Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax

by Mark Doyle

Overview

Communal Violence in the British Empire focuses on how Britons interpreted, policed, and sometimes fostered violence between different ethnic and religious communities in the empire. It also asks what these outbreaks meant for the power and prestige of Britain among subject populations.

Alternating between chapters of engaging narrative and chapters of careful, cross-colonial analysis, Mark Doyle uses outbreaks of communal violence in Ireland, the West Indies, and South Asia to uncover the inner workings of British imperialism: it's guiding assumptions, its mechanisms of control, its impact, and its limitations. He explains how Britons used communal violence to justify the imperial project even as that project was creating the conditions for more violence. Above all, this book demonstrates how communal violence exposed the limits of British power and, in time, helped lay the groundwork for the empire's collapse.

This book shows how violence, and the British state's handling thereof, was a fundamental part of the imperial experience for colonizer and colonized alike. It offers a new perspective on the workings of empire that will be of interest to any student of imperial or world history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474268257
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/11/2016
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Mark Doyle is Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of Fighting the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (2009).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Angel Gabriel in the Tropics: British Guiana, 1856
3. Causes: How British Imperialism Conjured the Very Violence it Sought to Suppress
4. Trouble on the Queen's Highways: Belfast, 1872
5. Interpretations: How Communal Riots Confirmed and Strengthened Britain's Civilizing Mission
6. Souter's Folly: Bombay, 1874
7. Policing: How Cultural Assumptions Guided the Policing of Communal Riots
8. The Cow Row: India, 1893
9. Consequences: How Communal Riots Weakened the British Empire
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Mark Doyle's Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax is an insightful book, as much for its methods as for the arguments and evidence it musters … he wants us to think more carefully about the ways in which liberal imperial ideology worked to sponsor the kind of unrest that, in turban, threw British supremacy into question.” —Victorian Studies

“Doyle's book is useful and original in focusing on specific instances of communal conflict and state response. Vivid and closely-grained studies ... alternate with analytical chapters assessing the strategies and failures of British authorities.” —Cercles

“Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this book draws together the local and imperial in impressive ways. Doyle masterfully explores the details of riots from the West Indies to Ireland to India, and demonstrates the ways in which these riots and the state's response fused communalism and nationalism to ultimately corrode the authority of the British Empire. By identifying and analyzing broader themes present in a variety of communal riots, this book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the intersections between internal violence and the imperial experience.” —Jill C. Bender, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA, author of The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire

“Treating communal disorder as a distinct analytical field, Mark Doyle's comparative approach to the causes and effects of riots in the Victorian Empire is consistently insightful. Communal violence in the Indian sub-continent, British Guiana, and Ireland - the three cases that Doyle examines - profoundly reshaped ideas of authority and attachment, at same time highlighting the hypocrisies of imperialist claims of benevolent modernisation.” —Martin Thomas, University of Exeter, UK

“An insightful book, as much for its method as for the arguments and evidence it musters ... Doyle has given us a welcome opportunity to head back into the archives and follow his provocations wherever they may lead.” —Victorian Studies

From the Publisher