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An Interview 権力行使としての 帝国 Volume 10 | Issue 41 | Number 1 | Article ID 3840 | Oct 08, 2012 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Empire as a Practice of Power: An Interview 権力行使としての 帝国 Partha Chatterjee, Ayça Çubukçu subjects. Partha Chatterjee's The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, 2012) follows the ever- changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the "civilizing" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, examining the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history Empire is an Inseparable Part of Modern of the modern state. Political Theory When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of "the black hole of Calcutta" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial 1 10 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF World History. In any case, I have tried to do something that is not very easily done, namely, combine within the same text a narrative history alongside a serious engagement with the history of a concept. The usual way of approaching the latter problem would have been to place the modern concept of empire within a frame of intellectual history. But I have been concerned in this book to deal with empire as a practice rather than merely as a concept. Hence, I needed to take the discussion out of a strictly intellectual history framework and instead show how conceptual changes were connected to actual practices of power in imperial settings and also of resistance to empire. I chose to do this by picking the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta as the narrative spine of the book. In each chapter, I move away from this evolving story to pick out instances of discursive shifts as well as shifts in the techniques of imperial power, only to return to a new episode in the Black Hole story and what was happening in and around the fort in Calcutta. That is the craft. I suppose I have Black Hole Memorial restored by Lord employed narrative techniques I have learnt Curzon from literature and the theatre, but that is the privilege one enjoys when one writes narrative history instead of theoretical social science. But Introduction: The Legitimation of Imperial Practices I have also done something that I learnt while doing Subaltern Studies—namely, to Ayça Çubukçu: How would you describe the interrogate in theoretical terms the elements of field and the genre which The Black Hole of popular culture. Hence, I was able to connect Empire fits, or else, wishes to inspire? What is the theoretical foundations of imperial policy the craft you practiced when writing The Black and anti-imperial politics with the everyday Hole? Is this a book in Anthropology and Asian forms of mass culture. No intellectual historian Studies as the Princeton University Press would consider the popular theatre or football catalogue claims? as subjects of serious study. But I have tried to show that they were as effective historical Partha Chatterjee: This is like asking a forces as—who knows, perhaps more effective magician to reveal his tricks. But actually that than—the writings and speeches of intellectuals is not a good analogy, because there are no and political leaders. secrets behind my craft. Is this a book in Asian Studies? Yes, it is. Is this a book inÇubukçu: “This book,” your preface declares, Anthropology? I am not sure. But I would “braids two histories: a little history and a certainly claim that it is a book on Modern grand one.” The little history is local, tracing 2 10 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF the career of the English East India Company’s conceptual changes in those disciplinary fortified settlement in Bengal from theknowledges of power. That is my method. To a eighteenth century, while the grand history is large extent, I had to invent it. Whether it global, following the phenomenon of modern works or not is for readers like you to judge. empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. How would you characterize the “method” which governed the way you braided these two histories? How does one write a History of a Global Practice of Power, as your book’s subtitle has it? Chatterjee: Let me elaborate on my answer to your first question. The two histories actually require two different methods. For the first, I could have written a straightforward political history of the colonial city of Calcutta, beginning with the fortified British settlement in the early eighteenth century, Siraj’s attack on the fort, the British reconquest and founding of the empire in India, the emergence of Calcutta as the capital city of the British empire and the centre of colonial capitalism, all the way to nationalism and the end of British rule. This political history has been already written by others. And as for the second, I could have done a conceptual history of modern empire—an old subject of intellectual history. But I wanted to bring them together into the same discursive space through a focus on the practices of empire. Hence the braiding of the English officers in the Black Hole two histories. But I had to be selective on both sides, since every switch from one register to Çubukçu: In a memorable formulation, you the other required a discursive shift. To try to observe that “modern empire was not an do both histories in the conventional way in the aberrant supplement to the history of same book would have been utterlymodernity but rather its constituent part,” and unmanageable—in fact, impossible. So Ithat “it will continue to thrive as long as the narrowed down the local political history to the practices of the modern state-form remain history of the Black Hole story and Fort unchanged.” Why is this the case? What is it William. On the other side, I moved selectively about the modern state-form, which lends itself through the historiography of British India, the to empire? history of Western political theory and political economy, of international law and international Chatterjee: This is a claim I could only have institutions, insofar as they had a bearing on supported by explicitly making the connection the evolution of actual practices of empire. My between the two histories, not otherwise. The attempt was to show that while many of my field of imperial history (even, I would suggest, narratives of actual practices were local, they the revisionist “new imperial history”) has had a strong relationship with evolvingdefined itself as a special subject separate from 3 10 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF the history of the modern state which is a wants to disavow empire. narrative supplement to the history of modern political theory—a classic field of intellectual Çubukçu: Offering a typology of European history. I have discussed this in myoverseas empires, you distinguish between book Lineages of Political Society (2011). The three kinds—white settler colonies, plantation fundamental claim of imperial history is that colonies, and Oriental colonies—to argue that the problems encountered in overseas colonies colonies of the Oriental kind posed were of a special kind that required pragmatic, unprecedented conceptual problems for on-the-spot solutions that, even though they (imperial) political thought in the late were often rationalized and packaged in eighteenth century. What was so particular theoretical terms for consumption in the about Oriental colonies? How do the metropolis, lacked a proper grounding in “conceptual problems” that materialized theoretical knowledge. In other words, what through the Haitian Revolution in a plantation imperial historians claim is that there really colony of revolutionary France, for example, can be no theoretical history of empire. The compare with those addressed by British rule in exception to this is, of course, the Marxist India? tradition of the history of imperialism. But that has been bound to the twentieth-century Chatterjee: It is interesting that you raise the history of finance capital, which is a rather question of the Haitian Revolution in this specific history if you want to think of modern context. The Haitian Revolution actually empire as going back at least to the beginning produced, I think, the first postcolonial of the nineteenth century, if not earlier. condition in our contemporary sense, as my friend Michel-Rolph Trouillot (who, sadly, So my answer was to find a way of tying passed away recently) tried to suggest. modern empire as a history of actual practices Because the revolt of African slaves and to its history as a concept. I found a way of freemen at the turn of the nineteenth century doing this through my braiding of the two in a French Caribbean colony was a very histories—one a local history of imperial and different thing from the revolution of white anti-imperial practices and the other asettlers in British North America or the Creole conceptual history firmly located within the revolutions in South America.
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