World population has probably now reached 8 billion. For many, this will be a cause for alarm rather than celebration. However, Natalia Kanem, the Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has rightly cautioned against ‘population alarmism’ and warned against population control measures, saying these have historically been ‘ineffective and even dangerous.’ Some commentators call for calm on the basis that past and present projections of runaway population growth leading directly to mass famine and other catastrophes have been overblown. A brief look back at the history of India’s experience of population control reminds us why population alarmism and population control can be so harmful.
Lori Lee Oates Memorial University of Newfoundland
It has long been established by historians such as Christopher Bayly and scholars of post-colonialism such as Leela Gandhi that theosophy was an important nineteenth-century intellectual current. Bayly, for example, credits theosophy with diffusing the Bhavagad Gita throughout India and bringing it to the attention of the wider world. However, what has been less well-established is how those ideas were moving across international lines or the links between theosophy and empire.
My recently published article in The International History Review drew on new primary sources to demonstrate that the Theosophical Society was actively building print networks to expand and move their occult philosophies across the globe. The article paid closer attention to how theosophical texts were moving internationally than previous research. It also demonstrated how Theosophical Society leaders were using expanding imperial networks such as steam ships, telegraphs, and international banking to grow the society across the globe.
In a widely criticised interview with Sky News on 25 April 2021, the IT billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates Jr. responded to a question whether he supported sharing the ‘recipe’ of the Sars-COV-2 or Covid-19 vaccines with manufacturers worldwide, with an emphatic: ‘No.’ No, he said, because there ‘are only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines.’ Moving the production of a vaccine from Johnson and Johnson’s to a factory in India was already novel, he said, and could only happen because of ‘our grants and our expertise.’ Intellectual property was not holding back anything in this case, he said, because it wasn’t as if there were ‘idle vaccine factories with regulatory approvals, that make magically safe vaccines.’
It would appear from this account that most of the world was a place empty of funds and expertise, waiting for the largesse of saviours such as Bill Gates Jr. and appropriate guidance to be able to protect their own health in a scientific and safe way. Looking at the story of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine with some more attention, however, produces some rather more complicated stories.
On 23 November 2020, an Oxford University-based research team led by Dr Andrew Pollard declared a breakthrough in developing an effective vaccine against Covid-19. The team had been working furiously for months, backed with UK government funding and public donations. Oxford University then announced a permissive protocol for licensing COVID-19 related IP to third parties under ‘these exceptional circumstances.’ Of the 5 points of guidance offered to organisations seeking licences to use Oxford University’s IP (or recipe for vaccine), one was: ‘The default approach of the University and OUI regarding (1) will be to offer non-exclusive, royalty-free licences to support free of charge, at-cost or cost + limited margin supply as appropriate, and only for the duration of the pandemic, as defined by the WHO.’
Such an approach is not unprecedented. In the 1950s polio epidemics swept through the globe, and in the midst of outbreaks two rivaling vaccines were developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, both without patent. When asked about this, Jonas Salk famously remarked ‘Would you patent the sun?’. It seems that the decision for the Salk vaccines lack of patent might have been a practical one, as it would not have been possible by contemporary standards, regardless of Salk’s moral stance. Sabin’s decision was an openly political one: the vaccine was a result of international collaboration between researchers of the two opposing sides of the Cold War, and this scientific exchange was greatly celebrated at the time. Of course, Gates is right that a lack of patent doesn’t automatically mean immediate access and capability of vaccine production everywhere in the world. It took years for many countries, in war-ravaged European states, up to half a decade to establish infrastructure, skill and procure materials (including live animals) for domestic vaccine productions of the Salk vaccine. However, many others had the capability, while standards of production were developed by the WHO, and this, in the end, dampened the dire global vaccine shortage in both the short and long run. More importantly, the lack of patent did not hinder national or global vaccination efforts.
Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception. At the front lines of imperial power were, all too often, common men (and some women) who were tricked, cozened, misled, coerced, and whipped into serving as the cannon-fodder of Empire. The temptation to desert was often present and the thought of mutiny cannot have been absent. These plebeian men were ‘kept in line’ men of status who served as commercial agents and military officers. But even among them, kickbacks and commissions were omnipresent and could grow into serious leakages of revenue or foment major acts of treason. Furthermore the wholesale desertion of a dynasty by its elite subjects was not unknown. In Britain in both 1660 and 1688, the political establishment and key army units deserted their established government to side with an invader sponsored by a foreign power. We could multiply such examples.
Transoceanic empires built by corporations like the British and Dutch East India Companies faced even greater problems because they lacked the sacred aura that surrounded kings and helped maintain nominal loyalties. It took nearly half a year for an inquiry or command to reach a functionary in Asia and it took many more months before a report or an excuse would come back. The military, commercial, or political situation could change dramatically in the interim. Many readers will be aware, for example, that the British and Americans continued to fight for six weeks in 1815 after the peace treaty was signed between the two powers. One of these peace-time battles cemented Andrew Jackson’s reputation and propelled him to the presidency. Asia was much further away and across more dangerous waters. Continue reading “Did the British Empire depend on separating parents and children?”→
Bengal Tiger, Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), Exeter.
Rajarshi Mitra Indian Institute of Information Technology
During my trip to Exeter to attend the Britain and the World Conference earlier this year, I discovered that the Royal Bengal Tiger on display in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) was a gift from King George V (1865 – 1936). Exeter’s Bengal tiger was one of 39 tigers the King had killed during his hunting excursion in Nepalese Terai in 1911 – the year of his grand Coronation Durbar in India. The accompanying plaque states that the King presented tiger skins to British museums so that visitors who have never seen a tiger could meet one face-to-face. Like any responsible museum, RAMM’s curators have taken care to send a nuanced message through its natural history exhibits. They raise our environmental guilt, they remind us of nature’s destruction in the hands of man. Tiger hunts in India have a rich history of their own, and that Exeter has somehow been made part of that history had me intrigued. Continue reading “Shooting Tigers in Early 20th-Century India”→
It’s been a year now since Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirkwas released to critical acclaim, public approval and criticism. Much of the criticism arose because the film omitted any mention of the Commonwealth troops who were in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and at Dunkirk.[1] It felt like a missed opportunity to correct an anomaly in the collective memory of Britain and the world: to remember the mule drivers of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps (RIASC) who were also on those beaches.
So here’s the missing piece of the story, derived from my research into Dunkirk’s Indian soldiers.
On May 29, 1940, in the middle of the evacuation of Dunkirk, with thousands of British soldiers lined up on the beaches east of the French town, with a giant pall of smoke from the burning oil refinery, with regular sorties by Luftwaffe planes scattering the queues, and with ships large and small taking men off the beaches, Major Mohammed Akbar Khan of the RIASC marched four miles along the beach at the head of 312 Muslim Indians, en route from Punjab to Pirbright.
Caroline Preston is in her final year of undergraduate study in History at the University of Exeter. This post stems from an essay written for the module ‘Critics of Empire.’
Many Indian nationalists in the 1920s were angered by the coercive British enforcement of free trade in India.[1] The policy was, according to one scholar, ‘thrust by an advanced industrialised country on a nation which still needed protective tariffs to develop’.[2] This same free trade imperial policy had resulted in an economic ‘drain’ as India had to export raw cotton and import manufactured cotton goods because India’s native industries were underdeveloped and thus uncompetitive in the global economy.[3] Mass nationalist politics picked up in colonial South Asia, first in Bengal in the Edwardian era, and then across India in the 1920s.[4] This included the self-determination ‘Swadeshi’ (indigenous goods) movement, which aimed to achieve ‘swaraj’ (home rule) by establishing India’s economic self-sufficiency from Britain.[5] Swadeshi was in certain respects an anti-colonial adaptation of German-American protectionist theorist Friedrich List’s (1789- 1846) concept of economic nationalism.[6]
Mahatma Gandhi led the Swadeshi movement in the 1920s, encouraging non-cooperation and the exclusive consumption of hand spun cloth called ‘khadi’ in order to develop domestic industries.[7] In response, the pro-India movement of the 1920s arose in the United States, a network of Indian and US intellectuals who hoped to mobilise the US government and the public to challenge British imperial policy.[8] They promoted Indian independence from British rule, or at least dominion status comparable to that of Canada.
Norman Thomas
I’ve chosen two illustrative sources to explore the political economy of the pro-India movement in 1920s America. The first is an article by Norman Thomas, ‘Internationalism and India’ (June 1920) in Young India, a monthly magazine published in New York by the Indian Home Rule League of America (IHRL).[9] Thomas (1884- 1968) was an American Presbyterian minister, a pacifist, and an anti-imperialist.[10] He was a member of the Friends of Freedom for India (FFI), another key pro-India organisation.[11] Thomas was also a democratic socialist; he became formally affiliated with the American Socialist Party in 1918, and was its presidential nominee in 1928.[12] Murray Seidler has since described Thomas as the party’s ‘most influential theoretician’.[13] In the article, Thomas’s general argument was that, although he supported the Indian nationalist movement, once they obtained independence they should avoid enforcing a protectionist economic policy, believing such policies created geopolitical tensions that could eventually result in war. Instead, he advocated internationalism under a democratic socialist structure.
Jabez T. Sunderland
The second source comprises of extracts from a chapter entitled ‘American Interest in India’ by the American liberal activist and Unitarian minister Dr Jabez Sunderland (1842- 1936). The chapter is from India in Bondage (1929), which, like Young India, was published in New York.[14] Sunderland was elected vice president of the IHRL in 1918.[15] Following the collapse of the IHRL and FFI in 1922, Sunderland again became active in the Pro-India Movement at the end of the decade, largely in response to Gandhi’s ongoing civil disobedience campaign.[16] Sunderland’s India in Bondage argued for Indian Home Rule, written partly in response to Pennsylvania journalist Katherine’s Mayo’s explicitly pro-imperialist book Mother India (1927).[17] This particular chapter explained why America held an interest in what was commonly perceived to be a local colonial issue for Britain. Here Sunderland focussed on economic factors; he suggested that Britain should relinquish its imperial control over India and enable Indians to enforce their own policy of free trade. He hoped this would reduce international tensions and provide opportunities for American businessmen.[18]
These two sources exemplify the confluence of socialist and liberal economic opinions within the movement, including the commonalities and shared values of free trade and democracy that enabled them to collaborate. Both Thomas and Sunderland also emphasised the threat of war as a key motive behind their economic arguments. Continue reading “The Political Economy of the Pro-India Movement in 1920s America”→
In 2019, India will embark upon a uniquely postcolonial set of centenaries. During the Great War the Defence of India Act (1915) had given the Government of India exceptional powers to silence dissent and crush any nascent “terrorist” or “revolutionary” movement. So effective had the powers proven, against both radical and moderate nationalists, that there were many within the colonial state who sought their extension into peace time. The “Rowlatt” (Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes) Act of 1919 attempted this, and the resistance against the act was led by the ex-lawyer and future-Mahatma, Mr MK Gandhi. The centenary of the Rowlatt “Satyagraha” (the name for Gandhi’s non-violent, political “truth-force”, protest movement) will doubtless by commemorated by the Congress party and many others in India.
Yet both these commemorations may well be overshadowed in 2019 by the centenary of the “Jallianwala Bagh” massacre, in which the colonial state displayed the violence inherent in the Rowlatt regulations in Amritsar; the shooting of unarmed civilians that sparked a global outcry. While India was enduring violence at home it was plotting peace abroad. The year 1919 will also mark the centenary of India’s contribution to the Peace Treaty of Versailles. Few anticipated that India’s attendance at the conference would automatically make it a founder of the League of Nations, the only non-self-governing state to ever become a member. 1919 will be a busy year for centenaries; all of the above, in some way, are legacies of the First World War.
I recently came across a photograph I can’t stop thinking about. Captured in 1905, it shows a Bangalore-trained masseur, Teepoo Hall, in the middle of a Melbourne Hospital room. One woman and twenty some men have clustered around Hall to watch him massage the bare shoulders of a reclining woman. Many of the students display bemusement in half-smiles. One of the men is positioned very close to Hall’s left shoulder and looks forthrightly at the camera, as if ready to learn from Hall; ready, even, to take Hall’s place.
The Weekly Times, 30 September 1905, State Library of Victoria.
The photo shows the transfer of Indian knowledge in process in the medical heart of Melbourne. It does so four years after the institution of the racially exclusive federal 1901 Immigration Restriction Act (IRA), which was effectively reducing the numbers of Indians in Australia. And yet, as the picture shows, in the early 20th century Hall continued to promote the ‘art of massage’.[1] Indeed, Hall had recently become a founding member of the Australian Massage Association, and on this basis he features in histories of physiotherapy in Australia.[2]
The image thus tells an intriguing story, but not a typical one. Probing further, we can understand that the picture also reflects a tension of nation-building and empire. In Hall’s centrality and power, an inversion is at play. Most white-made representations of the day consigned Indians to the ‘slum’ margins of ‘Little Lon’, and showed them as an ‘undesirable nuisance’. But in this Melbourne Hospital room, Hall literally had the upper hand. Continue reading “‘The Indian masseur’: How Teepoo Hall Kneaded Early ‘White’ Melbourne”→
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at India Gate, a memorial to Indian service in the First World War, its foundation stone laid by the Duke of Connaught in 1921. Credit: @PARoyal
Charles V. Reed Elizabeth City State University Editor, H-Empire
As the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit south Asia this week, doing the sorts of things that royals are expected to do whilst abroad in the former empire – attend fancy social events, commemorate, inaugurate, and patronize, play cricket, and so on – the celebrity-obsessed global media has enthusiastically followed their every move. An even cursory glance at the tweets tagged #RoyalVisitIndia reveals the performative and visual character of the royal tour – so essential to its purpose since the first visits of the nineteenth century. William and Kate’s touring ancestors would find much familiar in their itineraries, the ceremony, the responses. It’s a quite odd thing, when we think about it, considering nearly seventy years of Indian independence from British rule. Of course, the present Queen’s dedication to the Commonwealth and maintaining the monarchy’s role in the former empire — as chronicled in Philip Murphy’s Monarchy and the End of Empire — explains much of it. But the Victorian history of the royal tour is of equal significance. Continue reading “The Victorian Origins of Will and Kate’s Visit to India”→
Apollinariya Yakubova, who refused to marry Lenin, was discovered in London by a Russian historian. Photograph: State Archive of the Russian Federation. Courtesy of the Guardian.
News of the death of Sir Christopher Bayly swept across the world last week. We at the Centre for Imperial & Global History join the global community of scholars in expressing our sadness at his untimely passing. Below, we include some of the tributes to Bayly that have appeared in the days since: Continue reading “Tribute to Sir Christopher Bayly (1945-2015)”→
BBC Radio 4 recently featured the Centre’s Dr. Gajendra Singh in its ‘Soldiers of Empire’ series, ‘The Fight for Fairyland’ (especially at 17 minutes and 26 minutes). This episode:
tells the story of the Indian Army on the Western Front, from disembarkation in Marseilles where the troops were greeted by excited crowds, to the grim reality of the trenches. Ill-equipped and inadequately trained for industrial combat, they nonetheless resolutely held one third of the British frontline between October and December 1914.
Imperial & Global Forum 
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