A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea by Joseph McQuade

Abstract

This ground-breaking book uses Foucaultian language and method in a convincing way to “excavate” how the “discursive representations of Indian revolutionaries informed and enabled the … states of exception through which they were policed” in British-controlled India (23).1 McQuaid provides a fascinating discussion of historical debate about political violence as it evolved in India from the eighteenth century to the making of terrorism as an international legal category in 1937. Concurrently, he gives a revealing account of anti-British violence in India from the nineteenth century through independence. An epilogue devoted to the post-1947 legacy of colonial anti-terrorism regulation connects it with twenty-first century attitudes and practices internationally. Although this book is fundamentally a history—within a Foucaultian framework—and based on extensive research in the archives of India, Britain, Japan, and Switzerland, it discusses issues of gender, sexuality, and psychology, drawing insights from anthropology, sociology, and political theory.McQuaid argues that in order to justify their occupation of India, the British needed a criminal “other” to contrast with the allegedly civilized, legitimate colonial state (52, 58). They found their foils in the “thugs” (clandestine worshippers of Kali), dacoit gangs, pirates, Islamic fanatics, and ultimately terrorists. Moreover, across their empire, “the British often viewed political dissent as inextricably connected to moral degeneration and “deviant sexual behavior,” such as homosexuality (99). After Bengal became a center of bomb throwing in the early 1900s, the Bengalis were stigmatized as “effeminate.”With the rise of political assassination in India between 1897 and 1913, culminating in an attack that severely wounded the viceroy, the colonial government enacted a series of laws against sedition and “anarchical outrages.” McQuaid acknowledges that these assassinations were “analogous to” anarchist attentats in Europe but distinct nonetheless, since their perpetrators were nationalists and not anarchists. World War I, with its series of draconian security measures enacted for India, marked an “important bridge between the pre-war language of ‘political dacoity’ and the construction of new legal categories of ‘terrorism’ and ‘the terrorist” that came to dominate interwar understandings of political violence” (162).McQuaid might have given more emphasis to the continuing influence of the anarchist paradigm on both legal thinking and revolutionary mentality. After all, the notorious Rowlatt Act of 1919, which continued the repressive emergency measures of the war years, was officially known as the “Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act.” The bombing of India’s Central Legislative Assembly in 1929 was directly inspired, as the bombers themselves announced, by a similar act of a French anarchist in 1893. Until about 1904 or even 1914, the term terrorism was applied almost exclusively to violence in tsarist Russia (where despotism often seemed to justify it), whereas anarchist outrages were perceived to be a universal deadly threat, even without the tag terrorist. In international law, the term social crime applied to anarchist violence, gaining widespread acceptance until terrorism definitively replaced it in the 1930s.2 Evidence for this new terminology can be found in the 1932 Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act, which became the first piece of legislation in India to explicitly name terrorism in its title (198).McQuaid impressively elucidates the little-studied 1937 League of Nations Convention on Terrorism, the first worldwide law to target “terrorism” as a distinct category of crime. Although twenty-four countries initially signed the convention, colonial India was the only territory to ratify it (to create another tool for combating Indian revolutionaries). McQuaid’s excellent book will appeal to anyone interested in India, terrorism, or an elegant application of Foucault’s ideas.