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

Abstract

Joseph McQuade’s A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea is a study of the origin of the conception of the term “terrorism.” McQuade examines the ways in which such a term was used to legitimate the sovereign right of Western states to rule over colonized peoples. He does so through an analysis of the construction of “terrorism” as both a moral and a legal category in colonial India, in addition to—albeit, as I will discuss below, somewhat problematically—detailing how representing those who sought to resist colonial rule through violent means as “terrorists” both “informed and enabled the colonial states of exception through which” such individuals were policed (23). Although there is a growing body of scholarship on anticolonial revolutionary violence in colonial contexts such as India, as well as its contribution to both independence movements and processes of colonial state building, when it comes to the global history of terrorism, the colonized world has received short shrift, particularly prior to the Second World War. Such an approach, as this study notes, ignores the role of the colonized world as “a productive space in which ideas about terrorism were generated, contested, and reshaped” and which, in turn, shaped both the history of and state responses to radicalism in Europe (14). What is arguably most glaring about such omissions, however, is the role of anticolonial radicalism in spurring transformations in the international system itself, from one demarcated by relationships between sovereign states to one increasingly concerned with the threats posed to the sovereignty of the nation-state by radical insurgents. It is the elucidation of aspects of colonial India’s role in this process that is the most valuable contribution of this book.