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.
[Show full text]