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souls.ox.ac.uk

The Politics of Colonial Comparison

Workshop All Souls College, Oxford

29 September 2014, 9am-6pm Wharton Room

Supported by the Transnational and Global History Seminar

For information on how to get to Oxford see http://www.ox.ac.uk/visitors/visiting-oxford.

For information on getting to All Souls College see http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/content/Visiting_the_College

The British thought they were improving on the Spanish empire, French

colonial theorists marveled at the Dutch, the Italians believed they could develop a 'third way' between the British and French imperial models, and the Portuguese thought their colonies were so different that they were no colonies at all. While historians often compare empires, they have ignored the ways in which people in the past did so as well. Colonial empires are perhaps the last frontier of transnational history: historians of the British, French, Russian or Spanish empires remain focused on their own imperial systems, exploring links between metropoles and colonies in ever greater depth, but ignoring the rich connections across imperial boundaries. The purpose of this workshop is to explore how participants in imperial projects, willing or otherwise, defined themselves through engagement with other contemporary empires. Heeding Ann Laura Stoler's call to study the 'politics of comparison', it asks, in essence, what happens when empires look sideways?

Taking discourses of comparison as its object, the workshop will focus on the following conceptual questions: - Does modern imperialism always generate a particular form of comparative self-awareness? - How fundamental are cross-imperial comparisons to imperial self-definition? - Do these comparisons reinforce a sense of exceptionalism, or do they work to break down presumed barriers? - Why and how do they change over time? - How do they relate to the intra- and trans-imperial circulation of ideas, information, and actors? - How do they vary between administrators, travel writers, theorists, politicians, resistance movements, etc.? - How, and with what consequences, do these comparisons endure after the end of empire?

Timetable

9.00-9:15: Opening remarks Arthur Asseraf (All Souls College, Oxford) and Alex Middleton (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford).

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9:15-10:15: Session 1: Comparison, cooperation and competition Chair: Steve Tufnell (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) Katherine Parker (University of Pittsburgh) – ‘Geopolitics, trade, discovery: Pacific exploration in the long eighteenth century in trans-imperial context’. Anne L. Foster (Indiana State University) – ‘Opium and the politics of colonial comparison’.

____ 10:15-11:45: Session 2: Official minds Chair: Alex Middleton (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) Jenna Nigro (Utah Valley University) – ‘French primacy, French prowess: references to British and Portuguese imperialism in early nineteenth-century accounts of the French presence in West Africa’. Berny Sèbe (University of Birmingham) – ‘Looking across the Pyrenees in search for inspiration? The French empire in twentieth-century Spanish colonial thinking’. Satoshi Mizutani (Doshisha University) – ‘Egypt under British rule and the colonization of Korea: the Japanese politics of colonial comparison in the early twentieth century’.

- COFFEE BREAK - 12:00-1:00: Session 3: ‘Nicest to our natives’ Chair: Leslie Theibert (University College, Oxford) Kate Stevens (University of Cambridge) – ‘Comparisons across the ocean: connecting British and French ‘native’ policy in the southwest Pacific, 1875-1920’. Bronwen Everill (King’s College London) – ‘“Natives generally are anxiously awaiting our advance”: Colonial comparison and British humanitarian hegemony in Africa’.

- 1.00-2.00: LUNCH - 2.00-3:30: Session 4: Comparisons on the ground Chair: Simon Jackson (University of Birmingham)

Thomas Sharp (Oxford Brookes University) – ‘“The British were the best colonial masters an African could wish for”: Colonial comparison as nationalist protest in Cameroon, from the 1950s until the present day’. Roberta Pergher (Indiana University) – ‘Roman legionaries or British sahibs – sources of inspiration for Fascist colonizers’. Samuël Coghe (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) – ‘Colonial self-perceptions and the politics of inter-imperial comparison in interwar Angola’.

- COFFEE BREAK - 4.00-5:30: Session 5: What is a colony? Comparisons in times of crisis Chair: Arthur Asseraf (All Souls College, Oxford) John Hennessey (Linnaeus University) – ‘Defining Taiwan: turn-of-the-century Japanese colonial classification’. Andrew Arsan (St John’s College, Cambridge) – ‘The comparative politics of autonomy: decentralisation, dualism and federalism in the Ottoman empire, 1908-1919’ Milinda Banerjee (Presidency University, Kolkata) – ‘Recreating empire in another form? Comparing Japanese and ‘Western’ colonialism at the Tokyo Trial’. -- 5:30-6.00: Roundtable and concluding comments

Abstracts and contact details

Session 1: Comparison, cooperation, and competition Katherine Parker (University of Pittsburgh) kap125@pitt.edu ‘Geopolitics, trade, discovery: Pacific exploration in the long eighteenth century in trans-

imperial context’ The European encounter with the Pacific was defined as much by political feuds and alliances within Europe as by the challenges encountered in the Pacific itself. In the early-to-mid eighteenth century, it was the British who led in executing large-scale, state-funded expeditions to better understand what the Pacific might offer expanding trade empires. However, the planning of such expeditions depended on British relations with the French and especially the Spanish governments. At the same time, mariners and mapmakers utilized a communal body of knowledge circulating across borders in travel accounts and maps to decode what was then a daunting geographical mystery. I will use a case study of an aborted British expedition in 1749 to show how European politics could sometimes trump global expansion, as well as to show how British and Spanish diplomats used a comparative framework to debate the merits of imperial expansion. Overall, I hope to highlight the contradictory way in which Pacific exploration benefited from the desire to differentiate current expeditions from failed attempts by expansionary rivals, yet simultaneously depended on the knowledge brought back by those same rivals. The Pacific proved a space large enough for multiple empires to compare their pasts and shape their futures. -- Anne L. Foster (Indiana State University) anne.foster@indstate.edu

‘Opium and the Politics of Colonial Comparison, 1900-1930’

Opium policy in early 20th century colonial Southeast Asia reveals how politics and discourse of both comparison and uniqueness shaped the nature of the colonial state. A nascent anti-opium movement in the region grew quickly into an international effort to restrict opium after the United States, new colonial power in the region, pushed prohibition as the only justifiable policy. Despite differences of opinion about the dangers and value of opium, colonial officials throughout the region interacted at international conferences (held at frequent intervals between 1909 and 1936), during cross-colony study tours, and through the exchange of secret information about smugglers. Through these interactions, they formed and defended ideas about the purpose of imperial rule generally, and of their country’s imperial rule in particular. Although many colonial officials shared experiences of learning how to rule by reading about and visiting other colonies, histories of empire have been preeminent locations for the scholarly reproduction of ideologies of exceptionalism. By contrast, this paper demonstrates that opium policies formed in transnational, comparative environments re-shaped the functioning of individual colonial states in Southeast Asia.

Session 2: Official minds Jenna Nigro (Utah Valley University) jenna.nigro@gmail.com ‘French Primacy, French Prowess: References to British and Portuguese Imperialism in

Early Nineteenth-Century Accounts of the French Presence in West Africa’ When the French retook possession of their colony of Senegal from the British in 1817, they found it necessary to justify their continued presence on the West African coast. This paper examines the rhetorical strategies that French colonial agents used to promote French rule through the delegitimization of British and Portuguese colonization in the region. French commentators attempted to counter the notion that the Portuguese had been the earliest explorers of the West African coast by repeating a story that French merchants had reached the West African coast as early as 1364. Britain, too, served as an important point of colonial comparison. French officials criticized the way the British had run the colony of Senegal during the periods of British rule between 1758 and 1817, contrasting stories of British greed with an image of the French as kind colonial masters. However, French commentators wishing to emphasize their country’s colonial missteps also offered British colonies as models to emulate. Despite moments of cooperation between each nation’s colonies in West Africa, Britain and Portugal served as negative points of comparison at a moment when French agents worked through the question of how best to govern a colony in the era of transition away from mercantilism, company rule, and the slave trade. -- Berny Sèbe (University of Birmingham) b.c.sebe@bham.ac.uk ‘Looking across the Pyrenees in search for inspiration? The French empire in twentieth-

century Spanish colonial thinking’ Once the leader of the Latin world, in possession of an empire on which the sun never set, Spain gradually lost power over several centuries until it reached the climax of disgrace in 1898, when it was promptly beaten by the United States (a secondary power by then) and was dispossessed from its last remaining colonies as a result. The trauma caused by the defeat of 1898, and Spain's inability to secure a large empire at a time when the race for a 'place in the sun' was in full swing among European powers, brought about sustained internal debates about the country's future, its imperial destiny and the way in which it could break the dynamics of decline both in the metropole and overseas. France, which had become the leading Latin power, and which had been remarkably successful during the Scramble for Africa (often at the expense of the Spaniards themselves), appeared as a potential example of primary importance to the 'post-1898' generation. This paper analyses Spanish perceptions of French imperial policies and practices in the twentieth-century through the printed sources and private papers of the officer and leading Africanist Tomás García Figueras (1892-1981). It considers in particular the extent to which the French empire could be seen as an inspiring colonial example by a high-ranking Spanish official like García Figueras, and how Spanish commentators compared it to other European colonial projects (British, Italian, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese colonies also featured in his carefully compiled imperial syntheses). This paper offers a timely reminder of Spain's late modern colonial ambitions (which are too often over-shadowed by its early modern imperial experience), and the

ways in which the 'politics of comparison' worked in its case, to explain its frustrated colonial ambitions but also to find workable solutions to its twentieth-century imperial predicament. -- Satoshi Mizutani (Doshisha University) mizutanis0606@gmail.com ‘Egypt under British rule and the colonization of Korea: the Japanese politics of colonial

comparison in the early twentieth century’ One of the characteristics of imperial formations in modern times was a high degree of mutual awareness each empire showed to one another. In one way or another, all modern colonial empires were practitioners of comparison, and for such latecomers as Japan, �becoming a colonial empire in as late as 1895, comparative studies of colonialism assumed especial importance not least at the beginning of their career as a colonizing power. In the first two decades of the Japanese empire, politicians, officials, scholars, and journalists found themselves hungry for comparative knowledge on colonialisms as their young nation was fast acquiring new territories overseas. At the turn of the century, British rule in Egypt turned out to be one of the most studied examples of colonial rule. This was partly because the Egyptian situation looked analogous, at least in the eyes of many Japanese practitioners of colonial comparison, to the Korean situation at the time. This essay focuses on how Egypt figured in the Japanese discourse of colonial comparison around the time when Japan made Korea a protectorate in 1905. A close examination of such discourse will reveal the dynamics and complexities of what Ann Laura Stoler calls ‘imperial politics of comparison’. The fact that Egypt was hotly discussed did not at all mean that the Japanese were ready to follow the British example blindly. On the contrary, many involved in the debate on the Korean situation cautioned against simplistic comparisons and emphasized the supposed difference that existed between the two colonial contexts. Such rhetoric of difference, as the paper will try to show, constituted a particular politics of comparison, namely one engaged by those who wanted to impose on Korea a form of rule which was more authoritarian than the kind the system of protectorate rule would usually allow. Session 3: ‘Nicest to our natives’ Kate Stevens (Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge) kjs66@cam.ac.uk

‘Comparisons across the ocean: connecting British and French ‘native’ policy in the southwest Pacific, 1875-1920’

European imperial powers were drawn into the southwest Pacific over questions of law and authority, such as penal transportation, land disputes, and indentured labour recruitment as well as Anglo-French rivalry. Late nineteenth-century British and French expansion in the region was characterised by oscillation between colonial competition and co-operation. Following the French colonization of New Caledonia in 1853, British colonization of Fiji in 1874 and the respective appointment of High Commissioners over the area, the Anglo-French co-operation culminated in the joint colonisation of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in 1906.

This paper examines the extent to which officials in these three colonies looked across the ‘sea of islands’ to the administration and policy of their colonial neighbours in creating and critiquing their own strategies of indigenous governance. In doing so, I question the relevance of regional inter-imperial connections and the experience of joint rule in the New Hebrides vis-à-vis the influences from within each imperial network. In particular, while the Indigénat regime governing Kanak in New Caledonia from 1887 was inspired by parallel systems in Algeria and French Indochina, official reports also discuss Australian public opinion, British policy in Fiji and New Zealand and ideas of fatal impact. Such examples suggest the need for further research on the connections between empires in the Pacific. -- Bronwen Everill (King’s College London) bronwen.e.everill@kcl.ac.uk

‘“Natives generally are anxiously awaiting our advance”: Colonial Comparison and British Humanitarian Hegemony in Africa’

In October 1914, just after the outbreak of the First World War, the Journal of the African Society of Britain published an article by the Reverend W.A. Crabtree which expressed concern with German ‘native policy.’ Before the war was even over, the British were already framing their humanitarian ‘rescue’ (and postwar annexation) of German East Africa. At the end of the war, the District Commissioners of Kenyan provinces bordering German East Africa were asked to report on the “maltreatment of natives by the German forces during the war and also collect any examples of ill treatment or mal-administration before the war.” From their initial abolition of the slave trade onward, the British believed their empire to be the most ‘humanitarian’ in its focus – in contrast to the ‘cruel’ Germans, Italians, and Japanese; the ‘inept’ French, Portuguese, and Ottomans; the greedy Americans and Spaniards – and the government was often happy to work with various humanitarian lobby groups and local actors to secure this image. This paper will explore the ways that those on-the-ground in British colonies in Africa, especially Africans themselves, used conscious comparison with German, Portuguese, French and Ethiopian empires, and the Americo-Liberian state, in promoting, accepting, or fighting to change colonial policies. Session 4: Comparisons on the ground Thomas Sharp (Oxford Brookes University) tom.sharp3@gmail.com

‘“The British were the best colonial masters an African could wish for”: Colonial Comparison as Nationalist Protest in Cameroon, from the 1950s until the Present Day’

After the First World War, the German colony of Kamerun was divided between Britain and France. In 1961, after forty years of separate administration, the territories of British and French Cameroon were united as a single independent state. This paper examines the struggle of Anglophone Cameroonians living in the former British territory who opposed unification during the 1950s, and the re-emergence of this opposition in the 1990s. Motivated through a fear of marginalisation by the larger Francophone population, and through a desire for an independent Anglophone state, such opposition has continuously deployed a politics of colonial comparison. To justify their political claims, Anglophone secessionists have consistently posited idealised imaginings of ‘liberal’ British rule and ‘democratic’ tradition against a legacy of ‘Jacobin’ and

‘tyrannical’ French imperial culture. By examining these strategies, the paper shows that colonial comparisons are not simply the preserve of colonial administrators in the past, or professional historians in the present. Furthermore, a demonstration of how actors ‘from below’ can also ‘look sideways’ not only adds depth to the study of colonial comparisons, but also shows how such comparisons can become a new means to locate the politics of identity, secession, and colonial nostalgia within a historical context. -- Roberta Pergher (Indiana University) rpergher@indiana.edu

‘Roman legionaries or British sahibs – Sources of inspiration for Fascist colonizers’ In 1936, after the conquest of Ethiopia, Mussolini announced “the rebirth of the Empire.” What purportedly had been “reborn” was the Ancient Roman Empire. Yet the empire envisioned, and in part enacted, by the Fascists was very different from their ostensible model. Drawing on archival and oral-history research about the experience of Italian colonial settlers, my paper will discuss the various understandings of empire in circulation under Fascism. The regime supported a profoundly nationalist notion of empire, meaning Italians were supposed to populate and with their labor ensure Italy’s sovereignty over foreign territory. This supposedly “ethical imperialism” of hard-working settlers was contrasted with the “capitalist imperialism” of France and Great Britain. Hence, what the regime wanted were settler-soldiers, reincarnations of the Ancient Roman legionaries who had colonized newly conquered territories. What the regime got, however, were men mobilized by dreams of becoming estate owners and managers over toiling natives, akin to “the British in Kenya,” and with the ambition of eventually returning home rich. (Ironically, recent research suggests the legionaries of Ancient Rome were much the same). If the appeals to Roman precedent were often fanciful, rather more striking parallels are to be found elsewhere. My paper concludes by contextualizing Fascist conceptions of empire as a particular response to the interwar crisis of imperial governance, a response comparable to those put forth by imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. -- Samuël Coghe (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) scoghe@mpiwgberlin.mpg.de

‘Colonial self-perceptions and the politics of inter-imperial comparison in interwar Angola’

This paper explores how Portuguese colonial officials in interwar Angola viewed, discussed and rejected or emulated ideas and practices of ‘native policy’ in other African colonies and how these inter-imperial comparisons reflected competing and shifting modes of Portuguese imperial self-understanding. Based on a broad variety of published and unpublished sources, it argues that, in interwar Angola, comparing and borrowing between empires was caught in a complex and dynamic interplay between nationalism and internationalism. While in the 1920s leading colonial officials often called to adopt ‘best practices’ from other ‘more advanced’ colonial powers, for instance with regard to ‘native healthcare’, such proposals were increasingly challenged by voices who stressed the adequacy and sometimes even superiority of Portugal’s ‘own’ methods. This shift coincided with the consolidation of Salazar’s Estado Novo in the 1930s

and its official nationalist discourse of colonial grandeur and long-standing expertise. This paper also shows, however, that this official discourse was at odds with the anxieties of many colonial officials on the ground. Particularly in border regions and around foreign Protestant mission posts, administrators feared that ‘in the eyes of the natives’ Portuguese ‘native policy’ might compare unfavourably and cause them to emigrate to neighbouring colonies and/or defect to Protestantism. Session 5: What is a colony? Comparisons in times of crisis John Hennessey (Linnaeus University) john.hennessey@lnu.se

‘Defining Taiwan: Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Colonial Classification’ Soon after a string of smashing victories over China in 1894-95 emboldened Japan to demand the cession of Taiwan, Japanese leaders found themselves in possession an island that they had little idea how to rule and whose legal and symbolic status was highly unclear. Politicians and academics weighed the pros and cons of different Western colonial systems while British and French advisors pushed their respective models. One prominent figure in this debate was journalist and MP Takekoshi Yosabur�. Much as Western colonial discourse conflated geography and time to explain the non-West according to a teleological theory of progress, Takekoshi classified the various Western empires in terms of different developmental phases, placing Japan in “the English era”. Through this and other means, Japanese intellectuals’ detailed attempts to catalogue Western colonial systems served not just as a guide to colonial methods to be applied in Taiwan but also as a discursive tool to assert Japan’s place within the international colonial club. This paper will discuss the ambiguity of the discourse surrounding Taiwan during its first 15 years under Japanese rule, paying particular attention to the different ways the island was described both within Japan and in Japanese-authored texts aimed at Western audiences. -- Andrew Arsan (St John’s College, University of Cambridge) aka25@cam.ac.uk

‘The comparative politics of autonomy: decentralisation, dualism and federalism in the Ottoman empire, 1908-1919’

This paper takes the ‘First Arab Congress’, a gathering of Arabic-speaking Ottoman reformists held in Paris in June 1913, as a prism through which to peer upon a lost world of political debate and comparison. In doing so, it seeks to cleave this meeting from grand narratives of the ascent of Arab nationalism. This, I argue, was a forum for varying visions of imperial reform, which marked the culmination of debates, prompted by the Ottoman constitutional revolution of 1908, in which federation, confederation, dualism and other such sovereign arrangements figured prominently. Indeed, late-Ottoman public men were both aware of living in a world of composite polities, and alive to the possibilities, and pitfalls, of such multi-winged edifice of rule. But the comparisons they drew complicate our own understanding of imperial life-forms, and our sharp distinctions between empire and nation, Europe and the world. For Ottoman reformers drew as much upon the changing political landscape of Europe, with its newly unified nations, its cantonal federalisms and dual monarchies, as upon an imperial political world of dominions, condominiums and protectorates. Reconstructing these debates, then, may help us not just to challenge Ottoman exceptionalism, but also to consider anew the meaning of empire.

-- Milinda Banerjee (Presidency University, Kolkata/Heidelberg University) milindabanerjee1@gmail.com ‘Recreating Empire in Another Form? Comparing Japanese and ‘Western’ Colonialism at

the Tokyo Trial’ The paper uses the celebrated Tokyo Trial (1946-48) to suggest that comparisons between different empires which were articulated within this juridical space marked an important step in the redefinition and shifting legitimation of imperial governance in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that the intensification of Japanese imperialism across the early-mid twentieth century engendered a fundamental crisis in older European (British, French, Dutch) colonial empires across South and South-East Asia as well as in American spheres of hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. The Tokyo Trial was a critical space through which this crisis sought to be negotiated by some of the victorious powers in order to recreate ‘empire’ in another form in the face of mounting challenges posed by anticolonial movements. I further suggest that this re-formatting of empire was based on an epistemology of colonial comparison, as the United States and most of the Allied Powers sought to distinguish between the ‘evil’ racial empires of Japan (with Nazi Germany also in the comparison frame) and the more benign forms of ‘order’ represented by the older European colonial powers or by the United States itself. Basing myself particularly on the arguments of the Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan and his juridical associate Brendan Brown (both of them being Americans), I further suggest that this comparative frame legitimated the enunciation of new political-theological principles of global order which would play a significant discursive role in early Cold War politics and perhaps even outlive the Cold War to survive into contemporary debates about transnational political management and humanitarian intervention. Simultaneously, I also focus on the dissenting judgment of the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal whose judgment was also based on a comparative frame, albeit one which refused to distinguish between Japanese and ‘Western’ colonialism; to complicate matters further, and drawing his intellectual genealogies from older Bengali debates on colonialism, Pal also saw imperialism as integrally related to the emergence of global modernity and nationalism in different parts of the world. Such an attitude challenged rigid dichotomies between imperial and nation states as well; inter-imperial comparisons thus served here to subvert the difference between the category of the nation-state and the category of empire. The Tokyo Trial thus offered a key battle-ground in which debates about global order were played out and new imaginaries of transnational ‘imperial’ political management were defined, subverted, and challenged, foreshadowing similar contestations in the next decades. -- Organisers: Arthur Asseraf (All Souls College, University of Oxford) arthur.asseraf@all-souls.ox.ac.uk Alex Middleton (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford) alexander.middleton@lmh.ox.ac.uk