‘The Internationalism of Islam’: The British Perception of a Muslim Menace, 1840–1951
Abstract This article assesses British perceptions of a Muslim menace to imperial security between 1840–1951. These ideas had a long life. They rarely stood in the first rank of imperial concerns, but sometimes in the second. Over this period, British ideas of an Islamic menace focused first on the political self-consciousness of all Muslims than on subterranean bodies which tried to bind masses and elites for political ends, and moved to nationalist movements with a narrow popular base, and finally to those with a mass base. Between 1915 and 1924, fear of a pan-Islamic menace significantly affected British strategic and imperial policy. These ideas involved the interaction of observation, intelligence, perception, learning, fear, ignorance and uncertainty. Their study illuminates the evolution both of British intelligence and of its ideas about the political self-consciousness of its subjects, and the threat that posed to its rule, particularly about the nature and power of colonial nationalism.
The New Asia of Rash Behari Bose: India, Japan, and the Limits of the International, 1912–1945
Abstract:Despite attracting little attention within the historiography of Indian independence, Rash Behari Bose was the most wanted man in India during the First World War, and he remained an implacable opponent of British imperial rule until his death in 1945. By examining the challenge that Bose’s exile in Japan posed to British attempts to police the borders of colonial India against the circulation of unwanted arms, ideas, and students, this article points toward the emergence of imperial anxieties regarding the dangers posed by new forms of political violence. Furthermore, I argue that Bose’s life and political thought provide an opportunity for an alternative reading of the relationship between territory and nation, by demonstrating the ways in which Bose sought to subvert imperial and international geographies of power by imagining layered forms of an Indian nation, which interacted and intersected with broader global communities through ideas of history, religion, civilization, and race.
The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America: Acknowledgments
Introduction: re-examining the roots of Anglo-American political thought Part I. The Divine Right Challenge to Natural Liberty: 1. The attack on the Catholic natural law 2. Calvinism and parliamentary resistance theory 3. The problem of Grotius and Hobbes Part II. The Whig Politics of Liberty in England: 4. James Tyrrell: the voice of moderate Whiggism 5. The Pufendorfian movement: moderate Whig sovereignty theory 6. Algernon Sidney and the old Republicanisms 7. A new Republican England 8. Natural rights in Locke's two treatises 9. Lockean liberal constitutionalism 10. The glorious revolution and the catonic response Part III. The Whig Legacy in America: 12. British constitutionalism and the challenge of empire 13. Thomas Jefferson and the radical theory of empire 14. Tom Paine and popular sovereignty 15. Revolutionary constitutionalism: laboratories of radical Whiggism Conclusions Notes Bibliography.