Beyond Sovereignty Also by Kevin Grant A CIVILISED SAVAGERY: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 Also by Philippa Levine GENDER AND EMPIRE: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series PROSTITUTION, RACE AND POLITICS: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE: Citizenship, Nation and Race (co-edited with Laura Mayhall and Ian Fletcher) FEMINIST LIVES IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND: Private Roles and Public Commitment VICTORIAN FEMINISM 1850–1900 THE AMATEUR AND THE PROFESSIONAL: Historians, Antiquarians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 Also by Frank Trentmann FOOD AND CONFLICT IN EUROPE IN THE AGE OF THE TWO WORLD WARS (co-edited with Flemming Just) CONSUMING CULTURES, GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (edited with John Brewer) THE MAKING OF THE CONSUMER: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (editor) CIVIL SOCIETY: A Reader in History, Theory and Global Politics (edited with John Hall) WORLDS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY: Knowledge and Power in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (edited with Martin J. Daunton) MARKETS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXTS: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (edited with Mark Bevir) PARADOXES OF CIVIL SOCIETY: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (editor) CRITIQUES OF CAPITAL IN MODERN BRITAIN AND AMERICA: Transatlantic Exchanges (edited with Mark Bevir) Beyond Sovereignty Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 Edited by Kevin Grant Hamilton College, New York Philippa Levine University of Southern California, Los Angeles and Frank Trentmann Birkbeck College, University of London Editorial matter,selection and introduction © Kevin Grant,Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann 2007.All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8643-6 All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988,or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court Road,London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St.Martin’s Press,LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan®is a registered trademark in the United States,United Kingdom and other countries.Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-54089-1 ISBN 978-0-230-62652-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230626522 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beyond sovereignty :Britain,empire,and transnationalism,c.1880–1950 / edited by Kevin Grant,Philippa Levine,and Frank Trentmann. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.Commonwealth countries—Social conditions.2.Imperialism—Social aspects—Great Britain.3.Human rights—Commonwealth countries. 4.Transnationalism—History.5.Great Britain—Civilization—19th century.6.Great Britain—Civilization—20th century.I.Grant,Kevin,1965- II.Levine,Philippa.III. Trentmann,Frank. DA16.B556 2007 909’.09712410821—dc22 2006050836 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Contents List of Contributors vii 1 Introduction 1 Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann 2 Sovereignty and Sexuality: Transnational Perspectives on Colonial Age of Consent Legislation 16 Philippa Levine 3 After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930 34 Frank Trentmann 4 Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years: The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children 54 Barbara Metzger 5 Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery, c. 1885–1956 80 Kevin Grant 6 Beyond Sovereignty?: Protestant Missions, Empire and Transnationalism, 1890–1950 103 John Stuart 7 A Shadow Nation: The Making of Muslim India 126 Faisal Devji 8 ‘A Well Selected Body of Men’: Sikh Recruitment for Colonial Police and Military 146 Thomas R. Metcalf 9 Valleys of Fear: Policing Terror in an Imperial Age, 1865–1925 169 Robert Gregg v vi Contents 10 Screening Empire from Itself: Imperial Preference, Represented Communities, and the Decent Burial of the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1927–28) 191 Madhavi Kale 11 The Persistence of Privilege: British Medical Qualifications and the Practice of Medicine in the Empire 214 Douglas M. Haynes Index 240 List of Contributors Faisal Devji is Associate Professor of History at The New School, New York. He is the author of Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Kevin Grantis Associate Professor of History at Hamilton College. He is the author of A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926(New York: Routledge, 2005). Robert Gregg is Associate Professor of History and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. His publica- tions include Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) and Inside Out, Outside In (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Douglas M. Haynes is Professor of British History at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Madhavi Kale is Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Philippa Levine is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is author, most recently, of Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Gender and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Thomas R. Metcalf is Emeritus Professor of History of the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent publications include A Concise History Of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 2006) edited with Barbara D. Metcalf; and Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Barbara Metzger is Associate at the Centre of International Studies in Cambridge. She received her PhD in history from Cambridge University. vii 1 Introduction Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann Fifteen years ago, Francis Fukuyama declared in his influential The End of History and the Last Man that the future had been settled by the end of the Cold War in 1989 and by the apparent victory of liberal democ- racy and capitalism over communism. In the intervening years, and particularly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, the significance of the collapse of communism has increasingly become uncertain. As the widening gyre of so many global relationships pivots upon the Middle East, the end of the Cold War appears to have been the end of an interlude, rather than the end of history.1Politicians and commentators have been confounded by the continuities of the worlds before and after the Cold War, worlds in which the borders of the nation-state have been permeated and undermined by global processes that governments and civil societies have more often encouraged than resisted. Debates over the limits and future of sovereign nation-states, of transnational terrorism, of the impact of migration and the emergence of pluralistic identities, and of global civil society are far from new. This collection of essays illuminates their antecedents between the late nine- teenth and mid-twentieth centuries, demonstrating how transnational dynamics challenged the concept and practice of sovereignty in the age of empire. This volume is a historically informed critical intervention into the field of transnational studies, a field that has been built in large part by politi- cal scientists, legal scholars, sociologists, and anthropologists. Steven Vertovec defines transnationalism as the ‘multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states.’2Ethnic diasporas are, perhaps, the paradigmatic case of a transnational formation that transcends borders. But the significance of transnationalism reaches beyond spatial movements and physical connections, involving distinct 1 2 Introduction multilocal sets of identities and memories, fluid and hybrid forms of cul- tural reproduction, and transnational flows of money and expertise. For all its creative momentum, however, the field of transnational studies has mainly restricted its focus to topics after the end of the Cold War or to cur- rent developments. Some social scientists have argued that transnational phenomena, such as the back-and-forth movement of migrants, have only recently acquired ‘the critical mass and complexity necessary to speak of an emergent social field’ that warrants the development of transnational studies.3 This is not to say, of course, that other scholars have not considered ideas and movements that moved beyond sovereignty in an earlier peri- od. For example, a major body of scholarship has examined the inte- gration of financial markets, capital flows, labor migrations, and the expansion of trade in the decade before the First World War. Such work has been complemented by an anxious concern about whether any- thing may be learnt from this earlier period of globalization in order to avoid the catastrophic down-turn marked by the First World War and the Great Depression.4 In this narrative, the era of the two world wars marks a fundamental rupture in the process of globalization, which was then repaired by several decades of affluence and American-led trade liberalization. This volume, however, offers an alternative framework of analysis. It emphasizes additional aspects and dynamics of transnationalism and points to a profoundly different periodization. The seeds of transnatio- nalism are imperial, rather than post-colonial. Empires, we argue, were critical sites where transnational social and cultural movements took place. These movements took the shape of a triadic relationship, in which flows between colonies were as important as those between metropole and colony. Empires, and here most decisively the British Empire, devel- oped concepts and practices of international law that sought to come to terms with issues that palpably transcended the sovereign nation-state, such as slavery and the rights of minorities. It was in a context of impe- rial society, culture, and rivalry that new ideas of political citizenship developed and challenged inherited notions of nation-state sovereignty. These new ideas moved instead toward conceptions of rights and political participation that anticipated elements of what is currently called ‘cos- mopolitanism’ and ‘global civil society.’ At the same time, empires pio- neered instruments of policing that sought to respond to challenges to imperial power arising from the transnational movement of people and ideas. Finally, empires were sites of social and political movements that developed critiques of national sovereignty and explored transnational