Anatomy of a Book Cancellation

It was the second week of December 2017, and my wife and I were at Heathrow airport, waiting to board a flight to Germany. Just before setting off for the departure gate, I couldn’t resist checking my email just one last time. My attention concentrated when I saw a message in my inbox from the University of Oxford’s public-affairs office. I clicked on it. What I found was notification that my “Ethics and Empire” project had become the target of an online denunciation by a group of students, followed by reassurance from the university that it had risen to defend my right to run such a thing.

“For more than a fortnight, my name was in the media every day.”

So began a public row that raged for the best part of a month. Four days after I flew, the eminent imperial historian who had conceived the project with me, John Darwin, abruptly resigned, pleading “personal reasons.” Within a week of the first online denunciation, two further open letters appeared, this time issued by academics. The first bore the names of 58 colleagues at Oxford. The second, signed by about 200 academics from around the world, was addressed not to me, but directly to my university, calling for it to withdraw its support. For more than a fortnight, my name was in the media every day.

What had I done to deserve all this unexpected attention? Three things. In late 2015 and early 2016, I had offered a partial defense of the late-19th-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford. Then, in late November 2017, I published a column in The Times of London, in which I referred approvingly to Bruce Gilley’s controversial article “The Case for Colonialism,” and argued that we Britons have reason to feel pride as well as shame about our imperial past. Note: pride, as well as shame. And a few days later, third, I finally got around to publishing an online account of the “Ethics and Empire” project, whose first conference had in fact been held the previous July. Contrary to what the critics seemed to think, this project isn’t designed to defend the British Empire, or even empire in general. Rather, it aims to study evaluations of empire from ancient China to the modern period, to understand and reflect on the ethical terms in which empires have been viewed historically.

A classic instance of such an evaluation is Saint Augustine’s City of God, the early-fifth-century apologia for  Christianity, which involves a generally critical reading of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, “Ethics and Empire,” aware that the imperial form of political organization was common across the world and throughout history until 1945, doesn’t assume that empire is always and everywhere wicked, and does assume that the history of empires should inform—positively, as well as negatively—the foreign policy of Western states today.

That was quite enough to rouse the academic forces of repression. Responding to the online description of “Ethics and Empire,” Priyamvada Gopal—then a reader in postcolonial studies at the University of Cambridge, now promoted to professor—tweeted, “OMG. This is serious shit…. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN” (Dec. 13, 2017, 8:45 a.m.). A few minutes later, she issued a call to arms to “Oxford postcolonial academics” (8:49 a.m.). Among those who responded were Max Harris, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who tweeted, “Totally agree—more needs to be done” (5:08 p.m.), and “working on a response” (Dec. 14, 2017, 2:30 a.m.); and Jon Wilson, senior lecturer in history at King’s College London, who wrote, “We need a big well-argued letter signed by everyone who writes on empire” (Dec. 16, 2017, 12:39 a.m.), and, “I’ll be in touch with James [McDougall]” (2:14 a.m.). When the Oxford Open Letter appeared on Dec. 19, Max Harris and Jon Wilson were among its signatories, and James McDougall, professor of history at Oxford, was listed as its senior co-author. When the worldwide one followed on Dec. 21, Priyamvada Gopal’s name came first, then Jon Wilson’s.

Shortly afterward, Oxford’s Centre for Global History took its cue, almost verbatim, from the Oxford letter and announced on its website that it  “is not involved” in the “Ethics and Empire” project headed by me and “other scholars at Oxford”—coyly declining to name John Darwin, who, until very recently, had been the Centre’s own director. That this was a statement of boycotting intent, not of mere fact, was evidenced by the Centre’s obliquely critical claim “to move beyond the problematic balance sheet of empires’ advantages and disadvantages” and to “shun imperial nostalgia.” When this notice was first posted, one of the Centre’s own members reported to me that no one had consulted him about it.

The effect of all this was unnerving and damaging. Soon after John Darwin had jumped ship, the only other historian involved in “Ethics and Empire” followed suit. One of my oldest friends urged me to abandon the project, saying that it was too “toxic.” When I showed reluctance, he severed his public association with me by resigning from the advisory council of the research center I directed. Fearing that no historians would want to collaborate, I was forced to suspend plans for the project’s second conference in 2018, hoping that the damage might prove reparable once the dust had settled.

Happily, I was able to repair it. Four fresh historians—including one dissenter from the Centre for Global History—stepped up, three of them, as it happens, wearing slightly darker-than-pink skins. And since 2019, the three annual conferences have attracted more than 40 historians from Oxbridge and elsewhere in Britain, and from California to the Netherlands. “Ethics and Empire” will complete its work in the summer of 2023. So, that story has a happy ending: The attempted cancellation failed, albeit not for want of concerted trying.

A subsequent attempt did succeed, however—at least for a while.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/LA06tDa