Martin Thomas and Richard Toye. Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956.

Abstract

In Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956, Martin Thomas and Richard Toye tackle “the most divisive arguments about empire” between and within Britain and France, from Tunisia and Morocco in the early 1880s to Suez in 1956 (1). Their aim is to examine how British and French elites justified imperial activity in cases of both competition and collaboration between the two states. They argue that claims of exceptionalism and superiority on both sides mask and indeed contribute to commonalities in rhetoric, reflecting, in part, the significance of their common project of “co-imperialism” (10). The argument is developed through a series of case studies largely taken from North Africa and Western Asia, chosen as instances where both states were involved and where much discussion was generated (4). These are, unsurprisingly therefore, mostly familiar “crises.” The book starts by examining Tunisia 1881 and Egypt 1882 as the advent of a rhetorical struggle that was very much part of broader, clashing imperial agendas in which strategies of “othering” were pursued by both sides. Shared assumptions about the “civilizing” effects and the complementary existence of the two empires were later tested in Fashoda, but the containment of the crisis of 1898 is held to be “a harbinger of twentieth-century Anglo-French co-imperialist cooperation” (82). Their assessment of events in Morocco in 1905 and 1911 highlights jockeying for imperial advantage within the context of the Entente Cordiale, and the significance of the triangular relationship with Germany, in which “rhetorical posturing supplanted intergovernmental negotiation” (121). The theme of co-imperialism is explored further through Chanak in 1922, which they argue severely strained collaboration, establishing the rancor of subsequent Anglo-French relations in the modern Middle East. World War II as imperial crisis is examined at length, culminating in discord over Syria. Differing domestic contexts feature prominently in the treatment of Suez, cast as “a crisis of prestige for Britain . . . [and] a fatal crisis of regime for France” (229).