British Authorities Research Articles

Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion and Communities during the Irish Revolution, by Brian Hughes

Brian Hughes here seeks to examine the means by which non-state militants, primarily the IRA, attempted to establish and maintain control over their communities during the Irish war of independence. He is also much interested in the forms of response which local people offered to address, and (at times) counter, these ambitions. His general idea is to map a rarely explored part of the landscape of revolutionary Ireland—that encompassing the large majority of the population who found themselves caught between the relatively small numbers of separatist guerrillas (perhaps no more than 3,000 at any one time) and the retreating forces of the United Kingdom state. In essence, he posits that this community, otherwise diverse, was united by a desire to avoid absolute commitment, by a willingness to elide loyalties where necessary and by a general desire to look out for itself. The book is meticulously researched, but is particularly effective when combining papers from the Bureau of Military History and the records of the Irish Grants Committee. Collating these Irish and British materials has enabled Hughes to expose the complex ways in which ordinary citizens, caught in the cross-fire of revolution, interpreted the course of events around them, as well as their own loyalties. A strikingly emblematic case is supplied by an egg-dealer from Arva, County Cavan, James McCabe, who simultaneously applied to both the Irish Free State and the British authorities for compensation arising out of the struggle of 1919–21. McCabe, a (long-) retired officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary, looked to the British Treasury-funded Irish Grants Committee for financial relief on the grounds of his service to the Crown; but he was also an Irish nationalist, who had a son active in the IRA, and he turned, too, to the Irish Free State authorities for financial redress, citing the family’s record in the revolution. Few were as bold as McCabe in seeking to milk the two competing jurisdictions for personal benefit; but his story does illustrate crisply the kind of ambiguous, alternate or sequential loyalties which characterised many at this time.

British War Crimes Trials in Europe and Asia, 1945–1949: A Comparative Study

AbstractBetween 1945 and 1949, the British military conducted a large number of war crimes trials in Europe and Asia. Based on historical archival records, among other sources, this article evaluates and compares the British authorities’ implementation of the 1945 Royal Warrant and war crimes trials in Europe and Asia, with a specific focus on trials organized in Germany and Singapore. By examining the British war crimes trial experience in those two jurisdictions, the article analyzes factors shaping the evolution of the Royal Warrant's legal framework and trial model in different contexts. It therefore contributes to the growing historical work on post-Second World War trials and current debates among scholars of transitional justice and international criminal law on the contextual factors that impact on war crimes trials.

Great Britain Against Libya’s state Terrorism in the 1980s

The aim of this paper is to present and assess Britain’s attitude towards Libya’s state terrorism in the 1980s. It presents the circumstances of involvement of Libyan authorities in the acts of terror, as well as the reasons for directing such activity against the United Kingdom. The paper discusses the response of the British authorities to the Libyan-backed terrorist activity and the results of investigations into attacks perpetrated by Libyans against British citizens. The main thesis of the paper is the statement that the politics of Great Britain in reaction for support offered by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime to the international terrorist network was formulated in line with the main directions of US policy towards Libya.

Turtle Island: The Story of North America’s First People by E. Yellowhorn and K. Lowinger

Yellowhorn, Eldon and Kathy Lowinger. Turtle Island: The Story of North America’s First People. Annick Press, 2017.With this team effort, Eldon Yellowhorn, an archeologist and member of the Piikani First Nation, and Kathy Lowinger, a children’s author and former publisher, try, in part, to rectify a situation facing North America’s Indigenous peoples: “…generations unsure of their culture and disconnected from their identity” (102).Addressing this issue in ways appropriate for children is challenging; that the authors succeed to such a high degree is remarkable. At the outset, they reveal their strategy: Indigenous cultures can be understood through both myth and science. They explain their methods: historical timelines are established by means of carbon dating, archeological evidence, and documentation. They allow that “writing and paper making were not traditions among the peoples of North America,” but point out that before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519, the people of Mesoamerica wrote “…thousands and thousands of books…The Spanish invaders burned whole libraries down.”Because both the geographic scope (the entire continent) and the chronological scope (possibly 19,000 years) of the book are vast, the authors are necessarily selective about the specific cultures they discuss. Their choices give a clear sense of Indigenous intelligence and inventiveness. For example, we learn how the Haida Gwaii built cedar canoes and harvested the sea; how the Plains People of Alberta used buffalo jumps such as the one at Head-Smashed-In to ensure their supply of meat, bone, hide and sinew; and how the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region cultivated wild rice. We also learn how the Olmec people of San Lorenzo, Mexico combined latex from the rubber trees with sap from morning glory plants to create rubber; how the Anasazi of Colorado built “apartment buildings” of sandstone; and the Hohokam of Arizona constructed canals to irrigate corn and cotton crops.Interspersed with historical evidence realities gleaned from archeological sources, are myths that give a sense of the storytelling voice of each culture. In fact, the title of the book, “Turtle Island” is derived from the “Sky Woman” creation myth of the Haudenosaunee. For the most part, interspersing fact and story works well; however, on page 68 it becomes problematic. Here, an Aztec myth prophesying the arrival of “pale strangers with beards” is immediately followed—without a subheading or page break—by the sentence, “The Arctic is a place that tests anyone who lives there.” A six-page discussion of the Thule, Inuit, Tuniit, and Vikings ensues. Adults will grasp the connection of the Aztec prophecy to the arrival of the Vikings; children might—because of the juxtaposition of texts—associate the Aztecs themselves with the Arctic. Teacher or parent intervention here may be required.The book concludes with a discussion of laws, proclamations, wars, and institutions that affected Indigenous lives. Examples include: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 that declared British authority over the “Indian Territories;” the American War of Independence and the subsequent drive westward of settlers; the brutal slaughter at Wounded Knee; and, in both the U.S. and Canada, the residential schools.Apart from the one flaw mentioned above, the book is nicely designed, colourful, and clearly illustrated. Elementary school students should find it readable, enjoying its combination of myth and fact. In sum, Turtle Island is an excellent choice for both school and public libraries.Reviewer: Leslie AitkenHighly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.

SIS, Grigori Tokaev, and the London Controlling Section: New Perspectives on a Cold War Defector and Cold War Deception

This article examines British deception during the early years of the Cold War, and how a Soviet defector named Grigori Tokaev contributed to British plans and operations. Tokaev provided valuable insights into the Soviet Union, allowing British intelligence to craft more intricate deception operations, political and military. The manner in which he was used, and the extent to which his idiosyncrasies were tolerated, underline the difficulties the British authorities faced as they attempted to apply the lessons of the Second World War deception to the Cold War environment. The case offers new perspectives on both the relatively under-examined subject of British deception operations against the USSR, and the history of one of the most prominent Cold War defectors.

Reformers and revolutionaries: the battle for the working classes in Gibraltar and its hinterland, 1902–1921

This article examines labour organisation in Gibraltar and its hinterland from c.1914 to 1921. It demonstrates that the traditionally strong links which had existed between organisations in Gibraltar and neighbouring Spain, links based upon a shared belief in anarchist ideas and practices, had, by 1921, broken down due to the adoption of gradualist and constitutionalist politics and industrial relations by workers on the Rock. Two principle agents drove this change. First, in 1919, the British Workers’ Union established a branch in Gibraltar which successfully worked to establish itself as principle negotiator and representative of workers on the Rock. Second, a reforming governor in Gibraltar undertook to open up political spaces in Gibraltar which offered the potential to work with, rather than against, the state in the colony. By the end of the period, anarchism, and anarchist ideas, was not extinguished in Gibraltar, but they would never again serve as the inspiration for industrial and political campaigns on the Rock, much to the delight of both Gibraltarian employers and the British colonial authorities. This case-study invites further consideration of how British style trade union activity in the empire displaced indigenous forms of organising, a subject which has heretofore received scant attention.

Making borders from below: the emergence of the Turkish–Iraqi Frontier, 1918–1925

ABSTRACTThis article proposes to re-examine the Turkish–Iraqi Frontier dispute by observing the strategies and attitudes of local populations, in particular in the border areas, between 1918 and 1925, a time when the region became a battleground of British and Turkish agents seeking to secure the loyalties of the local community leaders. The latter played a relevant role in two fundamental and complementary ways. First, by playing different sides, local leaders helped to inform the discourse that served to justify the opposing claims over Mosul province. Second, borderlanders pushed British and Turkish authorities to come to the conclusion that an international agreement was the best solution for both countries. I argue the socio-historical process that led Turkey and Great Britain to accept the Brussels line cannot be fully apprehended without taking into account local players and their interactions with a variety of both state and non-state actors.

‘[A] Mere Cloak for their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race’: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838

ABSTRACTThis article examines opposition to the creation and presence of the West India Regiments in Britain’s Caribbean colonies from the establishment of these military units in the mid-to-late 1790s to the formal ending of slavery in the region. Twelve regiments were originally created amid the twin crises associated with Britain’s struggle with Revolutionary France and the horrendous losses to disease suffered by British forces in the Caribbean. Their rank-and-file were comprised mainly of men of African descent, most of whom had been bought by the British Army from slave traders or, after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, recruited from among people ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy. While there was nothing new in using men of African descent, free and enslaved, in the service of the European empires in the Americas, such enrolments had tended to be for fixed or limited periods. Thus, the establishment of the West India Regiments as permanent military units, whose soldiers were uniformed, armed and trained along European lines, was unprecedented—and bitterly opposed by West Indian colonists. Indeed, although white West Indians were concerned about the protection of the colonies from both external and internal foes, they were highly sceptical about whether arming (formerly) enslaved people of African descent would serve to promote their security or might, in fact, imperil the system of racial slavery on which they relied.The tensions arising from the establishment of the West India Regiments have been examined by other historians. However, much of the previous focus has been on the political conflict between the British authorities and local colonial legislatures, and on legal challenges to the regiments, especially during the early years of their existence. In contrast, this article takes a wider view of opposition to the regiments over a longer period up to the formal ending of slavery. In so doing, it examines how the regiments’ rank and file were viewed by white West Indians and the deep anxieties this reveals among colonists. The article also considers the efforts made by the regiments’ proponents and commanders to promulgate more favourable images of black soldiers, images that became more prominent by the 1830s. The more general argument is that this struggle around how the West India Regiments’ rank and file should be viewed was part of a broader ‘war of representation’ over the image of ‘the African’ during the age of abolition.

“Orangeism, A Great Protestant Crusade”: The Nativist Legacy of the Orange Order in the Northeastern Borderlands

ABSTRACTThe Orange Order was central to Canadian nativism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Formed in 1795 by Protestants who feared the specter of Catholic influence and political involvement in Irish society, the Order protected British authority in Ireland. Its advocacy for British loyalism and Protestant hegemony made it attractive to the growing populace in Anglophone British North America following the American Revolution. The chronological focus of this article will be in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of nativist upsurge decades after the violent heyday of the Order documented in works like Scott See’s Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s. It will explore the Orange Order’s legacy in New Brunswick, demonstrating its longevity as an anti-Catholic organization and its role in fostering the social acceptance of nativist ideology in the Northeastern borderlands long after the violent 1840s. It will present the Order as an ideological advocate for an ethno-religious strain of identity that espoused Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony across the Northeast and collaborated with establishment politicians and fellow nativist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce this hegemonic worldview in New Brunswick.

Inter-imperial Humanitarianism: The Macau Delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross during the Second World War

ABSTRACTFocusing on the history of the wartime Macau Delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross (1943–46), this article aims to shed light on interactions between Macau and the occupied British colony of Hong Kong during the Second World War. It argues that the Macau Red Cross branch was a concrete example of Portuguese collaborative neutrality with the Allies, most particularly the British. In coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross, this local branch played an important role in humanitarian assistance to many victims of the war, particularly refugees and POW dependants, in Hong Kong and Shanghai when British authorities were unable to negotiate an exchange with Japan or provide direct assistance in those occupied cities.The wartime Red Cross in Macau was a small-scale and temporary endeavour but, nevertheless, a multi-dimensional one: it was a local creation, a delegation integrated in a national and colonial context, an inter-imperial institution and part of a transnational organisation with global reach.

Conservation

Jemima Parry-Jones MBE is a British authority on birds of prey, a conservationist, author, raptor breeder, lecturer, consultant, and is the Director of the International Centre for Birds of Prey in Gloucestershire. John Bonner reports on the inspiration behind Jemima’s life’s work.

The Meeting of the Waters

The Meeting of the Waters

One Bold Deed of Open Treason: The Berlin Diary of Roger Casement 1914–1916 by Angus Mitchell (review)

One Bold Deed of Open Treason: The Berlin Diary of Roger Casement 1914–1916, Angus Mitchell (ed.), (Sallins Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2016), 280 pages. Roger Casement’s ancestors moved from the Isle of Man to Antrim in the early years of the eighteenth century and, later on, different branches held lands in Antrim and Wicklow. He himself is usually categorised as AngloIrish , which suggests money and privilege, but in his own family money was always scarce. The plaque commemorating his birth can still be seen in Sandycove, a suburb of Dublin, where he was born in 1864. Both his parents died by the time he was thirteen and the four orphaned children were taken in by their uncle, John, who lived near Ballycastle, Co. Antrim. Roger attended school in Ballymena where, of all places, he learned to love the Irish language. After a brief sojourn in Liverpool, where his cousins lived, he got a job with the International African Association, an organisation established by King Leopold to implement his interests in Africa. There he became one of the pioneer officers of what became the Congo Free State. In 1892 he was spotted by the British Foreign Office. Having been recruited as a customs officer, for three years he helped to establish British authority in the Niger Delta region. In view of his later unstinting praise of German ‘civilisation’, it is interesting to note that, in one of his first reports, he condemned the German authorities for their severe retaliation against insurgents in Cameroon. His career followed an upward curve and, after service in Mozambique and South Africa, he became British Consul in the Congo (1899–1902) and soon grew aware of the atrocities carried out there by Leopold’s Force Publique. He helped to found the Congo Reform Association, which had as its aims the restoration of land rights to the people of the Congo and the implementation of humane administration. Its report infuriated Leopold, who spent a fortune in England and America in an effort to silence Casement. Plans to extend the association’s remit were overtaken by events when the First World War broke out. He was next sent to South America to investigate alleged atrocities in the rubber plantations and, in 1909, he was made Consul General. In 1910 stories of a brutal regime of slavery inflicted on the indigenous people of the Putumayo District emerged and Casement was sent with a five-man commission to investigate the allegations. His journal maps a litany of Studies • volume 107 • number 425 123 Spring 2018: Book Reviews abuses: mass killings, torture, sexual violation, floggings and acts of public humiliation. He presented his case to the US President, William Howard Taft, who was able to put pressure on the Peruvian government and a mutually agreeable way forward was found. So famous did Casement’s ‘Blue Book’, as his report was known, become that the Pope issued an encyclical advocating protection of the indigenous people of Putumayo. For such services to the crown, Casement was knighted in 1911. The reader may well be puzzled as to how such a loyal servant could become an Irish revolutionary in the space of just a few years. There was, in fact, quite an overlap among his concerns. Always an Irish language enthusiast and intellectual, he had joined Arthur Griffith’s separatist movement, Sinn Féin, in 1904 and his travels, which were very extensive, had made him completely disillusioned with imperialism. He longed for the political and cultural separation of England and Ireland and, abandoning the methods chosen by O’Connell and Parnell, soon embraced violence as the only way to achieve his purpose. The mention of diaries in relation to Casement usually brings to mind the famous so-called ‘Black Diaries’ which (forged or not), ‘outed’ him as a homosexual and were used by the British authorities to blacken his name in ‘Catholic’ Ireland, allowing them to hang him with as little fuss as possible. The diaries in this book describe the period 1914–16, when he visited Germany in an attempt to raise an Irish regiment from among Irish prisoners of war and commit Germany to support an Irish rebellion. He...

Pushed into Pragmatism: British Approaches to Science in Post-War Occupied Germany

ABSTRACTOne of the most important dilemmas facing the British authorities when they occupied their zone of Germany at the end of the Second World War was what to do with German science. The contributions made by scientists and engineers to the Nazi war machine, in fields such as rocketry and submarines, meant that German science was both revered and feared, and was therefore closely linked to concerns about a post-war military resurgence in Germany. This article aims to chart the changing approaches which the British occupation officials adopted towards German science in this period. While the initial intention was to prevent Germany from ever waging war again, through demilitarisation, denazification and dismantling, the focus changed as British enmity shifted from a former adversary, Germany, to a former ally, the Soviet Union. Policy reflected this shift as technology transfer and the reconstruction of domestic German science won greater favour. This article aims to show that, in the face of growing hostility from the USSR and in the deeply suspicious climate of the early Cold War, Britain was forced to abandon its moral mission towards German science and adopt a far more pragmatic strategy instead.

Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota

Reviewed by: Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota Francis M. Carroll Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 302. $34.95. Diaspora Studies and immigration are not neglected areas of Irish scholarship. Nevertheless, Hidetaka Hirota has opened up a fascinating discussion on a relatively unexplored element of the subject—the forced return of Irish paupers, vagrants, criminals, and lunatics. In doing so, Hirota has also revised the conventional wisdom about the impact of the so-called Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the origins of federal immigration legislation in the 1880s. The accelerating migration of Catholic Irish in the 1830s and 1840s is well understood. These were largely people a few steps up from the bottom rungs of the Irish social and economic ladder—people who chose to seek a better life in the United States or Canada, who could pay their own passage, and who may have had some contacts to help them get settled in the New World. Hirota focuses on assisted emigration arising out of the catastrophe of the Great Famine and continuing economic distress in Ireland. The crisis of the 1840s and 1850s drove large numbers of destitute people off the land and into workhouses, hospitals, prisons, and simply onto the roads. For simple economic reasons, it was more cost-effective for public authorities and large landowners to pay for the transatlantic passage of these people to get them out from under their responsibility. In the course of 1849–50, for example, the Cork workhouse sent almost 3,500 paupers to the United States. The following year the Kerry estates of Lord Lansdowne were cleared of some 1,500 distressed tenants who were sent to America. More were to follow. Drawing on the work of Kirby Miller and Gerard Moran, Hirota estimates that assisted emigration sent between 50,000 and 100,000 tenants and laborers to North America during the famine years. These people arrived destitute in the United States or [End Page 154] Canada. Many immediately went onto the streets begging, into almshouses, or into hospitals, becoming either a public nuisance or wards of the state. Not surprisingly, this situation inflamed the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices of the settled Protestant communities of the eastern seaboard, who believed that Ireland's and Britain's problems were being dumped on their communities. Hirota draws his evidence from several jurisdictions, but his focus is on Massachusetts and New York, the destination of the largest number of Irish immigrants. The response, of course, was the rise of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nativism, taking its political form in the shape of the American Party, or the Know-Nothings, in the 1840s and 1850s. In these circumstances, Massachusetts and New York authorities turned back or deported immigrants on the strength of Poor Law legislation that had its origins in colonial times, when local authorities did not need to accept responsibility for people who were not natives of the locale. New York had legislation that simply authorized them to turn back arriving immigrants who were deemed likely to become a public charge. Massachusetts had similar powers but could also deport people who had lived and worked for some years before some personal or economic crisis drove them to seek public assistance. Injured workmen or widows or children born in the United States of Irish parents were no exceptions. Immigration authorities could order the deportation of these people, who had no recourse to appeal procedures or court intervention. By the 1880s, Massachusetts alone had deported as many as 50,000 people back to England or Ireland. (Hirota comments on the irony of the determination of the people of Massachusetts to deport hapless Irish immigrants while at the same time defying the federal Fugitive Slave Laws that required the return of runaway slaves to the southern states.) Assisted emigration was not discontinued by Irish and British authorities until the late 1880s. The Know-Nothing Party collapsed as a political movement in the mid-1850s, but the deportation policies of Massachusetts...

Stamford Raffles and the ‘Founding’ of Singapore: The Politics of Commemoration and Dilemmas of History

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) landed on the shores of the island of Singapore in January 1819. With its growing commercial success, he was celebrated by the British colonial authorities and mercantile community as the visionary founder of an excellent entrepôt between East and West. Despite their participation in the anti-colonial struggles, Lee Kuan Yew and his People’s Action Party, which led Singapore into self-government in 1959 and independence in 1965, allowed Raffles to remain crowned as the founder of modern Singapore in school history textbooks and the public psyche. However, the recent launching of Bicentennial planning has unleashed an exceptional wave of scholarly and public interest in the tensions and contradictions embedded in such a commemoration. The spirited discussion has included issues on whether such a moment should be commemorated, the island’s state of being in the longue durée stretching back for 700 years, and comparisons of Raffles with Lee Kuan Yew. Underlying the politics and dilemmas of the Bicentennial is an on-going tussle about how the history of a young nation state should be scripted.

Introduction: Trans Victorians

IntroductionTrans Victorians Ardel Haefele-Thomas (bio) On saturday, 26 May 1810, the following excerpt appeared in the Norfolk Chronicle, or, The Norwich Gazette describing the death of Chevalier/Chevalière d’Éon:1 The Chevalier D’Éon . . . died at his lodgings in New Milman Street, Guilford Street, on Tuesday last. . . . It will be remembered that a great doubt at one time existed to which gender he belonged, which, however, was set at rest by the verdict of 12 matrons who decided in favour of the female; and from that time to the present he wore the costume of that sex. But on his decease taking place it was unexpectedly discovered that the Chevalier was a perfect male! (“Postscript”) Fifty-five years later, during a terrible heat wave in London, the gifted surgeon and social reformer Dr. James Miranda Barry died of dehydration following a long illness. Despite Dr. Barry’s instructions before he died, Sophia Bishop, a charwoman, acted out of respect by preparing his body for burial at Kensal Green Cemetery. A few days after Dr. Barry’s burial, Bishop went to the military post at Horse Guards and told the authorities that Dr. Barry was a woman. As historian Rachel Holmes writes, “Barry’s own body passed into history as one of the most disputed corpses of the modern age” (3). Clearly, though, only five decades earlier, there was another body that was highly disputed in life as well as in death. This may seem like an odd and perhaps even sensational place to start my introduction to this special issue of Victorian Review on trans Victorians. D’Éon and Barry, though, exemplify a Victorian conundrum, or at least a conundrum for scholars of the nineteenth century. We have often looked to figures like d’Éon and Barry as examples to demonstrate the ways in which Victorians were caught up in the imperial project of categorization and obsessed with a rigid gender binary that assigned women to the private and men to the public sphere. As famous controversial public figures who were often written about in the British popular press because neither adhered to a strict gender binary, the ambassador and the doctor actually present Victorian scholars with an opportunity to move away from our [End Page 31] own narratives of nineteenth-century British culture as one of absolute binarisms. As the above news article regarding d’Éon exemplifies, the chevalier/chevalière’s sex was often in dispute because of the ambassador’s gender presentation. Over the course of the nineteenth century, d’Éon, instead of passing into obscurity, in many ways became legendary. In 1895, eighty-five years after d’Éon’s death, the Leeds Times published an article entitled “Duellists In Petticoats” that featured the late ambassador as one of the duellists: “As dauntless a fighter as ever buckled a sword during the year when Louis XV was King . . . was the Chevaliere d’Éon. Whether this strange being was a man or woman . . . is not positively known to this day” (4). It is important to note the newspaper’s spelling of d’Éon’s title in the feminine despite the majority of the news articles earlier in the century proclaiming d’Éon as a “perfect male.” The ambiguity surrounding d’Éon’s identity as either a man or a woman simultaneously points out a gender dichotomy and underscores the possibility of someone embodying both or neither. Likewise, Dr. James Miranda Barry was known during the time of his medical posts in South Africa, Jamaica, and Canada as a bit of dandy. He loved lavish and colourful waistcoats when he was out in society just as he often took British and Dutch authorities to task for the horrendous ways that former slaves, sex workers, and people suffering with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) were treated.2 Interestingly, Barry’s masculinity was anything but hypermasculine. As Lord Albermarle wrote in his memoirs, “I beheld a beardless lad . . . with an unmistakable Scotch type of countenance—reddish hair, high cheek bones. . . . there was a certain effeminacy in his manner”(144). Like d’Éon before him, Dr. Barry never clung entirely to one side or the other of the...

Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal imperialism and the surveillance of anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 by Daniel Brückenhaus

Reviewed by: Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal imperialism and the surveillance of anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 by Daniel Brückenhaus Zaib un Nisa Aziz Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal imperialism and the surveillance of anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 By Daniel Brückenhaus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Daniel Brückenhaus’ new monograph—the author’s first—contains all the exciting elements of new international history. Its archival span covers several countries across four continents, its source base is multilingual and it features a wide and diverse cast of characters. In this book, Brückenhaus tells the story of how European states, particularly Britain, France and Germany, responded to the rise of anticolonial activity within the continent. This work is hence a contribution to the growing historiography on the sites and spaces of transimperial and transnational radical politics in the twentieth century. Hitherto, historians have focused on the social and intellectual basis of cooperation and connections amongst revolutionary actors. Brückenhaus is also interested in the formation and workings of these networks but his chief concern is to demonstrate how these transnational movements led to internationalization of policing and the introduction of autocratic practices by supposedly liberal European states. This intervention is both important and timely because it allows us to understand how practices of anticolonial activism were shaped by, and in turn influenced, the evolving practices of policing and surveillance. This book can be best understood as a study of a certain kind of governmentality. As such, it also converses with the increasing scholarly concern with the phenomenon of imperial and colonial anxiety. Brückenhaus demonstrates how the imperative to control thought and police movements was not restricted to the colonial spaces. On the contrary, the increasing mobility of anticolonial networks meant that imperial anxieties were also transposed to the metropole. By tracing the movements of Asian and African anticolonialists in in British and French capitals, Brückenhaus is able to bring the colony and metropole into the same narrative frame. However, one of the critical aims of the book is to highlight the centrality of Germany to this history. In the first chapter of the book, Brückenhaus shows that the movement and subsequent vigilance of dissident elements had already begun at the turn of the century, particularly in London and Paris. But it is the outbreak of the First World War and the looming threat of German collusion with antiimperial forces that form the raison d’être of a significant expansion of police and spy networks. Anxiety about outside intrusion multiplies with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In Chapters Three to Five, Brückenhaus explains how the German-Bolshevik threat led to intergovernmental cooperation between the British and French authorities. These chapters illustrate that the desire to control activists did not just lead to expansion of policing within the borders of France and Germany but also led to the extension of spies, agents and intelligence officers in Germany. Through an extensive range of case studies, he uncovers how anticolonial activists sought to subvert and negotiate this growing web of policing. In averting the gaze of the state, rebellious activists from India to Ghana, Vietnam to Kenya were able to forge solidarities and new networks. But this work also serves as warning against the romanticizing of transnational cooperation in the twentieth century. The range of case studies in the book gives an idea about the heterogeneous nature of anticolonial movements and ideas. While anticolonial activists often aligned with the left, alliances with the extreme right were not out of the question. Indeed, fascism was able to capture the imagination of Indian leader Subash Chandra Bose. The complex relationship between Nazi Germany and antiimperialists forms the subject of the final chapter of the book. For many revolutionaries seeking an end of empire, political allegiance was as much a function of strategic needs as of ideological affinity. Equally, the author contends that European states could also make a political virtue of supporting anticolonial movements. This is most true, in the case of the German state, which not only provides support for anti-British movements during the Weimar period but at one stage during the Third Reich as well. The book is thus...

Western Cultural Beliefs in Wole Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman

Wole Soyinka's play Death and King's Horseman reflects the cultural conflict between the African and Western worlds. The play is based on an actual event that took place in 1946 when British colonial authorities prevented the customary ritual suicide from taking place. In Yoruba society the community is more important than the individual. It was also their tradition for the first horseman to commit suicide after the king's death. When the realization of this tradition is prevented by the white authorities, the horseman's son, who had received a European education commits suicide in place of his father. Building on Frantz Fanon's theories, my aim in this article is to challenge universal assumptions concerning right and wrong which may have different connotations for black and white culture.

Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 by Keith R. Widder

Reviewed by: Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 by Keith R. Widder Matthew Smith Keith R. Widder, Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Mackinac Island: Mackinac State Historic Parks, 2013. 331 pp. $49.95. Keith R. Widder’s Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow was published to mark the 250th anniversary of Pontiac’s War; or the Anglo-Indian War of 1763, as it is called here. Notwithstanding his panoramic vision, Widder focuses on the micro-historical significance of a single site—Fort Michilimackinac—captured from the British at the start of the conflict. Michilimackinac was, he emphasizes, “part of a larger story that reached to Montreal, Quebec, London, Paris, New York, the Ohio country, Detroit, the Illinois country, the Mississippi River, New Orleans, Lake Superior, and to points further north and west” (xii). Yet Michilimackinac deserves consideration in itself, as a microcosm of the changing world beyond its palisades. Departing from conventional narratives depicting the conflict as a rupture in the fabric of colonial America, Widder focuses on the fort’s capture as a bloody but ambiguous episode in “the saga of Indians, British, French-Canadians, and métis struggling to build an enduring peace and a viable fur trade based upon trust” (55). No historian is better qualified to trace this saga than Widder, the former curator of history for Mackinac State Historic Parks (co-publishers here with Michigan State University Press), who has written extensively on the colonial and early national history of the Great Lakes. Widder’s work complements the ethnographic turn in recent borderlands history, most notably Richard White’s The Middle Ground, as well as Michael A. McDonnell (Masters of Empire), credited with the present construction of the Anglo-Indian War. Fort Michilimackinac dominated the straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan, and with it the strategic and commercial fortunes of the Great Lakes borderlands, or pays d’en haut. It was, wrote one contemporary, “a rendezvous for all the Canadians trading with the northern savages” (9). But it was much more than that. It was the crucible in which early alliances between the British, Indians, and Canadians were forged—the center of the all-encompassing fur trade, binding peoples of the region through complex networks of trade and credit, religion and kinship. The loss of Fort Michilimackinac on June 2, 1763, Widder contends, was a traumatic but temporary blow to British authority. As the presumptive colonial power following victory in the French and Indian Wars and the Treaty [End Page 81] of Paris earlier that year, the British were humiliated when a small party of Ojibwe warriors stormed the garrison under the cover of a game of bagatiway (lacrosse). Such unpreparedness highlighted the key factors underwriting the conflict. The Ojibwe and other Indians refused to acknowledge British treaty claims, considering that French cessions were never France’s to cede. Initial attempts to extend the ritual Covenant Chain first brokered between the British and the Iroquois in the seventeenth century quickly broke down in the pays d’en haut. Much blame is laid at Governor General Jeffrey Amherst, whose “parsimony and low opinion of Native people” (75) revealed itself in the withholding of diplomatic gifts. While Amherst disdained gift giving as unnecessary extravagance, Indian leaders understood the custom as a proper form of tribute. Indian resistance reflected fears that European relations, characterized by diplomacy under the French, were being replaced by coercion under the new regime. Amherst’s failing, argues Widder, was to see “both the cause and solution to the violence of 1763 to be military in nature” (170). In fact, the fall of Michilimackinac was the climax rather than the prelude of efforts to expel the British. In spite of deep mistrust Amherst and other British leaders held towards local Indians, Native people were in fact most anxious to prevent their region disintegrating into bloody chaos. Widder moves beyond the obvious facts of bloodshed and conflict, “allowing Native people, Canadians, and British in the Michilimackinac borderland to tell us how they lived their everyday lives and their story about their participation in the war.” He notes that...