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The Politics of Anticolonial Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Erosion of Empire

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The Politics of Anticolonial Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Erosion of Empire The Politics of Anticolonial Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Erosion of Empire Richard J. McAlexander Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Politics of Anticolonial Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Erosion of Empire Richard J. McAlexander This dissertation studies conflict in a hierarchical international system, the British Empire. How did the British Empire respond to violent and nonviolent resistance within its colonies? I develop a theory explaining how and why an imperial metropole becomes involved in and grant concessions to its colonies. Unlike federal nation-states and looser relationship like in an international organization, modern European em- pires were characterized by selective engagement of the metropole with its peripheral colonies. This has important implications for understanding metropolitan response to peripheral resistance. In contrast to more recent work, I find that violence was more effective at coercing metropolitan concessions to the colonies in the British Empire than nonviolence. I argue that this occurred because violence overwhelmed the capabilities of local colonial governments, and violence commanded metropoli- tan attention and involvement. This theory is supported with a wide range of data, including yearly measures of anticolonial resistance, every colonial concession made by the British Empire after 1918, daily measures of metropolitan discussions of colo- nial issues from cabinet archives, and web-scraped casualty data from British death records. In addition, I present in-depth case studies of British responses to resistance in Cyprus and the Gold Coast, along with a conceptual schema of different types of resistance to understand strikes, riots, terrorism, and civil disobedience in a number of other British colonies. My findings show that the effectiveness of resistance is con- ditional on the political structure that it is embedded in and that hierarchy matters for understanding state responses to resistance. Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 0.1 Introduction . 1 0.2 Literature Review . 6 0.3 Decolonization, Historiography, and IR Scholarship . 16 0.4 Outline of Dissertation . 19 Theory 23 0.5 A Theory of Imperial Response . 23 0.6 Variable 1, Resistance . 24 0.7 Variable 2, Concessions . 26 0.8 Variable 3, Strategic Importance . 28 0.9 Variable 4, Metropolitan Attention . 31 0.10 How Do These Variables Fit Together? A Theory of Imperial Response 36 0.11 Hypotheses . 50 0.12 Scope Conditions . 52 0.13 Conclusion . 53 i Historical Background 55 0.14 Introduction . 55 0.15 What are the explanations for Britain's decolonization? . 59 0.16 Historical Background & the theory of Imperial Response . 69 0.17 Conclusion . 80 Empirics & Quantitative Models 81 0.18 Introduction . 81 0.19 Research Design . 82 0.20 Data . 86 0.21 Model and Estimation . 93 0.22 Results: Concessions . 95 0.23 Results: Attention . 100 0.24 Exploring Heterogeneous Effects . 113 0.25 Conclusion . 115 Typology of Resistance 123 0.26 Comparing Strategies of Resistance . 123 0.27 A Typology of Resistance . 129 0.28 Riots . 131 0.29 Strikes . 134 0.30 1929 Women's War in Nigeria. Why were there no Reforms? . 141 0.31 Within-case analysis: Palestine 1936-1939 . 145 0.32 Quantitative Models: Hierarchical Resistance and Concessions . 156 ii 0.33 Conclusion . 164 Parliamentary Debates 167 0.34 Introduction . 167 0.35 Background in Parliament's Role in Colonial Affairs . 170 0.36 What was an \uprising"? . 175 0.37 Euphemisms Over Time . 183 0.38 What drove the use of euphemisms? . 187 0.39 Hierarchical Resistance and Euphemism Use . 190 0.40 Attention, Euphemisms, and Concessions . 193 0.41 Conclusion . 196 Cyprus 199 0.42 Introduction . 199 0.43 Violent and Nonviolent Resistance in Cyprus . 202 0.44 British Views of Cyprus . 207 0.45 How British Responded to Resistance . 212 0.46 Conclusion . 223 Gold Coast 227 0.47 Introduction . 227 0.48 Background . 230 0.49 Riots and Strikes before 1948 . 236 0.50 The 1948 Riots and their aftermath . 239 iii 0.51 After 1948 . 244 0.52 Unrest in the Gold Coast and British Parliamentary Debates . 250 0.53 Conclusion . 252 Conclusion 255 0.54 Limitations & Future Work . 262 Appendix 269 0.55 List of Concessions . 269 0.56 Cabinet Archive . 282 Bibliography 283 iv Acknowledgements This was a (very) long process and there are lots of people to thank. First and fore- most, thanks to my advisor, Page Fortna. The idea for this project grew out of her Terrorism seminar In the Spring of 2016. During the prospectus stage, Page provided necessary encouragement to me that this was an idea worth pursuing. Her feedback throughout my writing of this dissertation strengthened my argument, clarified my points, and ultimately made me think much harder about what I was doing. Jack Snyder also provided crucial feedback in the early stages of this project and offered endless suggestions on the relevant literature that I was missing and points of clari- fication. This is a much stronger work than I would have produced alone if it were not for Page and Jack. Josh Simon and Matthew Connelly also provided very impor- tant guidance during the prospectus. I am in awe every member of my dissertation committee|Page, Jack, Sarah Daly, Michael Doyle, and Andreas Wimmer|and ten years ago I would never believe that such amazing scholars would read my work with such great care and provide me with such valuable feedback. Future iterations of this project will be stronger because of them. Above all, my wife PernaLyn, has supported me in countless ways during this long journey and made it very clear to me that this was something worth doing because it made me happy. Her strength v is infinite. PernaLyn gave birth to our three daughters during my time in graduate school. Our third daughter, Mabel, was born stillborn this February. We will miss her always. Ruby and Margot are beings of pure joy and light and I am fortunate to help raise them. In the spirit of this project, I hope they know that a better world is possible but only if you fight for it. vi To PernaLyn vii Introduction 0.1 Introduction Who was right, Gandhi or Fanon? The fall of the European empires in the 20th century transformed the international system. Explanations in the International Re- lations (IR) literature locate this change by referencing Cold War dynamics or the restructuring of the global economy. Less emphasis is placed on the role of anticolo- nial resistance within the colonies. This is puzzling, since anticolonial resistance was a near-constant response to imperial rule, occupied the metropole's attention, and factored into colonial policy. Both the violent and nonviolent forms of anticolonial resistance mobilized populations all around the globe, and the leaders of these move- ments at the time of independence came to rule their states for decades. Yet little is known about how the European empires responded to resistance, what the rela- tive effects of violent and nonviolent resistance were, and how resistance in imperial structures may differ from the more commonly studied context of the nation-state. This dissertation studies the effects of violent and nonviolent anticolonial resis- tance on metropolitan policy in the British Empire during the 20th century. To understand this phenomenon, I present a model of imperial response. Empires, un- 1 like nation-states, are political structures that are segmented into the metropole and its peripheral units. Peripheral units are directly administered by the local governors, but the metropole is in charge of large-scale changes in policy and other imperial re- lations. Metropolitan involvement in the colonies varies spatially and temporally. I theorize that anticolonial resistance can induce concessions from the metropole when the resistance is better able to command the metropole's attention. Violent resis- tance is more effective at coercing metropolitan concessions because it is better able to threaten the metropole's core interests and garner the attention of the metropole. While disruptive to governance, nonviolent resistance is much less likely to be debated and discussed by metropolitan policymakers. Nonviolence, because it is less likely to threaten the interests of the metropole, remains the province of the colonial governor. However, there are limits to violent resistance. Since imperial metropoles are mostly concerned with issues of security, the strategic value of an imperial posses- sion conditions metropolitan response to unrest. In strategically important colonies, granting concessions (and by extension, increasing suffrage) risks empowering hostile actors and allowing them to take over the levers of the colonial state. This jeopardizes the metropole's post-independence relations with these colonies. The result, in most cases, is a bargaining failure|concessions reduce anticolonial hostility, but granting concessions can also cause the metropole to lose access to its colonies. The persistent refusal of the metropole to grant concessions in response to unrest for strategically important colonies explains why some colonies experienced large-scale conflicts during the decolonization era. This work makes a number of contributions to existing scholarship. By privileging 2 the interests of the target of resistance in my theory, I show that this variation mat- ters for understanding responses to violent and nonviolent resistance. Current work focuses on aspects of resistance movements themselves. I argue that this approach is incomplete, and determining why a resistance movement is successful|or why they chose a primarily violent or nonviolent strategy|requires an assessment of what the target wants and their willingness to concede or repress (or both). In addition, by offering an empire-wide analysis of all formal colonies in the British Empire, this work compares colonies that experience violent, nonviolent, and no resistance, along with spatial and temporal variation in those variables.
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