The Politics of Anticolonial Resistance: Violence and Nonviolence

• In Event: New Findings from Deep Histories

Abstract

Who was right, Gandhi or Fanon? This paper examines the effects of violent and nonviolent resistance within the British Empire after World War 1. Scholars have previously debated the impact of resistance on the timing of independence for each colony. In order to study within-colony variation in the effects of resistance, I instead examine how resistance affected colonial concessions and reforms. I introduce an original dataset on colonial concessions along with measures of the intensity and type of anticolonial resistance. This data is constructed from searching over 7 million historical newspapers. In addition, I study the effect that resistance had on parliamentary debates and discussions within the British cabinet. I show that violence was a bigger predictor of colonial concessions than nonviolence in most colonies. However, in African colonies, nonviolence led to more concessions. Both the parliamentary debates and cabinet discussions were overwhelmingly concerned with anti-colonial violence. To explain this empirical pattern, I theorize that variation in the Empire's interest in the colonies explains reactions to resistance. In strategically important colonies, violence led to concessions because violence threatened Britain's geopolitical interests. In economically important colonies, nonviolence led to concessions because nonviolence impeded the export of valuable goods. This theory and empirical finding places the target of resistance at the center, and argues that previous works assessing the effects of political resistance have not sufficiently accounted for variation in a target's interest. Target interests condition the relative success of violent and nonviolent resistance,

Author

• Richard McAlexander, Columbia University