Book Review | Antoinette Burton's 'The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism

Book: Burton, Antoinette. 2015. The Trouble With Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Review by: Manamee Guha

Insecure, tenuous, challenged and turbulent are words that have been consciously left out of the vocabulary of Pax Britannica. Champions of imperialism, instead, have chosen to applaud all that was positive about British rule in South Asia. Antoinette Burton’s latest work questions such positivism by ‘for grounding the frictions that marked its limits and the tenuous hold it had on colonial subjects during its troubled life.’ (2) The book focuses on the troubles and the failure that constantly plagued the heroes of the British empire, and highlights the incapability of the British to counter these attacks successfully at all times. The monograph includes an introduction and three long chapters on the military history of the empire in the North-West Frontier Provinces, economic history of the empire that saw many instances of labor protests and insurgencies and revolts in India and South Africa that were more than just sporadic occurrences in the history of British empire. Through a careful and detailed study of the three imperial phenomenons, Burton studies the events in motion-not sporadic-to view the empire as ‘as an assemblage of territories and interests’ that was ‘subject to setback, interruption and insurgency.’ The empire, Burton would concede, was as much a product of the troubles it encountered, as it was a product of its successes.

In the first chapter of the book titled Subject to Setback, Burton does a detailed read of Winston Churchill’s The Story of the Malakand Field Force to make her argument. Churchill’s account provides a narrative of British war efforts in the Afghan region. While the account was meant to highlight the ‘bravest deeds and finest characters of the Malakand Field Force’, the text and Burton’s detailed analysis of it, ends up revealing a lot more about the nature of British expeditions. For the British the road to securing military power in the North-West Frontier Provinces, Burton argues, was replete with blunders and tactical fails. The British army fought most of their wars on the defensive, rather than having the privilege to follow a strategic, disciplined offensive attack, mostly because of their unpreparedness against the natives’ attacks.

Accounts like Churchill’s were meant to be a testament, for the British audience back home, to the bravado of the British soldiers who were bringing glory and fame to the British nation by conquering new territories displaying their racial and military superiority at every step. In a re-interpretation of Churchill’s text, Burton contends, that most of the British victories were, in fact, won through ‘subterfuge…night attacks and minor gains.’ (56) Yet, the victorious accounts, seemingly far-fetched, were convincing enough and Burton argues, this was because of the short lived nature of the successes and failures of the British in the battlefield. This helps Burton reiterate one of her original arguments about the impermanence of empire and to prominently highlight the vulnerability of the makers of this empire. The white man’s burden, Burton would argue, has more to do with negotiations and protests, retreats and defeats that plagued the British, than with a ‘burden’ to impart the superior culture of themselves among the less fortunate non-whites.

It was not just in the battlefields that British rule and dominance was questioned and challenged. In her chapter Subject to Interruption Burton justifiably highlights sporadic protests that disrupted the business of empire. While the protests may not all have been directed at the economics of empire, they all managed to once again highlight the instability and vulnerability of the imperial project. Burton discusses the various forms of protests that the natives used, ranging from “strike-cum-boycott”, hartals, boycotts, civil disobedience all targeted the British hegemony, initially economically and as the movements gained momentum, politically. Yet, as Burton shows, they all managed to hit the British where it hurt them the most, at their economic stability, thereby crippling the British empire, albeit temporarily.

Insurgencies and unrests, not necessarily driven by economics, was the third thorn of trouble in the history of British empires. While the revolt of 1857 has served as a watershed event in the history of anti-colonial rhetoric, Burton sees this revolt, not as an exception, but as part of a trend of rising anti-colonial momentum that was building up across Asia and Africa. For Burton instances of insurgencies like the Bambatha rebellion, the Morant Bay rebellion, the Fenian rising and the Quit India movement, all inadvertently came together to threaten the empire from all sides. Although, Burton is also eager to point out that there did exist symbiotic links between these different rebellions in the form of exchanges of ideas mainly through the circulation of print culture that these various rebellions constantly troubled the empire with sporadic interruptions.

While Burton has convincingly argued for empire being a tenuous, uncertain and a troubled space, the principle of trouble for Burton still exists in a binary of success or failure for the British. Troubles could exist in cooperation and collaboration and changing loyalties. Dissent and trouble could also exist in the private space that could play a cataclysmic role in the shaping of trouble as Burton understands it in the battlefield. It did not necessarily have to be in the form of an outright protest or a war. The rise and fall of the empire was driven by troubles, by subaltern and minorities that needs to be highlighted and be made a part of imperial histories. Imperial histories would gain much to bring to the forefront troubles that compelled the empire to take on the shape that it did. While the legacy of imperialism has upheld British victories continuously, it is works like The Trouble with Empire that gives dissent its due space in imperial historiography.