sumit sarkar, modern india: 1885-1947

(1): great, telling quote-- 'We shall not subvert the British Empire by allowing the Bengali Baboo to discuss his own schools and drains' (Finance Member Evelyn Baring).

(1): in early 1880s, Indians had only 16 of the 900-odd posts in the Civil Service; until 1947, no Indian rose above the rank of Brigadier in the Army

(3): despite contradictions, we are dealing with the "irreversible historical fact of the entry of the masses into active political life."

(13): the early 1880s (under Ripon and Dufferin) saw attempt to expand the circle of collaborators beyond princes and zamindars to the educated middle-classes.

(16): Indian troops used in 1882 in Egypt, in Sudan against Mahdi in 1885-1886 and 1896, and in China against the Boxers in 1900.

(16): military expenditure as % of gov't budget: 41.9% in 1881-1882, 45% in 1891-1892, and 51,9% in 1904-1905

(16): army had become 1/3 white after 1857; before it was only 14%

(16): priceless--Wood on divide-and-rule: "I wish to have a different and rival spirit in different regiments, so that Sikh might fire into Hindoo, Goorkha into either, without any scruple in case of need."

(17): Land revenue as single biggest source of income--receipts increased despite devastating famines of 1890s.

(18): story of import duties, thanks to Lancashire pressure, and countervailing excise tax.

(19): Sarkar's argument is that, at least in part, shift to local government/devolution had to do with increasing financial pressures.

(20): two arms to process of constitutional reform, throughout:

1. rallying the moderates
2. divide-and-rule

(21): elected municipalities sharpened Hindu-Muslim tensions as early as 1886 in Punjab. "separate electorates inevitably hardened the lines of division"

(21): Sec. of State Hamilton on Hindu-Muslim: "...One hardly knows what to wish for; unity of ideas and action would be very dangerous politically; divergence of ideas and collision are administratively troublesome. Of the two the latter is the least risky, though it throws anxiety and responsibility upon those on the spot where the friction exists."

(23): white racism affected Indian political elites (civil service exams held abroad) and economic elites (unity of white business men against Indian competitors)

(24): key--colonial economy. Dutt's theory spoke of three phases, though Sarkar points out that this is highly schematic:

1. 1757 - 1813: direct plunder, E. India company monopoly trade, investment of surplus revenues in purchase of low priced Indian finished goods for export.
2. 1813 - 1858: classic age of industrial exploitation, as India became market for Manchester textiles and a source for raw materials.
3. 1858 - onwards: finance-imperialism began to entrench iteself through export of capital, British banks, export-import firms

(24-42): Sarkar discusses sevenfeatures of colonial economy

1. Drain of Wealth: Plassey solved problem of bringing bullion from England--inland trade and land revenue was to provide capital for 'investments'. Profits of military conquest in Bengal were used to buy goods for export. Need for unilateral transfer of funds to Britain was a constant. (e.g., Home Charges in 1901-1902 came to 17.3 million pounds, of which a third were railway interest; 3 million was debt; army was 4.3 million; stores purchase was 3 million; and pensions were 1 million.) Part of this is India's export suprlus, which was vital for UK's balance of payments (Britain still required heavy imports of agricultural products, while manufacturers were having a tough time finding markets. India gave UK a captive market; and India's export surplus counterbalanced British deficits). Drain theory has been criticized for exaggerating figures, since foreign trade/export surplus were only a small part of the national income; but Naoroji's main point was about potential surplus which could have been reinvested in a way that benefited India.
2. Deindustrialization: some discussion of the controversy over figures, but conclusion is that nationalists were not that incorrect.
3. Commercialization of Agriculture: faux modernization. Bulk of profits from the export boom were appropriated by foreign firms, and left the country. "Capitalist penetration helped consolidate established structures of exploitation." "The central fact was the built-in tendency of the entire system against significant advances in productive technology..." The riskiness of investment in agriculture (owing to fluctuating or declining prices) meant that anyone who accumulated some funds would turn towards trade, usury, or renting-out land.
4. Land Relations: Agrarian policies were moulded by competing priorities--need for more revenue, desire to encourage certain kinds of agricultural production, the need to retain allies, administrative convenience, and changing ideological assumptions. Permanent Settlement encouraged usuorious and feudal exploitation. Landed income remained parasitic in nature. In sum, "the direct producer was too oppressed to go in for improvements, while above him had developed a hierarchy of rentiers with no need to go in for enterpreneurial risks..."
5. Agricultural Production--British intervened directly only in Punjab, western UP, and parts of Madras (irrigation, etc.) But even here research has thrown doubt on whether this was beneficial. "Colonial structure constituted a 'built-in-depressro for India's agrarian economy." Disastrous famines in the 1870s, the late-1890s, and twenty years later influenza killed millions. Till 1921, population hardly increased. And taking crop output into mind, post-1921 saw a drop in per capita production!
6. Foreign Capital--Marx in 1853 vs. Marx in 1881: railways have proven 'useless to the Hindus'. Oriented to British commercial and strategic needs. Nor were there any multiplier effects, since machinery was imported. In general, tendency was towards creating 'capitalist enclaves'. In the 1870s, interest payments abroad regularly exceeded annual capital inflows.
7. Indian Capitalist Development--British presence inhibited this through tariff and excise, and also through a variety of structural constraints.

(34): E. Bengal (favourable ecology meant a mass of independent peasants) vs. W. Bengal (peasants were splitting into rich farmers and share-croppers--the 'moribund delta')--

(35): in sum--"what remained largely absent was any structural need to invest in direct agricultural production... there was little incentive to technical innovation given the existence of a numerous rural proletariat... Not modernity, but a consolidation of semi-feudal relations was therefore the hallmark of the colonial impact on our agrarian scene." [for Zamindars and rich peasants]

(41): w-class was 2.1 million in a population of 303 million, in 1911 (800,000 of these in plantations). Concentration, though, would give it a power in excess of its numbers.

(41): an indenture system more like slavery than like wage-labour

(42): Pax Britannica as myth

(49): Moplahs of Malabar, in which religious fanaticism has expressed anti-landlord and anti-foreign discontent. Targeted at Hindu upper caste Nmboodri and Nairs [take-home of this entire section is very much the flexibility of religious ideologies, see p. 73--though Sarkar talks of the uniquely millenarian character of Islam, on p. 50]

(56): caste movements tended to be connected with intermediate groups, in this period

(59): Hindu-Muslim communalism as a 'modern' phenomena--"communal riots" rare until the 1880s. Sprung from elite conflict over political openings, but there were structural roots re: communalism in the "masses" (Hindu peasants faced muslim landlords in Avadh and Alagarh, opposite in E. Bengal; in Punjab, Hindu moneylenders, in UP opposite.

(62): point about how, in opposition to EP Thompson, rather than fall back on a rich tradition of artisan radicalism, the Indian working class fell back on sectional loyalties, etc.

(64): Indian business groups remained overwhelmingly loyalist until the 1920s (and even after the 20s, as Sarkar shows, their opposition was sectional and marred by a conservatism re: the mass movement)

(65): Congress in 1886 lacked members from the 'Old Aristocracy'

(67): British attitude to education was lousy. First bill to make primary education compulsory was moved by Gokhale in 1911, and rejected by majority on the Imperial Council.

(75-76): revivalist movements, around this period, in both Islam and Hinduism can be seen as a source of future tension, as they sought a religious idiom that rejected existing sycretic traditions (even if implicitly)

(77): Aligarh got unusual amount of British patronage--Sayyid Ahmed's social basis was UP Muslim landlords

(77): important--UP Muslim separatism had its roots in a traditional elite which felt increasingly threatened by Hindu trader, moneylenders, and professional groups. A similar case in reverse, in the Punjab [a la Alavi]

(78): Wahabism against syncretism in rural areas--sometimes heroically anti-British. Interesting analogy made to puritanical Kuka sect among the Sikhs.

(79): Jamal al-Din al-Afghani vs. Sayyid Ahmed--real bone of contention was against Ahmed's subservience to the British. Afghani himself pleaded for Hind-Muslim unity

(81-82): 1870s saw, in sum, emergence of nascent nationalism. Most important factors were racism, and awareness of colonial sources of poverty, Sarkar is arguing

(86): nationalist critique of colonialism had three pillars:

1. drain of wealth through export surplus
2. destruction of handicrafts, and tariffs
3. excessive land revenue burdens

(87): nationalist critique, though, 'slurred-over' tensions in the the Indian society (no real mention of exploitation by Hindu zamindars, etc.)

(89): discrediting of Congress as 'safety-valve' theory. Dufferin hadn't really reacted to Hume; and anyway latter's persona lrole wasn't very significant.

(90): Gokhale in 1905 Presidential address could claim that educated were the natural leaders of the people.

(90): early Congress demands were ICS, discrimination, and civil rights-related

(92): highly elitist lifestyle of top Congress politicians--here noting that landholders, commerical magnates, and some industrialists were very much involved.

(94): Aligarh Muslims were very wary of elected councils, given their numerical inferiority

(97): 'extremism' emerged out of a critique of the moderate Congress that had been ongoing since the 1890s--for appealing to British public opinion, and for being a movement of the english-speaking elite. Took three main forms:

1. self-development through constructive work
2. mass mobilization for Swaraj through 'passive resistance'
3. revolutionary terrorism

(99): emergence of Harkishan Lal in Punjab, in 1890s

(99): emergence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak in Maharashtra--use of religious orthodoxy, trailblazer of critique of Congress moderation

(101): Curzon's despotic paternalism [this sets the conditions under which nationalism emerges, the argument is--more-or-less]

(103): annual death from plague was at one million, yearly. and this after the cycle of famines that ended in 1899-1900.

(104): all-white juries in multi-racial cases, which Curzon didn't end, of course

(104): Curzon--"I hope I am making no false or arrogant claim when I say that the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception."

(107): Why partition of Bengal, in 1905--"the really important political motive at this time was a division among the predominantly Hindu politicians of West and East Bengal.... 'Bengal divided will pull in several different ways...'"

(110): Swadeshi erupted from July 1905--but problem remained Hindu revivalist language, and inability to formulate radical agrarian programme to take advantage of peasant discontent.

(111): three broad trends in Bengal, 1905-1908

1. 'constructive Swadeshi'
2. political Extremism (foreshadowing Gandhism, minus tax or no-rent--which was deemed harmful to zamindar communities)
3. terrorism

(115, 117): "the history... vividly illustrates limits of a movement with bourgeois aspirations, without bourgeois support."

(119): speculation/awareness of Russian revolution in Extremist journals, at this time

(121): the partition did have some support amongst upper and middle class Muslims, who opposed Swadeshi as E. Bengal promised them upward mobility

(122): paternalistic, 'good Zamindar' alternative proposed by R. Tagore, at this stage

(124): revolutionary terrorism as Swadeshi's most substantial legacy--but noting also its substantial social and political limitations, even while he's relatively enthusiastic about its efficacity

(127-128): Punjab in 1907 saw some discontent--including some signs of militnacy amongst the peasantry (which worried them, b/c it supplied 1/3 of Army). But died down after deportation of Lajpat Rai.

(131): spectre of the Russian Revolution, in Madras around this time

(133): important--Nationalists failed to concern themselves with labour conditions in Indian-owned factories, in contrast to foreign-owned.

(133): Tilak speeches 'remarkably free' of class-war tones, speaking in Bombay industrial area. even still, massive political strike when he was arrested in 1908--though agitation was short-lived.

(135-137): important--Surat Split in 1907. Most important factor for rigidity of Moderates in face of extremist pressures was the expectation of reforms, as Morley and the Liberals came to power in England.

(138-139): Minto-Morley discussion. Key point here is that the differences were less than the commonalities, in Sarkar's argument. Three major componentes to their policies (remained standard for the rest of colonial rule.

1. repression
2. concessions to moderates
3. divide and rule (typified by separate electorates).

(140): details of Indian Councils Act 1909 (along the lines of the above)

(140-141): key--this represented the success of the Aligarh group, which had pleaded for separate electorates in recognition of the Muslim contribution to the 'defence of the British Empire'. here were the origins of the ML and political separatism.

(142): ML founded in 1907--membership was only 400. there was a income minimum of Rs. 500! That it still had influence with Minto reveals British willingness to foster separatism.

(143-144): a 'Young Party' captured the ML in 1912, though, after George V took back partition of Bengal, and British foreign policy aggravated Muslims. This pushed it towards greater militancy, says Sarkar, which in turn led towards Khilafat and a period of Hindu-Muslim cooperation.

(149): war-time mobilization against British rule (terrorism, Ghadr movement, collaboration with Germans) was met with a "formidable battery of repressive measures." Defence of India Act 1915 most intense repression since 1857.

(150): Tilak and Gandhi support WWI, of course--in hope that reforms would be reward

(150): December 1915 sees Congress and ML unity, a series of minimum constitutional demands. Lucknow Pact in December 1916, where Congress accepted separate electorates and Muslims accepted under-representation.

(151): Home Rule Leagues, under Besant and Tilak, organized the only real agitational work at this time, though (Congress considered it out of its purview). Discussion groups, pamphlets, lecture tours--significant in their size and scope, Sarkar's arguing, not in their break with Moderate politics.

(153): Besant somersault in late-1917, when Montagu promised 'responsible government'

(155): chivalry/heroism of Ranas of Chitor (in Tagore's poems), circa 1905, when these were gross feudal exploiters and servile loyalists

(157): elite vs. popular communalism? (Bihar riots in 1917, where 50,000 Hindus attacked Muslim villages)

(158): intensity of caste was greater in south India and Maharashtra, which is why movements along caste lines acquired greater social and political importance here

(160): Nairs and Nambudris--matrileal families, etc.

(164): Urdu-Hindi question--populist/communal angle in all of this

(165): key--three major changes after WWI:

1. Montagu's constitutional reforms in August 1917, followed by Montagu-Chelmsford Report in 1918, and finally by the Government of India Act 1919 (which brought dyarchy, transfer of some functions to ministers of provincial governments which were 'responsible' to legislative assemblies).
2. emergence of Gandhi as leader of mass nationalism
3. important shifts in India's colonial economy

(166-167): against the liberal narrative, Sarkar very effectively points out that:

1. devolution had financial motives--shifted burden of local expenditure, and had been forced by war pressures and weaknesses.
2. dyarchy transferred departments with less political weight and little funds. this would discredit rather than empower the Indians who became ministers.
3. and communal representation and reservations were considerably extended. part of the need, of course, for a wider circle of Indian collaborators.

(168): important--the above is less controversial than the question of the relationship of reforms to 'mass politics'. unlike Cambridge school, Sarkar thinks it impossible to explain the post-war mass awakening of 1919-1922 from these piecemeal reforms (at most it extended voting rights to between 1 and 3 percent of the adult population).

(168-169): rather, the War affected India through massive recruitments (army was expanded to 1.2 million, thousands of Indians died in mismanaged and alien campaigns; basically compulsory recruitment--355,000 in the Punjab!), heavy taxes and war loans (300% increase in war expenditure), and inflation (as raw materials/grains were trucked out to sustain the war effort; as well as hoarding, etc.)

(168): and WWI was linked, therefore, to a two-fold expansion of the national movement:

1. to considerable sections of the peasantry
2. towards business groups

(169): private comment of Bombay Governor Lloyd--"Large quantities of valuable fodder are being exported from here to Mesopotomia by the Army... Lucky the Horniman Press.. have not tumbled to the fact that fodder is being exported while the Deccan starves."

(170): key--British couldn't afford to further alienate the rural areas, which were providing the bulk of recruits, so the axe of increased taxes had to fall on trade and industry (customs, import duty, income tax, supertax and excess profits duty)

(170): statistics on inflation, 1913-1923 (from 143 to 215, index 1873=100)

(170): adverse impact on peasantry, in particular--rich peasant paying more for basic goods, but his produce was not increasing in price (terms of trade); poor peasants getting fleeced, of course.

(171): business groups made of with super-profits: War demand, declining foreign competition, price-differential between raw materials and industrial goods, and stagnating real wages. substantial industrial expansion in this period.

(171-172): important--Indian capitalism made a real breakthrough in this period, in the cotton-textile industry of Bombay and Ahmedabad, as Lancashire competition slackened. Indian mill production surpassed Lancashire imports. British gov't policy also shifted towards Indian industrial development, motivated by

1. financial demands and
2. realization that a minimum of economic self-sufficiency was a strategic necessity

(173): there's also, though, the whole tiff over the exchange rate (set at 1s 6d by the Hilton-Young Commission, in 1926). British wanted to maintain a high ratio, but Indian business groups wanted a lower ratio of 1s 4d, e.g.. This was b/c high ratio made it:

1. easier to pay sterling expenditure for Home Charges
2. benefited Englishmen repatriating pensions or profits
3. stimulated import of Lancashire goods

(174): in sum, at this time, greater business involvement in nationalism was thus "in the logic of things." This was never going to be fullblown--there was considerable loyalism, too, motivated not least by their need for State support against labour unrest, as the working-class had been increasing in number, too (in December 1920 Chelmsford spoke of an 'epidemic strike fever')

(175): war and immediate post-war years mark the beginning of the Indian trade union movement.

(177): the source of uprising at this time was not just economic, Sarkar insists--part of a world-wide upsurge--anti-capitalist in developed countries, anti-imperialist in colonies and semi-colonies. Bolshevik spectre--Governor Willingdon describes Gandhi as one in May 1918, talks about UP agitation as Bolshevism, etc.

(178): Hindu-Muslim unity had been part of Gandhi's work in South Arica.

(179): in short, Gandhi's two-fold character:

1. drawing-in the masses
2. keeping mass activity strictly pegged down to forms pre-determined by the leader (above all non-violence)

(180): key point--Sarkar stressing that the perspective of "controlled mass participation" objectively fitted in with sentiments of socially-decisive Indians. social revolution was off the cards with Gandhi, and this proved acceptable to business groups, and better-off sections of the peasantry, both of whom stood to lose.

(180): third point about Gandhi, made here, is his obscurantism. a reaction to failures of colonization, of course, but never a solution--"live the simple life of a peasant."

(181): the Indian people always fashioned their own images of Gandhi--the 'role of rumor'

(182): point here also about the limits of peasant consciousness--represented still by a "savior from above" [though this isn't well-substantiated by the enormous variety of peasant upheaval in these and later years]

(186): Gandhi moderation--intervention in Ahmedabad dispute between mill-owners and their workers. workers assailed him for being a friend of the mill-owners, for riding in their cars, etc. He won a 35% wage-increase, after being stung by these taunts. But here was founded the Textile Labour Association of 1920, on the basis of the concept that owners were 'trustees' for workers, the interdependence of capital and labor. Gandhi, remember, would keep strictly aloof from the AITUC--fundamentally, his was a paternalistic message of "class peace"

(187): Rowlatt Act, March 1919--attempted to make war-time restrictions on civil liberties permanent. A bit to conciliate segment of white opinion that resented Montagu's liberal promises and the granting of dyarchy.

(188-189): a further change in leadership in the ML (Abdul Bari and Ansari, who hailed Gandhi as the 'interpid leader of India'). Ansari came out in favor of satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act. Congress was not in the picture; to be organized by the Satyagraha Saba.

(189): in short, patchy organizational work before the storm that arose in April 1919--"the biggest and most violent all-India upsurge since 1857. " Almost entirely urban, lower middle-class groups more important than workers--but an "elemental upheaval"

(190): O'Dwyer frightened by remarkable Hindu-Muslim-Sikh Unity in early 1919, in Punjab--this in a province noted for communal divisions (description of Hunter Commissions confirms this)

(191): April 13, 1919--Jallianwalla Bagh (Dyer's regret was that his ammunition had run out--went on, after it, with his job of 'producing a moral effect')

(191): Lahore virtually controlled by a People's Committee, between 11 and 14 April, 1919 (but not revolutionary)

(192): in the whole of Punjab, 4 whites killed, 1200 Indians dead.

(195): some controversy at Amristar Congress in December 1919, over how to treat the Motford Reforms (Moderate group split off, Gandhi was actually in favor of a resoluting thanking Montagu and promising cooperation with the councils, Tilak opposed--this would be totally reverssed by the next-year).

(196): Khilafat movement first calls for Non-Cooperation in November 1919. Both Gandhi and their leaders were eagerfor Hindu-Muslim unity. In June 1920, a formal programme was agreed--"victory of the radicals, now backed by Gandhi."Congress, depsite opposition from CR Das and Tilak and Motilal, agree by December 1920--apparently after they see poor election prospects. This is when Gandhi basically takes control of Congress, which becomes a real mass political party for the first time.

(200): Gandhi moderation--Gandhi skipped first AITUC session in October 1920 (Motilal Nehru, Vithalbhai Patel, Annie Besant, and Jinnah(!) were there). Didn't even send a message. The weapon of the political general strike would never be allowed to enter the armory of Non-Cooperation.

(204-206): Non-Cooperation upsurge of 1921-1922, in four phases (and Gandhi moderation):

1. January-March 1921, central emphasis on students leaving school
2. July 1921: radicalization, boycott of courts and visit of Prince of Wales (but not full-scale civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes)
3. November 1921: countrywide hartal and violent clashes in Bombay (Gandhi says 'Swaraj stung my nostrils')
4. November 1921-February 1922: gov't nearly brought to its knees. large-scale arrests, ban on meetings--country on brink of revolt. But Gandhi calls it off, after Chauri Chaura.

(207): the ec. boycott was successful, the value of imports of foreign cloth almost halved in this time.

(207): important--Business support brought about a qualitiative change in the Congress funds situation. Yet labor agitation kept the industrialists (not the merchants) ambivalent.

(207): Gandhi moderation--"Strikes do not fall within the plan of non-violent non-cooperation (Feb 1921)... In India we want no political strikes... We seek no to destroy capital and labour. We want to harness capital to our side. It would be folly to encourage sympathetic strikes. (June 1921).

(209): Gandhi moderation--no-revenue could be planned, after hesitation, for a raiyatwari area like Bardoli, but nor for a zamindari area where it would mean no-rent. Gandhi 'deprecated all attempts to create discord between landlords and tenants... for they had to join all forces in fighting against the most powerful zamindar, namely the Government."

(211): again, remarkable communal unity in the Punjab in 1921--to be lost, after 1922

(212): Gandhi moderation--discipline of non-violence fitted in perfectly with the interests of peasant-proprietors.

(212): Gandhi vs. Lenin, by Dange, which was symptomatic of an increasing current of critique of Gandhi's role.

(213): Non-Cooperation-Khilafat penetrated the South, too.

(216): again, the Mophlahs of Malabar--by far the most violent of the millenarian outbursts of 1921--a massive popular rebellion, with an inevitable communal aspect (much-exaggerated, though, says Sarkar). numerous 'Khilafat republics' were set up under various presidents. though hundreds of Hindus were killed, these figures are quite low considering that the 'fanatics' controlled an area inhabited by 400,000 Hindus for mohnths, many of whom were landlords and moneylenders. Central fact is its suppression--killed 2,500 rebels, with 45,000 prisoners. mas of British liberalism fell of completely. The Moplah Black Hole at Podanur, too.

(218): important--Communal unity in Bengal, too, between 1921 and 1922--possibly the greatest strength and unity in the entire history of the national movement in Bengal.

(221): Bengal burst Gandhi's bounds; Bihar embodied it (most solid work done there, said Gandhi)--could say Gandhi moderation.

(223): UP Congress leadership was partly more responsive to peasant outbursts than in Bihar, but probably because there the Avadh talukdar was loyalist. Even here a restraining role was evident. Nehru, interestingly, condemned this plebian outburst--Nehru had them put up their hands and turned over to police!

(225): Chauri Chaura, and Gandhi moderation--"a matter of shame" that British attempt to execute 172 people was not protested (eventually 19 were hanged, the rest transported). Only protest was by MN Roy. Nehru recalled that Gandhi's decision was resented; Gandhi's defence of decision cited non-violence, and the threat of the 'unruly element'. Bardoli resolution had noted that withdrawal of rent to Zamindars was contrary to Congress spirit.

(225-226): important--Sarkar is noting that Gandhi never did anything more than he claimed to believe in, and that the fizzling out of the movement when Gandhi demanded it speaks to its subjective weaknesses .

(227): swaraj for masses, not just for classes (Das)

(228): spinning qualification to enter Congress.

(230): Gandhi moderation--Gandhi refused to condemn the caste system in principle, even while he spoke about Harijan welfare (and didn't at all tackle the basic economic issues of landless and agricultural laborers that were the bulk of the untouchables).

(231-233): the politics of Council Entry

(233-234): important--unprecedented growth of Hindu and Muslim communalism was the most negative development after 1922. Sarkar points blame, first, at the very logic of participation in post-1919 political structure, which extended separate electorates. A built-in temptation for politicians working within the system to use sectional slogans. A second factor was spread of ecutation without employment opportunities--scramble for scarce resources fed it.

(235): ML revived, as Khilafat bodies petered away--Jinnah presided over Lahore session in 1924, which was the first to meet separately from Congress, and ML raised demand for federation and full provincial autonomy, danger of 'Hindu domination'

(235-237): rise of Hindu Mahsabha, etc.

(237): noting that Hindu Right didn't have a better record than the ML in terms of loyalism.

(237): key--by 1927 (Motilal Nehru depressed), the British were stiffening policy, now that post-war anti-imperialist upsurge had died down.

(238): important--economic contradictions sharpening. for elite-- again, tiff over exchange rate--Birla and Thakurdas found the FICCI, spokesperson of Indian bourgeoisie. for masses--no improvement in living standards in the 1920s--agricultural productivity stagnated, land revenue revisions in Bombay and Madras, working-class faced an employer offensive.

(240): Congress and Zamindars (and Gandhi moderation)--again, unresponsive to no-rent and to share-cropper efforts (evident in Bengal)

(243): Ambedkar in Madras, appears in 1920s

(244): noting that, net, 1922-1927 was period of decline, for labor.

(245): Gandhi moderation[!]--in Ahmedabad, 1925, urged workers not to embarass employers during depression: 'Faithful servants serve their masters even without pay.'

(246): Bombay proletariat won their mill-owners a suspension of the excise duty, after massive strikes in 1924 and 1925

(247): birth of Communist movement, from disgruntled nationalists (October 1920, founded in Tashkent)

(249): important--till Left turn at 6th Comintern Congress in 1928, Indian communist groups were working within the nationalist movement, even while being critical of Congress. Vanguard praised Gandhi, though after 1928 they spoke of him as a bourgeois mascot.

(250): CPI in 1959 said real founding was in 1925

(252-253): mid-late 1920s saw both Bose and Nehru turning left

(254): 1927-1937 in three phases:

1. offensive (1927-1931): beginning with all-white Simon Commission in 1927, to consider constitutional changes, national movement fought itself to a position of near-equality with Gandhi-Irwin pact of March 1931.
2. c-offensive (1931-1934): smashing of Congress, ostensibly
3. offensive (1934-1937): Congress rebound, with sweeping electoral triumph in March 1937 elections

(255): pattern of using princes against nationalism continues--giving Indians a strong Centre, but making sure that Central Assembly had a nominated and powerful princely contingent (coupled with continued 'divide and rule' agitation)

(256): ML lost in '37 elections to regional parties (Krishar-Praja and Unionist). important argument here is that failure of Congress (and failure of unity, ultimately) rested in the party's inability to develop a radical agrarian programme in Bengal and Punjab.

(258): depression hit middle-peasants the hardest (i.e., those with a surplus to sell), unlike post-1918, which had hurt poor peasants. this was reflected in patterns of mobilization in the 30's

(258): crucial--depression also brought about change in the pattern of British exploitation of India--until 1929, India had still been taking in 11% of British exports, her export-surplus with non-UK countries was crucial to Britain's balance of payments, and she was a site of British capital investment in extractive industries (mining, tea, and jute). now, though, as value of exports plummeted, Home Charges could only be met by massive exports of gold. this crisis, acutely felt by Lancashire, was behind the political counter-offensive [though this was a losing battle, he suggests--by the mid-30's, you wree starting to see a new kind of dependent Indian industrialization]

(260): crucial--with the depression, the 'national bourgeoisie came into its own. the weight of bourgeois groups in national politics expanded massively in the 30s.

(261): once again, though, peak point of labor militancy didn't coincide with nationalist upheaval (1928-29 was labor peak)

(261): wow--economic stagnation statistics. at 1938-1939 prices, per capita national income in 1916-1917 was 60.7 rupees, and in 1946-1947 it was 60.4!

(262): a last gasp at unity, 1927-1928--prospects seemed bring in 1927. Jinnah had persuaded some Muslim leaders to give up on separate electorates in exchange for guaranteed representation. Congress was close to agreeing, but alas: Hindu-communalist pressure from Punjab and Maharashtra pressured Congress into this not happening--the Nehru (drafted by Motilal, in 1928, at All-Parties Conference) report made concessions to the Mahsabha.

(263): Jinnah, in 1928, appears a striking activist for unity. Jinnah finally gave up, though, after being rebuffed, and in March 1929 put forward the 'Fourteen Points.' [Sarkar tries to underplay the significance of this failure, because there were deeper issues that would have made reconciliation difficult to sustain. But he acknowledges its importance]

(265): Princes, again, surface for the British at a time when the nationalist struggle threatens to erupt (after they had retreated in importance in the mid-1920s.

(265): Nehru report's basic conservatism, re: property

(267): Gandhi reprimanding Nehru on his incipient radicalism, in the late 20s (this was when he attended the meeting of the League Against Imperilaism, passed resolutions praising Sacco and Vanzetti, etc.)

(269): Bhagat Singh's transition to Marxism took place in context of massive labour upsurge, in 1928-1929

(271): huge strike in Bombay mills, 1928--which was met with a huge capitalist and government cuonter-offensive (Pathans employed as strike-breakers, leading to communal riots. A note of real alarm, and British alliance with the Indian capitalists against Indian workers)

(272): 1929 Meerut Conspiracy Case, in which trade union leadership was rounded up till 1933

(273-274): The suggestion here is that the labor movement was declining fast, but that the decline of Communists was due not to just this fact, but also to the larger Third Period strategy. No chance of links between communists and Congress, despite communist links in the trade union movement [all this said, it is unclear what the counterfactual is, here]

(274): Subhas Bose fails to defend peasants and sharecroppers during debate on Tenancy Bill in Bengal

(275): summary of Praja party and Unionist party base--and the weakness of Congress, giving in to communalism and agrarian conservatism

(279): the classic ambivalence of the national bourgeoisie--starting to come into their own, but terrified of their workers (and thus in need of the colonial state)

(281-283): key, Gandhi moderation--Gandhi as a break on the mass struggle in 1928-1929--not letting it erupt, opposing resolutions calling for complete independence (the roots of this, Sarkar argues, lay in the fact that the regions and social groups most active in this time were precisely those in which he had no base) But negotiations between Gandhi and Irwin would break down in December 1929.

(283): Nehru becomes President of Congress at Lahore in December 1929--says I am a socialist, lampoons 'trusteeship'. Yet, Sarkar notes, Gandhi was still "firmly in command" (in terms of resolutions passed, etc.). January 1930, however, Congress adopts tricolor. Move towards struggle.

(285-286): Gandhi plumps for salt march, which--unlike Nehru's proposal for a no-rent campaign--aligned perfectly well with Gandhi moderation (not socially divisive, but more symbolic)

(287-288): Ghaffar Khan's story--disciple of Gandhi by 1929. A striking example of unity in NWFP, where Hindu soldiers refuse to fire on Muslims.

(290): in short, though, communal unity of 1919-1922 was a "thing of the past" by 1930

(291): labor and the urban intelligentsia took a back seat this time; now business groups and large sections of the peasantry rose

(292): two phases, divided by September-October 1930

1. high point of bourgeois participation, and controlled peasant mobilization (successful boycott of cloth i mports, etc.)
   
2. decline in enthusiasm from urban merchants, alarm-signals from business groups--some portent of socially more dangerous forms.

(297): base of Gandhi controlled mass-movement was Gujarat (Anand, Borsad, Nadiad, Jambusr, Bardoli)

(302-303): Gandhi moderation--in areas where theere hadn't been previously estabilshed Gandhian centers, peasant mobilization could become quite militant. in sum, the pattern was same as the Swadeshi days--"the failure to develop any clear anti-zamindar or anti-moneylender programme, at a time when rural tensions where mounting."

(303): in Punjab, an urban Hindu trader bias, leaving Muslim and Sikh peasants in the lurch

(304): Congress had established a base among small landlords and better-off tenants through constructive work (even if big zamindars remained overwhelmingly loyalist)

(305): lower-class militancy led the enthusiasm of these elite groups to decline (Bihar group welcomed March 1931 truce)

(306): UP Congress was more radical--here there was a no-tax movement (both because Nehru was in leadership, and because zamindars in UP were demonstratively loyalist)

(307): in sum, given what has already been noted, Sarkar is arguing that the trend towards compromise was inevitable.

(308): Simon Commission submitted its report on May 1930

(309): again, at the Round Table Conference, the Hindu Mahshabha made impossible any agreement on minority representation. Jinnah was again ready to compromised with reserved seats, but they were unwilling to give up in Punjab and Bengal (Hindu zamindars were disproportionately powerful, remember, since universal suffrage was not being introduced)

(311): Why Gandhi-Irwin? "some evidence that the crucial role was played by business pressures."

(311): from March to December 1931, then, there was an uneasy truce. Broken by the second Civil Disobdedience movement in January 1932.

(312): Karachi Congress, March-April 1931 -- revealed the weaknesses of Left critics of Gandhi. Basically submitted to his will. Indication of weakness of the Left-no real alternative leadership emerged, and rural militancy remained entirely spontaneous. Communists were still in their Left-Sectarian phase, expelling Nehru from League Against Imperialists and feuding with Bose causing a split in AITUC

(313): 1931 was the moment to launch a no-rent, no-revenue campaign, but Congress had to hold back the peasantry to honor the pact

(314): assasination of Stevens by two schoolgirls

(315): pressures from below, on truce

(317): strongly pro-zamindar line taken by Congress, in Bihar

(319): maintaining the overvalued currency rate, and powers of Viceroy in matters of finance at the second session Round Table Conference (September-December 1931)

(320): Gandhi out-manuevered in December, had accepted parity with a variety of sectional interests. On 4 January second civil disobedience launches; British struck preemptively to break the movement before it got off the ground. Some 120,000 arrested in the first year.

(323): continued failure of Congress to champion a radical agrarian programme helped spur separatist Muslim peasant movements--this is where, in 1932, Maulana Bhasani enters the picture, demanding abolition of zamindari in Bengal

(325): peasant radicalism was increasingly seeking forms of expression outside of Congress proper

(326): important--while fighting the depression elsewhere with stimulus, it had spelt austerity for British India, of course

(327): critical juncture--with British pressure particularly intense 1932-1934, there was a realignment of business attitudes--arguing for less mass agitation, and towards Assembly and eventually ministerial participation. this was going to help Indian capitalists get over the split in their own ranks. [Gandhi's role in facilitating this is his ultimate legacy, I would add]

(328): Gandhi's obscurantism and moderation--attributing a Bihar earthquake in 1934 to the sins of caste Hindus. working now, more and more, on Harijan issues, but his stance was confined to social reform (delinked from economic demands--even though many Harijans were agricultural laborers).

(330): Gandhi moderation--Gandhi wrote a April 1934 letter to Birla, saying the reins of Congress should be in the hands of those who favor council-entry. this was a time, then, of the definite formation of a Congress Right (Gandhian constructive-workers combine with advocates of council-entry)

(331): When Gandhi called of Civil Disobedience in April 1933, Subhas Bose and Vithalbhai Patel repudiated his leadership.

(331-332): 1934-1935 marks the height of Nehru's interest in Marxism--encapsulated in his letters to his daughter. But he, "as always," draws back from a total breach with Gandhi. Did not approve of moves to start a socialist party.

(332): despite this, the CSP was started in May 1934--ideology ranged from radical nationalism to Marxian 'scientific socialism' (this was not a t all welcomed by the Right-leaning Congress)

(333): CSP contribution was mixed--on the one hand built up partly b/c of opportunism, on the other hand putting important issue s on the table (and built close links with the emerging Kisan Sabha movement)

(334): CSP was also sort of a bridge, by which radical nationalists passed onto the CPI (many communists also used the CSP as a front, as the CPI remained illegal from 1934 to 1942)

(335): by 1934, there was an upward tick in labor militancy and trade union work. It was this that was responsible for the CPI being banned in 1934. This didn't weaken the movement, though, because it was soon to come out of its sectarian phase (by 1935, 7th Comintern Congress had pushed a United Front perspective--there were also internal pressures, he's arguing)

(336): Gov't of India Act, 1935--the process that had begun with the Simon Commission of 1927 ended in the Govt of India Act, 1935 (from 1932 on, there was no real Indian participation in the making of the constitution). Virtually all sections of Indian public opinion criticized the Act as making very little progress over 1919 (dyarchy had been replaced by 'responsible government', and the electorate was expanded from 6.5 to 30 million. But governors retained discretionary powers, etc.).

(338): key--all signs were of a lurch to the Left. But in the end the Right was able to utilize the storm, and by 1937 Congress would be running in elections.

(340): even the Kissan Sabhas had trouble dealing with political implications of differentiation amongst the peasantry

(343-347): key--Nehru's addresses at Lucknow and Faizpur (April, December 1936) seem to mark height of Left influence (scientific socialism, condemning Italian and Japanese aggression, solidarity with Republican Spain). Domestic programme was radical, too. His working committee included three socialists. But the Left advance was "illusory and verbal" as regards the crucial decisions. Right-wing had consolidated itself--though they were alarmed by Nehru's Lucknow address, they responded strategically, noting that no real promises had been made. Right-wing would benefit immensely from a change in the attitudes of the old No-Chnagers (Vallabhai Patel, etc.). Gandhi moderation also was critical--didn't want to launch a mass strategy, b/c of strength of Left. Gandhi patches up quarrel in the working committee, and Nehru makes the concessions. Dropping of anti-zamindar demands from the Kisan manifesto, etc. [this is perhaps the most crucially negative role Gandhi plays throughout the whole freedom struggle]

(349): 1937 election results. Congress does very well; ML does terribly.

(350): Gandhi and Right-wing win motion re: office-entry after the elections

(352): and this Right shift thus explains the absence of major conflict between ministries and British officialdom from the taking of office till September 1939.

(353): important--with these elections, Muslims were decisively alienated--some argue particularly irked by pro-Hindu policy during these two years in power. Congress spurned coalition with ML (dismissed as a 'coterie of knights, Khan Bahadurs, Nawabs') in UP--which would prove portentous, as ML's revival was to be centered on this province.

(354): important--from the Lucknow session on (October 1937), though, the ML made a determined effort to build up a populist image. It accepted independence as a goal, recruited 100,000 members in the UP--and was able to obtain adherence of Unionist Sikander Hayat Khan and Krishak Praja leader Fazlul Haq (pushed into alliance with ML after failing to reach agreement with Congress) [Sarkar makes an important point, here--it's not as much Congress' failure to reach agreement with ML in 1937, as it is the failure to develop genuine agrarian radicalism that led to the communal divides of the 40s]

(355): ML was, in the late 30s, quite a sad spectacle--they accused Congress of pro-Hindu policy, but at least partly exaggerated (rejected Congress offer of an inquiry). They didn't have a clear programme. Jinnah in May 1938 insisted on being recognized as the sole representative of Muslims, which was entirely outlandish at any time before mid-1940s (at the very least) [in 1937 elections, only strong amongst Muslims in UP, Bombay, Madras--weak in Bengal, negligible in NWFP and Punjab, and failed to form gov't in Sindh]

(356): example of Congress conservatism leading to communalism--in NWFP, Khan Sb. lost support amongst peasants after failing to take adequate measures to reduce rural indebtedness; in N. and C. India, Hindu tinge to Congress populism (it was only in December 1938, that Mahsabha folks couldn't be in Congress; this had been the case for ML for longer time, as Azad used to complain)

(359): national capitalists in alliance with Congress in the late 1930s--foreign competition was a major threat to Indian capitalists (Unilever had displaced Godrej, etc.). More far-sighted of the bourgeoisie, it is being argued here, were ready to accept some measure of State direction [enter Vivek]

(361-363): more importantly, re: Labor and Agriculture--The Bombay Trade Dispute Act (November 1938) was terrible for the trade union movement--Gandhian trade union movement accepted it, of course. Subhas Bose made some private protests but didn't take a public stance. A conservative record re: agrarian issues, as well. Well short of moderate proposals made before coming into power.

(364): Kisan occupation of Bihar Assembly

(365): AIKS had its base in peasantry with some land, still

(366): Gandhi moderation--against Congress intervention in the affairs of Princely states, at first showing "exceptional rigidity" (some very limited attempts at "controlled mass struggle" in Rajkot, where there was little danger of agrarian radicalism. But failed)

(369): Gandhi moderation--refused to let Congress get involved in agitation in Hyderabad, in 1938

(370-371): not much disagreement in Left at this time re: staying in Congress, though attempts were made to have them adopt a more sympathetic stance toward popular demands (in private, Nehru and Bose expressed misgivings). Internationally, Left set the tone, thanks to Nehru in large part--many 'internationalist gestures'

(372): key juncture, Bose vs. Gandhi in early 1939--Bose elected president, but Gandhi and Congress right maneuvered to dismiss him (with the help of Gandhi--Nehru supported Gandhi, and the Left had been ambivalent re: support for Bose). Replaced by Gandhian right-winger Rajendra Prasad.

(375): by October 1939, Congress resigns from ministries, faced with Linlithgow's declaration of war [an element of luck, almost, given the immense problems they were having, in power]

(375): don't forget that Congress hostility to fascism had been far more trenchant and principled than the British--there were offers for full cooperation in the War Effort, dependent on certain minimum conditions

(376): Defence of India Ordinance came into force, restricting civil liberties (British had support of liberal and even left elements, especially after 1941)

(377): encouragement of the ML was an important aspect of war-time imperialist strategy

(378): ML really needed a positive platform after 1937--this was the context in which the Pakistan demand started to acquire importance, he's arguing (before it wasn't taken seriously--Iqbal's pres. address in 1930 was ambiguous wrt to partition)

(381-382): important--a weak Civil Disobedience campaign was run from 1940-1941--very limited and ineffective (sole issue was freedom of speech). [acc to Sarkar, this can be put down to Gandhi moderation--expressed concern about radicalism within movement].

(382): except for MN Roy, entire Left was behind the anti-war struggles until 1941--then division between CSP and CPI would emerge (the Nazi-Soviet Pact was an asset for Indian communists, remember).

(382): all told, though, no significant movement in the face of British repression

(383): Bose off to Germany

(383): weakness of national movement had economic roots, Sarkar is arguing--war brought gains rather than losses for substantial sections of the population (peasantry not hurt so bad, industrial development received a major stimulus)

(384): German invasion of Russia confronted CPI with very difficult choice--it took them six months to plump, in Jan 1942, for the war effort

(385-386): Cripps Mission was sponsored in 1942, after it was realized that some measures must be taken to placate Indian opinion--but plagued throughout, and torpedoed, by misunderstanding (Churchill's intransigence foremost among them--Cripps went considerably beyond what Churchill was willing to concede)

(388-389): August 1942, Quit India resolution was passed by the Bombay session of the AICC (some radicalism here in W. Committee resolution, though not coincidental, Sarkar is arguing, that the Communists were not out of the picture--Gandhi moderation)

(390): some disagreements over fasicsm and the desirability of Japanese rule, etc. (Bose vs. Nehru)

(391-392): key--British got much more than they bargained for--instead of Civil Disobedience a la 1932, there was the most militant outburst since 1857. Deeper factors underlay the popular mood, rel. to treatment of Indians in SE Asia after Japanese takeover; effects of blackmarket and food shortage profiteering; even some business may have come around to the movement, Sarkar is saying.

(394): three phases

1. urban revolt, till mid-August--hartals, strikes, clashes with police
2. mid-August till September--veritable peasant rebellion, in countryside
3. September on--weakened by repression, l. formidable phase, of terroristic activity

(395): White Terror

(396-397): short-lived and limited role of Labor

(397): students played very central role; peasantry were even more critical

(398): intensity of anti-foreign sentiment diluted internal class tensions, Sarkar is arguing

(399): Muslims, alas, were aloof from 1942 (NWFP was very weak, for example)

(400): capturing of police stations, setting up of national governments, running of people's courts, etc.

(404): in sum-- by the end of 1942, British had come out victorious in their confrontation with Indian nationalism--for the remaining two and a half years of the war, there was no serious political challenge. But their victory had come at the cost of serious repression, and required a ruthless use of force permissible only under war conditions. Wavell pointed out that it would be impossible to hold India after the war.

(405): Quit India and jail terms, afterwards, had the effect of wiping out the record of Congress ministries in office. Communists, on the other hand, branded as traitors

(406): details of 1943 man-made famine--aggravated by mismanagement and deliberate profiteering, etc.

(408): the ML advance--took full advantage of Congress suppression (installed ministries in Assam, Sind, Bengal, NWFP)

(409): Pakistan started to mean all sorts of things to Muslim peasants--in Bengal, Abdul Hashem was cultivating a radical image for the party.

(410): Muslim Bourgeoisie comes into the picture, backing the ML (Isapahani and Adamjee)

(411): INA--never meant much, military. Axis powers already in retreat by 1944

(411-413): CPI People's War line, and Adikhari Thesis on Pakistan (tried desperately to find progressives within the League--Abdul Hashem, for example). People's War was a mistake, but not a tragedy--legalization had its benefits, and the AITUC doubled between 1942 and 1944

(414): in short--above all, popular action made continuance of British rule untenable--fear of popular 'excesses', too, made Congress leaders cling to the path of negotiation and compromise. the limitations of the popular anti-imperialist movements made partition possible.

(415): Churchill the asshole--sent a telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet, etc.

(416): Gandhi-Jinnah talks in September 1944 unsuccessful

(416): key, ML position until August 1946 was actually quite weak--Khan Sb.'s ministry was restored in NWFP, the PUnjab Unionists broke with Jinnah in mid-1944, and the Nazimuddin Ministry fell in Bengal in March 1945. In Sind and Assam ML ministries existed on Congress sufferance. "little evidence that the League would be able to organize real mass sacntions..."

(417): Simla Conference, June-July 1945--Jinnah's intransigence torpedoed negotiations, as he asked for a communal veto in the Executive. Wavell granted Jinnah the veto; no attempt was made to call the League's bluff.

(417): Labor government entered, July 1945. But what was really changing was the objective situation--anti-imperialist wave (and Communist, in Europe) was sweeping the world. With a war-weary army and people, Britain would have to have retreated, whomever was in gov't.

(418): decisive shift in British attitude came about as a result of mass pressure in autumn and winter of 1945-1946--the trigger was the INA trials (November 1945), as well as use of Indian army units to restore French and Dutch colonial rule, all exacerbated by post-war problems of unemployment, high prices, food shortages (rations at 1,200 calories)

(420): Congress fighting with the CPI

(421): tricolor unity in anti INA trials (students tying together Congress, League, and Red Flags)

(422): question of non-violence/violence quite dynamic--many people at AICC session in September 1945 glorifying use of violence

(422): some talk of Pakistaan as an "Indian N. Ireland."

(423): February 1946, the Royal Indian Navy strikes--another example of joint-flag raising. remarkable scenes of intercomunal unity. involved 20,000 ratings, at its peak. CPI called for gen. strike in Bombay, 300,000 heeded. Two army battallions were needed to restore order, at the price of 228 civilian lives.

(425): Gandhi moderation--unequivocally hostile to the strike, a 'bad and unbecoming example'

(426): Congress decisively rejected mass confrontation--concentrated all their energies on fighting the elections. Patel in charge.

(426-427): Elections of 1946 marked by communal voting. Very limited franchise (10% in provinces, 1% for the C. Assembly), which had something to do with this. Congress did well; ML did incredibly well (won 86.6% of Muslim votes). But didn't win in Punjab (Unionists got power with Congress and Sikh support, despite winning less seats than ML--see p.434); Congress won in NWFP and Assam. Set up ministries in Bengal and Sindh, but depended on official support.

(427): report that while ML had the support of elite Muslims, Congress still had support of less well-to-do Muslims due to promise of ec. reforms (in any case, League claim to represent all Muslims was never really tested--not in elections, not in mass movements)

(428): Cabinet Mission, March-June 1946

(428): Wavell describing 'necessity to avoid mass movemetn which it is in the power of Congress to start'

(429): Strike wave in 1946 surpassed all previous records--Congress, of course, was uimpressed, worried about growing lack of discipline

(430): ML accepts Mission proposal (May 1946), but interprets it as a path to future sucession; Congress accepts with reservations. ML withdraws its acceptance in July 1946. Goes in for Direct Action Day.

(431): 'Labor situation is becoming increasingly dangerous... a more responsible gov't needed..."

(432): "communal holocaust" of Direct Action Day (16-19 August 1946)--4000 killed, 10,000 injured

(434): setting of stage in Punjab

(435): evidence of British passivity in face of the "communal inferno"

(435-436): ML obstructionism at the Centre (Congress-League coalition), as things approach their end. By early 1947, partition is on the mind.

(437): this is Gandhi's finest hour--"with undiminished courage decided to stake his all" in opposition to communalism.

(438): the counterfactual for Sarkar, though, is an alternative of militant mass struggle--which was the only thing that British dreaded. Communal divisions were periodically forgotten, when people were summoned to baricades (after August massacre in Calcutta, a tram strike the next January, etc.)

(442-445): Guerilla war in Telengana between July 1946 and October 1951--led by Communists (though urban Muslim population in Hyderabad was aloof). More than any other factor, this brought down the princely state of Hyderabad.

(447-448): deconstructing the myth of Mountbatten--responsible for break-neck speed, totally failed to prevent massacres in Punjab. code-name Plan Balkan.

(449): regional alternatives of non-communal dimensions--proposal for united Bengal, free Pathan state (to counter ML communal agitation in NWFP), etc. June 3 plan put paid to all these proposals, as provincial assemblies were given two choices.

(449): in NWFP, just 50.99% of 9.52% of the population decided to accede to Pakistan in a plebiscite (no universal franchise in the plebiscite!--and NWFP congress had boycotted it!)

(450): Quit Kashmir movement launched by Sheikh Abdullah against Hindu Maharaja--but then Maharaja acceded in October 1947

waziristan: the faqir of ipi and the indian army, alan warren

(xxxii): "Pathans, living as agriculturists on the Indus plains, were relieved to escape despotic Sikh rule, and the introduction of British government in the late 1840s was relatively smooth..." Not until 1870s that the government takes much interest in internal affairs; the British at this stage are content to continue the Mughal and Sikh "practice of grudgingly respecting the autonomy of the hill tribes..." Soon, though, the Great Game, for which the Hindu Kush were critical.

(xxiii): 2nd Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1881) precedes the formal annexation of the frontier territories in 1893 (for 'strategic reasons', thus content with a 'superficial' presence/loyalty)--"the government wished to control only a handful of vital passes"

(xxiv): this is the context that gave rise to the "political agent", who would maintain contact with the tribes--"the political agents paid the tribes regular allowances in return for their recognition of the principle that they lived under imperial government." of course, this was not always smooth--often required use of the State's 'stick'

(xxiv-xxv): 1850s-1900, "bulk of campaigns took place in northern and central sections" ; during last decades of british india, locus of fighting shifted southward, towards Kurram and Waziristan (and even Balochistan)

(xxv): Gov of India's 'long struggle' to pacify Waziristan was the climactic episode in the history of these tribal wars. one major revolt after WWI was followed by a period of calm, which was in turn followed by the famous revolt of 1936, led by the Faqir of Ipi (raised a force of "thousands")

(xxv): "If casualties are compared to the size of the indigenous population, the attempt to pacify Waziristan was one of the bitterest large-scale struggles of its kind."

(xxvi): what's more, the Great Game was over in 1907 and the British were in decline, anyway. nonetheless, "the British Indian government set out to crush resistance in Waziristan as if they were going to be running the Frontier for many years to come."

(xxvii): the author is here grouping this counter-insurgency campaign in Waziristan with the famous campaigns in Iraq (1920-1921), Ireland (1916-1922), Palestine, etc.

----

(1): despite the fact that the 19th century was, for the most part, characterized by a 'closed door' policy on the Frontier, "the Indian army were no strangers to Waziristan... no less than six expeditions were sent into the Wazir hills between the 1840s and 1880s."

(2): the British were re-committing to the possibility of confrontation with Russia in the late 1880s, as a conservative gov't came to power--for that, control of key positions in NWFP was key (they had already made their advances in Baluchistan--Quetta was soon to become one of the largest military cantonments in all of India)

(4): the Durand Line was born in this context, as Amir Abdur Rahman in Afghanistan was made insecure by British advances into tribal territory (this is, again, 1893)--as a reward, they raised the Amir's subsidy from annual 80,000 to 120,000 pounds.

(7-9): British make their first post-Durand incursion in 1894; though limited in its objectives, the invading force is met with resistance, but wins out (winning lenient terms of peace for the state). nonetheless, gov't refuses to occupy waziristan in campaign's aftermath, despite the wishes of one Richard Bruce, who wanted a cantonment built there. they are still, invited by some Toch valley Wazirs to build some military posts. "In 1895-1896 the North and South Waziristan political agencies were established."

(13-14): writing about Waziristan--into the 20th century, mainly a village-based subsistence economy (biggest village was about 400 households large), with the added depredation of being constantly at war (as a result, resources constantly diverted into armaments).

(16): KEY: "In the richer areas north of Peshawar, and in the trans-Indus border districts, the rough equivalent of feudal barons or khans existed (even small states in very favorable situations) but the tribal economy in Waziristan lacked the resources to develop a centralized political structure... If Waziristan lacked strong tribal chieftans it could boast a great number of petty chieftans.. The political life... revolved around the institution of the jirga... [where] any jirga member could speak his mind, but the maliks were likely to dominate proceedings... Significantly, the mullahs were not permitted a place in the jirga..."

(17): pukhtunwali--revenge (badal), asylum (nanwatee), and hospitality (malmastia) [needs theoretical an historical treatment, OF COURSE]

(17): women as objects--"women had no inheritance rights"

(19): "...in Pathan districts of the Indus valley under direct British rule, and subject to arms regulation and the Indian penal code, the observed murder rate was the better part of a hundred times that prevailing in the UK."

(21-22): unlike Baluchistan, early attempts at indirect rule in Waziristan were not very successful. the key difference was the lack of identifiable leaders with whom the State could enter in compact (it tried to fashion these by distributing allowances)--"Over time, the granting of monetary benefits to maliks would formalize and ossify the maliks into a government funded elite."

(23-24): Waziristan was not subject to land tax, nor to a penal code--rather, the Frontier Crimes Regulation (1872) was applied, like in Baluchistan and other border areas.

(27): in general, the political agent "tried to remain aloof from inter-tribal disputes. Tribes in conflict with each oteh was preferable to their uniting against the government..."

(27-28): the period of gradual extension of British administration over the Frontier came to an abrupt halt in 1897, when there began a general, though uncoordinated revolt in many different areas (began in N. Waziristan, in Tochi, though S. Waziristan would lay dormant throughout); this is when Winston Churchill fought in Malakand and Mohmand, restoring 'peace' to the hills north of Peshawar. The Army settled the areas by April 1898.

(29): KEY: in steps Curzon, who forms NWFP (taking it out of the Punjab gov't's hands). "The NWFP was conceived as a security arrangement. IT was a bureaucratic initiative, and did not arise out of a local demand for a Pathan province."

(30-31): rapid development of British military technology (Lee-Enfield introduced in 1908), which--it is thought--will help leave the tribes behind. but Kohat was already a major center of arms production, and replica rifles were doing the trick--they were able to inflict signficant damage on troops.

(32): it was 1900-1902 campaign against Mahsuds that prompted Curzon's remark about military steamroller. this was followed by an attempt to co-opt them into the British structure (along with Afridis, they were most favored tribe). but not always successful (in 1904, Political Agent murdered by a Mahsud sepoy)

(33): in 1907/1908, accusations/facts circling that Afghanistan was funding Mullah Powindah's attempts on the lives of political agents (ha!)

(34): Powindah's death paved way for his son, Fazal Din, who was to become famous. Organized assasination of Political Agent in 1914, but no action taken against tribe (seen as crime of the individual assistant)

(35): again, British confronted general rebellion in 1915-1917 (including a warring party from Afghanistan, which took issue with Britain's being at war with the Ottoman Empire), in much of the area. the Mahsuds, under loose leadership of Fazal Din, in particular, continue to be the most troublesome.

------

(44): in 1919, as Third Anglo-Afghan war begins (and ends), continuous trouble in Waziristan sees the agency moved to direct administration by military command in Delhi. Wazirs had a total fighting force of about 23,000, all told.

(51): final tally of 1919-1920 campaigns were heavy: "both the suddenness with which British authority had been expelled, and the human costs of the 1919-1920 campaign of reconquest, constituted powerful arguments for putting the administration of Waziristan on a new footing."

(52): KEY: here discussion in post-campaign environment of whether to puruse the military pacification to its fullest conclusion (but risk falling into greater deficits), or withdraw (but be seen as weak, and risk the possibilty of greater expenditure in the future). sounds familiar? it was decided, in a sense, to escalate--to build roads, and whatnot

(55): scouts being stationed in Waziristans were, in the main, Pathans from other tribes

(58): nonetheless--"fighting in Waziristan quietened down as 1923 wore on... A little prematurely Waziristan was declared a 'peace district' from 1 April 1924, and the Chief Commissioner resumed politcial control on 25 July. Gang warfare continued for the rest of the year, and early in 1925 an intensive aerial campaign was successfully waged against the last remaining pocket of tribal resistance." (!)

(59): Sir Denys Bray, India's Foreign Secretary (1923): "Come what may, civilization must be made to penetrate these inaccessible mountains, or we must admit that there is no solution to the Waziristan problem... I may be thought a visionary to talk of the civilization of the Mahsud. But you must take long views on the Frontier."

(60): "...the opening of the first Mahsud school by Malik Mir Badshah Khan, a former regular soldier, in 1922, caused a mullah-led riot."

(60): gov't not sure whether to educate tribesmen, as there wasn't much room to absorb them--"unemployed tribesmen with academic qualifications were 'bound to be a source of potential trouble.'

(61): regardless, never enough revenue to invest properly in non-tax paying areas, extenisvely (not that they invested anywhere else, extensively)

(63-64): in the late 1920s, NWFP joined the nationalist movement--a Congress flag seen in Waziristan! (though the revolt that racked the areas in 1930 was put down, quickly, allegedly thanks to the "forward policy in Waziristan")

(64): KEY, air power: "The RAF was quick to claim a share of the credit for the restoration of order in 1930. Several tribal sections had submitted in the face of air action alone. According to one senior RAF commander, 'without air power I believe that there would have been a general blaze up all along the Frontier.'"

(64): important analytic point: "With the benefit of hindisght, it is clear that the origins of the 1930 risings lay in the settled districts, where economic changes had altered the status quo. These changes were not mirrored in the tribal agencies, where only a handful of Red Shirt agents were detected."

(68-69): 1929 incursions from Waziristan into Afghanistan to support Nadir Shah; 1933 incursions of Wazir militia to do opposite, but this threatened interests of British, who threatened to bomb wazir militia unless they stopped fighting in Khost.

(68): KEY: "Despite persistent minor troubles, life in Waziristan between 1925 and 1935 was usually settled. As the government's medical, teaching, and political presence was so slender, the personnel in the military cantonments and scouts' posts were central to the imperial experience in Waziristan."

(70): "The 1945 Government of India Act, and plans for a new federal India, did not impact upon the NWFP tribal agencies, whereas in the settled areas..." [a very discontinuous experience, in other words--no "common sense of the national" through struggle, the q. of however illusory that might have been in other cases notwithstanding]

(72): SETTING SCENE FOR 1936 INSURGENCY: "Despite the growing arms trade, by 1935...the tribal lashkars had been dispersed and a long-running insurgency had been crushed. A large garrison had been installed in a brand new cantonment in the heart of tribal territory... The Wazirs and Mahsuds had been extensively involved in the new regimne... But had there been in any substantial change...?"

(81-82): the Islam Bibi case as the match that lit the fire (but there are questions to be asked here; which we cannot ask, I suppose...)

(82-83): tradition of muslim holy men resisting foreign occupation, especially the British (Mullah Powindah, Fazal Din, in particular)--in this tradition enters Faqir of Ipi.

(84-85): Faqir of Ipi born in 1901, settles in Tochi valley in mid-1920s. acquires reputation for demanding minimal donations from his followers. an important member of the N. Waziristan Lashkar that went to Khost to fight in 1933.

They would no longer be able to detain tribesman without charge or trial for three years. Instead, detainees would have to be indicted or released by officials within 24 hours of arrest and have the right to bail. Girls and boys younger than 16 would no longer be liable to arrest under collective punishment of a clan.

French politicians spoke about their “civilising mission” in Algeria. This was a monstrous lie. In 1834 a French general reported that virtually all the native population could read and write, with schools for boys and girls in each village. A century later only a quarter of the Muslim population could read Arabic. Less than one in ten could read French.
(...) [Setif:] But now the settlers wanted to assert their power. Large numbers of troops were brought in, including Senegalese soldiers, who unfortunately did not make common cause with the local population... Probably at least 15,000 died, though some claim as many as 50,000. Even on the lowest estimate, the Europeans killed 50 Muslims for every European life lost.

The important point is that liberalism emerged as part of the same historical moment as the development of capitalism, the rise of European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and race 'science'. Liberalism was always implicated in these processes, from Locke to Tocqueville. US liberals of the Progressive era were generally explicit imperialists and white supremacists, none less than the paladin of 'liberal internationalism', Woodrow Wilson. What you refer to as the "bombing Left" is part of the same history. Large parts of the developing left and labour movements in the 19th Century partook of the colonial triumphalism and associated doctrines such as 'social Darwinism'. The regnant view was that much of the human race was bound for extinction if it wasn't possible to civilize them. Thus Karl Kautsky argued in 1882 that: "In so far as they cannot be assimilated by modern culture, the wild peoples will have to disappear from the surface of the earth."
(...) Left-wing apologists for imperialism also borrowed a chauvinistic version of humanitarianism from the liberals, namely the idea that - as Eduard Bernstein put it - the "savages" under colonial rule were "without exception better off than they were before". The Fabians similarly believed that self-rule was as useless to non-white people as "a dynamo to a Caribbean" and that for their own benefit it was necessary to impose the "grandmotherly tyranny" of colonialism. Labour's 1919 manifesto, radical in so many other ways, continued to enjoin Britain's duty to the "non-adult races". The Russian Revolution, and ensuing national liberation struggles often fought under the impress of some kind of marxism, put those explicitly advocating empire on the back foot: they had to change the terms of their argument, and they did so with reference to the exigencies of containing communism. Even then, the racial and colonial aspects of American dominance took a while to be suppressed. The USSR was itself considered an "oriental despotism" resulting, according to George F Kennan, from "a century-long contact with the Asiatic hordes" whose effects had only been concealed by the "Westernised upper crust of the Tsarist elite". Of especial concern was the commie attempt to weaken the power of Western states in colonised nations, which produced a fear of "premature independence" for those not yet adequately schooled in the arts of government by whitey, who might prove easy meat for the Muscovite menace.

The first phase of the India’s relationship with Europe was one of mutual trade and prosperity. Until the East India Company began to establish a monopoly for itself in Indian trade, pushing out European rivals, notably the French, followed by conquest, that first phase from 1600 to 1757 was not really an unequal ‘colonial’ relationship. The East India Company had a large vested interest in promoting the export of cotton textiles and silks from India which soon began to militate against British industrial interests. Political agitation in Britain began to demand curtailment in the trading privileges of the East India Company and an end to imports of Indian textiles.
(...) The second phase of India’s relationship with Britain and the East India Company, opened with the beginning of the conquest of India in 1757. The main interest of the East India Company was still to maximise the export of Indian textiles to Britain and Europe. To that was now added the direct extraction of surplus from the Indian countryside in the form of land revenue and other taxes and impositions. Conquest and plunder joined hands with trade. In the collection of land revenue, the paternalism of Indian feudalism was replaced with the unmitigated avarice and greed of the faceless officials of the Company.
(...) [The third phase:] The East India Company had a major vested interest in the preservation and expansion of exports of Indian textiles. It obtained Indian textiles for resale in the Far East as well as Europe, where they fetched a profit of three times their cost. But there were rising pressures in England against that trade and for protection and promotion of the cotton textile industry in Britain. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that a cotton textile industry emerged in England. It is generally held that it was the development of the Manchester textile industry that triggered off the Industrial Revolution in England. As Landes pointed out, the ‘threshold’ of the industrial revolution in England was first crossed in cotton manufacture’. (Landes, 1970:82) It is little realised that the prior destruction of the Indian cotton textile industry was a necessary pre-condition for progress of the British Industry. It is a myth that is universally believed by economic historians (Marx among them) that it was the mechanisation of English textile production that killed the Indian textile industry. That was not so. Active steps had to be taken by the British government to suppress the flourishing Indian textile industry. The East India Company had a large interest in the continuation of Indian textile exports that conflicted with those of the rising British bourgeoisie and, especially, the British textile interests. Under pressure from them, the Company’s profitable trading monopoly was ended in 1813 and in 1833 it was required to stop its commercial operations altogether. It then became exclusively an organ of colonial government.

"the black man's burden," basil davidson

take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.

a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).

thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).

he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)

again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.

if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.

there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.

nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."

a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."

(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.

(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."

(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."

(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."

(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."

(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."

(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."

(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."

(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."

(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."


(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"

(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."

(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged

(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession

(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.

(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)

(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.

(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."

(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."

(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.

(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."

(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.

(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.

(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]

(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."

(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations

(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.

(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs

(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)

(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."

(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."

(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"

(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."

(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."

(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"

(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."

(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."

(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."

(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service

(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern

(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."

(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]

(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."

(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost

(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."

(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."

(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade

(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.

(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."

(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."

(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)

(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.

(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."

(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model

(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'

(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"

(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"

(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.

(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."