of a million masked supporters. 93 Here Thompson tried to have his cake and eat it too. First of all he pronounced the rule of law to be a cultural achievement. He then recognized that it might be an 'instrument of imperialism' in a context of 'even more inequitable contexts' (thus privileging English inequities as in some way less iniquitous than those to be found among other peoples). But, then, even when this might be the case, we are told that its presence led to 'inhibitions upon imperial power' - perhaps because the imperialism was in this case British (so that these inequities were established by people familiar with social conditions of less iniquity, who could therefore guide their new subjects in that direction). To imply, as this surely does, that there is some absolute benefit to be gained when nationalists learn the language of imperialism in order to overthrow it seems at the very least ironic when that imperialism has only been made effective by that same language. Ranajit Guha exposes Thompson's weaknesses most clearly here. Guha asks how it is that knowledgeable people 'could go on talking about a rule of law in colonial India when the facts of colonialist practice did nothing to support such assertion?' 94 The answer, he believes, 'lies in the pervasive power of the ideology of law in English political thought. It derives from the long standing of the British legal system and its proven superiority to all other historically evolved systems of the same order up to the age of capital.' Guha writes: It stands for the universalist urge of bourgeois culture and practice of law under metropolitan conditions as to assume the status of 'a cultural achievement of universal significance' in the eyes not only of English liberals and colonialists like Dodwell, but also, alas, of English radicals like E. P. Thompson from whom those words are taken. Thompson, then, falls foul of that desperate English urge noted by Marx 'to take only itself as its standard'. Guha continues:
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It is indeed the hallucinatory effects of ideology that a particularistic cultural achievement of the bourgeoisie should appear as one of 'universal significance' both to the friends and foes of that class. However, neither the special pleading by Dodwell when he speaks of a rule of law following a rule of force in the post-Mutiny period, nor the ingenuity of Thompson when he tries unsuccessfully to disentangle himself from the metaphysical implications of his statement by allowing for the class manipulation of the rule of law, can take away from the fact that bourgeois culture hits its historical limit in colonialism. None of its noble achievements - Liberalism, Democracy, Liberty, Rule of Law, etc. - can survive the inexorable urge of capital to expand and reproduce itself by means of the politics of extra-territorial, colonial dominance. Colonialism stands thus not merely for the historical progeny, atmaja, of industrial and finance capital, but also for its historic Other. 95 But, if 'bourgeois culture hits its historical limit in colonialism' what of working-class culture? For are not the English working class situated on an imperial terrain to some extent alongside industrial and finance capital? Not always, but sometimes? If so, are the noble achievements as they are picked up and wielded to the benefit of the working class by the Gandhi's and Nehru's of England also incapable of surviving in the colonial landscape? Most probably.
EPILOGUE An Englishman don't know they'se anny such things as wrongs in th' wurruld. He sets down in front iv his dinner an' says to himsilf: 'What a jolly wurruld this is!... I can't see a spot where th' wurruld needs improvemint. It's such a complete job I must have done it mesilf. Very civil iv me.' Finley Peter Dunne 96 It is difficult to read 'The Nehru Tradition' without being moved by E. P. Thompson's account of his father's close friendship with Nehru. Clearly, through his father E. P. Thompson knew empire intimately. But, like many of his generation, empire was 'over there'. His political essays, which were naturally preoccupied, as everyone seemed to be at the time (partly owing to his efforts), with the possibility of nuclear destruction, seldom mentioned the 'peculiarities' of those 'English' who had come from India, Pakistan, Uganda, or the Caribbean (not
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to mention any number of other places of origin - Ireland, Italy, Germany, Romania). This elision of empire in Thompson's work has had important implications for the emergence of Social History. While E. P. Thompson continued a well-established tradition among English historians of treating the empire as peripheral, the weight of his enterprise was considerable. The fact that one of the most radical and acclaimed of historians ignored empire and all its aspects enabled many others to adopt a category of class that was reductionist, even while it claimed to combat the reductionism of orthodox Marxism. 97 In other words, in his focus on culture Thompson did not merely enlarge the historian's lens to rescue the lower orders as agents, so enabling further enlargement in the future (a Whiggish version of historical practice). Instead, his use of culture placed another veil (to use W. E. B. Du Bois's term) in front of History, another layer on the 'palimpsest of history' (to appropriate Nehru's metaphor), making it in some ways more difficult to incorporate empire, non-metropolitan subjects, and race and gender perspectives into future historical analysis.98 Efforts to focus on such things have faced resistance, often from people who now invoke the name of E. P. Thompson. Such a focus, these people claim, will lead in the direction of nihilism, reactionary politics, 'fashion', and a loss of the only truly radical historical category, that of class.99 Instead, we would suggest that an enlargement of class analysis is required to incorporate race and other mutually constitutive categories, like gender, within an imperial framework. Thus we need to appreciate that class, race, and gender are historically contingent, and that they have been shaped by nations and national histories that are also historically contingent. When we do so we realize that English 'peculiarities' (alongside American exceptionalism) are themselves products of imperial location and privilege.
5 Piper at the Gates of Dawn Fairy stories held me high on clouds of sunlight floating by. Syd Barrett, 'Matilda Mother' The little groovers talked esoterically of Syd Barrett. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia1 Three-quarters of the way up Putney Hill (a stone's throw, I like to think, from where the great debates were held), down a side road, misnamed 'Avenue', several detached houses stood in a row facing towards a council estate. Inside one of these, up the stairs, was a room from which emanated the noise of Eliot Comprehensive schoolkids meeting in their lunch break. The room was dark, a little dingy, and smelled of incense to cover the pot and cigarette smoke. The walls were covered with posters - one an advertisement for the movie 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', another a silkscreen of Che, and many homemade commentaries on 1970s Britain. Nothing much new there, I suppose. The sounds of music, usually of psychedelic rock, were the standard accompaniment to all that went on within. Not much new there also. The favorite album of these schoolkids, without much doubt, was the Pink Floyd's 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn' (a second favorite being the Rolling Stones's 'By Her Satanic Majesty's Request'). Occasionally, when my eldest brother, Andy, would invite me into this den (it generally being accepted that this was his and Jamie's hangout, not something that a 'Public School' kid like myself could fully appreciate and share), I would venture in nervously. I would sit down on the mattress on the floor, under the window, and between the two large speakers, to be played 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'. One particular moment struck Andy as glorious, when the sound seemed to travel along the wall and through the body, back and forth, from one speaker to the other. This was particularly great, I was assured, when one was high - but I wouldn't know about these things, being a Public School boy, virtually from a different class. 81
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These memories came flooding back to me recently as I read my son a chapter from Kenneth Grahame's 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, in particular the chapter called by the same title as the Pink Floyd album. What on earth had the title meant, I asked myself as I read, and why had Pink Floyd used it for this album? I bought the album, or at least a later incarnation of the record (a tape called 'A Nice Pair', which combined 'Piper' with the group's second, inferior, album 'A Saucerful of Secrets'). I listened to the tape again and again, and on long commutes, again. But, given that the music was of a psychedelic nature, the meaning wasn't readily apparent. The first thing that occurred to me was that it was odd that such an Establishment text (one to be found in many middle-class homes) should be the inspiration for an attempt at counter-cultural statement -which is surely what this album was, at least to my mind. The album, after all, was something that non-Public School boys (certainly those who had been expelled anyway) and those who questioned social norms seemed to listen to. So what was the story all about? What was this particular chapter all about? Well, among other things, the story is about Britain and Empire or some animal equivalents. As far as can be discerned, the story seems like a prototype for Brideshead Revisited, before anyone needed to return for a visit. Chums - Toad of Toad Hall, Rat and Mole, and the fatherly and stern Badger - represent all that's right with Edwardian England. As the illustrator Ernest H. Shepard described them: 'Mole, the field worker, the digger; Rat, the perfect waterman, wise about the currents, eddies and what-not; Badger, big and stout, uncouth but oh! how dependable, a champion of the smaller folk, and Toad, the impossible and lovable, never out of a scrape and never ceasing to boast.' 2 There seem to be class distinctions among them, but muted, as each one is appreciated for what he brings to the world - within reason (provided, of course, that they conform to their basic natures and don't begin to see themselves as beings of a different type - superbeasts! - as Toad's boasting inevitably leads him to do). The three main chums live on the river bank, the Metropole, while Badger, more of the missionary sort, is off in the 'darkest' Wildwood, inhabited by the dreaded Weasels, who are either the uncouth working classes of England or those of the Empire, take your pick. Once when Ratty has rescued Moly in the Wildwood and they have through good fortune ended at Badger's humble domicile, one of the first things Badger says, in typical colonial fashion, is 'Now then! tell us the news from your part of the world.' 3 Ratty, in response, tells him
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how the world is changing, especially with the Motor Car, Toad's new infatuation, which seems to be transforming their 'part of the world'. And this, in general, is what the book seems to be about: the irresponsibility of Toad, losing his sense of proportion, his sense of duty, in his infatuation with the modern world and its inventions - the empire, perhaps, eating its own. All things are put right in the end, of course. When the dastardly Weasels take over Toad Hall, because its master has been in gaol, the friends club together to use their superior intelligence to outwit these lesser beasts. Five (Otter helps out) are enough to put to flight several hundred of the Weasels (Rorke's Drift, or the return of Jedi warrior, Lord George Gordon - again, take your pick). The chapter 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' focuses on Rat and Mole's search for Little Portly, Otter's son, who had gone missing and had been lost for several days. It is a strange interlude in some ways, not really fitting in with the rest of the world view of the story. Certainly, bumbling Toad isn't in the picture, thankfully. But, it is more than that. There isn't as much of the civilizing mission about this chapter, that sense of the superiority of the friends when contrasted with the lesser animals. Here, we find that there is an alternative, spiritual world, that has the ability to draw the animals away from their natural habitats. Portly has been pulled by the force of a Piper, and both Mole and Rat find the Piper irresistible too: Perhaps [Mole] would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the even, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between those very hooves, sleeping
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soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered. 'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?' 'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him! O, never, never! And yet - and yet - O, Mole, I am afraid!' Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.4 Rescued from the Ashram, Portly is returned to the river bank and all returns to normal - the one thing needful: to re-establish order in the world of Toad Hall. This, of course, can mean any number of things; but it is presented within a particular Orientalist and imperial framework common for that period. It has embodied within it the division of the world into the material and the spiritual, which replicates that of the scientific and rational West and spiritual and mystical East. Neither Walt Disney's Mary Poppins nor Somerset Maugham feels too distant. Something within all this conformity must have appealed to a young Roger ('Syd') Barrett, growing up in England and looking for something to express his sense of the counter-cultural. Syd Barrett, of course, was the driving force behind the early Pink Floyd, the man who would be replaced at guitar by Dave Gilmour, and whose leadership role would be usurped by Roger Waters, who would then take the band's music down a more commercial path. The first album combined some of the musical jamming and experimentation that Pink Floyd persevered with through 'Saucerful of Secret', 'Ummagumma', 'Atom Heart Mother', and 'Meddle' until the commercial success of 'Dark Side of the Moon' made potted populism and anarchism in relatively simple melodic form seem worth a lifelong commitment. 5 The first album, though, also included Barrett's madness and sense of the surreal or plain absurd, building on the comic wit that someone like Lennon was famous for, but
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perhaps going further than 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds', T am a Walrus', and 'Glass Onion'. 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' would be an inspiration for many who followed in the British Rock movement; from the Pythonesque absurdity of The Small Faces on 'Ogden's Nut Gone Flake', to the rather more serious early Gabrielled Genesis albums like 'Nursery Cryme', 'Foxtrot' and 'Selling England by the Pound', and, further still, to the altogether pretentious Yes ('perpetual change') and King Crimson. At moments during the album one is almost inclined to think in terms of connections with British punk, with Ian Dury and The Sex Pistols.6 Most of the songs seemed to deal with the experience of being high, or the various kinds of hallucinations witnessed under the influence. One of my particular favorites is 'Flaming': Swimming through the star-lit sky Traveling by telephone Hey ho, here we go Ever so high. Many of these visions were summoned up by tales of nurserystory-like characters, such as the gnome Grimble Grumble and 'the King who ruled his land'; or by simple homilies, as in 'Chapter 23', which seems to want to tell the listener something of moral value derived from some eastern influence, but who can tell what it is? Barrett resorts to a world of make-believe, which has so much in the past been used to inculcate morality and correct behavior, now to give it alternate readings, now to contrast it with the bourgeois existence of 1960s suburban Britain. Barrett casts himself as both the Piper (of Hamelin perhaps) and Portly - 'a Buddha of Suburbia'. 'Bike' showed Barrett at his most surreal, turning the prosaic world of suburbia into an altogether unsettling affair: I've got a bike You can ride it if you like It's got a basket a bell that rings and things to make it look good I'd give it to you if I could but I borrowed i t . . . I know a mouse and he hasn't got a house
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And so on, through the coat that looks good if you think it should, the gingerbread men and the musical tunes, 'most of which are clockwork'. Not surprisingly, Barrett went slightly mad, or sane, depending on how one looks at it. After seeing Barrett binge on LSD whenever he could lay his hands on the stuff, perming his hair so that he could look like Jimi Hendrix, and when he began merely playing middle C in all the band's gigs, the other members of the band, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason (who up to that point had been along largely for the helter-skelter ride) decided that Syd's behavior was altogether too erratic for their taste. He was pushed out, and replaced by his former friend (they had taught each other guitar and so played with much the same style), Dave Gilmour. Barrett produced another couple of albums in the 1970s, with the help of Gilmour, the first of which was called 'The Madcap Sings', lending credence to many of the rumors about his madness. The album was experimental in the extreme, mainly because Barrett never liked to play the same song the same way twice, so his accompanying musicians didn't have much clue what was going on. Last I heard, which was from a published interview with Gilmour that I have mislaid, Barrett was living with his Mum in her house in Cambridge where he grew up. Portly returns. How does the foregoing fit with these comparative essays? The story of The Wind in the Willows shows clearly the empire at home, both in the story itself and as it is naturalized in the reader's mind as he or she sits before the hearth. But this empire, and all that is relational along with it, is silenced or muted. We have to dig beneath the surface of a text that was in every middle-class English home to find it. This silencing is then carried over into popular culture, as it is found in this Pink Floyd album (and one could make similar links to The Beatles, obviously, as only a cursory glance at 'Help' will reveal), and in the process the absence, not the presence of empire, is naturalized. Just as it is for popular culture, so it is in the practice of history. Imperial location lies beneath the surface of historical practice, there for our imaginations to reach or to cover over when necessary. Our appreciation of 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' places us, readers and writers, in a moment after that imperial relationship has been exposed, locating us as part of the narratives that follow and
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thereby tainting them in certain ways. We endeavor to observe these narratives by creating spaces, inside and out, that allow us to position ourselves as subjective or objective parties. In the end, though, these spaces can be no more than strategic, subject to inversion - inside becoming out, outside moving in. Retaining an air of radicalism in all this confusion requires that we be honest about our own locations and attempt, through our gestures, to move beyond the arrogance of our own privileges.
6 Beyond Boundaries, Beyond the Whale For some people, when you say 'Timbuktu' it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world. Ali Farka Toure 1 C. L. R. James would have insisted that Americanists ask the question, 'What do they know of America who only America know?' 2 The importance of asking this question is made clear in Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House, which highlights the contribution of Africa to the formulation of ideas about culture. 3 Such ideas, embodied in particular in the modern concept of race, prevail in both the global academy and American society. To comprehend the genealogy of these ideas, from their invention to their current stranglehold on American political discourse, an understanding of the interaction between Africa and America is vital. Only once such genealogies are delineated and the concepts (such as race) they generate are contested can we hope to move beyond both that Western Tradition whale celebrated by William Bennett and his ilk, and its antagonists, ahistorical nationalisms, toward a multicultural society. Appiah's book, then, is the essential hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy beyond essentialism. Appiah is an excellent guide because, in his almost unparalleled ability to move back and forth between academic disciplines as wideranging as philosophy, anthropology, history, sociology, literary criticism, and biology, and in his access to a wide range of personal experiences, he can take us beyond so many boundaries. Besides being an allusion to a heaven where there is room enough for all peoples, the house to which Appiah refers in his title is that of his own father in Kumasi, capital of Asante, a kingdom in Ghana. Appiah's Africa is multilayered, encompassing many different worlds: Some worlds - the world of the law courts where my father went, dressed in his dark European suits, carrying the white wig of the British barrister ... - some worlds we knew of only because our parents spoke of them. Others - the world of the little church 88
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Saint George's, where we went to Sunday school with Baptists and Copts and Catholics and Methodists and Anglicans, from other parts of the country, other parts of the continent, other parts of the world - we knew inside and out, knew because they were central to our friendships, our learning, our beliefs. (p. vii) His mother's family house is located in England, where much of Appiah's education took place (though his upbringing, the dust jacket tells us, was in Ghana). Now he resides in the United States and has become used 'to seeing the world as a network of points of affinity' (p. viii). The author's ideas about culture emerge as he crosses back and forth over the boundaries demarcating center/periphery, colonial/postcolonial, traditional/modern, and national/transnational, among others. Like James's Caliban, Appiah 'pioneer[s] into regions Caesar never knew'.4 The opening essays, 'The Invention of Africa' and 'Illusions of Race', explore the role of racial ideology in the development of PanAfricanism. In these pieces Appiah focuses in particular on Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois, foremost among the African American intellectuals who initiated Pan-Africanist discourse. Appiah finds that 'the idea of the Negro, the idea of an African race, is an unavoidable element in that discourse, and that these racialist notions are grounded in bad biological - and worse ethical - ideas, inherited from the increasingly racialized thought of nineteenthcentury Europe and America' (p. x). These men, in turn, contributed to the further entrenchment of such notions. Crucial to CrummeH's assessment of Africans - and something he shared with most of his African American contemporaries (particularly the many African Methodists who traveled to Africa as missionaries for their church 5 ) - was an 'essentially negative sense of traditional culture in Africa as anarchic, unprincipled, ignorant, defined by the absence of all the positive traits of civilization as "savage"; and savages hardly have a culture at all' (p. 21). Providence, via the means of slavery in America, had brought many Africans in contact with both the English language and Christianity, and it was now the duty of the Negro to bring light to 'darkest Africa' and, to use Phillis Wheatley's words, its 'benighted souls'. 6 At the core of this vision, according to Appiah, was the concept of race. 'CrummeH's "Africa",' he writes, 'is the motherland of the Negro race, and his right to act in it, to speak for it, to plot its future,
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derived ... from the fact that he too was a Negro. More than this, Crummell held that there was a common destiny for the people of Africa ... because they belonged to this one race' (p. 5). In other words, he countered racism by accepting the category of race and by using it to his benefit. For Appiah, Crummell exemplifies the intrinsic racist; he differentiated morally among members of different races, because he believed that each race had a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence (p. 14). Regardless of whether evidence proved that the connection between race and moral capacity was false, he would have remained committed to his beliefs about race and racial destiny. While Du Bois transcended such moral fallacies, he was unable to transcend race altogether; he was an extrinsic racist, who made moral distinctions among members of different races because he believed that racial essences entailed certain morally relevant qualities (p. 13). Du Bois moved away from current biological explanations of race toward socio-historical explanations. In the process, he returned Hegel to the standing position by inverting Marx: 'the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races' (p. 28). In this history, Du Bois wrote, 'races have a "message" for humanity, a message that derives, in some way, from God's purpose in creating races. The Negro race has still to deliver its message, and so it is the duty of Negroes to work together through race organizations so that this message can be delivered' (p. 30). Appiah's rendering of Du Bois is consistent with The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, in which the latter placed the Sorrow Songs alongside the works of European poets from Shakespeare and Schiller to Whittier and Mrs Browning in the pantheon of cultural achievement. 7 But, Appiah contends, Du Bois's attempt to 'revalue' the race to counter oppression with an 'antiracist racism' is both theoretically and practically unproductive. The concept of race 'is a hierarchy, a vertical structure, and Du Bois wishes to rotate the axis to give it a "horizontal" reading. Challenge the assumption that there can be an axis, however oriented in the space of values, and the project fails for loss of presuppositions' (p. 46). More practically speaking, while the attempt to highlight certain race abilities might lead to a more equitable estimation of the different contributions of the 'races', 'it might just as easily lead to chauvinism or total incomprehension' (p. 94). Stereotyping, defining African Americans as natural athletes, musicians, and so on, would be just one by-product of such an approach.
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Much like an ideology of Separate Spheres, then, it might leave the system of oppression unaltered. Having established these origins for Pan-Africanism in EuroAmerican concepts of race, Appiah moves on to consider post-colonial directions in African literature and philosophy. In the process he contests the Afrocentric ('Egyptian') reconstruction of Africa with its vision of African literature as 'an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literature [with] its own traditions, models and norms'. 8 For Appiah, the boundaries between literatures have been crossed by imperialism and by diasporas, so that it is no longer possible to turn the clock back, even if we wanted to. 'For us to forget Europe,' he writes, 'is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our destinies; since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us' (p. 72). With such a perspective in mind, Appiah prescribes reform for both African and American academies. In the African academy, the need is to identify the modern African text as a product of colonial encounters, to stress that the continuity between precolonial forms of culture and contemporary ones are nevertheless genuine, and to challenge assumptions of the cultural superiority of the West (p. 70). In the American academy, Appiah asserts, the reading of African writing is reasonably directed by other purposes: by the urge to continue the repudiation of racism; by the need to extend the American imagination - an imagination that regulates much of the world system economically and politically beyond the narrow scope of the United States; by the desire to develop views of the world elsewhere that respect more deeply the autonomy of the Other, views that are not generated by the local political needs of America's multiple diasporas. (p. 70) To Appiah's list one must also add the need to move beyond a vision that only one 'American imagination' exists. After all, in a country whose history has included 'multiple diasporas', the development of a privileged 'American' narrative has led to the denial of the many others within. In short, the study of African literature may also teach us the tenuousness of our own imperial assumptions. Even when Appiah seems to leave America behind entirely in a discussion of the intricacies and complexities of African culture, as in the chapter entitled 'Myth of an African World', the analysis still has
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resonance for the Americanist. He argues that 'many African societies have as much in common with traditional societies that are not African as they do with each other' (p. 91) and that 'what is distinctive about African thought is that it is traditional' (p. 104). As such, the colonial interaction between Western and African discourses takes on the air of a confrontation between religion and magic, or a Thompsonian confrontation between industrial capitalism and the 'moral economy'. 9 While this formulation replicates the old modernization model, Appiah rejects the pessimistic, Weberian outcome to this saga. 'The beginning of postmodern wisdom,' he writes, 'is to ask whether Weberian rationalization is in fact what has happened' (p. 145). Appiah invites his reader to use the continuing confrontation between the traditional and the modern to raise questions that seem long-buried in Weberian pessimism about the inevitability of modern world to crush any non-bureaucratic, non-monetized, non-Western future; he invites us to swim free of the whale. 10 In contrast to both CrummeH's and Du Bois's approaches to PanAfricanism, Appiah considers the way forward to lie in moving beyond race altogether. The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us. As we have seen, even the biologist's notion has limited uses, and the notion that Du Bois required, and that underlies the more hateful racism of the modern era, refers to nothing in the world at all. (p. 45) Appiah is very persuasive on this point, and methodically discredits all racial rationalizations. But we are left in a quandary. While race may not exist, belief in its existence is pervasive, just as it was in CrummeH's and Du Bois's day, among both proponents and opponents of racial equality. What is the proper response to racism in a world of such political realities? Can racism be fought through race in the manner attempted by Du Bois? Appiah proposes that racism be fought by the denial of race. But the danger, which he sees clearly, is that this approach may reinforce the status quo. 'It is certainly true,' he writes, 'that there must be contexts in which a statement of... truths is politically inopportune. I am enough of a scholar to feel drawn to truth telling, mat caelum; enough of a political animal to recognize that there are places where the truth does more harm than good.' But Appiah does not feel that
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we need to choose between these two impulses. 'There is no reason to believe that racism is always - or even usually - advanced by denying the existence of races; and, though there is some reason to suspect that those who resist legal remedies for the history of racism might use the nonexistence of races to argue in the United States for example, against affirmative action, that strategy is, as a matter of logic, easily opposed.' After all, he continues, 'the existence of racism does not require the existence of races. And, we can add, nations are real however invented their traditions' (p. 175). These last two statements seem, to me at least, to create difficulties for Appiah. While affirmative action may be redressing past discriminations based upon racism, some who use Appiah's analysis might claim that it also contributes to the continued reification of race as a category (the same argument made about scheduled castes in India). Moreover, if nations can be realized through the invention of traditions, might not races also be? The problem persists, 'as old as political philosophy itself, of when we should endorse the ennobling lie.' Having rejected the work of the 'Egyptianists' for endeavoring to root Africa's modern identity in an imaginary history, and having rejected Du Bois's 'revaluation of the race', little space remains for the academic philosopher to employ an 'ennobling lie'. More's the pity: because invented traditions, so fundamental to the longevity of Appiah's other 'house', the AngloAmerican imperium, might be contested both by the invention of competing traditions and by questioning the legitimacy of traditions altogether.11 But taking the former route ends in difficulties. Today's political exigencies (or 'strategic essentialisms' 12 ) may become tomorrow's dogma. To celebrate and endorse 'those identities that seem at the moment to offer the best hope of advancing our other goals ... and to keep silence about the lies and the myths', is to depart from the academic imperative from which 'societies profit' (pp. 178-9). Further, intraracial differences - gender, class, regional, religious and even color conflicts, which are of great significance in their own right - will be downplayed in the service of racial unity. That counter-myth cannot be used is a pity also because the chances of making advances towards genuinely multicultural societies through the rejection of race seem so slim: 'We would need to show not that race and national history are falsehoods but [that] they are useless falsehoods at best - at worst - dangerous ones: that another set of stories will build us identities through which we can make more productive alliances' (p. 175). But, if we cannot ground our responses
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to racism, such as affirmative action, on grounds other than race, how should we proceed? For, if the imperium remains, and the American economy and military maintain their position in the world, can we not expect those who are excluded from the New Whale Order to want to be swallowed by it on whatever terms, racial or otherwise, that it offers? Will they not profit by doing so? As such, a Pan-Africanism, which Appiah wishes to see founded on an understanding of Africa's 'multifarious communities [and] local customs' (p. 180) and not on a yearning for a single African state, is likely to remain elusive. Instead, Africa will remain the province of the 'Egyptians'. Even if the imperial center should crumble, hopes for reassessment of Africa and race may be lost in the Balkan-style conflicts that emerge. Another approach that Appiah appears to sidetrack comes from those dealing with issues of gender. It is readily apparent that the issue of gender would quickly confound questions of race in this work, for better or worse. More importantly, perhaps, gender also confounds the presentation of Africa, African culture, and the traditional that Appiah presents throughout. The use of Chinua Achebe's writings as a source of epigraphs for a number of chapters locates this author's work as a starting point for Appiah. But, while seeming to concur with the novelist's presentation of Africa as the traditional culture facing the intervention of the modern and colonial, Appiah wants to evade the Weberian sense that 'Things Fall Apart' in the wake of the Europeans. Turning to face the issue of gender, perhaps using Buchi Emecheta as a starting-point rather than Achebe, might have helped in this endeavor. Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood presents a world that has not fallen apart, and forces the reader to wonder whether Achebe was unduly under the influence of William Butler Yeats. 13 From the perspective of Emecheta's characters, Nnu Ego and Ona, there is no denouement as there is for Achebe's Okonkwo, who commits suicide. Emecheta's characters' struggles are ongoing both in the rural village and in Lagos, as they face poverty, the restraints of motherhood, colonialism, and potential ethnic conflict. Moreover, the starting-point of Joys is the ending-point of Things Fall Apartu - a rural village soon after the British have established their control over Nigeria. But while Achebe describes an intervention of missionaries, good and bad, changing the lives of the Ibo, Emecheta describes a village conforming in most particulars to the one that has already fallen apart. Further, the British are almost nowhere to be seen, and the Christians are largely resident in Lagos. What emerges from Emecheta's text is
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a different kind of colonial relationship, one that is not dependent upon the destruction of pre-colonial society. Indeed, as the novel progresses it becomes pretty clear that the availability of a labor supply in Lagos is closely connected to the continuation of traditions in the villages. What better for the reproduction of labor, those joys of motherhood, than having men with several wives creating a labor surplus in rural areas? Colonialism, then, does not necessarily break down traditions; it can establish them more firmly as the basis for a divided labor market. 15 Out of such a picture a postcolonial critique of both the colonial and the traditional along the lines of gender might emerge. Nnu Ego is oppressed by the joys of motherhood, by other mothers, by her husbands and other men, by the English, by the market, and any number of things. Layers are placed upon layers such that if one of them were to 'fall apart', others might remain undisturbed or compensate for its collapse. Ultimately, the birth that is in process here is that of the new nation; and with the conflict that emerges at the end of the novel between Ibo and Yoruba, there is a sense that the pains of child birth are accompanied by dreams of future ethnic strife located not in the traditional but the modern urban landscape. With his 'reasonableness' on matters of race and his great optimism for the future, Appiah reminds one of the words of another optimist. Salman Rushdie writes: The truth is there is no whale.... However much we may wish to return to the womb, we cannot be unborn. So we are left with the straightforward choice. Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish, for which a second metaphor is that of Pangloss's garden; or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever - that is, we can make the devil of a racket.... Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; in place of the whale, the protesting wail. Interestingly, we are returned to the womb and the joys of motherhood, which we forget at our peril. The wars, cultural and otherwise, rage on; Rushdie remains in hiding. All we can do is resort to 'the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible'. 16
7 Beyond Silly Mid-Off: C. L. R. James, Ranjitsinhji, and the Boundaries of Englishness Everything James has done has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible, sensitive, and deeply cultured intelligence. He conveys not rigid doctrine but a delight and curiosity in all the manifestations of life, and the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket. E. P. Thompson 1 The word 'cricket' itself has come to mean in the English language, 'good sportsmanship'. It is in that spirit that cricket, or indeed any game, should be played. We play to win, of course, and try our utmost to do so, but even more than that we play to maintain the high standards of sportsmanship. Jawaharlal Nehru 2 'It's just,' he burst out at last, 'that if we don't go soon, we might get caught in the middle of it all again. And there's nothing that depresses me more than seeing a planet destroyed. Except possibly still being on it when it happens. Or,' he added in an undertone, 'hanging around cricket matches.' Douglas Adams 3 Along with W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, M. N. Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru, and few others, C. L. R. James was among the first political and social theorists to grapple with the problems of bringing categories of class and culture (often manifested in race) into alignment, marrying Marxism and Nationalism. 4 James fell away from the Trotskyist version of Marxism in 1940, partly because of its economic determinacy and its inability to incorporate culture into its analysis. Having been brought up in the world of cricket, he found the absence of culture most lacking in Marxist analysis.5 He discovered that he 96
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'had not arbitrarily or by accident worshipped at the shrine of John Bunyan and Aunt Judith, of W. G. Grace and Matthew Bondman, of The Throne of the House of David and Vanity Fair.' These made up a 'trinity', and James would continue to adhere to 'the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Matthew being the son of Thomas, otherwise called Arnold of Rugby'. 6 This marriage of class and race is most evident in Beyond a Boundary, perhaps the most cited book in sports history.7 In moving beyond class and race foundationalisms, however, we need to appreciate the importance of empire. 8 James's conception of 'Britain', after all, is nothing if it isn't located in colonialism; it finds its clearest expression on the playing fields of Maple and Shannon in Trinidad. 9 But while this is a crucial enlargement of our analysis, making us more keenly aware of the need to align class and race according to the locations and specificities of colonialism, we need to go one step further and highlight the way in which this enlargement may nevertheless exclude much imperial terrain. In saying this I do not mean to be critical of James; rather I want to attempt to show the workings of empire, whereby even those who are most critical of imperialism and all its manifestations (and few were more outspoken in their denunciation of this than James) still find themselves caught within its logic.10 Borrowing James's metaphor, getting beyond a boundary is very difficult, not because we do not want to transcend race or class divisions, but because the construction of the boundary itself is imperial in nature. We like to see it as something unitary to be crossed, rather than as part of a larger web of relations that somehow manage to keep us firmly in our place. We believe that we have found a boundary, we step boldly beyond it, only to find ourselves fielding silly mid-off all over again.
THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CRICKET Sport was accepted if it served a rational purpose, that of recreation necessary for physical efficiency. But as a means of providing for the spontaneous expression of undisciplined impulses, it was under suspicion; and in so far as it became purely a means of enjoyment, or awakened pride, raw instincts or the irrational gambling instinct, it was of course strictly condemned. Max Weber 11
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In Beyond a Boundary C. L. R. James describes how when he was young he had imbibed the code of cricket, the code of the English public school. He learned to 'keep a straight bat', and 'to play with the team', and that any failure to do these things ('letting the side down', for instance12 ) 'just wasn't cricket' (p. 33). This code could be summed up 'in one word: Puritanism; more specifically, restraint, and restraint in a personal sense'. This was learned not exclusively from cricket, though here the code was clearest, but from literature as well. It was the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, and James picked up many of its aspects from Thackeray's Vanity Fair, from his 'constant jokes and sneers and gibes at the aristocracy and at people in high places'. Thackeray, not Marx, 'would bear heaviest responsibility' for him (p. 47). While the roots of his own radicalism were to be found in Thackeray, others in Trinidad would find it in sport. After describing from Vanity Fair Henry Esmond's 'supreme embodiment of the stiff upper lip,' James writes: This is not the aristocracy of the early eighteenth century. It is the solid British middle class, Puritanism incarnate, of the middle of the nineteenth. If Judith [James's aunt] had been a literary person that is the way she would have spoken. The West Indian masses did not care a damn about this. They shouted and stamped and yelled and expressed themselves fully in anger and joy then, as they do to this day, whether they are in Bridgetown or Birmingham. But they knew the code as it applied to sport, they expected us, the educated, the college boys, to maintain it; and if any English touring team or any member of it fell short they were merciless in their condemnation and shook their heads over it for years afterwards. Not only the English masters, but Englishmen in their relation to games in the colonies held tightly to the code as example and as a mark of differentiation. (pp. 48-9) Almost in spite of themselves, therefore, 'the West Indian masses' imbibed the ethics of empire. This could be seen most clearly in the case of Frank Worrell, the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team, rising to captaincy only after a bitter struggle against discrimination. When, in 1961, Worrell returned triumphant from Australia and James talked with him about the tour, the latter was surprised by the captain's 'exceptionally quick and decisive appreciation of his players', not regarding their athletic performance but their behavior. 'His first judgment,
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without exception, was always "X was [or was not] a good team man."' The tour had started badly, but Worrell had not concentrated on their performances. Instead, He lectured a few only of his men on taking courses to bring their general knowledge of the appurtenances of life up to the standard expected from so prominent a personage as a Test cricketer; on cricket he lectured nobody. 'If something was wrong I told them what was right and left it to them.' These words will always ring in my ears. They are something new, not only in West Indies cricket but in West Indies life. West Indians can often tell you what is wrong and some even what will make it right, but they don't leave it to you. Worrell did. It is the ultimate expression of the most finished personality, who knows his business, theory and practice, and knows modern men. (p. 249) Here was someone who had been discriminated against, who still found method in the madness of the imperial code. The power of this code, its hold on James, and his belief that it represents a form of English 'exceptionalism' are most clear in his comparison of cricket with American baseball. James had gone to live in the United States in 1938, during the Popular Front period when Americans were still reasonably welcoming to a Marxist-Leninist. At the time, with the help of heavy doses of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, he believed that he had said goodbye to all that cricketing ethos. 13 Much to his surprise, however, he found it resurfacing at the first baseball game he visited. He writes: I didn't know how deeply the early attitudes had been ingrained in me and how foreign they were to other peoples until I sat at baseball matches with friends, some of them university men, and saw and heard the howls of anger and rage and denunciation which they hurled at the players as a matter of course. I could not understand them and they could not understand me either - they asked anxiously if I were enjoying the game. I was enjoying the game; it was they who were disturbing me. And not only they. Managers and players protested against adverse decisions as a matter of course, and sometimes, after bitter quarrels, were ordered off the field, fined and punished in other ways. (pp.51-2)
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'Say it ain't so, Joe!' 14 But it got worse. James was asked to organize a little game of cricket among his friends, which he did using bats 'hacked from pieces of wood' and a rubber ball. 'As soon as the fielders took position, they burst out with hue and cry, and when a ball was hit towards a fieldsman his own side seemed to pursue him like the hounds of heaven until he had gathered the ball and thrown it in' (p. 52). When James learned later that some university basketball teams had thrown games in exchange for money, he was outraged. But to his outbursts his friends 'shrugged their shoulders and could not understand what I was talking about. The boys were wrong in being caught, that was all' (pp. 52-3). The problem was that 'these young people had no loyalties to school because they had no loyalties to anything. They had universal distrust of their elders and preceptors, which had begun with distrust of their teachers' (p. 53). 15 The audience's reaction to sport requires exploration. Suffice it to say, James's observations about baseball fans may have had less to do with the peculiarities of public-school ethics and their absence from the United States, and more to do with issues of class. Implicit in James's comparison is the twofold assumption that he is observing both 'the American game' (a game loved and endorsed by all classes and ethnic groups alike roughly equally) and 'the British game' (a game similarly endorsed across class and ethnic boundaries) - two widely accepted but very faulty assumptions. Both games are supposed through their wholly 'invented traditions' to have embodied certain perceived characteristics of their respective national identities, even while they were clearly inadequate to such a formidable task.16 In the minds of baseball's promoters certainly, the two games were intended to be different from each other and their ethics were supposed to be in some ways opposites (though the fact that they were both endeavoring to fulfill their role as representative of the 'national spirit', resistant to change unless the 'Zeitgeist' underwent transformation, made them fundamentally similar). 17 However, the game of cricket, which James witnessed at his clubs in Trinidad, in the English county leagues, and read about existing elsewhere in the British Empire, had a different social location from the professional game of baseball that he observed from the bleachers. Cricket was a game, for all its pretensions to inclusiveness, that excluded vast groups of people across the social spectrum. 18 Moreover, where it did include the more lowly elements of a particular society (in the north of England, in Bombay, or Australia, for example), people who were not entirely under the sway of the
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public-school ethos, then, as Ranjitsinhji noted in 1895 and Cashman has recently remarked on, the behavior of crowds more clearly resembled the practices of American baseball fans (they acted in the ways that James suggests the West Indian masses acted when left to their own apparent inclinations).19 Further, football (association football and northern rugby league), not cricket, would have had the more committed adherence of the English masses. So what one saw at football stadiums (which indeed would have resembled the baseball bleachers, with the taunting of referees and players) would be a more appropriate comparison with baseball. 20 Baseball, notwithstanding all its structural inequalities, its history of segregation and other forms of elitism, and its equally bogus claims to be a national pastime, was a game that its propagandists claimed was closer to the masses than cricket.21 While it had started out among the elite Knickerbockers of Manhattan, it had quickly worked its way down the social hierarchy, while cricket (certainly in the United States) had worked its way up. 22 Baseball was also very distinctly imperial in its expansive vision and its success was linked to the imperial opportunities brought about by the Civil War. 23 And, though the mix was slightly different (varying according to location), this vision incorporated elements of both colonialism and frontier imperialism. The social elites (Richard Hofstadter's Mugwamp types24 ) came to the professional game late, they did not lead in its expansion. There were some who, like Theodore Roosevelt, jumped on board, but by the time they did so the game was firmly established.25 The game was spread by upstart capitalists, busily incorporating America in their own image.26 But what was remarkable was the speed with which these upstarts began to conceive of themselves as a foundational elite with a mission to civilize the masses and to bring their values and the promise of American sport to social inferiors (witnessed in the spread of the sports ethic among immigrants, through the Settlement Houses, YMCAs, YWCAs, and Hebrew Associations, though these sports, particularly basketball, were soon transformed from mere expressions of elite concerns to reflections of the aspirations of men and women participants). 27 Moreover, while conspicuous consumption remained part of an English gentleman's commitment to sport (especially when they were 'on parade' around the empire), Thorstein Veblen was correct in suggesting that, in the 1890s at least, it was the sine qua non for the new American middle-class's adoption of sports. 28 'India was full of Stalkies,' Kipling noted, 29 but so too was the United States - as
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Kipling's friend Samuel Clemens would have been only too happy to point out. Part of the similarity here, it should be noted as it will have some bearing on the following discussion, lay in the endeavors of members of the elite in both the British Empire and the United States to confront what was conceived to be the 'feminization' of society. For many, this seemed to be a feature of modern industrialized society.30 In different places this notion of feminization had many different things associated with it. In the United States, one could see in the writings of Henry James, for example, the concern evident among his male subjects that they reassert their masculinity in the post-CivilWar world (following a war that for many people had been brought on by the women-dominated anti-slavery movement). 31 Added to this there was the sense that there was a national and racial degeneration occurring. The Anglo-Saxon elite was becoming weak, suffering (like the protagonist in Looking Backward) from neurasthenia, while specimens from the 'poorer stocks' of the human race were flooding in at America's ports. 32 Sport's advocates and promoters, men like Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Albert G. Spalding (very much in touch with their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic who also placed sport at the center of their theories of education), saw it as a way to provide the rising nation with an opportunity to rebuild its men (and women as mothers) to accomplish the demands of empire, at home and abroad. 33 'Hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk; but hit the line hard!' Roosevelt wrote, and he might as well have been writing about San Juan Hill as the Harvard-Yale game. In this context of remasculinization associated with sport, women's location in this world, either as spectators or participants, became problematic. What would happen when a woman, refusing to conform to homosocial festivities, steps out of the crowd to disrupt the proceedings is something to which we will have to return later. 34 In summary, we must avoid getting stuck in an exceptionalism founded on the noblesse oblige of Britain's ancien regime. Some of the conflicts in American baseball look different from those in sport across the Atlantic, but at their core was the suggestion that sport must, like any other commodity, be shaped according to the needs or whims of a particular class or social group (Marx or Weber, take your pick). How sports were 'incorporated' in different places necessarily looked different, but that process of incorporation was still evident. So, for example, while questions of professionalism were decided fairly quickly in baseball, issues of who would control the sport - labor
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or capital, players or owners - raged on into the twentieth century. 35 These conflicts were analogous to those between the amateurs and professionals in both rugby and soccer.36 Baseball's similarity to soccer in this regard is shown by the way much of the American middle class withdrew from serious participation in baseball to the adoption of college sports, just as the middle class in England withdrew from soccer and rugby league into rugby union (and cricket) after the 1880s. James's exceptionalism is no more satisfying than any other brand of exceptionalism.37
STING WITHOUT STINGO If this is not social history what is? C. L. R. James With Puritanism and the public-school ethos as his foundation stones, James obviously has to contend with the issue of racialism and class privilege in sport, and this deserves close attention as it has a distinct bearing on whether the game has any significance, as he seems to suggest it does, outside of the context of colonialism and capitalism - as if cricket can simultaneously establish the boundaries of empire and transcend them. For it is in racialism (though elsewhere also - gender, class, communalism) that the ethos comes unstuck, just as 'bourgeois culture hits its historical limit in colonialism'.38 If cricket transcended the empire in some way and became more than a manifestation of its harsher realities, this would likely be evident in the way that it handled racial and class differences.39 The question of race is right at the heart of the matter for James. As he begins one chapter: I have not the slightest doubt that the clash of race, caste and class did not retard but stimulated West Indian cricket. I am equally certain that in those years social and political passions, denied normal outlets, expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket (and other games) precisely because they were games. Here began my personal calvary. The British tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind you the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that we would have had to divest ourselves of our skins. From the moment I had to decide which club to join the contrast between the ideal and the real fascinated me and tore at my insides. Nor could the
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local population see it otherwise. The class and racial rivalries were too intense. They could be fought out without violence or much lost except pride and honour. Thus the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance. (p. 72) This raises many questions. How did these 'passions' express themselves 'so fiercely' in cricket when the rule of law and the cricketing ethos were so firmly entrenched? Who were these 'selected individuals' who 'played representative roles', and were they recognized as such by everyone? At what point did the 'passions' abate and the 'Puritanism' kick in to stop the process falling apart into the anarchy of communalism? Are there other ways of configuring this? Perhaps it was not actually the rule of law, but was instead class, gender, and racial passions that dominated the game. As such, the cricketing ethos may only have made sense when a certain group had the power to dominate and demand conformity to its customs, through use of force or the claims of civility?40 But what of the particulars of James's biography that relate to race? As he mentions, immediately he thought about joining a club, race became an issue. There were several clubs in Trinidad, but only a few that James might have joined. The Queen's Club, as its name would suggest, was not a possibility: this was the club of the white and wellestablished mulatto elite, the club that controlled the island's cricket relations with other islands, a regular M.C.C. away from home (p. 55). Next in the social hierarchy came Shamrock, then an all-white club catering to the island's old Catholic families. Two other teams were not considered: the Constabulary - James did not want to become a policeman - and Stingo: They were plebians: the butcher, the tailor, the candlestick maker, the casual labourer, with a sprinkling of unemployed. Totally black and no social status whatever. Some of their finest players had begun by bowling at the nets. Queen's Park and Shamrock were too high and Stingo was too low. I accepted this as easily in the one case as I did in the other. (p. 56) James's problem began when he came to choose between the other two clubs: Maple and Shannon. Maple was the club of the 'brownskinned middle class', and 'class did not matter to them so much as
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colour'. The other club was Shannon, 'the club of the black lower middle class: the teacher, the law clerk, the worker in the printing office and here and there a clerk in a department store' (ibid.). James is flattered when, in spite of his own darker skin, Maple's members invite him to join their club. He accepts and 'so it was that I became one of those dark men whose surest sign of ... having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.' Not surprisingly, James feels that this decision cost him a great deal. It kept him apart from two of the island's most accomplished batsmen, W. St. Hill and Learie Constantine. But more importantly, 'faced with the fundamental divisions of the island, I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years' (p. 59). What an accelerated political development might have looked like in James's case is interesting to consider. Had he, a college boy, lived at double speed like Moraes Zagoiby in Bombay (more from him later), then he would have jumped to Shannon (but still not Stingo) at the outset. Would he have learned the puritan ethic in such a leap? We learn that 'Shannon Club played with a spirit and relentlessness, they were supported by the crowd with a jealous enthusiasm which even then showed the social passions which were using cricket as a medium of expression' (p. 60); certainly 'jealous enthusiasm' and 'reserve' seem at some distance from each other. Given this, James's insistence that 'the old Shannon Club of those days is a foundation pillar of this book' seem questionable. By the time that the different clubs are introduced the spirit of Maple is firmly established. In the process, James ends up speaking for a club to which he does not belong. No historian should question his ability or right to do this, except for the fact that it does raise important issues needing to be answered. Would a member of Shannon have revealed to a member of Maple that his fellow members did not conform to the Puritan image to the same extent as the more elite club? Of Shannon, James pronounces: 'As clearly as if it was written across the sky, their play said: Here, on the cricket field if nowhere else, all men in the island are equal, and we are the best men in the island. They had sting without venom' (p. 61). But 'some [men] are more equal than others', perhaps works when addressing a member from Maple. Does it get discarded when turning to an audience from Stingo? 41 So several further questions arise. First, what happens to Stingo in all this? Do they also imbibe the spirit, or are they beyond the pale of respectability? 'Stingo did not have status enough. Stingo did not
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show that pride and impersonal ambition which distinguished Shannon' (p. 61). In Mayhew's and Thompson's terms, they were not artisans, they were laborers. Several times in Beyond a Boundary, Stingo ('the club of bowlers' - which suggests that they took on the traditions of the working class in cricket42) seemed to be brought onto the stage to help illustrate a point about Shannon (pp. 61, 63 and 74). The club was made up of 'nobodies' like Piggott, who truly felt the injustice of racism. 'What is most curious,' James admits, 'is that to this day I don't know whether this superb cricketer was a tailor, a casual labourer or a messenger. Socially he did not register' (p. 74) a chokra, a 'pict', a dalit, a 'plebian' through and through. For James, there was one exception to the Stingo caste, and that was Telemaque. He was no plebian: He was a genuine proletarian, a shipwright or waterfront worker of some kind [uncertain which]. He made good money, and was a member of a very independent workers' organization, one of the few in the island at the time. In 1919 the waterfront workers had upset the island for days with a strike which they tried hard to turn into a general strike, and Telamaque may [uncertain] well have been one of them. That he was a different type of man from Piggott was apparent in every line of his body and every tone of his voice. (p. 75) Where does this leave James's political trajectory into the arms of radicalism? James's analysis in many places tends to privilege certain kinds of people as exemplary radicals, while others seemed to be lumped into a residual category beneath them. In many respects, this conforms to the practice of Social History which has also tended to privilege some people at the expense of others. The second question is, what of those great Indo-Caribbean cricketers - Sonny Ramadhin, Rohan Kanhai, Joe Solomon, and Alvin Kalicharan? 43 Many of them came from Guyana, but even were none of them to have come from Trinidad the absence of people of South Asian descent from this text would still be significant.44 The island's Indo-Caribbean population was large. How was it that they remained at a distance from cricket (at least James mentions no club for them), when the game 'had assumed the proportions of a craze' among their 'compatriots' in India, and South Asians in a neighboring country also saw the rise of many formidable players? 45 This absence, which turns out to be one from Beyond a Boundary, not from Trinidadian cricket, is crucial because it helps us locate James's cricket around Trinidad's
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urban population (blacks had migrated to the towns, when Indian indentured laborers were brought in to replace them after slavery). Consequently, the very cast of Puritanism - in James's Trinidad at least - takes on a non-Hindu, non-Muslim aspect, and turns out to be hegemonic partly because it is privileging certain groups within the population at the expense of others. 46 The third question, and perhaps the most difficult to deal with since James is so silent on the matter, is whether cricket's claims to universality take on a gendered cast when we observe that unmentioned boundary between men and women. One might pass over this in silence, merely providing a footnote indicating that the same kinds of criticisms of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class made by Joan Scott and others are relevant here also. 47 But this would be insufficient, I believe, as sport is about nothing if it is not about playing with notions of masculinity and femininity; it is about 'Colonial Masculinities' - to borrow Mrinalini Sinha's term. 48 Passing by in silence - referring again to James's version of the Kantian categorical imperative (there was sexual exclusion, there is sexual exclusion, there will always be sexual exclusion; but there ought not to be) - would only mean validating the process whereby James's silence is read into the historical record just as a Parliamentary or Congressional record or other archive is constructed in the artful erasure of inconvenient sources. 49 Having learned that James believed his aunt conformed to the Puritan ethos, we should at the very least ask why she would have done so. Aunt Judith clearly did not derive her Puritanism from cricket; neither, apparently, did she get it from Thackeray. In the absence of any other suggestions from James, I will propose that she got it, indirectly at least, from one of the legacies of the institution of slavery. The process of emasculation upon which that institution depended (to some extent at least, and in different amounts in different places), became something to be avoided in the wake of emancipation. 50 Aspects of male dependency found in slavery were replicated to some degree in the forms of exploitation found in wage labor ('wage slavery'), or in the inequitable and tenuous conditions of peasant households, while they were also invoked for different purposes in the system of Indian indentured labor. Thus, the notion of independence would remain a powerful one. That notion, which would have meant in many instances the relative dependence of women, may have been attractive not simply because people endorsed the Puritan Ethos as an idea, but because, in the relational world of
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the British Caribbean, it meant acting out social differences that existed or were believed to exist between Maple and Stingo, Constantine and Matthew Bondman, Africans and South Asians. 51 Here it is important to note that James's Puritanism was in part an inheritance from his mother, whose Anglicanism (associated with the black middle class) was mixed with Wesleyanism. This Wesleyan influence appeared in her emphasis on moral behavior, judged not in isolation, but by comparison with those deemed less than saintly those in need of uplift where possible, or vilification when not. 52 James's mother forbid him to play any sort of game on Sundays, or even to go to hear the band play: I was fascinated by calypso singers and the sometimes ribald ditties they sang in their tents during the carnival time. But, like many of the black middle class, to my mother a calypso was a matter for ne'er-do-wells and at best the common people. I was made to understand that the road to the calypso tent was the road to hell, and there were always plenty of examples of hell's inhabitants to whom she could point. (pp. 25-6) Such 'ribald ditties' focused on the lack of respectability of their subjects, and in the post-emancipation context in which James was growing up would have provided a good deal of tinder for fire and brimstone. The category of class, certainly as it was employed by Aunt Judith and James's mother, would have been heavily gendered in its manifestations. In such a context and climate, cricket would have provided a stage for performing notions of colonial masculinity.53 And yet, given this context, the Puritan ethos may have meant different things in different places, especially for a woman who might have experienced some of its constricting aspects. It is only necessary to note that James received mixed messages from his mother (Methodism/Anglicanism; stay away from calypso/read everything regardless how 'trashy'; publicly act out rigid morality/privately expand one's horizons), while the message from his father was more consistent, to know that things are not always as they appear. His mother may have been doing a bit of spin bowling. What might happen when a woman steps out of the crowd to embrace a cricketer is anybody's guess. But when she does so, according to Faith L. Smith, it is in the full knowledge of cricket as social text. While men are made the important actors in James's text, it is women, Smith notes, who taught the author how to read the likes of Matthew Bondman,
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James's 'dirty, vulgar tenant and neighbor', who could simultaneously excel on the cricket pitch and embody the caste of untouchable. It was women, after all, who had most at stake in making such readings. But in the process of learning their role, in Reddock's words, as 'cultured companions for the men of their class', they came to actively construct meanings for cricket 'as spectators and theorists'. 54 Whatever the details of this hypothetical story when it is set in Trinidad, it is clear that workers' 'agency' reaches its limits in relation to gender. 55 The independence of the emancipated laborer is expressed most clearly in the social histories of that process, in the ability of the male laborer to establish his household. 56 Cricket within these boundaries becomes the terrain for men to perform their masculinity, and remains within the confines of post-emancipation gender practices. 57 We should bear this in mind as we hear from Rushdie of an alternative cricketing ethos which emerges from the act of a single kiss. Finally, in Beyond a Boundary, James turns to the dark side of the force, and describes how cricket failed to keep him from beginning a campaign on behalf of Worrell's captaincy. Here, James describes his interaction with some of his friends over the issue: When I confessed I was angry, even sympathizers balked at this. According to the code, anger should not intrude into cricket. I understood them well, I had been as foolish in my time. According to the colonial version of the code, you were to show yourself a 'true sport' by not making a fuss about the most barefaced discrimination because it wasn't cricket. Not me any longer. To that I had said, was saying, my final good-bye; and no one knew better than I how much dangerous trouble was ahead if that sort of thing continued. (p. 232) James here recognizes the limitation of the ethos as a tool of imperialism, and had he not recognized this Beyond a Boundary might not have had much of its enduring appeal. For, the idea of 'keeping a straight bat' and proclaiming 'it just isn't cricket' works to constrain elites as well as the masses that they govern. This understanding of empire ('the tension between exclusionary practices and universalizing claims of bourgeois culture') has been taken up by Cooper and Stoler, when they write, 'The very universalism of the language gives subordinated groups a handle, outside the immediate power relations in which they are immersed, to single out local tyrannies and to claim global rights.' 58 In this case, James feels that he can do no other but take this stand. If the Queen's elite, who dominate the selection
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committee, cannot accept that the time has come for a black captain, then he will have to denounce them. After all, they are not only being unfair, it is they who are bringing the potential of anarchy into the game of cricket. 59 As we know, order is restored, Worrell is proclaimed captain, and it turns out that he clearly is not going to bring ruin to the game - he is as upstanding as any of the most gentlemanly of white cricketers. What does James compromise in taking this stance within the boundaries of cricket and fair play? He is angry, indeed, but his anger in fact establishes the 'proper' boundaries of the game (and the empire). In the process he concedes too much to the white elite when he tries to reassure them that concession will not bring disorder. For his position conforms to their justification of themselves, when in fact their interest lay in retaining control of the colony, and their loss of control of cricket is just one part of a larger fall from power ('The Decline of the West'). James also ties himself to a projection of a new nationalist elite that is in some ways complicit in the ordering of the imperial system.60 And we are entitled to ask whether the transference of the mantle to the new nationalist elite is necessarily beneficial to 'the West Indian masses'? This is an especially compelling question because in spite of his own Marxism, James seems distant from the masses, and in his brand of puritanism, very much an elitist. As such we can inquire also whether the problem is not, as James seems to suggest, that Cricket may be lost, but rather that it may be retained under the false, imperial, pretenses of universality. Cricket claims but it cannot represent universal truths. The ethnic and class privileges it harbors within it, overtly or covertly, will mean that a successful battle to install a non-white captain will likely be followed by another to install one who is of Indian heritage (as occurred in the case of Rohan Kanhai). If the rule of law transcends empire and passions, as James seems to suggest it can do, then we could imagine racialism being muted or channeled by cricket. Instead, we find that cricket seems to fit neatly the hierarchies put in place by British imperial rule. Once that hierarchy is removed or altered, the same passions are there, but other messages besides the public school ethos are heard. This is not a fall from [w.g.] grace, as James tends to describe it, but an end of particular imperial relationships. But empire is not gone, for vestigial imperialism nestles in James's text in that very romanticism about the world that has been lost.
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THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN He is an English man For he himself has said it and it's greatly to his credit... for despite all temptations to belong to other nations he is an English man Gilbert and Sullivan, 'The Pirates of Penzance' In many ways James's narrative conforms to the classic narrative of sports history, and British empire history also. Everything works out from the metropole to the periphery: the latter is shaped according to the needs of the former. And so with cricket: the game is institutionalized in the English public school; the schoolboys graduate to positions around the empire (Tom Brown, not his nemesis, Flashman!); the sporting ethic is spread around the pink bits of the globe; then the colonized themselves master that ethic and the system as a whole [Worrell is the descendant of Thomas Arnold 61 ]; they become nationalist elites and, hopefully, cricket becomes generalized in the achievement of independence. We are the World! Before endeavoring to subvert this narrative, let us first consider James's exposition of its development, found in the body of W. G. Grace. 'What manner of man was he?' James asks. 'The answer can be given in a single sentence. He was in every respect that mattered the typical representative of the pre-Victorian Age' (p. 173). Here we have the emergence of a figure akin to Edward Thompson's Metcalfe or E. P. Thompson's Blake: His was a Gloucestershire country father who made a good wicket in the orchard and the whole family rose at dawn to get in a few hours of cricket. Their dogs were trained to act as retrievers. They organized clubs and played matches all over their part of the country. W. G. was taking part from the time he was nine. It is 1857, but one is continually reminded of Tom Brown's childhood thirty years before. The back-swording, running and wrestling have been replaced by a game which provides all that these gave in a more organized manner befitting a new age. But the surroundings are the same, the zest, the concentration, the desire to excel, are the same. The Grace family make their own ground at home. I am only surprised that they did not make their own bats, there must have
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been much splicing and binding. If they try to play according to established principles, well, the father is a trained man of science. Four sons will become doctors. The wicket the father makes is a good one. The boys are taught to play straight. With characteristically sturdy independence, one brother hits across and keeps on hitting across. They let him alone while W. G. and G. F. are encouraged to stick to first principles. Such live and let live was not the Victorian method with youth. (ibid.) And the man was a cheat to boot. Here we have the 'white-collar criminal': 62 Everyone knows such men, whom you can trust with your life, your fortune and your sacred honour, but will peep at your cards when playing bridge at a penny a hundred. His humours, his combative ness, his unashamed wish to have it his own way on the field of play, his manoeuvres to encompass this, his delight when he did, his complaints when he didn't, are the rubs and knots of an oak that was sound through and through. (p. 174) Sound, perhaps, if you were a Gentleman. I do not believe that Telamaque got away with such things. And he was an Englishman. Hardly typical, not symbolizing John Bull the symbol (p. 175), but, He was English undoubtedly, very much so. But he was typical of an England that was being superseded. He was the yeoman, the country doctor, the squire, the England of yesterday [an episode of masterpiece theater - a jewel in the crown]. But he was no relic, nor historical or nostalgic curiosity. He was pre-Victorian in the Victorian Age but a pre-Victorian militant. (p. 176) Most importantly, he did for cricket what Babe Ruth did for baseball: he made it the national pastime when doubt was abroad (both home and away) by establishing the 'Zeitgeist'. For cricket, this was the coming to the fore of the all-rounder [the public school version of 'the Renaissance man'], the man who could bat forward and back, pick up the ball and bowl (not just a mere slugger). In some ways his theory was that it was necessary to get rid of the theory (which was just as well, because we know how 'peculiar' the 'English' feel around
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theory); nothing but the facts for this doctor: 'Practically from his very first appearance W. G. put an end to all this categorization. He used all the strokes, he played back or forward, aggressively or defensively, as the circumstances or the occasion required' (p. 177). And then we come upon some very destabilizing news - the evidence itself, or at least its construction by the 'spectators and theorists'. For what is our authority? It comes from Ranjitsinhji's The Jubilee Book of Cricket (1897). In this 'classic passage' we find W. G.'s achievement: What W. G. did was unite in his mighty self all the good points of all the good players, and to make utility the criterion of style. He founded the modern theory of batting by making forward- and back-play of equal importance, relying neither on the one nor the other, but on both.... I hold him to be not only the finest player born or unborn, but the maker of modern batting. He turned the one-stringed instrument into a many-chorded lyre. (p. 177)63 For James, this is enough; the 'Prolegemena to W. G.' has been written and W. G. is enshrined. 'Where a great man has led, many can go afterwards, but the honour is his who found and cut the path. The theory of modern batting is in all essentials the result of W. G.'s thinking and working on the game.' But since this is Ranjitsinhji's statement, and James's analysis of the meaning of Victorianism is drawn almost directly from him, we should at the very least inquire into the identity of this fellow; where is his calling card? Colonel His Highness Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Maharajah Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, GBE, KCSI, first played for Sussex in 1895 (the year of Grace when W. G. reached his hundredth century) and then for the England test side, remarkably only a year later. He made his last appearance at Hove in 1920, when he was 48. His scoring was prolific: in his peak years, 1899 and 1900, he scored 3,000 runs, including three centuries in a row. But the statistics are not really that important, especially since he became the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar in 1907 and his playing was necessarily sporadic thereafter. 'The Prince is a greater batsman than the doctor [Grace],' the leading umpire of the period declared, 'for the Prince has more shots'; these included leg-glances and late cuts, inside-out shots, that in some ways qualified as neither forward nor back play - in-betweenies. As A. G. Gardiner wrote in the Daily News:
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There is extraordinarily little display in his methods. He combines an Oriental calm with an Oriental swiftness - the stillness of the panther with the suddenness of its spring. He has none of the fine flourishes of our own stylists, but a quite startling economy of action.... He stands moveless as the bowler approaches the wicket. He remains moveless as the ball is delivered. It seems to be upon him before he takes action. Then, without any preliminary flourish, the bat flashes to the ball, and the stroke is over. The body seems never to have changed its position, the feet are unmoved, the bat is as before.... It is the art of the great etcher who with a line reveals infinity.... The typical batsman performs a series of intricate evolutions in playing the ball; the Jam Saheb flicks his wrist and the ball bounds to the ropes. It is not jugglery, or magic; it is simply the perfect economy of a means to an end. 64 The 'Oriental' here teaches the English 'utilitarianism'; perhaps 'He' had already taught it to the Mills.65 Ranjitsinhji seemed to be simultaneously 'Oriental' and 'English'. He had 'electric flashes that seemed insolently careless'; he also had, by the way, 'wrists as strong as Toledo steel'; he was 'an agreeable lad who dabbles in a little history' (what is more 'English' than to dote on Carlyle?); 'and, he is very good English company and speaks unaccented English'. He has 'a violent temper, which he generally controls with marked ability.' He was clearly a man of 'restraint.' 66 Arjun Appadurai has suggested that Ranji, as he was fondly known (apparently by all who knew him), carried a 'peculiar Oriental glow'. He 'represented the glamorous obverse of the effeminacy, laziness, and lack of stamina that many colonial theorists thought Indians represented. In Ranji, wile became guile, trickery became magic, weakness became suppleness, effeminacy was transformed into grace [and so much more].' 67 In addition to being 'a symbol of amateurism in cricket's "golden age'", 68 he also lived the empire. He declared (or had it declared on his behalf) that he trusted that 'the wrongs done in the past by Her Majesty's Indian subjects, and the injustice, if any, which they had suffered in days gone by, would be forgotten, and that England and India might form one united country, ready to show a united front to a common enemy, and be the admiration and envy of all other nations'. 69 He was indeed 'the pride of John Bull': in a match against Australia in 1899, when the batting of the rest of the England team collapsed, Ranjitsinhji persevered and the banner headline in many 'popular' newspapers was, 'Ranji saves England'. 70 He would
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also perform valuable service for the British Empire team during the First World War, when many other Indians were announcing 'the decline of the West', or, in the case of Rabindranath Tagore, returning their knighthoods. 71 Hannah Arendt suggested that the creation of the category of 'English' occurred outside the British Isles. There is clearly some truth to this. There is nothing like imagining an opposite to enable one to imagine one's self, as misleading and undialectical as this may be. The English anywhere in the world from Virginia to India must have found establishing a category of 'freeborn Englishman' easier, perhaps, than they did among the dark satanic Mills at home. In defining home and the world, however, there was obviously a good deal that could occur within the British isles. The English were not-Scots, or not-Welsh, and they were also not other kinds of immigrants. New complications would come in as the presence of an overseas empire would make itself felt in the metropole. The Ranjis and the Sassoons of the world would come to speak for the home (in different ways), and not just as 'outsiders' looking in.72 In addition, cultural forms and institutions like cricket would begin to take on the character of 'English' because of their service in the empire, and because subjects of that empire (like Ranji) pronounced their Englishness through the medium of cricket. And C. L. R. James's vision of cricket is just one of these traditions; it is informed by his own perception that he is outside looking in. Gaining a sense of 'the English', he suggests, can be done by observing the colonial setting and then projecting it back onto the metropole. But, while this provides some coherence for the category 'English', it in some ways establishes a boundary where there can be none. As a result, the universal truths that he believes are derived from English political culture and which he feels should inform class and nationalist politics are still firmly embedded within empire and remain hegemonic, in part, because people feel that they can be used in this way. In The Illusion of Permanence, Francis Hutchins has complicated our understanding of the emergence of organized sports by observing them prior to their adoption in the English public school in India and in England (the traditional interpretation, to which James conforms, saw sports emerging in the public school and being superimposed onto the empire). Hutchins writes: The cult of games is today generally associated with the Victorian public schools, where it was made an integral part of education, but
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the cult could trace its origin well back beyond the introduction of Thomas Arnold's reforms at Rugby and the consequent transformation of the majority of the public schools. Vigorous sports as such had been traditional in the English countryside, and characteristic of Englishmen in India from the earliest times. Sport, like other aspects of the cult of conduct, was not created de novo to form a support for character, but rather was simply adapted from an inconsequential part of life, a casual recreation, into an activity fraught with moral purpose. 73 If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then, Hutchins might suggest, this was so in part because Waterloo followed rather than preceded Plassy.74 Moving one step further, however, it is important to discard the notion of a trajectory in sports history altogether. Sport was adopted in the public school both because schoolmasters believed that it could be used effectively to control rowdy schoolboys, and, relatedly, because it was seen to be a significant institution in the British empire. Sport was learned as a medium of hegemony on the imperial frontier while headmasters at Rugby, Winchester, Eton, and Harrow were employing it as a means of controlling school populations (establishing order at the peripheries of their educational outposts, bringing the sons of the English bourgeoisie in from the local taverns and brothels). 75 The English elites were 'fox-hunters on parade' not just in India. 76 They became obsessed with sport and exertion, as the conspicuous consumption of leisure and superiority, as preparation for other exertions against Marathas, working-class radicals, and as a means to maintain health in a debilitating [moral] climate in local villages of India and England. 77 We do not need to locate an originary moment for sports at home or away. We should instead note the coincidence of approaches by people charged with the control and education of adolescents and 'adolescent' peoples (those considered in need of uplift and reform). While it is clear that public schools were, at least until the 1940s, vocational schools for imperial bureaucracies, the imperial mission of control has been retained to give them purpose throughout this century. So where does that leave Ranji? If this Prince could speak, then perhaps he would tell us. Unfortunately, besides The Jubilee Book of Cricket, he mostly seems to have spoken through press releases issued on his behalf, but written by others. So if we cannot add to his interpretation of Grace's significance, perhaps we have 'to listen' to his
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performance on the field. Alan Ross has summarized Ranjitsinhji's contribution to cricket in the following way: What Ranji left to cricket was a series of caressive gestures, a range of hitherto undreamed-of strokes, whose liquidity became the very music of an English summer. It is in terms of water perhaps, that his art can best be summarised; patient stillness under high cloud, elusiveness, transparency, mobility. It was said of Ranji that he moved as if he had no bones, a characteristic more generally associated with West Indian cricketers of African negro [sic] descent than with Indians. What Ranji did, though, was to master the accepted techniques of batting and then dispense with them. He was the embodiment of free form, architecture without evident structure. 78 Beneath the layers of Orientalism [turning 'bloomin' lyres' into sitars, perhaps] and other crusty stereotypes, Alan Ross hits 'something red'. Ranjitsinhji dismantled the very system that he himself had pronounced achieved by Grace. W. G. had founded the modern theory of batting; Ranji had gone one step further - he had gone into regions Caesar never knew - by dispensing with structure altogether. He would be both more and less English than the English [themselves?], and would thereby force the question, what are the boundaries of this thing called Englishness? This man who could give and make 'the silkiest of glances', who carried around with him an 'ironic, bitter parrot' (perhaps to remind everyone that he was in every way the model of the greatest English cricketer - but not quite), 'this Indian prince, in all his finery, abroad in an English summer', played for England, not India. He learned an English version of the tribal game called cricket, mastered it, and then he proclaimed it universal. When Anthony de Mello, a leading figure in Indian cricket administration and founder in 1928 of the Board of Control for Cricket in India asked Ranjitsinhji for assistance in researching his book on cricket in India, he declined to help. He had done nothing for Indian sport and sportsmen because, he said, 'Duleep [his nephew] and I are English cricketers.' 79 The mountain was Mahomet. 80
FIELDING SILLY MID-OFF AGAIN Please, babujis, you give this poor chokra one batting? One bowling only? Okay, Okay - then just one fielding! Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh, p. 230
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Salman Rushdie, in The Moor's Last Sigh, presents a rather different narrative for cricket from that provided by James. His description starts with a simple account of an innocent event at an India vs. Australia test match in 1960. The series was level at 1-1, Rushdie tells us, and the third game had not been going India's way. In the second inning, Abbas AH Baig reached a half-century, his second of the match. At that point 'a pretty young woman ran out from the usually rather staid and upper-crust North Stand and kissed the batsman on the cheek' [we do not learn whether she was merely tired from her 'twice removed' gaze, or whether this was a theoretical and political intervention!]. Eight runs later, perhaps a little overcome, Baig was dismissed (c Mackay b Lindwall), but by that time the match was safe.'81 The narrator's mother, the artist Aurora, liked cricket and proceeded to produce a painting, her theory, 'in which the "real" shy peck, done for a dare, was transformed into a full-scale Westernmovie clinch' (p. 228). It was this version of the incident, much reproduced in the national press - that everyone remembered; even those who had been at the ground that day began to speak - with much disapproving shaking of heads - of the moist licentiousness, the uninhibited kiss, which, they swore, had gone on for hours, until the umpires prised the couple apart and reminded the batsman of his team. 'Only in Bombay,' people said, with that cocktail of arousal and disapproval that only a scandal can properly mix'n'shake. 'What a loose town, I swear.' (pp. 22-9) The portrayal of the kiss had become 'a state-of-India painting, a snapshot of cricket's arrival at the heart of the national consciousness, and, more controversially, a generational cry of sexual revolt' (p. 229). Now that cricket was so securely placed, what would remain of the Puritan ethic? Of course, the simultaneous introduction of cricket and sexual revolt is not reassuring in these matters, but things in Rushdie's Bombay can only seem to get worse. A. A. Baig never again performed well for the national team, and after the following series against Pakistan he was dropped. 82 Rushdie continues: He became the target of a vicious young political cartoonist, Raman Fielding, who ... vilely and falsely accused the honourable and richly gifted Baig of having deliberately thrown away his wicket against Pakistan because he was a Muslim. 'And this is the fellow who has the nerve to kiss our patriotic Hindu girls.'
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Fielding (though the name is also an ironic echo of Forster's character in Passage to India) is Rushdie's model for Ball (no Makepeace here) Thackeray, founder of the Shiv Sena in 1966.83 This simultaneous introduction of cricket and communalism must be considered significant to the text, and immediately gives The Moor's Last Sigh - if it didn't have it already - a different feel from Beyond a Boundary. Fielding's name derived 'according to legend, from a cricket mad father, a street-wise Bombay ragamuffin who hung around the Bombay Gymkhana pleading to be given a chance' (p. 230). He turned out to be a lousy cricketer, but gained a reputation as a security guard, his employer, remembering him from the Gymkhana, nicknaming him J. O. Fielding ('Just One'). Raman Fielding, however, learns a different lesson from cricket from his father. Not for him the humble democratic pleasure of simply being a part, however menial, however marginal, of that cherished world. No: as a young man in the Bombay Central rum-dens he would harangue his friends about the Indian game's origins in inter-community rivalry [no fall here; it was without Grace at the beginning]. 'From the start the Parsis and Muslims tried to steal the game from us,' he would declaim. 'But when we Hindus got our teams together, naturally we proved too strong. By-the-same-token we must make changes beyond the boundary [a reference to James and his alternate description of the game's origins?]. (p. 231) Hindus needed to come together to start taking back some of their rightful heritage from Muslims. In his bizarre conception of cricket as a fundamentally communalist game, essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under threat from the country's other, treacherous communities, lay the origins of his political philosophy, and of 'Mumbai's Axis' [his movement] itself. (p. 231) Cricket, in spite of its ardent individualism, became 'the basis of the rigidly hierarchic, neo-Stalinist inner structures of "Mumbai's Axis'" - perhaps an interesting play on the irony that it has been the socalled 'individualistic' West that has thrown up the 'Great Dictator', not the so-called 'communal' East:
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Raman Fielding insisted on grouping his dedicated cadres into 'elevens', and each of these little platoons had a 'team captain' to whom absolute allegiance had to be sworn. The Ruling Council of the MA is known as the First XI to this day. And Fielding insisted on being addressed as 'skipper' from the start. 84 And that is not too far from your average English public school. There is a significant difference between James and Rushdie, even though the latter harbors some nostalgia for the principles of the game - he comes from Bombay, damn it (as H. Hatterr might say), and he does see these being lost in the erosion of principle: 'a pebble bounced down a hill: plink, plonk, plank.' Nevertheless, for Rushdie cricket was not merely a reflection of transformations occurring in society - the 'Zeitgeist'. It was not enough to see race in cricket as the Kantian categorical imperative, as if there will be racism because there are different kinds of people incorporated within one system. What Rushdie does through Fielding and Thackeray is show how the public school creed could be rendered fascistic with not much turning of the screw. All public-school boys know about blind loyalty to the team and worship of the captain, and are quite capable of making cricket seem 'bizarre' without Rushdie's assistance. To borrow from Caryl Phillips, cricket was created by the English 'tribe', and it has always had rather strange tribal customs associated with it, at Eton, in England's Bombay (Yorkshire), not just in the Trobriand Islands. 85 Puritanism will be wheeled onto the platform like the stuffed dog on wheels, Jawarhalal, in The Moor's Last Sigh, as a reminder of 'principles', but their meanings will have been transformed utterly. 86 As such, when sports are seen affirming a different spirit from that described by Rushdie, when they are to be found at the creation of non-racialism, it is not because of their pretensions to universality and the transcending of communalism - the claim that Britain really did bring something of value to the empire. It is rather to be found in facing racialism head on. Here a comparison between South Africa and the United States might reveal a great deal. While the signing of Jackie Robinson 50 years ago appeared to end segregation in American sport, racialism was transmogrified into different forms, and remains at the heart of this American pastime. 87 By contrast, South African sport was segregated along racial and ethnic lines so that each sport was associated with a different social group: soccer with Africans and so-called 'coloureds', rugby with the Afrikaners, and cricket with the English. 88 In 'Apartheid on the Run,' Rob Nixon
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shows how the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, better known simply as SANROC, endeavored to propagate a tradition of non-racialism. They managed to do so in spite of the public-school ethos associated with sports, not because of it. Non-racialism came out of a milieu of facing communalism directly, through the boycott, not trying to disguise it in claims of objectivity, fair play, and the pursuit of absolutes - not out of the tensions of empire, those tensions between puritanism and communalism, between universalizing claims and exclusionary practices. 89 In the process of reading about Raman Fielding's rise we also learn of the Emergency. One interpretation of this event, often recited, is that left to themselves (i.e., when the British leave) Indians fall back to their caste-ridden, communalist ways derailing the train of State, and someone like Indira Gandhi, who has imbibed the principles of democracy, etc. 90 is required to put the train back on its tracks. Rushdie, no surprise, wants to avoid such an easy reading of the rise of Fielding and the coming Emergency. These are to be linked to cricket and empire, not separated from them. When Aurora buys 'the Moor' a one-way ticket to Spain and a passport stamped with a Spanish visa, in the wake of the Emergency (even though from Malabar Hill, the poshest section of Bombay, 'the Emergency was as invisible as the illegal skyscrapers and disenfranchised poor'), she tells him that he may find it necessary to leave India. But if he does, she says (perhaps invoking Aziz's words to Fielding in Passage to India) he must remember not 'to go to the English. We have had enough of them' (p. 235).
EPILOGUE: TENSIONS OF BEING AN UMPIRE To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must pioneer into regions Caesar never knew. James, 'Preface' But Caliban and Ariel are still both male. Abena Busia91 Arjun Appadurai finds 'the empire play[ing] back' in Indian cricket. As such, he feels, cricket in India has departed from the Victorian codes. Of the Sharjah cup, for example, he writes:
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[It] is a long way from the playing field of Eton. The patronage of oil money, the semiproletarian audience of Indian and Pakistani migrant workers in the Persian Gulf, film stars from the subcontinent sitting on a sports field created by Islamic oil wealth, an enormous television audience in the subcontinent, prize money and ad revenue in abundance, bloodthirsty cricket: here, finally, is the last blow to Victorian upper-class cricket codes, and here is a different global ecumene. 92 But, while we learn a lot from seeing the way modernity is played in this way, I am suggesting here that what we now see as the empire 'playing back', was already in the original conception or practice of the game - whether in James's Maple, Douglas Adams's Lords, or Rushdie's 'subcondiment'. Rushdie helps us to recognize this by enabling us to appreciate more than just the single colonized site in which the action is taking place (Bombay, for example); Rushdie surveys an imperial configuration bringing together webs of association with other imperial locales and systems.93 Transferring such a perspective to cricket, we must extend our analysis beyond the boundary of the playing field to other imperial sites: the stands that house the spectators, the clubhouses that bring together the officialdom who administer the rules, and the archives that house the records. The colonized sites have been privileged at the expense of the imperial: what Constantine, Ranjitsinhji, and Grace did on the field has been made to stand in for 'the Zeitgeist'. But this is a very comfortable and complacent relationship at its worst; and at its best, it is one that finds the anti-colonial gesture being turned on its head to reauthorize empire. After all, 'Bodyline', which is supposed to represent the shifting Zeitgeist so completely ('the decline of the west', 'things fall apart', and 'goodbye to all that'), is used by James and others to establish empire's validity - to establish the boundaries of civility. After learning of such things, we can pine for a world when the Jardines weren't in control (the senior Thompson's 'Elizabethans'), and look back without anger to an age of Metcalfes, Cornwallises, and Company. In doing this, we are investing the events with the same meaning that the participants intended them to have, as if we, as historians, were impartial spectators just reporting the events, only to find that we too have been 'betrayed' and 'seduced'. 94 As Rushdie demonstrates, we can only be awakened from this predicament by the seemingly random act - a kiss - an act that we are forced to interpret both along and against the grain.
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While we await this act, we should at least realise that as historians we are dues-paying members in a pretty posh country club (The Duckworth Sports Club, or the pre-lapsarian Augusta National Golf Club perhaps!): we are neither 'mere' spectators observing from the uncovered stands, nor are we umpires announcing our decisions impartially. When observing, we are seldom in 'The Shed' at Stamford Bridge or the visitors' enclosure; we are to be found in the new American-inspired sky boxes - never without a particular imperial location. When we are on the playing field itself, 'with the flanneled fools at the wicket', we feel all the tensions of umpiring as we are embroiled in spitting matches with a mild-mannered Roberto Alomar. We know which side our bread is buttered on: we are the gatekeepers of a profession that safeguards the records of empire, that was established and professionalized (even if only imperfectly remaining tied to the amateur's code 95 ) in the wake of imperial expansion, and whose models derive their inspiration from the same expansive vision: area studies, modernization, the frontier, global studies, and all but the interstices in between.96 Moving 'beyond' empire, then, is not just frustrating, it is part of the illusion of empire itself.97 The logic of empire requires that we desire a boundary that we can step or hit the ball beyond, when this only distracts us from a critique of the manifestations of empire itself. The legacy of empire has become the fabric of our daily lives. We are rather like the Nawab of Pataudi (senior), playing for Anglostan 98 against Australia on the famed 'Bodyline' tour. We say to ourselves, this just isn't cricket, and we turn to protest to the captain of our 'eleven', the gentleman Jardine. He snaps back at us, T see his Highness is a conscientious objector.' We remain in our position.99 Of course, we wish to deny our location, to position ourselves beyond an Ayatollah's grasp, beyond silly mid-off. But this is to place ourselves beyond hiss hiss history itself.
8 The Sound of Silence Hello, Darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again ... Paul Simon, 'The Sound of Silence' Horace Pippin, apparently, used light very differently from most artists. While others usually start with a white canvas and then gradually fill it with color and shade, Pippin started by coating his canvas with black paint and then added lighter colors on top. This gave his paintings a heavily layered texture, providing a sense (intended or otherwise) that there was something lying beneath the surface image. For an artist who, among other things, wanted to reveal the hypocrisies underlying American propaganda in the World Wars (fighting against intolerance abroad, condoning lynching at home), this approach may have seemed most fitting.1 In his beautifully written and engaging work, Silencing the Past, which should challenge scholars and students alike, Michel-Rolph Trouillot does something similar with history, working in an opposite direction from that of most historians and social scientists. While most scholars start with what they 'know', the information they have gathered, and build from there, Trouillot starts with silence - and the concomitant assumption that where there is silence there must also be silencing, the muffling of noise. Any historical narrative, he suggests, is 'a particular bundle of silences'. Further, incorporated within each 'bundle' is a process of silencing others that might otherwise drown it out in cacophony. The result in Trouillot's hands is a text that lies 'between truth and fiction', reminiscent of one of Michelle Cliff's or Toni Morrison's novels.2 To illustrate this process of silencing at work, Trouillot begins by providing a new reading of events in Haiti at the turn of the nineteenth century, focusing on the silences beneath the histories of the revolution. These revolve around 'the three faces of Sans Souci', the African-born slave who led a faction against and was killed by Henri Christophe; the palace given that name (for obscure reasons) by the victor of this 'war within the war'; and the palace in Germany that may or may not have been an inspiration for the Haitian building. In the process of delineating these silences, Trouillot reveals the tensions 124
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within the revolution, its complexities, the fact (which is downplayed by many inside and outside Haiti), that the revolution was not a singular struggle of slave against French master, but was rather a factionalized saga with many different trajectories. After highlighting these silences, Trouillot turns to the silencing of the revolution itself. This revolution, about which 'the world knew', 3 became in the hands of contemporaries and historians a sideshow in the Age of Revolutions. Trouillot explores how this came to pass. He shows how the silence regarding the Haitian revolution in the works of historians as notable as Eric Hobsbawm 4 have their origins in the silencing undertaken by a wide range of people from planters and politicians (who desired to limit the revolution's influence), to observers and scholars (who wanted to explain away behavior that at the time was considered 'unthinkable'). And by bringing sound to this silence, Trouillot reminds us of the significance of this revolution for modern history - that it made vital contributions to the process of slave emancipation and to shaping the United States, and that it dictated the course of the Napoleonic wars and the future direction of British imperial policy - and thereby points to an enormous gap in most scholarly and popular histories. Of course, Trouillot presents the reader with a dilemma here. How do we weave a path between the silences of the revolution itself, and the silencing of the revolution? For in revealing the three faces of Sans Souci, bringing complexity to the story of the revolution, we may be doing the work of those who would mask that revolution's significance. But one of the beauties of Trouillot's work is that it begins with the premise that history is a 'messy' business. We cannot uncover all silences, and the choices we make as to what to uncover and what to leave in silence are political (they actively contribute to silencing the past), shaped by our own locations. 'Power does not enter the story once and for all,' Trouillot points out, 'but at different times and from different angles' (pp. 28-9); and one of these occasions is in the historian's act of description. Trouillot, then, does not present us with an either-or: coherent revolution, or events that 'got out of hand'. Rather, he forces us to search for the complexities in the power relations that we ourselves face, where every intervention must in some way only be strategic lest it become the pillar of its opposite. And this power to act strategically and incompletely has to be recognized in the slave as we would like to claim it for ourselves. The messiness of history is revealed most clearly in 'Good Day, Columbus', which follows the posthumous career of the Genoese
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adventurer, showing how he has come to be celebrated in the United States, how, in fact, History has come to revolve around his act of sailing the ocean blue. This North American career, dating from endorsements by the Irish Knights of Columbus, by promotors at the Chicago's Worlds Fair, and later by Italian immigrants, stands in stark contrast to Columbus' more humble career in Latin American countries, where his endorsements only seemed to represent the Spanish yoke. This essay includes a flourish on the 'whitening' of Columbus that contributes to work on the invention of whiteness:5 in order to become American, 'Columbus had to become white, in spite of the anti-Italian racism prevailing at the time of the Chicago Fair. As Columbus became whiter he also contributed to the whitening of people who claimed him as part of their past, further opening to multiple interpretations the narrative officialized at Chicago' (pp. 133-4). In looking for the silencing of Columbus here, and in engaging with silences generally (starting with a black, not a white canvas), Trouillot adds layers and textures to historical narratives bringing to light the power in the story. Trouillot begins and ends by recognizing his own location and his own power to shape the narrative. While many historians will feel comfortable with Trouillot's assertions on this score, these members of 'the guild' may be less appreciative of the ways in which 'positivism' has remained central to 'the public's sense of Europe and North America' and so has worked its way into their own scholarly contributions through the process of silencing that such positivism has masked.
9 A Common Wind Yet die not; do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies; There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. William Wordsworth, To Toussaint L'Ouverture1 In E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, the central character, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, Jr., is driven to rebellion against white society by the actions of members of a volunteer fire brigade. Walker is a successful, self-respecting black man. He is driving his Model T. Ford past the fire station when he is stopped and his car is dismantled as part of a racist practical joke. The firemen are saying, in effect, you may be successful but in America you are still black.2 Receiving no satisfaction from the authorities, Walker takes the law into his own hands and carries out a reign of terror in New York, culminating in the takeover of J. Peirpont Morgan's museum and Booker T. Washington's unsuccessful intervention to placate the rebel and have him turn himself in. In effect, Walker's predicament and his response to it represent a commentary on Washington's accommodationist philosophy. As many know, this Doctorow novel owes its origin to a short story written at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a young German novelist named Heinrich von Kleist.3 Kleist's story, based on events that occurred in the sixteenth century, was named 'Michael Kolhaas' and was about a successful young horse-dealer who has two of his horses detained and ill-treated by the Junka von Tronka, whose land he happens to be traveling through. His horses are taken away from him in the most dishonorable fashion, and Kolhaas seeks retribution, sacrificing everything he has, family and property, for revenge against the Tronka and the society that elevated him. The story is set in the sixteenth century, and so we find Martin Luther attempting to 127
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intervene. But Luther is concerned only for law and order, and is unreceptive to Kolhaas's claim that he had to make this stand, he could do no other. Almost two centuries divide these two authors, but the story seems to work in both instances. On the first occasion it is applied to the issues of class, the division between the aristocrats [of Germany] and a nascent bourgeois class; the author is a man looking back at these social developments through the events of the French Revolution. In the second instance, the same scenario is attached to the racial divide in the United States at the nadir of post-emancipation race relations; in this case Doctorow is surveying this nadir from a post-Civil Rights movement perspective. But this equivalence is all too neat, and this is so in a way that I think tells us something about the dangers of bringing categories of class and race together. What do we miss if we make the jump from Kolhaas to Coalhouse reflexively? What we miss is the event that always seems to be missed - the Haitian revolution. 4 A short story that might easily be paired with 'Michael Kolhaas' is Kleist's 'Betrothal in Santo Domingo'. 5 In this story we see the world turned upside down. What we see is the Kolhaases of Saint Domingue determining that they too need to make their stand. Their butchery, however, is not looked on quite so favorably as Kolhaas's. In Kolhaas's case we are dealing with a victim, and his rebellion is justifiable. In the case of Congo Hoango and company, it seems to be evil and sheer savagery at work. While Martin Luther is to be ridiculed for intervening on the side of authority in the Kolhaas piece, one feels that there is a desperate need for some Luther figure in the second story. Only if we carry forward the story about Kolhaas to the era of ragtime without knowledge of Haiti do we feel comfortable with the transposition. With Haiti in place we feel some dissonance, that the narrative is doing work that it was not intended to do. Either it cannot be applied to race, or Coalhouse has in a way been deracinated, incorporated into a system where we are to feel sympathy with him as no different from one of 'us'. But the questions that were evaded in the previous story - what of the peasants whom Luther also condemned and the other 'walking fertilizer', what of such people? - these things become clear when we know that some stands against oppression are to be valorized while others, however equivocal, however (non)-violent, are to be condemned. But here we do an injustice to Heinrich von Kleist. For what arises from the juxtaposition of these two stories is the realization that it is
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inadequate to take on the position of comfortable narrator and have the story develop along easy lines of good against evil. In the case of Kolhaas, we now know that the first part of the story, based on an eighteenth-century chronicle, was written in 1808. The later part, which introduces a lot of complication and tends to undermine the realism of the first half, was written two years later, at about the time that Kleist was writing his story of Santo Domingo. 6 In this later part Kleist introduces a gypsy-woman who gives to Kolhaas a talisman, and in so doing introduces a 'bizarre and fantastic sub-plot' to the story. What this sub-plot does, in effect, is take the easy identification with Kolhaas as protagonist away from the reader; Kolhaas now has a thirst for revenge that isn't merely reducible to his mistreatment. If this is an example of Nietsche's aphorism that T am just' really means T am avenged', then this applies also to others, who like Kolhaas have had their 'agency' stripped from them. In effect, Kleist racializes Kolhaas and also endeavors to 'class-ify' Santo Domingo. In 'The Betrothal in Santo Domingo' Kleist invites the reader to adopt a racial categorization in which white is good and black is evil, and then at almost every point along the way he attempts to dismantle this. A black woman's evil act of luring a white slaveowner to her bed when she is dying of yellow fever is contrasted with a white woman's nobility when she goes to the guillotine during the French Revolution in place of her fiance. These are the two stories that the Swiss mercenary tells to the two women who have themselves lured him into an evil trap. The younger of these two women, Toni, who is the daughter of a mulatto woman and white Frenchman, and was born in Paris, has been given the assignment of trapping white men so that Congo Hoango, an ungrateful former slave and leader of ex-slaves in that section of the island, can kill them. But Toni falls in love with this young Swiss mercenary, and in a way seems to whiten herself. Her attempt to save the Swiss soldier, however, leads him to suspect that she has been trying to trap him, and when she finally brings about his rescue, he kills her. Once he learns the truth he puts a pistol to his own mouth and commits suicide (with the kind of mess only Kleist seems to be able to savor, and in the manner in which the author a few months later would end his own life). The racial categorization is complicated by Toni's actions, by the fact that in her eyes not all whites are the same as the French slaveowners, and by Kleist's attempts to humanize the actions of Hoango and Toni's mother as the story progresses. In addition, the former
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slaves are no different from French revolutionaries, who are described in the story of the noble white woman as 'inhuman monsters' and 'butchers'. But, in the end it does not matter: the Swiss man seems trapped in his vision of the woman as either good or evil, white or black - tragedy will follow. The memory of these events and the couple's love for each other, occurring in the face of General Dessalines' march on Port-au-Prince, about which Kleist announces 'the world knows', is reduced to a small monument hidden beneath a bush in the garden of a Swiss family who had been saved by the young couple. In such ways, stories that go against the grain of world historical events become silences to be searched for and retrieved. Thinking of Kolhaas and Haiti, of the 'common wind', V. S. Naipaul'sy4 Way in the World comes to mind. 7 For it is altogether too easy to make one-dimensional men out of revolutionaries, to divest Kolhaas of his irrationality. Naipaul describes the work of an English travel writer during the period just prior to decolonization, who was sympathetic to the Grenadian workers' struggles in Trinidad of that period. In one particular strike led by a Kolhaas-like figure, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, and supported by a character Naipaul calls Lebrun, who appears to be modeled on George Padmore (with a twist of C. L. R. James for good measure), the English author gets carried away in his praise, turning Butler into a figure of the stature of a Gandhi. According to Naipaul: The strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves. This was the subject of the English writer's book. He (Foster Morris) wrote of Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people - as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness. For Naipaul, this was praiseworthy, 'well-intentioned,... but it was wrong':
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What was missing from Foster Morris's view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn't make sense. That idea of a background - and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectability - made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren't responsible in that way. Much had been taken from our hands. We didn't have backgrounds. We didn't have a past. For most of us the past stopped with our grandparents; beyond that was blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating. (p. 81) Foster Morris, acting the part of social scientist, 'didn't understand the nature of our deprivation'. He saw 'versions of English people and simplified us'. He could not see that Butler was considered by his followers, simultaneously, 'a kind of messiah' and 'a crazed and uneducated African preacher' (p. 82). Morris also could not understand that the policeman was not someone reviled by the insurrectionists, 'that he was to become, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured' (p. 82). Morris's 'rescue' project had avoided condescension towards the Butlers and Kolhaases, it is true; but what of those who could not be given their moment of reason in the face of oppression? They would remain un-anglicized, their irrationality - of which they would have the usual measure - characterizing them as far as it was necessary to characterize them at all.
10 Class, Culture and Empire: Making Social History Infamy, infamy, they've got it in for me. 'Carry on Cl[i]o'
PROLOGUE: CAN THE 'SUBALTERN' WRITE HISTORY? ... And I'm really quite self-satisfied. I'm happy with myself. I have no complaint about myself. I mean, if I'm just one more nice guy in the Dalton School in the seventh grade, well then, I'm just as nice as the next guy in the seventh grade. But the thing is, you know, let's face it, there's a whole enormous world out there that I don't ever think about, and I certainly don't take responsibility for how I've lived in that world. 'My Dinner with Andre' 1
WALLY.
In early 1968, about the time of the Tet Offensive, a leading member of the fraternity of South Asian historians wrote a 30-page prospectus for other members of his coterie outlining what American scholars needed to do to open the door to the subcontinent and to establish their own school of South Asian history.2 The Cambridge School in England was apparently too obsessed with theories of Nationalist conspiracy to be left unchallenged, while the failings of the historians from the subcontinent lay in their obsession with the work of great men, resulting from a conception 'of their own recent history, which tends to be seen in terms of "giants,"' and insufficient attention to social historical concerns. This scholar's vision did not go unchallenged. The facts of the characterization of English or South Asian historiographies were never questioned, nor was the overall outline of what American historians of the subcontinent should be attempting to accomplish. Rather, the major concern was whether or not this new school should be dominated by scholars from Chicago. Both Columbia (which received no 132
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mention in the prospectus) and Penn, one historian noted, had equal if not better claims to lead, having had Area Studies programs (language courses, archeology, history, anthropology, and the like) in place since the 1950s - as compared with Chicago, which, for all its pretensions in the field of Sociology, was a new kid on the block.3 Dollars, and many of them covert, were available in abundance, and squabbles would continue to revolve around the question of which institution should be getting what portion of this pie. The assumption that American scholars had a mandate to study India seemed to be taken for granted. 4 An echo of this debate could be heard in an introductory graduate seminar at a major research university in the middle of the 1980s, shortly after the invasion of Grenada, where a class of students was informed by an American, Harvard-trained specialist of China that Americans needed to be the ones to write the history of China because Chinese historians are too biased to do so objectively.5 It can also be heard today (at a time when we are reminded of the CIA-sanctioned killing of Patrice Lamumba) in African scholars' complaints that their work is discredited unless they can get published in EuroAmerican journals, and in American scholars' assumptions that African-based scholars' limited access to resources is a determining factor in their ability to write 'good' histories. 6 Such statements of imperial prerogative have a long history. As noted in an earlier chapter, Edward Thompson pronounced a few years after Jallianwalla Bagh in 1925 that Indians were not historians. 'They rarely shown any critical ability,' he wrote, and 'even their most useful books, books full of research and information, exasperate with their repetitions and diffuseness, and lose effect by their uncritical enthusiasms.' 7 These assumptions, what W. E. B. Du Bois would have considered examples of 'the propaganda of history', have remained with us into the 1990s, under the guise of notions of 'proper historical practice' (Thompson's 'solid highways to scholarly esteem and approval'). There may have been some improvement from Edward Thompson's time. We have moved from self-consciously racist and 'orientalist' assumptions to cultural, economic and political ones (distinctions between working class and underclass, worthy and unworthy poor, migrants and refugees, artisans and others, for example), where one of a pair can be 'rescued' or may represent itself, and the other cannot or may not. But the ascribed 'deficiencies' remain, as does the belief in the 'objectivity' and unassailabihty of
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bourgeois historiography. 8 What such things suggest (to me at least) is that the development of historical practice has paralleled the process whereby imperial privilege has become naturalized as 'progress' or 'civilization'; those who question the trajectory are dismissed as biased, beset by 'uncritical enthusiasms', and, in short, just not historians. 9 The latest group to be so described are members of the Subaltern Studies Collective (though not all to the same extent). Before we proceed further, therefore, it is worth glancing at the work of this collective, as their work has contributed to destabilizing western historical practice in quite significant ways. At first it did not appear that this would be the case. One reading of the early years of the Collective might be that it represented the application of Social Historical methods and concepts to Indian History. 10 As Gyan Prakash has ably demonstrated, however, it became evident very quickly to members of the group that these concepts 'hit their historical limit in colonialism'.11 Prakash writes: It is true that the effort to retrieve the autonomy of the subaltern subject resembled the 'history from below' approach developed by social history in the West. But the subalternist search for a humanist subject-agent frequently ended up with the discovery of the failure of subaltern agency: the moment of rebellion always contained within it the moment of failure. The desire to recover the subaltern's autonomy was repeatedly frustrated because subalternity, by definition, signified the impossibility of autonomy: subaltern rebellions only offered fleeting moments of defiance, 'a night-time of love,' not 'a life-time of love'. 12 The Collective's historians quickly realized, therefore, that Subaltern Studies 'could not just be the Indian version of "history from below" approach; it had to conceive the subaltern differently and write different histories.' 13 As such they were already receptive to the kind of criticism leveled at them by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her deconstruction of Subaltern Studies historiography 14 (and their response was not as defensive as social historians' reaction to Joan Wallach Scott's somewhat similar critique of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class15). When, later, Spivak asked 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' following a discussion of a woman's sati, many of the problems of attributing 'agency' to 'subalterns' were readily apparent. 16 Interestingly, Social Historians in America remained largely oblivious to these developments among Subaltern Studies
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historians, perhaps assuming that the latter would eventually make the leap from their second-stage insurgency (the study of colonialism) to the third stage (historical materialism) once they had access to funding and other western resources. Instead, however, it seems that what Thompson dismissed as a case of the 'French' flu (but, which for a number of reasons, would be better called 'Algerian' 17 ) took root within the Collective in the guise of 'postcoloniality', and has now begun to afflict British and American academic populations. One of the first symptoms of this flu is the miscegenation of categories and narratives that had previously been kept in seclusion. In western historical practice, categories of race and class emerged out of almost separately constructed (but intimately related and intertwined) historiographical traditions, in situations where historical narratives were assumed to be divided along the axes of metropolitan (class-based) and colonial (race-based) - never a Mark Twain do we meet; not even a Rudyard Kipling.18 Miscegenation between class and race categories and narratives clearly occurred, but it was either ignored (hoping it would go away) or repressed. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class needed to make no mention of race; 19 his father Edward Thompson's work on India and the British Empire ignored class.20 Many historians now question this dichotomy, but its legacy still affects the practice of history.21 Since the two narratives were constructed in relation to one another, it is not enough now to try to superimpose one on the other. Class analysis has race hidden within its interstices, and vice versa. Both have erased issues of gender. Uncovering these erasures and elisions is therefore the first step in the process of racializing class and classifying race. In an attempt to reveal a miscegenation of narratives - the assembling together of metropole and periphery, class, race, and gender in a promiscuous gathering, the mixing of metaphors 22 - this chapter enlarges on 'The Empire and Mr. Thompson'. In the earlier chapter, we endeavored to focus on an aspect of E. P. Thompson's work that has received minimal attention, namely the relationship between E. P. Thompson and the British Empire within which he was born. But this was only one part of our intent. Though we did not make this point directly, we wanted to suggest that this relationship with empire shaped the work of a whole generation of historians who followed in the younger Thompson's wake, and that what was alive and well in British India between the wars, the naturalizing of the imperial, is now what we witness in contemporary American political discourse.
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So natural has that which is socially constructed become that we do not realize the ways in which it seeps into our historical analyses. The first of several sections that follow focuses on a conversation I had with a labor historian about 'The Empire and Mr. Thompson', while the second section elaborates upon some of the points made in that paper about the omission of gender and race from The Making of the English Working Class. The last two sections discuss some of the work in American history that has been influenced by Thompson's analysis, focusing in particular upon two areas in which I have published - migration and American exceptionalism.
MY DINNER WITH ANDRE ... And they live with a sort of wild enthusiasm - you know, the word 'enthusiasm' refers to 'the god within', and they do somehow seem to see the god within everything. So all sorts of things that we would do sort of mechanically, just because we feel they have to be done, they do with an extraordinary intensity. I mean for instance, all the buildings at Findhorn just shine. And then things like the icebox, the stove, the car-well, they all have names. And since you wouldn't treat Helen, the icebox, with any less respect than you would Margaret, your wife, you make sure that Helen is as clean as Margaret...
ANDRE:
At an impromptu tutorial with a senior scholar of labor history, I was being questioned about 'The Empire and Mr. Thompson'. The discussion was a friendly one, even when it became clear that there were fundamental differences of opinion dividing us. I had arrived at this historian's doorstep believing that I would be attending a meeting only to learn that it had been postponed, and had been invited in for some cherry pie and a beer. Since I had given my host a copy of the Thompson essay at our previous meeting, I had expected, perhaps hoped, perhaps feared, that he would have read it and that the conversation would at some point focus on E. P. Thompson. At our very first meeting about a year previously he had told me of his own close connection with Edward: that he had house-sat for him when the latter had gone on his speaking tour of India (the trip that would be the starting-point of our essay).23 On this occasion I heard again about this relationship. But our initial point of departure was his comment, T have read the
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beginning and the end of your paper, which is very long [it has been abbreviated somewhat since], and I have the basic idea of what you are doing, but I do not think I will read more. It seems to be an indictment of Edward for not seeing and denouncing the imperialism of his father.' And before I could respond to this statement, we turned to a discussion of the nature of the father's imperialism. What exactly was it? Wasn't he pro-Nationalist? Didn't he convert from Methodism to Buddhism? 24 How did it compare with that of other members of his generation? If E. P. Thompson was raised in this milieu, can we blame him for not transcending it? What really was Edward, the son, supposed to do about this? Most of these questions were considered in the bulk of our article, so I will not rehash them in full here. Suffice it to say that the paper was not meant as an indictment of either Edward John or Edward Palmer. It was intended as an expose of an aspect of imperialism, and an analysis of the way that anti-imperialists (as we like to think we are) can miss the extent to which these aspects of imperialism find their way into our analyses. The essay was harsh in places, particularly when it attempted to show how different kinds of Indian nationalism were discredited in Edward John's sometimes pro-nationalist writings; but imperialism was and is harsh. We cannot pass over it by saying that we are so much better than everyone else, so what we do is fine. Perhaps we can say we are politically justified, that we are endeavoring to expose that imperialist discourse, and that this is an ongoing commitment. But we have to locate ourselves in that imperial landscape. We are not critics, above the fray.25 And if we think that we might be (and to some extent, this is directed at Thompson's understandings of both empiricism and objectivity), then we are both fooling ourselves and replicating imperial discourses.26 Was E. P. Thompson supposed to denounce his father? Of course not. Why would he? What would be the point of doing this, even if he were able to recognize his father's 'limitations'? No, the point is to understand what E. P. Thompson's defensive reaction to criticism of his father, and what his own impression of his father's 'alien homage' to Rabindranath Tagore in particular and India in general, suggest about him and his ideas. 27 Once we have examined these we can then ask informed questions about the son's writings. Are the British empire and certain kinds of people within it written out of, or elided in his work? 28 What is the significance, for example, of the absence of mention of slavery, slaves and abolition in The Making of the English Working Class! Where are the Irish? And what about India? All this
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was the subject of the central part of our paper, which talked about aspects of the father's work that seemed to have been carried over, consciously or unconsciously, into the work of the son. Up to this point our discussion had been going relatively smoothly, and the fact that the paper remained unread meant that some of my colleagues' questions were not as penetrating as they might have been. Nevertheless, there was some sparring going on. My senior colleague seemed to be waiting to pounce on a stray comment, should it present itself (which it almost inevitably would). In the meantime, though, we discussed our own debts to Thompson. I located my own 'conversion experience', as my discussant described that moment when one decides to become a historian, in my reading of The Poverty of Theory. This was clearly a romantic exaggeration of my own intellectual development (the length of unemployment lines in England were equally compelling reasons to apply to study history in the United States), but it did nevertheless speak to the fact that this text had influenced me greatly. My fellow communicant's 'light on the road to Damascus' came, apparently, while reading Hobsbawm's The Age of Capital. I then said something that my soon-to-be adversary thought was going to suggest that I had felt betrayed by Thompson, perhaps accounting for some of our invective against him. I said, 'That is not it at all, that is not what I meant, at all.' Rather, I was about to suggest that the fact that I had been started down the road to becoming a historian by reading Thompson meant that there was some degree of freedom to be derived from the fact that he no longer seemed to be practicing history within the rigid confines of the academy, but was instead engaged in anti-nuclear and other political concerns (my one experience of seeing Thompson was at an anti-nuclear rally sponsored by the Westminster Borough Council). Being a 'disciple' of Thompson was not a limiting experience. The same critical thinking that he applied to Althusser, his no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners writing, could be used anywhere. 29 All very romantic stuff. I continued by finally responding as forcefully as possible to my colleague's initial point, asserting that this was not a diatribe against Thompson for being an imperialist. For my part (and I only speak for myself here), I was trying to bring to the paper my changing understanding of myself: a former English public-school boy brought up on a 'healthy diet' of imperial propaganda dressed up in the guise of 'common sense' and 'proper' behavior (rugby not cricket!); a member of a middle-class English family, which when one scratches beneath
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the surface owes much of its (in)coherence to the (one-time?) existence of an empire; an American citizen who has written about African American history and now is preoccupied with writing on comparative historical concerns; and the father of two children who have roots in Maharashtra (Bombay Presidency) as strong as those in the Home Counties of England. My strong desire was to examine myself and my own intellectual baggage to consider the way in which the things that I have taken for granted have their origins in imperial relationships. What better way for a historian to do this than to consider perhaps the 'seminal' text in Anglo-American social history - The Making of the English Working Class! Inexorably, we were heading toward a disagreement. My cherrypie-eating assailant seemed happy enough so far, but he was there lurking, I felt sure. And then I stumbled into the present and toward the trap. We wanted to suggest further, I asserted, that if there were these imperial links hidden in Thompson's work, perhaps they also lay in the work of those people who had used his ideas on the American side of the Atlantic. This opened the door to a discussion of how Thompson has been appropriated by historians in different political contexts. But before considering American appropriation, we turned to consider that of Indian historians. Why had the Subaltern Studies Collective found Thompson so useful, if all these imperial links/limitations were manifest? I mentioned that we had focused on this question in our consideration of Ranajit Guha's critique of Thompson's ideas about the universal benefits of the 'rule of law' which he described the British bringing to India, and in Dipesh Chakrabarty's discussion of the problems of simultaneously applying Thompson's concepts of culture and class-consciousness to India; 30 and that, moreover, the Collective had seemingly caught a case of 'French flu', so that many of its members had changed their opinions of Thompson's usefulness to their endeavors. 31 The trap was laid, but still I was not within it - until, that is, I mentioned the word 'privileging'. I must have said something to the effect that one of the problems is that Thompson doesn't see how his analysis privileges certain groups and still ends up denigrating others. I did say that this had been one of my points of departure in my own contribution to social history.32 For it had always seemed to me that the way social historians had studied migration, the area with which I was most familiar, and that I felt owed much to Thompson's legacy, almost always tended to privilege certain groups and narratives over others. 33
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My antagonist pounced. 'That is where we part company, I'm afraid. I find the use of that term [privileging] in critiquing Thompson wholly misguided and unhelpful.' This is not verbatim testimony since I had no pen and my fork was filled with a chunk of pie, but it gets across the intent. I was then treated to a diatribe against some of those who have criticized Thompson along these lines, particularly, I felt (though no names were mentioned), Joan Scott.34 This had not been Thompson's intent, I was told. He was trying to get at the history of the inarticulate using those sources that were available to him. He was not trying to elevate the status of the artisans, but was trying to use them to give him access to this world about which the historical record was silent. He was rescuing them from universal condescension. This he felt was clear from his introduction to The Unknown Mayhew.35 Moreover, Thompson was akin to Eugene Victor Debs, I was told: 'when one man is not free, he feels that he is not free'. Thompson, he could assure me from his personal interactions with the man, was concerned about opening the doors to everyone. He was very radical. He was not interested in imposing his ideas on others, by privileging some and being condescending to others. Without question, the presentation was more impressive than my rendering of it here. I had been happily eating away, only to realize finally that these cherries were indeed a little sour. I needed time to think and it was already late, so I replied, 'That is an interesting perspective, and I need time to think about a response, and it's getting late. I should go.' But I didn't budge. Instead I made the mistake of quipping that Thompson may have felt that way, but he was no Debs, thereby implicitly endorsing the formulation as presented to me. Debs, I argued, was in the prison alongside the convicts who cheered him when he was released. Thompson, by contrast, I said (remembering the comment of a historian at Edinburgh University who had suggested that Thompson's romantic picture of the working class was typical of an outsider), was by his own admission 36 more of a patrician, one of the gentry. This was a side-track, perhaps stalling for time, and I was only digging the hole deeper. For my adversary's response was to say that that kind of critique might have resonance for historians from Britain and India, but Americans were unmoved by claims about Thompson's patrician status. It didn't really mean much to them; which is why, he stressed, it has been useful to have Americans assess Thompson's legacy. The conversation moved on to other topics. Order had been restored. I was pigeonholed as a misguided English critic of
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Thompson, my co-author a misguided Indian - citizenship denied. No more really needed to be said on the topic, especially as American Thompsonians had been immunized from the imperial infection. The last part of our paper (as it was then, and which I rehearse below), trying to make these connections across the Atlantic, had been discounted in the acceptance of the exceptionalism of American historians. I tried to resurrect Du Bois for my purposes, but this only took us down that Avenue named 'The Meaning of W. E. B. Du Bois'. It ended at a roundabout that we circled trying to decide which exit to take (the one that would allow us to employ him for our previous discussion), but we disagreed as to which one looked most attractive. And now it was very late. I needed to go, and go I did.
OF MR. EDWARD P. THOMPSON ... Now one of the chief errors of thought is to continue to think in one set of forms, categories, ideas, etc., when the object, the content, has moved on, has created or laid premises for an extension, a development of thought. C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics31 In the last few years social history has witnessed a rush among historians into discourse analysis, what Bryan D. Palmer has described as a 'descent into discourse'. 38 Palmer believes, as many other Social Historians do, that a lot has been lost in the process of this descent. 39 In particular, it is argued, a politically vital historical method based on class analysis has been replaced by one that apparently has no radical possibilities, and which ends only in a kind of Nietzschean nihilism. In part, the success of Social History has created its own difficulties. The idea of looking at history 'from the bottom up', while first applied to lower classes generally, was also an invitation to look at oppression from many different perspectives (sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination along with economic exploitation). Thus, while class analysis seemed to hold sway initially (especially as Karl Marx, turning Hegel on his head, was the first person noted for looking at history from this bottom-up perspective), African Americans, women, so-called 'ethnic-Americans' and so on also began to approach history from this direction. The result has been that class has been challenged as the most useful tool for social analysis. 'What about working-class racism, or patriarchy?' became common complaints. 40
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The first response of Social Historians has been to loosen the hold of class on their analysis. Large numbers of people have followed E. P. Thompson's less rigid and doctrinaire analysis of class and his assertions (following Engels) that class is a determinant only 'in the last analysis'.41 New emphasis has been placed upon ethnicity, race, gender, religion and so on, which has led to a further erosion of class's categorical supremacy. But, once historians focus on these other variables, class ends up only in the position of primus inter pares, sometimes losing even that position. 42 Things have fallen apart. Many of the old-guard Social Historians and their sympathizers believe that these new departures (the emphasis, for example, on identity politics) are less capable of producing change than the old class politics.43 Worse than merely 'hypocritical', it is often argued, linguistic theorists have been prone to psychotic behavior and borderline fascism. And indeed, some of them may not be particularly appealing people. But resorting to such ad hominem, un-'civiP attacks on 'discourse radicals' does not allow us to consider carefully what they are saying about the nature of Social History and the problems with some of its assumptions. For, while Marx should not be dismissed for what came after his death, we must nevertheless recognize, with the new 'radicals', that his analysis of exploitative and oppressive societies was formed at a particular historical conjuncture. Living in Western Europe at the height of the industrial revolution and seeing the formation of an industrial proletariat, it was not surprising that he would see the economic category as foundational - fundamental to all social problems and essential for social analysis. If one wanted to bring about a social revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, it would have been very difficult to ignore such developments to locate gender, ethnic, or racial conflicts at the core of social ills. This does not mean, however, that these conflicts were not there; nor does it mean that when social change occurred, either in its 'evolutionary' or 'revolutionary' forms, it dealt with these other conflicts. In fact, the very particularistic nature of class analysis, its tendency towards its own form of essentialism, led to gender and race being neglected and placed under erasure, so that dealing with or acting on the basis of class tensions often led to the hardening of sexual and racial oppression (and, in the end, the creation of new forms of class exploitation). As a result of the inadequacies of such an economic and class model, then, new approaches to history have emerged. Seen from a narrow perspective, as many of their detractors have tended to do,
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the practitioners of such approaches have revealed a tendency towards 'nihilism'. If the category of class is displaced by another category, why cannot it also be displaced by still another, and another, and so on? At first one moves towards a 'holy trinity' (race, class, gender), but pretty soon one is given these three plus a few more - region, ethnicity, religion, and sexual preference. Finally, one might suggest that whenever the list is terminated it should always be done with an 'et cetera' at its end, in case any category that might have some influence on the object under study has been omitted. Soon the same event can be examined from so many different perspectives that it has multiple meanings, with each having as much importance as another - post-foundationalism, nihilism. Nevertheless, any impulse in this direction is preferable to the status quo among radically minded historians. Of course, many scholars argue that such approaches play into the hands of reactionaries, who have been attacking class analysis all along and who would be happy to emphasize one or other of these social categories. There may be some validity to this charge. One only has to think of members of the Dunning school of historians at Columbia University who argued that race was of prime significance in the American South. Such an approach legitimated Jim Crow and other forms of racial oppression. 44 By contrast, the courage of a C. Vann Woodward focusing on class issues helped to undermine such legitimacy.45 But, while a system of economic exploitation may be overthrown and replaced by a less exploitative system, it is questionable whether this system would be considered liberating were it to be examined from an another vantage-point. From a gender perspective, for example, the replacement of a patriarchal slave system by a patriarchal 'free labor' system would not necessitate any change in condition for some of the enslaved.46 Similarly, from the perspective of race any radical social transformation that brought about social equality for all 'white' people, but which, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, left black people as hewers of wood, could not be considered liberating. 47 Of course, a so-called 'historical materialist' would argue that class analysis should incorporate the experiences of African Americans and women and that, used correctly, it would help to eliminate all forms of exploitation; but it need not do so. The type of change that occurs might be shaped by a particular discourse which limited the potential for liberation and rationalized 'a new kind of slavery'.48 Unless we believe that class is a transhistorical category, then it is shaped by a particular social environment.
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One part of this environment is economic (the means of production and who controls them); but other parts will be gendered and racial. The way particular people respond to their economic position in society, in other words how they feel about their relative economic disempowerment, will be determined in part by current gender and racial beliefs and practices. Thus, skilled white artisans losing their foothold in the labor market or finding their jobs deskilled, and thereby losing their prestige, will respond differently on the basis of a number of factors. If they see this as a loss of once-cherished masculinity, and believe that they now have no more value than 'their' womenfolk, they are likely either to contest it vigorously with management or attempt to assert their will over women in other, sometimes violent, ways. If they are told they are no better than 'wage slaves', and so explicitly compared to the most despised and believedto-be-emasculated group in society, their responses will often be similar, perhaps incorporating disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching to maintain or increase the distance between themselves and the despised group. Faced with such situations, historians have been tempted to argue that these people were economically exploited, accounting for the misogyny and racism prevalent during these periods as products of their marginality and therefore the fault of their bosses, and ignoring that such attacks on women and blacks might constitute part of their own understanding of the process of liberation. But this behavior cannot be dismissed so easily. Nor can we overlook historians' own tendency in the past to valorize these processes of liberation. When historians have found that the prerogatives of male laborers have been given precedence in periods of reform, such as the New Deal era when the 'family wage' for men gained widespread currency, they have nevertheless praised the reforms, downplaying the fact that they were premised on a proscription of women's roles that might set the stage for future sexual oppression (not to mention the racial oppression that followed from the fact that such perquisites were not to be offered to poorer African Americans, who consequently appeared to be unable to create their own stable patriarchal families).49 And here we might consider E. P. Thompson's introduction to The Unknown Mayhew, referred to by my dinner companion. Thompson does indeed reveal a very radical Mayhew: a man of some cultural sensitivity and political acuity; a poet, a novelist, and social scientist; a contributor and, briefly, an editor of Punch (in its more politically charged days before Thackeray); a man living at a time when
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Chartism seemed to be all but dead and when the English elites had seen revolutionary fires blazing on the Continent but had been spared their own; a man who, through his study of London's working poor, became sensitized to their needs and, very briefly, a spokesman for their concerns; finally, someone who made the leap from the partial journalist to impartial social scientist using the inductive method. Any parallels that might be drawn here between Mayhew and Thompson would just be distracting, however revealing. But in establishing this background, once again, nothing is made of slavery and London's position at the hub of an empire (except in so far as certain colonies are seen by some responding to Mayhew's articles as an outlet for London's 'excess' women). The Irish are not focused on, nor are other immigrants in London. Mayhew, Thompson notes, does refrain from resorting to some of the baser charges against the poor noted among the more provincial correspondents in the Morning Chronicle. But all-inclusive he is not. In a way the empire is made more invisible by Thompson's selective representation of it. 50 The colonies to which he refers, those growing in the Antipodes, were seen as destined to become outlets for white labor, thereby also facilitating the establishment of a well-heeled working class at home (Lincolnesque republicanism). In the process, India, China, and the British Caribbean colonies are erased as areas of concern, even though these colonies are contributing to making Britain 'the richest nation on the face of the earth', which simultaneously eased some potential social tensions and created a sense of outrage or shame that within Britain, 'we ... have allowed our fellowcreatures to "fust" in styes, reeking with filth, such as farmers, now-a-days, know that swine would pine and dwindle in' (p. 22). When Mayhew concentrates 'his attention upon the evils of unregulated competition', the immediate reaction is to cheer that he is taking up the populist banner and defending the female slop-workers (p. 29). And yet any reader of Gabriel Kolko would hear alarm bells going off, especially when, given this imperial terrain, we remember that concerns about over-competition would be associated with certain of the empire's capitalists (there's certainly nothing new about debates over NAFTA). 51 When Mayhew converts 'to the protectionist views of the boot-maker' we certainly begin to worry. Momentary relief comes when we find him addressing London tailors and declaring that 'the best remedy [for their problems] was a combination of working men in trades' unions' (though it is uncertain how this would help the women slop-workers). But this is immediately disrupted by Mayhew's attack
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'upon the importation of cheap foreign labour', during which 'his rhetoric became xenophobic and anti-semitic' (p. 38). Thompson makes no comment about this and doesn't feel that this taints Mayhew's radical credentials, even though Mayhew was reported by Bell's Weekly Messenger to have uttered the following: 'The magistrates were too ready to listen to any paltry Jew who might come from Judas Jacobs, or any other Hebrew, to swear, by Barabbas, or Iscariot, or any of the brutal race that were thus festering us (cheers [from the tailors]).' A year later, Henry Mayhew is combining with his brother Gus to write a novel 'with an intricately-worked plot of mistaken identities, supplemented with lavish backgrounds of seedy solicitors, retired Anglo-Indians, and spiced with anti-semitism' (p. 43). Again, no comment. Clearly, we are all a lot more p.c. these days, and we worry more than a reader might have done in 1971 about this omission on Thompson's part. No doubt Thompson would have argued that Mayhew's anti-Semitism was characteristic of that time and should not be judged by today's standards. This is the defense provided for all populists.52 But this misses the point, which is that this focus on imported labor, on Jews (Dickens' Fagin had made his appearance a few years earlier), or on the Irish as social problems, occurred within a particular social and political context that seemed to many to require the elevation of 'free-born Englishmen' and women above the status of 'wage slave' and prostitute whether at home or in Australia's and New Zealand's havens for Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Certainly there is nothing in the unknown Mayhew that makes one feel that the concerns for women laborers have been given full consideration beyond the parameters of Victorian moral strictures about women's roles in society.53 Nor do we feel that we have come to grips with the complexities of the plight of the poor of London in 1851 (and in any inner city today) when Mayhew condemns indiscriminate charity (apparently with Thompson's endorsement). Mayhew wrote: 'The most dangerous lesson that can possibly be taught to any body of people whatsoever is, that there are other means of obtaining money than by working for it' (p. 42). Thompson, through Mayhew, privileges artisans; his approach 'practically accepts the alleged inferiority' of 'others'. 54 When I first presented this essay at a conference on labor history at St. Antony's, Oxford, one fellow (whom I didn't know) rose to ask me about E. P. Thompson's biography of William Morris. Was it really possible, he exclaimed indignantly, to suggest that Thompson had
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ignored empire when it featured so prominently in his very first published book? Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to answer this particular question at the time (owing to an unhelpful conference format which required that all questions be asked of the three panelists before any responses would be allowed; by the time my turn came to answer questions there was no time left, so I sent everyone in for tea). I regretted not answering this question, however, not least because it left the impression that I did not have an answer for it (I knew this because Terence Ranger came up to me afterwards wondering whether the man had been correct). The question touched me as a little ironic, because when I read the pages in Writing by Candlelight that had turned me on to the question of Thompson and empire, I had immediately recalled reading William Morris as an undergraduate. 55 And, as we started our reading for 'The Empire and Mr. Thompson', it was there I turned first to recall what Thompson had said about imperialism. What I found in this work surprised me, not for the extent to which empire was discussed, but for its relative absence. And this awakened me to the distance I had traveled from my years as an undergraduate at Edinburgh and my early days as a graduate student at Penn, when I realized that I had stored away a different impression in my memory banks. 56 Interpreting the text anew, it seemed to me that empire and imperialism were indeed problems that Morris confronted and discussed. But these were reported by Thompson rather than absorbed and theorized. In terms of Morris's influences with regard to design, Egypt, India, and Persia were mentioned, but little was made of them. Instead, such influences were subordinated to the description of Morris's efforts to rediscover the lost artisanal world of the decorative arts. Empire seemed to come into the study with the coming of the Turkish crisis of 1876, but (in Thompson's rendering) empire was mainly seen as something that was 'over there', at most an excess jingoism that arose from the death of Gordon, a distraction from the 'real' concerns of Socialists and Fabians, a trick perpetrated by the 'jew-wretch' (Morris's term for Disraeli) and 'old Vic' on the people (p. 215). The fact of Morris's sympathies for Russia because it freed its serfs as we have 'freed our black men' (p. 209) is quoted, but not commented upon. The discussion of News from Nowhere as a 'Scientific Utopia' now seemed to me wholly dependent upon the erasure of empire - 'the change' happened in Hammersmith, but what occurred elsewhere? The protagonist's constant return to the realities of the past amidst the romance of the present seemed to
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follow in part from the fact that Morris was never able to fashion a revolutionary message from the shards of empire that kept resurfacing in this dreamworld. The problem really comes down to the fact that Thompson wants this post-1880 imperialism to be 'new'. He does not want empire and imperialism to be a feature of Chartist and pre-Chartist England. It follows, rather than precedes or accompanies the making of the English working class. Why anyone might care so much about this, one might wonder? Why Thompson does so, I think, is to be found in 'The Peculiarities of the English'. Unless imperialism and jingoism come late onto the English stage, then there really is nothing very peculiar about the English - nothing to be celebrated. There is no fall from artisanate idyll, the essence of which Morris might want to plaster, Laura-Ashley-like, on our walls. There is no English moral economy, land before time-work discipline, to laud. And these are surely what Thompson wants to extol. If one looks at 'Peculiarities' one sees that the working class movement 'crashed into the Boer War; the syndicalist surge of 1911-14 was smothered by the first great war; while the potentialities of 1945-7 were abolished by the Cold War. It was the night of Mafeking, in which the most sacred class distinctions dissolved in nationalist hysteria, which signalled the entry into this terrible epoch.' 57 We do not hear the answer to the question, why the crash? We also do not observe the potentialities of 1945-7 in 'midnight's children'; that, indeed, the first great war that ended syndicalism also contributed to the demise of imperial privilege; that, further, the 'terrible epoch' may have been in part fashioned by those who would halt such demise. We do not hear these things because Thompson wants to praise British reformism, founded in Englishness: 'Though we must never forget the overhanging shadow of imperialism, Britain has remained a comparatively humane society' - thus forgetting what we must never forget.58 If news has not reached us from nowhere, perhaps we should not worry unduly, for if we do not have a Utopian future, other places don't either; but at least we have our peculiar past. We remain outside the whale. Newthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. In contrast to Thompson, we need to recognize social power in all its imperial manifestations. Joan Wallach Scott has argued for replacing 'the notion that social power is unified, coherent and centralized'. We must replace this, she writes in Gender and the Politics of History, with something like Michel Foucault's concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal relationships, discursively
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constituted in social 'fields of force'. Within these processes and structures, there is room for a concept of human agency as the attempt (at least partially rational) to construct an identity, a life, a set of relationships, a society within certain limits and language conceptual language that at once sets boundaries and contains the possibility for negation, resistance, reinterpretation, the play of metaphoric invention and imagination. 59 Bryan D. Palmer has made a noble attempt to defend E. P. Thompson's analysis from Joan Scott's onslaught. But Thompson's presentation of Mayhew provides a good example of the limitations of class analysis used alone. This is true of his other work also. In his chapter on community in The Making, for example, Thompson mentions the women who came to their husbands' support. 'Their role was confined to giving moral support to the men,' Thompson mentions, and he then notes that even this limited role brought forth great consternation from their opponents, who claimed that they were 'putting off the "sacred characters" of wife and mother'. We can complain, as Scott does, that Thompson may have written the actual contribution of these women to the movement out of his narrative. 60 But, while noting Cobbett's opposition to women's suffrage, Thompson then juxtaposes 'the women of England' and Negresses of Africa.61 This one mention of'Negresses', almost the only mention of Africans in the volume, highlights one of the major absences from The Making of the English Working Class, namely the larger imperial framework within which the English working class was 'making itself. Thompson shows quite clearly that this class was forming along with an emergent middle class, but does not discuss one of that latter class's major concerns, the emancipation of the slaves - a concern that could be encapsulated within the notion of 'wage slavery'. Thinking imperially, focusing on power - the concurrent impositions of one group, or several groups, of people over another or others enables us to keep seemingly 'dispersed constellations of unequal relationships' tied together.
. . . A N D OTHERS Just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the
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spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire62 The foregoing analysis of the lack of attention to relational considerations in Thompson's work brings us to the work of Herbert Gutman, the historian whose landmark text, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, helped make Thompson's work foundational for labor history.63 Endeavoring to account for Gutman's 'greatness', in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness,64 David Roediger suggests that it lies in his political commitment, in the fact that he was of the old left, and that he was (as Ira Berlin put it so delicately) not 'soft'. But the fact that Gutman did not link his analysis of immigrants with that of blacks, that he was insufficiently relational, was, Roediger feels, one of his weaknesses.65 While it is tempting to agree on political grounds, one has to note that in this weakness lay his 'greatness' some of his appeal. Just as Thompson never tried explicitly to link his father's work on India to his work on the English working class, Gutman provided a model for the understanding of working-class empowerment that could be used both to describe immigrants and blacks favorably, but never simultaneously. The result is that we get the critique of Oscar Handlin's 'uprooted' immigrants, the gritty studies of Paterson's politically active and unionized immigrants, and a whole model established for viewing immigrants as holding on to their own cultures and resisting immediate Americanization. 66 Alongside this we get the favorable depiction of the black family, which likewise drew on the strength of the group's heritage, and which showed that African Americans too were not stripped of their culture and simply Americanized. 67 Slavery (black) and freedom (white) remain, in spite of all Gutman's efforts, carefully dichotomized once again. It would be difficult to find one passage that sums up the predicament for a historian as accomplished and versatile as Gutman. Were one required to do so, however, one could hardly do better than turn to a chapter from The Black Family entitled 'To See His Grand Son Samuel Die'. This is a wide-ranging chapter showcasing all of Gutman's great abilities - particularly that of drawing on diverse literatures in shaping his analysis. It begins with a comparison of other groups besides African Americans who have been denigrated by focusing on the nature and composition of their families. We learn
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that eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England had its class stereotypes to match the mythic American slave. Sambo, J. H. Plumb had noted, could be found 'in the deliberately stupid country yokel or in the cockney clown of later centuries'. 68 The Irish in America were also characterized negatively, as were the 'semi-barbarous' Russian serf and the 'uneducated' French peasant. Southern 'poor whites', meanwhile, were described as 'semi-savages'. 69 Such characterizations, which bring into question historical judgment generally (for can we go beyond saying that all the above-mentioned people 'were not as they seemed' to assertions about how they actually were?), are refreshing in their relativism.70 They open the door to other questions about how some people come to be characterized more positively (how they move from the lowest rung of immigrants to become the solid archetypes of success), while others remain 'on the trash heap of history'. Such relativism can lead to an understanding of the relational universe in which people become 'white' or 'black', 'ethnic Americans' or something else, according to how they differentiate themselves from others below them, and remove some of the distinctions from those above them. Gender and family patterns (particularly in the post-emancipation world, following a period when emasculation and dependence were believed to connote the status of a slave), would be key indicators in this process. But such thoughts, wherever they may lead us, are circumvented in the middle of the chapter with Gutman's declaration: 'Midnineteenth-century Afro-American slaves, southern "poor whites", and Irish immigrants differed very much from one another. They behaved differently. They were treated differently. The range of social and individual choices available to them varied greatly. Each group had a distinctive American experience.' 71 Following the discussion of similarities this certainly leaves a powerful impression on the reader. Each 'group' now goes its separate way, and the author can turn to his discussion of the limitations in the work of Elkins and Genovese seemingly uninformed by his previous discussion.72 But the following questions are elided in Gutman's statement: Did all these people always behave differently? was there really no overlap? Were they always treated differently? was there really no overlap? How different was the range of their individual and social choices? In short, should we, as historians, ever feel comfortable saying that a 'group' has 'a distinctive American experience'? People are certainly privileged, and we need to be aware of this so that we do
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not attribute the success of a 'group' to its members' distinctive behavior, rather than to those members' (and their historians') ability to render their history as the narrative of a distinctive group acting distinctively. The point is that unless groups are comprised of clones (and cloning is something that historians achieved long before scientists), they vary. As such, the art of writing the 'distinctive' history of a group becomes an exercise in politics, the jockeying for position by obvious ('The Birth of a [Scotch-Irish] Nation') and subtle ('The Jazz Singer') comparisons with other groups - denying and accentuating for effect. In terms of the remainder of Gutman's chapter, his critique of Elkins and Genovese is beyond the scope of this paper, but we need to note that gender is missing from his analysis. 'Distinctive' groups often seem less distinct when women and gender are introduced into the 'group portrait'. Not surprisingly, the two strands of Gutman's work cannot really be held up together without revealing blacks in a very negative light. This is in part because Gutman's analysis of the family is based on as sexist a construction as the vision of the family he was trying to refute those of Oscar Handlin and Elkins-Moynihan. 73 By busily searching for evidence for the strong family, Gutman valorized a particular kind of family (without the kinds of qualifications provided by the likes of Fox Piven and Cloward). 74 Moreover, Gutman's romanticism, in part inherited from the romantic Thompson, could reinforce the selfimage of so-called white ethnics - in the same way that Upton Sinclair had done years before in The Jungle. When applied to blacks, the description of the family could be dismissed with relative ease (and would be, after a relatively short period of people claiming that doing so was 'blaming the victim'). Nicholas Lemann, for example, effectively says, 'Well, Gutman may be right for the black family under slavery, but that was then. Now we have the "sharecropper family" living in the ghetto, and it is clearly dysfunctional.'75 In terms of popular and academic discourses on the black family, from the Million Man March to universities' ameliorative interventions in their surrounding neighborhoods, Gutman is hardly even remembered, and were he to be, he would probably be dismissed. What Gutman failed to transcend, then, was a debate founded on the acceptance of notions of pathology, which would denigrate somebody: if not artisans then others. 'White-ethnic' Americans could look around and say, 'It ain't us.' Members of the so-called 'underclass' could say the same thing, but who bothers to listen? While this may seem a little exaggerated, it will seem less so when we bear in mind that the person who
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brought 'The Problem of the Negro Family' and the 'emasculated' black male to the attention of public policymakers was also the historian responsible for remasculinizing the Irish immigrant experience in Beyond the Melting Pot.76 On with welfare reform - and export it to Britain!
EXCEPTIONALISM REVISITED I'm afraid that American theorists will not understand this, but the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket. E. P. Thompson's eulogy for C. L. R. James 77 E. P. Thompson's impact was arguably greater on the American side of the Atlantic than on the European. Peter Novick has noted that 'no work in European history ever so profoundly and so rapidly influenced so many American historians', a point that both Bryan D. Palmer and Bruce Laurie have emphasized in their works.78 Thompson's hold on American Labor and Social History has been so great, for example, that both advocates and their opponents of American 'exceptionalism' (a concept of some importance given Thompson's accent on English 'peculiarities' and Chakrabarty's analysis of the difficulties associated with trying to make his cultural interpretation of class generally applicable) have been able to invoke his work to make their case. For example, both David Roediger and Sean Wilentz, who have taken opposing sides on this issue, would include E. P. Thompson in their lineage - Roediger perhaps noting Thompson's influence on Herbert Gutman (who wrote on race), and Wilentz paying close attention to Thompson's cultural interpretations of class.79 This example is particularly significant here, as Roediger's criticism of Wilentz's Chants Democratic is in some ways related to our critique of Thompson. Roediger claims that Wilentz was insensitive to the ways in which race affected the emergence of working-class culture in New York. This similarity between Wilentz and Thompson is not altogether surprising, as Chants in many ways can be read as the 'making' of an American or New York working class. As such, the same absences evident in The Making of the English Working Class are to be found in Chants: both the Irish and African Americans are conspicuous by their absence; gender is hardly mentioned, even
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though the focus is on the same City of Women that would emerge from similar kinds of sources; slavery, in spite of the author's mention of David Brion Davis's influence on his 'conception of the age as a whole', is not considered of great significance, as laborers come to see themselves in the new 'class ways'.80 Roediger's critique falls short, however, because he assumes that by pointing out such absences in Wilentz's work he has made American working-class formation seem different from working-class formation in Europe. Instead, he shows how unreliable making comparisons can be, and how ingrained assumptions about class formation based on Thompson's work have become. For example, he quotes from Nell Irvin Painter's attack on U.S. labor historians, which would include Wilentz: 'They often prefer to wrap themselves in fashionable Europeanisms,' she writes, 'and to write as though their favorite, northern, European-American workers lived out their destinies divorced from slavery and racism, as though, say, Chartism meant more in the history of the American working class than slavery.'81 The first half of the sentence is all well and good. But the final phrase evinces an understandable (given British historiography) lack of appreciation for the imperial roots of Chartism - its own connections to slavery and emancipation. Indeed, Chartism could mean a lot to white American workers because it evoked the same solutions to the problem of sanctifying 'free labor' in a world of racial slavery. Roediger has also written in The Wages of Whiteness, 'If, as [David Brion] Davis shows, the discourse of slavery and abolition shaped that of labor reform in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, which held no slaves, we should not be surprised that a similar process occurred in the United States, which held four million.'82 Clearly, therefore, he is keenly aware of the impact of empire on British class development, and yet he sidesteps this in his comparative assessment. Perhaps the reason for this lies in the fact that by mid-century Britain had emancipated the slaves in its colonies, while the United States had several more years of profiting from the system of slavery to go before emancipation would become a reality. But the questions of slavery and emancipation were still raging in Britain around the mid-century as new forms of unfree labor were dreamed up to replace slavery in the colonies; as the country declared its intention to stamp out the slave trade; as it transported its trade unionists to the colonies; as it debated whether to trade with slave colonies; and as it responded to the American Civil War in the context of rebellions in India and at Morant Bay.83
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Roediger is perhaps suggesting that Virginia and Alabama were closer to New York and Boston than Demerara and Mauritius were to London and Glasgow, so that slavery can be considered an integral part of the American system and not of the British one. Certainly John and William Gladstone, whose family fortune was based on slavery and plantation ownership, would have disagreed. 84 And anyway, this formulation is itself founded on an interpretation of British history, to which E. P. Thompson was party, that gave such sugar-producing colonies a tertiary significance. It is unwarranted not only because of the presence of slaves and free blacks in Britain and the power and influence of East India and West India lobbies, but also because of the way discussion of slavery filtered into all levels of public discourse. 85 So glancing at the development of American labor history following Thompson, we arrive at the problem of how to understand American, British, and other histories when these are implicitly comparative, and when large chunks of imperial influence have been written off as incidental to the historical development of each country, mere flotsam and jetsam to be passed over. Roediger's critique of labor history is exactly right in calling for an enlargement of class analysis to incorporate race (and other mutually constitutive categories, like gender). In addition to this, however, we need to see class and race as both historically contingent alongside an understanding that these categories themselves have been shaped by nations and national histories that are also historically contingent. 86 And if we try to incorporate 'agents' into history we need to be aware of the historical genealogy of the idea of agency itself, and the fact that its use in the past has often obscured as much as it has revealed, granting to some while denying to others.
EPILOGUE: CAN THE 'ORGANIZATION MAN' WRITE HISTORY? [enters, accompanied by the ROOM-VALET, and glances around him]: Hm! So here we are.
GARCIN
VALET: Yes, Mr. Garcin. GARCIN:
And this is what it looks like?
VALET: Yes.
Second Empire furniture, I observe.... Well, well, I dare say one gets used to it in time. VALET: Some do. Some don't.
GARCIN:
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all the other rooms like this one? could they be? We cater for all sorts: Chinamen and Indians, for instance. What use could they have for a Second Empire chair? Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Robin D. G. Kelley has suggested that if academics are to look for a proletariat we can do no better than examine the movements for better pay and conditions in the academy itself, which after all is comprised of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the country.87 Bearing this in mind, we should remember that we, historians, are among the aristocrats of labor in this academy, and that our perspectives on this and other matters are likely to be shaped in some way by this location. These institutions of which we are representatives are not valuefree, scientific research centers. With more justification than many of us would like to admit, J. A. Hobson maintained that at universities teaching is 'selected and controlled, wherever it is found useful to employ the arts of selection and control, by the business interests playing on the vested academic interests'. We do not have to entirely believe in such instrumentalism to nevertheless agree with Hobson's formulation: The real determinants in education are given in these three questions: 'Who shall teach? What shall they teach? How shall they teach?' Where universities are dependent for endowments and incomes upon the favor of the rich, upon the charity of millionaires, the following answers will of necessity be given: 'Safe teachers. Safe studies. Sound (i.e. orthodox) methods.' The coarse proverb which tells us that 'he who pays the piper calls the tune' is quite as applicable here as elsewhere, and no bluff regarding academic dignity and intellectual honesty must blind us to the fact.88 It is within this context (though perhaps a little more artfully formed) that Spivak demands that scholars recognize the 'complicity between subject and object of investigation', and that we cannot be detached observers. 89 The astounding thing, to me at least, is that scholars describing a process of 'embourgeoisement' feel that they can still safely ignore their own location; that if they listen really hard, they will indeed be able to hear the subaltern speak - and render her/him comprehensible for people both within and without the academy; that, moreover, as members of the disengaged academy they can act
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as umpires between that bourgeois world and colonial subjects. Such is the highest stage of Thompsonianism. 90 We as scholars should not feel guilty about our location (our 'occupational psychosis', as Dewey called it, or our 'trained incapacity', to borrow from Veblen); 91 guilt is for those of a much higher calling than ours, and such feelings would probably only be sublimated into defensiveness or some other 'sly civility'.92 Rather, we need to be aware of our own limitations. We can be certain that the people we are attempting to describe are not 'as they seem' 93 - they will always be more than the narratives we construct to contain them - but we should not be so arrogant as to assume that our efforts to describe them transcend the political and become objective History. 94 The 'rescue' mission that we perhaps should engage in is that of rescuing ourselves from our delusions that we have transcended the parameters of bourgeois historiography. We need to rescue ourselves before imagining that we can rescue others. But then, this is just that 'easy ex post facto "radicalism" of Western guilt which assumes that, by definition, every cultural exchange must be read only in terms of colonial exploitation.' 95 Or it is just an example of what Cooper and Stoler, or my dinner companion, see as a postcolonial chip on the shoulder: 'a neoabolitionist denunciation of a form of power now safely consigned to history'. Get over it, they tell us. The bourgeois world is here to stay, you might as well accept its parameters and recognize its universalizing qualities, which are not just mere self-serving hypocrisy.96 But the world hasn't reached this 'stationary [bourgeois] state' quite yet. E. P. Thompson's relationship to empire can become a metaphor for understanding the relationship between AngloAmerican historians and empire. One reason E. P. Thompson elided empire so thoroughly in his work was because his father's relationship with India had familiarized and naturalized empire to such an extent that it became quite invisible to him. 97 This state of amnesia would last until the waning of Cold War antagonisms terminated Thompson's prominence as a public intellectual 'outside the whale', brought back to the fore (among western intellectuals) the realities of decolonization, and resituated him within the belly of the beast. It is no coincidence that the 'Golden Age' of Academe ended and academics lost their tenure as Supervisors of the Public Trust (while still remaining Defenders of the Faith) during the last 15 years. Pax Britannia and Americana can no longer be assumed or naturalized in the face of widespread legal and 'illegal' migration to the metropole, bitter nationalist struggles worldwide, and the struggles for access to
158
Inside Out, Outside In
resources under present economic and ecological limits. But as long as we see Empire as a process of embourgeoisement and its discontents we are going to be perpetually yearning for its return as things that we associate with it (but not Empire itself) disappear before us as we perceive the angel of history flying backwards into the future, surveying destruction in its wake. 98 Seeing the present and the past in this way, conforming to the underlying romanticism that has been evident in a great deal of social history, is truly pessimistic. There are optimistic alternatives, but they do not originate in battening down the hatches and falling back on the profession's past privileges - its notions of History, objectivity, meritocracy, standards, tenure (controlling the labor market), the family wage, and all the rest. As Salman Rushdie has written, borrowing from Saul Bellow, 'For God's sake open up the universe a little more'. 99
Notes PREFACE 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
1
William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 213. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 123. Herbert Marcuse's notion of 'repressive tolerance', in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse, eds., A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). K. Burke, Permanence and Change (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1965) pp. 89-96. Note the pithy comment of Gore Vidal's in an exchange with Arthur Schlessinger, Jr.: 'I do wish that Arthur would stop these bureaucratic quibbles, useful no doubt for the punishment of independent-minded graduate students but inimical to the study of history.' The Nation (Nov. 19, 1996), p. 24. APROPOS EXCEPTIONALISM
1. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (New York: Random, 1991), p. 28. 2. G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (New York: McPherson, 1986), p. 39. 3. Breyten Breytenbach, 'Dog's Bone', in The New York Review of Books, May 26th, 4-5. 4. Stanley Greenberg's Race and State in Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), as the title suggests, analyzes the role of the State in South African society. The main focus, however, is on the role of different social groups - mining and commercial capitalists, large farmers, and white labourers - in the creation of the apartheid State. It may be difficult to infer from this analysis how these different groups will act once apartheid is eradicated in a state that is perhaps even more centralized than before. See Michael Burawoy, 'State and Social Revolution in South Africa: Reflections on the Comparative Perspectives of Greenberg and Skocpol', in Kapitalistate, 9 (1981), pp. 93-122. Marxist historians, meanwhile, have argued that race has been manipulated primarily by capitalists who have retained their control over the State, and that race and class relations have merged. As such, they have used class analysis to understand the extreme racial divisions in South Africa. Whether or not their instrumentalist interpretation of the state is correct is beyond the scope of this paper, but questions remain about 159
160
5.
6.
7. 8. 9.
10.
Notes how different social groups have acted in the downfall of apartheid, whether these suggest different roles than were described by Marxist revisionists in the past, and so on. For Marxist revisionists, see (among others) H. J. and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); Martin Legassick, 'South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence', in Economy and Society, 3 (Aug. 1974), pp. 255-80; Frederick Johnstone's Class, Race, and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Duncan Innes, Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); and Robert H. Davies, 'Mining Capital, The State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901-1913', in The Journal of Southern African Studies, 3 (1976), pp. 41-69, and Capital State and White Labour in South Africa, 1900-1960 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1977). See also B. S. Kantor and H. F. Kenny, 'The Poverty of Neo-Marxism: the case of South Africa', in The Journal of Southern African Studies, 3 (1976), pp. 20-40, and Harold Wolpe's response: 'A Comment on "The Poverty of Neo-Marxism'", ibid. (1977), pp. 240-56. See Chris Lowe, 'Buthelezi, Inkatha, and the Problem of Ethnic Nationalism in South Africa', in Joshua Brown, et al., History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 195-208. See Colin Bundy, 'An Image of Its Own Past? Towards a Comparison of American and South African Historiography', for a discussion of historiographical shifts in both the United States and South Africa, as well as some discussion of future developments among radical historians of South Africa. National boundaries are not questioned in this article in the ways proposed here. Ibid. pp. 82-104. For shifts in the historiography of Reconstruction in America, see Bernard Weisberger, 'The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography', Journal of Southern History, 25 (1959), pp. 427-47. William Finnegan, 'The Election Mandela Lost', in The New York Review of Books (October 20, 1994), pp. 33-4. Ibid. p. 33. Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano, eds., The Elusive Search for Peace: South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), Donald Harman Akenson, God's People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). See also George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 319. Giliomee stands at the forefront of such reinterpretation. See, for example, '"Survival in Justice": An Afrikaner Debate over Apartheid', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (3, July 1994), pp. 527-48; and 'Democratization in South Africa', Political Science Quarterly, 110 (1, 1995), pp. 83-104. Unlike other authors, however, Giliomee is pessimistic about the potential for the emergence of liberal
Notes
11.
12. 13. 14. 15.
16.
17.
161
democracy in South Africa. More optimistic authors are: F. van Zyl Slabbert, The Quest for Democracy: South Africa in Transition (Johannesburg: 1992); Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3-23; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994). Nicholas Lemann's widely acclaimed The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991) revives the Frazier-Elkins-Moynihan thesis about the weak black family, through his sharecropper thesis. Alan Brinkley, 'For Their Own Good', The New York Review of Books (May 26, 1994), p. 43. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975); see especially pp. 381-7. Rob Gregg, 'The More Things Change ...' in Chartist (Nov.-Dec. 1992). In City of Quartz (New York: Verso, 1992), Mike Davis clearly shows at a structural level why it is that we should not be surprised by events that have occurred in Los Angeles, and how these are making their impact felt on California first, and the nation later. The main book-length comparative studies of the United States and South Africa are: John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1982); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, Oxford University Press, 1981); Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Stanley Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (this last work also includes Israel and Northern Ireland). Debates between Edna Bonacich and Michael Burawoy over divided and split labor markets, while not explicitly comparative, extend to both countries and have comparative implications; Burawoy, 'The Capitalist State in South Africa: Marxist and Sociological Perspectives on Race and Class', Political Power and Social Theory, 2 (1981a), pp. 279-335. Bonacich, 'Capitalism and Race in South Africa: A Split Market View', in ibid. Similarly, William Julius Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), is implicitly comparative, founded in large measure on Pierre van den Berghe's typology in Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Wiley, 1967). George Fredrickson, for example, argues that the differences between Jim Crow in the South and 'native segregation' in South Africa 'are of such a degree as to cast doubt on the value of a detailed comparison of the unequal treatment of southern blacks during the Jim Crow era and the lot of Africans under segregation or apartheid since 1910.' White
162
18. 19. 20.
21.
Notes Supremacy, p. 241. Fredrickson nevertheless proceeds to make just such a 'detailed comparison' and finds differences between the two systems of segregation 'too great, in terms of both underlying structures and patterns of historical development, to sustain comparison based on analogy' (p. 250). While John Cell was able to build a book on this analogy, it is true that he too found substantial differences between the two countries' systems. N. B. Utgikar and V. G. Paranjpe, eds. Collected Works of Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, volume I (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933), p. 390. Ian Tyrrell, 'American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History', in American Historical Review (October 1991), pp. 1031-55. Where the nation state isn't compared, a particular segment of the nation is taken as a proxy for the whole, or as a means to understand a national phenomenon. Thus, John Cell compares South Africa to the American South, and is critical of Stanley Greenberg for choosing to compare Alabama to South Africa. The Highest Stage, pp. xii-xiii. In fact, this criticism highlights the nationalist bent, as taking Alabama (part of the American system) as a comparative focus for South Africa (part of the British imperial system) is justified on many levels. The assumption that there is just one system of segregation in the South and so also the United States may be invalid. Tyrrell, 'American Exceptionalism', pp. 1035-6. Greg Cuthbertson, 'Racial Attraction: Tracing the Historiographical Alliances between South Africa and the United States', in The Journal of American History (December 1994) p. 1132. Fredrickson, 'Comparative History', in Michael Kammen, ed. The Past Before Us (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Fredrickson attempts to move beyond this national focus in The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), but his Weberian typology of different societies fulfills the same goal. Peter Kolchin, in 'Comparing American History', in Kutler and Katz, eds. The Promise of American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), asserts that 'most historical judgments are implicitly comparative' and that 'comparative history constitutes the effort to do explicitly what most historians do most of the time' (p. 65). He does not, however, question the national orientation of most historical judgments, and his own comparative work, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) fits this model; see also 'Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective', in The Journal of American History, 70 (3 Dec. 1983), pp. 579-601. Other works on slavery typical of this focus are: Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage, 1946); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959); Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967); and Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York:
Notes
163
Macmillan, 1971); Richard R. Beeman, 'Labor Forces and Race Relations: A Comparative View of the Colonization of Brazil and Virginia', in Political Science Quarterly, 86 (4 Dec. 1971), pp. 609-36; and Richard S. Dunn, 'A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828', in William and Mary Quarterly, 34 (January 1977), pp. 32-65. Ira Katznelson, in Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-30, and Britain, 1948-68 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) reaches for national conclusions about race when a study of New York City and London might have different imperial stories to tell. In City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), he shows his affinity for the idea of American exceptionalism. Comparing the American city to the European he neglects to consider the possibility that while London, Paris and Stockholm may look different from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, other cities like Bombay, Johannesburg and Manila may be structured very similarly to them. Eric Foner, in Nothing But Freedom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), endeavours to use comparative analysis 'to move beyond "American exceptionalism" to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the problem of emancipation and its aftermath' (p. 2). And yet, he arrives at a conclusion that 'sympathetic local and state governments during Reconstruction afforded American freedmen a form of political and economic leverage unmatched by their counterparts in other societies' (p. 3). Generalizing from South Carolinian experiences, and informed by the movement towards a 'Second Reconstruction', Foner's comparative study, too, falls foul of the nationalist tendency. An interesting exception to this rule is the institution of slavery itself, which had to be considered 'peculiar' in order for it to be comfortably incorporated into the notion of 'American'. For further discussion of the intersectedness of histories, see Gyan Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,' in American Historical Review (Dec. 1994), p. 1486. Sport which has been tied to colonialism and imperialism, and which has transnational histories, has received insufficient attention from comparativists. For a compelling exception to this rule, see Ian Tyrell, 'The Emergence of Modern American Baseball c. 1850-80', in Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan, eds. Sport in History (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1979), pp. 180-204. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 65-92. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, ed., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), makes no mention of slavery, abolitionism or empires generally. E. P. Thompson, 'The Peculiarities of the English', in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 245-301. In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), David Roediger argues (contra Sean Wilentz) that the existence
Notes of slavery and the prominence of race in the United States makes American labor exceptional when compared to European societies, pp. 27-34. Wilentz, 'Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement', in International Labor and Working Class History, 26 (1984), pp. 1-36. Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also Gregg, 'Group Portrait with Lady', in Reviews in American History, 20 (1992), pp. 354-9. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (New York: Longman, 1989); for attempts to theorize empire in American studies, see Williams, Empire as a Way of Life', Amy Kaplan, 'Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture', in Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 3-21. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, p. 15. This important conceptualization for British history has been further developed by Linda Colley in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). See also Antoinette Burton, 'Rules of Thumb: British History and "Imperial Culture" in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Britain', Women's History Review, 3 (4, 1994), pp. 483-500; and Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). While being careful to see the imperial considerations in the political incorporation of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, we need also to be aware of the ways in which others besides Anglo-Saxons and Celts were incorporated into the imperial model. Moreover, it is important to be aware that just because empire is significant this does not mean that only the history of the metropole is important, while histories of the peripheries should remain just that. This is an assumption that has been present to some extent in Eric Hobsbawm's work. As Tony Judt notes in his review of The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, Eric Hobsbawm is 'unashamedly Eurocentric'. Building on this unashamedly eurocentric foundation, Judt notes: 'Any history of the world in our century is of necessity a history in large measure of the things Europeans (and North Americans) did to themselves and to others, and of how non-Europeans reacted to them and were (usually adversely) affected. That, after all, is what is wrong with the twentieth century, seen from a "third world" perspective, and to criticize Hobsbawm, as some reviewers have done, for understanding this and writing accordingly, seems to me incoherent.' 'Downhill all the Way', The New York Review of Books, 42/9 (May 25, 1995), p. 21. Understanding that an imperial meridian exists should lead towards 'coherence' founded on the realization that what non-Europeans did was in fact as important as, and in some cases more important than, the actions of Europeans. An imperial perspective allows one to see how the actions of a Toussaint L'Ouverture in Saint Domingue could have an impact from Savannah to Moscow, a John Chilembwe in Nyasaland could affect people from South Africa to Edinburgh. The agency of all
Notes
28. 29.
30. 31. 32. 33.
34.
35.
36.
165
- white working classes, white elites, and non-Europeans alike - was limited by the imperial terrain, but that terrain was shaped by all, sometimes with minimal regard to the power relations within it. See Ranajit Guha, 'Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography', in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi, 1992), in which he critiques the 'Cambridge approach' to South Asian history for 'writing up Indian history as a "portion of the British History'", p. 305. For the significance of Toussaint on Jefferson and Napoleon, see Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Colley, Britons, pp. 120-32. Judith R. Walkowitz, for example, tells of the almost orientalist vision of East London when compared to West London; City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 19 and 193. Ruth H. Lindborg, 'The "Asiatic" and the Boundaries of Victorian Englishness', in Victorian Studies (Spring 1994), pp. 381-404. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992). See Henry Jones Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America (Princeton: 1915). Kaplan and Pease, eds., Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. This number is used by Salman Rushdie in both Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (London: Viking, 1991) and The Satanic Verses. It also appears in the movie Masala. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1 and 5. Another attempt to make transnational linkages can be found in George M. Fredrickson, 'Resistance to White Supremacy: Nonviolence in the U.S. South and South Africa', in Dissent (Winter, 1995) pp. 61-70, which draws on the Gandhian influences in both American and South African resistance. The reliance on a national comparison is evident, and this leads to the rather predictable comparison being made between South African political violence and black-on-black violence in the United States. Since this comparison ends in the claim that 'in the short run, the need for more and better policing has become evident to many blacks' (p. 70), this national bias must certainly be considered a shortcoming. Ian Tyrrell suggests other kinds of connections that can be made in what he terms 'transnational history', through regional analysis, environmental history, and the study of organizations, movements and ideologies; 'American Exceptionalism', pp. 1038-53. Mtesa, the Kabuka of Buganda, made the initial appeal for missionaries, which Stanley reported in November 1875. He added, according to Thomas Pakenham, that 'here was the most promising field for a mission in all the pagan world'. The Scramble for Africa, p. 28. Cell, The Highest Stage, pp. 33-45. For an excellent book-length study of African Methodists in South Africa, see James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
166
Notes
37. For Turner's attitudes toward the freedpeople see Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1980) p. 458; for Coppin's views of Southerners, see Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia's African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 94-5, 196; see also, Levi J. Coppin, Observations of Persons and Things in South Africa, 1900-1904 (Philadelphia: AME Book Concern, 1905); and, Adelaide Cromwell Hill and Martin Kilson, eds., Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro American Leaders on Africa from the 1800s to the 1950s (London: Cass, 1969), pp. 44-7. 38. Gregg, Sparks, 69-86; Cell, The Highest Stage, 41. 39. George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958). 40. Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, 1876-1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) pp. 259-81. For additional connections between African Americans and Africans, see Robin D. G. Kelley, 'Introduction' in C. L. R. James, A History of PanAfrican Revolt (Chicago: Kerr, 1995), pp. 1-33. 41. Tim Couzens, '"Moralizing Leisure Time": The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg, 1918-1936', in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds., Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870-1930 (Essex: Longman, 1982). 42. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 5 and 21. See Ch. 5. 43. Dennis C. Dickerson, The Land of the Southern Cross: John A. Gregg and South Africa (New Orleans: 1990); Levi J. Coppin, Unwritten History (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968); Robert R. Wright, Jr., Eighty-Seven Years Behind the Black Curtain (Philadelphia: 1968); William Henry Heard, From Slavery to the Bishopric (Philadelphia:, Arno, 1969); Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Wilson J. Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 179-95; Appiah, In My Father's House, pp. 10-23 (Crummell) and pp. 28-46 (Du Bois). 44. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 1-40. See Madhavi Kale, 'Review of "Black Atlantic"', in Social History (1996). 45. Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: 1993); Gregg, Sparks; James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For an example of assumptions about division within the African diaspora, see Clarence E. Walker's unfounded assertion that Americans could not have supported Marcus Garvey in the numbers some have claimed simply because he was Jamaican. Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 34-55.
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46. Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia (Victoria: Penguin, 1986), pp. 105-13. 47. Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914: New Babylon (Harlow: Longman, 1982) p. 108. 48. For one compelling example of Americans in South Africa and prospecting migrants, see Mary and Richard Bradford, eds., An American Family on the African Frontier (Colorado: Roberts Rhinehart Publishers, 1993). This book brings together the letters of the Burnham family, whose 'head', Frederick Russell Burnham, was an American prospector who had taken part in suppressing the Indian uprisings in the United States, and finding industrial America not to his taste, had left for South Africa. There he attempted to gain mineral rights by engaging as a scout for the British South Africa Company in its invasion of Matabeleland in 1893. Within three years Burnham had become prosperous and returned to America, where he undertook prospecting in Alaska on behalf of a London syndicate. During the Anglo-Boer war Burnham was appointed chief of scouts by Lord Roberts. Following the war, in which he earned a Distinguished Service Order, he prospected in West Africa and then in Kenya. From 1908 to 1914, Burnham 'directed an American colony in Mexico, mixed in that nation's revolution, and dealt with an insurrection of Yaqui Indians'. After the First World War, the family made a new fortune in Southern California, where they were numbered among the region's 'leading citizens'. A mountain east of Pasadena has been named after him. 49. C. W. De Kiewiet,/! History of South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). James Campbell notes that more than half the mines on the Witwatersrand were managed by Americans ('one frustrated Rhodesian mining engineer complained that it was impossible to get a job without an American accent'); Songs of Zion, pp. 126-7. Moreover, these transients did not merely stick to mining. Once the Australian gold rush ended, pacific islands like Fiji were inundated with speculators looking for more gold and mineral deposits. When their efforts to locate such deposits failed, and other opportunities appeared, they turned to a wide range of capitalist endeavors. The emergence of the sugar plantation system in Fiji, for example, which drew on the Indian indentured labor (a system established in the British Caribbean after emancipation), was just one such development. No doubt others played important roles in the coming of sugar and Chinese indentured laborers to Hawaii. I am indebted to John D. Kelly for this information. 50. De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa, p. 166; Innes, Anglo-American, p. 41. 51. The antecedents to such labor practices were not, as might be expected, the wage-labouring systems of north America, but rather the indentured labor systems developed by Anglo-American capitalists in the years after the end of slavery. For an explanation of the process by which this occurred, see Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1998); 'Projecting Identities:
168
52.
53. 54.
55. 56.
57. 58. 59.
60. 61. 62.
Notes Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836-1885', in Peter van der Veer, ed., Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 73-92. For a full description of the methods used to deprive the Chinese of access to gold mines and then exclude them from the United States, see Connie Young Yu, 'The Chinese in American Courts', Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 4 (3, Fall 1972), pp. 22-30; and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). De Kiewiet,/4 History of South Africa, p. 166. There was also, in South Africa, an exclusion of Chinese indentured labourers ('celestials') in 1906; Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa (New York: Wiedenfield and Nicolson, 1988), pp. 47-53. Van Onselen, New Babylon, p. 110. Ibid. p. 111. In 1898 The Standard and Diggers' News had complained: 'There is a large and thriving colony of Americanised Russian women engaged in the immoral traffic, who are controlled by an association of macquereaus of pronounced Russian pedigree embellished by a twangy flashy embroidery of style and speech acquired in the Bowery of NYC, where most of them, with frequent excursions to London, have graduated in the noble profession.' George J. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969), p. 336. In 1896 there were 25,282 white males and 14,172 white females living in Johannesburg, a ratio of 1.78 men to every woman. For blacks the ratio was even more skewed, with about 10 men for every 1 woman in the city, and in the nearby work compounds, a ratio of about 24 to 1; van Onselen, New Babylon, p. 104. Van Onselen, New Babylon, p. 107. Ibid. p. 108. White, quoted in Philippa Levine, 'Rough Usage: Prostitution, Law and the Social Historian', in Adrian Wilson, ed., Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 276. Ruth Rosen, Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). The 'French Madam' Matilda Hermann, for example, paid about $5,000 each year to the police. W. T. Stead, Satan's Invisible World Displayed (New York: Arno Press, 1974 [1898]), p. 127. Levine, 'Rough Usage', p. 276. Levine writes: A s we develop a better understanding of the complex relationship between state, law and work, a case may emerge for seeing large-scale prostitution (and its concomitant, a more attentive state) as the feminised auxiliary service industry to changing male work patterns, perhaps most particularly in "frontier" contexts such as the opening of the American West, the Europeanising of South Africa or the development of Australia.' The similarities between mining and prostitution labor markets was reinforced by the fact that when mining capitalists went to India, China and
Notes
63.
64.
65.
66.
67. 68.
69.
169
Japan to secure labor, members of the 'pimping fraternity' (so-called by Joe Silver) often shadowed them in pursuit of prostitutes. Van Onselen, New Babylon, p. 138. Ibid. p. 121. The Bowery Boys' methods in New York and the London East End, as described by their detractors at least, are described in full here. Van Onselen perhaps reads these sources uncritically, and he conforms to a prostitution discourse which distances it from other labor employing images from slavery that Progressives of the era also employed. Having seen capital move people and production from one region or country to others so readily in the last few decades, this assumption of difference between slaves and prostitutes on the one hand, and free laborers on the other, seems more tenuous. Other terms used by women were housekeeper, milliner, musician and florist. Van Onselen, New Babylon, pp. 119-23. Philippa Levine, 'Women and Prostitution: Metaphor, Reality, History', in Canadian Journal of History, 28 (December 1993), p. 484. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, 'Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow', in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, eds., Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 23-61. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 21-2. Levine, 'Women and Prostitution', p. 482; 'Rough Usage', pp. 266-92; and, 'Consistent Contradictions: Prostitution and Protective Labour Legislation in Nineteenth-century England', in Social History (19, January 1994), pp. 17-35. See e.g. the experiences of Chinese and Japanese prostitutes described by Lucie Cheng, 'Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-century America', in Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the U.S. before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Yuji Ichioka, 'Ameyuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America', Amerasia, 41 (1977), pp. 1-21, and The lssei (New York: Free Press, 1988). Levine, 'Women and Prostitution', p. 488. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight. Robin D. G. Kelley, 'We are Not What We Seem', in The Journal of American History (June 1993), pp. 75-112; and A n Archaeology of Resistance', in American Quarterly, 44 (June 1992), pp. 292-8. For a critique of Scott's work along these lines, see Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, 'Introduction: The Entanglement of Power and Resistance', in Contesting Power, pp. 2-4, 9-11; and Timothy Mitchell, 'Everyday Metaphors of Power', in Theory and Society, 19 (1990). Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 123; Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 174-8.
170
Notes
70. Here note Darlene Clark Hine's critique of Roger Lane's estimates of prostitutes in Philadelphia's African American population at the turn of the twentieth century. Clark Hine is right to suggest that Lane's estimates are faulty and exaggerate the number of prostitutes. Lane argued that lower birthrates among African Americans could be accounted for by the infertility casued by diseases associated with prostitution, and he suggested that as many as 25 per cent of all black women in the city had engaged in the 'trade'. Clark Hine prefers to see such lower birthrates arising from black women's sexual abstinence (in fact, the imbalanced sex ratios and the nature of domestic work were sufficient causes). Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 130-1, 158-9; Clark Hine, 'Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-45', in Joe William Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 134-5. What is at stake for Clark Hine is the portrayal of women in the black community and whether or not historians can move beyond 'latent acceptance of the myths concerning the alleged unbridled passions and animalistic sexuality of black women'. And yet, if prostitution is such a common factor in all migrations, it need not tell us anything about passions and sexuality. In fact, both sides of the argument fall within Levine's category of 'rough usage' of prostitutes, failing to rise above the 'homogenous notions of prostitution as a category' and the moralistic arguments about prostitutes propagated by Progressive reformers and nationalists at the time; Levine, 'Rough Usage', p. 286. 71. Kale, 'Projecting Identities', pp. 80-3. 72. Du Bois in Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: W. Morrow, 1984), p. 61. See also Dan Czitrom, 'Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889-1913', in The Journal of American History (September 1991), p. 548; and Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 96-8. Howe devotes only two pages to prostitution, and claims that, along with crime, 'it was never at the center of Jewish immigrant life', p. 101. This claim perhaps shows the success of Jewish leaders struggling to disassociate their ethnic group from the taint of 'crime'. Defining 'the center' of immigrant life is problematic and is generally undertaken only when it is deemed important to push to the imagined periphery of one's own group behavior considered common to other people. 73. Lisa Lowe, 'Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences', in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 24-44. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, in Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), makes no mention of prostitution, and yet the manner in which many Japanese American men resisted women's efforts to join the paid labor force (even under the direst economic conditions) provide examples of how
Notes
74. 75.
76.
77. 78. 79. 80.
81. 82. 83.
111
men felt the behaviour of their spouses reflected badly on them and Japanese Americans as a whole, p. 114. Anne McClintock, 'Family Feuds', p. 61. Kale, 'Casting Labor in the Imperial Mold'. The other side of this nationalism coin, of course, is the anxiety whites in the United States and British Empire had that 'their women' might have been 'violated' by blacks and Indians respectively. Thus, any lynching and all the horrors perpetrated by the British in 1857 could be justified by claims (most often spurious) that white women had been in some way dishonored. See Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (London: Hogarth, 1925), p. 38, and Ch. 4 below. Japanese nationalists and government officials, however, were far more successful in controlling access to prostitutes in America than were the Chinese. Cheng, 'Free, Indentured, Enslaved'; Ichioka, 'AmeyuikiSen', pp. 16—17. In Bombay in 1911, the Turkish Consul, upset by the association between prostitution and Arabs', persuaded the Government of India to repatriate one brothel-keeper and many women to Baghdad. It is unknown whether the Japanese intervened on behalf of the many Japanese prostitutes; S. M. Edwardes, Crime in India (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 87. Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, p. 123. Oldenburg, 'Lifestyle as Resistance', p. 55. Adam Duritz, Counting Crows (Geffen Records, 1993). This is based on a cursory study of several texts and syllabuses. The texts include: Joseph R. Conlin, The American Past: A Survey of American History (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984), George Brown Tindall, America: A Narrative History (New York: Norton, 1988), James A. Henretta, et al., America's History (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1987), John M. Blum, et al., The National Experience: A History of the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1993), S. E. Morison, et al., The Gowth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), and John A. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Nell Painter's, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: Norton, 1987) devotes one page to American Indians, though this is not included in an analysis of westward expansion but in a chapter on 'The White Man's Burden' - imperialism. Even Alan Trachtenberg's Incorporation of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982) uses this layout, though for Trachtenberg the dichotomy established on the frontier between 'civilization' and 'savage' becomes central to the meaning of America' itself; pp. 25-37. Unless there is a brief mention of the American Indian Movement as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement, in sections on the 1960s and 1970s. This discussion focuses largely on Midwestern Populism. The analysis could be extended, with modifications, to Southern Populism. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955); James Turner, 'Understanding the Populists',
172
84.
85.
86.
87. 88. 89. 90.
Notes The Journal of American History, 67 (2, Sept., 1980), pp. 354-73; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); and Robert C. McMath, Jr., American Populism: A Social History (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993). This ignoring of the significance of American Indians is shared by other historians focusing on this period. In Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (NY: Norton, 1976), for example, Nell Painter mentions that the migrants were to relocate to former Cherokee land in Kansas, p. 113. The significance of this is not commented upon. One of the latest overviews of Populism, McMath's American Populism, even goes so far as to describe 'Populist Country Before Populism'. This background chapter makes no mention of the fact that Indians were either present or recently removed from this country. Throughout the period of the Populist movement Indians saw their territory reduced from 138 million to 78 million acres (Painter, Standing at Armageddon, p. 163). Moreover, this was a period of the commercialization of the romanticized Wild West, both in dime novels and in Wild West shows: Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, pp. 22-5, and Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 321-47. This is not merely a condition for the Midwestern and Western states. Ward Churchill writes: 'No area within what are now the 48 contiguous states of the United States is exempt from having produced its own historical variant of the Sand Creek phenomenon. The very existence of the United States in its modern territorial and demographic configuration is contingent upon this fact. Racially-oriented invasion, conquest, genocide and subsequent denial are integral, constantly recurring and thus defining features of the Euroamerican make-up from the instant the first boatload of self-ordained colonists set foot in the New World.' Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1992), p. 119. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt, 1920). Joseph Howard, Strange Empire: Louis Riel and the Metis People (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), pp. 136-7. See McMath, American Populism, pp. 161-2. Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column (New York: AMS Press, 1981). For the description of Stanley see pp. 209-309; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, p. 66; A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), pp. 229-32. Morton notes that Theodor Hertzka, in Freeland (published in the same year as Donnelly's work), also located a Utopia in East Africa. According to Morton, 'Both books ... were written in the very years in which the British East Africa Co. was preparing the way for the formal annexation of the whole region',
Notes
91.
92. 93.
94. 95.
96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.
103. 104.
2
173
p. 232. Donnelly did not pick Uganda at random; he must have followed events in Africa closely. Kenneth P. Vickery, in '"Herrenvolk" Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the U.S. South', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974), pp. 309-28, makes a similar comparison to that made here between Populists and Voortrekkers, though his argument is confined to the U.S. South during slavery and Reconstruction. Lamar and Thompson, The Frontier in History, p. 25. Unfortunately, none of the essays in the Lamar and Thompson volume discusses the issue of the similarities in political ideologies thrown up by the American and South African frontiers. Christopher Saunders does discuss the political conflict on the South African frontier, however, presenting some of the differences between Southern African and American frontiers. 'Political Processes in the Southern African Frontier Zones', pp. 149-71. Ibid. p. 26. Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds., A History of South Africa to 1870 (London, 1982), p. 407. Fredrickson employs three 'crucial veriables' - demography, geography and the role of imperial power in South Africa; White Supremacy, p. xxi. Anne McClintock, 'Family Feuds', p. 69. Snow, The Star Raft, pp. 47-53. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, p. 28. These American literary conventions were evident in Donnelly's efforts to write Africans out of Africa. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 50-1. Turner, 'Understanding Populists', p. 368. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 253. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, pp. 27-34. Thus, if we are to join Alan Brinkley in seeing continuities in republican political tradition from the Populists to the followers of Father Coughlin and Huey Long in the 1930s, we must do so bearing in mind both the critique of capitalism and the status anxiety inherited from the days of frontier expansion. Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 143-68. Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, pp. 29-30. Prakash, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Indian Historiography Is Good to Think', in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 353-88.
HOMELANDS, HARLEM AND COMPARATIVE HISTORY 1. 2. 3.
Quoted in Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, p. 233. Ibid. pp. 1 and 5. This has been exposed and critiqued by Mahmood Mamdani in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
174 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 3
Notes George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 319-23. Fredrickson, White Supremacy. Shula Marks, 'White Supremacy: A Review Article', pp. 385-97. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness', Appiah, In My Father's House. Robert Archer and Antoine Bouillon, The South African Game: Sport and Racism (London: Zed Press, 1982). Nixon writes, 'The boycott's role went well beyond publicizing discrimination in South African sport: it became an indispensable mechanism for training the media spotlight on apartheid per se' (p. 132). Comparable figures in the U.S. to people such as Robinson and Muhammed Ali are also omitted from Black Liberation. See e.g. Richard E. Lapchick, Broken Promises: Racism in American Sports (New York: St. Martin's, 1984). Gilroy, Black Atlantic, see Madhavi Kale, 'Review of "Black Atlantic"'. Robin D. G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Campbell, Songs of Zion. See also Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed Press, 1983). 'Fidel Castro in Harlem', October 24 1995,
[email protected]. edu. Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (NY: John Day Co., 1942), pp. 702-4. Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, How Far We Slaves Have Come (NY: Pathfinder Press, 1991), pp. 20, 23-4. See Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 87-106. BEYOND NATION. BEYOND METHODISM?
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
4
Cited in Gregg, Sparks, p. 69. Campbell, Songs of Zion, p. xii. See Marks, 'White Supremacy: A Review Article', p. 387. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy, pp. 33-45. Gregg, Sparks, p. 120.
THE EMPIRE AND MR. THOMPSON 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (NY: International Publishers, 1964), p. 154. Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 101. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. xix. E. P. Thompson, Writing By Candlelight (London: Merlin, 1980), p. 138. Ibid. pp. 135-48. Both men were historians of India and were nationalist by inclination, though they also found much that they could embrace in what Britain had introduced to the subcontinent. But, while Edward
Notes
175
Thompson would come to see that British Governments had often been misguided with regard to India, Nehru believed that this was generally the case and was, in fact, an outgrowth of the imperial relationship itself. Both believed that there were two 'Englands' - but Thompson saw this as being divided between the Metcalfes, Malcolms and Elphinstones, who built the empire, and the commoners who inherited it and inflicted the barbarities of 1857. Nehru was inclined to see it divided between the England of Shakespeare and Milton, and that of 'the savage penal code and brutal behaviour, of entrenched feudalism and civilization'; Edward Thompson, The Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (London: Faber & Faber, 1937); Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princes (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), pp. 264-5: Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 287-8, 303-6. Consequently, while Edward Thompson could idealize parts of British intrusion into India, Nehru would always see this history more than balanced by the weight of brutality. Thompson, Writing By Candlelight, p. 142. Bayly, The Imperial Meridian, pp. 11—15; Antoinette Burton, 'Rules of Thumb: British History and "Imperial Culture" in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Britain', in Women's History Review, 3 (4, 1994), pp. 483-500. 'Foreword', in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. iii; P a l m e r , ^ P. Thompson, pp. 27 and 174 (n. 16). Thompson's statement that he modelled himself after his father can be found in Penelope Corfield, 'University of London Interviews with Historians: E. P. Thompson'. In E. P. Thompson, Palmer describes the father's influence on his son, part of which was found in the latter's lifelong expectation that governments would be 'mendacious and imperialist'. Palmer does so partly to defend Thompson from the charge of 'Little Englandism' and cultural nationalism, p. 11. Consequently, while he is to be commended for highlighting this influence, Palmer's description is one-sided. For, although the son's political consciousness 'cut its teeth' on India, it is remarkable that he could ignore so many issues arising out of imperialism. Palmer's own understanding of Thompson, cemented in his earlier work The Making of E. P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History (Toronto: New Togtown Press, 1981), ignores this issue, and his reading of the father's influence is through concepts like Methodism and liberalism, that are stripped of their imperial meaning. Indeed, Palmer takes on the mantle of being an apologist for the Thompson family, when the issue is not to defend the Thompsons but to understand them. The words of Edward Thompson regarding C. F. Andrews's uncritical reading of Tagore seems to apply to Palmer's reading of E. P. Thompson: He is like 'a lover who has long got past the stage of being able to criticize'; Alien Homage, p. 33. We are not suggesting that E. P. Thompson was in any way politically an imperialist. Palmer indicates clearly Thompson's many anti-imperialist political pronouncements (see also Writing By Candlelight, pp. 144, 148). Robert Young, in White Mythologies: Writing
176
11.
12.
13.
14.
15. 16. 17.
18.
Notes History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), highlights Jean-Paul Sartre's anti-imperialism, but notes that such politics did not lead him to question his own ethnocentric and imperialist notions of history: pp. 41-7. Few of the many obituaries and articles spanning The Nation, New Statesman, Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Historical Review, Economic History Review, Journal of Social History Monthly Review and Commentary commented or dwelled on an imperial connection (see also the articles in Kaye and McClelland). Peter Linebaugh comes close in 'Commonists of the World Unite!' Frederick Cooper, 'Work, Class and Empire: An African Historian's Retrospective on E. P. Thompson', Social History, 20 (2, 1995) pp. 235-41, considers Thompson's impact on historians of Africa, but remains oblivious to any imperial roots for Thompsonian analysis like his own; while Roger Wells, in 'E.P. Thompson, "Customs in Common," and Moral Economy', The Journal of Peasant Studies, 21 (2, January 1994) pp. 263-307, discusses the applicability of Thompsonian concepts to the interpretation of peasantries worldwide. The influence in James C. Scott's works, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) and Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) is obvious. But none of the aforementioned reverse the analysis to discuss the way empire influenced Thompson's writing (Palmer is the exception here). And, we should add, other genealogies can be found that would require the intrusion into the profession's narrative: people like W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna J. Cooper, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, George Padmore, and a host of others who have been made to seem peripheral. See Robin D. G. Kelley, 'Introduction', in James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1995), pp. 1-33. Antoinette Burton, from personal correspondence with the authors. See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), Gyan Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism', American Historical Review (Dec. 1994), pp. 1475-90; 'Who's Afraid of Postcoloniality?' Social Text, 49/14 (4, Winter 1996), pp. 187-203; and Ch. 1 above. E. P. Thompson, 'Alien Homage': Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (London: Oxford University Press, 1921). Alien Homage', p. vii. Thompson and Garratt, Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India (Allahabad: Central Book Depot, 1962), pp. 660-2. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 206. Said is wrong to describe Thompson's The Other Side of the Medal as 'an impassioned statement against British rule and for Indian independence'; 'Introduction', in Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 25. Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British
Notes
19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
111
Imagination, 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 166; Thompson's quote is from The Reconstruction of India, p. 279. Thompson's novels included An Indian Day (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1921), A Farewell to India (London: E. Benn, 1931), and An End of the Hours (1938). Ibid. p. 171. Thompson, Alien Homage, p. 104. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this work. Thompson wrote, 'Benita Parry's capable and compact study of EJT in Delusions and Discoveries leans over-heavily on this point, and she has been followed by others', p. 107, n. 12. Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). Alien Homage, pp. 1—10. Thompson here quotes from Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World - A Derivative Discourse (United Nations University, 1986), p. 66. It is surrounding this point that praise or condemnation of Thompson's work on Tagore revolves. An author who accepts or implicitly assumes that there is a location for the critic 'above the storm' (as Matthew Arnold defined for himself beyond class conflict in Culture and Anarchy) tends to give Thompson greater credit than one who doubts this. For an example of an assessment that E. P. Thompson would have considered 'fair' see Harish Trivedi 'Introduction' in Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore, p. 39. Alien Homage, p. 82. Marx Engels, The First War of Independence 1857-1859 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), pp. 79-80. The Other Side of the Medal (London: Hogarth, 1925). Palmer, in E. P. Thompson, provides a good account of the transformation the war affected in Edward Thompson, pp. 18-22. The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, p. 600. This decline was also witnessed in the end of indenture brought about in 1917, which had considerable nationalist ramifications. The Other Side of the Medal. Page numbers in parentheses that follow refer to this volume. Vinay Lai, 'The Incident of the "Crawling Lane": Women in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919', in Genders, 16 (Spring 1993), pp. 55-6. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956), p.190. V. D. Savarkar, The War of Independence of 1857 (Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1947). Cited in Parry, Delusions, p. 177. The Other Side, p. 122; Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 149. Savarkar's involvement in the crime was similar to that of Tilak in the assassination of Walter Charles Rand in 1898: Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1961). No actual direct involvement on the part of Savarkar was found (otherwise the punishment
178
37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45.
Notes would have been far worse); Peter Fryer, Staying Power (London: Pluto, 1980). For an account of Savarkar's sometimes stormy relations with other Indians in London, like Mohandas K. Gandhi, see James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London (Delhi: Promilla and Co., 1993), pp. 89, 124-7. G. M. Joshi, 'The Story of this History', in Savarkar, The Indian War, p. xii. Ibid. p. xiv. One of which was used in the murder of an official in Nasik. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale, p. 230. Savarkar had escaped from custody once already in London, as a result of a collaborative effort of Irish and Indian nationalists. Fryer, Staying Power. Savarkar, My Transportation for Life: A Biography of Black Days of Andaman (Bombay, Sadbhakti Publications, 1950), pp. 11-12. G. M. Joshi, 'The Story of this History', p. xx. Stephen Hay, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, volume II: Modern India and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press) pp. 289-90. Hay describes Savarkar as a Hindu nationalist only, and anachronistically attempts to reveal a line of continuity between the violence of the revolutionaries in London and the assassination of Gandhi by Savarkar's 'devoted lieutenant', N. V. Godse, in 1948. War of Indian Independence, however, endeavored to bridge gaps between Hindu and Moslem communities in revolt against the British. Thompson compared the Mutiny to lynchings in the United States (p. 38). He noted that when uprisings of slaves against their masters occurred there was often 'devilish cruelty on both sides ... Terrorism wars with terrorism, till the stronger side issues its bulletin to the world.' The Mutiny should, therefore, be placed alongside slave revolts in Jamaica in the 18th century, the uprising at Demerara in 1824, and the Morant Bay uprising in 1865 (though the participants were not slaves). But rather than making the most obvious and telling comparison with the United States by focusing on the events surrounding the Nat Turner rebellion, which would have forced him to consider similar political issues surrounding the justification of slave violence in the pursuit of freedom, Thompson compares the Mutiny to lynchings that continued in the United States at the time of his writing. While this gives The Other Side of the Medal a defensive air, in trying to justify inhumanity by showing one of his audiences some of their own propensities for inhumanity, more importantly it defuses the potential political message surrounding the events and characterizes the actions of Anglo-Americans as reactive - a response to alleged criminality of the victims. Perhaps by focusing on Nat Turner, Thompson would have been led to concede that 'the services which Britain has rendered to India [and] the greatness of the individual contribution of many of her sons and daughters' (p. 20) might have been exaggerated when viewed from the perspective of the non-Briton. And if instead of turning to American lynchings, he had focused on the manner in which Americans had made treaties with, and then through war and the decimation of
Notes
46.
47.
48.
49.
50. 51. 52. 53. 54.
179
buffalo herds had brought about the virtual genocide of American Indians, he would have found a more comparable model for British rule in India. See Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race, especially pp. 111-20, on the massacre at Sand Creek (1864). Such a comparative perspective, drawing on the similarities and continuities between American and British imperial policies, might have led Thompson to reconsider his sanguine assessment, which he shared with many of his peers, that 'The record of my country is cleaner from such deeds of deliberate cruelty than the record of any other country on the globe. The story of mankind is a melancholy one; but we have at least the right to claim that, though often ruthless, we have rarely been fiends. This incident is exceptional in our annals; but the whole Mutiny episode was exceptional' (p. 49). Savarkar asked, A r e massacres in the cause of freedom justified?' (p. 206). While he did not say that they were - 'The question "should be left to God!'" - he intimated that if 'duty' could be used as a defense of conduct (as English historians were wont to do for the barbarous acts of imperial forces), then it was really only 'the revolutionaries' who could use this claim legitimately. See pp. 115-17. Savarkar describes the Sepoys as showing 'unexampled skill' in 'nationalizing' the revolt by quickly seizing Delhi, but then bemoans: 'If the whole of Hindusthan had risen simultaneously on the 31st of May, history would not have had to wait longer than 1857 to record the destruction of the English empire and the victorious Independence of India.... [T]he Meerut Sepoys, by their rising, unconsciously put their brethren in unforeseen confusion by warning the enemy beforehand!' Savarkar uses J. C. Wilson for this assessment. Thompson also concedes, in the comment cited earlier, that any widespread rebellion would have led to the eviction of the British. E. F. Oaten, in Glimpses of India's History (London: Oxford University Press), presented an alternative view, claiming that the events originated within the loyal members of the Indian army, that the 'Mutiny' was in fact many 'small mutinees', suggesting that the revolt was not against England itself, but rather particular isolated conditions. Glimpses, p. 102. It is worth noting that both Karl Marx and Jawaharlal Nehru characterized the events of 1857 to 1859 in terms closer to Savarkar's than Thompson's. Marx-Engels, The First Indian War of Independence', Nehru, Glimpses of World History, p. 414; and The Discovery of India, pp. 322-6. Sir Walter Ralegh: The Last of the Elizabethans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), and The Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (London: Faber & Faber, 1937). Ralegh, p. vi. Ibid. p. 15. Metcalfe, p. vii. Page numbers appearing in parentheses in the following paragraphs refer to this work. Metcalfe's minutes 'are the mirror of a mind bent always on the finding of essential truth, by exclusion of the personal and accidental.' (p. 59)
180 55.
56.
57. 58.
59. 60. 61. 62. 63.
64. 65. 66. 67. 68.
Notes The extent of Metcalfe's personal involvement in the expansion of poppy growing and establishment of factories in Calcutta, to process large quantities of opium mixture which would then become a major source of revenue for British India and the key to British policy in China, is uncertain. But the fact that he governed Calcutta for several years while his elder brother served in the lucrative position of factor for the EIC in Canton is, at the very least, suggestive. The Opium War (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976). Thompson wishes to see this as Metcalfe's innovation. He writes, 'But Charles Metcalfe, aged twenty-six, had abolished both mutilation and the gallows, at a time when Ranjit Singh was in constant warfare and in England a code of nightmare severity was being enforced' (p. 123). But what is really noteworthy is that Ranjit Singh could be noted for being merciful even while he was facing 'constant warfare'. Guha, Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 50. Several other continuities between father and son can be found of varying significance. E. P. Thompson's dismal portrayal of Methodism in The Making of the English Working Class has often been commented upon. Palmer describes Thompson's experiences at Kingswood School and reveals the extent to which this criticism of Methodism arose from his reaction to his father's and mother's Methodism as well as from his father's criticism of the denomination when he ended his work as a missionary in India. This legacy has been treated sufficiently and will not be discussed here. Two other continuities from the Indian Princes to the English Working Class of considerably less significance were the influence of the Leverhulme Trust (which contributed significantly to Edward Thompson's transformation from a Hindi scholar at Oxford to a historian of the British Empire, and which extended its support to E. P. Thompson's research for English Working Class), and the near obsession that both historians seemed to have had with footnotes as essential to proper historical scholarship. Indian Princes, p. viii. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993). Indian Princes, pp. vii-viii. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour (1984). At this point, E. P. Thompson's work takes on the distinctive character of modernization theory. Daniel T. Rodgers, 'Tradition, Modernity, and the American Industrial Worker: Reflections and Critique', in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7/4 (Spring 1977), pp. 655-81. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire. English Working Class, p. 435. Ibid. p. 429. Making History: Writings on History and Culture (NY: The New Press, 1993). Indian Princes, p. v. This transformation was very much a self-conscious one on Thompson's part. In his introduction to the second edition of his biography of Tagore he noted the fact that his interpretation of the
Notes
69. 70.
71. 72.
73.
74.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.
181
poet had undergone change owing largely to the transformations that had occurred in India. Indian Princes, p. vii. In fact, the term 'Princes' would not be conferred on these men until after their defeat at the hands of Edward Thompson's heroes. Indians remained pawns or, rather, flotsam before the ineluctable logic of British imperialism and history, even while their testimonies were being sought. Rosalind O'Hanlon, 'Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia', Modern Asian Studies, 22/1 (1988), pp. 193-4. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. For the defense of Thompson against the Scott critique see Palmer, Descent into Discourse, pp. 78-86 and 271, n. 115. While some of Palmer's points have merit, others do not, and it is enough to note that 'on one, quite basic, level', he agrees that, as Scott claims, 'in The Making of the English Working Class "the master codes that structure the narrative are gendered in such a way as to confirm rather than challenge the masculine representation of class.'" See Judith Walkowitz's description of the difference between East and West London, the language used to explain the difference often taking on an Orientalist tone, in City of Dreadful Delight, see also Antoinette Burton notes in 'Rules of Thumb', p. 497, n. 38. The possibilities of coming upon people of a wholly different 'stock' or 'race' within London, were great indeed. In addition, status differences might take on a language similar to that reflected in the imperial hierarchy. Certainly Mayhew's language is of this ilk, especially in his discussions of the Irish and Jews. See e.g. Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (NY: Vintage, 1976); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1984); Bruce G. Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); and Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: 1976). This approach is then extended to apply to African Americans also, especially in the literature on migration. See Trotter, Jr., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, and Gregg, 'Group Portrait with Lady'. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 113-14. Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 39. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Cedric Robinson makes a similar point in 'Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography', in History Workshop, 23 (Spring 1987). Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal,
182
81. 82.
83. 84. 85. 86. 87.
88.
89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.
95. 96. 97. 98.
99.
Notes 1890-1940 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); page numbers in this and the following two paragraphs refer to this volume. Palmer, E. P. Thompson. Edward Thompson, Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928). Figures in parentheses in the two following paragraphs refer to this volume. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. Quoted in Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 44. Edward Thompson, Reconstruction of India (NY: Dial Press, 1930), p. 18. Lata Mani, 'Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India', in Cultural Critique 1, Fall: pp. 119-56. See A. B. Shah, ed., The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (Bombay: Maharshtra State Board for Literature and Culture, 1977), p. 178. Critical Inquiry, 12/1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 243-61; see also 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism', pp. 1487-8. Indian Princes, p. 37. Steedman, 'The Price of Experience: Women and the Making of the English Working Class', Radical History, 59 (1994), pp. 108-19; quoted in Cooper, 'Work, Class and Empire,' pp. 241. Indian Princes, p. 287. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, pp. 245. Quotes in parentheses in this paragraph refer to this volume. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), pp. 265-6. Ranajit Guha, 'Dominance Without Hegemony And Its Historiography', Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies VI: Writings in South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 276. Ibid. Finley Peter Dunne, The World of Mr. Dooley (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 167. Bayly, Imperial Meridian; Burton, 'Rules of Thumb', pp. 483-500; Said, Culture and Imperialism. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America; Nehru, The Discovery of India; see also Rushdie's use of the 'palimpstine' in The Moor's Last Sigh. Palmer, The Descent into Discourse, p. 185.
Notes 5
183
PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, p. 8. Shepard, 'Illustrating "The Wind in the Willows'", in Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (NY: Macmillan, 1989). Grahame, Wind in the Willows, p. 67. Ibid. pp. 135-6. Being a public schoolboy, this album was naturally one of my favorites. And here one is almost inclined to make comparisons between the likes of Pink Floyd on the British side of the Atlantic, and the more prosaic, serious and generally political versions of counter-culture on the American side, that summon up Rushdie's comments about the differences between British and American humor. Perhaps, too, we should note the altogether more irreverent aspect to British Punk from Ian Dury and The Sex Pistols as compared to American New Wave (Blondie and The Pretenders, for example). Before we get carried away in these differences, however, we need to be aware of the considerable crossfertilization in the music world that didn't only strip humor on the journey west, and add humor on the journey east.
6 BEYOND BOUNDARIES, BEYOND THE WHALE 1. 2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10.
Toure in notes to Talking Timbuktu. While James undertook an analysis of the United States (published posthumously), it did not lead him beyond an inclination towards exceptionalism; American Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). Appiah, In My Father's House. Ibid. See Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy; and Hill and Kilson, Apropos of Africa. Phillis Wheatley, 'On Being Brought from Africa to America', in The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989 [1903]). Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983), p. 4. Quoted by Appiah on p. 57. E. P. Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism', Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp. 56-97; and 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76-136; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971). See Appiah, p. 122. Until recently the whale as metaphor was generally associated with the Cold War status quo. See George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), pp. 9-50; and E. P. Thompson, 'Outside the Whale', in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays,
184
11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
7
Notes pp. 211-43. With the end of the Cold War Jonah's whale takes on more of an imperial manifestation. See Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 87-101. This is surely manifested in the debates over Martin Bernal's Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not out of Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3-6. Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (New York: George Braziller, 1979). Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York, 1959). A point made in Mamdani in Citizen and Subject. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 99.
BEYOND SILLY MID-OFF 1.
2. 3. 4.
5.
Thompson, back cover of Beyond a Boundary. See also Thompson, 'C.L.R. James at 80', Urgent Tasks, 12 (Summer, 1981), back cover: 'I'm afraid that American theorists will not understand this, but the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket' also cited in Palmer, E.P. Thompson, p. 24. L. N. Mathur, The Encyclopedia of Indian Cricket (Udaipur: Prakashan, 1966), frontispiece. Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 31. See Robinson, Black Marxism; and Kelley, 'Introduction', James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, pp. 1-33; 'The World the Diaspora Made: C.L.R. James and the Politics of History', in Grant Farred, ed., Rethinking C.L.R. James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 103-30. For a discussion of Du Bois's attempts to marry class and race in Black Reconstruction in America, see Gregg, 'Giant Steps: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Historical Enterprise', in Michael B. Katz and Thomas Sugrue, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois and the Philadelphia Negro Revisited (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). In many respects James's and E. P. Thompson's 'deviations' were similar (Thompson's term in 'The Nehru Tradition', Writing By Candlelight, p. 141). While appreciation for 'Englishness' (defined around 'the rule of law' - cricket - and empiricism) would take Thompson out of the Communist Party, James would find himself continually confronted by the significance of the cricketing ethos and would be similarly unable to tow an orthodox line. Thompson, 'The Poverty of Theory'. 'The Peculiarities of the English'; Kelley, 'Introduction,' pp. 4-12; James, Beyond a Boundary, pp. 151 and 249. It is no surprise, then, to find Thompson expressing such an affinity for James's work. The empire James described was certainly one that he could feel comfortable with, understanding its limitations, but also believing in its benefits.
Notes 6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. 12. 13.
185
James, Beyond a Boundary, p. 29. Page numbers in parentheses throughout this paper refer to this text. James's use of Matthew Arnold here, while clearly one of convenience (he fits), is belied by the text. No doubt Robert Young would make a good deal of this shrine to St. Matthew, given his chapter on Matthew Arnold in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge Press, 1995), pp. 55-89. The gospel according to Matthew Bondman, see below, would look very different. See Brian Stoddart, 'Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire', Comparative Studies in Society and History (1988), pp. 649-73 and Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, Liberation Cricket: West Indian Cricket and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) -very much a tribute to Beyond a Boundary, and building upon James's analysis. See also Michael Manly, A History of West Indian Cricket (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988), which relies heavily on James's assessments. Gyan Prakash, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (2, April 1990), pp. 383-408; and 'Who's Afraid of Postcoloniality?' Social Text, 49/14 (4, Winter 1996), pp. 187-203. 'I was British' (p. 152). James's conception of Britishness can be contrasted again with Thompson's understanding of the 'peculiarities' of the English which appears to be the product of a 'little England' perspective with all its attendant problems. See Helen Tiffin, 'Cricket, Literature and the Politics of De-Colonisation: The Case of C.L.R. James', in Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan, Sport: Money, Morality and the Media (Kensington, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1981), pp. 177-93; and attempts to defend Thompson from this charge, in Palmer, E.P. Thompson, p. 11. Helen Tiffin shows that in both his novel, Minty Alley, and The Black Jacobins James achieved 'an extraordinary feat of psychic de-colonisation'. This accomplishment was not matched in Beyond a Boundary, in which 'the centre remains in England': 'Cricket, Literature and the Politics of De-Colonisation', p. 190. In White Mythologies, Robert Young highlights Jean-Paul Sartre's anti-imperialism, but notes that such politics did not lead him to question his own ethnocentric and imperialist notions of history: pp. 41-7. Opposing imperialism as politics does not an anti-imperialist make, as anyone reading Mark Twain should be aware; for example, More Tramps Abroad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907). Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1958), p. 167. See Derek Jarman's application of this phrase, quoted in Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, p. 131. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1929] 1957); Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber & Faber, [1937] 1986). For James's analysis of the United States, see American Civilization; and Andrew Ross, 'Civilization in One Country? The American James', in Farred, ed., Rethinking C.L.R. James, pp. 75-84.
Notes It would certainly have been interesting had James been able to write a review of John Sayles's 'Eight Men Out'. For the clear connections Sayles draws between the labor turmoil of 1919 and the White Sox players' oppression at the hands of their boss, Charles Comiskey ('The Old Roman'), provides a strong justification for throwing the world series. In making this assessment James drew on the Elia Kazan film 'Rebel Without a Cause', even though this film was a typical Hollywood movie and so 'dodged every serious attempt to explore either causes or conclusions' (p. 53). However, observing another Kazan movie, 'On the Waterfront' (one, incidentally, that appears to have provided Sayles with a model for a number of scenes and themes in 'Eight Men Out'), would provide a different image of loyalty in the United States. For this allegorical treatment of the McCarthy hearings is about nothing if it isn't about the demands of loyalty and conscience, something shown in abundance during the McCarthy hysteria. 'Old School-tie' could be found in the United States, only the stripes went in the 'wrong' direction - the uniforms were different. A. G. Spalding's invention of the origins of baseball would be worthy of inclusion in Hobsbawm's and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition, alongside those cloth manufacturers who divided up their patterned kilts among designated clans in pursuit of profit. In addition to the Cooperstown mythology, there is also 'the field of dreams' and 'frontier' mythology associated with baseball; Peter Levine, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xii-xv, 97-9; see also Ken Burns's documentary 'Baseball' (the first inning). Cricket meanwhile has its own mythology, much of which resides in the character of W. G. Grace discussed below. Men like Henry Chadwick and Harry Wright were crucial in the process of defining baseball in this way - especially the latter, who migrated from cricket to being a leading booster of baseball; Levine, A.G. Spalding, pp. 10, 17-19; Ken Burns's 'Baseball' (first inning); see also 'Comparing Cricket and Baseball', New York Herald, 16 October, 1859, and Stephen A. Riess, ed., Major Problems in American Sport History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), pp. 90-2. Ian Tyrrell's debunking article provides a strong antidote to much of the analysis of baseball's origins and development; 'The Emergence of Modern American Baseball c. 1850-80', in Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan, eds., Sport in History: The Making of Modern Sporting History (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979), pp. 205-26; J. Thomas Jable, 'Latter-Day Culture Imperialists: The British Influence on the Establishment of Cricket in Philadelphia, 1842-72', in J. A. Mangan, ed., Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British Culture at Home and Abroad, 1700-1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1988), pp. 175-92; as well as Levine's description of A. G. Spalding's and the White Sox's world tour; Donald Rodin, 'Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan, American Historical Review. James makes a great deal of the public celebration that occurred when
Notes
187
Grace scored his hundredth century, and suggests that this was one of the most significant public celebrations of the nineteenth century. 'What I take leave to ask at this moment is this: On what other occasion, sporting or non-sporting, was there ever such enthusiasm, such an unforced sense of community, of the universal merged in an individual? At the end of a war? A victorious election? With its fears, its hatreds, its violent passions? Scrutinize the list of popular celebrations, the unofficial ones; that is to say, those not organized form above. I have heard of no other that approached this celebration of W. G.'s hundredth century. If this is not social history what is?' pp. 182-3. It would be interesting to compare this celebration with that in Blackburn when, in 1883, Blackburn Olympic defeated the Old Etonians to take the FA Cup north for the first time. This celebration would have been more local than that for Grace, perhaps, but still may have revealed more about the social history of Britain in the late nineteenth century. Which one touched the hearts and minds of more people? The two would certainly have had different class meanings, especially after the Old Etonians accused the Blackburn team of cheating and then along with other members of the middle and upper classes proceeded to make the dash to Rugby Union and Cricket (whence came, perhaps, their enthusiasm - and perchance, relief- that Grace's achievement in 1895 had been accomplished by an amateur, not a sweaty professional). Richard Cashman has noted that cricket's eclipse by soccer as a mass spectator sport in England can be explained by the class attitudes of many cricket officials; so to what extent was this sport 'national'? These men, Cashman quotes from Sandiford, 'doggedly refused to sell the game to the rising urban proletariat as aggressively and as effectively as the first division soccer clubs, and sometimes raised prices deliberately to restrict the size of the working-class crowd'; 'Cricket and Colonialism: Colonial Hegemony and Indigenous Subversion?' in Mangan, ed., Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism, p. 262. In The Jubilee Book of Cricket (1896), Ranjitsinhji noted, 'On the whole the northern counties field better than the southern - probably because the spectators in the northern towns are such remorseless critics of anything like slovenliness on the field.' Alan Ross, Ranji: Prince of Cricketers (London: Collins, 1983), p. 79. In 'Cricket and Colonialism,' Cashman has pointed out that gambling and barracking were prominent traditions among Australian spectators. Gambling was virtually removed from the game during the 1880s, the same time that baseball was being cleaned up by Spalding and company; but barracking jeering at or taunting the opposition (and sometimes one's own players if one is in Philadelphia) - has had a much longer history. Indeed, one of the subtexts of the whole 'Bodyline' controversy involved Douglas Jardine's attempt to put these 'convicts' with their 'uncivilized' behavior in the stands firmly in their place. Cashman further notes that barracking traditions were not unique to Australia, 'in that workingclass crowds at football and cricket, and American crowds at baseball have all developed similar traditions', pp. 264-7. Of course, it may be anachronistic of me to claim that what I heard in
Notes 'The Shed' in the 1960s and 1970s ('you're a bastard, you're a bastard, you're a bastard, referee...,' - to the tune of 'My darling, Clementine' - among other less savory offerings) was something that had a long tradition in English football, but this was not merely part of Britain's post-imperial malaise, the declining sense of values and authority. This, after all, is what social historians have always found so attractive about the game, while American football, which is more representative of the corporate world or post-industrial America, does not have the same appeal. There must be many a social historian who can relate to James's comment that he only ever read one book about soccer, he couldn't face any more. Football compared to baseball receives similar responses, as is witnessed by the number of volumes on baseball produced by historians compared to any other American sport. The ideals that seem to be embodied in the game of baseball - the moral economy, the lack of a time-work discipline, the artisanal lifestyle, the fields (not the racism) - are appealing to those who extol the virtues of the pre-industrial world. James, as we will see in his 'Prolegemena to W.G.', established a similar location for cricket, which seems to have been profoundly satisfying for the social historian of sport. Even when one takes into consideration the issue of race, the mythic status of baseball comes through intact, as Burns managed to demonstrate in his marathon presentation. Perhaps the surprising thing about segregation in the game of baseball was the degree to which it tied those who were excluded to the ethic and values of the game. Had James watched Hilldale, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Homestead Grays, or the Kansas City Monarchs, he might have found things more to his taste; he would have found African-American baseball players performing perhaps the purest and most idealistic brand of the game in front of integrated crowds. Barracking was not as noticeable as it was in grounds like Shibe Park, Philadelphia, where white supremacy was entrenched and blacks were unwelcome; Bruce Kuklick, To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-76 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 145-8; Robert Peterson, Only the Ball was White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Ribowsky, The Complete History of the Negro Leagues. Interview with Gene Benson (of the Philadelphia Stars) by Donna DeVore, Philadelphia's Afro-American Cultural and Historical Museum (AAHCM); Gregg, 'Personal Calvaries: Sport and Religion in Philadelphia's African American Communities, 1920-1950', (unpublished paper). Tyrrell, 'The Emergence of Modern American Baseball', pp. 206-11; 'Baseball' (first inning); Levine, A.G. Spalding, pp. 17-19, 99-109. Tyrell describes this as the spread of the New York game; 'The Emergence of Modern American Baseball', p. 211. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform. Roosevelt, then Police Commissioner of New York City, was present when the White Sox returned triumphant from their 'unsuccessful' world tour. He would hear Mark Twain tell of baseball's ability to capture the American spirit (Levine, A.G. Spalding). Just as Chadwick had used the failed tour of Britain in 1874 to proclaim baseball
Notes
26. 27.
28. 29. 30. 31.
32. 33. 34. 35.
36.
189
America's national game and to comment on its uniqueness (p. 19), Twain remarked on the incongruity of bringing baseball, 'the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, nineteenth century ... to places of profound repose and soft indolence, [Melbourne, Colombo, Cairo, Rome, Paris and London]' (p. 107; and 'Baseball', First inning). Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America. As is evident in J. A. Mangan's works; for the spread of elite ideas about sport and its social value in the United States, see Harvey Green, Fit for America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986), pp. 181-215; James Naismith, Basketball: Its Origins and Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996); Gael Graham, 'Exercising Control: Sports and Physical Education in American Protestant Mission Schools in China, 1880-1930', Signs, 20 (no.l), 23-48; also, for the adoption of such ideas among one group of immigrants, see Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 11-50; and among Philadelphia's African Americans, see Gregg, 'Personal Calvaries', and interviews with Zachary Clayton, 'Tick' Coleman, John Seawright, Ann Garrott, among others by Donna DeVore (Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library, 1953), p. 179. Quoted in Eugen Weber, 'Gymnastics and Sports in Fin-de-Siecle France', American Historical Review, 76 (1971), p. 97. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977). For example, Ransom's efforts to win Verena from Chancellor in The Bostonians. 'Guarantee us health,' Thomas Wigginson wrote in 1858, 'and Mrs. Stowe cannot frighten us with all the prophesies of Dred.' Reiss, Major Problems in American Sport History, p. 84; Harvey Green, Fit for America. The phrase comes from Woodrow Wilson, History of the American Republic. See Wilson in Reiss, ed., Major Problems, pp. 245-6; Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life. Clearly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman felt that if women attempted to step out of line, men would retaliate in the form of some kind of sexual violence, as with her character Terry (Roosevelt) in Heriand. Lowenfish, The Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball's Labor Wars (NY: De Capo Press, 1980); Paul Hoch, Rip off the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 44-8. And the professionalism/amateur debate raged in the United States also; see Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 165-74. For Britain, see Eric Dunning, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (New York: New York University Press, 1979); Tony Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863-1915 (Sussex: Harvester
190
37. 38. 39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
Notes Press, 1980), pp. 67-78; Charles P. Korr, West Ham United (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). See 'Apropos Exceptionalism' above; Tyrell, 'American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History', pp. 1031-55. Guha, 'Dominance Without Hegemony And Its Historiography', p. 276. For a helpful discussion of some of these points see Grant Farred, 'The Maple Man: How Cricket Made a Postcolonial Intellectual', in Farred, ed., Rethinking C.L.R. James, pp. 165-86. Farred mentions Stingo in his analysis, but seems to accept James's reasons for ignoring its significance. Consequently, he is silent also on issues of ethnicity and gender. Here, William H. Chafe's Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University, 1981) is useful for our purposes. His description of the way civility is used to bolster the status quo provides an alternative to the model employed by James. While James conceives of cricket creating conditions for change, civility in both British and American imperial systems has worked to minimize dissent (its very mention from Southern plantation owners, to Judith Rodin, a University President in search of a cause, to defensive historians, is an indication that debate is about to be stifled); see also Benjamin DeMott, 'Seduced by Civility: Political Manners and the Crisis of Democratic Values', The Nation (December 9,1996), pp. 11-19. The other point that Chafe makes clear is that civility was fundamentally associated with progressivism rather than reaction. 'Civility was what white progressivism [what I call imperial progressivism] was all about - a way of dealing with people and problems that made good manners more important than substantial action As victims of civility, blacks had long been forced to operate within an etiquette of race relationships that offered almost no room for collective self-assertion and independence. White people dictated the ground rules, and the benefits went only to those who played the game', p. 8. James's perplexed reaction to racialism is found in this exclamation: 'But there was racialism! So what? I am the one to complain. I don't. "But racialism! In cricket!" Those exquisites remind me of ribaldry about Kant's Categorical Imperative: there was racialism in cricket, there is racialism in cricket, there will always be racialism in cricket. But there ought not to be' (p. 64). There ought not to be, and a player like Rohan Kanhai also refused to let it remain a foundation stone of West Indian cricket. See the comment of his brother, Richard, referring to the opposition to Kanhai being selected captain, and then the manipulation that took place to push him out of the captaincy: 'IndoCaribbean cricketers: A Panel Discussion', in Frank Birbalsingh, ed., Indenture and Exile: The Indo-Caribbean Experience (Toronto: TSAR, 1989), pp. 248-9. See the discussion of the working-class Yorkshire bowlers in 'Bodyline', who received their orders from the man who resembled a 'colonial official' to bowl at the bodies of the Australians. Frank Birbalsingh, 'Indo-Caribbean Test Cricketers', in David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, India in the Caribbean (London:
Notes
191
Hansib Publishing, 1987), pp. 265-77. I will not touch here on the Chinese (see James, pp. 69-70). James mentions both Ramadhin (merely by his nickname, Ram) and Kanhai in his text, but does not note their different ethnic origin; nor does he endeavor to explain their presence in his narrative (as he had done with the Chinese). Of the fourteen Indo-Caribbean players who represented the West Indies in test matches between 1950 and 1983, seven were from Guyana and seven from Trinidad. However, three of the four best-known players came from Guyana, so that Guyana has gained the greater reputation for producing Indo-Caribbean players. This may have to do with the fact that the plantations in Guyana remained more a central part of the economy, monopolized as they were by a very few large companies who were able to kill competition and keep production costs exceedingly low. Since the estates' laborers were almost exclusively Indian (as in Trinidad), and this population became more than 50 per cent of the total Guyanese population, and the rural section of the economy was relatively more significant to its economy than was the case in Trinidad (which was going through its oil boom), Indo-Caribbean cricket continued to flourish longer than in Trinidad: 'Indo-Caribbean cricketers: A Panel Discussion', p. 244. An anonymous contributor to this panel discussion, which included Ramadhin, Solomon, and Birbalsingh, had this to say: 'Indo-Caribbean cricket started in the sugar estates. There were teams of one sugar estate playing against teams from other sugar estates. But with the demise of the sugar industry and increasing urbanization of what were previously rural areas in both Guyana and Trinidad, we have seen a general decline in participation or competition among cricketers from rural areas. I think this has resulted in the demise of Indo-Caribbean cricket, because they are no longer playing in the country districts, and most of the people playing in the city tend to be descendants of Africans for well-known historical reasons. So if there are fewer IndoCaribbean cricketers today it is because the Indo-Caribbean cricket base has collapsed, and they are not playing as much as they used to when the coconut and sugar estates were active' (p. 248). Ramadhin, the first Indo-Caribbean test cricketer, was noticed in the countryside by an oil company official who admired his bowling and facilitated his entry into first-class cricket; see Ramadhin's contribution to panel, p. 245, and Birbalsingh, 'Indo-Caribbean Test Cricketers', p. 276. Cashman, 'Cricket and Colonialism', p. 258; see also his 'The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket', in Cashman and McKernan, eds., Sport in History, pp. 180-204; and Patrons, Players and the Crowd (Delhi, 1980). James's naturalizing of the Caribbean as part of the African diaspora as opposed to a larger 'Black Atlantic,' is not something that was peculiar to him but is found in many other historians and social scientists of the region. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Carolyn Steedman, 'The Price of Experience: Women and the Making of the English Working Class', Radical History, 59 (1994), pp. 108-19; Mandala, Work and Control, and Luise White, The Comforts of Home:
Notes Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); Joan Walloch Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography', in Spivak and Ranajit Guha, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) pp. 3-34; 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) pp. 271-313; and, 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism', Critical Inquiry, 12/1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 243-61. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinities: The 'Manly Englishman'and the Effeminate Bengali' in the late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). In a related discussion to that below, Sinha describes the adoption of sports among Bengalis to counteract stereotypes of the 'effeminate Bengali', pp. 41-2. The French in the wake of their defeat against Prussia, and the Japanese when faced by baseballing imperialists, also followed this trajectory; see Weber and Rodin articles cited earlier. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire. I am here privileging gender 'strategically'. In other words, this is one narrative of slavery and emancipation, not a complete history (the gathering of all narratives). It is told in this way, because I am focusing on cricket and gender, and in part because it has been less than fully explored by historians. James conforms to the notions of agency that emerged in the aftermath of emancipation, with the suggestion that the withdrawal of women from the labor force marked an attempt by blacks to maintain control of their working conditions and establish their (men's) independence; rather than the equally plausible theory that in the consolidation of land holdings that occurred after emancipation, the new merchant capitalists were able to 'rationalize' their labor force using the notions of bourgeois domesticity to telling effect. In this latter model, the independent peasants appear more like those confined to the infertile and overcrowded Bantustans in South Africa than those independent farmers who had to be displaced by the Native Lands Act to lower the price of their labor (This is a point made in Mahmoud Mamdani, who notes the origins of South African racial codes in the practice of colonialism). Or, where peasants were still in a strong position to establish a form of independence (in other words, they were in a position to organize to improve their conditions on the plantations, or there was fertile land available - i.e. in Trinidad and British Guiana), they would be undercut by the influx of immigrant indentured laborers. Ibid. Sumanta Banerjee, 'Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal,' Kumkum Sungari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 127-79; Gregg, Sparks From the Anvil of Oppression. I will not elaborate on the connection here with Thompson, whose own Methodist inheritance was formidable. No doubt Kingswood Old-Boys made their way to the British Caribbean as well as India; Palmer, E.P. Thompson, p. 15.
Notes 53. 54.
55. 56.
57.
58.
59. 60.
193
Faith L. Smith, 'Coming Home to the Real Thing: Gender and Intellectual Life in Anglophone Caribbean', The South Atlantic Quarterly, 93 (4, Fall 1994), pp. 895-923. This is Smith's formulation, one that highlights both the passive role of spectator, observing the action on the field, and then the active role of participant in theorizing such action; Ibid. pp. 912-14. This is a more active involvement in cricket attributed to women than that in Arjun Appadurai's formulation of the Indian female gaze: 'twice removed: watching males play, but also watching males watching other males play'. In Smith, males must also be watching other males watching yet other males play, and also watching women watching men. If sport links to status founded on gender, then all spectatorship becomes 'the female gaze', with both the possibilities and limitations inherent therein; 'Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket', in Carol Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 44. See Bhabha, 'The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency', in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge Press, 1994), pp. 171-87. For examples of such readings of emancipation, see Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom, and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992). All this may seem academic, but Rhoda Reddock, a feminist activist in Trinidad, I believe, would argue otherwise. Women have become tired of spectatorship, active or passive, and their pursuit of similar kinds of independence afforded or ascribed to men has created tensions of a quite significant nature. In short (because I return to this with Rushdie's scenario of the flannelled fools), the pursuit of sexual equality has led to a backlash that has accentuated ethnic or communal tensions. Feminists in Trinidad, Reddock argues, those people who have been kept beyond cricket's boundary altogether, have been the ones arguing for transnational, cross-ethnic, and universal notions, only to face efforts to impose the boundary of ethnicity between them. The louder their voice, the stronger the communal backlash. Rhoda Reddock, workshop on Gender and Colonialism, Bryn Mawr College, February 1996; see also Smith, 'Coming Home to the Real Thing', p. 912, and her use of Reddock's work. Cooper and Stoler, 'Between Metropole and Colony,' pp. 35 and 37. Postmodern critics, they continue, give 'insufficient weight to the possibilities that universalistic notions of rights and participation can be deployed against the exclusions and inequities that have historically been associated with them'. The intersection of this comment and this essay is left to the reader to work out. As witnessed in the riot at Queen's Park Oval following the collapse of West Indian batting, Beyond a Bundary, pp. 218-19. 'Clearing their way with bat and ball, West Indians at that moment had made a public entry into the comity of nations' (p. 252). See also the works of J. A. Mangan.
194 61. 62.
63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.
69. 70. 71.
72.
Notes James: 'Thomas Arnold, Thomas Hughes and the Old Master [Grace] himself would have recognized Frank Worrell as their boy' (p. 252); J. A. Mangan, etc. Before anyone gets worked up, I should say that I am here being deliberately anachronistic, for the sake of effect, not for the sake of objectivity, nor to speak in the terms of our subjects - w.c.c. came in about 200 years after M.C.C. Let me call it 'perspective by incongruity': Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change. Ranjitsinhji, The Jubilee Book of Cricket (London: Blackwood, 1897), conclusion. Ross, Ranji, p. 54. For the impact of India on 'Utilitarianism', see Eric T. Stokes (1989). Much of this comes from the caption at the foot of the Spy cartoon in Vanity Fair, published in 1897; ibid. pp. 53-4. Arjun Appadurai, 'Playing with Modernity', p. 30. Cashman, 'The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket', p. 264. Regarding Ranjitsinhji and amateurism, it is important to note that while Grace was the figurehead of the supremacy of amateurism, playing for M.C.C. and allowing it to retain control of the game (whereas football witnessed the weasels from the wildwood seemingly taking up shop in Toad Hall), Ranjitsinhji represented compromise between the contending forces of gentlemen and players. He himself was an amateur, but he proclaimed that the game should accept professionalism. Moley had a different outlook from Toad: 'If for some reason skill in cricket suffered a sudden decline, the interest in it would wane I cannot see how cricket, as a great institution for providing popular amusement, could, as things are now, exist without a class of people who devote themselves entirely to it', Ross, Ranji, p. 80. By extension, Toad can only really be accepted if he performs up to snuff - put him in jail for cheating, that's what I say. James' conception of Grace's appeal deriving from his embodiment of the pre-Victorian gentleman seems questionable in Ranjitsinhji's text. He is good and therefore bears commenting on, but his achievements will be transcended. Ranjitsinhji's praise for the Australians' 'adventurousness' over the English also fits within this approach: p. 93. Ross, Ranji, p. 75. Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain, 1700-1947(London: Pluto, 1986), p. 173. Ashis Nandy has suggested that Ranjitsinhji's commitment to empire was mixed with deep personal doubts; The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New York: Viking, 1989). Certainly, when he died in 1934 he felt that he had been betrayed by the empire and certain colonial administrators. See Antoinette Burton, A "Pilgrim Reformer" at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari in Late-Victorian London', Gender and History, 8 (2, August 1996), pp. 175-96, and other works; Behramji M. Malabari, The Indian Eye on English Life; or, Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer (Westminster: Constable, 1983); Peter Fryer, Staying Power; Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes; Colin Holmes, John Bull's
Notes
73. 74.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.
83.
84.
195
Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988). Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence, pp. 44-5. Eugen Weber, in 'Gymnastics and Sports', notes that 'even more than the battle of Waterloo - the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton', p. 97. This belief came to be adopted by people as different as Pierre de Coubertin, Theodore Roosevelt and young Japanese in Yokohama adopting the game of baseball in the 1880s and 1890s; see Rodin, 'Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan', pp. 511-34. The danger of this formulation lies in assuming, with nineteenth-century imperialists, that the empire was an outward manifestation of the sporting impulse, rather than the sporting impulse being functional to empire. Gauri Viswanathan's analysis in Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) might be extended to incorporate the institution of cricket. Edward Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princes, p. 72. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence, p. 46. Ross, Ranji, pp. 240-1. Ibid. p. 242. Tiffin writes, in Beyond a Boundary, 'Mahomet still goes to the mountain'; 'Cricket, Literature [etc.]', p. 190. Baig had scored 50 in the first inning (c Grout b Davidson); Mathur, The Encyclopedia of Indian Cricket, p. 320. A. A. Baig had to return to Oxford University to take his exams and so missed the final tests against Australia. He did return to the side in 1966, but never achieved the greatness that was predicted of him. E. D. Docker, The History of Indian Cricket (Delhi: Macmillan, 1976), p. 211. Neither this work nor the Encyclopedia refers to a kissing incident. The fact that Rushdie places Henry Fielding as a key influence for Raman and turns to cricket at the moment of this character's introduction suggests that he has read Beyond a Boundary with its discussion of Vanity Fair: 'You call me narrow and parochial,' Rushdie writes, perhaps glancing at James's puritanism, 'Bigot and prude, you have also called. But from my childhood time, intellectual horizons were broad and free. They were - let me so put it -picaresque' (p. 232). For a helpful study of Shiv Sena, see Jayant Lele, 'Saffronization of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of City, State and Nation', Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds., Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 185-212. See e.g. Lele's description of K. S. Thakeray, Ball's father, as an 'eminent journalist' whose 'art of writing was so pungent and biting that it could make the opponent under attack choke. Both in terms of style and attitude towards communism, BT took on his father's mantle when he started Marmik\ p. 188, quoting Y. D. Phadke. Rushdie's references and allusions to others' works are legion and have been widely remarked upon. The kinds of violence undertaken by Raman's 'elevens' sticks closely to that undertaken by Shiv Sena's cadres; Lele, 'Saffronization of the Shiv Sena', p. 205.
196 85.
86.
87.
88. 89.
90. 91.
Notes Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe; this is something that Phillips develops for his screenplay for the 1986 movie 'Playing Away', about a team from Brixton going into the country to play the small village team. The movie, however, falls back on the rather tired statement of the old colonial to the captain of the Brixton team: 'Standard of play is irrelevant. The rules are of paramount importance. So long as you know the rules.' See also, Cashman, 'The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket', pp. 180-204; Ramachandra Guha cited above in Ch. 4, Wickets in the East: An Anecdotal History, p. 50. Trobriand Cricket, documentary. Rushdie's descriptions of cricket are matched by Cashman's in Patrons, Players and the Crowd: the Phenomenon of Indian Cricket (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1980), especially the chapter on the crowd; see discussion of violence, p.124. At all of them really, though it is interesting to note (along the lines that I am arguing here) that basketball, which was heavily associated with Jews in the 1920s and then later with African Americans, and so did not have the pretensions of baseball, dealt much better with issues of race. This, I would argue, came out of the accentuation of race, rather than its denial, in the 1930s, in the shape of the Harlem Renaissance (a team built around a combination of West Indians and Philaelphia's southern migrants) and their contests with the New York Celtics, led by Nat Holman and Joe Lapchick (father of the antiapartheid activist Richard Lapchick). See Gregg, 'Personal Calvaries'; Peter Levine, From Ellis Island to Ebbets Field; Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Richard E. Lapchick, Broken Promises: Racism in American Sports (New York, 1984). Archer and Bouillon, The South African Game. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, pp. 131-54. Nixon's analysis of sports in South Africa can be contrasted with that of Brian Stoddart in 'Sport, Cultural Imperialism and Colonial Response' (pp. 672-3), who tends to describe the boycott as an example of the power of the sporting ideology. While sports were a very important part of the anti-apartheid movement Nixon reveals a more nuanced relationship, one that shows the sporting ideology (like capitalism itself) capable of incorporating 'constructive engagement' into its logic. The case of Basil D'Oliveira and the South African Government's mistakes pushing the M.C.C. towards a boycott of South Africa reveal the difficulties of ascribing 'postcolonial power' to the 'imperial sporting ideology'. A salutary slap in the face for the 'sporting ethos' comes from South African soccer star, Mark Fish. When his alma mater, Pretoria Boys' High ('a smart white school where the rugby and cricket fields roll into the distance and where soccer, the black man's game, is discouraged'), rang him to ask him to give a speech, 'he told it where to go' (civilly, of course): Simon Kuper, A Man Called Fish,' British Airways High Life (February 1997), p. 48. And through her father, cricket. Busia, 'But Caliban and Ariel are Still Both Male: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female', in Kenneth Harrow et al., eds.,
Notes
92. 93. 94.
95. 96. 97. 98.
99.
8
197
Crisscrossing Boundaries in African Literatures (Washington, D.C., 1991), pp. 129-40; cited in Smith, 'Coming Home to the Real Thing', p. 899. Appadurai, 'Playing with Modernity,' p. 42. Richard Cashman notes something very similar with the 'Packerization' of cricket; 'Cricket and Colonialism'. See Kale, Fragments of Empire. Smith, 'Coming Home to the Real Thing', p. 898, referring here to Toussaint L'Ouverture's decision to go to France. Toussaint is seeped in French revolutionary rhetoric to such a degree that he takes French promises of freedom and democracy at their word and departs for France, prison and death; James, The Black Jacobins. This is Daniel T. Rodgers' formulation, Atlantic Crossings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream. No doubt this is part of a 'neo-abolitionist denunciation of a form of power now safely consigned to history'. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, p. 213. This is the term used by William Digby in 1901 to describe that part of India where the English were firmly established: 'the India of the Presidency and chief provincial cities, of the railway system, of the hill stations, in all of which Britain is as supreme as she is in the chief places of the United Kingdom'; Prosperous' British India (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), pp. 292-3 , cited in Meera Kosambi, 'British Bombay and Marathi Mumbai: Some Nineteenth Century Perceptions', in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 12. I am proposing that the English were reasonably firmly established in England - though, of course, this can be exaggerated! Docker, A History of Indian Cricket, p. 57. Duleepsinhji had been picked for the Australia tour, but owing to a bout of tuberculosis remained in England. He didn't get on too well with Jardine either. THE SOUND OF SILENCE
1. 2.
3. 4. 5.
Judith Stein, 'The Art of Horace Pippin'. For example, Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven and Free Enterprise; or Toni Morrison, Beloved and Jazz. Free Enterprise deals very specifically in the 'silences' Trouillot is describing. I am grateful to Rajeswari Mohan for this observation. Kleist, The Marquise of O (Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), p. 232. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolutions, 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962). James R. Barrett and David Roediger, 'Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the New Immigrant Working Class', in Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, American Exceptionalism? U.S. Working-Class Formation in an International Context (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 181-220; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Verso, 1996).
198 9
Notes
A COMMON WIND 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 10 1. 2.
3.
4.
5. 6. 7. 8.
In Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 504. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O, pp. 114-213. Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Kleist, The Marquise, pp. 231-69. David Luke and Nigel Reeves, 'Introduction', in ibid. pp. 27-31. A Way in the World (New York: Vintage, 1994). CLASS, CULTURE AND EMPIRE Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, My Dinner with Andre (New York: Grove Press, 1981), p. 83. 'Developments and Prospects in South Asian History in the United States.' The paper, its author wrote, is a 'rather hurriedly prepared potpourri of impressions and suggestions'. He also noted that 'I am sure on reflection that there is much I would not want quoted in any form'. The document is noteworthy for what it says about the profession at the time, rather than as a reflection of the individual's writings. Paper accompanied by letter from Ainslee T. Aimbree to Richard Lambert, dated April 18, 1968, in author's possession. The 'Open Door' is a suitable metaphor for these incursions into South Asia. Americans in China and the Middle East (with oil) wanted open access until they were established and then doors were closed after them; Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) p. 191. A block, one might add, that at least in the case of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago, was noted for widespread evictions of local dwellers to make way for university expansion and 'gentrification'. For the University of Chicago's record, see Arnold Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto. Penn has escaped similar scrutiny. The blunders that had been witnessed with regard to the study of Russia and China were not seen as cause for doubt in this regard, because fortunately, this author felt, Harvard remained out of this race to lead in the field of South Asian Studies. For an illuminating examination of Area Studies, see Vicente Rafael, Social Text. This incident was reported to me by someone present in the classroom at the time. Both points are frequently heard and need no attribution. Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (1925), pp. 29-30. A term that seems to have fallen out of use - but seems to be appropriate for historians working within the so-called 'bourgeois world'. Robinson, 'Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography', pp. 122-40. 'Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983),
Notes
9.
10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17. 18.
199
pp. 138-9. Cooper and Stoler, 'Between Metropole and Colony', pp. 1-56. The claim that 'X' is not a historian is a common one - 1 will not list all of the profession's venues in which it may be heard. It is implicit in Rosalind O'Hanlon, David Washbrook, and Burton Stein's attacks on Gyan Prakash. See Prakash, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (2, April 1990), pp. 383-408; Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, 'After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World,' in ibid. 34 (1992), pp. 141-67; and Prakash, 'Can the "Subaltern" Ride?', ibid. pp. 168-84. For further discussion along these lines see Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism', in American Historical Review (Dec. 1994), pp. 1475-90; the attempt to diminish Subaltern Studies theorists' contributions to History in Frederick Cooper, 'Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History', ibid. pp. 1516-45; and Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 'Between Metropole and Colony', in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California, 1997), pp. 33-7; which brings up the question asked by Prakash: 'Who's Afraid of Postcoloniality?' Social Text, 49/14/4 (Winter 1996), pp. 187-203. Even though, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar has argued, these historians may sometimes have misapplied Thompsonian ideas in their analyses of Indian history: '"The Making of the Working Class': E. P. Thompson and Indian History", in History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 177-95; Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, I-1V (Delhi: OUP, 1982-5). Ranajit Guha, 'Dominance Without Hegemony And Its Historiography', p. 276. Gyan Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism', p. 1480, drawing on Veena Das, 'Subaltern as Perspective', Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 315. Ibid. p. 1480. Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography', in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 197-221. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', pp. 271-313; Spivak's focus on sati (and the problems it presents for historical analysis) makes Cooper's question in 'Conflict and Connection' (p. 1528), 'Can the theorist listen?', extremely insensitive; perhaps he missed the point of her argument. Young, White Mythologies, pp. 1-3. Cooper and Stoler, 'Between Metropole and Periphery', p. 27. Americanists have crossed these boundaries more readily than British historians. Some good examples are David Montgomery's Beyond Equality; Eugene Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made; Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom; and the model for them all, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. The
200
19. 20. 21.
22.
23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
Notes United States as a political unit has incorporated metropoles and peripheries so some miscegenation has occurred: see Apropos Exceptionalism'. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Edward Thompson, The Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe; The Making of the Indian Princes; The Other Side of the Medal. Clearly, the work of Subaltern Studies historians reflected, initially, the attempt to bring considerations of class to the periphery. Paul Gilroy's early work brought categories of race to resituate Britain; There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. Among Americanists this need has been articulated most notably by Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; and Robinson, Black Marxism. See also Rick Halpern, 'Organised Labour, Black Workers, and the Twentieth Century South: The Emerging Revision', Social History, 19 (1994). Thompson wrote, 'Instead of interrogating a category, we will interrogate a woman. It will at least be more agreeable.' The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 150, cited in Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 40. I do not want to comment on this directly (there's no need). Let me instead suggest that the categories we interrogate will be gendered, and that not all miscegenation is the same. Take 'West Side Story' and 'Bombay', for example. If we were to make Tony Puerto Rican and Maria Polish, we would have a very different movie. Likewise 'Bombay', considered very controversial, would have been inflammatory if it had brought together a Muslim male and a Hindu female. The same with historical categories and historians. 'Classifying race' (the metropole's colonization of the periphery) has been a lot less troubling than 'racializing class' (the illegal immigration of peripheral categories to the metropole). The former remains within the codes of civility and order. People may not like it, but they can be dismissed as unenlightened. The latter leads to sharp rebuke against the transgressor, the academic equivalent of a lynching. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight, pp. 135-48. Thompson's affinity for Buddhism, while highlighting his own disgruntlement with Methodism and aspects of Christianity, ought not to be seen (as E. P. Thompson and Bryan D. Palmer tend to argue) as an appreciation of Indian culture. His praise of Buddhism was generally accompanied by very critical and often dismissive assessments of Hinduism and Islam, the religions of the majority of people in the Indian sub-continent. Palmer, E.P. Thompson, p. 30; E. P. Thompson, Alien Homage', pp. 2-10. Consider Matthew Arnold's attempt to establish this position for himself and the way in which, as Robert J. C. Young shows, his ideas were shaped by colonial discourses; Colonial Desire, pp. 55-89. For a related discussion of these issues, see 'Beyond Silly Mid-Off. E. P. Thompson, 'Alien Homage'; this defensiveness in the face of critics is taken up by Palmer in his biography, E.P. Thompson. As Paul Gilroy notes in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, p. 39. Though I am now inclined to agree with Spivak that Thompson's attack
Notes
30. 31.
32. 33. 34. 35.
36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.
43.
44.
201
on Althusser is 'trivializing' and serves to keep disciplinary boundaries distinct; In Other Worlds, pp. 208, 284. The fear of many historians like Palmer is that there really are forces 'massing on the borders of history', like Turks at the gates of Constantinople. Palmer, quoting Thompson, Descent into Discourse, p. 199. Guha, 'Dominance Without Hegemony And Its Historiography', pp. 210-309; Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940. Clearly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1985 expose of the problems associated with Subaltern Studies Collective's adoption of the 'subaltern as the subject of his history' led many within the Collective to develop further their 'critique of humanism as produced in the West'. These problems were most pronounced, Spivak noted, when women and gender were given consideration: 'Subaltern Studies', p. 209. Interestingly, while members of the Subaltern Studies Collective have responded to Spivak's essay by attempting to endorse and apply her ideas, similarly situated Social Historians, facing the culturalstudies/postcolonial/multiculturalism onslaught, have resorted to digging trenches and crying foul. Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression. Gregg, 'Group Portrait with Lady'. A diatribe that, not surprisingly, fit quite neatly with that found in Palmer's Descent into Discourse. E. P. Thompson, 'Mayhew and the Morning Chronicle', in Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson, eds., The Unknown Mayhew (New York: Pantheon, 1971), pp. 11-50. Thompson, Writing By Candlelight, pp. 91-7. Quoted in Paul Gilroy, 'Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism', in Small Acts (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), p. 69. Palmer, Descent into Discourse. See Steven Watts, 'Point of View: Academe's Leftists Are Something of a Fraud', in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 29, 1992). Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 469-521. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; The Poverty of Theory. Not surprisingly, some of the radicals nurtured on this analysis have lost their commitment to a radical agenda, sometimes seeing everything as OK in America, workers achieving their aims generally, or diverted to other concerns, or seeing Americans as divorced from trends elsewhere; Wilentz, Against Exceptionalism' and Alan Dawley, 'Peculiarities of the Americans'. According to Steven Watts, for example, 'the linguistic left has failed in its radicalism.' In fact, it has succumbed to 'academic narcissism', with the 'stakes' being 'almost exclusively academic: reputation, promotion, and publication'. 'Ultimately,' Watts concludes, 'the linguistic left seeks sanctuary in the rarefied, intertextualized world of a kinder, gentler academe. From this location its theoretical and political doctrines have emerged as the latest bankrupt expression of radical chic' U. B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery; William A. Dunning,
Notes Reconstruction, Political and Economic; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pp. 710-29; Gregg, 'Giant Steps.' C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; though it is noteworthy that Du Bois's earlier assault on these notions is generally overlooked (Black Reconstruction in America). As are other assaults from women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett (The Red Record) and Lillian Smith, which do not come from the same class perspective, and which deploy race and gender to telling effect. Holt, 'Ida B. Wells-Barnett', in Franklin and Meier, Black Leaders in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). In this vein, Lillian Smith wrote, 'I use the word we on many pages of this book: yet, never in this movement backward or forward has there been any unity in the South. There have always been thousands of dissenters whose voices are muffled, whose acts are ignored.' Killers of the Dream (NY: Norton, 1961), p. 223. Absence of gender analysis on studies of slavery and emancipation. Faith L. Smith, 'Coming Home to the Real Thing,' pp. 895-923; Brereton, Shepherd, and Bailey, eds., Engendering History. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward. Take Jacksonian Democracy, for example. Many historians have argued, from the Whiggish standpoint, that this was the beginning of a democratic impulse that could be spread to African Americans and women: see e.g. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945); Robert V. Remini, The Jacksonian Era (Arlington Heights: H. Davidson, 1989) and Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power in the Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Noonday Press, 1990). Once class is no longer examined in isolation, however, it becomes clear that the formulation of 'democracy' was so dependent upon the subordination of black people and women, not to mention the American Indians with whom Jackson went to war, that any reforms that might arise out of the Jacksonian impulse would be at best mixed blessings, and at worst downright oppressive. See Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-century America (London: Verso, 1990); Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. All this is linked to points that I made about Populism in Apropos Exceptionalism'. Replacing slaves with Indian indentured laborers in some British Caribbean colonies was justified by the suggestion that denying the right of an Indian to improve 'his' lot by indenturing himself in the West Indies would be in some way limiting his freedom to sell his labor. Through such a rationalization, itself an outgrowth of anti-slavery discourse of free labor, a hierarchical and unfree labor system was maintained. Kale, 'Capital Spectacles in British Frames: Capital, Empire and Indian Indentured Migration to the British Caribbean', in International Review of Social History, 41 (1996), pp. 109-33. Historians of the New Deal have paid insufficient attention to the sex discrimination embodied in the reforms of the period. They have been attuned to discrimination on the basis of race, however. Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order; Anthony Badger, The New Deal; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest; Gerald Nash, The Great
Notes
50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.
61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.
72. 73. 74.
203
Depression and World War II. Along these lines, the GI Bill amounts to a form of white ethnic subsidy, enabling the children of immigrants to make their 'white flight' to the 'crabgrass frontier'. This is forgotten when the time comes to explain how it is that today's inner-city poor have failed to make this escape from the ghetto. This is a feature of his work William Morris also, which could not fail but discuss the impact of imperialism on working class radicalism in the 1880s, but which keeps the empire at a distance. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Democratic Promise. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Philippa Levine, 'Consistent Contradictions', pp. 17-35. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 36. William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin, 1977). A Labour-voting undergraduate (with Scottish Nationalist sympathies) and a socialist-inclined labor history graduate student, I did not attribute much significance to empire at this time. 'The Peculiarities of the English', p. 277. Ibid. p. 285. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, p. 43. Spivak writes ironically of the Subaltern Studies Collective: 'The group is scrupulous in its consideration towards women. They record moments when men and women are joined in struggle, when their conditions of work or education suffer from gender or class discrimination' (p. 215); these words can be applied less easily to The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson, Making, p. 417. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 15. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919 (New York: Pantheon, 1976) pp. 3-87. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, pp. 39-46. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, p. 43. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, pp. 212-92. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Ibid. p. 296. Ibid. p. 298. Du Bois, in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (NY: Schocken Books, 1967), makes some of the same comparisons in his conclusion with significant effect. Ibid., p. 303. Gutman clearly wanted to avoid falling into the trap of treating slaves as 'white men with black skins,' which had tainted Stampp's analysis in The Peculiar Institution. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. This point was made clear to me a long time ago by Miriam King. 'We make no judgment about the relative merit of different family
204
75.
76. 11. 78. 79. 80.
81. 82. 83.
Notes systems, female-headed or otherwise. Our point is a different one that any type of family undergoing rapid change is likely to be at least temporarily less effective as an agency of social control.' Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 225. For Gutman's discussion of family see Work, Culture and Society: 'Tough familial and kin ties made possible the transmission and adaptation of European working-class cultural patterns to industrializing America', p. 43. In light of the foregoing discussion, see E. P. Thompson's essays, 'Happy Families', New Society, 8 (Sept. 1977), and 'The Sale of Wives', in Customs in Common, pp. 404-66. In the latter essay, Thompson endeavors to revalue the sale of wives in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury rural England. These transactions should not be seen merely as reflections of the despicable and sexually repressive behavior of members of the lower classes. Rather, when they did occur, they constituted part of the 'moral economy' of the community. Such analysis may not seem too disquieting when applied to rural English folk, but if utilized to describe other communities from inner-city Chicago to the Deccan hills above Mumbai, it seems more so. Social historians' attempts to 'rescue' subjects from the condescension of utilitarian social reformers and Whiggish historians founder in romanticism when they assume that they can speak for the people who perform these acts. Is the woman sold from one husband to another really able to 'speak' her mind about this particular event? And is the attempt to revalue the transaction analogous to an overly romanticized picture of conditions of slavery that ignores the oppression by the master of the slave? Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land. Lemann writes: 'It is clear that whatever the cause of its differentness, black sharecropper society on the eve of the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker was the equivalent of big-city ghetto society today in many ways. It was the national center of illegitimate childbearing and of the female-headed family' (p. 31). For a response to this, see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (NY: Pantheon, 1989) p. 203. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1967); Nathan Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot. Quoted in Palmer, E.P. Thompson, p. 24. Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 440-2; Palmer, E.P. Thompson, and The Making of E.P. Thompson; Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers, pp. 6-7. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Sean Wilentz, Against Exceptionalism'. Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 18, 427-8; Christine Stansell, City of Women. Quoted in Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, p. 11. Ibid. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 12, notes the transportation of trade unionists the year after the emancipation of slaves. His work
Notes
84. 85.
86. 87. 88. 89.
90.
91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.
205
provides a clear understanding of the imperial connections that went in the making of English and American working classes. Kale, 'Projecting Identities'. Young, Colonial Hybridities, p. 119; Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Ain't No Black in the Union Jack; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others, Said, Imperialism and Culture. For discussions of blacks in Britain, see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain; Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Rozine Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain, 1700-1947 (London: Pluto, 1986). Antoinette Burton, 'Who Needs the Nation?' Robin D. G. Kelley, 'The Proletariat Goes to College', in Social Text, 49 (Winter 1996), pp. 37-42. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 [1905]), pp. 218-19. 'This is the greatest gift of deconstruction: to question the authority of the investigating subject without paralysing him, persistently transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility'; Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography', in In Other Worlds (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 201. For another view of the historian's relationship to the academy, see Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York: NYU Press, 1977), and a compelling review of the same, by H. Aram Veeser, 'The Barricades of Academe', in The Nation (June 23, 1997), pp. 32-4. Cooper, 'Work, Class and Empire: an African Historian's Retrospective on E.P. Thompson', Social History, 20 (2, May 1995), pp. 235-41. This brings to mind Steve Biko's comment about white liberals in South Africa attempting to establish themselves as 'gobetweens in the struggle for emancipation'; cited in Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, p. 84. John Dewey in Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change, pp. 37-49. See Homi Bhabha, 'Sly Civility', in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 93-101. Robin D. G. Kelley, '"We Are Not What We Seem": Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South', The Journal of American History (June 1993), pp. 75-112. If one were permitted to quote Nietszche, one might be tempted to interject, 'only that which has no history is definable'; quoted in Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 198. E. P. Thompson, "Alien Homage', p. 101. Cooper and Stoler, 'Between Metropole and Periphery', p. 35. In 'Conflict and Connection', Cooper writes, 'as we look ever more deeply into the contested spaces of colonial politics, we would do well to look beyond the notion of subalternity - and conceptions of colonialism that assume its ability to coerce, coopt, and categorize into its own structure of power and ideology - in order to pry apart further the ways in which power was constituted and contested.... [I]f "subalterns" are to be seen
206
97. 98. 99.
Notes as vital parts of history, the possibility, at least, that the very meanings of domination and subalternity could be undermined should be kept open'; pp. 1544-5. In his frustration at postcolonial critics, Cooper ends up misconceiving what they are doing, evidenced also on pp. 1525, 1528, 1530 ('This is the kind of history that Subaltern Studies scholars want to have told'?), 1531 (his discussion of dominance without hegemony), and 1533 (what is 'pessimistic' about postcolonialism, unless one is committed to the imperial project?). This frustration perhaps derives from the fact that 'Guha and his colleagues' haven't been playing by the rules. They refuse to come out and conform to bourgeois historiography and be pacified. Can they not see its benefits? - which lie in the satisfaction we will feel as we rescue 'subalterns' (who by definition cannot be rescued), transcribe their speech, and, from the academy's strategic hamlets, 'pry apart power structures'. Sheehan's The Bright and Shining Lie seems to resonate here. Here I paraphrase Antoinette Burton's comment on the naturalization and familiarization of empire: personal correspondence. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations (Glasgow: Fontana, 1979), p. 259. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 21.
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Index Abhi Nava Bharat Secret Society (ANB) 52-3 Abyssinian Baptist Church 31 Achebe, Chinua 94 Adams, Douglas 96, 122 African Americans 10-11, 17-18, 28, 31, 33, 89-91, 141-4, 150-3 African Methodist Episcopal Church (A. M. E.) 10-11, 33-8 African National Congress (ANC) 2, 29, 30-1 Afrikaaners 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 21-5, 29, 120 Ali, Muhammed 174n 'Alien Homage': Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Thompson) 41,43-4 All About H. Hatterr (Desani) 1, 41 Allen, Richard 36 American Slavery, American Freedom (Morgan) 4 Anderson, Perry 46 Andrews, C. F. 45 Anglo-American Corporation 13 Angola 31 anti-semitism 19, 146 apartheid 1-3, 9, 27-8, 29, 31-2, 41, 120-1, 159-60n, 161-2n Appadurai, Arjun 114, 121-2 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 11,28, 88-95 Arendt, Hannah 115 Ashe, Arthur 29 Asia, South 132-6 see also specific countries Attenborough, Richard 31-2 Australia 11-12, 21, 22, 98, 100, 114, 118, 123, 146, 167n Babe Ruth 112 Barrett, Syd 81, 84-6 baseball 100-3, 112, 186-9n, 195-6n
Bayly, C. A. 7 Belgium 7 Bell Curve, The (California Proposition 187) 4 Bengal 41-6,73 Bennett, William 88 Bentinck, William 73-4 Beyond A Boundary (James) 29, 97-8,103-13, 119 Beyond The Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan) 153 Biko, Steve 32 Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Gilroy) 69 Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, The (Gutman) 150-2 Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in The United States and South Africa (Frederickson) 28-32 Blyden, Edward Wilmot 11 Bowery Boys 13-15, 169n Breytenbach, Breyten 1-2 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh) 82 Brinkley, Alan 4 Britain and India 39-57, 64-5 prostitution 13-17 British Empire 97, 100, 102, 103, 110-11, 116 E. P. and Edward Thompson and 40-80, 135-53 British South Africa Company 167n Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (Colley) 64,68 Brutus, Dennis 29 Bryan, William Jennings 24 Buddha of Surburbia, The (Kureishi) 81 Bumbireh Africans 1, 23 Burnham, Frederick Russell 167n
225
226 Busia, Abena 121 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu Gatsha
Index 2
Caesar's Column (Donnelly) 20 Calvinism 68 Campanis, Al 30 Campbell, James 30, 33-8 Canada 20, 60 capitalists 11-12, 17-18, 22-3, 63, 145 Caribbean 17, 20, 21, 79, 106, 108, 145,167n Cashman, Richard 101 Castro, Fidel xiii, 30-1 Cell, John W. 9-10 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 70-2, 139, 153 Chants Democratic: New York City and The Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (Wilentz) 153-4 Chatterjee, Partha 44, 46 Chilembwe, John 10, 164n China 49, 133, 145 Chinese Exclusion Act (1881) 12 Chirol, Sir Valentine 51 CIA 133 City of Women (Stansell) 154 class 141-53 American studies of 5-7, 153-5 cricket and 103-10 see also Making of the English Working Class, The Clemens, Samuel 102 Cliff, Michelle 124 Clinton, President Bill 4, 30-1 Clinton, Bishop George E. 33 Cobbett, William 61, 68, 149 Cold War 27,148,157 Columbus, Christopher 125-6 comedy x Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (Kneeland) 14 Constantine, Learie 105, 108, 122 Coppin, Bishop Levi J. 10, 11, 36-7 Cornwallis, Charles 67, 122 Cotton, Sir Henry 53 Coughlin, Father 173n
cricket 29, 46, 75, 79, 96, 153, 186-97n development of 111-17 Indian 29, 67, 100, 106, 114-23 Protestant ethic and 97-103 racialism and class privilege 103-10 Crummell, Alexander 11, 89, 90, 92 Cuba 10, 20, 30-1 Davis, David Brion 154 de Kiewiet, C. W. 12 de Klerk, F. W. 29 de Mello, Anthony 117 Debs, Eugene Victor 140 Denmark 7 Disraeli, Benjamin 147 Doctorow, E. L. 127 D'Oliveira, Basil 29 Donnelly, Ignatius 19-20 Du Bois, W. E. B. 11, 16, 80, 89, 90, 92, 96, 133, 141 Dunne, Finley Peter 79 Dury, Ian xiii, 85, 183n Dutch Reform Church 25 Dwane, Bishop James 36 East India Company 60, 61 Egypt 147 Elkins, Stanley 151-2 Emecheta, Buchi 94-5 Engels, Friedrich 142 England 3, 4, 13, 24, 39 Ethiopian Church 33-8 Fiji 21, 167n Finnegan, William 2-3 Forster, E. M. 66,119,121 France 7, 24, 53, 60, 128, 130 Gandhi, Indira 121 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 30-1, 45, 78, 79 Gardiner, A. G. 113-14 Gender and The Politics of History (Scott) 148-9 Genesis 85 Genovese, Eugene 151-2
Index Germany 7, 24, 53, 79, 124, 128 Ghana 88-9 Giliomee, Hermann 2-3 Gilliam, Terry x-xi Gilmour, Dave 84, 86 Gilroy, Paul 11,30,69 Gingrich, Newt 4 Gladstone, William 155 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 17, 74 Goodwyn, L. 18, 19 Gorbachev, Mikhail 41 Grace, W. G. 97, 111-13, 117, 122, 187n,194n Grant, President Ulysses S. 20 Great Trek 20-5 Greenberger, Allen J. 42 Gregg, Bishop John 11 Grenada 133 Guha, Ranajit 78-9, 139 Gutman, Herbert 71, 150-2, 153 Guyana 106, 191n, 192n Haiti 10, 124-6, 128, 130 Hargreaves, Edward Hammond 11 Harlem 27,31 Heard, Bishop William Henry 11 Hegel, Georg 90, 141 Helms-Burton Act 30 Hendrix, Jimi 86 Highland Clearances 49 history, Asian 132-6 History of South Africa to 1870, A (Thompson) 21 Hobsbawm, Eric 62, 125 Hobson, J. A. 156 Hofstadter, Richard 101 Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood (Nixon) 9, 27-32, 33, 120-1 Illusion of Permanence, The (Hutchins) 115-16 In My Father's House: Africa in The Philosophy of Culture (Appiah) 88-95 Independent African: John Chilembwe and The Origins, Setting and Significance of The Nyasaland Native Rising of 1815 (Shepperson and Price) 10
227
India Britain and 39-57, 64-5 cricket 29, 67, 100, 106, 114-23 Edward Thompson and 39-40, 41-2, 133, 135, 136-8, 150, 175n history 134-41 Mutiny 48-57, 65, 147, 178-9n Indian Mutiny 48-57,65,147,178-9n Indians 39, 63, 72, 145 Inkatha Movement 2 Innes, Duncan 12 International Court of Justice 53 Ireland 48, 49, 58, 60, 79 Irish 7, 30, 58, 62-4, 72, 126, 137, 145, 151, 152, 153-4 Iron Curtain 3 Italy 24,79 Jackson, Fanny 37 Jamaica 60, 178n James, C. L. R. 39, 88, 89, 96-123, 130, 141, 153 James, Henry 102 Japan 7 Jardine, Douglas 122, 123 Jews 7, 18, 19, 146, 147 Jim Crow 31, 143, 161-2n Jordan, Winthrop 69 Joys of Motherhood, The (Emecheta) 94-5 Jubilee Book of Cricket (Ranjitsinhji) 113,116-17, 187n Jungle, The (Sinclair) 152 Kafka, Franz ix-x Kalicharan, Alvin 106 Kanhai, Rohan 106, 110, 191n Kelley, Robin D. G. 30, 156 Khan, Azimullah 56 King, Martin Luther Jr. 30 King, Rodney 4 Kipling, Rudyard 101-2, 135 Kleist, Heinrich von 127-31 Kolko, Gabriel 145 Kreslo, Fanny 15 Krishnavarma, Shyamji 52 Kruger, Stephanus Johannes Paulus 15
228 Ku Klux Klan
Index 25
Lai, Vinay 49 Lamar, Howard 20-1 Lamumba, Patrice 133 Laurie, Bruce 153 Lemann, Nicholas 152 Lennon,John 84-5 Levine, Philippa 16 Liberia 10, 11 Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe, The (Edward Thompson) 57-61, 66, 111 Livingstone, David 9 Lomellini, Caesar 20 Long, Huey 173n Looking Backward (Bellamy) 102, 143 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 42, 60, 65, 74 Mahalanobis, Prasant 45 Making of The English Working Class, The (E. P. Thompson) 60-80, 107, 134-54 Making of The Indian Princes, The (Edward Thompson) 47, 61-80, 180-1 n Malcolm, Sir John 59-60, 62 Mandela, President Nelson 27, 31 Marx, Karl and Marxism 39, 47, 62, 71-2, 76-7, 78, 80, 90, 96, 98, 102, 110, 141, 142, 150, 160n Mary Poppins (Disney) 84 Mason, Nick 86 Matabeleland 167n Maugham, Somerset 84 Mayhew, Henry 67, 140, 144-7 MCC 67, 104, 194n McCarthy, Joseph 186n McClintock, Anne 17, 21-2 McKinley, President William 20, 25 Mesopotamia 48 Metcalfe, Charles Thaeophilus 47, 57-61,62,66,67, 111, 122, 179-80n Methodism 33-8, 63, 68, 89, 108, 180n
Middle East 3 Midnight's Children (Rushdie) xii Mill, James 42, 65 mines and miners 11-13,24,29, 167n missionaries 9-10, 33-4, 42 Moor's Last Sigh, The (Rushdie) xi-xiii, 117-23 Morley, John 52-3 Morris, William 146-8 Morrison, Toni 124 Muller, Max 73 My Dinner With Andre (Shawn and Gregory) 132, 133, 136-41 Napoleonic Wars 60, 125 National Party (South Africa) 1-3 Nehru, Jawaharlal 31, 39-40, 42, 45, 46, 65, 66, 78, 79, 96, 175n Netherlands 7,53 New Zealand 21, 22, 146 News From Nowhere (Morris) 147-8 Nigeria 94-5 No Exit (Sartre) 156 Northern Ireland 3 Notes on Dialectics (James) 141 Novick, Peter 153 Nyasaland 10, 164n Omaha Platform (Donnelly) 19-20 opium trade 60 Orange Free State 20-1 Other Side of The Medal, The (Edward Thompson) 25, 47-8, 50, 51, 54-5 Padmore, George 96, 130 Painter, Nell Irvin 154 Pakistan 79
Palmer, Bryan D. 47, 141, 149, 153 Pan, Lynn 17 Pan-Africanism 11, 89, 91-4 Parry, Benita 42-3 Passage To India (Forster) 119, 121 Persia 147 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois) 37
Index Philippines 20 Phillips, Caryl 120, 196n Pink Floyd 81-2, 84-5, 86-7, 183n Pippin, Horace 124 Plaatje, Sol 10 Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (E. P. Thompson) 75, 138 Prakash, Gyan 134 prostitution 13-17, 22, 168-71n Protestantism and cricket 97-103 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 19 Puritanism 98, 103-4, 107-9, 118, 120 Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (Edward Thompson) 41-7, 137 Ragtime (Doctorow) 127-8 Ralegh, Sir Walter 47, 57-61 Ramabai, Pandita 74 Ramadhin, Sonny 106, 191n Ramsamy, Sam 29 Ranjitsinhji, Kumar Shri, Maharajah Jam Saheb 67, 100, 113-17, 122, 187n, 194n Ransom, Reverdy C. 37 Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, The (Thompson and Garratt) 48-50,55-6 Robinson, Jackie 120, 174n Roediger, David 28, 150, 153-5 Rolling Stones 81 Romania 79 Roosevelt, Theodore 101, 102, 195n Ross, Alan 117 Roy, M. N. 96 Roy, Rammohan 73-4 Rushdie, Salman ix-xiii, 31, 95, 109, 117-23, 158, 183n Russia 7, 147 Said, Edward 8 Saint Dominique 60,128,129,164n Sardesai, Rai Saheb 66 Saunders, Christopher 21 Savarkar, Vinayat Damodar 40, 50-7, 177-8n
229
Scandinavia 24 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. 159n Scots 7, 64, 68, 72, 152 Scott, Joan 67, 73, 107, 134, 140, 148-9 Scramble For Africa, The (Pakenham) 1 Seal, Brajendranath 45, 66 Seton, Archibald 59 Sex Pistols 85, 183n Shepard, Ernest H. 82 Silencing The Past, Power and The Production of History (Trouillot) 124-6 Silver, Joe 13-14 Simon, Paul 124 Singh, Ranjit 59, 61 Sinha, Mrinalini 107 Sir Walter Ralegh: Last of The Elizabethans (Edward Thompson) 57-61,63 slavery 4, 5, 6, 8, 28, 31, 34, 49, 63, 70-1, 89, 102, 107, 124-6, 143, 145,150-1, 154-5, 178-9n Small Faces 85 Smith, Faith L. 108-9 Smuts, Jan Christian 3 Snyder, Jimmy 'The Greek' 30 social history 79-80, 132-49 Solomon, Joe 106 Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in The United States and South Africa (Campbell) 33-8 Souls of Black Folk,The (Du Bois) 90 South Africa African National Congress (ANC) 2, 29, 30-1 Afrikaaners 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 21-5, 29, 120 apartheid 1-3, 9, 27-8, 29, 31-2, 41, 120-1, 159-60n, 161-2n Bantustans 192n Bowery Boys 13-15, 169n 'coloureds' 2-3, 120-1 contact with African Americans 10-11, 17-18 democratic elections 9
230
Index
South Africa - continued Dutch Reform Church 25 Ethiopian Church 33-8 historiographical changes 2-5 Inkatha Movement 2 Methodism 33-8 mines 11-13, 24, 29, 167n missionaries 9-10 National Party 1-3 Native Affairs Commission 36 Native National Congress 34 prostitution 13-17,22 sport 27, 29-30, 120-1, 174n Voortrekkers 9,20-5 South African Mines and Works Act (1911) 12 South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) 29, 121 Soviet Union 41 Spain 7,40 Spalding, Albert G. 102 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 75, 134, 156 sport in South Africa 27, 29-30, 120-1, 174n in USA 29-30, 100-3, 112, 120, 174n,186-9n, 195-6n see also cricket St. Hill, W. 105 Stanley, Henry Morton 1, 9, 23, 26 Steedman, Carolyn 75 Subaltern Studies Collective 134-6, 139, 200n, 203n suffragists 30 Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into The Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (Edward Thompson) 73-4 Tagore, Rabindranath 41-7, 115, 137 Tensions of Empire (Cooper and Stoler) 109 Thackeray, William Makepeace 98, 107, 144, Thatcher, Margaret 46 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 94
Thompson, E. P. and Tagore 41-7, 137 impact in USA 153-5 see also works by this author Thompson, Edward John and Tagore 41-7, 137 on India 39-40, 41-2, 47, 133, 135, 136-8, 150, 175n see also works by this author Thompson, Leonard 20 To Toussaint L'ouverture (Wordsworth) 127 Toure, Ali Farka 88 Towards The Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (Roediger) 150 Transkei 34 Transvaal 20-1,24 Trinidad 29, 97, 100, 104-7, 109, 130, 191n, 192n, 193n Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 124-6 Turner, Frederick Jackson 18, 19 Turner, Bishop Henry McNeil 10 Turner, James 24 Turner, Nat 178n Uganda 20,79 United Nations 31 United States of America African Americans 10-11, 17-18, 28, 31, 33, 89-91, 141-4, 150-3 African Methodist Episcopal Church (A. M. E.) 10-11, 33-8 civil rights 3-4, 128 Civil War 2, 101, 154 class 4-7, 153-5 drugs 4 E. P. Thompson's impact on 153-5 health care 4 historiographical changes 4-5 illegal immigration 4, 157-8 Indians 6, 18-25, 58, 172n, 179n Italians 126 Jim Crow 31, 143, 161-2n miners 11-13,24
Index missionaries 9-10 Mormons 21 pluralism 3,6-7 Populists 9, 18-25, 172-3n prostitution 13-17 slavery 4, 5, 6, 8, 28, 31, 34, 49, 89, 102, 125, 143, 145, 150-1, 154-5, 178-9n sport 29-30, 100-3, 112, 120, 174n,186-9n,195-6n westward expansion 18-26 Unknown Mayhew, The (Yeo and E. P. Thompson) 140, 144-5 van Onselen, Charles 11, 13, 14-15 Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 98 Vann Woodward, C. 143 Veblen Thorstein 101, 157 Vidal, Gore 159n Vietnam War 132 Voortrekkers 9,20-5 Wages of Whiteness: Race and The Making of The American Working Class (Roediger) 154 War of Independence of 1857 (Savarkar) 50-1, 52-3, 56 Washington, Booker T. 30, 127 Waters, Roger 84, 86 Way In The World, A (Naipaul) 130-1 Weber, Max 97, 102 Wellington, Duke of 60, 61, 76 Welsh 7,68 Welstein, Gabriel 20 West Indies 98-9, 101, 103, 110, 117 Western Cape 2 Wheatley, Phillis 89 Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of
231
The Black Act (E. P. Thompson) 71,77-8 White, Luise 15 White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Frederickson) 28 Wickets in The East: An Anecdotal History (Guha) 61 Wilan, Brian 10 Wilentz, Sean 153-4 William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary (E. P. Thompson) 146-7 Wilson, Woodrow 102 Wind in The Willows, The (Grahame) 82-4,86 Witness Against The Beast: William Blake and The Moral Law (Edward Thompson) 62,111 Witwatersrand 11-14, 29, 167n women 4, 34, 67, 69, 72-5, 102, 107, 108-9, 143-6, 149, 154, 192-3n Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919 (Gutman) 150 Worrell, Frank 98-9, 109-10, 111 Wright, Rick 86 Wright, Bishop Robert R. Jr. 11, 37 Writing By Candlelight (E. P. Thompson) 75, 147 Wyllie, Sir William Curzon 50, 52-3 Yeats, William Butler Zagoiby, Moraes
105
94
