Time's Monster: History, conscience and the British Empire by Priya Satia

Abstract

Reviewed by: Time's Monster: History, conscience and the British Empire by Priya Satia Angus Mitchell Time's Monster: History, conscience and the British Empire By Priya Satia. London: Allen Lane, 2020. The essential thesis of this illuminating and timely study unpacks the complicity between historians and empire. Priya Satia considers how history as a formation of knowledge is instrumentalised to both shape and defend the reputation and conscience of liberal progress and the violent excesses of colonial power. She sets out to challenge historical traditions and unearth motive forces of history sustaining imperialism and capitalist realism. In making this argument she exposes, often in deeply unsettling ways, the ethical confusion at the core of British imperial thought and the Enlightenment concepts of universal human experience. Since her first monograph, Spies in Arabia (2008), Satia has established herself as a historian of extraordinary insight and intellectual originality. In that book, she considered the rise of Britain's covert empire in the Middle East and the role of a group of scholar-spies "who thought with and through history" (9). In her second book, Empire of Guns (2018), about the Quaker gunmaker, Samuel Galton, she looked at how the pre-eminence of British industrial capitalism was built upon an arms industry that fuelled growth and expansion and placed the industrial-military complex at the epicentre of Britain's economy. In Time's Monster, Satia revisits some of her earlier arguments to interrogate the relationship between time, history and conscience. Who has the right to make and shape history? How can we think beyond the limits of history? How has the "Great Man" harnessed his sense of hubris and atonement to historical discourse to justify his motives, actions and crimes? The title also has echoes in Antonio Gramsci's axiom: "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." Beginning with analysis of the emergence of history from "the eschatological structures of religious belief" (27) and the Enlightenment view of history as the narrative of progress, the argument moves into the confrontation between imperialism and anticolonial nationalisms. Theories of history proliferated during the nineteenth century. Historians were both public moralists and soothsayers. In the twentieth century, as history and secrecy were increasingly entangled, so an "occultist" element was pioneered by Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence through the fusion of intelligence-gathering and archaeology. It is no coincidence that many of the principal architects of empire from the late nineteenth century lived parallel lives as historians. Historymaking and history-writing became inextricable. A comparative element to this study is achieved through analysis of those who stood up to empire: the antihistorical narratives of the subaltern sensibility. Poetry became an important conveyor of counter histories able to inspire people to act against the grain. The imagination of Urdu, Ghandar and Irish poets sought a new matrix of temporality. There is a recurring and sublime metaphor throughout this book of the moon glimpsed through prison bars, an image that crystalises that unending struggle of the downtrodden to break through the blockade of colonial time. Both coloniser and colonised were forced to come to terms with the violent elimination of certain categories of people in the name of evolutionary progress and the structural racism of the imperial imagination. In unpacking historical difference, Satia builds on the Subaltern Studies collective, notably the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Guha. If historians such as Thomas Macaulay, James Mill and J.R. Seeley are identified as early exemplars of historians who built the liberal illusion of progress, Satia reserves a different criticism for E.P. Thompson. He is upended for his narrow focus on the domestic struggle of the English working class and adopting an "ostrich position vis-á-vis the empire" (260). Thompson's father had made an important anticolonial intervention with The Other Side of the Medal (1925), exposing a "policy of terrorization" (247) underscoring British rule in India. His son, however, steered the British Left away from imperial engagement, thus draining precious energies away from the broader anticolonial struggle. This review was written as Britain's recent defence policy was announced—Global Britain in a Competitive...