Review of "Imperial Reckoning" by Caroline Elkins

Imperial Reckoning

            Caroline Elkins is a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya is a sober recounting of Britain’s attempt at imperialism in Kenya. Not just a British-version of colonialism in Kenya, what sets this book apart from accepted histories of colonialism in Kenya is Elkins’ attention to the Kikuyu version of Mau Mau.

Imperial Reckoning presents the Mau Mau rebellion from the point of view of the Kikuyu and explores the atrocities they faced during the uprising. The Mau Mau rebellion is normally presented as a brutal and savage perpetrated by the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu did commit their share of violent crimes on British colonials living in Kenya. This, coupled with their refusal to disavow Mau Mau oaths while under detainment have been used as evidence of Kikuyu savagery. However, Elkins asks readers to reconsider this assumption and examine evidence against the numerous atrocities committed by colonial forces.

            Elkins lays the foundation for the uprising by examining land in Kenya. For the Kikuyu, land was fundamental to being Kikuyu (14). Given the British’s imperial habits in other parts of the world, land was fundamental to empire. In Kenya, the British saw an African population for labor, and land that would meet their needs for imperialism (15). Elkins explains the social hierarchy that emerged in Kenya: landed British colonialists at the top, African tribal chiefs somewhere in the middle, and landless African laborers at the bottom. The Kikuyu had previously been a stateless society, governed by councils of elders and lineage heads (18). The Kikuyu had previously used the land to meet their needs without restriction. Elkins argues that the colonization of Kenya took place to exploit the country’s natural resources and labor (55). In time, the Kikuyu, under the influence of London-educated Kenyan native Jomo Kenyattta, would foment a rebellion known as Mau Mau.  

As the rebellion unfolded, the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, and colonial official Thomas Askwith devised methods of detainment and rehabilitation to quell Mau Mau. Elkins lists many administrative and governmental measures taken to punish the Kikuyu: repressive laws, taxation, imprisonment, legal floggings, and terror. For Baring’s part, his State of Emergency produced communal punishment, curfews, control of mass and individual movements of people, confiscation of land and property, censorship and banning of publications, disbanding of all African political organizations, control of labor, suspension of due process, and detention without trial.

Straying from the traditional argument that the Kikuyu were the brutal party, Elkins describes the manners in which Mau Mau suspects were subjected to upon intake and detention. During the initial screening process, suspects would be interrogated in order to elicit information and confess Mau Mau affiliations (63). There were two outcomes for the Kikuyu after this screening process. The first would be deportation to Kikuyu reserves, which was territory set aside especially for the Kikuyu people, but land that could not agriculturally sustain the enormous numbers of Kikuyu sent there. The second outcome of screening was deportation to a detention camp. These camps were used for the Kikuyu who refused to confess Mau Mau oaths or affiliations.

It is generally at this part of Imperial Reckoning where Elkins upholds her thesis and begins her assault on the “paternalism” of the British in Kenya. She begins to explain in severe detail the conditions in the Kikuyu reserves and detention camps. Kikuyu would be subjected to extreme humiliation upon arrival at detention camps. Strip searches, sanitation dips, and brutal beatings greeted the Kikuyu (134). In addition, the British supposed Africans had lower health and sanitation standards, permitting disease to run rampant (143). Several compounds held the designation as the place where “hard core” Kikuyu would be sent. There, Kikuyu were met with intense pain and degradation as the foundation of camp life (156). The vituperation experienced by detainees is incredibly unimaginable.

            I think Elkins provides an interesting and normally silent account of life in the detention camps of Kenya. Despite the terror of camp life, the detainees created their own social world and rules to survive their detention. Survival and resistance strategies abounded. For instance, in order to speak without subjecting themselves to beatings, some Kikuyu would feign mental illness and pretend to speak to the wall or yell incoherently. It was only the Kikuyu who could understand, thus undermining the constant control they were normally subjected to while in the cruelty camps.

            Elkins examines the rehabilitation methods as put forth by Askwith. Under Askwith’s rehabilitation plan, detainees would be offered domestic and agricultural classes, education, and other skills that would ease assimilation into British society. After intense research, Elkins was able to find little if any evidence of rehabilitation taking place in detention camps. When British officials were questioned about the rehabilitation process, they would either lie or completely fabricate rehabilitation measures. I think that it is in the realm of rehabilitation measures that the British erringly regard their imperialist actions as to the benefit of Kikuyu society. However, from the Kikuyu point of view rehabilitation was non-existent.

            As detention camps came to represent unimaginable repression and brutality for the Kikuyu, Governor Baring instituted a new policy of villagization. The goal of villagization was to contain, control, and discipline Mau Mau women (240). British colonialists considered Kikuyu women the foundation of Africa. Women faced forced communal labor, public terror, torture, and malnutrition. Many women also had the responsibility of caring for and providing for children. Elkins describes villagization as detention camps in all but name. These villages were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Villagization served to disrupt the supply line between women and the remaining forest fighters, thus helping to root out Mau Mau (250).

            The most brutal detention camps were reserved for hard-core male Mau Mau suspects. These men experienced a form of violent and systematic brutality officially sanctioned by Governor Baring (328). Under the tutelage of district officer Terrance Gavaghan, Kikuyu men were under a perpetual atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that intended to break them of their Mau Mau support (244). Gavaghan’s compound, Mwea, was the site of indescribable sexual and physical abuse, public torture, and violence. After reading Imperial Reckoning, it is hard to imagine any other perspective of Mau Mau that could be believably brought forth other than inhumane violence. Elkins convincingly argues and provides evidence that British colonial leaders repeatedly “obfuscated the facts, skirted the issues, and lied” about the procedures taking place in detention camps (332). 

            Interestingly, Elkins points to Jomo Kenyatta as being implicitly complicit in the cover up of British brutality in Kenya. Kenyatta refused to speak of the past horrors that Mau Mau suspects survived. Elkins argues that Kenyatta sacrificed the past Kenya for the future Kenya. Mau Mau men, women, and children have never been memorialized. No African loyalist or British official was prosecuted (360).

            Part of what makes Imperial Reckoning so clarifying for history, is Elkins’ use of sources to formulate and construct her narrative. Not satisfied with the limited British sources, Elkins conducted oral testimonies of not just Kikuyu who lived through the Mau Mau rebellion, but also the interviews of British officials complicit in the adherence to colonial policy in response to the uprising (374). Elkins admittedly struggled with the believability of the Mau Mau suspects’ harrowing ordeals in camps and on the reserves. However, she was struck with the consistency of oral testimonies over time and space. Elkins was also able to corroborate the oral data with what little did survive in the written record after the British denial and cover-up.  

            British imperialism operated under a cloak of protective civilization. I think this book, better than any other this semester, demonstrates how the British continually justified imperialism by holding on to paternalism. The British believed they had a duty and moral obligation to redeem the heathens of the world (5). Elkins found little evidence of the British in Kenya as paternalistic reformers. Imperial Reckoning serves as evidence of the British’s brutality. The author’s investigative skills are impressive. Despite the British’s attempts to cover-up notorious atrocities, Elkins presents a view from the Kikuyu side. In the end, the British won the long, hard war against Mau Mau, but lost the war for Kenya (353).

Spies in Arabia - Review

Spies in Arabia

Priya Satia, writes Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East to examine the establishment of the pre-war intelligence community in the Middle East and the eventual establishment of Britain’s covert empire following World War I. Of particular focus is the cultural characteristics of Edwardian intelligence agents and Britain’s use of air control in Arabia. Satia greatly contributes to the scholarship of British occupation in Arabia, and Spies in Arabia is a lively and interesting work.

            Satia begins by answering the question of why Arabia was important to the British. The region provided a land route to India where the British ruled indirectly as we read in Ideologies of the Raj by Thomas R. Metcalf (3). Arabia also provided a place for heroic action, which took the form of intelligence gathering. This beginning is important for our purposes because we can better understand why the British desired a presence in Arabia and how they overcame obstacles there. The British relied on intelligence agents for information from the interior of a land shrouded in mystique. Due to a weakened military force in South Africa, the rise of German power and imperial ambition, and political rumblings inside the Ottoman Empire, it became ever more important for the British to improve intelligence gathering methods in the Middle East (15).

            The cultural world of British agents proved the most interesting for me to read. Satia argues that upper-class British citizens with an eye towards literary careers found in Arabia a place to exploit their dreams (61). The agents sought a respite from political changes happening in Britain. In short, Arabia provided redemption from industrial, social, and political life in Edwardian Britain (72).  Satia argues that British agents’ fascination with Arabia shaped information gathering. “Interest in Arabia flooded Edwardian society just as that society had begun to steep itself in metaphysical enquiry” (96). In general, the British considered Arabia as a land of myth, mystique, and wreathed in an atmosphere of unreality (91). No other region had a biblical past quite like Arabia and Satia surmises that that past added a sense of otherness and mystical aura (84). Desert travel was travel back in time that required the agents to be healthy and not dependent on the trappings of everyday Edwardian society. Gertrude Bell believed that minimalism in the desert was ideal for spiritual and aesthetic redemption (92). Most agents argued for immersive travel through the Middle East to gather greater insight into the area. They were profoundly interested in the deepest secrets of creation while at the same time gathering information on politically- and militarily-useful information (97). It is understandable that the romantic years of the war and post-war offered opportunities for intelligence gatherers to fulfill dreams of adventure and storybook ardor (80). Arabia was the natural choice for adventure-seeking intelligence agents.

            In laying the groundwork for a covert empire, Satia explains the challenges the British intelligence agents had as they attempted to “Orientalize” themselves while collecting information. Despite adopting styles, habits, and mannerisms of Middle Eastern peoples, they experienced quite a bit of trouble in their endeavors. British agents characterized the Middle Eastern people as never telling the truth, estimating, or otherwise being coy. Natives were also known to mix fact with mysticism. For example, in a report submitted as intelligence by Mark Sykes, he relayed a mythical story as told by a sheikh in response to an inquiry about agricultural activities in the area. The sheikh went on to tell a story about two owls falling in love and the issues they encountered. Sykes made use of the story because it was generally believed by the agents that even the most outlandish recounting contained some truth or useful information (100). This is just one example of many that Satia uses to clarify for readers the difficulty agents faced. They were left to their own devices to translate what they had gathered into useful information. In addition, it is clear from Satia’s chapter about the cultural world of the agents that they used the intelligence gathered as an outlet to hone their literary skills.

            If the agents had trouble gathering information, Satia describes how perhaps the environment itself gave them more trouble. The British agents had never before encountered a region as filled with mysticism and history as they did in Arabia. Arabia was a land wreathed in an atmosphere of unreality. Not only did the British have trouble surveying the area, for a time they thought it an impossibility. Agents described the land as infinite, immeasurable, interminable, and featureless. How could the British map a country that was constantly blown into a new form every day? The Royal Geographical Society admitted that Arabia was almost wholly without survey in any scientific sense (105).  I think Satia’s treatment of how the British reacted to the land of imprecise borders, mirage, and myth is her greatest gift to Britain’s history in Arabia.

            Satia expertly weaves together the difficulties experienced by the agents in gathering useful information and the trouble the agents experienced with the environment. The author makes it seem like air control was a foregone conclusion in the attempts of colonialism by the British in Arabia. Surveillance practices and methods of coercion became dependent on air control; this turned Arabia into an arm of the British Empire but without outright British occupation.

Given the fact-finding issues with native Middle Easterners and the challenges of desert life and travel, I think Satia presents a convincing argument that the British were faced with more challenges in Arabia than either India, Africa, or China. T.E. Lawrence is credited with being the first to realize the need for aerial control over the region. Satia expertly sets up the need for aerial surveys. By utilizing aircraft, agents were able to extract truth from an essentially deceptive land (159). Air control allowed easier communication between tribes and agents. The Royal Air Force was able to aerially patrol Arabia from a network of bases and coordinate information from agents on the ground in order to bombard subversive or corrupt villages and tribes (240). Air control meant control without occupation and a secret, covert empire.

Agents on the ground in Iraq believed that country was especially suited to aerial surveillance. Given the nature of the environment in Iraq, there were many landing zones, little cover to insurgents, and the British were able to make use of far-flung bases allowed the British to radiate power throughout the country. The British justified air control by believing that air control was chivalrous warfare (242).

Overall what Satia is able to prove, is that although the British began with knowledge gathering in mind, their quest evolved into a struggle for power in Arabia. “The quest for knowledge became entangled with a quest for power” (137). To gather knowledge, the agents simply needed to immerse themselves in Middle Eastern culture and landscape (138). As the war ended and the use of air control increased, the quest for power manifest itself in the covert empire. Air control was used because the more overt colonial rule was a political impossibility (262). The only way the British could keep their hand in Middle Eastern matters was to rule aerially, and thus, covertly. Satia ties this to today’s events in the Middle East where it’s more economically and politically acceptable to control from the air (think: the bombs recently dropped in Syria) than “boots on the ground.”

Generally, I liked this thematically organized book. The reader’s initial impression may be of a haphazard and overwhelming organization, but as one reads the chapters Spies in Arabia becomes easier to comprehend. This book is not for the common reader, nor someone with no prior knowledge of British Imperialism in the Middle East. Satia gives few hints on what an Edwardian character was, nor does she clarify the cultural or political differences between a consul, intelligence gatherer, or agent.

I think there was one aspect missing from the work, and that is the tie between aerial control and wireless technology. One could not have been very useful to the British without the other. While Satia does write that ground agents did not become indispensible with the rise of air control, she never actually examines why.

Finally, the similarities between the problems encountered with mapping the area during the British colonial project in Arabia call to mind Google’s general problem in the same area. If you pull up Google Street View, “Arabia” is a blank map, especially when compared to other parts of the world. Although the reasons why are different, even today the region still maintains an aura of mystery. Today’s society has the benefit of high-technology satellites, drones, GPS, and imagery mapping, but “Arabia” is still shrouded in mystery on one of the Internet’s greatest travel tools.  

Review of: Ideologies of the Raj by Thomas R. Metcalf

As Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, Thomas R. Metcalf specializes in South Asian History. His 1995 work, Ideologies of the Raj, is included within the volumes of The New Cambridge History of India. Ideologies of the Raj seeks to investigate how the British aimed to justify their rule over India and its subjects. Metcalf’s volume is a useful summary (especially after reading the works of Bernard Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks) covering many aspects of British India. Metcalf focuses on two areas in his study of British rule in India: the similarities and differences in Britain and India as seen by the British.

            Metcalf argues that the British used ideologies to convince themselves of their right to govern India. The similarities and differences between the Britain’s self-perceptions and India’s characteristics as a nation, including India’s supposed despotism, the cultures of dress and gender, and India’s caste-based social hierarchy system versus the feudalism in which Britain was familiar, all gave Britain plenty of examples to use the growth of empire and their conviction of Britishness to rule India. The differences became the enduring legacy.

Cohn and Metcalf differed in the ways in which they clarify how the British ordered society. For Cohn, codifying knowledge was how the British were able to order and justify rule in India. Metcalf uses the dual strategy of similarities and differences. While I think there is truth to both author’s points, Cohn’s makes the most sense for me. The British would not be able to order society based on similarities or differences if they did not first understand that there were similarities and differences in the first place. The British had to first gain the knowledge before they could structure the results, the results being similarities and differences. In addition, Metcalf almost completely skirts the topic of language, but one could read Cohn’s work to gain a better understanding of how the British identified, regarded and codified Sanskrit and other native dialects of the Indian subcontinent.

When comparing Dirks and Metcalf, I think their arguments fall closer together than Metcalf and Cohn’s positions. Whereas Dirks argues that the transformation of Indians into victims by Burke laid the foundation for a civilizing mission as justification for empire, Metcalf answers that the justification of empire was difference between the societies of Britain and India. With Dirks’ focus on the Indian victim in the Hastings trial, he makes the Indians appear inferior and badly governed. Metcalf’s basic argument is that the British saw the Indians as inferior and different, and were thus available for governance.

One way Metcalf demonstrates the difference sought by the British over the Indians his the treatment of the climate in India. The British believed that the tropical climate of India produced natives who were ineffectual and submissive (8). Hot humid temperatures produced natives who would rather lounge about than engage in strenuous activity. “Heat and humidity were seen as conspiring to subvert manliness, resolve, and courage.” Even the Indian diet of rice contributed to the view of climate’s responsibility regarding effeminacy because rice required little effort to grow (105). However, the climatic explanation of difference expired the longer the British took up residence in India. The climate argument allows Metcalf to demonstrate how the British purported a difference, but the same argument also points out how the British changed differences to suit their justification of empire. Metcalf uses the example of climate to show how British men, who were considered powerful and masculine, contrasted to Indian men, who were viewed as diminutive, weak, and effeminate.

One of Metcalf’s strongest points is his indication of similarity between past Britain and present India. Practically the only time the British considered themselves similar was between the past and present. India’s villages and communal tenures reminded the English of a familiar form of their own feudalism (71). India’s “ancient institutions” gave the British a way to order society and make Indian society subservient to the needs of the Raj (81). Metcalf does argue, though, that Indian feudalism as a social order based on the ties of blood and kinship were fundamentally different from any form of feudalism observed in Europe (74). This shows that the British did not need much encouragement to find similarities.

English self-perceptions made it very difficult to accommodate similarities of gender in India. Ideologies of the Raj employs gender differences between English women and Indian women to explain how the British attempted to justify their rule in India. English women projected the appearance of purity and domesticity, while Indian women were viewed as prostitutes. Moral reformers in Britain fought for the rights of all Englishwomen, prostitutes included, but the same was not true in India. Metcalf argues that the only concern for females in India was to maintain the appearance of purity in the behavior of British women. In a great example of double standard, the British did encourage the prostitution of Indian women in order to downplay the possible appearance of homosexuality in British men (113). Metcalf uses this point to demonstrate how the British used a distinct difference to justify their rule in India.

Concerning men, Metcalf explains the comparison between the effeminacy of Indian men and the masculinity of British men. Bengali men’s baggy clothing was quickly viewed as similar to that of women’s dresses. Combined with the Indian devotion to female deities, the British had confirmation that India was a land ruled by women or womanly men (105). The British considered India a land of degraded women and effeminate men.

I think Metcalf’s strongest argument is his treatment of the Aryan racial theory. Using this theme, Metcalf succinctly shows how the British used similarities and differences when it served themselves best. The British saw what they wanted to see.

The Aryan racial theory involves the belief that British and Indian peoples originated from a common peoples in southern Russia. Language was not connected to race, but German scholars found perceived similarities between Sanskrit and most European languages. The Aryans were supposed to have spread out and conquered Europe and the Indian subcontinent (82). This view suited the British for a time, until several difficulties came up. On problem the British finally had to come to terms with was the issue of heredity: if the Indians and the British descended from the same people, how could the Indian be marked as inferior to the British? The British skirted this issue by claiming that those Aryans who traveled south to India intermingled with an aboriginal people living there, thereby losing their purity of race (83).

            Wholly missing from Ideologies of the Raj (and maybe from South Asian studies in general) is any discussion on how the Indians viewed themselves as similar or different to the English. I think the Indian viewpoint would contribute a great deal to illuminating the history of British imperialism in India. How did the Indians contribute to imperial ideology? Certainly the Indians could not have simply viewed the British as reformers of morality.

            If Metcalf’s purpose is to present the most important findings of the justification of British rule in India then he overwhelmingly succeeds. Metcalf presents the big picture ideas in India and it is much easier to read than the previous works, particularly The Scandal of Empire by Dirks. Exposing the similarities and differences as viewed by the English shows how the British set out to turn Indians into Englishmen. The British were able to completely transform Indian culture and society.

The Scandal of Empire

Nicholas B. Dirks, author of The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, is a prominent scholar of British India. He writes on the impact of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent. Dirks studied under Bernard Cohn, and in-line with Cohn, publishes works of history and anthropology. Dirks also published Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, which delves into the establishment and institutionalization of the caste system on the Indian subcontinent. In Castes of Mind, Dirks argues that the caste system is a product of the encounter between India and British colonial rule, and that the caste system effectively organized Indian society while creating a cultural identity.

The Scandal of Empire seeks to explain how well known scandals of the East India Company in the eighteenth century were either overlooked or incorporated within the larger and more compelling imperial narrative of a land that laid itself bare for the British to conquer. Dirks maintains that scandals are the foundation for the creation of British imperialism, and that scandals led to “modern understandings of corruption, sovereignty, public virtue, market economy, bureaucratic state, history, and tradition” (5). Based on these nine themes, Dirks organizes his book accordingly. The first three chapters chronologically build up to the Warren Hastings impeachment trial and Dirks arranges each of the other six chapters around a single thematic concept. While the opening chapters flow in a chronological manner, the remaining chapters bounce around and seem jumbled in their organization. I think The Scandal of Empire would have flowed better and read less repetitious if all chapters followed a chronological arrangement.  

The Scandal of Empire is informative about the origins of British corruption in India. Dirks argues that the right to private trade by East India Company officials is the “alleged scourge of Company integrity and managerial probity” (37). When Mughal authorities granted the right of trading privileges to the Company for private purposes, the Company servants accumulated great fortunes. The Company grew in domestic importance and influence in Parliament increased. This allowed Company servants in India to, essentially, “pay off” the Crown with the spoils of India.

As evidence of the profitability of corruption in British India Dirks turns to Robert Clive. The son of lower-level gentry in Britain, Clive went to India at age seventeen to augment his family’s social and financial position. He earned the distinction of valor on the battlefield at the Battle of Plassey and eventually rose to a position of high rank in the Mughal court. There Clive accepted land grants, secured plunder, captured military spoils, and accepted gifts. When detractors in England soffed at his growing fortune Clive argued on behalf of himself that it was acceptable to receive gifts voluntarily given for genuine purposes and posed no harm to the Company or England (44).

I think Dirks is correct to affirm that private trade in India by British officials marked the beginning of corruption for the British Empire. As long as the Crown received revenues, a blind-eye would, for a time, be turned from the enrichment of British officials in India. The rights of private trade and the implications of the Hastings scandal that would follow launched the British Empire into the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Without these scandals, it is possible to argue that the empire would not have emerged as so dominant a force (31).

Dirks focuses much attention to the build-up and eventual impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. Following Clive’s example, Hastings served as governor-general of Bengal and took in presents and gifts that amassed his great wealth. Hastings role in the judicial murder of an Indian maharaja, Nandakumar, would also be brought to light at trial. Edmund Burke, who had served on secret and select committees to investigate “the capricious abuse of British power and position” (89-90) of British India, spearheaded the impeachment trial. The ferocity of Burke’s pursuit of impeachment of Hastings is interesting, and Dirks hints at the reasoning behind the vehement pursuit. This aspect was most interesting for me and a slant that I believe Dirks could have explored further. Dirks mentions that Hastings was much less corrupt than either of his two predecessors, Clive and Paul Benfield, but Burke still pursued Hastings for over seven years. That Edmund Burke’s brother, William, had previously been injured in a duel with Hastings probably had a great deal to do with Burke’s impassioned quest to impeach Hastings.

The impeachment trial of Hastings did bring to light many instances of imperial abuse, but the trial failed to reform British activities in India. Dirks convincingly argues that the Raj that emerged after the Hastings trial was largely implementations of measures “of which Hastings had been the primary architect” (237). “The trial produced conditions not just for empire’s success, but also for its transformation into a patriotic enterprise” (125). Hastings’s reputation was ruined and he complained that the seven-year-long trial sent him into bankruptcy. Lord Cornwallis replaced Hastings as governor-general and it was Cornwallis who would be seen as the savior of India.

Dirks addresses an important topic regarding sovereignty in British India. Initially the Company was a mercantile company with an eastern monopoly guarantee by Parliament (13). Eventually, through the Company, India had become a rogue state and the precise nature of sovereignty was unclear. Dirks is able to explain the transition to a rogue state, and this is most interesting to me. The Company was engaged in almost constant warfare against the French and native Indians. The 1765 Bengali Diwani transferred the right of revenue to be collected directly from Bengali landowners, in what Dirks terms part of a massive bribe to Parliament to maintain the Company’s eastern monopoly (14). Company officials used bribery to propagate sovereign rights over conquered territories. 

The East India Company came to be in possession of India, economically, politically, and financially. The Company had several expanding characteristics that make clear the true sovereign status, including waging war, peacemaking, tax assessment, coin minting, and the administration of justice (168). Dirks is able to convince readers that the Company was a “fully functioning state that was sovereign and autonomous,” in essence, an independent entity (169). Dirks quotes Clive concisely summarizing the Company’s position in India, “We can never be less without ceasing to be at all” (174).     

Another interesting aspect of The Scandal of Empire is how Dirks ties together the British imperial project with modern-day American occupation in the Middle East. He compares the way the British sought to justify their own imperial project by saving Indians from their sins to the way in which “the United States has more recently represented its primary role in Afghanistan as the liberation of women from the oppression of the fundamentalist Taliban and the protection of all Afghanis from the ruthless warlords who controlled the highways and trading routes of the region” (310). If Dirks’s claim that empire is built with scandal, then the scandals in British India should serve the United States as a warning of the effects of empire.

In line with the title, The Scandal of Empire, I would have liked to read more about individual scandals faced on the Indian subcontinent. Dirks framed the book around the Hastings impeachment trial, but more comment could have been given to the “Black Hole” of Calcutta or the “Sepoy Mutiny.” The Hastings trial captivated Britain and created a spectacle, especially when speeches and descriptions centered on the most harrowing, most horrific, and most inhuman treatments were brought to light. The “Black Hole of Calcutta and the “Sepoy Mutiny” would have been perfect examples in which to examine the macabre. The veracity of the “Black Hole” of Calcutta event has been called into question, but I think Dirks could have spent more time calling to question the eyewitness account and verification of the supposed event.   

One significant way The Scandal of Empire to Cohn’s work, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge concerns codification of language. Cohn highlights the role of codification in imperial expansion and rule, and according to Dirks, would have found a comrade in Warren Hastings. Hastings “inaugurated the British colonial interest in codification” of the Indian legal system (232). At his impeachment trial, Hastings made special effort to draw attention to his record in India for his institution of new codes and procedures, and for civil and criminal justice in compliance with Indian constitutional traditions and norms.

Dirks successfully argues that scandals did not cause empire to be abandoned, but instead led to reform so that excesses would be attached nationally to Britain, instead of individually, as was the case with Hastings. He illuminates the scandal surrounding the Hastings impeachment trial and shows how the scandal proved to be the prerequisite for the British restructuring, acquiescence, and institutionalization of empire. In addition, Dirks expertly draws important comparisons to our modern world by noting the American occupation in the Middle East. For me, this historical warning was my biggest take-away. In conjunction with Cohn’s Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, The Scandal of Empire is essential reading for those interested in British India or imperialism. 

Ornamentalism by David Cannadine

            Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine attempts to satisfy the question: How did the British see their own empire from the mid-nineteenth century, through Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1896, and ending with Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953? Cannadine examines the beginnings of the Empire and all of her localities, and describes the several ways in which British aristocracy propelled the ornamented image of Britain throughout those places and back to England.

            As an English historian and writer, Cannadine also brings a personal aspect to Ornamentalism: Cannadine considers himself a “Coronation child” as he was a three-year-old English boy at the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation (183). Not only that, but Cannadine’s father served in the British Empire’s Royal Engineers between 1942 and 1945. The elder Cannadine’s imperial experience in India certainly left a profound influence on the author, who used his father’s recollections to piece together a boy’s superficial idea of empire (184). Despite his personal familiarity with the British Empire, Cannadine asserts that he “was not drenched in empire” (198).

            In contrast with authors such as Edward Said and Karl Marx, Cannadine strays from the usual scholarship that suggests the British Empire was arranged by racial superiority and inferiority. Unlike Said’s Orientalism, where it is argued that British imperialism exhibited a subtle and persistent prejudice against Arab and Islamic peoples, Cannadine argues that the British Empire was concerned with the familiar and domestic, but also the varied and the exotic. Imperialism consisted of understanding and reordering foreign dominions, colonies, and mandates into analogous and equivalent constructs (xix). Essentially, the British Empire was arranged hierarchically by social status and position. The concept of individual social ordering versus collective racial identity sets Cannadine as a historian far apart from his contemporaries.

Cannadine points out two models of social stratification that would manifest under British imperial expansion. The first model mentioned by Cannadine was the expansion of British social hierarchy as an anti-hierarchical social revolution. When the American colonies were initially settled, the English pattern of social hierarchy was evident. There were great country estates, mansions, an aristocratic-ruling class, all exhibited by a clear social stratification. Abolition in the nineteenth century only served to reinforce the hierarchical view of society. Slaves would be free, but they would remain at the lowest rung of American society. Eventually “anti-hierarchical impulses won out, and the country was launched on a non-British, non-imperial trajectory of republican constitutionalism and egalitarian social perceptions” (15).

The second model was a transoceanic replication and encouragement of Britain’s existing social hierarchy. In Britain, those of the highest social prestige undertook local government and aristocrats at the top of the social hierarchy wielded the power (11). Imperialism took this hierarchy to Britain’s vast colonies, dominions, and mandates. Using India as an example, Cannadine points out that the native regimes and hierarchies of India were considered backward, inefficient, and despotic by the British. Many elite Britons felt that these existing hierarchies could be cherished and preserved. The resulting replication and expansion of British ornamentalism of the Raj was undoubtedly one of the most ostentatious and grandiose realms on earth.

Analogous with India, Australia, Canada, and other dominions employed the British model of social hierarchy. British transplants in Canada continued the layered and established social structure and they exhibited an exaggerated regard for British traditions. Notions of rank and respectability were important there (29). In Australia, Cannadine explains how British transplants continued with traditions from the motherland, such as dueling, coats of arms, genealogy, and obsessions with pedigrees (28). In order for the these new settler dominions to successfully retain the English mark or hierarchy, an aristocratic thread needed to be present. Both Canada and Australia exhibited this thread by displaying fealty towards Britain eagerly desiring and accepting honors and hereditary distinctions. With their replicated social hierarchy and esteemed British traditions, settler dominions and colonies demonstrated the need for unprecedented British grandeur, pomp and circumstance, and projected an image of order and authority, thus legitimizing British rule (18).

            One way Cannadine supports an aspect of his thesis that Britain’s social hierarchy was divided by class and not race, is his treatment of the colonies in the British Empire, specifically Malaya, Fiji, and Africa. As part of Imperial policy, Britain would govern the colonies, not settle them. Using governors and colonial secretaries Malaysians accepted British residents and advisors using the Indian model of hierarchy. Similarly, indigenous Fijian chiefs and leaders were considered on the same social level as aristocratic Englishmen. When the Hon. Arthur Hamilton Gordon served as colonial governor of Fiji, he “codified chiefly authority and entrenched aristocracy as the established order through which the British would govern indirectly” (59). Gordon sought to preserve indigenous influences in support of British authority (61). In Africa, it was obvious that maintaining indigenous hierarchies and supporting the native rulers at the top of society would be the clearest way for the British Empire to govern the new lands. Cannadine maintains that even in Africa, instead of a social hierarchy based on race, the admiration of the dark-skinned Africans led to a recognition of indigenous genius instead of perpetual inferiority (67). As a result, African traditions were able to survive, and the British model of class hierarchy flourished.

            An important way that elite Britons viewed their society was through ornamentalism in the form of honors and titles. Using honorific inventiveness in the dominions, colonies, and mandates, the British Empire was able to promote and encourage traditional hierarchies. Rewards and honors were considered an essential component of the British social structure based on hierarchy (87). It was assumed that Indians cared a great deal about recognition in the form of awards and honors, and as such the British Empire created and bestowed thousands of titles on members of Indian aristocracy (89). This sense of Britishness, tied together through ornamentalism and an ordered imperial society, reinforced the elaborate system of honors and titles that began in metropolis England, extended to the periphery of the Empire, and back to the metropolis.

            In addition, the British Empire came to exude ornamentalism through elaborate ceremonies and occasions. These public ceremonies were opportunities for distant monarchs to pledge fealty and pay tribute to the British Empire (112). Combined with regular and routine observances, ornamentally ostentatious public ceremonies were “globally inclusive, elaborately graded, and intrinsically royal” affairs (105). They afforded a pervasive sense of royalty.

            However celebrated the British Empire was in distant lands, Cannadine offers that there was a difference between theory and practice. Never as fully socially hierarchical as the Britons who governed and collaborated in the Empire, the colonies, dominions and mandates were also a system of exploitation for those who were titled and rich. Some distant lands were never economically similar to Britain, which therefore produced a society less unequal and less layered. Critics of the British hierarchy tended to be on a different social level than those at the top: urban, middle-class, educated, colonists on the periphery of the Empire. There, on the periphery, hostility to hierarchy and empire bloomed (140). Dominion leaders may have coveted imperial titles and honors, but that did not translate into their nation’s dependence. Many leaders on the periphery of the British Empire recognized the need to move away from the traditional British connection. Titles and honors did not make aristocracies (141).

            By 1950 the position of British rule in the dominions had been fundamentally altered. Cannadine argues that because the British Empire had been created and envisaged based on hierarchical consistency and social subordination, it is no surprise that the Empire was finally undermined by the politics of nationalism and the ideas of equality (154). Ornamentalism faded into abandonment and desuetude. There were deliberate repudiations of royalty and empire. By Queen Elizabeth II’s Cornonation, three years after the birth of Cannadine, the monarch was no longer the empress of India or the Ruler of British dominions beyond the seas. Instead, she was bestowed with the title, “Head of Commonwealth” with no social preeminence or constitutional standing (158).

            I think Ornamentalism is especially important in the historiographical debate surrounding the creation, heyday, and decline of the British Empire because Cannadine is able to offer a contrasting theory on the structure of the Empire. His idea that the Empire was constructed on social hierarchy divided by caste instead of race is a bold declaration when compared to the accepted research that the Empire was separated by race. The ornamentalism exhibited in the Raj certainly provides abundant evidence that society was chiefly concerned with social adornments, aristocracies, and wealth. My only criticism of Cannadine is his proximity to the subject. However, given his astute use of journals, literature on the subject, and thorough research, this is quickly overcome. One is able to read Ornamentalism for what it is: a clear social history of the British Empire’s social hierarchy.

Unit 1 Discussion

What does Cannadine understand as “ornamentalism” and how does he apply this concept to the British empire?

Cannadine uses “ornamentalism” to describe how the British viewed their own empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, through Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1896, and ending with Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1952, Britain experienced overseas expansion and imperial domination through which imperial hierarchy expanded across the growing empire. I think the social construct of British hierarchy forms the basis of how Cannadine understands ornamentalism.

A layered social hierarchy allowed the British to bestow titles, awards, peerages, and honors on natives of conquered dominions and colonies and on British governors, viceroys, and wealthy citizens. Canada, for example, held an exaggerated regard for British traditions, had a layered and established social structure, and maintained notions of rank and respectability (29). For their part, the British saw an eagerness for hereditary distinctions and honors as vital to the new settler colonies and dominions. In India, the British took what they considered an established social order based on class, and preserved and promoted a similar hierarchy to their own (41). There, too, honors were a way to promote and encourage traditional hierarchy. That India was generally village living and princely-led fit right in with the established social hierarchy in Britain (45).

It was in India were ornamentalism took on an even more exotic meaning. In pomp and circumstance ceremonies in India far-exceeded British rituals. The image of India as glittering, ceremonial, layered and traditional was protected and projected by the British (51). Cannadine uses descriptions like ostentatiously ornamental, brilliantly displayed, splendor, and pretentious to describe India’s ordered and ornamental regime and ceremonies.

Sort of on a tangent, I would like to mention Britain’s continued ornamentalism in the form of modern rituals. The wedding of Kate Middleton to Prince William was broadcast around the globe, and I can hardly think of another ceremony more ornamented than their wedding. The pomp, pageantry, uniforms, etc. all carry forth Britain’s ornamentalism even though the British Empire as it once was is no longer in existence. Kate and William’s son, George, was born on the same day as my son (July 22, 2013). When they were born, I read where if you had a child born on the same day in England the royal couple sent silver pennies to your family. I wanted a penny so badly even though I live in Texas! 

History 5389.01 Great Britain and the British Empire

Discussion 1 response

Ornamentalism response paper

The Scandal of Empire response paper

Spies in Arabia response paper

Ideaologies of the Raj response paper

Imperial Reckoning response paper

List of Books Read for SHSU - Master of Arts in History

History 5097 - African-American Slavery - Spring 2014

The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870, by Hugh Thomas

The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, by Winthrop D. Jordan

From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans by John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

In Human Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, by David Brion Davis

12 Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs

The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, by William L. Andrews

History 5373 - Civil War and Reconstruction - Summer I 2014

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, by David W. Blight

James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, by Drew Gilpin Faust

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Fiery Trial, by Eric Foner

History 5384 - Texas History - Fall 2014

Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, by Susan E. Cayleff

The Raven, by Marquis James

Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Tomlinson Name - One White, One Black, by Chris Tomlinson

Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire, by Robert Perkinson

History 5372 - Early National America - Spring 2015

Forced Founders, by Woody Holton

Affairs of Honor, by Joanne Freeman

The Hemingses of Monticello, by Annette Gordon-Freeman

Parlor Politics, by Catherine Allgor

American Lion, by Jon Meacham

God's Strange Work, by David L. Rowe

Trail of Tears, by John Ehle

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, by Walter Johnson

History 5374 - Seminar in the History of the American South - Summer I 2015

The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash

The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Vann Woodward

American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund S. Morgan

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell

History 5384 - Early Modern Europe - Summer II 2015

Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), pp. 1-31
Paul Hazard, The European Mind [1680-1715] (orig. 1935), pp. xv-xx, 3-79.

History 5336 - Topics in History of Pre-Modern Europe Fall 2015

Mohammed and Charlemagne, by Henri Perinne

The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the history of European unity, by Christopher Dawson

Medieval Technology and Social Change, by Lynn White, Jr.

Plague and the End of Antiquity, edited by Lester K. Little

Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, by Patrick J. Geary

Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity, by Rosamond McKitterick

The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, by Chris Wickham

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, by Peter Brown

History 5097 - Urban and Suburban History - Spring 2016

Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, by Benjamin L. Carp

The Park & the People: A History of Central Park, by Roy Rosenzweig & Elizabeth Blackmar

Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco by Judy Yung

Crabgrass Frontier, by Kenneth Jackson

The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Surgrue

Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms, by Richard R. W. Brooks & Carol M. Rose

The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, by Scott Kurashige

Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community, by Monica Perales

History 5377 - The American West - Summer 2016

The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture by Neil Foley

Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol by Kelly Lytle Hernandez

The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space by William David Estrada

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown by Nayan Shah

History 5385: A Seminar on the History of Latin American Commodities - Fall 2016

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, by Marcy Norton

Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes, by Nicholas A. Robins

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, by John Soluri

Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, by Paul Gootenberg

Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of The Pill, by Gabriela Soto Laveaga

History 5389.01 Great Britain and the British Empire - Spring 2017

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine

Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, by Bernard Cohn

The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, by Nicholas Dirks

Ideologies of the Raj, by Thomas Metcalf

Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa, by Richard Price

English lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, by James Hevia

Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East,  by Priya Satia

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, by Caroline Elkins

History 5098.03 Auschwitz - Summer I 2017

Auschwitz, by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt

Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum

Commandant of Auschwitz, by Rudolf Hoess

The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, by Witold Pilecki

Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi