The trouble with British imperial history, this book argues, is a master narrative that fails to accord resistance its due place in the story at hand. Plotting the rise of an irresistible power—until a corner is turned and the tale begins to echo Edward Gibbon—conventional accounts see unrest as exceptional. Dramatic events such as 1857 in India and the South African War of 1899–1902 reveal “the whole story of imperial disorder on the ground” (p. 5). Missing here is the everyday unrest and resistance that rendered imperial order nominal and routinely subject to pushback. Bringing this “perpetual insecurity” (p. 4) into focus, Antoinette Burton argues, allows us to see how the British Empire was forged as much by its troublemakers as by those who sought to impose its order on the world.
Burton divides The Trouble with Empire into three thematic chapters. The first challenges the idea that outright military victory was the norm during the heyday of Britain's empire, positing instead that regular eruptions of guerilla resistance rendered peace often elusive. The second explores the frequent labor and other disruptions that exposed the insecure nature of Britain's global economic power. Recurring political resistance and violent sedition—terrorism in today's parlance—are used in the third chapter to question whether there was a Pax Britannica.
Each chapter relies on case studies and comparative analysis. The chapter on military matters opens with a detailed look at the Swat Valley campaign of 1897 and then branches out to other examples of simmering warfare in South Asia, Africa, and New Zealand. While British narratives usually claimed victory and pacification, the reality on the ground tells a different story. This gap, Burton stresses, was implicitly acknowledged by the British in accounts such as Winston Churchill's dispatches on the Swat Valley campaign and in their invention of the term “small wars.”
Chapter 2 examines ordinary individuals disrupting matters with boycotts, strikes, desertions, sabotage, and other acts of economic resistance. Again, a master narrative—“the story of how imperial capital went forth and civilized” (p. 141)—is belied by a steady drumbeat of instances where the colonized withheld their consumer power, set down their tools, shirked their duties, and otherwise interrupted the business of empire. A wide and diverse range of examples is given, many blurring the lines between labor discontent and anti-colonial nationalism. The 1880 Irish Land League boycott, early twentieth-century East African tax boycotts, Gandhi's 1919 hartal, the 1893 Ceylon printers’ strike, and mid-nineteenth-century slowdowns on Caribbean sugar plantations are among the cases examined.
A concept borrowed from biology (“pluripotent”) is used in chapter 3 to explore how political resistance to the Empire had manifold possibilities for development in divergent forms. The case studies here are all drawn from after 1857, in order to “decenter” and “right-size” (p. 146) the great upheaval in India by repositioning it in a wider context of challenges to imperial power. The “Blue Mutiny” in Bengal (1859–62), an 1890–93 struggle over flag-flying in Buganda, the 1929 campaign by Nigerian women against census-taking, Indian unrest after World War I, and the 1936 Arab revolt in Palestine are among the examples used for illustration. Burton stresses the transnational nature of some political resistance, as in the Clan na Gael and Ghadar movements. These multiple fronts of pluripotent opposition “bedeviled imperial state power” and rendered “political order … routinely and at spectacular moments, provisional at best” (pp. 214–15).
Burton claims that this is a “dissenters’ history” employing “a methodology of the oppressed” (p. 18) to challenge conventional ideas of empires following a natural arc of rise and fall. In the process she skirts the edges of historical sociology. The transnational nature of the everyday, routine, and perennial ferment traced here suggests the outline of a colonial sociology. In places, this is implied, or almost asserted. Tacking back and forth across time and space, rather than pursuing a chronological narrative, “reveals both the commonalities among different forms of agitation and the structural weaknesses of imperial formations in situ” (p. 8). British officials, settlers, and business figures confronting frequent economic disruptions knew that they were “the unenviable lords of misrule wherever they settled down, arrogated power, or sought profit” (p. 144). The British needed to invent the term “small war” to describe a distinctive feature of colonialism. Withholding consumer power was more than a common means of protesting, it was also “a characteristically anti-imperial strategy” (p. 106). All but claiming that colonialism is a peculiar sociological condition with distinct and endemic characteristics—something Herbert Spencer and Shyamji Khrishnavarma long ago argued—Burton offers up a compelling challenge to popular accounts of the British Empire.
