Rochelle

Vanessa Ogle on the history of offshore capitalism

In our fourth seminar of the semester, the CSMCH teamed up with the new Edinburgh Centre for Global History to invite Vanessa Ogle (Berkeley) to talk about her work on offshore tax havens. She used the Centre’s theme of ‘space’ to deliver a masterclass in how global history can be done effectively and innovatively. You can read Anita Klingler’s succinct seminar report, or listen to the recording via the Audiomack link below or via the CSMCH podcast channel (on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts).

The topic of Vanessa’s talk was the emergence of so-called tax havens over the course of the twentieth century and her central argument was that decolonization, besides being a political, social, and cultural process, should also be viewed as a financial event.

In view of the constantly expanding nature of global capitalism, Vanessa’s work is underpinned by impressively extensive archival research, literally all over the globe, from Europe, to Australia, to the Bahamas and back. She began her talk by pointing out that the ‘offshore world’ consisted of four distinct elements: tax havens, with very low tax rates, special rates for foreign businesses, and strong bank secrecy laws; secondly, offshore finance; thirdly, ‘flags of convenience’ registries; and lastly, free trade zones. Her paper would focus on the first of those four elements, tax havens.

Their emergence, as Vanessa pointed out, was largely a product of the First World War and the postwar world. Many countries, the UK among them, raised or introduced new taxes during the war, thus prompting the development of tax havens in the Channel Islands and other locations in Europe. The second wave of tax haven development followed after the Second World War, particularly in the North Atlantic world, the Caribbean, and South-East Asia. In a third wave, further tax havens sprang up in the Pacific world in the 1980s and 1990s. From the 1980s onwards, Vanessa remarked, recalling Hannah Arendt’s arguments on colonial violence, financial instruments developed in the (formerly) colonial world began to make their way back to the metropole.

What Vanessa’s research led her to discover was a correlation between the moment when former colonies gained independence and a noticeable effort to move capital out of those places and into known tax havens. Her first example of this was the Swiss National Bank which, in the second half of the 1950s, began to notice an increasing number of foreign banks requesting permission to open in Switzerland.

Among them, were two Moroccan banks operating out of Tangier. Following the effective partition of Morocco in 1912, Tangier was brought under international governance and developed into a tax haven. When it was reunited with newly independent Morocco in 1956, however, Tangier stopped being attractive as a tax haven and capital was systematically moved elsewhere, for example Switzerland.

One of Vanessa’s slides, as simple as it was striking, listed some fourteen cases in which her archival research has allowed her to retrace similar capital flows from formerly colonised countries to international tax havens, at the very moment of upheaval in those areas and/or national independence for those countries.

During the first wave of decolonisation following the Second World War, in particular, places which had a significant European settler community witnessed the exodus not only of the European settlers themselves, fearing violence and repercussions under the new independent regimes, but also of their money. Examples which Vanessa discussed included that of capital being shifted from Kenya, in view of the Mau Mau Uprising, and Rhodesia to Caribbean tax havens such as the Bahamas; as well as white South Africans who decided to move to the UK, especially following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, but chose to move their liquidated assets to Gibraltar instead.

Vanessa discusses decolonisation as a financial event

There was an awareness that these processes were going on even at the time, which earned the capital thus shifted the moniker ‘funk money’. Banks in emergent tax havens in fact made active efforts to attract capital, for example in Malta, which, while still under British control, offered pensioners who settled there very low taxes. Other groups which were targeted specifically by banks were minorities, such as the East African Indian population or Christians living in North Africa, who feared future political developments.

In another striking display of numbers, Vanessa pointed to the vastly different tax rates between (former) colonies and the metropole; a discrepancy which, in her analysis, led to the creation of a taxation culture which tried to avoid repatriating wealth, for example to the UK, and move it into tax havens instead.

Vanessa ended her talk by explaining that the channels created by bankers between the developing world and international tax havens continue to be used today by corrupt local elites to move their assets out of their countries, causing these economies significant losses in tax revenue and exacerbating their economic difficulties. In the end, the question of who had had the power to buy up the assets which were being sold at the end of Empire, has in fact set up power structures in the decolonised world which endure today, lending strong credence to Vanessa’s argument that decolonisation was a financial event.

Vanessa’s talk was followed by a brief comment by Martin Chick (Edinburgh). He reminded the audience that individuals who had fixed assets in colonial settings, such as land or houses, and chose to liquidate them when moving elsewhere, had virtually no incentive to move their money to places like the UK or France, as both countries were, up to the late 1960s, active in nationalising industries. There were therefore good reasons not to want one’s assets in the developed world, and, depending on one’s approach to risk, investments outside the developed world were much more attractive. The stability of the Bretton Woods system thus encouraged the development of overseas tax havens where its rules did not apply. Following the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, however, tax havens did not begin to disappear, but continued to flourish instead. Martin ended by observing that the ‘funk money’ flowing freely around the world in the last few decades has had the effect of driving up asset prices globally.

In the question and answer session, audience members invited the speaker to share her reflections on the political-ethical dimensions of her research project. How can or should historians position themselves while also avoiding writing a ‘how-to’ manual on tax evasion? Further, related, questions addressed the changing culture of ‘scandalisation’ around tax evasion; and possible solutions to this ongoing phenomenon. While our speaker was too wise to make predictions about the future, some of Vanessa’s suggestions focused on the necessity for a certain political moment, which, in her analysis, the growing discourse on inequality since the financial crisis of 2008 has potentially provided, and in which changes to legislation might be possible. Nevertheless, the cycle of plugging existing loopholes while bankers and lawyers try to find new ones will likely continue as a constant game of cat-and-mouse.

Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.

Davina Cooper on the conceptual space of gender

The CSMCH took a decidedly theoretical turn this week as the legal scholar Davina Cooper (King’s College London) shared with us the conceptual foundations of her new ESRC project on reforming legal gender identity. She challenged us to think differently about what gender is, what it could become, and what sorts of spaces it could inhabit. Our dedicated scribe, Calum Aikman, was there to take notes and send this report, or you can listen again to the talk by following the Audiomack link or tuning in to our podcast channel on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

In an age when gender is an increasingly important feature on the political landscape, how can we seek to resolve the contentious issues that arise? How can gender identity hope to move beyond today’s climate and become something new? And what chance is there for agreement and unity when feminist campaigners are frequently at odds with one another? These are just some of the questions which animated Davina’s paper on ‘reimagining the conceptual space of gender’.

Davina began by briefly illustrating the recent history of gender politics, arguing that the main themes are by no means new; many feminist essentialist arguments, in particular, have been aired at regular junctures in the recent past. These have, however, been considered secondary to the broader challenge of how to define women and womanhood without resorting to overtly male, middle-class modes of thought.

But the increased prominence of debates pertaining to the rights of transsexual men and women, amongst other things, has shifted emphasis towards ideas that specifically evaluate gender. Many governments throughout the world have been involved in passing legislation that seeks to further ‘trans’ rights – Davina mentioned Malta, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland as three countries that have taken the lead in formulating a light-touch approach to gender transitioning.

Yet progress remains uneven, and even those states with a more interventionist ethos have found it difficult to avoid issues – such as sex-divided spaces and provision of ‘puberty blockers’ – that generate a great amount of controversy. (In some instances, it is established feminist groups that have raised objections – such as over proposals to make gender reconstruction easier, for example.)

Davina sketched out two contesting concepts that influence the way many of us think about such matters. ‘Gender as Domination’ (GDom) was described as a paradigm in which exploitation is considered a part of everyday relations between men and women; its proponents thus focus primarily on combating those factors that make it possible, with a defence of rights and freedoms as one of the main goals.

In contrast, ‘Gender as Diversity’ (GDiv) sets out to tackle the hardships experienced by gender-fluid people, and adopts a more outrightly radical attitude that emphasises trajectories of self-realisation. Davina explained that there is no single right or wrong answer to the narrative of gender experience, and that both GDiv and GDom are valuable as interpretive models.

Of course, both these approaches also have flaws: GDiv is unduly concerned with subjective needs, while GDom – although relational in its understanding of how men and women shape each other – can potentially become over-focused on ‘dystopian’ visions of male predatory behaviour and female victimhood.

Can these two conceptions of gender coexist in a way that allows for positive dialogue, rather than antagonism? What Davina suggests is a move away from such binary divisions, by introducing alternative ideas that illuminate other social inequalities and, in doing so, provide a ‘hopeful conceptual line’ that can go beyond the stale assumptions of the ‘gender wars’.

Her own idea is to offer a utopian perspective by thinking in terms of ‘prefiguration’ – a concept which aims to challenge the restrictions inherent in a given situation by proposing that one should act as if the desired alternative is already in place. This creates space for play and imagination, to work within a plural framework that assumes ideals and reality to be part of one continuum. Although Davina stressed that for any such theory to be effective an awareness of objective evidence is still necessary, her hope is that such an approach will allow people to concentrate on identifying what gender might become, rather than be trapped in competing, often authoritarian definitions of what it already is (or, indeed, what it is not).

Davina further argued that prefiguration can provide a new dimension to gender politics, by allowing it to engage with various socio-economic issues that highlight other aspects of the gender experience – family life, for instance, or care-work. She noted that legislators already have the potential to act in a prefigurative fashion, by changing meanings and notions of gender while introducing political reforms.

Even so, she argued that individuals ultimately have a greater degree of agency than the state does, because they are not bound by the limitations of what is ‘real’ and ‘right’, and can thereby give their imagination free rein. She did acknowledge that the utopian nature of prefiguration has its drawbacks, not least because harmful relations between men and women cannot simply be wished out of existence. But at least it brings forth new concepts to work with: these ‘fruitful pathways’, as she described them, have the potential to go beyond current struggles by substituting competition and criticism with something more constructive.

Davina answers questions in a fascinating Q&A session after the talk

Commenting on the paper, Mathias Thaler (Edinburgh) began by conceding that he did not fundamentally disagree with any of the main points raised in the paper, noting that Davina’s portrayal of prefigurative politics as a collective reflection on what gender could mean allows for a genuinely new perspective on an otherwise frequently terse debate. Nonetheless, he expressed some reserve about what he described as the ‘ambivalent’ nature of prefiguration as an idea, observing that its ‘playfulness’ can only oscillate between the seemingly contradictory principles of utopian idealism on the one hand and realpolitik on the other. This, he suggested, has the potential to cause conflict, especially if the underlying principles are not properly understood by the wider public. The frequent accusations of failure that have dogged the Occupy movement, for example, illustrate what happens when a performative and experimental movement is unable to articulate its agenda on its own terms.

Related to this, while Davina suggested that activists were empowered through the act of prefiguration, Mathias wondered just how many actual examples of this there actually are, and commented more generally on his feeling that there wasn’t much ‘empirical substance’ to the paper. He was also sceptical about how effective the legal system could be in enabling prefiguration, given the capacity of the law to erode its playful, subversive qualities, and ruminated on the involvement of academics themselves – should they seek only to bear objective witness, or is it their responsibility to mediate actively in the issues they are studying?

Calum Aikman is a PhD student in History. His research mostly focuses on twentieth-century British and Scottish politics, trade union history and the fortunes of the Labour Party in the post-war era. His thesis is on the political thought of the Labour Party’s ‘revisionist’ right wing in the 1970s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

Emily Brownell on urban spaces and building materials in postcolonial Tanzania

For this week’s seminar, we explored an entirely different aspect of our theme of space: the built environment. We broke with tradition and invited one of our own – our new lecturer in environmental history, Emily Brownell – who took us on a fascinating journey through the urban sprawl of 1970s Dar-es-Salaam and the concrete fantasies of postcolonial socialism. Mathew Nicolson was our note-taker on the day and you can read his report below. You can also listen again to the whole lecture on Audiomack or by tuning in to our podcast channel (accessible via iTunes or your favourite podcast app).

By framing the city of Dar es Salaam as the explicit subject of her research instead of simply the backdrop for its people and elites, Emily’s research on post-colonial building materials provides an innovative approach to the history of post-independence Tanzania.

She began her paper by outlining the political, social and economic background of 1970s Tanzania. Noting that the short timespan of this period makes her study unusual within environmental history, a field more commonly examined over centuries rather than decades, Emily explained her approach by emphasising the rapid changes Dar es Salaam experienced during these years. On one hand, the state ideology of ‘Ujamaa’ as advocated by Tanzania’s first President, Julius Nyerere, led to the government concentrating its development funding in rural parts of the country in order to address inequalities inherited from the colonial area. On the other, the combined impact of famine, the 1973 Oil Shock, a collapse of commodity prices and the 1978-9 war with Uganda sparked a trend of rapid urbanisation, creating intense pressure on Dar es Salaam’s infrastructure at a time when funding for urban development was already scarce.

These conflicting pressures form the core of Emily’s study. She asked how urban residents shaped their environment in the face of anti-urban state policies and, more broadly, how Tanzanians subsequently adjusted their material and ideological expectations for the future. To answer these questions, she traced the history of the city’s building materials back to the colonial period. The presence of a growing African population in cities caused initial anxiety among British colonial administrators, for whom urban areas were generally European spaces. Unplanned migrant neighbourhoods were prohibited from becoming permanent, limiting their structures to ‘traditional,’ non-permanent materials such as mud and wattle. This contrasted with the permanent concrete and brick structures inhabited by Europeans, resulting in the de facto segregation of Dar es Salaam along material and racial lines.

After the Second World War, colonial administrators increasingly framed colonialism as a modernising project. Emily suggested building materials played a key role in such attitudes, evidenced by the belief that Tanzanians would become ‘civilised’ by inhabiting permanent structures designed for a European-style nuclear family.

The arrival of Tanzanian independence in 1961, by contrast, created the first opportunity for Tanzanian elites to shape urban and material policy. How did these differ from colonial-era regulations? Emily argued that, while Nyerere sought to reverse the material segregation of urban areas through a programme of slum clearances, replacing impermanent structures with concrete housing, his approach nevertheless maintained the colonial distinction between permanent and impermanent housing within government policy. The state therefore continued to perpetuate the colonial narrative regarding the ‘civilising’ properties of permanent materials.

In particular, cement assumed a vital position in the post-independence national consciousness. Major construction projects created an intense need for cement, including a new airport, a hydro-electric plant, railways, harbor extensions and the relocation of the country’s capital to Dodoma. Prevailing architectural styles favoured cement as the ‘new national aesthetic.’ To meet this need, the Wazo Hill Cement Plant was established. Cement produced in the plant was marketed with the Dar es Salaam name, leading to what Emily referred to as the ‘territorialisation of cement.’

However, Tanzania’s deteriorating economic situation throughout the 1970s created growing problems for Wazo Hill, which faced outages and production stoppages. The state responded by reversing its policy as Nyerere condemned his country’s ‘unhealthy addiction to “European soil”.’ Economics, then, also influenced the state’s ideological attitude to building materials.

New techniques were subsequently sought to compensate for these shortages. Emily explained this development by charting the emergence of brick manufacturing as an alternative to cement. Community brick building was promoted with utopian imagery, portrayed as – literally – ‘building socialism,’ while the bricks were increasingly viewed as the solution to Third World slums. Yet, brick manufacturing also brought a major environmental cost: 25,000 bricks produced requiring the felling of 70 trees.

Emily concluded by remarking on the value this period offers African scholars. Specifically, it represented a time of continuing optimism before the emergence of a ‘desperate reckoning with terror and failure’ which forced a reimagining of the future.

Commenting on Emily’s research, Isabel Pike (University of Wisconsin-Madison) emphasised the role of building materials in recording life changes among urban residents, whereby individual and community progress has often been described alongside changes to such materials. Isabel then raised the possibility of comparing Tanzania with neighbouring countries, questioned broader global attitudes to cement and inquired into the role materials play in Tanzania today. After listening to Emily’s paper and engaging with the discussions that followed, those of us in the audience left with a keen sense of the possibilities offered by urban and environmental history to reshape our understanding of the past, both in a post-colonial setting and more widely.

Mathew Nicolson is a PhD student in Scottish History. His research interests focus on the politics and culture of postwar Scotland with particular emphases on its ‘peripheral’ island groups and imperial connections. His thesis explores the politics of culture, identity and constitutional change in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles from 1969 to 1999. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

Corey Robin workshop and discussion group

Corey Robin’s visit to the CSMCH was an opportunity for us to learn more about his ideas during his lecture, but also for him to contribute to the intellectual life of the Centre. He did this in two ways: first, in person during a graduate and early-career workshop on the morning of his lecture; and, second, by inspiring a group of students to get together and talk about the history of conservative politics in a session of the CSMCH Discussion Group.

The workshop was organised by me – Emile Chabal – and steering committee member, Mathias Thaler, from Social and Political Sciences. It consisted of very short presentations by pre-selected Edinburgh PhD students and early-career scholars, including Louis Fletcher, Benedikt Buechel, Masa Mrolvje, Jill Poeggel and Gisli Vogler. The presentations were followed by comments from Corey and other people in the room. The participants were overwhelmingly from political science, but the topics ranged widely, from the work of international relations theorist Quincy Wright to the political value of disappointment.

Over the course of three hours, Corey offered valuable encouragement and criticism. Everyone – especially me! – learned a lot, both about Corey’s wide-ranging expertise across a bewildering array of subjects, and also the excellent work being done by scholars in the university.

By the time the CSMCH Discussion Group met to talk about conservatism, Corey had already left Edinburgh. But his ideas were still hard at work amongst our students. Rory Scothorne, who led the discussion group, had this to say about the spirited exchanges during the session:

Our discussion group explored Robin’s work in the context of recent and ongoing developments within conservatism beyond Donald Trump, many of which – like him – have moved rapidly from the fringes to the mainstream of the tradition in recent years. Reviewing Robin’s talk, we were able to clarify some areas of uncertainty around his thesis with reference to his book.

For instance, if Robin is offering a ‘History of an Idea’ version of conservatism, he risks falling foul of the definitional problems associated with the former: the potential anachronism of projecting a ‘conservatism’ of principles, worked out and formalised, from one era into another and vice versa without the wider contexts that give those principles meaning. This, it was suggested, is not the nature of Robin’s outlook, which should be understood more as an effort to trace the mobilising ‘spirit’ of a changing and adaptive conservative tradition: it is in this sense a sort of ‘anthropological’ or social-psychological history of the inspiration behind those movements and ideas throughout history which today are seen to have produced a distinctive and self-identifying conservative political outlook. Robin’s point is both that conservative ideas are remarkably discontinuous, and that their mobilising spirit is relatively continuous.

We explored two other efforts to divine similar ideological undercurrents in present-day articulations of conservatism: first, via William Davies’ analysis of Tory support for Brexit. This identifies a possible ‘coherent’ justification for Brexit within an enduring conservative fondness for the clarifying and invigorating virtues of pain, as a means of avoiding ‘moral hazard’: just as welfare cuts are justified as a means of persuading unemployed people to ‘get on their bike’ and find work, so too can Brexit be viewed as a means of finding out what the British people ‘are really made of’ in the face of crisis. Yet Davies suggests that this may be too generous: leading pro-Brexit figures like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are ready-made politicians for the ‘attention economy,’ their self-consciously distinctive ideological perspectives largely subordinate to a system that makes publicity – and thus distinctiveness – a route to power for its own sake.

A similar analysis can be extrapolated from Angela Nagle’s essay on the young men of the alt-right movement. Nagle outlines divisions within the alt-right between, on the one hand, those who may indeed hold far-right views, but ‘ironically’ deploy neo-Nazi, violently misogynistic and white supremacist tropes on web forums in pursuit of the attention which accrues from effective ‘trolling’; and those who are increasingly open about their more deeply held and programmatised far-right views.

The collision of these two worlds in high-profile rallies and marches last year prompted considerable anguish within the alt-right over just how seriously its ideological statements should be taken, but it also connects to a common concern of intellectual historians: what is the conservative speaker doing when they speak? Is the sneering conservative ‘outsider’ – William F. Buckley comes to mind – articulating a programmatic political alternative, to be pursued in the present, or merely exploiting and revelling in the status which the cultural field tends to grant to the figure of the ‘stranger’?

These are not questions exclusive to the right, and much of our discussion focused on the extent to which Robin might understate the porosity of boundaries between left and right. It was suggested that this might be a product of Robin’s embeddedness within the deep-rooted political binary between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ that characterises American political culture; European politics displays far more ambiguous interpenetrations of left and right: both ideologically, in the thought of figures like Georges Sorel and Hendrik De Man, and politically, such as the ‘Historic Compromise’ between the Italian Communist and Christian Democratic Parties in the 1970s.

With any luck, this is just the beginning of a much wider – and extremely important – conversation about the shape of politics in the contemporary world!

— Emile

Corey Robin on the history of conservatism

We opened the year with a talk by the acclaimed American political scientist and commentator, Corey Robin (City University of New York). In front of an audience of more than 120 people, Corey explored the roots of conservatism and suggested ways we might understand its current shape, especially under the influence of Donald Trump. The talk – and Jamie Allinson’s short comment – were recorded as a podcast, which can be accessed via the Audiomack link below, through iTunes, or through any other podcast app (just search for ‘CSMCH Edinburgh’). For those who prefer an executive summary, Rory Scothorne was there in person and sends this report, based on his meticulous notes.

Donald Trump and his supporters are often portrayed in the media as a quasi-revolutionary force in US politics, breaking with conservatism and rejuvenating the Republican Party after the Obama years. Many liberals and those further left are frightened of a new era of intensified right-wing hegemony, fuelled by a turn towards ‘national populism’ across the globe.

Corey Robin argued, however, that Trump is in fact part of a Conservative tradition in crisis. The most important sign of this crisis, Robin suggested, is the budget. This can be obscured by a popular focus on Trump’s public statements, many of which don’t match what’s going on in policy terms: on higher education and primary school aid, immigration, planned parenthood and renewables, Trump’s spending plans have not only been blocked by Congress – in many cases spending has gone in the opposite direction. Trump’s dependence on the spectacular deployment of executive orders is a sign of weakness being marketed as strength: compared to other highly ideological conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump’s record leaves little for the latter to boast about.

So why is it all going wrong for the right? Understanding this, suggested Robin, requires us to situate Trump within the broad conservative tradition. The thread running through this tradition, and holding it together, is a consistent desire to react against and suppress the assertion of power and agency by subordinate groups. Conservatism entails a fetishisation of ‘rule’ and a desire for competent, even heroic, domination; this carries the populist corollary of a disdain for the inadequacies and compromises of the existing elite. One means of elite rejuvenation is through a self-consciously unpredictable but assertive violence: ‘the spectre of lawless grandeur,’ as Robin put it.

Yet it is not simply through violence that conservatism secures itself. Fundamentally shaped by the left, it also borrows copiously from it. The reassertion of elite legitimacy can be framed in terms of novelty and innovation, a sort of ‘progress.’ Most importantly, conservatives popularise hierarchy by offering subaltern groups some sort of real benefit from it: they do this by giving the masses a ‘taste of power,’ recomposing old hierarchies so that the dominated are also able to dominate, in their own modest ways. Thus popular support for conservatism is not merely ‘false consciousness’ but a product of shifting lines of inclusion and exclusion which confer real material benefits and status upon certain subordinate groups.

Corey Robin discusses conservatism in front of (probably) the CSMCH’s largest ever audience

If this is the shape of the Conservative mould, it is not hard to see how Trump might fit, perhaps even better than most. Far from breaking with Conservatism, then, Robin’s thesis implies that Trump simply follows several of its elements to their logical conclusions, and often openly admits to them. This loss of nuance may represent a sort of end-point, a hollowing-out of the the tradition after years of success.

Robin argued, somewhat counterintuitively, that the crisis of conservatism is the product of having been so effective: there is little left to react against, too little insubordination against which reactionary desire might be sustained and mobilised. The labour movement has accepted its marginalisation after decades of setbacks; movements for black liberation have not been able to stop rising school and residential segregation, and a growing racial wealth gap; and the feminist movement, while more successful, has still seen been forced onto the defensive against challenges to fundamental rights in several states.

This does not mean, however, that Trump and the wider conservative tradition cannot make further gains: further sweeping tax cuts have been made, and through executive orders and the courts Conservatives continue to exercise considerable authority. But the right can no longer define the political horizon as it once could. Robin, who identifies within the American democratic socialist tradition, suggested that the responsibility to break with the past few decades of Conservative hegemony lies with the left.

In his comment, Jamie Allinson suggested that Trump’s novelty may lie in his role within a political system transformed by global crisis: Trump’s successes and constraints must be seen in terms of a dialogue between a Conservative intellectual tradition and the wider systemic context in which it operates. One of his most thought-provoking queries concerned Robin’s thesis about the ‘buying off’ of the oppressed, proposing that there may be other, more organic forms of popular conservatism which stress the virtues of knowing one’s place, or a more simple acceptance of the way things are and desire for stability.

The question and answer session developed some of Jamie’s lines of questioning. One audience member asked how religion features in all of this, and Robin admitted that this is one of the weaker points in his analysis. Scholars engaging with his thesis might find in religion a productive way of complicating the ways in which conservatism can be ‘popular’, a reaction not to the assertion of subaltern agency, but the more systemic disruptions of modernity (Marx’s ‘heart of a heartless world’). Robin’s argument is in some ways an inversion of that of Karl Polanyi, who sees much of the progressive politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a diverse, cross-class and politically ambiguous ‘counter-movement’ against the attempt by market ‘utopians’ to ‘disembed’ the economy from society.

One way Conservatives have demonised the left in recent years has been to associate them with new waves of systemic disruption, particularly globalisation – Theresa May’s infamous remark about ‘Citizens of Nowhere’ comes to mind, as well as conspiracy theories about ‘Globalists’. Today’s radical figureheads – Corbyn, Sanders, Melenchon and others – are nevertheless learning to harness ‘conservative’ impulses to more progressive goals. But Robin shows us that conservatism is endlessly adaptive, motivated by a reactionary desire that runs deeper than formal principle: new Conservatisms – which, he suggested, will surely emerge – may still be able to turn these attempts at radical triangulation to their own advantage.

Rory Scothorne is a PhD student in History. His research interests lie broadly in the history of social movements, the development and contestation of the public sphere in the twentieth century, and the political thought of the radical left. His thesis focuses on the relationship between the radical left and Scottish nationalism from 1968 to 1992. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

Looking back on the CSMCH’s inaugural year

With the university semester gradually receding, it’s time to look back on an exciting inaugural year here at the CSMCH (and, if you missed anything, you can catch up with reports and podcasts simply by following the links in the text).

Our theme for the past academic year has been ‘democracy’, and almost all of our events tied in with this theme. The core of the Centre’s activity has been the fortnightly seminar series, which brought an exceptional range of scholarly talent to the university.

We opened the year with an exciting – and polemical – roundtable on ‘truth and democracy’. This was followed by a series of talks by Vincent Tiberj (Sciences Po) on French democracy, Malte Rolf (Bamberg) on Soviet visions of modernity, Lorena de Vita (Utrecht) on the German-Israeli reparations agreement of 1952, Esra Ozyurek (LSE) on Holocaust memory and Muslim Germans, Jake Blanc (Edinburgh) on dam protests in 1980s Brazil, and a double bill on the history and geography of South Asia with Rakesh Ankit (Jindal) and Nilanjana Mukherjee (IIT Delhi).

In the second semester, we got a chance to listen to Aditya Sarkar (Warwick) on the Hindu right in India, Peter Jackson (Glasgow) on interwar Franco-British relations, Sonja Levsen (Freiburg) on postwar education policy in France and Germany, Malcolm Petrie (St Andrews) on Scottish politics and the European question, and Rana Mitter (Oxford) on the reconstruction of postwar China. Our last event of the semester was a book launch by our Edinburgh colleague Felix Boecking, who discussed his research on the mid-twentieth century Chinese economy with Rana Mitter.

In true Edinburgh fashion, the first screening in our Czechoslovak New Wave film screening series (Valley of the Bees) was disrupted by a monster snowstorm. But those who did come had a great evening.

Our seminar series was complemented by a range of other activities, from a Czech New Wave film screening series, to a major public event on academic freedom in Uganda, China, Turkey and Bangladesh. In addition, our enterprising affiliated students set up a CSMCH Discussion Group, which met several times throughout the year. They tackled issues as complex and controversial as the Catalan crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a convivial environment.

Last but not least, we hosted two visiting scholars and students this year. Our inaugural CSMCH-IASH Visting Postdoctoral Fellow was Rakesh Ankit from OP Jindal University in Delhi, who pursued his research on Indian Communism while he was in Edinburgh from November 2017 to January 2018. And we hosted a Belgian Erasmus+ student, Birgit Ampe, who assisted with the running of the Centre and produced a three-part series for the blog on Indian soldiers in the First World War.

Despite this bewildering list of activities, some of this year’s achievements have been more intangible. The conversations in the pub after each seminar; the exchanges between students in the discussion group; the contributions to the CSMCH’s blog and social media pages; or the new ideas that have emerged out of chance encounters. These are exactly the kinds of benefits that a research centre can bring.

So, thank you to all of you for taking part in the life of the Centre. We hope to welcome you back next year – when we will be tackling the theme of ‘space’ – and we look forward to continuing some of the stimulating conversations that have already begun.

— Emile

Intimate Politics: Fertility Control in a Global Historical Perspective

The CSMCH was delighted to support a recent conference on the history of fertility control. Cassia Roth, who was one of the organisers, sends this report on the fascinating discussions that took place during the conference.

On 23-24 May 2018, the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Edinburgh hosted an international conference titled “Intimate Politics: Fertility Control in a Global Historical Perspective”. The two-day event included speakers from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the European Union, and Turkey, who discussed topics ranging from forced abortion in early twentieth-century China to child exposure in Ancient Rome.

Conference organizers Cassia Roth and Diana Paton conceived of the event as way of historicising women’s fertility control practices. Across the globe, women have always controlled their fertility through intimate efforts ultimately tied to larger political processes and gendered power dynamics. Women’s biological reproductive capabilities have been contested sites of power struggles, shaping the formation, rule, and dissolution of nation-states and political regimes throughout history.

From the concept of partus sequitur ventrum, in which slavery was passed on through the mother’s womb, to settler colonial projects that supported ‘desirable’ reproduction while restricting ‘undesirable’ migration in Australia and the United States, to abortion as the most common form of birth control in some communist regimes, the politics of the state have played out on the bodies of women. It is not surprising, then, that current debates over nationhood, globalization, and inequality continue to be mapped onto women’s bodies.

Yet the intersection of larger political, economic, and social processes with women’s intimate and embodied experience of fertility control remains understudied in the historical literature. This conference placed the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches towards women’s bodies.

“Intimate Politics” explored these issues from the perspective of multiple time periods, geographic locations, actors, and methods. Some of those presenting at the conference explored how women’s individual or social practices of fertility control, including contraception, abortion, and infanticide, intersected with larger political, economic, and cultural trends. Others problematised the idea of “control” and “agency” in the history of reproduction.

What did it mean to “control one’s fertility” in different historical periods and geographical regions? How did historical actors understand, define, and practice what we now call fertility control? How can we expand conventional definitions of fertility control to interrogate ideas of infertility, menstruation, and heteronormativity?

Contributors also highlighted how race, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender to shape if, and how, women and men approached fertility control.

The keynote speaker, Professor Laura Briggs (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) discussed her new book How all Politics are Reproductive Politics, which looks at the gendered and reproductive nature of issues as disparate as the foreclosure crisis during the Great Recession to social service reform.

Cassia Roth (@drcassiaroth) is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America with a focus on Brazil. In particular, she examines how gender, race, medicine, and the law intersected in the lives of Brazilian women in key moments of political and economic transition. She is a CSMCH affiliated staff member until August 2018, when she takes up a new position at the University of Georgia.

Indians in Europe during the Great War

In the final instalment of her three-part series on Indian colonial soldiers during the First World War, our Erasmus+ trainee Birgit Ampe discusses Mulk Raj Anand’s novel ‘Across the Black Waters’ and the reactions of Indian soldiers to what they saw in Europe.

It is often suggested that the outcome of the First World War was decided not so much by the main powers, but by their colonies. This is especially the case for Britain and India. The latter’s contribution to the conflict was one of the main factors that helped to secure British victory. It comes as no surprise, then, that British propaganda praised the achievements of the Indian troops in France and Flanders.

But what was not mentioned was how these Indian men had to leave their homes and families in order to get to the front. Many of them had hardly ever crossed the boundaries of their village, let alone travelled across the ocean. So how did they react when they first set foot on the shores of France and came into contact with Europe and its inhabitants?

One particular source that deals with this question is the First World War novel Across the Black Waters (1939) by Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand. The story follows Lalu as he arrives in France and is sent to fight at the front in Flanders. Throughout the novel, the reader is presented with Lalu’s opinions as he explores this strange new land.

One could argue that Lalu’s narrative is a fictional account and thus not a faithful representation of reality. But, as I already suggested in the second blog post, the novel stays true to the sentiments and ideas expressed in letters written by actual Indian soldiers.

The main protagonist of the novel, Lalu, was fortunate in his upbringing since he was able to attend the Bishop Cotton School in India and could therefore more or less understand English. His time at the school also made him familiar with the ideas of the West, and tales of its wealth and splendour. It is obvious that Lalu is already biased beforehand. So when the soldiers are given some spare time to explore the city before they go to the trenches, Lalu feels the need to justify everything he sees: “He had aspired to this Europe as to some heaven, and sought to justify everything in Blighty [informal term for Britain]. He was inclined to forget the good things at home” (44). Lalu goes on to praise the wealth of the city, the kindness of the people and the equality that seems to exist between men and women and the different social classes.

It immediately strikes the reader that Lalu’s praise mimics that of real sepoys, who expressed similar opinions in their letters. However, it should be pointed out that these sepoys were not educated in the same manner that Lalu was. Mulk Raj Anand might have created a semi-educated protagonist in order to allow for a more complex character whose opinions can change towards the end of the novel, as we will see later on. But more importantly, by being in-between, Lalu acts as a bridge between the Indians and the Europeans.

The other characters in the novel resemble the sepoys perhaps more. They are uneducated and do not share Lalu’s need for justification. Nevertheless, they are intrigued by the beauty and wealth of France. They are very curious and marvel at the different customs of the French. But what they are most surprised about is the kindness of the people. The attitude of the French people stands in sharp contrast to that of the British who look upon the Indians as inferior. The French on the other hand are “kind and polite” (16), and treat the sepoys as equals. Their friendliness makes the Indians feel that “they had grown to the dignity of human beings and [makes them forget] the way in which they had always been treated as so much cattle in India” (37-38).

The sepoys especially enjoy the kindness bestowed upon them by the women. The outgoing character of the French women is new to the Indians and it excites them. This attraction is mostly sexual, as is illustrated by the men’s eagerness to visit a brothel. For Lalu, however, women are not just sexual beings. He is physically attracted to them and he enjoys looking at the French girls who are in his opinion more beautiful than the “flabby and tired” (19) women of India. But later on in the novel, when he meets a French farmer and his family, Lalu has more complex feelings. The wife of the farmer acts as his mother and so there is no sexual attraction. He is, however, attracted to the farmer’s daughter. But as a reader we notice that the feelings are more than merely sexual.

This mixture of feelings is also present in the sepoys’ letters. Many Indian men wrote to their families that the women they met were like mothers and sisters to them. Only a few letters revealed a sexual attraction towards the women. Perhaps the men did not want their families to know about these feelings. We can fairly assume that men felt more sexually attracted to the women than they let on in their letters. Mulk Raj Anand certainly picked up on this point and incorporated it into his novel.

Despite the kindness they receive from the women and the French people in general, the sepoys were plagued by a sense of inferiority. Colonisation had a negative effect on the colonised and it influenced the way they think and behave. Indians often felt inferior and embarrassed in the face of the coloniser.

These feelings are also present in the novel, when the sepoys feel the need to salute every white man, even a peasant. The narrator concludes that “[t]his was the most tragic element in the position of the Indian soldiers: they were face to face with death in the unknown, but they could not stare at one of the myriad faces of their French and English comrades with the impunity of human beings” (227).

Interestingly, these feelings of inferiority are hardly ever described by real sepoys in their letters. Did they hold back their opinions because they knew their letters would be read? Or did they want to prove their loyalty to the Empire by not mentioning how they truly felt?

In the novel, the difference the sepoys experienced between themselves and the French and English soldiers illustrates how they identified with their homeland and how India never left their minds. This is especially the case when they explore the city. The sepoys comment on the small rivers and are eager to visit a French farm.

I already mentioned in the previous blog post how some Indians compared certain aspects of the war to elements of rural labour, not least because most Indian soldiers were peasants before. But the novel suggests that they were also genuinely interested in agriculture. For example, when some Indians are talking to a French soldier with Lalu as an interpreter, they ask him: “Did you ask whether he owned land, whether they plough the land, like us, with oxen? Whether they use a plough to break the soil, and the scythe and sickle to cut the crop, and flail? And how they thresh? That is what we want to know” (82).

Indian soldiers marching (source: Imperial War Museum, Q 70214)

The characters in the novel generally cast India in a positive light, but Lalu, who is somewhat biased, disapproves of the outdated methods of the Indians, arguing that that “[i]n every land, even in our own country, it could be like this […] [b]ut our elders say, ‘It is not the custom to do this, it is not the custom to do that.’ Fools!” (50).

This idea was expressed by real sepoys in their letters as well. They did not use such strong language, but it is clear that they admired the West and believed that India had a long way to go before it could ever reach the same economic standard.

Towards the end of the novel, however, Lalu is forced to change his opinion of the West. The difficult life in the trenches and the meaninglessness of the war begin to take their toll on Lalu’s naive mind, and he eventually “reproached himself for his predilection for the fashionable life. … So ashamed was he of thinking of the enthusiasm which he had felt as he started out on this journey” (179).

This brief exposition illustrates the close connection between Across the Black Waters and the corpus of letters written by actual Indian soldiers. Historical sources, such as these letters, can provide valuable insight into the lives of the Indian World War I soldiers, but the element of censorship must always be taken into account when examining them. In this respect, it can be useful to look at literary sources too, since these often highlight other aspects of soldiers’ experiences and reveal new perspectives on the historical past.

Birgit Ampe is an Erasmus+ trainee and visiting postgraduate student at the CSMCH. She completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Ghent in Belgium. She intends to start a second Masters degree in library studies at the University of Brussels in September 2018.

Fact versus Fiction: Mulk Raj Anand’s ‘Across the Black Waters’

In the second instalment of her three-part series on Indian colonial soldiers during the First World War, our Erasmus+ trainee Birgit Ampe discusses Mulk Raj Anand’s novel ‘Across the Black Waters’ alongside actual letters written by Indian soldiers.

Since the end of the First World War, many novels have been published describing the experiences of the soldiers who fought in the trenches. But whereas stories about the British combatants are strongly represented, those about the Indian sepoys are notably absent. One of the few novels that does take the sepoys’ experience as a subject is Across the Black Waters by Indian author Mulk Raj Anand. Published in 1939, the novel follows a young Indian boy, Lalu, as he arrives in France and is sent to fight at the front. Throughout the novel we see Lalu mature as his service progresses. His feelings and emotions are described extensively as well as those of the other sepoys.

But how far do these feelings represent the reality? In order to find out, we must look at the letters from real First World War sepoys. Even though the letters were subjected to censorship, they can provide a glimpse into the minds of the Indian soldiers. By comparing them to the novel we can establish how close the fiction of Mulk Raj Anand lies to the reality.

The majority of the letters either hint at the war or explicitly refer to it. With this in mind, one thing that is immediately apparent when regarding the letters as a whole, is that the tone of the letters changes as the war progresses. At the beginning of the war, a feeling of optimism is present and morale is high. The Indians express in their letters a will to fight and are grateful for an opportunity to show their loyalty to the Empire.

The same ideas are described at the beginning of Mulk Raj Anand’s novel. When the Indians arrive at Marseilles they let out shouts of joy and are very excited (11). Lalu himself believes it is “thrilling to be going out on this adventure” (13). Lalu’s excitement lasts for a few chapters and does not even diminish when he has to enter the trenches, as he feels it is an honour to be fighting alongside the British Tommies (124).

However, these feelings of hope did not last. When the first battles proved to be more difficult than imagined, the sepoys began to despair. This was reflected in their letters. Morale declined and they even wrote letters home urging their family members not to enlist.

The sepoys in the novel do not write such letters but it is clear that despair has taken hold of them. When the first attack turns into a slaughter and when they are mowed down by the Germans’ superior guns, they start to realise that they should not be part of this war:

They did not know what they were fighting for or what anyone else was fighting for. And, almost from the beginning, things had gone wrong, almost from the start they had been shattered by the bombardments, flooded by rains and frozen by the cold. (178)

When the winter kicked in towards the end of 1914, the Indians’ morale declined even further. The sepoys were not used to the cold climate of France and Flanders, and the perpetual rain and snow made life in the trenches even more difficult. Throughout the novel, references to the cold are made, but they are subtly woven into the larger emotional framework. It is mentioned for example that some Sikhs froze to death overnight, or that several sepoys got frostbite (303).

When in 1915, morale reached its breaking point, it was decided to move the infantry to the Middle East. The tone of the letters of the remaining cavalry turned slowly from despair into resignation as they accepted their fate. The events in the novel only span across the year 1914, but occasionally some feelings of resignation are already present among the sepoys. They lose the joy of eating and “did not even complain about the inconvenience of changing trenches and this red-hot reception they were greeting from the enemy, as if after the hardships of the first attack they were now prepared to accept anything” (187). So although a general feeling of resignation is not yet present, some hints to it can already be found in the novel.

Besides the changing curve of emotions, the loyalty to the British Government in a context of war is worth examining. Overall, the Indians speak favourably of the Government or Sarkar in their letters. They want to show their loyalty and believe that it is their duty to fight because they have profited of the ‘salt of the Sarkar’.

In the novel, however, this image is more nuanced. Whereas the higher ranking officers keep reminding the soldiers that the Government is good and benevolent, the soldiers themselves have mixed feelings towards the Sarkar. The Government is blamed for the lack of information the sepoys receive and the fact that they have to fight in a war that is not theirs.

When they have to return to the trenches after some failed attacks, one sepoy even cries: “Oh, I won’t fight! I will not fight for this dirty Sarkar” (200). At one point, it is even hinted that there is a general “fear of the Sarkar” (266). However, when the men actually have to fight, they speak differently of the British Government. They urge each other on to go over the parapet of the trenches by saying that they should “prove true to the salt of the Sarkar” (284). This more nuanced image is very interesting and one wonders whether this could be closer to the truth since the letters by real sepoys were censored.

Another aspect in the letters that is often connected to the war is religion. The sepoys often mentioned how daily religious observances were being abandoned, a concern that is also present in the novel.

A good example to illustrate this is the ‘sanctity’ of the kitchen. When the sepoys set up camp after their arrival in France, they build a makeshift kitchen and are very angry when an unsuspecting woman walks through it. Later on in the novel, when their camp has to be broken down and everything needs to be loaded into trucks, Lalu remarks:

Seeing that he himself and the other sepoys were going freely about the kitchens with their boots of cowhide skins and their leather belts, and handling food without washing their hands, he thought that if Dhanoo and Kirpu needed any more proof of the spoliation of their religion they could see it here. (70)

In the letters written by Muslim soldiers in particular, religion was mentioned in relation to Turkey. In 1914, Turkey joined the war on the side of the Germans which proved to be a difficulty for some Muslims. This is also briefly touched upon in the novel when Lalu confirms a Muslim soldier’s suspicions that the Turks have joined the war. The Muslim is horror-stricken and exclaims: “Then we have been fighting against the Khalif of Islam!” (349).

Although religion is omnipresent in the novel, the war is hardly ever described in terms of it. This was, however, the case in the letters where the war was compared to religious epics of destruction. Nevertheless, in both the letters and the novel, war is described in terms of the sepoys’ home. For example, in the novel, the sound of the artillery is compared to the drums of a marriage procession (148), and the noise of gun fire is likened to that in a cotton factory (157).

From this short comparison we can conclude that Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Across the Black Waters stayed true to the reality of the First World War sepoys. The emotions and feelings expressed in the soldiers’ letters are portrayed in a very realistic way in the novel. Even though the novel was written for an English-speaking audience, it managed to present the perspective of the colonised rather than that of the coloniser. And just as the letters gave the sepoys a voice in reality, so Across the Black Waters gave them a voice in fiction.

Indian Soldiers, Their Letters and the Great War

From March to May 2018, the CSMCH is hosting Birgit Ampe as an Erasmus+ trainee and visiting postgraduate student. Amongst other things, Birgit is using her time in Edinburgh to pursue research on Indian soldiers during the First World War. In the first of three blog posts, she explores some of the letters that Indian soldiers wrote during the war, and what these can tell us about the relationship between Indians and the colonial administration.

When the war broke out in 1914, it was soon termed the Great War. It was only later that it would become known as the First World War. This more accurate term envelops the true nature of the conflict: the great powers used their vast empires to march on the enemy. This was especially true for Britain, which at the onset of the war controlled over one-fifth of the world’s land mass and held a quarter of the world’s population. In the British Empire, India was seen as the crown jewel. It then comes as no surprise that most of Britain’s colonial recruits came from India. In total, 1.27 million Indian men contributed to the war effort, including 827,000 combatants. These so-called sepoy were first deployed in France and later also in the Middle East.

The majority of the Indian soldiers were recruited from the middle peasantry, which has led many historians to conclude that these illiterate men were voiceless victims of the war. This is, however, not entirely true. In the British Library and the Cambridge University Library we can find an entire collection of letters written (or dictated to scribes) by Indian soldiers. The reason for their survival is perhaps not what one might suspect. Throughout the war, Indian inward and outward mail was translated, examined, and if needed, censored by the Indian Base Post Office to ensure no inappropriate things were written. This Office made weekly reports with extracts from the letters. So thanks to censorship these letters have survived.

Some of the letters from this collection have been reprinted by David Omissi in Indian Voices of the Great War (1999). As the title already suggests, the Indian soldiers were anything but voiceless. It is of course important to keep in mind that these letters were sometimes written with censorship in mind, but as David Omissi himself explains in the introduction to his work, most letters show genuine feelings and thoughts which can provide a glimpse into the minds of the soldiers. And that is exactly what this blog post will try to do, by means of highlighting some of the main ideas and recurrent themes as presented by Omissi in his introduction.

A scribe transcribes a soldier’s letter (source: IWM, Q 53887)

At first glance, it is immediately clear that the war has a prominent place in the letters. Although the soldiers had been given strict orders not to write about the war, it was almost impossible not to do so, because this unprecedented event had inevitably become part of their lives. Interestingly, the emotions expressed in the letters seem to mirror the developments during the war. When, for example, the first battles proved to be more difficult and the number of casualties much higher, there was a marked shift in tone from hope to despair. Many soldiers no longer believed the war would be over soon, but instead urged their family members not to enlist.

Morale began to decline even further with the arrival of winter. The Indian soldiers were not used to such harsh weather conditions and the number of self-inflicted wounds increased. In 1915, Indian morale had reached its lowest point and it was feared that it would not survive another winter. The Indian infantry was consequently moved from France to the Middle East. Immediately, we see another shift in the letters. There is a less depressing tone and – apart from some despairing letters – the soldiers seem to have adjusted to the war. However, this adjustment came with a feeling of resignation and a loss of belief in personal survival. As a Sikh wrote to his mother:

I am very happy. In the end I have to die, and to die is best. Except for resignation, there is no remedy. (351)

Perhaps as interesting as what the soldiers wrote, is how they wrote it. Many of them described the war in terms of what they were familiar with. Since the majority of the soldiers were recruited from the middle peasantry, they frequently described the war using references to rural labour. For example, a soldier wrote to his uncle:

Germany fights the world with ghastly might, harder to crush than well-soaked grain in the mill. (123)

Religious imagery is also frequently used. Muslims refer to the war as the Karbala, whereas Hindus compare it to the Mahabharata, both tales of destruction.

In fact, religion played a very important role, not only in the imagery, but in the everyday lives of the soldiers. Daily religious observances, such as eating halal, remained important to the men, even when the war made it difficult to do so. Some Muslims complained in their letters about the difficulty to come by halal food and how other Muslims had become lax in their observance. But this was not the only challenge Muslims faced. In 1914, Turkey joined the war. At the time, this country was a great Muslim power, and fighting it meant fighting the home of the Khalifa. However, from their letters we can gather that many Muslims decided to remain loyal to Britain, writing that “Turkey is nothing at all to us” (1).

The letters do not only give us an insight in how the soldiers felt about the war, but also about what they left behind. There are heart wrenching letters about homesickness, disputes about family allowances and the strain of war on marriage. It is also worth remembering that these soldiers were peasants before enlistment. Even in the midst of war, their minds were still preoccupied with the agricultural conditions back at home, as we can see in the following letter:

He said that the wheat harvest had been utterly ruined. Please write and tell me whether this is true or not. (112)

But leaving one’s own nation behind, also meant coming into contact with a new one. For most Indian soldiers this was a positive encounter, as their letters show. The beauty of France is often praised, along with the friendliness of the people and the wealth of the cities. When compared to India, the latter seems to come off as rather backward, with some soldiers even claiming that it would “take at least five hundred years for India to attain to such conditions” (58).

One reason why the soldiers made such claims is the education of women. Many Indian men were surprised that French women were so well-educated. They even wrote letters home expressing a wish that their daughters should be educated as well as their sons. Overall, the Indian soldiers wrote positively about women. Some compared them to mothers and sisters, because of the care they received from them, while others had more sexual thoughts in mind when they wrote “[t]he ladies are very nice and bestow their favours upon us freely” (171).

A final interesting point to be found in the letters is that there is a lack of Indian identity and nationalist discourse. Instead, the soldiers seem to have a strong sense of duty towards the Government or Sirkar:

I consider it an honour that I am called to do this work, and am looked upon as a loyal subject. […] Our Government has done everything possible to make things easy for us and has provided us with every comfort, but up to date I have not been able to make any recompense. Now is the time. (585)

But perhaps even more than loyalty to the Government, there was loyalty to the King. It must be stressed, however, that this loyalty was directed towards the person of the King, rather than his office.

When examining these letters and highlighting certain recurrent ideas, it becomes clear that the Indian soldiers were not as different from their British colleagues, even though they came from an entirely different culture. They are in essence just men, with their own ideas, fears and curiosity. David Omissi’s work is invaluable to the research on Indian soldiers as through these letters we get a rare glimpse into the thoughts and lives of these often forgotten people.