Afterlives of Empire: “Unlawful Assembly,” Social Control, and People Power, c. 1830s-1970s

• In Event: Solidarities with, of, and alongside Palestine

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss the connected imperial history of “unlawful assembly” laws across imperial Britain, postcolonial South Asia, and the United States, which were ostensibly used to ban small gatherings of public crowds but morphed into a policing architecture banning a plethora of activities deemed to be against “public order.” Originally conceived in metropolitan Britain, “unlawful assembly” was a British colonial era law which travelled across the British imperial world to ban public gatherings of five or more people under the guise of protecting “public tranquillity,” charging violators of this law with the crime of “unlawful assembly.” I will show both how local police authorities across colonized worlds – from metropolitan Britain to South Asia to the United States – implemented laws against “unlawful assemblies” as connected forms of social control against “riotous” and “unruly” populations. In each of these locations, this law was often used to suppress nascent language movements, student protestors, radical labor organizing, disease outbreaks, religious processions, and anti-authoritarian uprisings. In two sites in particular – 1970-71 in East Pakistan, as well as during the 1960s and 2023-present in the United States during the anti-genocide Palestine uprisings – unlawful assembly laws were used with brutal consequences to suppress protestors agitating against genocide. I will also show the subjects of these laws responded with imaginations of freedom – in the courtroom, in public street protests and gatherings, as well as with creative forms of resistance such as art, song, movies, and poetry – to the law’s authoritarianism and absurdity. My archival research works through government gazettes, newspapers, court cases, political party records, declassified police intelligence files and cabinet decisions, as well as vernacular literature at several libraries and archives across India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Broadly speaking, my work speaks to a number of academic conversations about the management of crowds, the history of emergency law, and the regulation of public space as an afterlife of empire. This paper comes from a chapter of my History Ph.D dissertation entitled People to the Power: Governing Crowds and “Unlawful Assembly” in Britain, South Asia, and the United States, c. 1830s-1970s.

Biographical Information

Daniel Waqar is a History PhD candidate and graduate worker at Tufts University. He is a historian of colonial and postcolonial law, the police, race and ethnicity, and art and literature across imperial Britain, postcolonial South Asia, and the United States. His dissertation is focused on the history and social practice of “unlawful assembly” laws in British colonial, postcolonial South Asia, and the United States. He received his MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford and his BA in History from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. At Oxford, he served as the Managing Editor of the St Antony’s International Review, the University of Oxford’s only peer-reviewed journal of international affair and led journal’s board to publish two issues on gender in the international arena as well as climate breakdown in the anthropocene. He is also a member of Scholars for Social Justice, a platform and network through which progressive scholars can work collaboratively to articulate and support a political agenda insisting on equity, justice, and freedom, especially for those most oppressed in society.

Author

• Daniel Waqar, Tufts University