Worldly visions of living outside empires, states, and
nations had, from earlier times, carried dark associations: with the quest for
illicit knowledge like alchemy; with cabalistic
brotherhoods; of universal tongues written in cipher; freemasonry of the
mind that was constantly stigmatized by charges of disloyalty to the
established order.1The ‘Cosmopolis’ was a commonplace of publication by the
underground printers of the Enlightenment, and ‘Cosmopolite’ a common pseudonym
for radical writers. It signified the clandestine world of the dispossessed,
belonging nowhere.2 In the late nineteenth century, the principal heirs to this
tradition were the anarchists. They were a central presence in Paris's émigré
politics, and London became their principal city of refuge. They were the first
to withdraw from the International after their leading thinker, the Russian
Mikhail Bakunin, broke with Marx and the International Workingmen’s Association
in 1872, in the face of what he saw as authoritarian tendencies. Anarchism’s
‘black internationals’ were, by the movement’s very nature, institutionally
formless. No Asians attended or were invited to their few congresses, the last
of which was in Amsterdam in 1907.3
But, denied full access to the West's
internationalism, Asian travelers created their own, to which anarchist ideas seemed to speak directly. Anarchism was mostly
encountered through a broad spectrum of thought, as a path rather than a
doctrine, and – for its followers – as the antithesis of creed or dogma. The
most read and translated theorist in Asia, Peter Kropotkin, defined anarchism
in 1881 as a collective of individual acts. It offered a spectrum of different
economic and social organization approaches, such as mutualism, federalism,
syndicalism, and communism. In common with the times, most anarchists tended to
identify with scientific advance and expand the worldly vision.4 The most
comprehensive anarchist account of the world was the nineteen-volume Nouvelle
Géographie Universelle: La Terre et les Hommes (1876–94) of Elisée Reclus. His
thought was distinctive in how it ‘provincialized’ Europe as humanity’s
‘smallest tribe’ and firmly set an anarchist vision of the future within a
global context.5 His writings also anticipated the form and scale of the new
urban spaces emerging in Asia. For Reclus, the city was the highest form of
communal life, a ‘collective personality’ formed by mutually supporting,
contrasting neighborhoods.6
Reclus’s writings profoundly impacted Chinese studying
in Paris, such as Li Shizeng, who translated some of them and adopted them as a
work-study foundation. The Chinese-language journal this group founded in 1907,
New Era (Xin Shiji), lasted three years and a hundred issues, generating
translations of anarchist thought that would circulate across Asia for many
years to come. Its banner-head carried an Esperanto subtitle, La Novaj
Tempoji.7 Leo Tolstoy’s spiritual anarchism also found followers among
pacifists and socialists in Japan and China during the Russo-Japanese War. In
the face of the futility and doubts raised by early confrontations with the
colonial power, anarchism spoke directly to the question of violence as a form
of political struggle. And these and other issues of theory – on the forms of a
future society, on attitudes to the ‘nation’ – were increasingly worked through
in struggles beyond Europe.8
During the French Revolution, François-Noël
Babeuf, who used masonic forms and
whose writings foreshadowed much later anarchist thought, had argued that
in the face of an oppressive, immovable state, ‘when a nation takes the path of
revolution it does so because the … masses realize that their situation is
intolerable, they feel impelled to change it, and they are drawn into motion
for that end’.9 By challenging the state’s monopoly of violence, ‘terror’ could
acquire meaning and purpose. After the violent suppression of the Paris Commune
of 1871 – in which not only anarchists fought – the argument gained currency
that terror could be discriminate, proportionate even when it was self-defense
in the face of police action. Such thinking underlaid a decade of anarchist
attentats in Europe and beyond.10 By a different route, the populist Narodnik
tradition in Russia that culminated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II
in March 1881 struck an emotional chord in India, Japan, and elsewhere. Others
defended the motive for the deed, if not the deed itself. But beyond Europe, in
the United States, the anarchist, and feminist theorist Emma Goldman, together
with Alexander Berkman – about attacks such as that on the Carnegie Steel
Corporation boss Henry Clay Frick in downtown Pittsburgh in July 1892 – argued
that capitalists must take responsibility for their actions. The question was,
whom and what was to be targeted? What was the threshold of guilt or
innocence?
The invention of dynamite, both as a weapon and as an
idea, supported the arguments of men such as Émile Henry, the infamous
perpetrator of a series of fatal bomb attacks in Paris in 1892–4, that the
police’s indiscriminate targeting of anarchists dictated an indiscriminate
response. But despite the secret circulation of manuals for bomb-making, the
construction of explosive devices was a specialized and hazardous affair. Most
assassinations were a coup de main, and many attempts failed. They were often
the work of solitary, troubled figures, dismissed as misanthropes. By the
1890s, despite the wave of violence that killed eleven people in France between
1892 and 1894, extreme nihilism had been largely disavowed in Europe. But
although the 1892–4 attacks were unconnected, the idea of a vast underlying
conspiracy distilled many of the anxieties of a global age and could not be
dispelled. The state response conflated in the popular mind the image of ‘the
terrorist’ and ‘the anarchist,’ who were not at all the same thing.11
What also traveled was the figure of the terrorist as
a modern demon, both as a theoretical ideal and as a literary type. The
agitator's aesthetic was usually that of a male, monkish ascetic, ‘everything
in him,’ as a much-traveled primer by Mikhail Bakunin put it, ‘absorbed in a
sole exclusive interest – in one thought – the revolution.’ For initiates, this
forged a sense of solidarity and heroic martyrdom. In opponents' eyes, the
anarchist was more of an individualist, an egoist, often an aristocratic type,
or a student alienated and alone. Representations shaped reality: ‘the
propaganda of the deed’ demanded that an act be staged and publicized for
maximum notoriety. Its effect lay as much in the anticipation as in the bomb or
the bullet itself: the dread that they could puncture time and order at any
moment and without forewarning. Fictional representations of the deed, such as
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) and, even
earlier, José Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, viewed it both from without and from
within the mind of the perpetrator. These, together with a host of memoirs,
generated a curious interplay of literary form and actuality.12 In Paris,
‘crime factories’ churned out sensational fiction; in 1908, the journal Le
Parisien gave over 12 percent of its column space to it. This magnified the
idea of ‘investigation’ in modern society, where lives were enacted in front of
reporters, forensic scientists, policemen, and private detectives.13 The theme
was soon taken up in the Romans-feuilletons read in Japan and China, and
elsewhere.
In the anarchist panics of the 1880s and early 1890s,
secret police practices became globalized. After the assassination of Tsar
Alexander II in 1881, the Okhrana extended its informers' reach and even
operated freely out of its own building in Paris. New forms of censorship,
anti-socialist laws, and criminal conspiracy prosecution all widened state
power repertoires. An ‘International Conference of Rome for the Social Defence
against Anarchists’ in December 1898 further criminalized anarchism and
entrenched the argument that it had ‘no relation to politics.’ It advocated new
measures, such as extradition across borders for regicides. In 1903, in the
wake of the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, anarchists
became the first category of person to be prohibited from entry to the United
States on the grounds of political belief. A St Petersburg ‘Secret Protocol for
the International War on Anarchism’ in March 1904 helped fashion a more
standardized and professionalized police culture across the globe. As one
Italian anarchist, Pietro Vasai observed: ‘The police are the same in all parts
of the world’; they had become a highly mobile, specialized global labor force,
identified with imperial migrants such as Sikh constables and watchmen.14
Following the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between Britain and France, their police
forces shared information on Indian and other activists across Europe, which
was soon extended to colonial territories.15 From the landlords and
brothel-keepers, pimps, and prostitutes who peopled the underside of the
migrant world, they recruited an undercover army of turncoats, informers, and
agent provocateurs. This was the same terrain that anarchists worked
themselves.16 The policing of ports and railheads was often in private hands.
Security companies, such as Pinkertons, with their detectives and ‘procurers,’
worked internationally in an extra-legal way to break strikes and seize
fugitives. They enforced borders before the states themselves did and fed
public paranoia about the anarchist peril. In the words of Allan Pinkerton
himself: ‘It was everywhere, it was nowhere.’17
Anarchism was the quintessential ideology of exile: a
state of being – displacement outside a country – which embodied anarchist
belief's anti-nationalism.18 The aftermath of the Paris Commune sent a
generation of sympathizers into exile and imprisonment worldwide. Between 1864
and 1897, the French authorities despatched some 4,500 political prisoners –
only twenty women – to New Caledonia. Many were communards of 1871, spared the
firing squads to live alongside colonial rebels, Arabs and Berbers, and
Vietnamese laborers. Many died from what was diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’: a void
of isolation and unrelieved depression.19 More than 9 percent of Italians lived
outside Italy; among Italian anarchist editors, 20 percent had the experience
of more than one country – and 40 percent of all Italian anarchist publications
were produced abroad. The mystique of many anarchists was enhanced by extended
exiles far from home. Enrico Malatesta – one of the best-known European exiles
– spent time in Egypt, Argentina and Uruguay, Tunisia, the United States, and
England.20
The slogan ‘Nostra Patria e il mondo intero’ – ‘Our
homeland is the whole world’ – was a lived experience. Its citizenship, as it
were, came not through allegiance to any formal organization, but from personal
networks: from the circulation of letters, pamphlets and newspapers; from the
translation of small pieces aimed at initiates as much as the masses; from
encounters with people passing through on propaganda tours; and from songs and
theatre.21 2These ties could prove as strong as the more visible ones of kin
and kind, and resilient to the new forms of policing.22 In this way, radical
ideas oscillated worldwide, endlessly syndicated and taken up, reshaped by
local circumstances, and exported again. Hence, it was impossible to say who
had thought of what first. It was a Pentecost rather than a movement.23 At the
very moment that anarchist ideas began to capture radicals' imagination in
Europe, they were also at large in Asia. They were present with the first wave
of Russian exiles to Japan, beginning with Mikhail Bakunin himself, who spent a
month in Japan on his escape from internal exile in Siberia in 1861. Some were
adept in the science of dynamite.24 In 1874, another Russian internationalist,
Narodnik, Lev Mechnikov, appeared in Japan. He arrived from the United States,
competent in Japanese and with excellent introductions to the country’s
intellectuals from those he had met in Europe. Over the next two years, while
teaching at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, he saw in the Meiji
revolution’s search for knowledge, everyday collaboration, and solidarity. It
was a premonition of the general human evolution towards a cooperative
civilization. He understood that Japanese use of European ideas was selective
and a manifestation of a deeper communitarian ethic, rather than, as most other
Europeans saw it, part of an evolutionary flow of reason and progress from the
west to the east. On Mechnikov’s return to Europe, his writings had a profound
impact on Reclus's likes – with whom he worked closely on the Nouvelle
Géographie Universelle – Georgi Plekhanov and Kropotkin. This was especially
true of Kropotkin’s collection of essays Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
(1902), which, by a circumnavigation from east to west to east again, was
reintroduced to Japan by the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and from the
Japanese translated into Chinese. It was as if Kropotkin merely explained and
clarified ideals they already cherished to many Japanese readers as their
own.25
Kropotkin's principal Japanese translator was Kotoku
Shusui, author of Teikokushugi: Nijuseiki no kaibutsu (1901), or Imperialism:
The Monster of the Twentieth Century and co-founder in 1896 of the Society of
the Study of Socialism. He had read Kropotkin and corresponded with him on a
visit to the United States in 1905, following a prison sentence for his
opposition to the Russo-Japanese War. Kotoku argued that both the war and the
terms of the concluding peace treaty would lead to further imperial
competition, instability, and violence, and that ‘true progress’ lay in
extending anarchist forms of mutuality and cooperation into the international
sphere. He was an early enthusiast for Esperanto, and, during the relatively
liberal period of Japanese politics in 1906, a founder of the Japanese
Socialist Party. In the midst of the party’s factionalism, anarchism's
collaborative ideal ideas a powerful common ground.26 They were present too at
the Asian Solidarity Association meeting in 1907 when Kotoku chided the Asian
movements for failing to ‘go beyond demands for national independence.’ He
urged the patriots gathered in Tokyo to go further in making anarchism the
foundation of the new Asia: ‘if the different revolutionary parties of Asia
start to look beyond differences of race or nation they will form a grand
confederation under the banner of socialism and one-worldism. East Asia of the
twentieth century will be the land of revolution.’27
It was almost a new dawn. Kotoku’s 1901 critique of
‘imperialism’ had preceded and gone further than J. A. Hobson, Lenin, and
others in the west. Within a year, it had been translated into Chinese and 1906
into Korean. The Chinese organizers of the Asian Solidarity Association had
embraced anarchist ideas. Even Phan Boi Chau, representing Vietnam, was part of
the anarchist grouping at the meeting. He shared the euphoric mood of unity,
but it is unclear how he was of delegates’ diverse ideological positions. By no
means all of them identified as anarchists or embraced the propaganda of the
deed.28
Within three years, dark repression struck. In June
1910, a Japanese worker was arrested and accused of making bombs. The police
claimed to have uncovered an extensive assassination plot against Emperor
Meiji, and there was a general round-up of alleged socialists suspected of high
treason. Among those snared was Kotoku, who worked on his translation of
Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (1892) at a hot-spring resort. In the trials
that followed in early 1911, twenty-six conspirators were condemned to be
hanged. Although twelve of the guilty were reprieved by the emperor at the last
moment, another twelve were executed within three days of their sentencing.
Kotoku and his lover, the journalist and feminist Kanno Sugako, were the final
two to be hanged.29
Known as the High Treason Incident (大逆事件, Taigyaku Jiken), also known as the Kōtoku
Incident (幸徳事件, Kōtoku Jiken), provoked an unprecedented press
blackout with the trials held in camera. Nevertheless, in the way it polarized
opinion, it became the ‘Dreyfus Affair of Japan.’ Not all of those indicted
were intellectuals, and not all the intellectuals – including Kotoku – were
active in bomb-making or even endorsed violence. For many, it seemed that the
only charge proven against Kotoku was that of his anarchist beliefs.30 As the
poet Ishikawa Takuboku wrote in June 1911:
Though I used to feel quite remote from
The sad mind of the terrorists –
Some days recently, I feel it coming close.31
The Japanese authorities reaffirmed the emperor's
authority as the center of the nation, and the Special Higher Police deepened
its surveillance of his subjects' thoughts. Many socialists and anarchists
withdrew from public life; some committed suicide, others fled abroad, such as
the close associate of Kotoku, Sen Katayama, who moved to the United States and
was soon prominent in activist circles there. By 1910 most Chinese anarchists
in Japan had moved on to Paris to join the schools and newspapers founded for
the work-study group there. The trial and executions were reported in anarchist
journals in London, Paris, and the Americas as part of a worldwide attack on
the anarchist idea.32
Kanno Sugako’s involvement in the plot was more direct
than Kotoku’s own and went beyond acting as a courier or helpmate. She was a
thinker in her own right, and her troubled life moved many across Asia, her
‘free love’ with Kotoku, and her cruel execution. In the words of a ‘farewell
missive’ from her friend, Koizumi Sakutara, Kanno copied as one of the final
entries into her prison journal: ‘How pitiful. This enlightened age derails the
talented woman.’33 The feminist circles occupied by women such as Kanno were a
site for new experiments in thinking that did not see the women’s movements in
Europe, America, or even Japan as the yardstick for female emancipation, unlike
many male reformers. Moving amid them, the Chinese feminist thinker He-Yin Zen
drew on radical anarchist critiques of the state to envisage fundamentally new
forms of social life, beginning with a rejection of existing forms of family
and property. In her journal Tianji Bao (Natural Justice), published in Tokyo
between 1907 and 1908, excerpts from The Communist Manifesto reached a Chinese
readership for the first time – specifically, the burgeoning audience for new
periodicals and translations among women.34
This world might be formless and fluid, but it had its
recurring and intersecting circulations and its own rhythm. In his early
writings, Karl Marx had a premonition of this, of the moment world history came
into being: when capitalism could no longer satisfy its needs within one
country, but ‘chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the world’: From
this, it follows that this transformation of history into world history is not
indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the ‘self-consciousness,’ the world
spirit, or of any other metaphysical specter, but a quite material, empirically
verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he
comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself.35 In this sense, these mobile
Asians abroad were among the first people to experience world history. They
experienced it not as an idea but by coming and going, as workers and also as
colonial subjects, in a way that brought capitalism and imperialism closer
together in their worldview. Liminal spaces – locations of sudden displacement
and new solidarities little understood by metropolitan elites, such as port
city slums and the mining and plantation frontiers of the tropical colonies –
became the foci of world-historical change. In this context, as a doctrine of
self-help and self-governance, anarchism, as a vision of internationalism and a
world less patriarchal, began to insinuate itself into the village abroad,
carried by the new workers of the global economy of movements, such as seamen
and dockhands.36 Anarchism was well adapted to their mixed labor forces of the
waged, the unwaged, and the casual, which defied the kinds of conventional
‘class’ analysis that were the staple of Marxist inquiry in Europe.37 These
broad coalitions had already led boycotts in Asia and would do so again in new
‘general’ labor unions.
Anarchists were also more willing than other radicals
to give countenance to the underworld of labor. As an early anarchist newspaper
in Buenos Aires celebrated it in 1890: ‘We are the vagrants, the malefactors,
the rabble, the scum of society, the sublimate corrosive of the present social
order.’ This itself was an echo of protest forms in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, during the first global age of empire, when motley crews,
slaves, drifters, and pirates had combined in a world of resistance across
shorelines and oceans. It was seen at the time by those in authority as a
‘many-headed hydra’ and left behind a freewheeling vision of liberty and folk
memory of places outside empires and their authority.38
Marx and Bakunin shared an image of how the radical
spirit survived under the weight of capitalist oppression: the underground. Its
source was Hamlet’s quip to his father’s ghost: ‘Well said, old mole. Canst
work the ground so fast? / A worthy pioneer!’ G. W. F. Hegel took this as a
metaphor for the spirit of the philosophy of history, which ‘often seems to
have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly
working ever forward … until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust
of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion so that the earth crumbles
away’.39 And so the underground idea was taken up in this new age of empire by
the kinds of itinerant leadership that were emerging from the waterfronts and
railheads of the empire, harrying, disappearing, burrowing, and then
resurfacing somewhere else, far away. The imperial underground now confronted
western power in Asia with the logic of its own globalism: that it too might
crumble away.
'A Passage to India'
At the center of the western condominium over Asia was
the British Raj in India. It was a world system in its own right, centered not
on London but its seat of power in Calcutta.
It formed the midpoint of an arc encompassing the Indian Ocean and beyond,
eastwards to Singapore and Hong Kong, down towards the southern Dominions,
westwards from Bombay into the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and down the coast
of Africa. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 threaded new ‘red routes,’
in the form of garrisons, post offices and telegraph relay stations, through
the eastern Mediterranean and, via Malta and Gibraltar, into the home waters of
the British Isles. Singapore took on a new strategic significance as the
Clapham Junction of the East. This great arc helped defend the Raj approaches,
and the Raj supplied the circulations of people that gave it unity. Punjabi
constables and guards guarded western interests in Southeast Asia and the
foreign concessions in China. Sindhi merchants set up shop in Malta, Bukhara,
Kobe, and Panama, and Bengali or Malabari clerks staffed colonial secretariats,
land offices, and railway stations from Mombasa to Malaya. Plantation laborers
recruited in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras hewed out human cultivation and
settlement frontiers across three oceans. The 200,000 or so men in Raj's arms
garrisoned the far-flung outposts that allowed Great Britain to imagine herself
a terrestrial instead of the maritime power of consequence. And it was the
vastness of this domain that allowed British statesmen to think in classical
‘imperial’ terms. The only occasion when British sovereigns assumed an imperial
style was in their guise as Kaiser-i-Hind – a title by which the British
claimed the inheritance of the Mughal empire, bestowed on Queen Victoria, in
her absence, at the imperial Durbar, or grand levée, held in Delhi in
1877.40 Britain’s unchallenged paramountcy in Asia stabilized the entire
imperial order, for a time.
In the new century, the Raj was beset by political and
strategic challenges and by self-doubt. In 1904 the British geographer Halford
Mackinder announced the end of ‘the Columbian epoch.’41 Western maritime
conquest had reached its furthest extent; all that remained was securing its
internal frontiers in contested border regions. In a more imaginative sense,
the limits of the ‘human empire’ had been reached, and with this came a gnawing
sense of vulnerability and decay.42 The arrival of competitors such as
Germany and Japan brought new conundrums to the so-called ‘Great Game,’ the
clandestine scheming for hegemony in Central Asia. Never mere play, this was
prosecuted with lethal seriousness by a growing phalanx of specialist soldiers
and spies, cartographers, and cryptographers.43 Yet, despite this, the number
of Britons governing India was famously small, around 1,000 in the Indian Civil
Service, with perhaps 1,000 more in the police. Over two-fifths of the Raj
territory, comprising some 565 princely states, was ruled by proxy. The ‘steel
frame’ of the Raj was very uneven. It was government by smoke and mirrors.
After the attrition of decades of warfare across the empire's arc, there was a
growing risk that the underlying trickery might be exposed in Egypt, Sudan,
Burma, and on the Northwest Frontier. In the highest circles of the Raj, it was
possible to discern doubt and pessimism. Britain, the viceroy, Lord Lytton,
feared in 1878, was ‘losing the empire's instinct and tact.’ Others foresaw the
Raj being swamped by its own collaborators, the rising elites within Indian
society, or, in the Darwinian language of the day, being fatally enfeebled by
its own racial degeneration.44 In truth, the Raj had never emerged from the
shadow of the Indian Mutiny-Rebellion of 1857. The British lived in eternal
fear of sedition among Raj’s Indian troops, especially those posted overseas or
fomented by ‘mad mullahs’ and mahdis: the Muslim outlaws – Sufis, scribes, and
go-betweens – who moved between the various imperial constellations in Asia and
the Middle East. Such men grafted a rival Muslim connectedness to consuls'
western networks, shipping lanes, and law, which the British never fully
understood.45 These mobile subjects mastered empire as a system before the
British ever did.
Next was up to Lord Charles Hardinge, who served as
India's new viceroy, to make it public. In 1912, Viceroy Hardinge entered Old
Delhi atop the biggest elephant he had ever seen. Lord Hardinge mounted the
giant beast with his wife, Winifred, at his side and two attendants to
accompany them. The procession moved off, led by the Royal Artillery and the
Enniskillen Dragoons; then came Lord Hardinge’s own bodyguard and staff; and,
immediately preceding the viceroy, the Imperial Cadet Corps on black chargers,
resplendent in snow-leopard skins. To Hardinge’s rear, his council flowed
behind him on fifty carefully picked elephants. Then, somewhat diminished by
having to ride on horseback this time, but still resplendent in their royal
accouterments, came the rulers of Punjab: the Princes of Patiala, Jind, Nabha,
Kapurthala, Maler Kotla, Faridkot, and others. The legendary frontier cavalry
of the 3rd Skinner’s Horse brought up the rear.
At 11.45 a.m., the viceroy passed the building of the
Punjab National Bank; it was some 300 yards down Chandni Chowk, at a point
halfway between the gothic Clock Tower and the Fountain. The elephant halted,
and there was a sudden silence. The bomb deafened the viceroy and his wife
before the sound of it could reach them. Hardinge saw his pith helmet in the
road. He turned first to his wife, saw that she was unscathed, and then to the
back of the howdah, where he noticed some yellow powdery residue. The viceroy
turned again to his wife and said: ‘I am afraid that was a bomb.’ ‘Are you sure
you are not hurt?’ ‘I am not sure. I have had a great shock, but I think I can
go on.’ He felt as if someone had struck him in the back and poured boiling
water over him. The Viceroy escaped with flesh wounds, but the servant behind
him holding his parasol was killed. And his wife never fully recovered from the
shock, dying soon afterward.46
Henceforth called the Delhi Conspiracy case or
Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy. It was later shown that Rash Behari Bose threw the
bomb. He successfully evaded capture for nearly three years, becoming involved
in the Ghadar conspiracy before it was uncovered. Bose fled to Japan in 1915,
under the alias of Priyanath Tagore, a relative of Rabindranath Tagore. There,
Bose found shelter with various Pan-Asian groups. Though more expensive than
the usual "British-style" curry, it became quite popular, with Rash
Bihari becoming known as "Bose of Nakamuraya.47
1. Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World:
The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe, Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
2. Tom Genrich, Authentic Fictions: Cosmopolitan
Writing of the Troisième République, 1908–1940, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2004, pp.
21–2.
3. Constance Bantman, ‘Internationalism without an
International? Cross-Channel Anarchist
Networks, 1880–1914’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 84/4 (2006), pp.
961–81.
4. For a general introduction to (mostly) western
anarchism, see Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of
Anarchism, Oakland, CA, PM Press, 2010; Carl Levy, ‘Anarchism, Internationalism
and Nationalism in Europe, 1860–1939’, Australian Journal of Politics and
History, 50/3 (2004), pp. 330–42.
5. Federico Ferretti, ‘“They Have the Right to Throw
Us Out”: Élisée Reclus’ New Universal Geography,’ Antipode, 45/5 (2013), pp.
1337–55. As Ferretti notes, others have compared the writing of Dipesh
Chakrabarty over a century later: see esp. Chakrabarty’s Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press, 2000.
6. John P. Clark and Camille Martin (eds), Anarchy,
Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus, Lanham, MD,
Lexington Books, 2004, pp. 72–4.
7. Arif Dirlik, ‘Vision and Revolution: Anarchism in
Chinese Revolutionary Thought on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution’, Modern China,
12/2 (1986), pp.123–65, at pp. 126–7.
8. For this point and a challenge to Eurocentrism in
histories of anarchism, see Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds),
Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940:
The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution,
Leiden, Brill, 2010, esp. the editors’ introduction. For a similar review, see
also Carl Levy, ‘Social Histories of Anarchism’, Journal for the Study of
Radicalism, 4/2 (2010), pp. 1–44.
9. David E. Apter, ‘Notes on the Underground: Left
Violence and the National State,’ Daedalus, 108/4 (1979), pp. 155–72, a
quotation from Babeuf at p. 159.
10. Martin A. Miller, ‘The Intellectual Origins of
Modern Terrorism in Europe,’ in Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in Context,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 27–62.
11. For a useful introduction, see Olivier
Hubac-Occhipinti, ‘Anarchist Terrorists of the Nineteenth Century’, in Gérard
Chaliand and Arnaud Blin (eds), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al
Qaeda, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 113–31.
12. Bill Melman, ‘The Terrorist in Fiction’, Journal
of Contemporary History, 15/3 (1980), pp. 559–76.
13. Dominique Kalifa, ‘Criminal Investigators at the
Fin-de-Siècle’, Yale French Studies, 108 (2005), pp. 36–47.
14. Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist
Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2013; Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of
International Police Cooperation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002; Clive
Emsley, ‘The Policeman as Worker: A Comparative Survey, c.1800–1940’,
International Review of Social History, 45/1 (2000), pp. 89–110. For Vasai see
Lucia Carminati, ‘Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in
Nineteenth-Century Egypt and the Mediterranean’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, 59/1 (2017), pp. 127–53, at p. 136.
15. Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational
Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in
Europe, 1905–1945, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 9–12.
16. See, for example, Charles van Onselen, ‘Jewish
Police Informers in the Atlantic World, 1880–1914’, Historical Journal, 50/1
(2007), pp. 119–44.
17. Martin A. Miller, The Foundations of Modern
Terrorism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 126. See also Katherine
Unterman, ‘Boodle over the Border: Embezzlement and the Crisis of International
Mobility, 1880–1890’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 11/2
(2012), pp. 151–89.
18. Important recent reassessments are: Maia Ramnath,
Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation
Struggle, Oakland, CA, AK Press, 2012; Constance Bantman and Bert Altena (eds),
Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and
Syndicalist Studies, New York, Routledge, 2015.
19. Alice Bullard, ‘Self-Representation in the Arms of
Defeat: Fatal Nostalgia and Surviving Comrades in French New Caledonia,
1871–1880’, Cultural Anthropology, 12/2 (1997), pp. 179–212.
20. Davide Turcato, ‘Italian Anarchism as a
Transnational Movement, 1885–1915’, International Review of Social History,
52/3 (2007), pp. 407–44.
21. Ibid.
22. I am thinking here of Mark S. Granovetter, ‘The
Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78/6 (1973), pp.
1360–80. For an elaboration of this see Andrew Hoyt, ‘Active Centers, Creative
Elements, and Bridging Nodes: Applying the Vocabulary of Network Theory to
Radical History’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 9/1 (2015), pp.
37–59.
23. Bruce Nelson used this image of Pentecost to
describe the unionization of maritime labor in the 1930s: see his Workers on
the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s, Urbana,
University of Illinois Press, 1988, p. 2.
24. Yin Cao, ‘Bombs in Beijing and Delhi’, pp.
586–7.
25. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and
Japanese–Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 2013, esp. pp. 29–73 and ch. 3; John Crump, The Origins of
Socialist Thought in Japan, London, Routledge, 2010.
26. George M. Beckmann and Genji Okubo, The Japanese
Communist Party, 1922–1945, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1969, pp.
1–7; Thomas A. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taishō Japan: The
Creativity of the Ego, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982.
27. Quoted in Robert Thomas Tierney, Monster of the
Twentieth Century: Kotoku Shusui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015, pp. 119–21.
28. See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of
the Vietnamese Revolution, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp.
58–62; and, for a more cautious view, see Daniel Hémery’s review of Tai’s
study, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24/2 (1993), pp. 461–3.
29. Ira L. Plotkin, Anarchism in Japan: A Study of the
Great Treason Affair, 1910–11, Lewiston, ME, Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.
30. For the Dreyfus analogy see Peter F. Kornicki,
‘General Introduction’, in Kornicki (ed.), Meiji Japan, vol. I: The Emergence
of the Meiji State, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. xiii–xxxiii, at p. xxviii. For
the trial itself see Plotkin, Anarchism in Japan.
31. Yukinori Iwaki, ‘Ishikawa Takuboku and the Early
Russian Revolutionary Movement’, Comparative Literature Studies, 22/1 (1985),
pp. 34–42, at p. 39.
32. Tanaka Mikaru, ‘The Reaction of Jewish Anarchists
to the High Treason Incident’, in Masako Gavin and Ben Middleton (eds), Japan
and the High Treason Incident, London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 80–88.
33. For this remarkable prison testament see Mikiso
Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 51–74, quotation at p.
74.
34. Liu, Karl and Ko (eds), The Birth of Chinese
Feminism, pp. 1–48; Rebecca Karl, ‘Feminism in Modern China’, Journal of Modern
Chinese History, 6/2 (2012), pp. 235–55.
35. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German
Ideology Part One, ed. C. J. Arthur, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970, p.
58. The preceding quotation is from Gareth Stedman Jones (ed.), The Communist
Manifesto, London, Penguin, 2002, p. 223.
36. Levy, ‘Social Histories of Anarchism’, esp. pp.
15–16.
37. A subject central to recent debates on ‘global
labor history’: see Marcel van der Linden, ‘The Promise and Challenges of
Global Labor History’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 82
(2012), pp. 57–76, at pp. 63–4, and the responses to this article in the same
issue.
38. For these themes see Geoffroy de Laforcade,
‘Federative Futures: Waterways, Resistance Societies and the Subversion of
Nationalism in the Early 20th-Century Anarchism of the Río de la Plata Region’,
Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 22/2 (2011), pp.
71–96; Jose C. Moya, ‘The Positive Side of Stereotypes: Jewish Anarchists in
Early-Twentieth-Century Buenos Aires’, Jewish History, 18/1 (2004), pp. 19–48;
and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s inspiring The Many-Headed Hydra:
Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary
Atlantic, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2000.
39. Jesse Cohn, Underground Passages: Anarchist
Resistance Culture 1848–2011, Oakland, CA, AK Press, 2015, p. 4; Peter
Stallybrass, ‘“Well Grubbed, Old Mole”: Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un) Fixing of
Representation’, Cultural Studies, 12/1 (1998), pp. 3–14. 3.
40. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean
in the Age of Global Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2006;
Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena,
1860–1920, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007.
41. H. J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of
History’, The Geographical Journal, XXIII/4 (1904), pp. 421–44, at p.
421.
42. Rosalind Williams, The Triumph of Human Empire:
Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World, Chicago, IL, University of
Chicago Press, 2013.
43. James L. Hevia, The Imperial Security State:
British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2012, esp. pp. 11–14.
44. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century,
1815–1914, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan, 1993, p. 190. See also Jon Wilson, India
Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London, Simon & Schuster,
2016.
45. Seema Alavi, ‘“Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed
Fanatics”: Indian Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Trans-Asiatic Imperial
Rivalries’, Modern Asian Studies, 45/6 (2011), pp. 1337–82, quotation at p.
1342.
46. Charles Hardinge Hardinge of Penshurst, My Indian
years, 1910-1916;: The reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, 1948, pp.
79–81, and Lady Hardinge’s account, as reported in the New York Times, 9
February 1913
47. On this subject see Takeshi Nakajima, Bose of
Nakamuraya: An Indian Revolutionary in Japan, 2009.
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