Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings

Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Harald Fischer-Tiné

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319451350
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319451367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of panics. The case studies it assembles examine the various ways in which panics and anxieties were generated in imperial situations and how they shook up the dynamics between seemingly all-powerful colonizers and the apparently defenceless colonized. Drawing from examples of the British, Dutch and German colonial experience, the volume sketches out some of the main areas (such as disease, native 'savagery' or sexual transgression) that generated panics or created anxieties in colonial settings and analyses the most common varieties of practical, discursive and epistemic strategies adopted by the colonisers to curb the perceived threats.

© The Author(s) 2016

Harald Fischer-Tiné (ed.)Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial SettingsCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Empires and Emotions

Harald Fischer-Tiné¹ and Christine Whyte²

(1)

Department of Humanities, Social and Pol.Sc., ETH Zurich, Institut für Geschichte, Clausiusstrasse 59, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland

(2)

School of History, University of Kent, Rutherford College, 7 Oyster Mews, CT5 1QY Whitstable, UK

Harald Fischer-Tiné (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Christine Whyte

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The subtitle of this volume is not only a humorous nod to Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar; it also points to our main contention. This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment, as well as by the regular occurrence of panics. This is perhaps most obvious if we zoom in on the group of the ruling colonial elites. Contrary to their well-known literary and visual self-representations, Europeans who were part of the imperial enterprise were not always cool, calm and collected while ‘running the show’ of empire. ¹ Quite the reverse: one of the seemingly paradoxical effects of the asymmetries characteristic of the situation coloniale, which put a minuscule elite of culturally alien colonizers in a position to exercise power over an often numerically stronger ‘native’ population, was the fact that anxiety, fear and angst became part of their everyday experience. At least in this respect, it apparently did not make much of a difference whether they were high-ranking officials, merchants, missionaries, ordinary settlers or rank-and-file soldiers.

Empire themed fiction is full of examples of such emotional states of exception. George Orwell’s short story Shooting an Elephant, ² for instance, has been rightly celebrated by post-colonial scholars because it debunks the imperial authority masquerade by telling the story of a British police officer in colonial Burma who comes to realize that, in spite of his constant attempts at performing authority, he has completely lost control to the local population. ³ There are also cases in point of embarrassment and outright panic. The first part of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1900) provides a pertinent example. ⁴ The book’s protagonist, the Englishman ‘Jim’, is first mate on the steamer Patna, which is full with hundreds of Muslim pilgrims on their way from a Southeast Asian port to the Arabian harbour of Jeddah. When the Patna is damaged in heavy weather, Jim (together with the captain and the rest of the European crew) panics and abandons it to save his own life, leaving the Muslim passengers to their fate. However, the Patna does not sink, the pilgrims are saved and Jim is brought before the admiralty court, where he is stripped of his navigation command certificate for dereliction of duty. What soon becomes evident, however, is that for most members of the community of European expatriates in the Malayan archipelago, the ultimate disgrace consists not in his breach of maritime law, but in the fact that a representative of an ‘imperial race’ has displayed his incompetence and cowardliness in front of colonial subjects. The embarrassment caused by this failure and the experience of utter social ostracism by his peers drives Jim to perform heroic deeds in the novel’s second part in order to recover his lost imperial masculinity.

What makes these vignettes highly relevant for historians of imperialism (and emotions) is that they are not the products of mere literary imagination, but are based on real events. As is well known, George Orwell (that is, Eric Arthur Blair) was a police officer serving in Burma in the 1920s and his short story has an obvious autobiographical character. Joseph Conrad too famously crisscrossed the seas as ship captain for decades before he could live off his writings, and his Lord Jim is based on the scandalous case of the S.S. Jeddah, whose captain and crew deserted pilgrim passengers en route from Singapore to Mecca in 1880. ⁵ Many more literary accounts could be cited. ⁶ They all give historians good reason to tackle the complex relationship between emotions, panics and colonial empires beyond the fictional and the anecdotal in greater depth than has been done so far. The time for such an enterprise seems to be just right.

The ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences has produced new analyses of the way in which emotions emerge, travel and are performed. Drawing on the observations of anthropologists that emotions are the result of socio-cultural practice and historical context rather than being hard-wired into our brains, new social theory has attempted to trace the relationships between emotion, power and politics. ⁷ At the same time, there have been attempts to bring the ‘inner’ or emotional life of empires to scholarly attention through a recent focus on the history of imperial sensitivities, families and friendships. ⁸ This volume draws on this new literature to explore a particular set of emotions and emotional states that affected the colonized, colonizers and metropolitan publics. As has already become clear, rather than focus on love and affection or on the intimate and private, we are concerned with the impact of the darker affects connected with colonialism. The emotions detailed in the 13 chapters of this anthology played out largely in the public sphere and they were fuelled by rumours, press reports or professional knowledge collection in the form of police or secret service intelligence, scientific surveys, archives, academic literature and so on. The book also brings together examples from a broad range of imperial settings. Though the majority of case studies relate to various colonies within the British Empire, chapters on Dutch and German colonialism also offer alternate contexts. In terms of the timeframe, the contributions cover a long period, stretching from the beginning of the imperial heyday in the 1860s to the crest of the great wave of decolonization in the early 1960s and thus capture the shifting circumstances in which the emotional experience of empire took shape.

As the geographical and temporal breadth of the contributions suggest, this book does not aim to develop a narrow definition of ‘colonial panic’. Rather, by providing insights into how emotions like embarrassment, anxiety and fear guided political action and defined social or cultural attitudes, it provides a comparative and longue durée view on the numerous origins of imperial panics, examines the various strategies to respond to them and assesses their multi-faceted consequences for historical actors on both sides of the colonial equation.

Approaching Emotions in History

The idea that emotions are essential to the understanding of history is not a new one. Although this is not the place for a comprehensive review of the vast literature that already exists on the history of emotions, it might nonetheless be helpful to provide a rough sketch of the more prominent developments in the field. As early as 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche deplored an obvious lacuna in historical research by asking ‘where can you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty?’ ⁹ Over the course of the twentieth century, such histories gradually began to appear. Johan Huizinga’s pioneering examination of medieval emotional life was published in 1919, ¹⁰ followed by the work of Norbert Elias on the changing emotional norms of Western Europe and the proliferation of an ideal of self-restraint. ¹¹ In France, the historical interest in emotion intersected with social history in the call of the Annales school, and Lucien Fèbvre in particular, to ‘plunge into the darkness where psychology wrestles with history’. ¹² In the 1960s, E.P. Thompson extended the limits of historical materialist inquiry by rethinking the relationship between social being and consciousness, through the mediation of ‘experience’. With this insight into a particular limitation of Marxist theory, Thompson highlighted the central role emotion played in shaping political consciousness. ¹³ Before long, a new generation of social historians followed Thompson’s example by focusing on the previously overlooked lives and experiences of other marginalized groups like women and racial minorities.

However, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that a body of work readily identifiable as the ‘history of emotions’ emerged. This new current of research was closely related to the development of the history of the family and gender history, which had done much to overturn the traditional dichotomy between the public and private spheres. In 1985, the Stearns observed that much of the historical literature from the late 1970s and early 1980s claiming to deal with ‘emotion’ was actually still concerned with the question of changing emotional standards of the era, tackled previously by Elias. This work, the Stearns claim, established the idea of a ‘new period in Western emotional history, corresponding to what we call modern’. ¹⁴ Thus, by this point, the history of emotions as a field not only reconstituted how certain fundamental categories were understood, but was also being invoked to formulate historical periodization. While the field has remained decidedly Eurocentric (and to some extent rooted in either medieval or contemporary history), its focus on both the variety of emotional standards and expressions and the manner in which emotional experience was shaped by social expectation make it a fruitful field of enquiry for imperial historians.

Between the publication of the Stearns’ groundbreaking article on ‘emotionology’ or the rules that govern emotional life and this volume, there have been considerable advances in the theorization of the history of emotions. In 2012, the American Historical Review invited some of the ‘new emotional historians’ to introduce and explain the field. This roundtable made clear that the field had undergone radical change since the first calls were made to take emotion seriously. Barbara Rosenwein’s ‘emotional communities’ added depth and complexity to the flattening of emotional standards into one homogeneous norm. She argued that historical actors felt their way through multiple and overlapping emotional communities that shaped both their affect and behaviour. ¹⁵ William Reddy, on the other hand, drew on ant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Empires and Emotions
• 1. The Health of Body and Mind
• 2. Imperial Panics and Discursive Responses
• 3. Practical and Institutional Counter-measures
• 4. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Ignorance’
• Backmatter