Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 by Kevin Grant (review)

Numerous studies exist on hunger strikes waged during the suffragette campaign, the Irish War of Independence, the Troubles, and other periods of socio-political unrest. Only recently have scholars adopted cross-comparative approaches to explore the interplay among hunger strikes staged in different time periods and national contexts. As well as shattering a myth popular among the Irish that hunger striking belongs almost exclusively to their political heritage, this comparative frame has allowed selfimposed fasting to emerge as a complex, multifaceted protest with global interconnections. Also, historians now better appreciate hunger strikes as acts that implicated prison doctors, posed challenging medical ethical questions, and were responded to, in cases involving force feeding, with a brutal, physical assault upon the body sanctioned by governments and prison officials. Kevin Grant’s Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 adopts a transnational approach to hunger strike history, specifically focusing on Ireland, India, and Britain. Drawing from James Vernon, Grant presents self-imposed starvation as all the more horrific in the twentieth century, a time when death from hunger caused by famine or poverty was relatively uncommon, at least in the west. In this context, Grant explains, starving oneself as protest became a global phenomenon. Grant also moves the focus beyond well-known hunger strikers–Terence MacSwiney, Mahatma Gandhi, Bobby Sands–to engage instead with thousands of often forgotten protestors.

Grant’s main thesis is that most political protestors used the hunger strike as a “last weapon.” This is a subtle but significant departure given that the Irish typically perceive hunger strikes as having been first and foremost about self-sacrifice and national ideologies, a stance that contributes to republican mythologies. Grant’s closer examination reveals that ideologies were of secondary importance and, in many instances, of no significance at all. Most hunger strikers acted almost out of desperation and frustration, seeking immediate relief from oppressive prison conditions rather than the realization of vaunted ideals. They protested against harsh conditions, physical violence, brutal punishments, as well as the unwillingness of governments to grant political prisoner status. It seems that hunger striking was far less heroic and glamorous than national mythologies suggest. For Grant, hunger striking was an instrument, not a symbol. This ties in with the research of other scholars who have highlighted the large numbers of convict prisoners with no obvious political affiliation who chose to hunger strike throughout the twentieth century.

Throughout Last Weapons, Grant draws from a wide range of biographies, newspapers, official records, and prison correspondence spanning Britain, Ireland, and India. The first chapter examines the science of starvation. When hunger striking first emerged as a potent form of protest, little was known about the physiology of starvation. After all, it would be unethical to starve an individual for months for experimental purposes to find out what happened to his or her body. Willing volunteers would presumably have been hard to find. Until the 1920s, prison doctors feared that prisoners could only survive for only a week or so before succumbing to a hungry death. With little scientific knowledge to guide them, prison medical officers swiftly turned to the stomach tube to avoid publicly controversial deaths. But force-feeding was equally problematic, raising an unresolvable set of ethical conundrums about the limits of what could be done to incarcerated bodies.

Grant’s second chapter charts the influence of late nineteenth-century Russian hunger strike tactics on British suffragettes, placing the suffragettes in a transnational network of political protests. As Grant suggests, hunger striking became temporarily feminized. Chapter three argues that, in turn, in the 1910s, Irish republicans adapted the hunger strike from the suffragettes, impressed by its power to challenge the authority of the British government. The Irish Civil War complicated events when republicans went on hunger strike to protest against the newly-formed Irish government, whose institutional responses and lack...