EPILOGUE: IMPERIAL FRICTIONS

Thinking through impediments in empire history

Antoinette Burton

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the history of Western empires is the fact that their ambition for unchallenged global hegemony routinely met with impediments to that aspiration on the ground.

For some contributors, the perpetual unrest of empire is the centre point of the history they seek to tell. Felix Hinz is the most direct in this regard, suggesting in a variety of ways how frankly serendipitous some New World conquests were. Michael McDonnell and Kate Fullagar take up this argument in another vein by demonstrating the nature and extent of indigenous resistance and its impact on how colonial expansion was carried out. The nat­ural environment here is key: ‘the Anishinaabeg knew that they, as always, held the key’ to the waterways and hence to the North American continent—a knowledge that was cer­tainly tried and tested but which made the terrain of empire a decidedly uneven ground for early explorers and settlers. The sea might be a place of imperial opportunity but it also held its perils, navigable only through native guides. Despite the contempt of Western explorers for them, they had the power to lead (and mislead), as the Lynch expedition to the Dead Sea testifies. The combination of unknown terrain and unfamiliar native hosts meant that places like Sitka (Alaska), which figures in Annaliese Jacobs’ chapter, were sites of highly vulnerable commercial ventures. Though they were intended to spearhead grand economic and civilisational projects, they were at best semi-colonial enterprises that were typically experimental, if not provisional as well. This is not to say that Europeans were unsuccessful: indigenous populations were decimated, local authority circumscribed and terrible violence done. But there were always dangers, both symbolic and real, at the floe edge that could give settlement a semi-permanent feel and might blur the line between native custom and occupier life-ways as well. Intermixture, ostensibly a sign of assimilation and peaceful coexistence, was not guaranteed to be a stabilising influence in imperial pol­itics. In colonial Mexico, sexual liaisons between Spanish conquerors and native women may have been a means of securing imperial power but they could also create dynastic crises and formidable women warriors, as the example of Micaela Bastidas, the mestizo wife of the rebel leader Tupac Amaru, so dramatically shows.

Empire-builders are notorious for their developmental schemes, plans and theories. As we see in Tony Ballantyne’s examination of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ‘system of colo­nisation’, though such programmes advance coherent plans they are themselves most often a reaction to the ‘messy conglomeration’ that constitutes, a priori, the field of imperial power. The significance of this insight cannot be overestimated. For the project which Wakefield mapped in the early Victorian period set the stage for one of the most aggressive and world-historically important forms of imperialism, settler colonialism—a concept that grew not out of an abundance of confidence about the viability of imperial endeavour but out of an abundance of doubt about his own fortune and the fate of the New South Wales colony with it. Though he penned the basic lineaments of his scheme while incarcerated, free emigration was the keystone of Wakefield’s colonial vision—and that too was a reac­tion against the convict labour regimes that linked slavery and empire in a transnational, transoceanic chain of connection. Clare Anderson and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart scan the globe to flesh out their account of how and why imperial states and/or their agents con­scripted so many hundreds of thousands of people at the bottom of the social hierarchy into the fields and onto the docks that were the throbbing heart of the European economy for centuries. Though they don’t dwell on it here, and though it had little lasting impact on the determination of merchants and entrepreneurs and capitalists to create a flexible imperial labour supply chain, these slaving and indentured bodies chafed against their bonds and strafed the underside of the imperial beast, most often sporadically in open rebellion or via other more clandestine means. They were one unstable base for what Mark Choate calls ‘the colonialism of economic exploitation’, a drive for global profit that was fuelled, as he notes, as much by paranoia about that base as by the prestige thought to be associated with colonial monopoly and its commercial dividends.

The insecurities of empire are often most legible in the biographies of individuals, especially when they move through several imperial spheres at once. In doing so they illuminate the European rivalries that kept imperial powers on their toes in nervous anticipation of any advantage that the competition might gain, in endeavours military, scientific or otherwise. This is the story that Cindy McCreery tells, reminding us of the long history of inter-imperial diplomatic tensions that played out in the deep waters of the

Asia-Pacific region. Such defensive postures might manifest themselves on the high seas or in metropolitan policy of the kind that Marie-Paule Ha calls ‘familial colonialism’. For what are female emigration schemes if not the consequence of national-imperial anxiety about the surplus of white women and, in the French case, the result of a sense of com­petition with British colonisation programmes? Lest we imagine that this is not imperial rivalry displaced, we need only heed the words of the author of a 1903 article for the journal Le Conseil des Femmes who—at the prospect of British women carrying their tea services to the colonies—lamented: ‘All these tea tables will assure the British domination better than regiments of soldiers.’ This awareness of the need for claim-making on a regional or global stage was by no means new to the twentieth century. Christina Skott reminds us of Sweden’s eighteenth-century imperial past, its investment in its East India Company holdings, and the sense of urgency it exhibited about its role in the geopolitical project of exploring and classifying ‘Flora’s empire’.

Science is indispensable for understanding empire’s power and its limits as well. The sheer ‘bewildering diversity’ of indigenous environments and peoples was as unsettling as it was compelling for the earliest European scientists of humanity, who were arguably over­whelmed by new and unfamiliar data. As they scrambled to develop reliable theories—and new disciplines—in the face of this information revolution, men like Donald Thomson developed views on official policy towards tribal peoples that were ‘politically contentious’ because they challenged the very premises of imperial governmentality.

There are a number of contributors in this collection whose emphasis is on connectivity rather than breakdown; on networks rather than frictions; on circulation and mobility rather than obstacles to them. We must give these claims their due, especially if we wish to acknowledge the tremendously fruitful contributions that research and theory on space and place have made to imperial historiography in the last two decades. In his contribution here as in his empirical work more generally, Alan Lester models out the impact of that work on recent trajectories in the field. He insists, with Doreen Massey, that ‘the identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant.’ In this sense, and more than meta­phorically, imperial histories of space may have been concerned with connection and with the ‘trans’ in transnational and transcolonial, but they have also been interruptive: of the stasis of older notions of empire, of the boundedness of territorial dominion, and of the very territoriality (i.e., land-centredness) of Western imperial historiography itself. Frances Steel’s chapter makes the perfect follow-on from Lester. For not only does she historicise a variety of material linkages between identity, politics and commercial activity, she effec­tively counters the terrestrial with the oceanic—as a site of investigation and as a method of doing counter-hegemonic imperial history as well.

There are, of course, a variety of imperial spaces where such limits are legible. The colonial city is prime among them. Jim Masselos’ sweeping study of India’s multiple urban empires emphasises their essentially defensive position—whether against ‘internal uprisings, challenges from fiercely independent local leaders [or] indigenous nationalisms’. Without putting too fine a point on it, the outsized monuments to British rule, the juggernaut buildings, the elaborately staged pageants he catalogues look like massive over-compensa­tions for a smug, precarious overlordship, whether Mughal or British. Each such installa­tion speaks as much to the fragility of imperial power, the vulnerability of hegemony, as it does to empire’s untrammelled dominion. This is a contention that dovetails nicely with Eric Jennings’ nuanced account of the relationship between colonial forms of sociability and the anxieties attendant on aspirations to dominance. Women and femininity are key to this dynamic, especially where the exigencies of settler reproduction and feminist sentiment were in conflict. Neurasthenia was and is a sign of crisis written on both the body and the psyche; the sanatorium is, in turn, the sign of India ‘as a land of peril’. Nor was the danger strictly the stuff of melodrama; high mortality rates signalled the inhospitability of the raj just as surely as the ice kept whalers and explorers alive to Arctic perils. The quest for cool air and physical wellbeing that sent European settlers and tourists to higher elevations was undoubtedly a flight from the heat of tropical climes. It is also evidence of how the ‘colo­nial encounter’ was often, if not always, a life on the run.

As the essays by Mary Roberts and Susie Protschky amply illustrate, the tensions and contradictions endemic to global imperial aspiration were everywhere in the visual cultures of modern Western empires. ‘Latent dangers’ lurked in all quarters, and not least in the subtexts of the visual histories of rival imperial courts and sultans. Even and especially as gifts, such objects were not necessarily what they seemed, in part because as palimpsests they might speak an aesthetic language that was unfamiliar or ambiguous in terms of contemporaneous diplomatic intention. And when backdrop is foreground, when environ­ment has agency, when landscape plays a determining role in colonial representation— these reversals challenge the promontory view of the imperial observer and upset the whole symbolic economy of empire as well. It was a turbulence that the realism of photography must surely have exacerbated in the Dutch East Indian context. If football offers a more playful terrain on which to appreciate such contests and reversals, it too was unquestion­ably a defence mechanism, a prophylactic against dissolution, drunkenness and disorder: those plagues on the stable (and healthy) imperial body politic. Meanwhile, if we need an explanation for the persistent appeal, the seductive return, of the Roman ideal of Pax Britannica that Patricia Lorcin traces to the heart of multiple Western imperial discourses, we see it in the spectre of decline as embodied in the preoccupation with the rise-and-fall arc of classical imperia. In this sense, the imperative to make and keep ‘peace’ served as a justification for Western imperial expansion and as an unstable sign of imperial weakness and ever-imminent defeat.

It’s this cycle of making and unmaking in the shadow of inevitable failure that is the real footprint of empire. There is no better example of this, perhaps, than the history of mis­sionary work in the imperial contexts under consideration here. Native converts who became leaders might raise the cry of evangelism in danger, even when that cry was secreted in the folds of scriptural language or pious euphemisms (the injunction of Bishop Samuel Crowther of the Niger mission to ‘patiently to wait His good time, when our own fondest hopes are disappointed, and our well-laid plans are frustrated, and to work on in hope, though for a long time we may not see what good may result from our persevering labour, yet believing that God will fulfill His promise, and accomplish His work in His own good time and way’ comes to mind). Elsewhere, as John Gascoigne notes for Australia, the ‘largely fruitless’ labour of missionary men and women among Aboriginal communities was a visible sign of Christianity’s failure, as well as that of the ‘higher’ imperial civilisation it betokened. But it is surely the archive of violence and counter-insurgency that is the most faithful witness to empire’s system failures and to the palpable limits of its blind ambition. Leopold II’s resort to Congo followed on spectacular colonial failures elsewhere. The out­rages perpetrated in the name of his desire for—what? utterly annihilating supremacy?— territorial sovereignty can only be understood as reactionary in the extreme. Here we must understand ‘reaction’ not simply as a conservative stance but as a defensive response to blowback from the ground up: an indication that civilisation and uplift will not come quietly and that savage wars of peace, to quote Rudyard Kipling, are what is required.

Despite post-colonial critiques to the contrary, it has often proven easier to understand colonialism and its violence as the seamy underside of post-Enlightenment history, or as a contradiction at the heart of European progress, than to admit that such paradoxes are in fact constitutive of what we should think of as the will to imperial modernity, rather than its actual accomplishment. As if we need more evidence, we see very clearly in both the Belgian and the post-war French cases that narratives which suppress the instabilities that are at the heart of Western colonial and post-colonial formation are convenient fictions at worst, red herrings at best. Indeed, if the whole of this collection tells us nothing else, it is that the limits of Western imperial supremacy are proportional not to the ambitions of their agents, but to the challenges they faced at every turn on the very terrains they sought to subdue. It’s according to the nature and contingencies of its impediments that we should scale any given empire’s accomplishments, and then proceed to right-size its halting, parlous and inglorious histories.