Imperial History and the Global Politics of Exclusion by Amanda Behm

Author:Amanda Behm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

After his own eight years’ banishment from domestic politics, Low’s insistence on studying the self-governing and authoritarian parts of empire side by side was a thinly veiled jab at tariff reform zealots, made further clear by Low’s ensuing protests against including Amery on the new Imperial Studies Committee. ‘[Amery] is a strong party politician, & his presence on the first committee might cause some people to look askance at our whole scheme under the ideas that it is connected in some way with Tariff Reform & Conservative politics’. 10 For similar reasons, Low balked at the prospect of designating a King’s College London lectureship for ‘Imperial History and Politics’. ‘I am even doubtful to whether it is desirable to call it a “Rhodes” lectureship. “Lecturer on the History & Institutions of the British Empire” would I think be the best title. Otherwise the present title “Lect. on Imp & Col. Hist”. will do very well’. 11 Low shied from invoking a name associated with tariff-reforming and pro-settler lobbies in his project of intended renewal. The inclusion of India and the dependencies in imperial studies might signal the final defeat of the radical Tory vision and, in turn, Low hoped, his validation in academic and wider public spheres.

Low, like Curtis, insisted that imperial studies include India and dependencies. Both men operated at the intersection of academic history, journalism, and political theory, and in 1912, sought to draw the territories of non-white, authoritarian rule into the purview of an institutional history hitherto built for the white settler colonies. And both of their campaigns had real institutional effects. Curtis’s efforts revitalized the moribund Beit program at Oxford and provided a focus for the emerging Round Table movement. Low’s crusade brought together a committee of notables to debate the changing face of imperial knowledge and eventually secured the founding of the Rhodes Professorship of Imperial History at King’s College London in 1919. Yet their efforts bore mixed results. Both men were products of Edwardian political conflict. Both redefined imperial knowledge so as to overcome party strife. But while Curtis and Low’s proposals demonstrated a growing impulse to bring dependent populations into the scale of settler historical time, the trajectories of their projects also revealed the uneven and volatile effects of the First World War on the organization of knowledge and the role of historical expertise in British public life. Historians spoke for Britain, for empire, for civilization; imperial theorists sought to use history to illuminate new lines of policy for a now undeniably diverse empire. Yet beneath it all lurked the inexorable influence of settlerism, infecting even the most capacious attempts to give an empire with history a future after the war. Those problems will be the focus of Chap. 7.

This chapter picks up where the last left off, contemplating the ideological war that convulsed Edwardian imperial politics and produced self-perceived moral sentinels and historical innovators, such as Curtis and Low, by 1912. It examines the tenets of a settler-citizen ideology, sharpened and reinforced as shared touchstones by acrimonious political debate.

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