PROOF Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributors ix 1 Liberal Civilisation and Its Discontents: Evil, Barbarism and Empire 1 Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill and Bertrand Taithe Part I Metropolitan Evils 2 Evil in Question: The Victorian Social and the Politics of Prostitution, 1830–1900 33 Tom Crook 3 Terror, Spectacle and the Press: Anarchist Outrage in Edwardian England 54 David Speicher 4 ‘And I am the God of Destruction!’: Fu Manchu and the Construction of Asiatic Evil in the Novels of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1912–1939 73 Antony Taylor Part II Imperial Evils 5 The Politics of Italianism: Reynolds’s Newspaper,theIndian Mutiny, and the Radical Critique of Liberal Imperialism in Mid-Victorian Britain 99 Eugenio F. Biagini 6 The Victorian Lexicon of Evil: Frederic Harrison, the Positivists and the Language of International Politics 126 H.S. Jones v June 16, 2011 18:43 MAC/VIL Page-v 9780230_241275_01_prex PROOF vi Contents Part III Geopolitics of Evil 7 Evil, Liberalism and the Imperial Designs of the Catholic Church, 1867–1905 147 Bertrand Taithe 8 ‘Now I have seen evil, and I cannot be silent about it’: Arnold J. Toynbee and his Encounters with Atrocity, 1915–1923 172 Rebecca Gill 9 Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Britain, Germany and the Treatment of ‘Native Races’, 1904–1939 201 Christina Twomey Part IV Agents of Evil 10 Conrad’s Horror: Heart of Darkness and the Imaginary of Power 229 Thomas Osborne 11 The Lives of Others: The Defeat of Evil or the Evil of Defeat? 246 Scott McCracken 12 Islam, Violence and the New Barbarism 267 Tim Jacoby Index 283 June 16, 2011 18:43 MAC/VIL Page-vi 9780230_241275_01_prex PROOF 1 Liberal Civilisation and Its Discontents: Evil, Barbarism and Empire Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill and Bertrand Taithe There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpreta- tion of phenomena ...1 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Good and evil, Nietzsche stressed in his aphorisms of 1886, were the obsolete moral legacies of more credulous times. Yet, for many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, good and evil remained forces of great power and vitality. Often transposed on to notions of civilisation and barbarism, good and evil were thought to be at restless work in the world: in the movements of history; in the rise and fall of empires; in the cosmopolitan cities of an ever-shrinking globe. We have only to recall George W. Bush’s evocation of an ‘axis of evil’ in the wake of 9/11 to observe that the antithesis of good and evil still enjoys considerable currency.2 Then, as now, languages of evil and barbarism were put to work in relation to all manner of threats, both at home and abroad. It made for an abundant discourse, capable of manifold applications and variations, not least because it intersected with considerations of race, class, imperial geopolitics and religion, among others. To be sure, these applications and variations were often crude. As Nietzsche argued, part of the attraction of the binary opposition ‘good and evil’ lies in its ability to impose order on a complex world of power and struggle. Morality always has its uses.3 It can demonise, dramatise and caricature. Above all perhaps, it can provide a sense of purpose, narrative and meaning. In this respect, moral binaries them- selves are a function of power and should be interrogated accordingly (as Nietzsche himself attempted in his Genealogy of Morals). Yet, as the historical record suggests, binaries of this sort were not always taken 1 June 16, 2011 18:36 MAC/VIL Page-1 9780230_241275_02_cha01 PROOF 2 Liberal Civilisation and Its Discontents for granted; not everyone was part of Europe’s unthinking ‘moral herd’. Rather, good and evil, barbarism and civilisation, were also the subject of critical interrogation and subtle exploration. In fact, when unravelled, as they frequently were, claims to moral superiority, a civilising mission, or victory over forces of evil could offer glimpses of more disturbing possibilities – of the allure of evil, its governmental ‘necessity’ and even the capacity for barbarism within all, no matter how civilised.4 The chapters contained in this book seek to recover the richness of this discourse in the context of nineteenth-century Western Europe through to the present. ‘Genocide’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘mass warfare’: these are among the immediate historiographical coordinates that spring to mind in the context of European modernity. An immense labour has gone into investigating and conceptualising all three. The aim of this book, however, is not to contribute to this scholarship as such. Rather, the aim is to begin the task of generating a new set of his- toriographical coordinates, ones which set established preoccupations within a more expansive interpretive framework. These coordinates are threefold: political, in terms of the discourses and practices of liberal governance; historiographical, in terms of moving beyond philosophi- cal and empirical approaches to evil and barbarism; and chronological, in terms of various assumptions regarding human agency, free will and time that emerged in the wake of the Enlightenment. This introduction considers these elements in turn, dedicating dis- crete sections to each. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasising at the outset that the book assumes that evil has a history and is a historical phe- nomenon, a history which includes the shifting use of key terms to grasp and problematise evil: ‘civilisation’, ‘terrorism’, ‘Islamism’ and ‘culture’, among others with immediate resonance. A further section will thus introduce the shifting application of terms and the increasingly globalised public sphere in which they circulated. As will be apparent throughout this book, evil and barbarism have been – and continue to be – subject to discursive mediation and the complex interplay of ideas and interests, principles and prejudices. Evil raises all sorts of tricky ontological questions, so it will be useful to be clear as to what is at stake here. It could be, as various philosophers have argued in recent years, that evil possesses a kind of constitutive inscrutability, an irreducibly non-representable character, which might be considered universal.5 But even if ultimately elusive, it is also true that some attempt is always made to put evil into discourse. As such, evil emerges in specific historical scenarios, replete with their own par- ticular idioms and media, and assumptions about moral agency and June 16, 2011 18:36 MAC/VIL Page-2 9780230_241275_02_cha01 PROOF Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill and Bertrand Taithe 3 the workings of society and government, as we shall see. Furthermore, evil can serve political and cultural ends, shoring up governmental projects, as much as conceptions of ‘national character’, among other possibilities.6 It can indeed be put to use, and in all manner of ways. This is not the same as saying that evil is merely in the eye of the beholder; nor is it to affirm glibly that the devil may appear in many guises. Rather, it is to assert not only that evil must be put into discourse, but also that this discourse can be deployed strategically, with given cir- cumstances and aims in mind, and that evil is capable of being invoked in multiple ways, from the cynical to the naïve. Evil in fact has never been the preserve of theologians or philosophers, as this book demon- strates. The chapters collected here show that, with varying degrees of sophistication, evil has been – and continues to be – bound up with fears of anarchy, terrorism and immigration, forebodings of tyranny and colonial abuse, and encounters with extreme violence and exploitation. As the introduction will set out, various themes cut across the chap- ters, but the editors have also chosen to group them into four further thematic and broadly chronological parts. Entitled ‘Metropolitan Evils’, the first part is concerned with evils associated with cities, especially London, as commented on and propagated in various forms of dis- course, from pamphlet literature and social investigations to pulp fiction and tabloid journalism. Crook explores the subject of Victorian prosti- tution, often referred to as the ‘great social evil’, and examines how it was contested in terms of different assumptions regarding the agency of prostitutes and the efficacy of state intervention. Speicher’s chapter reconstructs press reaction to an ‘anarchist outrage’ which took place in Edwardian London, while Taylor’s chapter examines depictions of Asiatic evil in the pulp fiction villainy of Fu Manchu during the early twentieth century. Both chapters demonstrate how popular perceptions of evil and barbarism tapped into powerful currents of anxiety regarding immigration and the presence within the capital of foreign ‘aliens’ and ‘exotic’ cultures. The part that follows, entitled ‘Imperial Evils’, is devoted to radical critiques of the evils and atrocities arising from British foreign policy and colonial rule. Biagini’s chapter examines the anti-imperialism of a popular post-Chartist weekly, Reynolds’s News, while Jones examines the work of the leading English positivist thinker, Frederic Harrison, and his critique of imperial evils and what he termed ‘terrorism’. Both chap- ters demonstrate that the civilising rationale of ‘liberal imperialism’ was far from hegemonic. They also demonstrate how, for radicals at least, corruption abroad was always profoundly entangled with corruption at June 16, 2011 18:36 MAC/VIL Page-3 9780230_241275_02_cha01 PROOF 4 Liberal Civilisation and Its Discontents home: British claims to civilisation were at best fragile, at worst offen- sive. The radicals who subscribed to Reynolds’s News viewed themselves as part of a universal democratic fraternity, whose own struggles for free- dom mirrored those of colonial subaltern subjects. Similarly, as Jones stresses, for Harrison the moral integrity of foreign and colonial policy ultimately reflected the moral integrity of the metropole.