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When Hegemony Fails: British Imperialism in India and Brazil from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries Michael McIntyre DePaul University Chicago, Illinois Prepared for the meetings of the Western Political Science Association San Antonio, Texas April 21, 2011 A crimson thread runs through the history of the last half-millennium: empire. A geopolitician surveying the world in 1500 would have located the great powers in Asia. Europe, a peninsula hanging off the far western end of Asia, was at best the home of second-rank powers. Yet the following centuries saw unending colonial expansion, in which even decolonization meant a transfer of power to colonial settlers, not to the natives. After four-and-a-half centuries of expansion, the age of empires came to an end no less suddenly than it began. Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, all of the great European empires had collapsed, leaving only slowly disappearing shards. Each of these stunning turning-points in world history has set off acrid debates. Why did Europe reach a position of world dominance so quickly, starting from a position of seemingly minor significance? Why did the empires collapse so suddenly? Oddly enough, though, there has been little effort to place the whole range of questions - How were the empires built? How were they maintained? Why did they collapse? - within a common analytic framework. Thus, work debunking the profitability of empire, even at its height, goes almost unremarked in a parallel literature attributing the collapse of empires to their loss of profitability. Materialist theories of the birth of empire sit easily alongside ideological theories of the fall of empire. There is no oddity here in the coexistence of mutually incompatible theories; that's normal in the social sciences.
Usually these incompatible theories generate continuing debate; even if the One True Theory is a chimera, we act as if we are on a quest to find it. In the literature on imperialism, though, such debates tend to be contained within specific spatial or temporal niches. A word must be said about the choice to include informal empire, and not simply colonial rule, under the rubric “imperialism”. Colonial rule is one variant of a larger range of cases in which a particular state exercises substantial influence in the political affairs of another country without attempting to base that political power upon common nationality. Perhaps the more powerful country has already recognized the formal sovereign equality of the less powerful, or perhaps it rules over another country as a selfconsciously alien power. The subject country, far from becoming a cultural replica of the metropole, is regarded as the photographic negative of the home country. Contemplating this (inferior) image, the nation learns what it is by learning what it is not. In such cases, it becomes unimaginable that the two polities could become one, that they could share a common nationality. The influence exercised may range from direct rule through a colonial state to power exercised primarily through non-state entities such as banks, missionaries, private investors, firms, or settler colonies. In no case is such influence absolute. Even in the case of direct colonial rule, it may turn out to be the case that the colonial state reigns but does not rule, that colonial sovereignty is little more than a hollow crown. It should not need to be said, but it does, that just as colonial power is not absolute, the influence exercised through the agency of non-state entities does not control all aspects of the less powerful country's politics. The exercise of power is not symmetrical, however, for one country exercises influence in the other's affairs without
2
being subject to similar influence. Whenever one country contains elites who exercise sufficient influence in another country that they must be regarded as parties to the core ruling alliance of that country (even when their power is limited, even when their participation in that alliance is accepted or initiated by elites in the receiving country) and no reciprocal relationship exists, I will call the resulting pact of domination imperial and the relationship between the two countries imperialism. This study focuses on the second of the three questions asked above: how were empires maintained? By spanning a substantial time-period, however, it casts an eye on the other two questions as well. If it does not directly address the issue of imperial conquest, it does at least take on board the construction of political alliances that necessarily followed conquest. If it does not directly concern itself with empire's disappearance, it does at least bring into view the era when the tide began to turn against empire. Moreover, by taking on such very different countries - Brazil and India - and two distinct kinds of empire - formal and informal - it aims to stretch the range of application of a theory of empire to its utmost. In a nutshell, the theory advanced here focuses on the political alliances that underpin empire, whether formal or informal. Empires were created when metropolitan powers and their peripheral counterparts were able to form political alliances despite material, ideological, and cultural challenges, and came apart when those same powers were unable successfully to re-form those alliances in the face of new challenges. The key theorist in this endeavor is Antonio Gramsci, but not the Antonio Gramsci you may think you know, not "the Marxist you can take home to mother" (Lears 1985, 567). In the received interpretation of Gramsci, hegemony, thought of either as a
3
dominant ideology or a naturalization of power, explains the dominance of almost any ruling class, oligarchy, political elite, or what-have-you. James Scott’s work buried this Gramsci, or should have, some time ago (see Scott 1985, 1990). But that Gramsci was not the Italian Communist who wrote while quite literally rotting away in a fascist prison.1 Nothing could be clearer in the Prison Notebooks than that Gramsci was concerned first and foremost to explain the Italian case, not to generate a universal theory of power. Equally clearly, Gramsci did not see Italy as a case of hegemonic domination. Quite to the contrary, in his "Notes on Italian History," Gramsci refers again and again to the failure of Italy's bourgeoisie to achieve hegemony (Gramsci 1971, 52-120). The key figure in Gramsci's story is Camillo Cavour, the leading political figure of nineteenthcentury Italy. Cavour's unparalleled skill in stitching together parliamentary coalitions, only to rip out the stitches and stitch together yet another when circumstances dictated, was for Gramsci at the heart of hegemonic failure in Italy. Instead of assembling a compact political coalition oriented around the class with a dominant role in the world of production - a blocco storico or historic bloc - Italy's political elites settled for shifting alliances. Time and again, Gramsci compares the politicians of the Risorgimento unfavorably to a political elite that, he believes, did successfully create a hegemonic historic bloc: the Jacobins of the French Revolution(Gramsci 1971, 77-9). Nor does Gramsci have a pollyannish view of the Jacobins - repression was an integral part of their success in imposing their hegemony.2
1
Gramsci's Prison Letters make continual reference to skin diseases and loss of teeth (Gramsci 1994). 2 In a long footnote, the editors of the most widely used English abridgement of the Prison Notebooks rescue an important passage from an early version of these notes: " … a class is dominant in two ways, i.e. 'leading' and 'dominant'. It leads the classes which 4
Not only does this make Gramsci less "nice", it also forces us to reconsider what kind of theorist Gramsci was. Rather than considering him a theorist of "cultural hegemony" (a phrase he rarely used), I will consider him first and foremost a theorist of political alliances. Indeed, among Marxist theorists, Gramsci is almost alone as a theorist of political action. While abundant Marxist theorizing about the state focuses primarily on how to conceive the relationship between the state and the ruling class, Gramsci is almost alone in making political action theoretically central, not simply a tactical residue of theorizing about the state. For my purposes, a somewhat simplified version of Gramsci's rich, but not completely worked out, theory will suffice. Successful achievement of hegemony requires a political elite, tied to the economically dominant class, to undertake the formation of a historic bloc, a political alliance that includes most or all of the dominant class, along with a heterogeneous but reasonably stable set of allies. Successful rule requires such alliances to be built to rule successfully, but does not require that they be hegemonic. Two criteria distinguish alliances that are hegemonic from alliances that are dominant without being hegemonic: one material, one cultural. Imperial alliances, I are its allies, and dominates those which are its enemies. Therefore, even before attaining power a class can (and must) 'lead'; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but continues to 'lead' as well … there can and must be a 'political hegemony' even before the attainment of governmental power, and one should not count solely on the power and material force which such a position gives in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony"(Gramsci 1971, 57n.). Hence, the Jacobins' use of repression is not contrary to, but in furtherance of, their hegemonic project. In making the case for their success in creating a "political hegemony", Gramsci praises the Jacobins for "creating irreversible faits accomplis and … driving the bourgeois forward with kicks in the backside," not to mention having "sent to the guillotine not only the elements of the old society which was hard-a-dying, but also the revolutionaries of yesterday - today become reactionaries" (Gramsci 1971, 77-78). 5
argue, are able to meet the first, but not the second criterion. Material dominance can be achieved through constraint: allies are pressed into service through fear of selective retribution against "allies" who refuse, or fear of generalized oppression and exploitation of those not invited into the alliance. Material hegemony, in contrast, must be built around material inducements to join the alliance. The dominant class makes economic sacrifices to induce partners to join the coalition, thereby broadening its ruling base. One may suspect that regimes that achieve only material dominance do not last long, but since both India and Brazil achieve material hegemony, this study cannot test that proposition. Cultural dominance can come in three forms: imposition, emulation, and recognition. The imposition of dominant cultural forms, whether architectural, literary, ideological, or even constitutional, is most easily achieved under direct colonial rule, although not necessarily excluded when power is exercised more indirectly. Emulation is more common in the informal empire, as local elites hasten to demonstrate their status as partners in the family of "civilized" nations (Gong 1984). That status cannot be achieved, however, in the absence of a gesture of recognition on the part of those who hold the torch of "civilization" by ascriptive right. Cultural hegemony, then, is achieved only when recognition is bestowed on the partners whose "civilized" status is in doubt, making them "natural" partners in rule.3
3
Two misunderstandings should be avoided here. First, the culturally dominant partners may not be dominant in other respects. In Brazil, for example, the imperial alliance that binds Brazilian elites to British finance is initiated and maintained by Brazilian elites, and I take this form of local initiative to be typical of informal empire. At the same time, the desperate need of Brazilian elites to establish themselves as bearers of European civilization gave substantial power to their British partners, who were more than reluctant to concede them civilized status. Second, this criterion extends only to local elites. For purposes of deciding whether a ruling alliance is culturally hegemonic, it matters not at all whether dominated groups also adopt these cultural forms. 6
For a political alliance - a historic bloc - to achieve hegemony, then, it need not convince the dominated that they rule by right or by inevitability. For hegemony, you need an alliance built on material inducements in which the partners come to see themselves as bearers of a culture which makes them fit to rule, and natural allies. A central claim of this study is that imperial alliances can achieve the first, but not the second, condition. Partners outside the metropole are culturally (and in this era, racially) identified with the dominated. Their attempts at cultural emulation are rebuffed, and they suffer the indignity of persistent reminders of their cultural (and again, in these cases, racial) "inferiority". Does it matter? After all, the imperial alliances in question may not have been hegemonic, but they were long-lived. In the period under consideration, both India and Brazil were ruled by two distinct political regimes. Three of the four regimes were as long-lived as the French Third Republic, and the fourth, lasting forty years, was by no means evanescent.4 Failure to achieve cultural hegemony appears not to affect the longevity of political regimes, then, but it does affect how they fail. Political alliances must undergo periodic reformulation, because the world around those political alliances changes. India develops a class of indigenous capitalists, for example, or the old established coffee growers in São Paulo start to lose ground to newcomers. How are the existing political alliances to respond? To make no response is to invite a powerful new group to join or form the opposition. To respond is to risk alienating existing members of the alliance. The cultural divide in imperial alliances, we will find, makes this task particularly fraught. On the one hand, metropolitan elites are slow to recognize and quick 4
This suggests that material hegemony may be a sufficient condition for regime durability, but in the absence of a negative case, that hypothesis cannot be tested here. 7
to discount the importance of ascendant class fractions in the empire. On the other, peripheral elites who suffer the indignities attendant on cultural devaluation become prone to defect when an alliance is re-formed. Imperial alliances thus become brittle, and can respond only with difficulty to the changes in the world of production that gather increasing speed with the spread of capitalism. While the alliance endures, the cultural divide also leaves its mark on the way power is exercised. Under conditions of colonial rule, an official sociology classes and ranks the natives, reifying and justifying both the social inequalities that predate colonial rule and those created by colonial rule. In addition, ever unsure of its hold on power, the colonial state remains on the lookout for "dangerous classes", potential threats to its rule. Whether in the everyday brutality of colonial policing or in the exemplary brutality with which local revolts are suppressed, rigid exclusion at any cost becomes the condition of imperial rule (Orwell 1950, 1956). Under conditions of informal empire, a slightly different mechanism produces the same result. Ever eager to demonstrate their exceptional cultural status, the upper classes of the periphery draw sharp lines of distinction between themselves and those they rule, trying to move the line that separates civilization from barbarism from a position that divides metropole from periphery to one that divides class from class (or race from race) within the periphery (Rodó 1988; Sarmiento 1972). In consequence, elites in the informal empire create brutal, rigid, exclusive systems of rule that mirror those in the formal empire.
8
In brief, this study does not try to answer the big question, "Why did Europe come to dominate the rest of the world?"5 It does, however, show how, through the timely creation of alliances, relatively small advantages can be parlayed into durable imperial regimes. Those regimes are maintained by material concessions to the junior partners whose support is needed to maintain the imperial pact of domination. While material hegemony is within the reach of these pacts, however, cultural hegemony remains elusive. Brittle, rigid, and brutally exclusive in consequence, these regimes resort to the crudest forms of domination when it comes to those outside the alliance, and are prone to come apart when faced with the necessity of re-formation. This work examines the effects of imperialism through the methods of historical sociology, examining a small number of cases in detail to build mid-level theory inductively. Since similar effects are postulated, the cases I have chosen are as unlike as possible in other respects in order to screen out competing explanatory factors. They are substantially different in that the cases in question should have had little historical interaction, formally different in that the kinds of "imperialism" in question should be distinct. The first qualification is very difficult to fulfill for any time after 1500, but the two cases in this study, Brazil and India, are as remote as practicable for the time in question.6 Likewise, India and Brazil stand at opposite poles of the imperial spectrum. India, "the jewel in the crown," was the archetype of colonial rule during the golden age of imperialism, larger by orders of magnitude than any other colonial possession, and the school in which Great Britain learned to administer the colonies it acquired after 1757. 5
But for a very suggestive partial response to this big question, see Kenneth Pomeranz's new work, The Great Divergence (Pomeranz 2000). 6 Earlier, of course, the Portuguese Empire included both Brazil and sections of India (McIntyre 1987). 9
Brazil had no colonial tie with Great Britain at any time, and is a textbook case of Britain's "informal imperialism" of the nineteenth century (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Robinson 1986).7 While the study can therefore be characterized as using "most-different systems" design (Przeworski and Teune 1970) or the "method of agreement" (Skocpol 1979, 36-7; 1984, 378-79), the method is not simply one of across-case comparison. Close readings of a small number of cases permit periodic shifts in the level of analysis, incorporating within-case comparisons and multiplying observations for across-case comparison.8 The argument proceeds in four parts: success in achieving material hegemony, failure in achieving cultural hegemony, the effect of the resulting rigid and brittle alliances on regime changes, and the brutally exclusionary politics to which these regimes gave rise.
7
Indeed, for some the characterization of the relationship between Great Britain and Brazil as "imperial" is already taking matters too far, for two related reasons. First, it is sometimes argued that the rubric simply exaggerates the influence wielded by the British in Latin America (Platt 1972, 1985). Second, one can worry that while under some plausible definition the relationship between Brazil and Great Britain might qualify as "imperial", the conceptual stretching involved in framing such a definition makes the term virtually unusable. I hope that readers who find themselves in sympathy with the first objection will find the material presented in chapter two compelling enough to grant the plausibility of the term. In a sense, the entire work is an answer to the second worry. The only real answer to the objection that conceptual stretching has made a term unusable is to do something with it. If these (intentionally) very different cases prove to be the loci of similar historical processes, traceable to the (intentionally) very different sorts of imperial relationships they endured, I will take the second objection to be moot. For now, I can only stipulate the meaning of "imperialism" in this study. 8 Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, in Designing Social Inquiry, recommend the strategy of multiplying observations rather than simply multiplying cases, while Kenneth Pomeranz demonstrates that systematically varying the level of analysis can be a useful tactic for multiplying observations (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, 21728; Pomeranz 2000, 4-10). 10
Material Hegemony Tightly-knit political elites used carefully crafted material inducements to build and sustain the ruling alliances in India and Brazil from roughly 1820-1930. That set of inducements and the practices of rule they sustained may be called "material hegemony". In such alliances, local collaborators are rarely mere order-takers; they act in the more ambiguous role of brokers. In the case of colonial rule, a small cadre of colonial administrators recruits a larger number of elite collaborators to perform the subaltern functions of rule, whether as lower-level colonial bureaucrats or as subsidiary rulers under imperial paramountcy. In India, when the elites of the Indian Civil Service were faced with the problem of soliciting the support of collaborators and making India pay for its own rule, they solved both problems by recruiting landowning elites, though the composition of that elite varied from province to province. Informal empire is typically an artifact of the alliance between the elites of poor, trade-dependent states and metropolitan merchants, financiers, and, to a lesser extent, entrepreneurs. Brazil's political elite was dominated by the bacharéis, the graduates of its law schools in Recife and São Paulo. The bacharéis ruled a country dependent on trade for revenue. They therefore needed to encourage exports on the part of an agroexporting class, from which families many of them came (and into which many others married). They had also to abide by the rules of the international trade regime. Moreover, they actively sought capital on international markets for government finance and private investment. The
11
incorporation of British commercial and financial elites into the ruling alliance in Brazil facilitated the creation of a stable state dependent on an agroexport economy.9 India's colonial bureaucracy had its roots in the pre-administrative structure of the East India Company. Company employees until the mid-eighteenth century were mainly concerned with the trading side of the Company's affairs, though a few were charged with the administration of justice within the British enclaves at Bombay, Fort St. George (Madras), and Calcutta. With the abolition of all trading functions in the Charter Act of 1833, the administrative structure of British India had taken its essential shape. A formal structure of review by regional, provincial, presidency, or London officials was in practice vitiated by the attenuated staffing of the upper bureaucracy and difficulties of communication, so that the district collector had substantial autonomy, becoming the linchpin of administration (Cohn 1987, 508-12). The District Collector had sway over one of the 250 administrative districts of British India. With an average land area of 4,430 square miles and a population usually in the neighborhood of one million scattered across a thousand or more villages, the collector's administrative responsibilities were vast. He oversaw a hierarchically organized staff including a handful of Sub-divisional Officers (S.D.O.'s) composed of new I.C.S. recruits and older men from the provincial civil services (the second-tier bureaucratic corps that switched over from nearly allBritish to nearly all-Indian in the nineteenth century), a score or more of tahsildars (native officials responsible for actual collection of revenue and petty magistracy), and innumerable village accountants (patwaris) who kept the records upon which the revenue 9
At times, British state elites also formed part of this pact, although here the relationship was more variable. In both India and Brazil, moreover, there were regions (the princely states in India, Brazilian Amazônia) in which the ruling alliance took a very different shape. 12
demand was based (Blunt 1937, 91-2, 99-102). While all retired I.C.S. men fondly remember their romantic days on horseback, staying in touch with "their" peasants, they in fact spent endless hours generating the reports and correspondence that were the lifeblood of the Empire. The assessment and collection of revenue drew the British into a set of social relations, not entirely of their own choosing, which then became the linchpin of a collaborative contract (Robinson 1986) between British rulers and particularly favored Indian subjects. We must take it as an elementary datum that neither the East India Company nor the British state were willing to incur significant expense on behalf of India. On the contrary, India more than paid for itself. Indian revenues paid not only for internal governmental costs, but for a variety of "home charges"--remitted interest (chiefly on railways and irrigation works), military costs incurred in Britain but charged against the Government of India, pensions and furlough expenses for civil servants in retirement or on home leave, and various others--which amounted to roughly 16% of revenues and rose in real terms from a yearly average of £10.5 million in the third quarter of the nineteenth century to £18.9 million in the first quarter of the twentieth (Kumar 1983, 937-38). The home charges became especially onerous late in the nineteenth century when the value of silver fell dramatically relative to gold. The silver standard of India's rupee forced India to spend more and more local resources to meet slowly increasing home charges which had to be paid in the gold-backed pound sterling. The military expenses which consumed roughly one-quarter of the Government of India's budget (Thompson and Garratt 1962, 594) must also be thought of as a subsidy to the Empire. The peacetime army of India was larger than that of Great Britain, and
13
beginning with the campaign against Napoleon in Egypt (1801) and the seizure of the Cape of Good Hope (1795, 1806) formed an integral part of Britain's projection of power into China, Africa, and the Middle East (Bayly 1988, 1). Land revenue was the fiscal cornerstone of the budget, accounting for between two-fifths and one-half of all revenue, year after year. Other sources of revenue--opium, salt tax, customs, excise tax, income tax--accounted for the rest, but none by itself ever contributed as much as one-fifth of annual revenue, and all fluctuated dramatically during the years in question (Kumar 1983, 916, 929). To rule India successfully was, in large part, to collect the tax on land, and the I.C.S. bore primary responsibility for its collection. No district collector, of course, could be expected to personally assess and collect revenue in the hundreds of villages under his rule. A separate corps of settlement officers, mostly from the I.C.S., but also drawn from the army, was responsible for assessment (at the rate of half-a-dozen villages per day), while a handful of Subdivisional Officers and a larger cadre of native officials (tahsildars) were directly responsible for revenue collection, and their success depended on the cooperation of village watchmen (chaukidars) and accountants (patwaris).10 To secure the cooperation of a class of intermediaries, the British were obliged to favor some at the expense of others. The alliances made by the British were embodied in "settlements", determinations of title to and tax on land. There was, however, no unified policy of cooptation in British India. British sovereignty over India spread gradually from bases in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. While Calcutta was the seat of central administration,
10
Blunt 1937, 99-102, 141-42. This is, of course, an extremely stylized portrait, most seriously at variance with practice in Bengal and Awadh, but reasonably accurate elsewhere. 14
each of the three presidencies was fiercely jealous of its independence, and each was molded by governors of strong opinion and determination. Hence, each presidency developed its own system of revenue administration. As British sovereignty was extended up the Gangetic plain into Agra, Awadh, and the Panjab, further innovations in the collection of land revenue were introduced.11 Indian land settlements were influenced, not just by strong personalities, but by the state of the administrative apparatus at the time of settlement, alliances between Indian administrators and British politicians, and scholarly debate about the proper form of landed property, the economic theory of rent, the role of caste in India, and the elementary forms of village community. Two unifying themes emerge from this welter of highly variant land settlements: the ubiquity of intermediaries and the interplay of knowledge and power. It is hard to overemphasize how thinly spread the British administrative apparatus was in India. In 1842, there were 776 men in the Company Service, 651 of them in executive posts. While the I.C.S. grew to just over one thousand men by the turn of the century, the addition of some fifty districts in Panjab and Awadh mean that its force per district could hardly have increased (Woodruff 1953, 2:363). This force was spread over some two hundred fifty districts, with an average district population of roughly one million. The public service of British India (excluding the army) had some 13,431 employees earning more than Rs. 75 (about £7.50) per month in 1867, doubling to 28,278 in 1903 (by which time, however, the value of Rs. 75 had fallen to roughly £5). British administration was 11
I already oversimplify. There were also variations on land systems within each presidency or province and within each district. It's like trying to describe the coast of Maine; a reduction in scale does not entail a corresponding reduction in topographic complexity. The attempt to master the minutiae of land revenue administration led to Baden-Powell's massive work of synopsis, Land-Systems of British India (1892); since then, no one has had the courage to tackle the job. 15
far too attenuated to decipher all the micro-variations in pre-British land tenure, systematically identify the cultivator in possession of each small plot of land, carry out full-blown cadastral surveys, systematically register land transfers and division upon inheritance, evaluate the rent for each property, and systematically adjust that rent for annual variations in weather, loss to insects, etc. Power was in the hands of those who controlled the flow of information to British revenue officials: village panchayats, accountants, revenue officers, and the district officials recruited from dominant castes (Mukherjee and Frykenberg 1969). Favored local elites successfully pressed claims of revenue commutation on the British. In principle these grants of inam were merely recognition by the British of pre-existing commutations, often grants to religious institutions. In practice, many of these claims had no historical basis (Charlesworth 1985, 53-5), but were an artifact, once again, of British dependence on local elites for information. Around 1850, revenue had been remitted on between twenty and thirty percent of the cultivated land in Bombay (Charlesworth 1985, 28). Inam land in Madras amounted to some 6.5 million acres, 3.5 million going to Brahmans and 1.5 million to religious institutions (Kumar 1965, 13). It would be a mistake to read this arrangement as a British payoff, a bribe to extract loyalty from dominant castes. Rather, British dependence on Chitpavan Brahmans in Bombay or Maratha Desasthas in Madras gave the latter an opportunity to press such claims while the former had few autonomous sources of information with which to oppose them and every incentive not to alienate these valued collaborators. In Brazil, as in India, the state's hegemonic project incorporated internal and external actors. In the absence of either set of actors, the pact of domination would have
16
been fundamentally altered. In both cases, a well-defined group within the state apparatus stood at the point of maximal tension between the two sets of hegemonic actors. Unlike India, the crucial actors in this putative hegemonic pact came from the subordinate society. Brazil's law-school graduates (bacharéis) were neither mere representatives of a landed oligarchy nor merely an anomalous urban class co-opted into a way of life modeled on that of European capitals, cut off from the base of Brazilian society. With a foot in both worlds, they had opportunities for the strategic diffusion of identity not available to I.C.S. officers in India (Briggs 1971). Descendants of settlers and their slaves, they were European, but not quite. They were channels of patronage and managers of a modernizing state apparatus, products of one particular strand of European intellectual culture and of a patriarchal rural culture. Accordingly, the basic elements of a pact of domination will be somewhat different in India and Brazil. State elites will seek out external partners for the pact of domination, before whom they will play the role of a cultivated, European stratum of a society firmly committed to international (read European) norms of civilized conduct (Gong 1984). While national identity is perceived as a threat by colonial powers, the creation of a "natural" nation-state is high on the agenda of a post-colonial state elite. The legitimating ideology for internal consumption will look quite different, stressing norms of asymmetrical reciprocity as the legitimate corollary of personal dependence. If the task of the I.C.S. was to bridge the gap between two cultures (building from one side only), Brazil's bacharéis can be thought of more as a hinge, not strictly part of either door or frame, but maintaining a proper alignment between the two.
17
Bacharéis dominated Brazilian cabinets after 1831, holding a near-monopoly on cabinet posts after 1840.12 Coimbra graduates held two-thirds of cabinet posts during the 1830s, and nearly half during the 1840s, after which their place was taken by graduates of the Brazilian schools (Carvalho 1982, 385). The relation of these law graduates to Brazil's agrarian elite is a vexed issue. At least half of the graduates from these schools had family ties to landowners (Carvalho 1982, 397 n.44). The most successful among them, those who held ministerial posts, likewise had agrarian ties; at least 41 percent and perhaps as many as 62 percent of Cabinet ministers under the Empire were either landowners, came from landowning families, or married into landowning families. The extensive family alliances built through marriage and godparentage extended the reach of powerful agrarian clans. Rio served as a marriage market where provincial families could acquire political clout while political elites secured the wealth needed to pursue a political career (Needell 1987, 117-21). Godparentage implied not just a responsibility for spiritual counsel, but an obligation to attend to the material interests of a child or newlywed couple (padrinhos and madrinhas were acquired at weddings as well as at baptisms) (Needell 1987, 124). But the influence of landowners on the Brazilian State did not rely on kinship alone; with the state apparatus dependent on foreign-trade taxes for eighty percent of its revenue in the 1850s, and over two-thirds of its revenue as late as 1914, no member of the political elite could ignore the regime's dependence on the prosperity of his landowning relatives (Fritsch 1988, 195; Leff 1982, 2:84). Both the
12
José Murilo de Carvalho (1982, 387) provides the following data on law graduates as a percentage of cabinet ministers from 1822 to 1889: 1822-31, 51.3%; 1831-40, 56.7%; 1840-53, 85.0%; 1853-71, 77.1%; 1871-89, 85.7%; 1822-89, 72.5%. 18
structure of the regime and the structure of networks in which the elite were embedded reinforced the power of rural landowners. Throughout the nineteenth century, Brazil held a uniquely creditworthy position among the nations of Latin America. European banks lent large sums of money to the new states of Latin America in the 1820s. With the exception of Brazil, all defaulted in 1825-26 and were cut off from European capital. In the years following that panic, Brazil took 50% of British exports to Latin America, and as late as the 1840s still took over onethird of all British shipments (Marichal 1989, 49). From 1825 to 1914, the Rothschilds of London were virtually the sole bankers of the Brazilian national government. The terms of Brazil's loans with the Rothschild's were among the most favorable on the continent. Nominal interest rates varied from four to five percent on bonds which sold for between 74 and 100 percent of face value (usually over 85 percent), giving real interest rates of between four and 6.76 percent (Normano 1968, 161-63).13 During this period, Brazil contracted new loans on the average of one every three years, causing an uneven but rapid expansion of her foreign debt. Brazil was in the hands of a political elite whose self-defined mission was to secure a place in the family of civilized nations. For both the Empire and the Republic, this mission meant building a state and creating the infrastructure characteristic of a modern nation (specifically, railways and public utilities). Both regimes were hampered in this task by a chronic shortage of capital. In sixty-six years (roughly contemporaneous with the period 1850-1914), the Brazilian central government ran a deficit fifty-five times. In twenty-seven of those years, the
13
These rates of interest, low by current standards, were nevertheless higher than those prevalent within Europe. Moreover, since the pound sterling was a deflationary currency during this period, Brazil's repayments of foreign debts did not ease over time. 19
deficit exceeded twenty percent of government revenues; twelve times it exceeded fifty percent of revenues; three times it was more than one hundred percent (Leff 1982, 2:83). This capital shortage could only be made up from abroad, through bonds underwritten by the Rothschilds. Under both the Empire and the Republic government loans constituted nearly half the public securities issued in London. Railways and public utilities, investments usually undertaken with government subsidy, dominated the remaining half of the bond market. The pact of domination between British and Brazilian elites was not exhausted by this high-level arrangement between the Brazilian state and a powerful British bank. Brazil's exports were channeled through an organized market in which commercial intermediaries were more powerfully placed than Brazilian planters. Coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco, and cacao were tied to the world market through a foreign-controlled financial and commercial complex which was well-established in each Brazilian port city: import-export houses, railroads, shipping lines, insurance underwriters, banks. In each constituent part of this interlocking commercial sector, British capital was more prominent than its French, German, or North American competitors. Taken together, no other foreign power could begin to match the British presence in this sector. In all of these export sectors Brazilian plantation owners employing servile labor faced a commercial bottleneck controlled by British interests. Most fazendeiros were cash-poor and therefore relied on advances at interest rates of up to 24 percent p.a. This sort of economic squeeze left the planters with crushing debt burdens; by the 1880s it was estimated that "only twenty percent of farmers were solvent, another thirty percent could repay loans if pressed, but the rest, in need of fresh capital yet unable to service current
20
debts, were beyond retrieval" (Greenhill 1977b, 205). It is easy to see that this sort of debt burden drained planters of bargaining power as well as cash. Export houses which loaned large sums to comissários, and comissários who loaned large sums to planters, were able to face their debtors as monopsonistic buyers; the debtors had little choice between selling at whatever price was offered or seeing their loans called in (Graham 1968, 78-80; Greenhill 1977b). Whether or not an export house was British, its creditors probably were. As late as 1913, "British banks held 30 per cent of the total assets of all banks and 57 per cent of those of all foreign banks in Brazil" (Graham 1968, 96). These banks were run conservatively, specializing in short-term credit to finance external trade, so that while their deposits came from Brazilians, their loans were mainly extended to their fellow expatriates. Rails and steamship companies were able to squeeze merchants, just as merchants were able to squeeze planters. Rail lines negotiated exclusive throughagreements with shipping companies, so that shipping lines were able to enforce a system of quotas and fixed prices that merchants were rarely able to challenge (Greenhill 1977a, 129-34). This system kept British shipping lines in a dominant position, even as British export houses were eclipsed by German, French, and North American competitors. As late as 1913, British carriers shipped more coffee (5.3 million bags) than their two nearest competitors combined: the Germans with 3.5 million bags and the French with 1.6 million bags (Graham 1968, 301-2). The most formidable competitors for British shipping lines were not foreign lines but the tramp steamers which made up sixty percent of Britain's merchant fleet. At least for the coffee trade, though, the British cartel of major shipping lines was able to capture the bulk of the traffic despite its quotas and artificially high rates. In addition to the agreements negotiated with monopolistic rail
21
lines, major lines offered rebates of between five and twelve and a half percent for major customers, though these rebates were withheld from disloyal customers who might be penalized by premium rates in future business (Greenhill 1977a, 133). To recapitulate, Brazilian political and economic elites were universally committed to integration in a world economy whose rules were set by other economic actors (a trade regime, to adopt the jargon of international relations). The rules of the game were a package that you bought whole or not at all. To obtain credit on London financial markets, or to find a ready market for your exports, you had to maintain an economy that was both open and secure. Tariffs might be high, in order to produce revenue, but they had to be nondiscriminatory. Default on loans was likely to shut you out of financial markets for decades. Foreign subjects had to be secure in their persons and assets. To insure the former, commercial treaties frequently secured extraterritorial rights for European citizens in Latin America. Assets might be seized only with full, prompt compensation. It is virtually impossible to construct a plausible scenario in which the British would not have figured as important partners in the pact of domination. Brazil's economy had been thoroughly integrated into the Atlantic economy since the mid-sixteenth century, first as the world's premier exporter of sugar, then as its primary gold producer. Unlike Spanish America, there was no drastic, bloody struggle whereby one ruling class replaced another. The elites of colonial Brazil were the elites of independent Brazil (which is not to say that there was no conflict among those elites). There was, therefore, no powerful caudillo-led faction advocating personal, autocratic rule and autarky (a project taken furthest in Paraguay). It was inevitable that Brazil would raise loans in European capital markets, export primary goods to Europe through
22
foreign-controlled trade complexes in its coastal cities, and open its domestic market to foreign capital; there was no plausible set of political actors on the scene to propose an alternative project. Due to its longstanding alliance with Portugal and the crisis of the Napoleonic wars, Great Britain was uniquely positioned to take advantage of Brazil's open economy. Only a war that damaged Britain's standing on a world scale allowed its displacement in Brazil. Cultural Hegemony These alliances may have been rooted in material interests, but did they take on the character of a "political ideology expressed neither in the form of a cold utopia nor as learned theorising, but rather by a creation of concrete phantasy which acts on a … people to arouse and organise its collective will” (Gramsci 1971, 126)? For while hegemony cannot be reduced to "cultural hegemony" or a "dominant ideology", still less can it be reduced to a cynical transaction for mutual gain. In arguing that the ruling alliances of Brazil and India did not succeed in establishing cultural hegemony as they had material hegemony, I simultaneously seek to understand how "imperialism" relies on an invidious distinction between the metropolitan/national Self and the peripheral/colonial Other that drives the Others to a program of self-defeating emulation (that is, when cultural forms from the metropole are not simply imposed) and Selves to an implacable assumption of cultural superiority. An imperial pact of domination entails a process of the production of cultural difference in which the lines of division are drawn as much between societies as within societies. Because the production of cultural difference is always also the production of superior and inferior status, imperial pacts of domination mark some parties to the pact itself as essentially inferior. India and Brazil
23
became alters in which England found no trace of itself. The English defined them by the ways in which they differed from England, differences that became badges of inferiority. Indian and Brazilian elites, like others on the short end of an imperial alliance, could react to their own devaluation with scorn, anger, or emulation, but they could not fail to be aware of their status. Even when they vigorously emulated the cultural standards of the dominant society, or adopted cultural standards imposed upon them as their own, they were never recognized as anything other than more or less skilful imitators. In a particularly cruel twist, their emulation of European culture marked them as bearers of imitative, and therefore fundamentally deficient, cultures. First, I will examine emulative projects whereby the junior partners sought to make a place for themselves as recognized and civilized partners. In India, that project will be the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu (or was it?) reform movement that drew on and adopted large parts of the missionary critique of Hinduism. In Brazil, it will be the small coterie that in the late nineteenth century produced a national literature that attempted to inscribe Brazil within a civilizational narrative, complemented by the writers of Brazil’s two nineteenth-century constitutions. Second, I will examine the way everyday life gives shape to a cultural order. In both India and Brazil I will consider the ways urban space was remade in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and how the shaping of that space reinforced invidious status distinctions. Third, I will pick out individuals remarkable for their adherence to British standards of civilization: Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who ceaselessly promoted loyalty to the Raj as the path to advancement for India's Muslims, and Brazil's self-proclaimed "Gladstonian Liberal," Joaquim Nabuco. Neither repudiated his loyalty (they are, after all, chosen precisely because they did not waver
24
there), but each was frustrated by the contradictions of that loyalty. Fourth, I will examine writings from the center of the pact of domination: memoirs from those members of the I.C.S. who served at the height of British power, and the private deliberations of Brazil's Conselho do Estado counterposed to the reflections found in confidential correspondence of the British Foreign Office. In each case, we will find that the failure of cultural hegemony can be read from the center as well as from the margins. Until roughly 1813, the English East India Company ruled India as a sort of private preserve. The Company jealously guarded its trading monopoly, but was also eager to exclude Christian missionaries and thereby avoid antagonizing its trading partners. This dual exclusion set the stage for a marriage of convenience between evangelicals and free-traders which bore fruit in the renewal of the Company charter in 1813. Advocates of laissez-faire obtained abolition of the trading monopoly. Evangelicals gained a new mission field with the establishment of and Indian church with a bishop and three archdeacons (Stokes 1959, 25-47). Christian missionaries hoped to rid India of suttee, the ban on widow remarriage, child marriage, and like horrors through a program of education and mass conversion. Among the Bengali elite, there were not a few who shared the evangelical horror at such practices, but recoiled at the prospect of mass conversion. Chief among them was Rammohan Roy, founder of the earliest and most radical of the Hindu reform societies, the Brahmo Samaj. For Rammohan, loyalty to the British Raj meant not conversion to the ruler's faith but reform of one's own in order to become a worthy partner in the imperial project. As early as 1820 Roy published the Precepts of Jesus, a work very much in the liberal, rationalist and ethical mode. There the teachings of Jesus,
25
particularly those found in the Synoptic Gospels, were endorsed, while core doctrines such as the Trinity and vicarious atonement were dismissed (Kopf 1979, 12). But while Roy attempted to deflect the missionary thrust of Christianity, "Rammohun attributed social evils in Hindu religion and society to the poisonous effect of 'idolatrous notions' which, by the middle period of Indian history, had completely undermined the pure Upanishadic belief in the 'unity of the Supreme Being as sole Ruler of the Universe (Kopf 1979. 14). So close was Roy's position to that of English Unitarians that he, along with William Adam and Dwarkanath Tagore founded the Calcutta Unitarian Committee and a Unitarian Press in 1823 (Kopf 1979, 12). By 1829, though, Roy had dropped his Unitarian affiliation and founded a new organization, the Brahmo Sabha. The organization, however, remained moribund between its founding and Roy's death in 1833 (Kopf 1979, 15). The Brahmo Samaj was invigorated by Dwarkanath Tagore’s son, Debendranath, and sustained by his grandson, Rabindranath. When Rabindranath took over the Adi Brahmo Samaj in 1911, he refounded the newspaper that his father had closed in 1859, and brought followers of rival faction back into the fold (Kopf 1979, 299). During this phase, Rabindranath repudiated his earlier dalliance with Bengali cultural nationalism in his novel The Home and the World (Kopf 1979, 306). Rabindranath responded to the bloodletting of World War I with an acute condemnation of all forms of nationalism, but it was a mark of his subtlety that his condemnation of nationalism was at the same time a condemnation of imperialism. His most acute insight was a demonstration that aggressive nationalism and imperialism were two faces of the same monster. From the "soil of Europe" arose a virulent poison of "national self-glorification," he wrote, which when politicized transformed Western civilization into a horrendous monster seeking to devour its neighbors. This "epidemic" of nationalism
26
"is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other people and tries to swallow their whole future…." (Kopf 1979, 305) Here Tagore places his finger on the central contradiction of empire in an age of nationalism. In an age of nations an empire is invariably legitimized by an appeal, veiled or not, to the intrinsic superiority of the empire's home nation. Any project of cultural renewal aimed at the production of a worthy imperial partner is bound to founder on the rock of this immutable difference. The Brahmo Samaj, originally intended as such a project, in the end split into a variety of different projects, none of them in alignment with the purposes of Rammohan Roy. Culture may be read through its material traces, those concrete artifacts that express a way of life, even if involuntarily. The most obvious of these artifacts are the buildings and spaces in which we live our public and private lives (and which in part make visible the boundary between public and private). While India was largely a rural society, the Anglo-Indian population lived overwhelmingly in towns. After 1857, increased attention was paid to the layout of colonial cities, with security an uppermost concern. Consequently, the colonial city in British India was remade in conformity with a single pattern of divided and hierarchical space. European space lay outside the city (or "native city" or "native quarter") and was further divided into the cantonment (military camp) and the "civil station" or "civil lines" where British civilian officials, merchants, and planters lived (King 1976, 79). The civil lines, with a handful of residents, frequently occupied as much physical space as the whole native city. The European quarter was itself divided and hierarchic. Britons lived in bungalows on large compounds (notice the prevalence of military 27
terminology). A compound was surrounded by a wall, and divided into lawns, gardens, servants' quarters, outhouses, and bungalow. The bungalow nearly always had a large verandah. The compound can then be seen as a set of increasingly segregated spaces, divided into: 1) 2) 3) 4)
the area between the verandah and the enclosing compound wall, the verandah, the hall of the bungalow (when there was one), the "inner sanctum" of drawing, dining, and bedroom (King 1976, 149).
Indians were then "classed" according to which threshold they might cross. Common hawkers would rarely be allowed so far as the verandah; often they were kept outside the walls. To receive an Indian guest in the inner sanctum was rare indeed. Public spaces within the civil lines were the Mall, a central promenade with a few shops where one might be accompanied by servants, and the Club, the local center of social life from which all Indians were rigorously excluded (until after the Great War). Within the clubs, there were frequently rooms to which men could withdraw, secure from female intrusion (King 1976, 84-7). The cantonment was similarly divided. British officers lived in bungalows situated within compounds of half-an-acre to ten acres. British troops lived in wooden or brick barracks. Native troops lived at a distance from their comrades-in-arms in thatch huts they were obliged to construct themselves. The amenities were entirely for the benefit of the British: Anglican and Catholic churches, clubhouse, canteen, racquet courts, library, private cemeteries. Well-stocked bazaars encouraged soldiers to stay on base, while memorials to heroes and martyrs of 1857 did little to encourage fellow feeling among the troops (Oldenburg 1984, 51-2). On a grander scale, many Europeans withdrew during hot weather to hill stations
28
in the north, most famously to Simla, seat of government during those months. The opening of hill stations in India was concurrent with romanticism's discovery of wild, mountainous places as "majestic" and "picturesque" (rather than merely dangerous). Too, hill stations were seen as a refuge from the diseases of hot, damp, lowland plains: cholera, malaria, typhoid (King 1976, 164). The hill stations virtually recreated an idealized England, right down to the shrubbery, while the absence of a working class and a common sentiment of exile flattened the class differences of nineteenth-century England (King 1976, 167-68). All British officials, then, lived their lives within a tightly bounded social space, incorporating multiple thresholds. Europeans might cross these thresholds with ease; for urban Indians, the question of who might cross which threshold, when, and in what role was an omnipresent reality. Whether they carved out lives within their assigned spaces or attempted to gingerly negotiate the crossing of these boundaries, Indian subjects of the Raj necessarily performed their own subordination. It was, in a word, apartheid. The previous two sections suggest that projects of imperial partnership were bound to be rebuffed and that at least in urban areas Indians had their inferior status impressed upon them at every turn. It might be argued, however, that both of these sections presume an expectation of equality on the Indian side at odds with existing hierarchical norms. If partnership was not possible, perhaps it was still possible for a loyal subject of the Raj to carve out an honorable place as a loyal subaltern of imperial rule. In the nineteenth century, no figure pursued such a course with greater resolution, constancy, or vigor than Sayyid Ahmad Khan, onetime servant of the East India Company and founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (precursor of today's
29
Aligarh Muslim University), intended as a training ground of Muslim subalterns for British India. Fundraising was crucial to the success of Khan's project, because he hoped to create an institution that would both prepare young Muslims for government service and maintain its autonomy from the British system of higher education. Instruction was to be in Urdu as well as English, and the curriculum, while it might be modeled on British institutions, was to be controlled by the college faculty. To secure this autonomy, Khan hoped to raise an endowment of one million rupees (£100,000), but by 1876, a year after its opening, only about 200,000 rupees had been collected. Even by 1898, the year of Khan's death, only 600,000 rupees had been collected (which, with the intervening devaluation of the rupee, came to only some £40,000). The shortfall in funds was made up by a government grant that covered some 20-25% of the college's annual operating expenses (Lelyveld 1978, 141-142). Ironically, while Sayyid Ahmad spent his life trying to convince British rulers of the loyalty of their Muslim subjects, the British funded his college precisely because they distrusted Muslims and saw the MAOC as a valuable bulwark against incipient disloyalty (Robinson 1993, 126). In return for funds, though, Khan had to cede substantial independence, with instruction (outside of religious classes) taking place exclusively in English and the curriculum being taken from Calcutta University, which certified the degrees of its graduates (Lelyveld 1993, 136-137). In 1895 a major embezzlement scandal broke at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, enrollment and revenues began to drop, and the college was saved only through the personal intervention of the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces (Lelyveld 1978, 313-314; Robinson 1993, 130). This scandal, debilitating in itself to a man approaching eighty years of age,
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became bound up with a far more personal tragedy. Sayyid Ahmad's son, Sayyid Mahmud, became for his father the emblem and personification of all his hopes for the future, not only of his family, but of Muslims in British India. One of a handful of Indians to join the Indian Civil Service in the nineteenth century, Sayyid Mahmud rose to serve as a judge on the Allahabad High Court. Only two other Indians had achieved post as high as Mahmud's and none had risen higher. Nonetheless, he continually suffered the disrespect of his British colleagues on the court, and was consistently assigned to relatively minor cases. Eventually, Mahmud took to drink and in 1892 was dismissed in public disgrace. Relations between father and son were strained for the next six years, with Mahmud's son and wife living in his father's house in Aligarh while he pursued a private legal practice in Lucknow. With the embezzlement scandal at the college, Sayyid Mahmud returned to Aligarh and attempted to take control of the college's finances. The quarrel between the two grew so bitter that Sayyid Ahmad for a time took up residence in a boarding house. A similar incident in March 1898 drove Sayyid Ahmad to take up residence with a friend, Ismail Khan Shervani, where within weeks he died (Lelyveld 1978, 313-314). The tragic denouement of Sayyid Ahmad Khan's attempt to embody his project of loyal, if subordinate, collaboration of elite Muslims with British rulers through the career of his son echoed on a larger scale in the political direction Aligarh graduates in the years following his death. The foundation of the Muslim League following the reception of a deputation of Muslim leaders by the British at Simla in 1906 has been read by some as one of the master strokes of a British policy of divide and rule (Das 1964, 162ff.). Whatever role the British played in the creation of the League, on the Muslim side the
31
deputation was sponsored by a number of Aligarh elders who had begun to see disaffection among students who were coming to believe that nationalist agitation more effective in securing concessions and material benefits from the Raj than was Aligarh’s sedulous inculcation of loyalty (Lelyveld 1978, 337-338). On each side of the table, then, leaders saw the Muslim League as a valuable safety valve whereby Muslim elites could pursue group interests within an overall framework of loyalty, thereby weakening the growing influence of the Indian National Congress. As is so often the case, though, an organization created to contain dissent became instead the vehicle of dissent. A decade later, the Muslim League formally joined forces with Congress in the Lucknow Pact, but as Francis Robinson has noted, the Muslims who entered into the Lucknow Pact were hardly representative of the Muslim League as a whole. They were, instead, a delegation packed with militants from the League's "Young Party," overwhelmingly based in the United Provinces, led in large part by graduates of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (Robinson 1993, 255-256). Prominent among this group were two brothers, Mohamed and Shaukat Ali, both Aligarh graduates, who after the pact began to seek student support for the Ottoman Empire against the British in the First World War, found themselves interned for the duration of the war, and then, demanding that the British victors respect the integrity of the Khilafat after the war, joined vigorously in Gandhi's Non-Cooperation movement of the early 1920s. Even as they were active on a national scale, Aligarh was never far from their minds; in 1920 "they returned to Aligarh in the company of Mahatma Gandhi, organized a student boycott, seized the Old Boys' Lodge and set up a break-away 'national university,' the Jami'ah Milliyah Islamiyah, in opposition to the government-sponsored institution" (Lelyveld 1978, 340). Whether on
32
an intimate or on a national scale, then, the Aligarh project of forming loyal subalterns foundered on the imperial construction of cultural difference. For the British, loyalty had its uses, but it never served as a marker of parity between distinct, unequal civilizations. If we wish to understand why Sayyid Ahmad Khan's vision of a durable alliance between beneficent British rulers and loyal Indian subalterns came to frustration, not by accident, but almost inevitably, we must look at the other side of the coin, at those members of the Indian Civil Service who engrossed the rule of British India. When his son, Sayyid Mahmud, joined this elite corps, what kind of service was he joining? I have selected seven memoirs for review: Sir Andrew H. L. Fraser's Among Indian Ryots and Rajahs ([1912] 1975), R. Carstairs's The Little World of an Indian District Officer (1912), Sir Henry Cotton's Indian and Home Memories (1911), John Beames's Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (1961), George Robert Elsmie's Thirty-five Years in the Punjab (1908), Hermann M. Kisch's A Young Victorian in India (1957), and Sir Malcolm Darling's Apprentice to Power (1966). In reviewing this diverse range of memoirs, I wish to test the proposition that one can identify something like an "official mind" of British India, a relatively durable picture of the proper relationship between Britain and India, between ruler and ruled. I will argue here that what was taken for granted in British rule came openly into view with the controversy on the Criminal Jurisdiction Bill of 1883, more commonly known as the Ilbert Bill. Sir Courtney Ilbert, a liberal MP, introduced the bill at the behest of Lord Ripon, the liberal reformer appointed by Gladstone to serve as Viceroy of India. By 1883, a token number of Indians had joined the Indian Civil Service. However, racial restrictions forbade any Indian, no matter his official rank, to try a case involving a European, no matter how trivial the offense. The Ilbert Bill proposed to lift such
33
restrictions, calling forth a firestorm of denunciation from Britons resident in India. The bill could only finally be passed in gutted form, assuring Europeans that in any case in which they were tried by an Indian judge they had the right to a jury trial in which at least half of the jury would be composed of Europeans (Wolpert 1982, 257). Of our seven authors, six served during the Ilbert Bill controversy, and most of them treat the controversy either directly or indirectly in their memoirs. Only Henry Cotton comes out in favor of the bill, noting at the same time that "opposition to the Ilbert Bill was headed by members of my own Service" (Cotton 1911, 180). But a mere poll of opinion does little to establish the case for a powerful "official mind" in India. More to the point, in reviewing these memoirs it seems clear that those with the most conservative views were rewarded with successful careers while dissenters encountered blocked ascent or even punitive assignments. Rising to the post of Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, H. L. Fraser certainly had a career that outshone the others. In his memoires, we learn that the people of India "have made no moral or intellectual advancement: they have been asleep throughout these ages." What is left of India's ancient civilization is comparable to "the crumbling ruins of castles and palaces long deserted and falling into decay, while all around there is gross ignorance and darkness." Nor should European civilization hesitate to assert itself: "the corrupt religion, which has long held sway, has been characterised by practices which our civilisation regards as inhuman and compels the Government to put down with a strong hand" (Fraser 1975, 248-249). In contrast, Henry Cotton had a lineage within the I.C.S. that stretched back three generations and which with his children extended to a fifth, but even this stellar pedigree could not save him from the consequences of his heresy. He notes not only that civilians were encouraged "to assume
34
an attitude of a patronising and superior character, but that the "pernicious practice of striking natives, but especially domestic servants, prevailed as a common and general habit during the whole of my residence in India" (Cotton 1911, 65-66). But, most unforgivable of all, Cotton broke ranks and public supported the Ilbert Bill at a time when the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal province was its principal opponent. Consequently, Cotton, who had in 1880 been appointed Senior Secretary to the Board of Revenue, found himself thereafter assigned to backwaters and passed over for promotion (Cotton 1911, 165, 187). Paradoxically, it was in the end Henry Cotton who was the most deceived about the nature of British rule in India. For all his dissent from the sterner aspects of British rule, for all his dalliance with the Congress moderates, Cotton was in the end convinced that liberal reform would secure British rule in India. If there is anywhere a safe and sure guarantee of British rule in India, it is to be found in a contented people. If we are willing to govern that wonderful country on liberal and sympathetic principles, to show deference to popular wishes, opinions, and aspirations, to encourage and foster the national sentiment of the people, and to unite the educated classes of the community with ourselves in the administration of their own affairs and in formulating a policy in which all can join in furtherance of progress - in this case we need have no cause for anxiety. The best protection of India must always rest on the loyalty, confidence, and affection of the Indian people. The surest way to prevent unrest is to take away the matter of discontent. Remove the causes of discontent and there will be no sedition. (Cotton 1911, 334-335). Contrast such high-minded delusion with the low-minded, but more clear-sighted, view of Fitzjames Stephen: A barrel of gunpowder may be harmless or may explode, but you cannot educate it into household fuel by exploding little bits of it. How can you
35
possibly teach great masses of people that they ought to be rather dissatisfied with a foreign ruler, but not much; that they should express their discontent in words and in votes, but not in acts; that they should ask from him this and that reform (which they neither understand nor care for), but should on no account rise in insurrection against him; in short, that instead of regarding their rulers, according to the habits of their ancestors from remote antiquity, as persons who must be obeyed till they become intolerable, and who are then to be dethroned and destroyed with all their adherents, they should play the part of a constitutional opposition, though they have had none of the experience which is necessary to render such an idea intelligible? (Stephen 1883, 562-563) No doubt Cotton would cavil, and rightly, at this nonsense about habits from remote antiquity, about the inability of Indians to wrap their minds around the notion of constitutional opposition. Take that away, and Stephen is still right to assert that one cannot expect Indians to accept the role of permanent opposition, ever the loyal losers in the imperial partnership. "Why can't we be friends now? … It's what I want. It's what you want," pleads the English liberal, Cyril Fielding, at the close of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, echoing Cotton, even as his counterpart, Dr. Aziz, has already told him "we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then … you and I shall be friends." With a prescience that echoes Stephen's insistence that British India can only endure as "an absolute government founded on military force," Forster through Aziz foresees the denouement of gradual reform: "If we see you and sit on your committees, it's for political reasons, don't make any mistake. … Until England is in difficulties we keep silent, but in the next European war - aha, aha! Then is our time." (Forster [1924] 1984, 316, 315; Stephen 1883, 562) Dominance, not hegemony, was England's hand to play. When we turn from India to Brazil, it is important to bear in mind that the pact of domination that held together British and Brazilian elites was not an alien imposition, but for the most part a strategy adopted by Brazil's rulers. Accordingly, in the cultural realm
36
we will not find (with rare exception) the sort of ability to impose cultural norms that were evident in, for example, British patronage of public architecture in India. Still, it will quickly become apparent that Brazil's elites were almost fanatically concerned with showing the world that Brazil's civilization, albeit in the tropics, was essentially European. To some degree, this monomania can be traced to Europe's unquestioned cultural supremacy in the belle époque. In 1881, Henry James quite explicitly turns his back on America to take on Europe, noting in his notebook that "an American … must deal, more or less, even if only by implication, with Europe; whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America. No one dreams of calling him less complete for doing so."14 In Brazil, this peculiarity of being an American was compounded by the omnipresent question of race. When Englishmen (and other Europeans) went to Brazil, they invariably noticed and commented on the country's racial composition. Brazil was, by quite a large margin, the largest importer of slaves, receiving roughly forty percent of the total traffic. By the nineteenth century, the country was a glorious racial mixture of pardos, brancos, pretos, cafusos, marrons - the list of local terms can be extended almost indefinitely. In European eyes, this marked Brazil as a degenerate and uncivilized country. By the late nineteenth century, this prejudice had hardened into a "scientific" discourse in which it was taken as an established fact that humanity was divided into separate races, and that some were biologically superior to others. Brazilian elites when faced with this judgment accepted its premises, challenging only the conclusions about Brazil drawn from them. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Rio's literary elite slavishly imitated Parisian fashion. The Rio elite not only learned French in school, it 14
September 1881 entry in The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Mattiessen and K. B. Murdock (New York: Galaxy Books, 1961), 23-24; cited in Schwarz 1992, 72n. 37
studied primarily from French texts. Boys were sent to the Colégio Pedro II, where their humanist education included five years of Latin, three of French, English, and Greek, and one of Portuguese. Four years of geography were required, but only one of the history and geography of Brazil. Texts were as likely to be French as Portuguese or Brazilian. In a regimented, authoritarian atmosphere, learning was measured by the capacity to reel off memorized responses on command (Needell 1987, 55-6). Girls went to the Collège de Sion, when not educated at home. There, French influence was even more pervasive, as French nuns of the Congrégation de Notre Dame de Sion imparted a French, Catholic curriculum (Needell 1987, 59-60). This literary elite was convinced that its "imagination cannot but be European, that is, be human" (Joaquim Nabuco, cited in Andrews 1988, 9). The tiny community of Brazilian intellectuals looked primarily to Paris as its lodestar. "Our soul is still, and I believe always will be, an extension of the French soul," proclaimed the poet Olavo Bilac in 1907. "Brazil is morally linked to France," echoed the newspaper O País in 1910. Monteiro Lobato, the writer and publisher, recalled in 1915 that his reading of literature up to the age of twenty-five had been overwhelmingly in French rather than Portuguese. The principal Brazilian publishing house, prior to 1914, was Garnier. With the protean exceptions of Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha (and, arguably, Graça Aranha), Brazilian literary culture was frankly and openly imitative of French models (Skidmore 1974, 93-4). Why this attraction to France, rather than Great Britain, if British capital was so prominent in Brazil, far outdistancing the French presence? To some degree, perhaps, one can attribute this attraction to linguistic affinity (two Romance languages), to France's policy of self-promotion as "Latin" and therefore kindred to the countries of "Latin
38
America" (the term itself is of French origin), or simply to the overwhelming cultural presence of Paris, "the capital of the nineteenth century," in Walter Benjamin's phrase (2002, 3, 14). But for fin-de-siècle Latin Americans (in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago as well as Rio) the attraction to French culture was clearly more than that. José Enrique Rodó's extraordinary tract, Ariel (1988), published in 1900, presented Latin America as the inheritor of classical Greek civilization, passed down through France, while England and the United States possessed at best a utilitarian pseudo-civilization. Latin America played Ariel to the Franco-Greek Prospero; Caliban spoke English, and knew only how to turn a profit on it. This determination to recreate European high culture in the tropics excluded black novelists and poets even when they adopted French models for their work. Such exclusion can be found in the life of Lima Barreto, now recognized as one of Brazil's great novelists, but shunned by most of the literati of his day. A pardo, Lima was prevented from graduating at the Escola Politécnica by a racist professor and condemned to employment as a petty bureaucrat. A devotee of French culture - he died with La Révue des Deux Mondes in his hands - he nonetheless faced real color prejudice among Rio's literary elite, a hostility augmented by his acid portrayals of the europhile pretensions of Rio's haute monde. His repeated attempts to gain admission to Brazil's Academy of Letters were invariably rebuffed, and he died young, embittered, and given to drink in 1922 (Needell 1987, 221-24). A parallel story can be told of João da Cruz e Sousa (1861-98), a black poet who died in penury and obscurity. His reputation was salvaged only when a French critic, Roger Bastide, discovered his work and compared it favorably to that of Mallarmé (Haberly 1983, 104). In fact, Bastide's role in the
39
reevaluation of earlier generations of black Brazilian writers was extensive. Arriving in São Paulo in the 1930s, one of a generation of French intellectuals others included Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel) invited to help in the founding of Brazil's premiere university, the Universidade de São Paulo, Bastide's imprimatur was an essential part of Brazil's mid-century recuperation of at least some aspects of AfroBrazilian culture. Even at that date, it took a French imprimatur for Brazil to embrace an œuvre that it had dismissed as dangerously non-European. This is not to say that all Brazilian writers of the day were unambiguously white. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, was the son of a white mother and pardo father. Unlike Cruz e Sousa or Barreto, Machado de Assis was recognized as Brazil's supreme literary figure while he was still alive. His mordantly ironic work, owing nothing to the imitation of Continental fashion, eschewing the articifially elevated tone of his peers, is still recognized as masterfully sui generis. He worked as an apprentice typesetter and later a journalist until, at the age of 27, he managed to secure a government job that he held until his death (Schwarz 1992, 80, 78). His early novels counterpose an authoritarian paternalism that exacts subservience from its dependents to an enlightened one "by giving initiative and dignity to the protégés … civilizes and enriches the society of the protectors … justifying an alliance between people of property and their most gifted dependents" (Schwarz 1992, 81). Only later in life, with the security that a government sinecure brings, does Machado's vision turn dark. It would be too much to claim that Machado de Assis became in his maturity a critic of the established social order; he did not propose remedies for the ills around him,
40
or even explicitly diagnose them as ills, but rather determined to show them, hiding nothing. One might take as an epigram for this phase of Machado's work a phrase later attributed to him: "Anything, my friend, anything except to live always being played for a fool!"15 One might even argue that his refusal to be taken in by Brazil's liberal veneer cut him off from the conventional tropes of the European novel. In Stendahl's Julien Sorel or in Hardy's Jude the frustration of upward ascent reveals the hypocrisy of a notion that talent sufficed to secure a career. To be sure, one can find more subtle evocations of the theme; Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke is not only a woman of talent frustrated by her gender-assigned place, but also an ambiguous victor over her constraints, allowing George Eliot to not only demonstrate the hidden gender inequality of liberal England but at the same time to place the norms themselves in question. For the later Machado, the liberal norms have so little traction that they are entirely unable to drive the action (or lack of action, since Machado's are often novels of action superseded by lassitude) (Schwarz 1992, 90). This "complex, modern, national, and negative" position occupied by Machado lays bare the split between formal liberal institutions and the substantively personalistic and arbitrary exercise of power in Brazil. Unlike the great European literature of the era which took the liberal ethos at face value, using it to critique the ways in which liberal capitalism fell short of its ideological justifications, Machado self-consciously took on an environment in which only an utter dupe could be taken in by the liberal façade and its ideological trappings. The great majority of Brazilian literature, aping Parisian fashion in a guarded protest against British financial ascendancy, produced little that resonates today. Machado's work, improbably escaping the constraints that reduced his contemporaries to 15
"Tudo! Meu amigo, tudo! Menos viver como um perpétuo empulhado!" cited in Schwarz 1987, 177). See a slightly different translation in Schwarz 1992, 82. 41
imitators, at the same time exposed the trappings of Brazil's haute monde as an "ideology of the second degree", incapable of even giving an account of social appearances (Schwarz 1992, 23). There were, in nineteenth-century Brazil, distinct European districts that still leave the occasional ghostly trace, such as the Rua do banco dos ingleses (English Bank Street or, less pithily but capturing an important nuance, Bank-of-the-English Street) in Salvador da Bahia. Nonetheless, the direct influence of such neighborhoods on Brazilian cityscapes was marginal. The influence of European architecture and urban design had to spread by emulation rather than imposition. In the end, Rio de Janeiro was radically remade in a European image, but that image was Paris, not London. In remaking Rio, Brazilian elites both wholeheartedly adopted European standards of civilized urban life and took a marked distance from the British formulation of the same. Rio was explicitly remade in a Parisian image from 1903 to 1906. Just as Louis Napoleon turned Paris over to Baron Haussmann, so Brazil's president, Rodrigues Alves, gave full authority to Pereira Passos to remake the old city (cidade velha) of Rio. Passos had attended the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris during the early years of Haussmann's labors, and as early as 1875 had submitted a plan for the reconstruction of Rio de Janeiro along Parisian lines. Nearly thirty years later he was given authority to put his plans into effect (Needell 1987, 28-33). Like Haussmann, Passos tore down extensive sections of lower-class neighborhoods to create a network of broad avenues linking all parts of the city together. While Rio's unique urban topography made it impossible to fully replicate the geometric regularity of Haussmann's Paris, the centerpiece of the new Rio, the Avenida Central, was a fair replica of the Champs
42
Élysées. Thirty-three meters wide and nearly two kilometers long, illuminated by art nouveau gaslights and lined by buildings with beaux-arts facades, the Avenida Central displaced some 590 old buildings as it became one of two central avenues for Rio's elite. High culture, represented by the Municipal Theater, Monroe Palace, National Library, and National School of Fine Arts, was henceforth defined by the Avenida Central (Needell 1987, 33-40). The Avenida Central did not fully displace, however, an older street of prime importance to Rio's elite--the Rua do Ouvidor. Since the 1820s, the Rua do Ouvidor had been exclusively devoted to small fine shops purveying the latest in European, especially French, luxury goods. While the carioca elite may not really have sent their underwear to Paris for laundering, they did buy their underwear--and everything else--from the French shops on the Rua do Ouvidor. Slavish imitation of European fashion reached its peak in the proper selection of clothing. As the century progressed, layers of ever-heavier cloth were added to the public dress of both men and women. In Rio's scorching summer heat, one could find men dressed in black woolen frockcoats, woolen vests of lighter color, cotton or linen shirts and drawers, stiff collar and cravat, high-button shoes, lightweight gloves and top hat. Women's clothing, while of lighter material, had no fewer layers, and was supplemented by constricting corsets and bustles. Included among the French goods available for purchase were the immigrant shopgirls who fetched high prices from a clientele willing to pay for the last item in the fully realized fantasy of a civilized European life in the tropics, a French mistress (Needell 1987, 161-75). Rio's high society, an inbred group of not more than a thousand households, thus partook from first to last of an imitative parasitic material culture (Needell 1987, 110).
43
Not only were most city-dwellers poor and therefore excluded, but in 1872 only eight percent of the population lived in towns of 20,000 or more (Dean 1986, 702). What we have seen here is nothing more than a culture of fantasy. As Jeffrey Needell encapsulates: To mob daily into one thin, short street full of expensive bric-à-brac, overpriced cloth, and hot, expensive cafés and restaurants; to wear those clothes with such sweaty, steady devotion, to discriminate so obviously in one's lovemaking is to make manifest the internalization of this fantasy and to point the way to the reality of its meaning. A fantasy so deeply internalized is the stuff in which a vision of the world is obvious. Carioca consumer-fetishism discloses the wholeness of the world whose separate levels all these pages have torn apart for analysis. It makes clear the place Civilization had in the carioca belle époque, as the central ideology of domination and identity. (Needell 1987, 177) The colonial cities of India were built around a policy of rigid exclusion, a policy reproduced at the most intimate levels in the civilian compound. Brazil's capital city was remade in a European image, but emphatically not the image of England. Brazil's elites gradually came to live in houses built after English and French models, but the surface was more European than the interior, and the most intimate rooms were the most Brazilian of the lot. In an elite Brazilian's home, public rooms such as the drawing room or dining room were sure to be furnished lavishly, but in the bedrooms where the family lived, one was likely to find, not a solid Second Empire bed and Louis XV fauteuil, but a hammock and floor mats (Needell 1987, 150-51). Everywhere, when we uncover evidence of cultural power, we simultaneously uncover evidence of gaps in and resistance to that power. The most notable Anglophile of nineteenth-century Brazil must surely have been Joaquim Nabuco, the son of José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo, one of the preeminent
44
Liberal statesmen of the century, senator from Pernambuco, member of the Council of State, and a longtime advocate of the gradual abolition of slavery who was a principal force behind the Lei do Ventre Livre of 1871. Born in Pernambuco in 1849, raised on the family's plantations there, far away from a father whom he idolized, the younger Nabuco became a convert to the cause of abolition from his teens. Educated at the elite institutions of the day - the Colégio Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro and the law schools of Recife and São Paulo - Joaquim Nabuco was clearly being groomed to carry on his father's political career, and entered Parliament in 1878 upon his father's death.16 There, his fierce abolitionism made him a lightning rod and a prime target for the Conservatives. Hence, while Joaquim Nabuco is remembered as one of the premier architects of Brazilian abolitionism, his fragmented parliamentary career ensured that his primary effect would take place outside that chamber. Indeed, Nabuco led a peripatetic life from his twenties onward. After making the grand tour of Europe in the first half of the 1870s, Nabuco served in minor diplomatic posts in the United States and London in 1876 and 1877 before his parliamentary victory in 1878. Turned out of office in the elections of 1881, Nabuco travels to London (via Lisbon, Madrid, and Paris) where he worked as a journalist and a consultant on Brazilian law until 1884. Returning to Brazil for the electoral campaign of 1884, Nabuco managed to regain his seat in Parliament only after narrowly losing an election tainted by fraud, winning a new election after the first was annulled, being refused his seat by the Chamber of Deputies, and then winning a byelection from another Pernambuco district. Beaten again in 1886, he once again returns to London in early 1887, only to return to Pernambuco on August 26 for another round of
16
Robert Conrad, "Translator's Introduction," in Nabuco [1883] 1977, xii-xiii. 45
elections and taking his seat until the overthrow of the Empire in 1889. Unlike most of his contemporaries who in 1889 found themselves to be "16th of November Republicans," Nabuco then retired from political life, maintaining a fierce loyalty to the monarchy which had finally abolished slavery in Brazil. A decade later, Nabuco reconciled with the Republic to accept the task of negotiating with Great Britain the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana, and was shortly thereafter named Brazilian minister in London. In 1905, within a year of his rather unsuccessful conclusion of the boundary dispute, Nabuco is named Ambassador to the United States, holding the post until his death in 1910 (Nabuco [1928] 1968). Given Nabuco's education, it is not surprising that until his mid-twenties he read almost entirely in French. Indeed, his daughter reports, a book on Camões written by Nabuco at the age of twenty-one reveals an at best imperfect grasp of Portuguese syntax. He never entirely gave up his attachment to French, publishing four books in that language, but from the age of twenty-five onward he increasingly read English authors (Nabuco [1928] 1968, 216-217). Nabuco's own short autobiography demonstrates the importance of this break. After a very short chapter on his formal education in which he damns with faint praise the French influence, we come to the second chapter with which his real education begins, a chapter entitled simply "Bagehot". Bagehot converted Nabuco to "the practical superiority of English cabinet government over the American presidential system" to the extent that Nabuco declared himself "so entirely under the influence of English liberalism as if I were to take orders from Gladstone" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 36, 127). The invocation of Gladstone here is even more forceful than it appears, for Nabuco's Brazilian audience would not have remembered Gladstone simply
46
as a great leader of the Liberal Party. Rather, when in mid-century the British commitment to ending the slave trade led to a serious infringement of Brazilian sovereignty (of which see more in the section below), Gladstone was among the most rabid critics of Brazil in the House of Commons, declaring at one point "we have … a perfect right to go to Brazil and call upon her to emancipate every slave imported since 1830 and, upon refusal, to make war with them even to extermination."17 Joaquim Nabuco's anglophilia was not of the exclusive sort. Rather, he saw it simply as the highest expression of true, that is to say European, culture. From Naples to Genoa to Geneva to Paris, Nabuco wrote, he "had passed through as a voyager," but when disembarking at Folkestone, seeing the hills of Kent, immersing himself in the neighborhoods of London, his "curiosity to travel was satisfied, exchanged for the desire to stop there forever" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 73). London's aesthetic appeal was, for Nabuco, at the same time a political appeal. "London was, for me, what Rome would have been had I lived between the 2nd and 4th centuries…. This universal impression of a city which camps above all others, mistress of the world … the effect of this impression of dominion was a sensation of finality that only London gave me … a material finality, if I may express myself so, of crushing grandeur and unlimited empire" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 74). To live in London, to follow the political life of the city, was for Nabuco to see Bagehot's ideas come to life, "it made me comprehend the mechanism whose theory he formulated: it came to be for me, in constitutional law, a real gospel" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 86). But above and beyond the incomparable institutions of English government was "the English spirit," manifested in the reform movements of nineteenth-century
17
Hansard, cix 1170, 19 March 1850, cited in Bethell 1970, 381. 47
England even more than in Parliament. This spirit incorporates a panoply of virtues: tradition, realism, generosity, progress, and the ideal of "anglo-saxon and Christian supremacy in the world" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 89). Motivated by this spirit, the English reformer "does not make scapegoats, casting responsibility on individuals or institutions for the common errors of society, does not wash his hands like Pilate from the injustices of the crowd, does not single out the weak on whom to allow the blow to fall, in a word, fair-play" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 91). Nabuco the abolitionist never ceased to consider that Brazil owed the royal family a debt of obligation for its role in the abolition of slavery, for it was, in the end, Princess Isabel who promulgated the Lei Aurea on May 13, 1888. When, less than a year and a half later, a military uprising in the capital snowballed into the Emperor's abdication and the proclamation of a republic, Nabuco saw not a completion of the revolution that abolition had begun, but a betrayal. For ten years, he retired entirely from politics. When he was brought back to the diplomatic service to serve in London, how he must have relished life in the universal city! To be sure, he must have felt the sting when Brazil, along with other South American republics, was slighted diplomatically. Moreover, Nabuco could not have had much time to enjoy London. Freighted with the responsibility of resolving the boundary dispute with British Guiana, working almost entirely without assistance, the case he prepared for Brazil came to two thousand pages of text, submitted in eighteen volumes, outweighing the submission of the entire British Foreign Office (Nabuco [1928] 1968, 292-293). Unable to reach agreement with the British on the disputed territory, Brazil and Great Britain agreed to submit their respective cases to the Italian King, Victor
48
Emmanuel III, for arbitration. The outcome for Brazil was widely regarded as a disappointment, and as a personal failure on Nabuco's part. In 1904, the King awarded roughly 60% of the disputed territory to Great Britain and 40% to Brazil. Brazil gained much less than this implies, for in its submission Brazil had already substantially reduced its original claim, while Great Britain pressed for all the territory it could. In fact, the final boundary "was exactly the same line which a high functionary of the Foreign Office had verbally proposed to Nabuco on August 23, 1900" (Nabuco [1928] 1968, 297-298). Nabuco could have saved himself four years of prodigious labor and simply acceded to Britain's demands. Perhaps he could have even maintained the illusion that fair play matters in disputes between great powers and small powers. Certainly, there is evidence that his experience in the dispute was profoundly disillusioning. As late as 1900, he proclaimed in his memoirs that his devotion to English liberalism "will last forever, it will be the unredeemable vassalage of my political temperament or sensibility" (Nabuco [1900] 1981, 127). Five years later, fresh from his defeat in the boundary dispute, posted to the United States as Ambassador, Nabuco writes to his friend, Graça Aranha, that "our diplomacy should receive its principal impetus from Washington." In this era of the Roosevelt Corollary, in which the United States for the first time begins to exercise explicitly imperial ambitions in Latin America, Nabuco breaks from British liberalism to embrace the new imperium. "For me," he writes to Aranha, "the Monroe Doctrine … signifies that politically we have broken away from Europe as completely and clearly as the moon has from the earth. In that sense I am a Monroist" (Nabuco [1928] 1968, 307). Decades earlier, Great Britain could bring warships into Brazilian waters, even bombard the Brazilian shore in the name of putting an end to the slave trade, and Nabuco could
49
still write that "Each shot fired from the British cruisers to prevent the imprisonment of human beings on our plantations and to free them from permanent slavery was a service to the national honor" (Nabuco [1883] 1977, 73). His only reservation was that in this campaign "Britain did to a weak nation what she would not have done to a powerful one" (Nabuco [1883] 1977, 68). Faced at the end with his life that Britain was willing to exercise imperial mainmise on a weak nation when it was no longer a question of elevated principle, but of simple self-interest, Nabuco's deception must have been bitter. In India, because Great Britain was the sovereign power, we turned to the memoirs of the elite corps of civil servants to discern the cultural tensions within the imperial pact of domination. In Brazil, matters are more complicated, because there the pact of domination, so far from being a British imposition, was sustained by Brazilian elites. While the treaties of the early 1800s that initiated this collaboration may have been unequal pacts imposed by Great Britain in moments of exceptional bargaining power - the flight of the Portuguese court to Brazil prior to the 1810 treaty, Brazil's need for diplomatic recognition prior to the 1826 treaty - by mid-century Brazilian statesmen were demanding more evenhanded diplomatic relations, even as they wished to sustain the diplomatic, commercial, and financial partnerships between Great Britain and Brazil. In a pinch, though, Brazilians were willing to let the diplomatic end of the collaboration suffer, knowing full well that the City did not take its orders from Whitehall, that a break in diplomatic relations need not entail a loss of commerce or access to the bond market. Consequently, if we wish to understand the cultural tensions between Brazil and Britain as they were reflected at the highest levels, we need access to sources that allow us to listen in to each party as it spoke outside the earshot of the other. Fortunately, in
50
this case such sources are available, at least for part of the period under scrutiny. The Brazilian Empire incorporated an institution, the Council of State, which had no parallel in the subsequent Republic. The Council of State, composed of twelve statesmen, was Brazil's highest consultative body. Meeting in secret session, with only the Emperor and an occasional Cabinet Minister present, the records of their meetings were not made public until after the Empire's demise. Now available, these records do not show, as one might prefer, free-ranging extemporaneous debate among Brazil's most distinguished statesmen. Rather, as transmitted to us, we have only the dense, legalistic formal interventions of the councillors, presented in the elevated tone deemed appropriate to a debate conducted in the presence of the emperor (Rodrigues 1973-78). One cannot say, then, that these records present an undistorted view of the mindset of Brazil's political elite, but one can say at least that when the Council turns to discussions of foreign affairs its views are not trammeled by the need to avoid giving offense to one or another great power. On the British side, we have at our disposal the confidential correspondence of the Foreign Office, long available in the archives and now in the process of systematic publication (Philip 1991a, 1991b). The Foreign Office Confidential Print (hereafter FOCP) includes, to be sure, formal diplomatic letters and notes, whether from the Brazilian foreign ministry given to the British minister for transmittal to the Foreign Office, or vice versa. Far more valuable, though, are the despatches between consular officials and the Foreign Office, whether intended to acquaint Whitehall with the local official's reading of local conditions or to lay down general principles of policy that ministers were expected to implement. In these communications, while the exchange of
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views is certainly constrained by the fact that ministers serve at the pleasure of the ministry, one does find stunningly frank expressions of opinion. When transmitting a note from the Brazilian foreign ministry to Whitehall, for example, the British minister, Mr. Christie, includes the following commentary: "The inclosed note mentions no additional information to be presented to Her Majesty's Government, and gives no reason for referring the question to London. I have regarded the note as a mere trick to gain time, and stave off a difficulty…."18 If the Brazilian records indicate a persistent mixture of admiration for European civilization and frustration at British policy, the British records are rife with a casual assumption of superiority and the more than occasional willingness to assume a stern tutelary role toward these not quite civilized Brazilians. I have chosen to examine in detail the Paraguayan War as refracted through these two sources. Great Britain, while officially neutral, informally supported the BrazilianArgentine-Uruguayan alliance in its war against Paraguay. Brazil, playing by far the most important military role in the alliance, explicitly saw itself as upholding the standards of civilization against a barbaric Paraguayan regime. As we will see, the British diplomatic correspondence takes a far more nuanced tone, and is willing to concede to neither party in the war unquestionable status as a civilized power. In this conflict, as in several which preceded it, Brazil sought to portray itself as a rock of stability and civilization in comparison with the far less stable states of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Indeed, the Argentine regime with which Brazil found itself allied in the Paraguayan War of 1865-1870 might not have existed had it not been for an earlier Brazilian intervention in the River Plate. For the Argentine Presidents of the time,
18
FOCP 1140/78 in Philip 1991b, 58. 52
Bartolomé Mitre (1862-68) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868-74), the war must have had a particular air of déjà vu. Both were members of the formidable group of Argentine intellectuals who came to be known as the Generation of 1837. Their formative political experience was the fight to oust the Argentine caudillo, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the country from 1829 to 1852. Sarmiento's Civilización y Barbarie, first published in 1845, depicted Latin America as torn between light and darkness, a continent where urban European progressive enclaves were encircled by the barbaric, primitive, racially degenerate countryside.19 For them, Rosas represented the triumph of the latter over the former. Rosas faced the hostility of the British, who blockaded the port of Buenos Aires in 1845 and negotiated with rival caudillos for his overthrow, and was overthrown by a coalition of rival forces (Montevideo, Entre Rios, and Brazil) led by the giant of South America (Lynch 1985, 647-48). A dispatch of November 29, 1865 from the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs drew the parallel between the two cases explicitly: The alliance of 1865 is equal to that of 1851 in its causes and means of action, and should not produce different results. López must be expelled from Paraguay as Rosas was from the Argentine Republic. This is not only in the spirit of the alliance as stipulated in the respective treaty. In the mind of all – Brazilians, Argentines, Uruguayans – it is a guarantee of civilization, of order, of the tranquillity that the three governments owe to their respective nationals and to the foreigners with whom they maintain commercial relations. (Rodrigues 1973-78, 7:60). Five years later, at the end of the war, Brazil's Liberal statesman, Tavares Bastos drew the same parallel as news of victory in Paraguay reached Rio de Janeiro: 19
This was one of the most influential works of Latin American literature of the nineteenth century. The Brazilian Emperor, Dom Pedro II, wrote Sarmiento of his admiration for the book (Burns 1980, 22-24). 53
At this happy moment the roar of Brazilian cannons at Humaitá announces to the world that a barbarian government has fallen before our strength, that our gold and green flag fluttering among the banners of our brave allies carries the message of peaceful progress to the isolated villages of Paraguay as it once carried a similar message to the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata. One after another, first Rosas and now López, falls before free peoples. Our forebears, heralds of the liberal tradition that they initiated in South America, would tremble with joy to see the generous use we make of our power (cited in Burns 1980, 130). In its origin, the Paraguayan War was bound up with the complex, fluid politics of the Rio de la Plata region during the middle half of the nineteenth century. Uruguay, at the time, was an unstable buffer state between Brazil and Argentina, each of which coveted control of the Rio de la Plata estuary. Paraguay, landlocked and upriver, depended on the Rio de la Plata-Paraná-Paraguai system to export its goods via either Buenos Aires or Montevideo, and built a huge army, relative to its size, to defend its interests. The war's genesis is variously attributed to the megalomania of Francisco Solano López, the Paraguayan dictator (Lynch 1985), "step-by-step escalation of competing interests" in an unstable geopolitical environment (Graham 1985, 686), or British insistence on commercial dominance in the Rio de la Plata (Chiavenatto 1988). The precipitating cause of the war, however, was Brazil’s intervention in Uruguay, siding with the forces of the rebel General Flores in his successful attempt to overthrow the sitting government. Occurring when Brazil had no diplomatic relations with Great Britain, this intervention had already occasioned conflict with British shipping, the British Minister in Uruguay, W. G. Lettsom, strongly protesting to the Brazilian ViceAdmiral Baron of Tamandaré against Brazil’s policy of boarding and searching British
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ships in Uruguayan waters.20 Within a week of Lettsom’s protest, Candido Bareiro, the head of the Paraguayan Legation in Paris, notified Earl Russell, the British Foreign Minister, “that the Government of the Republic of Paraguay will consider any occupation of the Oriental territory by the Imperial forces … to be injurious to the balance of the States of the Plata, which concerns the Republic of Paraguay as being the guarantee of her safety, her peace, and her welfare.”21 Despite the Anglo-Brazilian dispute over neutral shipping in Uruguay, when hostilities between Brazil and Paraguay broke out into the open, Great Britain found itself firmly on the side of the Triple Alliance. Edward Thornton, the British Minister to Argentina who was soon to restore diplomatic relations with Brazil, noted accurately that López had no intention of aiding Uruguay in its attempt to fend off Brazilian aggression, and “that he was delighted to find so specious a pretext” for hostilities with Brazil that would allow him to attempt to annex part of the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso.22 For the leaders of South America's largest, most modern, most Europeanized nations, Francisco Solano López, like his father, Carlos Antonio, represented the worst caricature of a backward, ignorant, half-breed caudillo.23 Scarcely a single British diplomatic dispatch fails to portray López in a negative light, always as a tyrant, frequently as a beast.24 If there was bestial savagery in this war, it was to be found in the truly extraordinary number of casualties suffered by Paraguay. The conventional estimate has 20
FOCP 1348/26(i) in Philip 1991a, 169. FOCP 1348/16(A) in Philip 1991a, 163. 22 FOCP 1348/48 in Philip 1991a, 171-172. 23 This attitude lives on in modern historiography. John Lynch, an outstanding British historian of nineteenth-century Latin America, calls Carlos Antonio a "fat and bovine mestizo, whose neck bulged over his collar" and refers to his son's "meagre and eccentric talents." (1985, 668, 670) 24 See the material in Philip 1991a, 165-227. 21
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long been that half of Paraguay’s population was slaughtered in this war (Lynch 1985, 673). In the past decade or so, this estimate has come under more substantial scholarly scrutiny, beginning with the study by Vera Blinn Reber who attacked this consensus, arguing that military and civilian deaths during the war claimed between 7.5 and 15 percent of the prewar Paraguayan population, similar to the Soviet Union's losses in World War II (1988, 318). A response to Reber by Whigham and Potthast (1990) argued that a figure of 30% was probable. Since that time, Whigham and Potthast have been able to revise their estimates using a newly discovered complete census of 1870 and reexamining serious undercounts of the Paraguayan population in the census of 1846. They estimate a prewar population of 420,000 to 450,000, while the 1870 census shows a postwar population of 116,351, a decline in population of nearly three-quarters. Even adjusting very liberally for undercounts in 1870, assuming an unreported population between 25,000 and 50,000, deaths during the war would amount to between 60 and 70 percent of the prewar population (Whigham and Potthast 1999, see also Reber 2002 and Whigham and Potthast 2002). When Tavares Bastos proclaimed this triumph over barbarism as a vindication of Brazilian liberalism, he was quite literally celebrating the triumph of civilization in a charnel house. But were Brazil’s British allies so convinced that the Triple Alliance and Paraguay were civilization and barbarism, light and darkness? Not without substantial nuance. If British correspondents had nothing but contempt for the Paraguayan dictator, Francisco Solano López, their view of Paraguay’s troops was substantially different. Early in the war, a British agent in Corrientes, F. J. Pakenham, noted the remarkable discipline of the Paraguayan troops, who at least made token compensation when
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requisitioning supplies, who abstained from drunkenness and theft, and who in one remarkable instance returned without damage all of the horses requisitioned from an Argentine estancia.25 The “courage and obstinacy” of Paraguay’s troops is favorably compared to that of the Triple Alliance, as Francis Clare Ford, the new British Minister in Argentina, notifies the new Foreign Minister, the Earl of Clarendon in 1866 that no early end to the war may be expected.26 Even G. F. Gould, a British intelligence agent who despised López, remarked upon the desperate courage often shown by Paraguayan troops.27 In contrast, British correponsdents showed little regard for Brazilian troops, Lettsom noting that the Uruguayans speak of Brazilian soldiers “with contempt.” He will not go quite so far: “This I hold to be ungenerous; the feeling with which at least they inspire me is unmingled pity. I never saw so poor a race of men.”28 Lettsom reserves his real venom, however, for the Triple Alliance’s policy of inducing Paraguayan prisoners of war to fight against their compatriots. He requests from the Foreign Office a communication setting forth the light in which Her Majesty’s Government look upon this proceeding, which, as one of the results arising out of the Treaty of Triple Alliance of the 1st of May 1865, goes far to show what the true character of that alliance is – an alliance against which, as far at least as this disgraceful act is concerned, three great European powers cannot but enter their joint protest. The three powers I refer to are law, decency, and common sense. (FOCP 1488/28 in Philip 1991a, 204). Lettsom did not get the formal condemnation he sought, but he does stand as an exemplar of the nuance with which a substantial part of the British diplomatic corps saw 25
FOCP 1411/3(i) in Philip 1991a, 184-185. FOCP 1488/15 in Philip 1991a, 200. 27 FOCP 1580/9(i) in Philip 1991a, 226. 28 FOCP 1488/18 in Philip 1991a, 201. Do not forget that these soldiers were overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian. 26
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this conflict. If they did not condemn the savagery of the war, or waver in their support for the Triple Alliance, neither did they adopt without reservation the notion that this was a war of civilization against barbarism. In contrast, Brazilians were twice deceived, first in believing their own propaganda, second in believing that Great Britain believed it as well. As the war was in the offing, the Council of State met to consider how the war would be financed. The Viscount of Jequitinhonha rose to speak of the importance of civilized standards in prosecuting the war. Whatever the cost, he proclaimed, Brazil must never take a backward step on the route of civilization; come what may, it would remain on the gold standard (Rodrigues 1973-78, 6:7-8). Surely Walter Benjamin (1986, 256) was correct: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Regime Change In four distinct episodes, the imperial pacts of domination in question were first shaken to their foundations and then shattered: India's revolt of 1857-58 and nationalist mobilization from 1919 on, Brazil's revolutions of 1889 and 1930. When those elites marked by an essential status inferiority undertake a program of cultural emulation they draw sharp lines of distinction between themselves, as bearers of special traits marking them as "civilized", and the great unwashed below them. Conversely, those endowed with status superiority recruit collaborators from narrow strata and concoct ad hoc justifications for the special qualities of those collaborators. But long-term processes of social change produce new aspirants to participation in the pact of domination. To successfully incorporate new groups into an alliance, the parties to that alliance must develop a subtle and flexible reading of the social structure outside the alliance. They
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must be able to identify or create groups ripe for incorporation, those at once susceptible of being brought into the alliance and potentially important enough to the alliance to merit a share in the benefits of domination. Making new allies requires a sensitivity to the multiplicity of ways people think of themselves in different contexts, an ability to perceive cross-cutting social cleavages, to choose the particular form of social identity under which new partners may be recruited without alienating old ones. When ruling elites code most of the salient cultural traits of non-elites as marks of inferiority, deepening a political alliance becomes more than a little problematic. Hence, the ruling alliances of both India and Brazil were more threatened by political movements that require refashioning of the core pact than by military rebellions. In northern India, mutiny enveloped the army in the late spring and early summer of 1857, attracting to itself a motley collection of rebels whose grievances against colonial rule remained fragmented and inarticulate. As a result, British reinforcements were able to put down the revolt piece by piece. After 1919, in contrast, the Indian National Congress was able to (imperfectly) mobilize a constituency based on a common political program. Despite apparent opportunities to cut into Congress's base, the Raj stuck to the last with its "wasting assets" in the existing coalition. In Brazil, an army heavily influenced by Comtean positivism, and therefore with a surprisingly high degree of ideological unity, deposed Emperor Dom Pedro II and installed a Republic. Yet, within a decade, that army had entirely faded from the political scene, handing power over to the same elites, configured in nearly the same ruling alliance, it had so recently come to despise. In contrast, Getúlio Vargas mobilized a broad coalition against the ruling alliance of the Old Republic in the Presidential election of 1930. Upon losing the
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election, with a military base limited to Rio Grande do Sul's Third Army, he nonetheless took power and fundamentally changed the shape of Brazilian society and politics. His revolution was made possible in large part because an effort to recruit new parties to the existing alliance caused core members of the old alliance to defect - briefly, but at the crucially important time - to Vargas's Aliança Liberal (Font 1990). In both India and Brazil, then, we find that ruling alliances were less threatened by the defection of the institution upon which the state's ability to monopolize violence rests than by imperfect and partial mobilizations of opposition coalitions. On May 10, 1857, the sepoys at Meerut, north of Delhi, rose in mutiny against their British officers, putting them to the sword. Unlike earlier mutineers, these rebels did not await punishment or flee, but made for Delhi where they laid claim to the last of the Mughal emperors, Bahadur Shah II, as titular head of their revolt and the source of its legitimacy. The English schoolboy's tale then proceeds: From Delhi, the contagion spread throughout northern India as one unit after another turned to mutiny, slaughtering officer and civilian alike.29 As the mutineers concentrated their forces in cities, the mutiny came down to two sieges and a betrayal. At Cawnpore, British women and children, promised safe passage by the rebel prince, Nana Sahib, are savagely murdered before relief can arrive. At Lucknow, threatened with a similar fate, courageous Britons hold out for months in the Residency, calmly discussing the propriety of suicide in the event that worse comes to worst, until finally the city is relieved. At Delhi, where the largest force of mutineers is concentrated, a small contingent of British troops lay siege to the city, bravely holding out against foray after foray of sepoys attempting to break 29
Forty-two members of the I.C.S., roughly ten percent of those serving in the Bengal Presidency, died during the revolt (Blunt 1937, 214; Woodruff 1953, 2:363). 60
through their lines, and finally, under the gallant leadership of Jack Nicholson, leading an outnumbered column into the city itself, securing it against the rebels, Nicholson himself, after innumerable acts of bravery before and during the action, perishing in the assault.30 Later, with slightly different emphases, the story could be appropriated by Indian nationalists and told as the first great nationalist revolt against colonial rule. This version emphasizes the spontaneous uprisings against British rule that accompanied the mutiny in district after district of northern India, incorporating the feats of rebels outside Delhi, Lucknow, and Kanpur, not least those of the rebellion's own Joan of Arc figure, the Rani of Jhansi. Even this story, when pressed to account for the revolt's failure, borrows a page from the standard imperial account: the decrepit leadership of Bahadur Shah, and the resulting lack of political direction, undermine initial military advantage. Modern historiography of the revolt has decisively turned against a focus on the action in the cities towards the peasant uprisings in the mofussil (Stokes 1986, 14). In this, the discussion has followed a more general trend that sees the action of the peasantry as decisive for success or failure of a revolution.31 At the centenary of the rebellion, with India's independence freshly won, an interpretation of the revolt championed by S. B. Chaudhuri held sway: that British land settlements displaced both old landed classes and peasant smallholders, contributing to the rise of a despised class of moneylenders who, along with the British, were the objects of a generalized uprising uniting magnate and small property holder throughout northern India (Metcalf 1979, 111). More recent studies paint a much more fine-grained and nuanced picture of the revolt. Eric Stokes'
30
Even English schoolboys may no longer learn this version of the story, but it remains the essential version found in popular histories. See, for example, Hibbert 1978. 31 See, inter alia, Moore 1966, Wolf 1969, Paige 1975, Skocpol 1979. 61
(1978, 1986) incomparably detailed studies of the rebellion in the environs of Delhi have led the way here. For Stokes, what must be explained is the differential pattern of revolt and loyalty at the district and sub-district level. Stokes' critics among the subaltern school have likewise emphasized the diversity of the revolt, but tend to stress the importance of territoriality to the uprisings and note the presence of non-elite local leaders (Bhadra 1985). Even in this very fine-grained debate, one can still hear the echoes of the older polemics. Was it a mutiny, with the peasant revolts in the countryside sporadic, disunified, weakly articulated with the sepoys, led by elites with narrow grievances? Or was it a nationalist revolution, with widespread, if diverse, peasant uprisings, held together by a broad defense of territory against outsiders, socially welded together by grievances against high revenue assessments and the class of usurers spawned by British rule? The broader question here, however, is the self-limiting nature of the 1857 revolt. Reading Stokes on the uprisings in the environs of Delhi, one cannot help but be struck by the isolation of one revolt from the next, though separated by only a few dozens of miles. Ranajit Guha rightly notes, however, that territoriality could be a force that linked revolts across administrative units, extending them to regions "as large as a pargana or even a number of parganas comprising many villages in a contiguous area extended over two or three neighboring districts." Because physical space and social space closely coincided, but did not quite fit one another, the spillover between the two could, in nineteenth-century conditions, serve to extend rather than restrict the range of the revolt. A clan whose territorial base had extended beyond its recognized "Des" could thereby extend a rebellion into neighboring territory. Since a minority clan or caste in one locale
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can be a majority clan or caste in the next, the mobilization of several clans and castes within a particular "Des" could likewise extend rebellion (Guha 1983, 330). Beyond a certain level, however, and for Guha as well as for Stokes that level was rarely larger than a district, clan and territory served to put the brakes on the rebellion. Narrow localism raised its head and impeded the progress of the insurgents at critical moments. Villagers would not allow a party of mutineers from other parts to cross the Ghagra at Azamgarh. Caste would fight against caste - Gujars against Rohs and Jats, for instance. The same caste could be at war with the British in one region and on their side in another, as witness the contradictory careers of Gujar leaders like Futtuah and Sahib Singh. Even when solidarity between ethnic groups triumphed over separateness for a time, it weakened soon under pressure from their common enemy…. In the event, all resistance splintered into "the hundred local revolutions as well as the hundred local reactions following them."32 The impression derived from Bhadra's (1985) "Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven" is similar. While decisively showing that non-elite leadership was an important part of the rebellion, the utter isolation of each rebel from the next, and the diverse range of aims they brought to the rebellion, cannot help but reinforce the notion that the mutiny and jacqueries of 1857-58 were far too uncoordinated, both tactically and in terms of ultimate aims, to have replaced the British as a political force in northern India. The British, at least, had a coherent strategy for identifying and rewarding the loyal while visiting exemplary punishment on the disloyal. Skocpol (1979) has decisively made the case that urban revolutionaries, at least under ancien régime conditions, can proceed only so far as their base of peasant support allows. The Indian case suggests that it may be no less important that urban revolutionaries be able to impose a unity of purpose on peasant revolts. This, precisely, was what the mutineers at Delhi were unable to do. As a result, 32
Ranajit Guha 1983, 331. The internal quote is from Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 63
while the military threat to British rule in 1857-58 was very real, the revolutionary threat was illusory. The immediate reforms caused by the mutiny are well known. The charter of the East India Company was withdrawn, and crown rule was extended to those Indian territories formerly ruled directly by the Company. The recent reforms substituting recruitment by examination for patronage in the selection of I.C.S. officers was affirmed. Indian princes who ruled in subordinate alliance with the Company became vassals of the British monarch (Cohn 1983). British troops came to form a much larger part of the Indian army, and recruitment from Bihar and the eastern U.P. virtually ceased while Sikh recruits from the Punjab became the core of the army. None of these immediate adjustments touched the land settlements that formed the cornerstone of the alliances which sustained British rule in India. There, the effects of the revolt were much slower to work themselves out, and much less dramatic. Over the course of the next half-century or so, the British undertook a limited and uneven deepening of the pact of domination to include - or at least attempt to include - the most substantial class of landholding tenants. A brief survey of tenancy legislation will give an idea of the scope of reforms. In Bengal, Act X of 1859 established occupancy rights for tenants after twelve years' residence on the same plot of land. The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 plugged loopholes in the earlier act and attempted to create a more precise hierarchy of tenancy rights (Rothermund 1978, 99-104). While these reforms primarily benefitted established cultivators of relatively large plots, in some cases they buttressed the power of large village landlords (jotedars) who were protected from rent increase by the zamindars from whom they leased land, but were not limited in their power to extract rent from their sub-tenants. Jotedars, though,
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probably controlled less than one-fifth of cultivated land in Bengal (Chaudhuri 1985, 119, 124).33 In Madras, similar protection was enacted, though not without decades of footdragging, in the Madras Estates Land Act of 1908 (Rothermund 1978, 115-17). In Bombay, acts of 1865, 1880, and 1904 recognized that the settlement with the khots was not properly ryotwari, but a settlement with revenue-collecting intermediaries, formalized the relationship, distinguished among various classes of tenants, regulated their rents, and ultimately increased the district officer's ability to fix rents on those lands (Rothermund 1978, 167-69). In Agra, the Tenancy Acts of 1873 and 1901 gave revenue officers very substantial powers to adjust rents (Rothermund 1978, 126-28, 141-42). In both Punjab and the Central Provinces, tenancy acts of the late nineteenth century established a broad class of occupancy ryots with nearly full proprietary rights, including alienability of land (Rothermund 1978, 147-57). Even in Awadh, the Rent Act of 1886 established some very limited occupancy rights and limited rent increases to 6-1/4 percent every seven years (Rothermund 1978, 134-36). In Bombay and Punjab, even more radical steps were taken to limit the rights of moneylenders. The Deccan Agriculturalists' Relief Act of 1879 established judicial review of contracts between landholders and moneylenders, limited the amount of interest that could be charged, and restricted the forced sale of land (Rothermund 1978, 63-74). In Punjab, the Land Alienation Act of 1899 went even further, restricting land sale to intra-caste transactions. A similar act was passed in Bombay in 1901, but never put into effect (Rothermund 1978, 78-9, 91). 33
After the Bengal Administration Report of 1871-72 lambasted the lack of "knowledge and familiarity with the people in Bengal," a scion of the Punjab school, Sir George Campbell, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor with a brief to "concentrate more power and responsibility in the hands of the District Officers" (O'Malley 1931, 111-12).
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This spate of legislation hardly provided a strong web of protection for the Indian peasant. It was enacted piecemeal and late, coverage varied from one province to the next, rigorous enforcement would have required a more powerful--and more expensive-rural bureaucracy, and even when enforced these new rights could create problems as intractable as the old. The Punjab Land Alienation Act, for example, did not drive moneylending out of the province. No piece of legislation could; indebtedness was the inevitable corollary of the British demand for land revenue to be paid in cash. Instead, wealthier members of agricultural castes replaced the loathed banias as purveyors of credit, thereby tightening their grip on village landholdings (Rothermund 1978, 79). The Deccan Act of 1879 did more to cause a contraction of credit than to prevent land transfer, as moneylenders continued to prevail in court (though in a smaller number of cases filed) and resorted to taking fraudulent deeds of sale rather than mortgages against land (Charlesworth 1985, 252-58). In general, the rights vested in occupancy tenants may have both pushed capital investment out of agriculture and limited that which remained to investments in short-term high-interest loans and commodity speculation (Washbrook 1981, 678-79). On balance, these reforms represented not a strong paternalistic defense of the archetypal Indian peasant, but a limited deepening of the existing pact of domination. Some protection was extended to the better-off sections of the tenantry, while the fundamental rights of the large landowners were not challenged. In fact, by attacking non-agriculturalist money lenders such as banias and marwaris, these reforms may have helped rich agriculturalists extend their power from control of land to control of credit as well (see Charlesworth 1985, also Musgrave 1978). Failing to achieve its announced economic goals, this reformist policy seems to have been more
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successful in reaching its less loudly proclaimed (but hardly hidden) political objectives. Peasants who were already fairly well off by Indian standards were not incorporated into the core alliance, but were made beneficiaries of British policy with a limited stake in continued British rule. If the success of a state is measured only by its longevity, then the colonial state in India may be said to have achieved a considerable measure of success. The pact of domination between British rulers and Indian collaborators not only endured in quiet times, it survived the rude shock of 1857. It is all the more surprising then, that while the dramatic breach of 1857 was quickly healed, the Indian National Congress, especially after the arrival of Gandhi on the scene, was increasingly able to induce permanent defection from among the core members of the imperial pact of domination. The theory developed at the beginning of this chapter would lead us to predict that the former was reparable through bargaining within the pact of domination while Gandhi's challenge could be met only through a substantial renegotiation of the whole pact, excluding some old allies and incorporating new ones. That, the theory predicts, an imperial pact of domination is unable to achieve. Without a doubt, the level of mobilization achieved by the I.N.C. fluctuated violently in the three decades from the end of the First World War to the achievement of independence, peaking during Gandhi's campaigns and declining rapidly thereafter. Nonetheless, when fully mobilized, the I.N.C. was able to place an immense army of civil resistance into the field. During the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22, some 30,000 were arrested; during the satyagraha campaign of 1930-31 another 60,000 were arrested; another 120,000 joined them when civil disobedience resumed in 1932-33; and
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in just five months following the Quit India campaign of August 1942, 78,000 were arrested or detained, while nearly 2,500 were killed or wounded in police firings (Pandey 1978, 31, 2). Since the number of arrestees in campaigns of this sort represent the tip of the iceberg, the full number of nationalist activists mobilized by the Congress at its height must have numbered in the millions. Anil Seal, who clearly regards the early phase of nationalism as dominated by elites from the Presidencies, notes that "Gandhi's rise to power was assisted by support he won from Gujarat, the United Provinces, and urban Hindus of the Punjab…. Above all it was supercharged by the Khilafat movement, which swung much of Muslim India against the Raj, and by the peasant risings in the United Provinces" (Seal 1968, 348). The expansion of the I.N.C.'s social base was worrying enough; perhaps even more troublesome was the source of that expansion. Throughout northern India, especially, Congress began to draw the bulk of its rural support from small zamindars and upper tenants, precisely the groups upon which the British had built their original pact (Hasan 1988, 339). Congress was able to mobilize very large numbers in opposition to the Raj, and this mobilization ate away at the core of the imperial pact of domination, but Congress squandered a number of chances to extend its reach even further. It was unable to forego the tactical advantages of communal appeals for the strategic value of Muslim support. Its prevarication on class issues, both urban and rural, constituted a conscious self-limitation on its ability to mobilize large numbers of lowerclass workers and peasants. In the face of what Gyan Pandey (1978) has aptly called "imperfect mobilization" by the Congress, might the British have developed a more decisive response? I will argue here that such an option was available, but that it would
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have required a fundamental reworking of imperial alliances, and that it was just this degree of renegotiation of the existing pact that the Raj was unable to accomplish. After World War I, Indian industrialists argued for a protectionist policy and direct aid to Indian industry. The lack of receptivity on the part of the government explains in part why Indian capitalists by and large supported Gandhi and the Congress (Markovits, 1988, 252). The conventional explanation is that the Government of India was held hostage by the Lancashire lobby, and that a protectionist policy was thereby ruled out. In fact, during the early twentieth century, Indian import of cotton goods was declining. Imports of yarn and twist peaked in the 1890s, while imports of piecegoods declined rapidly after the First World War (Chaudhuri 1983, 860). Moreover, British cotton exports to India suffered greatly from Japanese competition after 1900. In 1890, Great Britain was the source of over three-quarters of India's imports, while Japan hardly registered at 0.1%. By 1930, Britain's share was under 40% with Japan's share shooting up to 8.8% (Chaudhuri 1983, 865). Moreover, after World War I the Government of India was conceded fiscal autonomy, greatly reducing the direct influence of the Lancashire lobby on policy. While tariffs on cotton goods did increase after World War I, they were not held at a consistently high level and never went above 25% (Dewey 1978). The need for increased revenues and perception of Indian industrialists as a swing constituency lay behind the policy of tariff increases, but that policy never developed into the sort of full-scale policy of infant industry protection called for by the Indians. Instead, British policy continued to be built principally upon an alliance with agrarian interests (Washbrook 1981, 694-711).
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In the countryside, the British alliance continued to rest primarily with large landholders, whatever the details of revenue assessment. The range of rent and tenancy acts passed after 1858 were designed to secure the loyalty of lesser landholders, but not to incorporate them as full partners. This legislation, in fact, formed but half of a dual strategy for the management of India's peasants: conciliation where possible, repression where necessary (Low 1988, 135-36). The ability to conciliate, moreover, was restricted by the pressing need for revenue. Still, for India as a whole the sources of revenue were shifting markedly. While land revenue still accounted for 53% of revenue in 1900-1, by 1917-18 land revenue made up only 36% of total revenue, a scarce 1% more than customs and excise taxes combined (Kumar 1983, 929). Here we can begin to see a shift in the Raj's material base laying the groundwork for a feasible shift in political strategy. With land revenue decreasing in importance, with industrialists clamoring for protectionist policies, and with fiscal autonomy conceded to India, the Raj could well have combined dramatic increases in customs revenue with dramatic cuts in land taxes, thereby satisfying both industrialists and peasants, and conceding to the Congress neither of the nationalists' core constituencies. The utter stasis in the strategy of the Raj may be gauged by its stance in the provincial assembly elections of 1937. In the United Provinces, the government threw its support behind the National Agriculturalist party, whose leadership was composed overwhelmingly of landlords. Congress, reckoning its chances against this party weak in Muslim constituencies, supported the Muslim League, at least tacitly, in many of those ridings. While the Muslim League's performance in UP was not stunning, Congress's performance was, completely wiping out the Britishsupported National Agriculturalists as an important political force, and this even in an
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election with a circumscribed franchise (Prasad 1988, 317-18). Faced with a nationalist movement that proved quite capable of eating into its core constituency, and possessed of the capacity to change policy to retain and even expand that constituency, the Raj chose instead to stand pat, until its constituency had virtually evaporated. There has been a long and fruitless search for deep structural causes of the sudden collapse of the Brazilian Empire in 1889. For early apologists of the Republic, the Empire was identified as a relic, the revolution that overturned it in 1889 twinned with the abolition of slavery, the Republic identified with a long-delayed advent of freedom. This reading of events collapses at the slightest touch. Republicans were divided among themselves on the issue of slavery, with the strongest bastion of the Republican Party, the state of São Paulo, largely in the hands of slaveowning landholders. Consequently, the Republican Party never formally endorsed abolition (Carvalho 1991, 141). Conversely, as ardent an abolitionist as Joaquim Nabuco could be found ardently identified with the Empire, so much so that the advent of the Republic marked his withdrawal from public life (Needell 1991, 166-69). A somewhat more believable reading runs in a diametrically opposed direction. In this account, the Empire was identified with the abolition of slavery; Princess Isabel's declaration of the Lei Aurea caused rural oligarchs to suspend their support for the monarchy; and the Republic represents the return to power of an old land-owning elite. In its most credible form, this argument does not claim that landowners actively opposed the monarchy, simply that their disaffection and lack of positive support for the monarchy allowed others to do away with it (Simmons 1966, 65, 95-6). Even this reading mistakes the circumstances of abolition, however. Brazilian slavery collapsed in the face of mass desertion by slaves on the coffee plantations of Rio
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de Janeiro and São Paulo beginning in the mid-1880s. Employees of the British-run railroads were strongly abolitionist and allowed slaves to stow away on freight cars until they reached the cities where Brazilian abolitionists hid them in an extensive, wellorganized network of safe houses. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Army had refused to participate in hunting down fugitive slaves (Graham 1968, 171-75). When slavery was formally abolished in Brazil on May 13, 1888, it merely recognized the ongoing, irrevocable collapse of an institution that had long been in decline. By 1888, there were only 500,000 slaves left in Brazil, two-thirds of them in coffee-growing provinces (Leff 1982, 1:53). As early as 1872, slaves provided only 14% of agricultural workers in the sugar-growing municípios (counties) of Pernambuco, previously the area of their greatest concentration (Graham 1985, 759). The coffee growers of São Paulo had already begun to diversify their labor force. Only in the declining Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro did coffee plantations still depend largely on slave labor. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that abolition fatally undermined landed support for the Empire, though it may have weakened support in some localities. The abolitionist struggle, however, did play a key role in the military politics that led to the deposition of Dom Pedro II on November 15, 1889. If there was a structural tension that did in the Empire, it was that between the military and civilian government. In comparison with its Spanish American neighbors, Brazil had been blessedly free of caudillismo, army officers neither seizing the reins of power nor dictating to civilians from the sidelines. The subordination of the army to civilian control began to weaken with the Paraguayan war, however. Long a very small force, the army swelled to over 40,000 men during the war (Simmons 1966, 28). The war
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both politicized the army and imbued the officer corps with a conviction of their superiority to civilians (Simmons 1966, 38-9). The separation of military from civilian life was augmented in 1874 by the creation of a Colégio Militar where all officers underwent training (Simmons 1966, 36). After the Paraguayan War, sons of the nobility gradually left the officer corps to be replaced by children of urban middle classes and small landholders who were attracted by the excellent free education provided by the Colégio. Indeed, the Colégio could lay strong claim to being the only institution in Brazil to provide its students with up-to-date scientific training. While young fidalgos at Brazil's universities studied rhetoric, Latin, and theology, its cadets studied mathematics and engineering. Moreover, its cadets absorbed a self-consciously "modern" outlook. Abolitionist sentiment became common in the Colégio (and, eventually, in the officer corps as a whole). The cadets absorbed an ideology of Comtean positivism through Benjamin Constant, who held the chair of mathematics from 1873 to 1889 and enjoyed enormous respect and prestige among his students. In sum, the Colégio created an officer corps which entered the army as a means of social advancement, knew very well that its technical training was second to none in Brazil, and therefore saw itself as the embodiment of Comte's "third stage of humanity" (the positivist or scientific stage) in a society which was still stuck in the first (theological) stage, an officer corps which was systematically frustrated in what it expected and thought it deserved. Promotions were slow, living conditions were poor, pay was low (no pay raises had been granted since 1852), and manifestly inadequate pensions were often simply not paid. The events of November 1889 were a military golpe with a high degree of contingency and opportunism on all sides.
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Beneath the surface of institutional change in Brazil, the old alliance of landowners and bacharéis continued in force. With the Republican Party having very little presence outside São Paulo in 1889, the leaders of the revolution were forced to come to terms with the political bosses who ran the provinces under the Empire, men who became known as "16th of November Republicans" (Janotti 1991, 226). The primary political effect of the revolution was to shift power away from Rio de Janeiro through a federal constitution, and away from the old power centers of the economically stagnant northeast. After 1889 the São Paulo law school was firmly established as the primary institution of the state elite, while northerners were reduced to second-class status in national politics. From 1894 to 1930, ten of eleven presidents came from the south; nine graduated from the São Paulo law school (Pang and Seckinger 1972, 243). Studies of the political elites of the important states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Pernambuco show that bacharéis continued to dominate the entire political spectrum. From 1889 to 1937, seventy percent of those studied had law degrees. Of those whose father's occupations could be identified, 57.3 percent were large landowners (fazendeiros), ranging from 46.9 percent in São Paulo to 57.0 percent in Minas Gerais, to 68.6 percent in Pernambuco. In each state, the second most common father's profession was lawyer, but only in São Paulo, at 34.6 percent, was it of the same order of magnitude as fazendeiro (Love and Barickman 1989, 6-8). While the political elite of the Republic came from the same strata as the Empire's, they functioned under a different political system. No longer were two parties competing for the Emperor's favor; instead, statelevel Republican parties held a monopoly of power. Gone were the senators serving life terms. The counterweights to landed power were removed by the 1889 Revolution. The
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always-tight embrace between landed oligarchs and the state apparatus became a death grip. The system whereby landed elites dominated elections changed hardly at all with the advent of the Old Republic. Indeed, the web of patronage linking statesmen and landholders was once thought to be typical only of the Old Republic, summed up under the rubric coronelismo. Victor Nunes Leal ([1949] 1977) was the first to rebut the oncecommon view that the power of local magnates was an artifact of the 1891 Constitution. The anomaly of a Republic established and maintained with virtually no popular participation was commented upon by the Republican ideologue, Aristides Lobo, in a letter to the Diário Popular of São Paulo published three days after the coup. The people who, according to Republican ideas, should have mounted the barricades to overthrow the monarchy instead passively watched a coup d'état unfold as if they were watching a military parade (Carvalho 1987, 1). Lobo was perhaps too optimistic. The well-known abolitionist sentiments of the Emperor, along with the Princess Regent's key role in passage of the law abolishing slavery (Haring 1968, 103), made the monarchy quite popular among Rio's dark-skinned populace. The Emperor's birthday, December 2, 1888, was the occasion of mass popular demonstrations and the imperial regime had organized "Black Guards" to break up Republican meetings (Carvalho 1987, 29-30). Under the Old Republic, suffrage was tightly restricted; "illiterates were denied the vote in a country where 85.2% of the population was illiterate in 1890" (Fausto 1986, 801). More people were able to vote than under the very restrictive provisions of the Saraíva Law, but the proportion of the total population remained tiny. "In 1886, 111,700 people voted out of a total population of 13.2 million, representing 0.89 per cent of the population. In 1898,
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there were 462,000 votes which corresponded to 2.7 per cent of the population of 17.1 million" (Fausto 1986, 800). In Rio, where there were perhaps one hundred thousand residents qualified to vote in 1890, only 28,585 registered and only 7,857 voted in the 1894 elections (Carvalho 1987, 85). By 1900, President Campos Sales had concluded a political pact with state oligarchies, declaring that the Republic would be governed from the States, that State politics was national politics (Carvalho 1987, 32-3). São Paulo, the linchpin of this pact and traditional stronghold of the Republican Party, had always been the site of an oligarchically-based republicanism. Unlike Rio, where urban literati formed the core of an ideologically-based party, in São Paulo the Republicans were constituted by planters angry that their growing economic importance was not reflected by augmented political power within the Empire (Needell 1987, 14-5). Local electoral boards were controlled by local notables in favor with the dominant faction of the state Republican Party, bound up with officeholders in a web of patronage. Just as in the days of the empire, organized violence was an element of oligarchical control of elections (Carvalho 1987, 87-8). At the highest level, the oligarchically-dominated state Republican Parties negotiated behind the scenes to present a consensus candidate for the Presidency. The official candidate never lost an election; indeed, there were only two seriously contested elections.34 It is tempting to note strains in the Republic in the 1920s and to extrapolate from it deep structural causes of the 1930 revolution. This tendency is reinforced by the profound consequences of 1930 for the rest of the century. Consequently, Brazilian 34
In 1910, the widely respected Rui Barbosa challenged the official candidate, Hermes da Fonseca, and lost by nearly two-to-one. In the election of 1930, Getúlio Vargas did somewhat better, gaining a bit over 40% of the vote. Unlike Barbosa, Vargas did not quietly accept the outcome of a rigged election. 76
historiography of 1930 was long bedeviled by the debate over whether or not 1930 represented Brazil's long-delayed "bourgeois revolution," part of a larger debate on how to date the advent of capitalism to Brazil.35 The proponents of the view that 1930 was a revolt of Brazil's industrial bourgeoisie against an agrarian oligarchy have confused cause with consequence. To be sure, after 1930 industrial growth in São Paulo made the city and its environs the workshop of Latin America, but in fact virtually every industrial group in São Paulo supported the candidacy of the Republican Party's candidate, Júlio Prestes, not Getúlio Vargas, in the election of 1930 (Fausto 1987, 29). Moreover, the Paulista Republican Party was not a backward-looking defender of agrarian interests. On the contrary, throughout the 1920s São Paulo's rising industrialists, through their various Centros Industriais, raised more money for the PRP than did the coffee growers' Sociedade Rural Brasileira (Fausto 1987, 35). But the traditional rival interpretation of 1930 as a revolt of the middle classes against the oligarchy is scarcely on firmer ground. While urban middle classes did turn out in support of Vargas in rallies early in 1930, they were neither the principal base of support nor the principal beneficiaries of the revolution (Fausto 1987, 82, 84). On the contrary, the coalition that supported Vargas in the 1930 elections, the Aliança Liberal, was a disparate, even incoherent marriage of the moment. For his part, Vargas was a product of the rural oligarchy in Rio Grande do Sul, and his support in that state came primarily from the political establishment which served that oligarchy. Vargas's other principal base of support came from the Republican Party of the state of 35
Very roughly, in this debate those who look to market exchange as the criterion date Brazil as capitalist from the 16th century onward, those who define capitalism by wage labor look to 1888 or thereabouts, and those who equate capitalism with industrialization look to 1930. 77
Minas Gerais. Under the pact of 1898, Minas Gerais was to have provided the official candidate for president in 1930. When the Paulista president, Washington Luís, designated as his successor the governor of São Paulo, Júlio Prestes, mineiro elites deserted the official candidate (Levine 1998, 16-19; Fausto 1987, 39-40, 43). Within São Paulo, Vargas's support came not from industrialists but from the Partido Democrático, an unusual alliance of large coffee growers with few ties to industry and urban middle class supporters (Fausto 1987, 38). Behind the scenes, Vargas seemed to be hedging his bets, safeguarding a political future against his probable loss of the election. Before resigning to become governor of Rio Grande do Sul, he had, after all, been the first finance minister for Washington Luís. Late in 1929, Vargas reached an agreement with Washington Luís not to campaign outside Rio Grande do Sul, and both Vargas and Luís pledged to support the declared winner of the election. Vargas did not follow this pact to the letter, campaigning in Rio de Janeiro on New Year's Day and following that rally up with several others. When violence broke out at the rallies however, Vargas retired to his ranch and stopped actively campaigning. Not surprisingly, the Republican Party machines delivered their votes on election day. Outside of Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and Paraíba, home state of the vice-presidential candidate, João Pessoa, Vargas was soundly defeated. Overall, the official tally gave roughly one million votes to Prestes and 700,000 to Vargas (Levine 1998, 18-21). Elements within the Aliança Liberal unwilling to accept the official results were unexpectedly given new life when João Pessoa was shot by a young army officer. Interpreted at the time as a political assassination, Pessoa was in fact done in by his wife's lover. Even then, behind-the-scenes negotiations with Washington Luís were crafting a compromise in which the Republic would have been
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preserved in return for power sharing. Hastily confident of his military support, though, Luís turned down the compromise. On October 3, the Aliança launched its revolution in the northeast, where the army swung to the rebels and prepared to march south through Minas Gerais. Vargas, however, had to move from the opposite direction, from Rio Grande do Sul north to Rio de Janeiro. Vargas moved exceptionally slowly, his train stopping to frequently on its way north for political rallies, and no doubt to insure that his military force combining the Third Army and Rio Grande do Sul's state militia had cleared the way ahead of him. He did not reach Rio de Janeiro until October 31, and was made provisional president on November 4 (Levine 1998, 21-24). Vargas's slow progress northward makes far more sense when we realize that his train had to travel right through the heartland of the Old Republic, São Paulo. There, the stage was set for a battle between the gaúcho troops of the Third Army and state militia with São Paulo's Second Army and no less powerful Força Pública. Indeed, everyone expected the two armies to face off in Itararé, but the battle did not take place as Paulista troops deserted the republic (Font 1990, 265). Why, one must ask, was São Paulo unable to come to the defense of the republic in which it held supreme power? After all, a scant two years later, São Paulo rose in revolt against the new regime under far more difficult circumstances, when it was able to muster only its state militia supplemented by volunteers against government forces pressing in on it from three directions (Levine 1998, 29). As early as January 1931, even Vargas's supporters in the Partido Democrático had broken with him (Font 1990, 266). Why, then, didn't Paulista elites make a stand when the revolution of 1930 could have been stopped, if they were willing
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to foster a desperate rebellion such a short time later? To answer that question we will have to examine a surprising fissure within the Paulista coffee elite itself. By the mid-1880s it had become clear that slave labor would not for long provide the mainstay of labor on São Paulo's coffee plantations. Rather than undertake a program to convert existing slave laborers to wage laborers, the state of São Paulo encouraged, even subsidized, a wave of largely Italian immigration onto the coffee plantations. These colonos were not paid purely in cash, however. In part, their subsistence came from usufruct rights to land on the coffee plantation, sometimes merely the land between the rows of coffee trees that they were to tend. The colonos, along with independent smallholders, became very successful producers of agricultural staples: rice, beans and corn. Indeed, they were so successful that "[b]y the end of the 1920s São Paulo occupied first or second place among Brazilian states in the production of all three items." A minority of the colonos and smallholders became so successful that profits from the sale of staple foods permitted them to become coffee producers in their own right, pushing Brazil's coffee frontier further to the west (Font 1990, 19-21). First-generation immigrants accounted for 22% of coffee growers in 1905, growing to 43% in 1923. Their farms were smaller than the norm, representing some 30% of trees in production in 1923. Immigrants' weight in coffee production continued to grow in the 1920s; by 1932 48% of coffee farms were in the hands of first-generation immigrants. Large coffee farms were responsible for a declining portion of coffee production. Plantations of more than 250,000 trees accounted for 22.9% of trees in 1919 but only 17% by 1932. In contrast, farms of less than 20,000 trees accounted for 23.5% of trees and farms of less than 50,000 accounted for 46%. By 1932 there were more than 70,000 coffee growers, over
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80% of them on small farms of less than 20,000 trees (Font 1990, 15, 17-18). Moreover, it was these immigrants, not the old coffee elite, who were primarily responsible for São Paulo's burgeoning industrialization. By 1920, native Brazilians owned 35.8% of the factories in São Paulo, but those factories were smaller than average, accounting for only 24.5% of the capital invested. In contrast, Italians owned 48.7% of the factories, accounting for 46.9% of the capital invested (Font 1990, 90). In 1926, with the founding of CIESP, a growing wedge could be found between the industrial and coffee elites.36 Industrialists favored protection for industries, and restrictions on the export of cotton from the state, while coffee growers campaigned against "artificial" industries, meaning those who had to import essential inputs (Font 1990, 111). An emblem of the split between old elites in new may be found in the riot which destroyed the facilities of the Italian newspaper, Il Piccolo, in October 1928, led by students from the Law School (Font 1990, 210). In the São Paulo of the 1920s, then, we see a growing rift between an old elite firmly enracinated in coffee and an emerging bourgeois fraction that was much newer to Brazil, less dependent on coffee for its wealth, and growing in economic importance. Unlike the Raj, which had held onto its old basis of support long past the date when new alliances were needed, the state of São Paulo, under the rule of the Partido Republicano Paulista, moved with alacrity to promote and incorporate these new bourgeois. The opening of the Paulista far west proceeded with remarkable speed after 1900, and the 1920s saw a dramatic shift in the state's coffee production. In 1920, 71% of the state's
36
The Centro de Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo is the immediate predecessor of the Federação de Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (FIESP), still, by far, the most influential organization of industrialists in Brazil. 81
coffee was produced in the oligarch-dominated Old West with 26% produced in the New West, where the parvenus thrived. By 1934, the Old West produced only 34% of São Paulo's coffee and the New West 63% (Fausto 1990, 23). Moreover, the opening of the new western tracts was not left to individual large landlords, but was directly supervised by the state. The state sponsored large-scale settlement projects by putting large tracts of land in the hands of developers (loteadores de terras), who sold the land in small parcels to the new coffee producers (Font 1990, 24). With this expansion of lands to the west, the old planters lost an important source of power over their clients. Moreover, the PRP itself underwent a reorganization in the early twentieth century that substantially reduced the influence of the rural oligarchy. First, a formal structure of municipal directorates was put in place and given responsibility for electing a state executive committee of six members each year. Later, in 1913, the executive committee was expanded to nine members and terms were extended to four years. As this executive committee became more insulated from the coffee oligarchy, it began to act at cross purposes with old coffee. Not only did the executive committee develop a party bureaucracy, exercise discipline over legislative delegations at the state and federal levels, and exercise a decisive influence in the choice of gubernatorial and presidential candidates, but in a reversal of previous roles, it began to intervene in the muncipality-level conflicts between coronéis (Font 1990, 130-31, 143-44). Perhaps the prime indicator of the PRP's growing autonomy was the fight for control of the Coffee Institute. Created in 1924 to intervene stabilize coffee revenues, the state saw the institute primarily as a means of regulating coffee production and extracting revenue, while the old elites saw it as a means of limiting production and control of exports. Weakened by a significant loss of production
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due to blight in 1924, the old elites lost the battle for control of the Coffee Institute (Font 1990, 70-77). But this hard-won autonomy was fragile. Having wrenched itself free from control by the old elites, the PRP made itself the patron of São Paulo's new bourgeois, but its new supporters had no autonomous political organizations with which to mobilize. Consequently, in the crisis of 1929, the PRP found itself under attack by a well-organized movement dominated by the old elite, but unable to call on new supporters to mobilize in its defense (Font 1990, 278). Let us grant that in the chaotic environment of 1930, small events made a big difference. Had João Pessoa not been shot by his wife's lover, perhaps the military rebellion that finally tipped the balance would never have taken place. Still, the failure to defend the Republic as the military column advancing on the capital passed through the state that led the Republic reveals deep structural fissures within the pact of domination. At the national level, São Paulo had undone one of the principal props of the política dos governadores. At the state level, the most important Republican Party, the PRP, had attempted to incorporate a rising fraction of the state's bourgeoisie, but was able to do so only at the expense of thoroughly alienating the core of its old base of support.37 Too strong to be toppled without a revolution and too weak to mobilize a defense once a revolution had begun, the isolation of the PRP reveals the fracturing of an old historic bloc and, more than that, deep paralyzing divisions within the leading economic class. In short, Brazil in 1930 fulfilled perfectly the conditions for the emergence of a Bonapartist 37
To be sure, the same might have happened in India had the Raj followed the strategy I suggested earlier, relying more on smallholders and industrialists, less on large proprietors. Still, the Raj had few choices, since after 1918 Congress was cutting drastically into the core of its base of support; new allies had to be found.
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regime, and I would argue that with Vargas Bonapartism is exactly what Brazil got.38 Vargas came to power at the head of a coalition that was deeply divided as to purpose. In such a situation, the head of state can find himself more or less skillfully playing one small fraction off against another, constantly building and shifting coalitions, a tactical game Gramsci refers to as trasformismo. In some ways, the first two years of Vargas's regime can be characterized in this way. With the suppression of the Paulista Revolt in 1932, however, the armed forces came to play a more decisive role, and Vargas switched to a strategy of imposing and reimposing authoritarian rule (Levine 1998, 112; Fausto 1987, 113). While putting down the paulista revolt, Vargas imprisoned dozens of politicians, including his two most powerful supporters from 1930, Artur Bernardes and Borges de Medeiros (Levine 1998, 30-31). Thereafter, Vargas ruled with little civilian opposition, though he had constantly to attend to his base of support in the military. Even during the brief constitutional interlude of 1934-37, Vargas ruled by decree while the legislature and judiciary exercised little power (Levine 1998, 40). From the first days of the regime, interventores were placed at the head of state governments, thereby displacing the governors through whom landed oligarchs exercised political power (Fausto 1987, 110). In the longer term, Vargas acted decisively to disarm the hinterland, arresting or killing thousands of bandits, while disbanding the personal armies of
38
On Bonapartism see Marx [1869] 1963. I here interpret the Bonapartist phenomenon not as the emergence of a regime subservient to the functional needs of capital despite the opposition of a capitalist class, but as a type of regime in which the state's autonomy, and sometimes its directionlessness, is occasioned by either an inability of capitalists to act collectively or by a standoff between opposed fractions of the capitalist class. This interpretation is influenced by Elster 1985, 387-89, 416-18. Similar interpretations of Vargas can be found in Francisco Weffort's characterization of the Vargas regime as an estado de compromisso (Fausto 1987, 104-5) or in Robert Levine's characterization of Vargas as a "passive revolutionary from above" (Levine 1998, 112). 84
landowners that were often indistinguishable from bandits (Levine 1998, 32-33). This is not to say that the coronéis lost power, but it is to say that after Vargas they had to exercise power through the state, no longer alongside or in competition with it. With the creation of the Ministry of Labor, Industry and Commerce in November 1930, Vargas also began to incorporate and control a segment of the labor force through laws decreeing social benefits, state patronage of tightly restricted labor unions, and a system of labor courts (Fausto 1987, 108). These benefits were not extended to more than a fraction of the workforce. Neither rural workers nor urban workers in the unofficial and unregulated market were entitled to benefits, only those in possession of a carteira, perhaps twenty percent of the workforce (Levine 1998, 26). Even those with papers were often denied benefits in practice. Most strikes in the 1930s were about denial of benefits, not wages. Most firms simply ignored laws regulating child and female labor, length of working day, and so forth. Typical was the experience of one worker who, after waiting six months to receive his papers, "was told by a manager that he could have the job if the work card was not signed, so that the firm would not have to pay social security benefits, pensions, sick-leave and overtime rates. The man accepted the job, working a twelve-hour shift, four hours over the legal maximum, at half the minimum wage and without any worker protection" (Levine 1998, 121-22). The carteira became an instrument of social control that could be used whether one possessed it or not. Those without it could be picked up by the police for vagrancy (Levine 1998, 122). Those with a carteira had to present it to their new employers, who could use the information in the work book to blacklist those with a history of labor or political activism (Levine 1998, 44). By 1943, labor law had been codified and explicitly based
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on Mussolini's repressive, corporatist legal code. Nonetheless, even this limited, repressive incorporation of a formerly excluded class of persons earned Vargas the sobriquet of pai do povo, the father of the common people. In addition to the rather modest extension of material benefits to a portion of the working class, Vargas was assiduous in expanding "the psychological boundaries of citizenship," frequently directing his speeches (not to mention his 1954 suicide letter) to "all Brazilians, especially the humble" (Levine 1998, 94). We need not accept the Vargas myth to recognize that his Bonapartist regime initiated changes in the fundamental pact of domination in Brazil that continue to resound in Brazilian politics some eighty years later. Exclusion and Resistance Even when the ruling alliances of colonial India or the Brazil of Empire and Old Republic were not threatened with dissolution, their "success" was based on the exclusion of the vast majority of the populations of India and Brazil, not only from the pact of domination or a share in political power, but from the life of civil society. That exclusion was enforced through everyday brutality, while their eruptions into the political sphere, episodic and frequently diagnosed as criminal, were put down with a brutality that frequently crossed into blood lust. Brazil, always at pains (with little success) to present itself to the world as a European civilization in the tropics, could maintain its pretense only by rigidly excluding dark-skinned lower classes from political participation. In India, where some members of the I.C.S. pressed for a deepening of the pact of domination to include an idealized sturdy yeoman peasantry alongside the large landowners who had previously formed their core
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group of allies, the reforms in property law needed to carry out such a project were enacted in weakened form after delays of decades, with substantial geographical divergence and uneven enforcement. In the end, it was Gandhi, not the British, who was able to incorporate relatively well-off peasants into a powerful political alliance. The "dangerous classes" at the bottom of the social hierarchy faced routine criminal sanction, in India through the designation of certain groups as "criminal tribes," subject to group sanction, in Brazil through vagrancy statutes and the criminalization of certain aspects of Afro-Brazilian life. The primary effect of the failure of cultural hegemony, then, is not that it destabilizes political regimes but that it creates substantial obstacles to the creation of inclusionary polities. Subordinate groups therefore have little incentive to press for incorporation into the existing alliance. Not only would a call for incorporation be rebuffed, there are no channels for such an appeal to be made. The excluded are therefore left with a politics of resistance, a politics often read as criminality by the dominant. This misreading of the politics of the dominated is not a simple misreading. Criminal activity, however restrictively defined, is one response to subordination. It is normally a response with limited aims: slaves kill a harsh overseer, villagers riot to call attention to a corrupt local official, a poor vagrant steals to survive, a small landowner turns to banditry when forced off his land by a larger landowner. There is no reason to think of such activity as other than criminal, so long as we remember that it is criminality with a distinctly limited political purpose. In the absence of channels for demands of inclusion, political activity with broader aims tends to take the form of public and communal resistance: a prophetic community gathers in the Brazilian sertão (Cunha
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1944), the Santals of eastern India rise up to expel "outsiders" (diku), both British and Hindu (Guha 1983, 77-83). Such criminality/resistance is recurrent and endemic, but also localized and evanescent. Negation and reversal rather than programmatic reform are its common idiom.39 Its categories of friend and foe are improvised, fluid, and changing, though some common features can be found in both contexts. It is a selflimiting form of resistance, both because the range of loyalties it can mobilize is geographically restricted and because its attention to signs at the expense of strategy. Despite this stringently exclusionary polity, however, in the epoch when the ruling alliances of Brazil and India were beginning to come apart, workers in the most heavily industrialized cities in both countries managed to gouge out a space for public contestation that they never gave back. The official colonial view of British India saw it as divided by fixed and immutable lines of race, tribe, caste, and religion, even extending to “criminal tribes” whose members were “criminals by birth”. A number of generalizable features can be noted from the treatment of various "criminal tribes." First, while the boundaries used to classify criminal tribes were set down in rigid legal terms, their application was permeable and fluid. In practice, ascription of criminality was left up to local officials who interpreted their mandate broadly, catching up members of the named group who did not engage in criminal activity and others with a reputation for theft who were not members of the specified group along with those for whom the law was designed. Second, despite the portrayal of criminal tribes as nomadic outlaws who preyed on a 39
On idioms of reversal and negation see Ranajit Guha and James Scott (Guha 1983; Scott 1985, 1990). In contrast, "[t]he more authentically hegemonic a class really is, the more it leaves opposing classes the possibility of organizing and forming themselves into an autonomous political force" (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, 57). 88
settled agricultural society, in fact these outlaws were frequently agriculturalists as well as occasional robbers and, moreover, engaged in crime not in isolation but in collusion with local landlords.40 Third, becoming a "criminal tribe" was often tied to the loss of itinerant livelihoods. The itinerant traders of Madras lost their livelihood in the late nineteenth century under pressure from railroads, the government salt monopoly, and the restriction of free grazing land for cattle. Despite their recent history of useful employment, they were promptly classified as "criminals by birth" when the Criminal Tribes Act was extended to Madras in 1911 (Radhakrishna 1989, 269-75). Fourth, the implementation of the Criminal Tribes Act frequently worked to the benefit of landlords and industrialists. The former could invoke the Criminal Tribes Act and call on the colonial state to help them keep their laborers bound to the land. Likewise, criminal tribes were sometimes sent to work in mines or factories, with criminal penalties for refusal. In Bombay, mill-owners had whole communities of "criminals" transported to work in the mills (Radhakrishna 1989, 279-88). Fifth, "criminal tribes" were not just resettled, but resettled into a social system that insured their economic and social insecurity. Their failure to adapt to resettlement programs was coded as moral failure rather than a response to oppression. In consequence, surveillance and punishment rather than reformation became the foci of the resettlement programs (Nigam 1990, 286-87). The rigidity of interpretation which is found in the policy adopted towards the "criminal tribes" typifies the British understanding of India in the mature phase of colonialism. Behavior is explained with reference to essential characteristics rather than
40
This last feature was implicitly recognized in the Police Responsibilities of Landlords Act (1868) which made landlords liable for harboring criminals. This recognition did not feature in the treatment handed out to criminal tribes, however. 89
context. In effect, this reduces to the pseudo-explanation of labeling. The action of an individual or group is explained by the claim that it is in that group's nature to perform actions of that class.41 The rhetoric surrounding "criminals by birth" is in this sense of a piece with the notion that Hindus and Muslims are naturally at one another's throats. In both cases, the only remedy is an agent of external control, to wit, the colonial state. In contrast, the first generation of colonial figures often had a more subtle, varied, and contextually sensitive view of their social environment. Witness the variation in treatment of Bhil, Kond, and Koli compared to the later criminal tribes. This is not because Elphinstone was more intelligent than Curzon or Munro more humane than Ripon. Rather, the generation of colonizers who must create alliances is thrust into a situation in which the social world does not come ready made. Just as alliances must be made piecemeal, and a beginning must be made before the end is in sight, so presumptive mappings of the social world must be tried, modified, used and discarded before one knows what the final map will look like--the two, in fact, are aspects of the same process. To a fixed set of alliances corresponds a fixed map of the social world - the kind we saw used by the British in their response to "communalism" and their creation of a set policy for "criminal tribes". A hegemonic alliance, one which continually refashions itself by incorporation of new groups (and, at times, exclusion of former allies), does not adopt so rigid a view of the world. The extreme measures of the Criminal Tribes Acts are distinguishable in degree, but not in kind from routine police work in colonial India. Surveillance was the linchpin 41
The logical vacuity of this "explanation" would not change if "culture" were substituted for "nature." An explanans must be defined independently of the explanandum for an explanation to make sense. The bare statement "I φ because it is in my nature to φ, " or "because I am part of a culture of φ-ing" tells you nothing you didn't already know. 90
of the whole criminal system. Every Police Commission cited inadequate oversight and supervision by Europeans as the cause of the flaws of the colonial police (Indian Police Commission 1965, 14, 21). In 1898, the Criminal Procedure Code was amended to allow supervision of some classes of offenders after their release from jail (Indian Police Commission 1965, 147). The most far-ranging proposal for reform to come out of the Police Commission of 1902-03 was the creation of a system of village records to systematically track "persons whose conduct has shown a determination to lead a life of crime" (Indian Police Commission 1965, 153). The Thugi and Dakaiti Department, whose earlier work formed the model for the Criminal Tribes Acts, provided the model for successful crime control in India. Crime was a large-scale organized conspiracy that had to be detected, eradicated, and watched for possible resurgence (Freitag 1985, 14748). That view of crime was easily extendable to political opposition to the Raj. Not surprisingly, the Thugi and Dakaiti Department became responsible for "the collection of information regarding political or social movements which might affect the stability of the country" (Griffiths 1971, 342), or, to put it less delicately, became an agency for political spying. In time, that became its sole function; it was succeeded in 1904 by the Central Intelligence Department (Arnold 1986, 186-87). There was never a hard-and-fast distinction between extraordinary crime and ordinary crime, or between crime control and political control. The genealogy of the discourse at one end of the spectrum--control of extraordinary crime through extraordinary measures--can be replicated at the opposite end--the control of non-criminal political activity. Non-hegemonic domination by the ruling alliance both enables and limits the possibilities for subaltern resistance. This theme has emerged most clearly from the
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"subaltern studies" project in demonstrating the weak and troubled articulation between Indian nationalism and the more radical but more localized autonomous mobilization of peasants. Chauri Chaura can stand as an emblem of this troubled relation. Gandhi's visit to Gorakhpur in 1921 set off rapid mobilization among the local peasantry, but not mobilization controlled and guided by the District Congress Committee. Tales of Gandhi's miraculous powers proliferated, culminating in the story that the British had granted swaraj after Gandhi had successfully walked through fire unharmed. The local manifestation of swaraj, according to this widely-believed rumor, was that rent on land was to be reduced to eight annas per bigha. This story became the basis for a violent uprising in 1922, during which the police station at Chauri Chaura was stormed to the cries of "Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!" This was also, of course, the episode whose violent conclusion led Gandhi to call off the nationwide non-cooperation campaign (Amin 1988). Chauri Chaura may be read as a morality tale in which the timidity of nationalist leadership serves as the whipping boy, but it may also be read as illustrative of a real dilemma. Nationalism, for all its timidity, managed to create an India-wide organization that was disciplined and purposeful, able to act strategically and not just expressively. In every other case, including the 1857 revolt, fractionated leadership doomed the uprisings to failure. (To be sure, the failure of these uprisings was overdetermined, but the inability to generate supralocal leadership structures alone would have caused their defeat). Gautam Bhadra's (1985) analysis of the diverse histories and aims of four leaders of the 1857 uprising succeeds remarkably in his aim of demonstrating that leadership of the uprising was not merely "traditional," that non-traditional leaders arose during the course of the revolt. The diversity of this leadership, though--a petty landlord who came to
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control some eighty-four villages during the revolt, a Jat peasant who led a Jat uprising in fourteen villages, an adivasi who led a rebellion of Kols but portrayed himself as the agent of the Raja of Porahat, and an itinerant Muslim preacher who led the rebellion at Lucknow--simultaneously shows that the unbridgeable diversity of aims among participants in the revolt would have made it unsustainable even if the purely military aspects of the mutiny had gone more favorably for the rebels. Nor should we apotheosize "subaltern consciousness." For all its radical possibilities, this remains a contradictory consciousness, characterized simultaneously by revolt against, submission to, and sacrifice for authority. Rebellion against a particular king (or other authority) is perfectly compatible with devotion to a normative order of kingship. Given that the normative model for the relation between raja and subject is that between father and son, it does not follow that discontent of the ruled is invariably displaced onto the agents of the raja/father. A subject may equally ascertain a duty of the raja to control his agents, failure to do so indicating a failure to properly wield the rod of danda and, ineluctably, a failure to secure the material precondition of dharma (Bhadra 1989). Even when authority is challenged, though, it is incipiently reconstructed in the course of revolt. The challenge to authority, with its negative project of envisioning the negation or reversal of the world's order, necessarily coexists with a project of reconstituting an order with its own hierarchies and forms of domination. Finally, we must take note of the role religious consciousness plays in these revolts. The expectation of divine sanction and aid is too omnipresent to be ignored, but it is too easy to dismiss the admixture of religious belief and political mobilization as a form of "false consciousness." One may agree that religiously-based mobilization
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"generated a certain kind of alienation: it made the subject look upon his destiny not as a function of his own will and action, but as that of forces outside and independent of himself," without thereby concluding that this was "an unquestionably false consciousness if there ever was one" (Guha 1983, 268). Take voluntarism, the secular mirror-image of this "false consciousness" in which "forces outside and independent of" oneself are given little or no weight. We would be quick to regard voluntarism as an intellectual error, but not so quick to regard it as an obvious manifestation of "false consciousness." There is no mystery behind our asymmetrical reactions to these symmetrical errors. The taken-for-granted agnosticism or atheism of academic history and social science - a legacy of that Enlightenment whose other legacies the fashionably postmodern are quick to question or reject - prejudges the rationality and coherence of those whose actions are based on theistic premises. Without judging the rationality or the "consciousness" of religiously-motivated rebels, though, one should note that, in a certain sense, these rebellions presume their own defeat. They take place, not in secular time but in eschatological time. Defeat of the enemy is not to be accomplished through superior numbers, strategy, weaponry, or any other material means. Rather, the uprising is a sign that defeat of the enemy has already been accomplished and need merely be made manifest. The uprising itself is not a means to an end but a sign that will usher in the end of the age, simultaneously a reaction to an external event and a necessary condition for the incoming of the eschaton.42 Lack of immediate temporal fulfillment will disperse and dishearten those involved, but it will not
42
Not a causally necessary condition, but a symbolically necessary condition. One acts because one's action is commanded or entailed by the prophetic utterances in which one has placed faith. 94
necessarily discredit a particular prophecy (which can always be reinterpreted to fit new conditions), and has never succeeded in discrediting this particular mode of mobilization. Belief in a victory that is already real but not yet manifest cannot be disabused by a failure of the reality to become manifest at any particular time. When we turn to urban labor movements, the temptation is to reproduce the hoary old distinction between "tradition" and "modernity". That distinction simply will not do. Sacramental movements proved ineffective not because they were traditional but because they were savagely repressed. Similarly, labor movements were not cast in the emblem of modernity; as Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, Indian laborers were marked by the "prebourgeois" society that surrounded them.43 Managerial authority in the jute mills surrounding Calcutta bore little resemblance to the rational-legal rule-book-and-clock discipline of Marx's factory, or Weber's. Like a north Indian landlord, the (usually Scottish) manager's authority was personalized, excessive, and terroristic. The manager's will, not abstract rules, was law in the factory. That will was not hidden but displayed, and frequently displayed through the public use of physical coercion. So far from the exercise of authority being rule-bound, it was strengthened insofar as it could be imposed arbitrarily (Chakrabarty 1989, 166-71). Further down the hierarchy, laborers were under the thumb of Indian supervisors (babus) and jobbers (sardars) whose authority was bound up with a variety of corrupt practices, from usurious moneylending to exacting bribes in return for bestowing jobs to pocketing the proceeds from ghost payrolling to the maintenance of housing for workers at exorbitant rents. The "corruption" of sardars, in
43
The rubric "prebourgeois" has its own problems, for it compares the real labor movement in India to an idealized model of what a fully modern labor movement "should" look like, instead of what real labor movements outside India did look like. 95
particular, was not incidental to the system of labor control in the jute mills. In the skilled and relatively highly paid factory jobs, such as those in the weaving department, managerial oversight was routinely used to check corruption. In the badly paid unskilled positions, rapid turnover was the norm and sardars were left on their own to procure an adequate supply of labor at going rates without too much inquiry into just how the work was accomplished (Chakrabarty 1989, 96-99). This was not mere oversight on the part of the millowners, for surveillance entails both direct costs and opportunity costs; below a certain wage level, those costs exceed the costs of winking at "corruption". Sardars, then, were free to draw on "relationships of community, kinship, and religion" in recruiting and disciplining an ill-paid labor force, buttressing their authority by sponsoring communal institutions such as temples and mosques (Chakrabarty 1989, 107, 112-13). If a distinction is to be drawn between rural uprisings and urban labor movements in India, then, it is not a distinction between a traditional countryside and a modern metropolis. How could it be, given the often-noted strength of ties between India's urban workers and their villages of origin (Chandarvarkar 1998, 66-7)? It is scarcely more enlightening, though, to reintroduce the distinction between tradition and modernity by categorizing Indian society as a whole as "prebourgeois", contrasting both workers and (implicitly) peasants with an idealized modernity. Instead of resorting to a global explanation of this sort, Chakrabarty might well have noted more proximate explanations of the unusual features of class formation in the jute mills. Jute was, for example, a technological laggard. The Calcutta region had a near-monopoly on jute production, and substitutes for jute arrived on the scene after the local industry had sunk
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costs in technologically primitive factories, for which an unskilled labor force was needed. Market challenges were met not through technological innovation but restriction of supply through a cartel, the Indian Jute Mill Association (Chakrabarty 1989, 63, 93). The weakness of unions may have had as much to do with the use of industrial spies as with workers' lack of class consciousness. The IJMA created its own Intelligence Service to place spies in the mills and report on "developments and the general trend of opinion" among mill workers (Chakrabarty 1989, 122). Similarly, in Bombay, mill-owners established a network of spies and provocateurs to inhibit the formation of unions (Chandarvarkar 1998, 80-81, 118). The low pay in the mills was unable to attract enough laborers from relatively prosperous Bengal. Instead, the bulk of the labor force came from impoverished Bihar and the eastern half of the United Provinces. In 1921, Bengalis made up less than a quarter (24.1%) of the labor force, while UP and Bihar accounted for well over half (56.5%). Over time, the predominance of north Indians in the factories appears to have increased. By 1941, Bengalis made up only 11.6% of factory workers, while those from Bihar and UP made up 79.5%.44 Recruitment of migrant labor combined with a Bengali hold on the best jobs may have contributed as much as India's "prebourgeois" society to communal tension in the mills. Chakrabarty himself notes several alternative explanations of communalism in the mills: employers encouraged unions tied to the Muslim League, easily replaceable laborers might well be expected to use linguistic, religious, geographical, or kin ties to secure and retain employment, and the insecurity of life for laborers made it necessary to secure such ties throughout daily life, not just in relation to the job (Chakrabarty 1989, 203-8). Begging the question, 44
Chakrabarty 1989, 105. The data for the two years are heterogeneous, so the figures cannot be taken as more than a very general indication of trends. 97
Chakrabarty then rejects all of these explanations out of hand, arguing that "to see in this 'utility' the workers' reason for valuing and retaining these bonds is to invest the jute worker with a bourgeois rationality" (Chakrabarty 1989, 212). If we focus on the scale of militance rather than the degree of organization, India's labor movements emerge in a more favorable light. Early in the twentieth century, labor militance tended to accompany the nationalist movement. The swadeshi movement of 1905-8 saw such an upsurge, accompanied by the formation of the Indian Mill-Hands Union under the leadership of A. C. Banerjee. The Khilafat movement of 1920-21 saw a similar peak, with the organization of over twenty unions in Bengal. By the late 1920s, though, the labor movement was no longer riding on the coattails of the nationalist movement. In Bengal, a wave of militance began with a long strike at Fort Gloster Jute Mill from 17 July to 31 December 1928, and picked up with a general strike from July to September of 1929 (Chakrabarty 1989, 118, 124-25). Bombay's cotton-mill workers were more militant, mounting strikes as early as 1891 and 1901, and general strikes in 1908, 1919, 1920, and 1923 before the great general strikes of 1928-29 (Chandarvarkar 1998, 68, 75). Between April 1928 and September 1929, Bombay's cotton mills were effectively shut for eleven months out of eighteen (Chandarvarkar 1998, 100). Without a doubt, the upsurge of labor was conditioned by the turgid postwar British economy and the ongoing crisis of political support for the Raj, but the timing of the strike wave of 1928-29 was determined by neither. On the contrary, it preceded both the global economic downturn that began in October 1929 and the resurgence of nationalist militance in 1930. This time, the strikes were determined by more proximate causes, having primarily to do with managerial attempts to rationalize the jute and cotton
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industries respectively. The jute mills were increasingly turning from multiple to single shifts, throwing many out of work while simultaneously lengthening the working day and lowering the wage of those who remained (Chakrabarty 1989, 118-20). Bombay's cotton mills were engaged in similar efforts to augment the productivity of labor, partly by lengthening hours, but moreso by increasing the number of machines a laborer was to oversee (Chandarvarkar 1998, 63-4, 90). The nationalist movement usually kept the labor movement at arm's length, although by the 1930s a significant socialist faction within the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, provided verbal support, though not much more. The colonial state was scarcely more hospitable to labor. Colonial officials perceived both the nationalist movement and the labor movement as conspiracies, fostered by occult societies, spread through the whisperings of the bazaar, to be anticipated through espionage and countered with force (Chandarvarkar 1998, 207, 216). In the official mind, Indians, especially lower-class Indians, were given to credulity, and could be inspired to unreasoned heights of violence by the flimsiest of rumors. The only way, it was believed, to put an end to the furies of the crowd was a rapid and decisive show of force. The 1919 Jalianwalla Bagh massacre in Amritsar in which 400 were killed and 1,200 wounded met with widespread approbation among the Anglo-Indian community (Wolpert 1982, 299). Brigadier Dyer, the officer in charge, "had been faced, he later told the Hunter Committee, with only two options: either to fulfil his 'very distasteful and horrible duty' of 'suppressing disorder' or else risk 'becoming responsible for all future bloodshed'" (Chandarvarkar 1998, 218). Not surprisingly, then, labor "unrest" was attributed to hooligans who misled ordinary workers. The police responded to the labor
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movement by drawing up lists of "bad characters" to be rounded up in times of trouble. In fact, the police's claim to detailed knowledge of this "criminal class" was puffery; the usual procedure in times of "unrest" was to call in the army, surround a neighborhood, and arrest anyone in the neighborhood who looked suspicious (Chandarvarkar 1998, 16162). But if the governmental response to the labor movement was primarily repressive, it was not only repressive. On paper, the government pushed through an impressive series of labor laws in the 1920s: the "Factories Act (1922), the Workmen's Compensation Act (1923), the Trade Unions Act (1926), the Trade Disputes Act (1926), the Maternity Benefits Bill (1929), the Payment of Wages Act (1933), and others" (Chakrabarty 1989, 71). With the expansion of the franchise in the 1920s, labor was guaranteed a small number of seats on legislative councils (Chandarvarkar 1998, 83-4). To be sure, the aim of this legislation was more to control and monitor labor than it was to encourage unionization, but that should not prevent us from noting the important distinction between pure repression and repression combined with co-optation. In the end, neither the nationalist movement nor the Raj was sure quite what to do with India's industrial labor force, and both made halting, half-hearted attempts to secure labor's support. That modest political opportunity space allowed labor to do what India's sacramental movements could not: create a public sphere for organization, win some battles (even if most were lost), and live to fight another day. Discussions of policing and social control in nineteenth-century Brazil were dominated by a single great fear, that Brazil's relatively small elite would be overwhelmed by its large African and mulatto population, that Brazil would become Saint-Domingue on a continental scale. In some ways, the commonplace stereotypes
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about Brazilians of African descent became more, not less, invidious as abolition became seriously debated. The old stock figures in Brazilian literature were Pai João, the faithful but servile and impotent slave, and the negro velho, a sinister figure portrayed as being in league with the devil, but essentially a bogeyman to frighten children rather than a truly fearsome figure (Brookshaw 1986, 5-8). Abolitionist literature, which "started from the premise that slavery was bad for slave owners because it brought them into contact with moral degenerates," helped introduce new stereotypes: the "lusty slave woman, always willing for sex with her master" and the "Demon Slave," a runaway quilombola "who turned his back on the tutelage of his white master and thus confirmed his savagery" (Brookshaw 1986, 27-8). In neither India nor Brazil did the State successfully claim a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence; this was particularly true of the rural areas where more than four-fifths of the population lived. In India, though, the de facto concession of legitimate violence to organizations not controlled by the State was a concession by a would-be despotism whose means were too paltry to prevent what it winked at. In Brazil, in contrast, the exercise of violence by men of private means was not merely an unavoidable concession, but an integral part of keeping the lower orders in line. Correctional discipline was the prerogative not only of slaveowners but of employers, and much of the activity of police in urban areas had little to do with binding over lawbreakers for judicial punishment and much to do with administering on-the-spot beatings to miscreants who, in an urban environment, were not directly supervised by an owner or employer (Holloway 1993, 282-83). Indeed, when it came to the discipline of slaves in urban areas, the State acted, quite literally, as the arm of the slaveowner,
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administering lashes of the whip not at the command of the judge but at the command of the slavemaster. On the other end of the scale, slaveowners were never brought to book for injuries inflicted upon slaves. I have been able to find a single, partial exception to this rule, an 1871 episode in which a Rio judge and police commissioner worked to secure the manumission of a number of slaves forced by their mistresses into prostitution (Graham 1991). Far more typical was the report of a Justice of the Peace, who absolved a slaveowner of beating his slave by invoking the need to control "barbarous Africans, who disgracefully continue to increase among us, and whom nothing will contain short of a healthy terror" (Holloway 1993, 120-21). If we wish to understand how Brazil was policed, then, we must start with that "healthy terror," the relationship between slave and master, and see how formal State police institutions were gradually built on that base. Rural Brazil's social stratification was far more complex than a simple bifurcation between masters and slaves. In most provinces, a few clans stood at the top of the pyramid, dominating the political landscape. Other large landowners found themselves drawn into the webs of alliances created by these families. Smaller landholders, most of them not slaveholders, found themselves hard-pressed, and not infrequently evicted from their land by larger and more powerful families. Almost without exception, the most powerful families were those most closely involved with the production of exportable commodities. They were the heirs of a colonial state which had formally given the sugar barons of the northeast juridical power on their own land, maintaining a significant police presence only in the gold and diamond-producing regions where smuggling to evade the twenty percent royal tax was rampant (Mattoso 1986, 93-4). While their formal jurisdiction lapsed with independence, the great landowners continued to constitute a law
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unto themselves, both in that the police had no effective jurisdiction on their property and in that their factional rivalries were conducted through violent, virtually unregulated conflict. The patriarchal Brazilian family included, in addition to the core family unit of parents, acknowledged children, and close relatives, a large array of bastard children, distant relatives, hangers-on, agregados and moradores (the latter living on the landowners' property, the former under his informal protection). From this crew, especially those in the last two categories, could be assembled a private militia for disciplining unruly slaves, tracking down runaways, resolving family feuds, or settling local land disputes (Huggins 1985, 16; Mattoso 1986, 107-8). With the formal instruments of state authority spread so thinly across the countryside, the administration of justice could not be entrusted solely to the provincial police forces. The army was no better placed as an instrument of control, for its effective strength hovered around fifteen thousand men, except when mobilized between 1865 and 1870 for the Paraguayan War. Only the National Guard, with a peak strength of some two hundred thousand men, had the reach to act as a police force throughout Brazil (Uricoechea 1980, 63-4). The National Guard, though, cannot be thought of as a bureaucratic arm of the state. Rather, it was an expression of patrimonial authority, a liturgical association in which the state pressed local notables into service and through which, in turn, those notables were able to capture the state's repressive apparatus (Uricoechea 1980, 3). In India, as we saw in the previous chapter, most forms of resistance were, one way or another, territorially based, whether that took the form of Deccani "wild tribes" trying to hold onto a share of sovereignty or "tribals" trying to defend their territory from
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encroachment by English and diku alike. In Brazil, resistance usually meant not the defense of territory but withdrawal from territory, going somewhere else. Slaves were less likely to rebel than to flee to marginal zones where they could found autonomous communities. Even the pitched battles between sacramental movements and the Brazilian army which we will examine below were desperate responses to military attack by communities that sought to withdraw from the surrounding society. Even India's bandits tended to have a territorial home base, while Brazil's had at best temporary zones of refuge. I have uncovered no set of cultural differences to which this variance can plausibly be ascribed, though an explanation of that sort cannot be ruled out. In this case, it seems that geography is destiny. Brazil is a larger country than India, and not much smaller than India even if we ignore the thinly populated regions of the interior. Its population, though, was much smaller: 10 million versus 249 million for India in 1871-72 (Costa 1986, 728; Visaria and Visaria 1983, 490). With a population roughly twenty-five times as dense as that of Brazil, withdrawal was a closed option for Indians. For Brazilians, spread out along the coast with a frontier not far away, exit was the easy option. By far the most successful form of organized collective resistance was the creation of durable communities of escaped slaves, Brazil's quilombos. The best-known and most successful quilombos, incorporating several hundred to a few thousand slaves and lasting for several decades, date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but smaller quilombos existed in abundance until the final days of slavery (Mattoso 1986, 138-42). As Brazil became more densely populated, these maroon communities became smaller and more fleeting, but we can find records of their existence even in the most
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densely populated parts of the country. There are records of two quilombos in a single município of the state of Rio de Janeiro during the 1870s. They managed to survive for several years, causing a panic in local white society. In one case, assaults by the provincial police were repeatedly rebuffed so that a general mobilization of the local population was needed to destroy the quilombo (Donald 1976). Eugene Genovese has noted, correctly, that maroon settlements did not aim for the abolition of slavery - indeed, some Brazilian quilombos practiced slavery internally - but for a sort of de facto independence on the margin of a slave-owning society. His conclusion, that such communities were therefore not a "revolutionary" threat to the larger society, is more misleading. True, the quilombos never coalesced into a threat on the scale of the revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture in St. Domingue (Haiti), but their mere existence provoked rebellion and desertion by other slaves, and they frequently defeated troops set out to crush them. Most of their activity was defensive, but that doesn't mean they posed no threat to slaveowners. Short-term accommodations might be reached with individual quilombos, but their very existence threatened slaveowners with mass desertion, an intolerable threat that explains the persistence of attempts to destroy them (Genovese 1981, 40-41, 52, 57). There is an unfortunate tendency in Brazilian historiography to lump a wide variety of what I have called "sacramental movements" under the rubric "millenarian rebellions," even when few can be called rebellions and none can properly be called millenarian. One prominent interpretation of these "millenarian rebellions" in Brazil suggests that they represent a revolt against the substitution of impersonal bourgeois relations for personalized feudal relations. In this view, the withdrawal of the patrão
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from traditional obligations "signifies, for the peasant, a scandal: it's not only his material conditions of existence that are transformed, but also his universe of symbolic representations of social relations that is crumbling" (Oliveira 1979, 67-8). The view that capitalism is responsible for these movements is hardly tenable; they grew up in peripheral zones, not in the central zones of capitalist development. If a case can be made that the Contestado rebellion of 1912-16 was a response to capitalist penetration, the other most prominent cases of sacramental movements in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brazil, Canudos and Juazeiro, were located well beyond the zone of capitalist relations of production. There is a case to be made, however, that a fraying of patron-client ties was central to each case. In northeastern Brazil, where Canudos and Juazeiro were found, a series of devastating droughts in the late nineteenth century made it impossible for patrons to fulfill obligations of minimal sustenance. Peasants were forced into large-scale migration in a desperate and largely futile search for food. Not capitalism, but demographic disaster had destroyed customary social relations for the peasants of Juazeiro and Canudos. Several common features of these three movements can be identified. First, they were occasioned by a break in the social bonds between patron and client, caused by the intrusion of capitalism in one case and killer droughts in the other two. The "messianic" leader was in no case a self-proclaimed messiah, and only in the case of Antônio Conselheiro can a case be made that he might have been seen as such by some of his followers. Padre Cícero was venerated as a powerful, living saint, but not a messiah. José Maria died before the movement he inspired gained a widespread following, though the rumor was spread that he would return to lead his followers. Leaders of these
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communities were not expected to fulfill messianic expectations so much as act as idealized patrons. The attraction to an idealized form of personal leadership reflects the belief that impersonal ties are amoral by definition. These were not movements for an abstract, procedural justice but for the restoration of a moral cosmos. Each movement evinced hostility to the Republic in one way or another. Canudos and the Contestado were suffused by a rather vague monarchism, though neither was part of a political conspiracy to bring back the Brazilian Empire, as was suggested at the time. Padre Cícero was deeply involved in Republican politics, but his devotees typically dissociated him from vulgar politics. Dissatisfaction with the political aspects of the movement were displaced to Padre Cícero's political operative, Dr. Floro. Unlike Antônio Conselheiro and José Maria, Padre Cícero managed to square the circle, to engineer the political compromises needed to insure Juazeiro's survival while remaining unsullied by politics in the eyes of his followers (Slater 1984, 1991a, 1991b; Pessar 1981, 1991). Above all, though, it is an error to think of these sacramental movements as characterized by aggressive confrontation with the state. Withdrawal, a reformulation of social relations within a separated community, and patient waiting for the defeat of one's enemies, not an assault on them, were the chief features of these movements. As noted above, Brazilian political elites displaced large numbers of workingclass citizens in order to remake Rio de Janeiro in the image of Paris. By 1906, Rio's reconstruction was virtually complete. The center city, which had housed 37.2% of the population in 1906, contained only 27.8% by 1920, while the working-class Zona Norte and subúrbios shot up from 30.5% to 64.5% of the population (Meade 1997, 124). Obligatory smallpox vaccination was reintroduced in 1909, the same year that Oswaldo
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Cruz pronounced Rio de Janeiro free of yellow fever. Despite this public health triumph, the primary killer of the poor, tuberculosis, continued unabated, killing more people from 1903 to 1920 than yellow fever, plague, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and small pox combined (Meade 1997, 125-26). In this urban landscape built to serve the elite alone, popular contestation continued to center on the city's refusal to extend adequate collective consumption goods to working-class zones, with transportation services a particular target (Meade 1997, 128-29). This form of contestation reached a peak in 1913 as FORJ, the anarchist Worker's Federation of Rio de Janeiro (Federação Operária do Rio de Janeiro) brought a wide range of such concerns under the umbrella of the Campaign Against the High Cost of Living (Campanha Contra a Carestia da Vida). The campaign called for an end to customs tariffs and other protectionist policies that allowed monopolies (or 'trusts') to keep prices high and make exorbitant profits on products in short supply. It opposed high municipal taxes on apartment buildings and commercial houses, which were passed on to tenants and consumers in the form of higher rents and retail prices. The platform called for across-the-board pay increases, noting that current salaries were inadequate for the needs of a family. The campaign's supporters condemned the 'brutal and extremely hard work' laborers endured, which, combined with the long distances they had to travel on erratically scheduled trains and shoddy streetcar lines, made for a miserable life and brought on an early death. Finally, the campaign's platform denounced the squalid living conditions of poorer neighborhoods: houses infested with parasites, poisonous food, unpaved streets, lack of water and sanitation, the suffocating heat in living and working quarters. (Meade 1997, 141-42). The campaign spread throughout the city with impressive speed, allowing FORJ to organize an extensive network of local committees, but was brought crashing down by an economic depression in Europe that brought new foreign investment in Brazil to a halt,
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drove down the prices of Brazilian exports, threw factories into half-time production when they didn't close their doors entirely, and curtailed all new public spending (Meade 1997, 147). Nonetheless, the Campanha Contra a Carestia da Vida refused to stay dead. Under conditions of wartime inflation, FORJ once again mounted a series of protests against the high price of foodstuffs and other necessities starting in January 1917. On May Day, the campaign brough over 6,000 protesters to Rio's main thoroughfare, the Avenida Rio Branco (Meade 1997, 156-57). In the midst of this mobilization came news of a general strike in São Paulo. Beginning June 10 at the Rudolfo Crespi textile mill, within one month strikes had effectively shut down the city. At one point, the city administration was taken over by the Comité de Defesa Proletária. Throughout June and July, Rio workers joined the strike until by July 24 Rio was also under general strike conditions (Meade 1997, 159). Events were moving so fast that FORJ had to struggle to keep up with them. Only on July 14 did FORJ finally issue a statement declaring its solidarity with the São Paulo strikers and declare itself in permanent session, trying to shape the strikes that had taken it by surprise (Meade 1997, 162-63). In São Paulo, the gap between the anarchists of FOSP (the Federação Operária de São Paulo), who had taken nominal leadership positions in the general strike, and the workers in the mills who had begun the strikes was wider than in Rio de Janeiro. While most of the textile mill workers, including those who had begun the strike wave, were women, the anarchist movement in São Paulo had consistently shown suspicion or hostility towards women workers. One anarchist writer urged his fellow workers, "Let us make of women what they should be: the priestesses of the home, the priestesses of
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morality." In 1900, the anarchist journal, Il Diritto, blamed women for men's lack of militance: "We are not well enough aware of how at present women are a danger, an enemy of the social movement. We could not precisely count the number of militants who have deserted the struggle and abandoned forever the revolutionary ideas they once so avidly espoused so as not to displease their women and to have tranquility on the domestic scene." Not surprisingly, women workers had little to do with anarchist (or other) unions, finding support instead in more informal networks that would gel into ad hoc factory commissions in order to facilitate bargaining with mill owners (Wolfe 1993, 12-13). The factory commissions had already been employed in a strike wave in 1907; the 1917 general strike in São Paulo started and spread not because of anarchist agitation but because of workers' ability to quickly recreate factory commissions based on these informal ties (Wolfe 1993, 17-18). The strike became generalized after police shot and killed a striking worker, Antônio Ineguez Martinez, on July 9 and a mass public funeral was held on July 11 (Wolfe 1993, 18-19). The all-male leadership of FOSP had virtually no role in this phase of the strike. Only once the general strike was well-established did the anarchists create the Comitê de Defesa Proletária to act as a bargaining agent for the strikers. The fact that the city and leading industrialists were willing to accept this committee as a bargaining agent, not grassroots support, was the basis for the anarchist presence in the 1917 strike (Wolfe 1991; 1993, 20-21). Within a week, the committee had settled the strike for a 20% wage increase and a pledge not to fire strikers and to allow unions to organize. Specific concerns of the women organizers, including sexual abuse by foremen, played no part in the final settlement (Wolfe 1993, 22). Not long after the strike was over, owners retaliated by firing many of the leaders of the factory
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commissions who had played a key role in spreading and sustaining the strikes (Wolfe 1993, 26). São Paulo's workers once again showed a capacity to take matters into their own hands during the July 1924 tenente uprising. With the rebels briefly in control of the city, "workers sacked food warehouses in Brás, Mooca, and other neighborhoods in riots carefully targeted against the holdings of industrialists … , stole and destroyed machinery in some factories, and burned down certain flour mills they blamed for the highest prices" (Wolfe 1993, 37). The rebels threatened to shoot looters on sight, but far more destructive was the retaking of the city during which aerial bombardment destroyed factories and killed several hundred workers. The uprising was subsequently used to justify creation of a state political police force, DOPS (the Departament da Orden Política Social), used primarily to close down unions and the labor press while sending a number of labor leaders to the remote Clevelândia penal colony (Wolfe 1993, 37-8). Despite this level of repression, workers once again showed their capacity to act collectively during the state crisis of 1930. After the revolt that carried Vargas to power had begun in Rio Grande do Sul, but before the military column reached São Paulo, workers took matters into their own hands, rioting in downtown São Paulo on October 24. The next day, the crowd marched on São Paulo's notorious Cambuci prison where a number of labor leaders were held and the DOPS torture sessions often took place, freeing all the prisoners and burning the building to the ground (Wolfe 1993, 50). The crowds that lined Vargas's way when he entered the city on October 29 were provisionally ready to take his campaign pledges in favor of a minimum wage, abolition of child labor, and the like at face value, but they were not prepared to wait forever. In
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July 1931, textile and metalworkers walked off the job en masse throughout São Paulo. Once again, women organizing through their factory commissions in the factories took the lead with a mass meeting calling for an eight-hour day, an end to child labor, and an end to sexual abuse in the workplace.45 By 1931, FOSP no longer sought to control the strike and in its coordinating role both included the gender-specific demands of women workers and dropped earlier demands, such as an end to night work for women, that would have increased gender discrimination (Wolfe 1993, 54-55). Vargas, who had only in March created the Ministry of Labor and its officially recognized state unions, refused to bargain either with the factory commissions or the anarchist unions. Instead, the federal government authorized the police to protect strike-breakers and break up the public meetings of strikers. In short order, the strikers conceded defeat and returned to the factories with no major gains (Wolfe 1993, 55-56). In breaking this strike, Vargas demonstrated the Ministry of Labor's ability to enforce its monopoly of worker representation, and took a giant step towards bringing independent unions to heel.46 Even this defeat was not the end of the story. Less than a year later, in May 1932, the textile workers walked out again. This time, acting through an officially recognized 45
John French (1992, 332-33) has criticized Joel Wolfe for lumping a variety of ad hoc factory-level organizing arrangements together as "factory commissions" and presenting them as though they represented a single phenomenon. He argues, in contrast, that "there is little to suggest that such 'commissions' or 'committees' were independent bodies with a long existence and an established place within factory life" (332). While French may be ceded the debating point, his critique is overdrawn. The crucial fact for Wolfe is not that these commissions were permanent institutions but they became a durable feature in the repertoire of contention available to São Paulo's workers, especially women workers. He is quite clear that this form was kept alive through informal networks, not permanent institutions. 46 Notably, the São Paulo metalworkers were among the most stubborn in keeping an independent union alive. The leaders of the textile workers' union, still all male and less closely tied to their membership than the metalworkers' leaders, affiliated with the Ministry of Labor after 1931 (Wolfe 1993, 57). 112
union, they managed to secure a degree of support from the Ministry of Labor and gain substantial concessions from an industry whose initial response to the strike was to hire strikebreakers and use the police to arrest strikers and ban public meetings. Two months later, when São Paulo rose up in revolt against Vargas, factories were converted to war production and kept running around the clock. In order to secure the loyalty of workers, industrialists acting through FIESP arranged a variety of heretofore unknown benefits for workers, including subsidized foodstuffs and free medical and dental care (Wolfe 1993, 59-62). Only one year after their defeat, São Paulo's workers were in the enviable position of being able to play both ends against the middle. But the victories were not to last. Beginning with the abortive communist uprising of 1935 and accelerating with the imposition of the Estado Novo in 1937, gains made by Brazil's unions came to a screeching halt. Intervention in unions to impose tractable leaders became the norm, and even undertaking a strike, let alone the prospect of victory, was at best a remote possibility. Even in this period of limited prospects, São Paulo's textile workers kept alive shop-floor factory commissions, independent of the officially recognized unions. Years later, in the "Strike of the 300,000", thirty-six years after the general strike of 1917, in an era when metalworking had eclipsed textiles as the industrial heart of São Paulo, the Central Strike Committee elected Mariana Galgaitez as a director, her primary function in the strike to serve as a liaison with the factory commissions in the textile mills. Repression was unprecedented, as the police and DOPS began to beat peaceful picketers in the street. The Minister of Labor, Segadas Viana, not only supported the repression but suggested that the police were going too easy on the strikers. Despite the opposition on all sides, the strikers managed to secure a 32% wage increase along with
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other concessions (Wolfe 1993, 180-83). Immediately following this partial victory, Getúlio Vargas delivered a fiery May Day address attacking "those who enrich themselves with easy profits" and declaring that, "A new world is born, a world in which we begin to realize that all people, because they work, have the right to share in the common wealth they produce" (Wolfe 1993, 183-84). Backing up his rhetoric, Vargas fired Segadas Viana and replaced him with João Goulart, who quickly conceded the largest increase in Brazil's minimum wages seen before or since. (Eleven years later, as president, Goulart was deposed by the military for his radicalism). In this turn to the left, Vargas created the polarization that was to play such a large role in bringing him down. The labor movements in Brazil and India, then, begin to appear eerily similar. Both grew up in the shadow of repressive states, both existed for decades without strong institutions to lean on, both developed a tradition of militance grounded in informal networks rather than durable institutions, and both managed to bootstrap institutions out of that militance. Fighting against long odds, losing more often than winning, never winning more than partial victories, both movements by sheer dogged survival managed to gouge out a recognized public sphere for contestation, and limited, inadequate, but real and durable gains for urban workers. Exit, it turns out, was never a viable strategy in either Brazil or India, but by refusing to play the game of loyalty, refusing to routinely produce the hegemonic appearances on which all forms of domination depend, and by striking during periods of crisis for the ruling alliances, urban workers in Brazil and India slowly secured the voice option.
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