The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton (review)

Antoinette Burton's The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism is an exciting read for historians who have engaged with histories of dissent, and it should be required reading for historians of the British Empire more generally. The trouble with Empire, Burton tells us, is that "British imperial histories" have not been "written with dissent and disruption in the lead" (1). We have been led to believe that agents of resistance shaped the end of Empire only. Thus, a presumption of basic stability in the preceding decades of colonial rule has evolved "especially as it is popularly consumed and understood" (2). Burton questions from the outset the rise-and-fall narratives of Empire, which downplay the impact, "let alone the role, of the anticolonial movements and people on the imperial framework" (16). It is refreshing in this regard to see Ireland referenced early on, and alongside South-Asian and African movements, as Ireland often is overlooked in the historiography of British decolonization in particular. Perhaps Ireland is too close to the imperial metropole, historically too complex, and, until relatively recently, too politically sensitive a subject with which British historians of Empire could engage. Burton promises to open our ears to the drumbeat of resistance and insecurity in three specific domains—military, economic, and political—and the book is divided into chapters accordingly.

In the first chapter, Burton brings us through vast geographical terrains, some familiar, others less so. We revisit sites of imperial conflict, from the Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence of 1857 and the Boer Wars to the Cattle Killing Movement in Xhosland and the campaigns against the Maori in New Zealand. Perhaps the shortest and not so sweetest of engagements for British forces came in the Anglo-Zulu War with the Battle of Isandlwala in 1879, which "was lost between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m." (74). These conflicts are recast for us with the help of a "close reading of British imperial battle literature and military accounting [which] suggests … a pattern of defensive engagements, local struggle and decidedly imperfect 'victory' across most of the Victorian empire" (53). Couple this with her coverage of the ferociousness of retribution and counter-insurgency (especially the brutal repression in Benares, which involved the "[g]entleman executioners of young Indian boys"), and Burton successfully argues that the second half of the nineteenth century was one of the densest moments of imperial instability in the history of the Empire (61).

In the second chapter, devoted to economic protest, Burton highlights a theme that also does not feature much in grand narrative accounts of modern British imperialism. It might be classified as a maligned add-on, much like women or gender in larger compendium volumes, although women appear throughout this book (understandably, given Burton's back catalogue). Yet, "ordinary colonial subjects routinely disrupted the business of empire … in a variety of ways," and, in this segment of the book, Burton harvests grains of sedition strewn across the Empire to great effect (88). From the story of the Krobo in the Gold Coast, who brought unprecedented prosperity to the indigenous community by resolving a price fixing dispute and developing ports on the river Volta, to the story of Charles Boycott going viral, apparently unconnected strikes, boycotts, and desertions are consolidated from vastly different territories whose common denominator is British colonial rule. The success of the Indian swadeshi campaign is rightly given due weight. Raj era reaction and suppression are crucial here, especially in Bengal where it resulted in significant wider politicization of local communities, or so-called radicalization, to use imperial parlance. The "hartal" or strike aspect of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre have been restored: "a very particular mode of protest … designed to impose economic sanctions on the regular business of imperial commerce" (111).

The final chapter suggests that we undertake a rereading of the winner...