The Irresistible Rise of Scottish Independence? A Brief History of Scotland’s Constitutional Debate

Ben Jackson

While it is obvious that Scotland’s political trajectory has significantly departed from England’s, the explanation for this divergence is less straightforward. Social scientists have demonstrated that Scotland’s economy, social structure, and even underlying values are not in fact that different from England’s. To understand why Scottish electoral behaviour and public debate has followed a distinctive path, it is instead necessary to turn to the realms of politics and culture, where the same underlying socio-economic shifts that have transformed England’s political landscape over the last fifty years have been filtered in a different direction in Scotland.

As the leading sociologist of modern Scotland, David McCrone, has put this point, a distinctive Scottish ‘frame of reference’ became more prominent in Scottish public life from around the 1970s onwards. The rise of this framing was produced by, among other things, the paradox that the mid-twentieth century rise of a centralised UK state committed to promoting economic welfare also highlighted Scotland’s special status as a nation whose economy was managed quasi-autonomously by the Scottish Office, the arm of the state that had been established to govern Scotland in 1885. McCrone argues that the expansion of the Scottish mass media, notably the introduction of separate Scottish television news bulletins, popularised an understanding of Scotland both as a distinct economy and as a distinct polity gripped by its own particular political debates about how to address economic challenges (1).

The rise of this Scottish framing was deepened in the 1980s as deindustrialisation accelerated. A clear Scottish political identity emerged that focused on national autonomy and presented this objective as expressing left-wing opposition to the dominant Conservative government in London. Until the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, this leftist politics of national identity did not necessarily equate to support for the complete dissolution of the Anglo-Scottish Union. But, as I argue in my book, The Case for Scottish Independence, it is clear in retrospect that Scottish political discourse, as it developed across the 1980s and 1990s, had the effect of priming a large section of the Scottish electorate to support independence if faced with a choice between creating a new Scottish state and a Conservative government in London (2).

As the results of the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections show, Scotland is now a divided nation, with roughly half of its citizens supporting full independence and the other half in favour of the constitutional status quo of devolution. How did the rise of McCrone’s ‘Scottish frame of reference’ produce such a dramatic constitutional debate? (3)

the hegemonic view of the Union as a beneficial contractual arrangement was not placed under serious pressure until the late twentieth century

The durability of the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union derived in part from its legitimation within Scotland as a voluntary contract between sovereign states, a bargain that was said to have preserved for Scotland its distinctive national religious, legal and educational institutions in return for merging its parliament with that of England and Wales (and later Ireland). Although Scottish culture did feature a consistent wistful romantic criticism of the Union as a bargain orchestrated by England using economic and diplomatic coercion, the hegemonic view of the Union as a beneficial contractual arrangement was not placed under serious pressure until the late twentieth century.

Economically, Scotland participated fully in the UK’s development into the leading industrial and imperial power in the world in the nineteenth century. At a political level, Scotland was integrated into the British parliamentary system. While culturally Scotland remained a distinct nation, as Britain democratised during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries each of the two major party systems that evolved (Conservative and Liberal; Conservative and Labour) bridged national distinctions between England, Scotland and Wales (the case of Ireland, of course, was very different). Within these integrative political and economic structures, space was also available for significant amounts of Scottish autonomy, notably (as we have seen) with the creation of the Scottish Office, which pioneered a form of administrative devolution long before its parliamentary counterpart.

More generally, Scottish identity in this period remained nested within a wider British imperial consciousness that transcended the islands of Britain and Ireland and thought of Britain not as a conventional nation-state but as an empire that linked the ‘mother nations’ of the UK to colonies around the world. As David Edgerton has argued, there is a sense in which Britain as a modern nation was a mid-twentieth century artefact, produced by the retreat from empire and global trade to the more autarchic, industrially-focused UK state of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s (4).

In these decades, a new form of British identity began to displace earlier connections forged around a shared Protestantism or imperialism as the main bulwark of the British union-state, namely an image of the UK as a social democratic state committed to economic planning and social welfare. The Scottish National Party (SNP), founded in 1934, was only a fringe presence in popular politics at this time, but styled itself as a libertarian defender of Scottish national interests against the rise of the large impersonal bureaucracies that now drove British industrial development and redistributed economic resources. It was not at all successful, but the mere fact that dedicated activists were able to keep the party alive as an organisation across many decades of electoral unpopularity ensured that it would remain a possible outlet for voters when external circumstances became more favourable to a distinctively Scottish political appeal.

in the 1970s, as an economic downturn and crisis-ridden Labour and Conservative governments drove voters to express their dissatisfaction via third party voting

Circumstances did change in the 1970s, as an economic downturn and crisis-ridden Labour and Conservative governments drove voters to express their dissatisfaction via third party voting. The SNP had by this time positioned itself as a modernising force that backed a more decentralised model of government in order to address Scotland’s economic challenges. Bolstered by the discovery of North Sea oil in Scottish waters, which significantly enhanced the economic credibility of an independent Scotland, the SNP soared to 30 per cent of the Scottish vote and 11 MPs in the October 1974 general election.

The rise in support for the SNP triggered a panicked attempt by Labour to introduce Scottish devolution, the first example of what has become a recurring pattern of the electoral threat posed by the SNP shifting the UK political elite (and in particular the Labour Party) towards supporting ever stronger forms of Scottish self-government. The attempt to introduce devolution failed in 1979, washed away in a referendum that stipulated that 40 per cent of the eligible electorate had to vote in favour for the measure to pass. This was a bar that campaigners for devolution could not clear in the face of internal divisions, an unpopular incumbent government, and a bleak economic landscape characterised by fractious industrial relations and high inflation (though of those who turned out to vote in the 1979 referendum a majority still voted in favour of devolution).

But the Thatcher and Major years forged a deeper political consensus within Scotland on the need for a Scottish Parliament. A crucial feature of this period was that voting in Scotland followed a markedly different pattern than in England, with Labour clearly winning in Scotland in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. Since these were also the decades in which rapid deindustrialisation occurred – with accompanying increases in unemployment, poverty and income inequality – the startling social and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s became understood in Scottish political culture as an undemocratic imposition from outside, visited on Scotland by an illegitimate government.

The SNP did not significantly increase its support, but this was in part because the Scottish Labour Party adopted a quasi-nationalist rhetoric. Labour argued that the UK government lacked a democratic mandate to rule Scotland and presented itself as the guardian of Scottish national interests, which Labour maintained could best be advanced by a devolved parliament within the UK. Labour also pursued open dialogue with other parties and civil society organisations about the character of such a parliament through the Scottish Constitutional Convention (which the SNP chose to absent itself from because the Convention would not consider independence as a serious political option). Once Labour returned to office in 1997, devolution was duly delivered, ratified whole-heartedly in a successful referendum, and a new era in Scottish politics began with the first sitting of a democratically elected Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Devolution … represented an important staging post on the road to the creation of a new Scottish state

One important feature of the new devolved political system was that the SNP had clearly established itself as the second largest party (after Labour) in the 1999 Scottish Parliament elections. Although the SNP had supported the creation of the parliament, the party’s leaders were committed to what had become known as the ‘gradualist’ strategy for Scottish independence. Devolution in their view represented an important staging post on the road to the creation of a new Scottish state, a project that they would seek to pursue if they ever entered government in Edinburgh.

The defenders of the devolutionary settlement, notably the Labour Party, did not take the presence of the SNP as a competitor for government office as seriously as they should have. Labour’s years in control of the Holyrood parliament in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (1999-2007) were marked by a hubristic assumption that there was no need to continue, let alone deepen, their careful positioning in the 1980s and 1990s as the party best suited to advance the Scottish national interest. Indeed, it is striking in retrospect how dismissive of the prospect of Scottish independence the wider British political system was throughout this period. This was, after all, the New Labour era, in which a centre-left government had seemingly bound together Britain with a hegemonic electoral coalition that put them in office in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Tensions between the nations of the UK seemed to have been dissolved by the application of asymmetric devolution and a booming economy that in turn enabled a significant increase in the level of public spending.

This illusion was dispelled after 2007 on two fronts. Locally, it was in 2007 that the SNP capitalised on growing disenchantment with Labour in the wake of the Iraq War to emerge narrowly as the largest party at Holyrood and take office as a minority Scottish government. The SNP was elected on an appeal relating to governmental competence, with the question of independence parked as one that could only be resolved via a referendum at a later date. Globally, the financial crisis of 2007-8 transformed the terms of economic debate and eventually brought into power in London a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration committed to a strikingly unequal distribution of the burdens of austerity. This new UK government elected in 2010 held twelve of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, only one of those won by the Conservatives.

The SNP was able to capitalise on Scottish opposition to this coalition to win a majority in the Scottish Parliament elections of 2011, significantly aided by the absence of any strategic purpose or strong leadership in the Scottish Labour Party. Independence was at this stage still an unpopular position in Scottish public opinion, favoured by perhaps only around a third of the electorate. Lulled into a false sense of security by this opinion polling, the UK government accepted that the 2011 victory granted the SNP a mandate to hold a referendum on whether to create a new Scottish state. Although supporters of the Union were indeed victorious in the 2014 referendum, the level of support for independence dramatically increased during the campaign, eventually finishing at 45 per cent of the vote on an exceptionally high turnout of 85 per cent of the electorate.

The referendum proved to be a moment of structural realignment in Scottish politics

The framing of the referendum by the SNP as a choice between Scottish self-determination and the continuation of an unpopular Conservative government that lacked democratic legitimacy in Scotland was an artful one, which drew on the arguments about Scottish self-government first developed in the 1980s and won over many Scots previously hesitant about independence. The referendum proved to be a moment of structural realignment in Scottish politics: pro-independence voters, many of whom had previously been Labour supporters, subsequently voted SNP, giving the party comfortable victories at the 2015 general election and then the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.

However, it was ultimately the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU in 2016 that brought the debate about Scottish independence back to the forefront of political debate. A key argument of supporters of the Anglo-Scottish Union in 2014 had been that an independent Scotland’s prospects for membership of the EU were highly uncertain, so Scots might face exile from EU citizenship (even if only temporarily) if they voted to leave the UK. Of course, shortly afterwards the UK as a whole then voted to leave the EU, while Scotland registered a strong vote in favour of remaining (62 per cent voted for remain in Scotland as opposed to 48 per cent in the UK). The political significance of this vote was far wider than the specific issue of EU membership, since it provided another piece of evidence for supporters of independence that Scottish democratic preferences were doomed to be drowned out by a far larger English electorate.

In short, it provided a vivid illustration of the classic Scottish nationalist themes of the 1980s and 2010s, namely that the Anglo-Scottish Union was now a block on the democratic preferences of the Scottish people. The initial mobilisation of this argument by independence supporters was not as successful as they expected. Scots who voted for Brexit were still a large minority of the electorate, some of them SNP voters, and the 2017 UK general election in fact saw the SNP lose ground electorally. But support for the SNP was ultimately revitalised by the subsequent acrimonious debates over the details of Brexit, and then the high profile of the Scottish government during the pandemic, leaving the SNP unmatched as the dominant party in Scotland at the 2019 general election and the Scottish Parliament election in 2021.

Yet even then support for the SNP (or the SNP in combination with the pro-independence Greens) extends only to around one half of Scottish voters, with Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats splitting the other half between them. While Scotland is therefore now a nation broadly divided between two equally sized blocs of voters, recent opinion polling also suggests that some fluidity between the two positions is possible. In 2020, for example, there was a clear movement towards majority support for independence in the opinion polling, in reaction to the UK government’s initial maladroit response to the Covid pandemic, although this now seems to have unwound as vaccines are distributed and the economy reopens. But the very fact that public opinion can shift markedly in that direction indicates an underlying fragility to the Anglo-Scottish Union that was initially exposed in the 2014 referendum and has been exacerbated by subsequent events.

As long as Scottish nationalists can plausibly portray England as a conservative nation that thwarts the democratic will of the Scottish people, advocates of independence will have a resonant rhetorical frame at their disposal. They face from their opponents a barrage of detailed questions about the economics of independence and the transition to statehood, as well as a profound reluctance to entertain another referendum so soon after 2014. It seems likely that the next few years will become dominated by this latter, procedural question at the expense of the more substantive former ones. The danger for the advocates of the Union is that such a posture will merely strengthen support for Scottish independence.

The Anglo-Scottish Union has for centuries been legitimated as a voluntary contract. For the UK government to depart from that well-rehearsed line of argument by denying a referendum risks playing into the hands of Scottish nationalists, who have always suspected that behind the seemingly consensual façade of the Union lurks the coercive force of an undemocratic, quasi-imperial state. Scotland’s political future seems likely to hang in the balance unresolved for some time yet. But simply avoiding the argument altogether is a strategy that supporters of the Union will surely find has diminishing returns.

References:

(1) David McCrone, ‘Cultural Capital in an Understated Nation: The Case of Scotland’, British Journal of Sociology, 56 (1), pp. 67-9, 76-9. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2005.00047.x

(2) Ben Jackson, The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

(3) This article provides a concise outline of a complicated history. Readers interested in the full story will find the following excellent books helpful: Catriona MacDonald, Whaur Extremes Meet: Scotland’s Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, John Donald, 2009); James Mitchell, The Scottish Question (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014); Tom Devine, Independence or Union? Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Future (London, Penguin, 2016); David McCrone, The New Sociology of Scotland (London, Sage, 2017); Michael Keating, State and Nation in the United Kingdom: Fractured Union (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021).

(4) David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London, Penguin, 2018).

Ben Jackson is Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and the co-editor of Political Quarterly. He is the author of The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Header image credit: Study for ‘Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags)’, William Crozier. Courtesy National Gallery of Scotland.

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Jackson, Ben 2021. ‘The Irresistible Rise of Scottish Independence? A Brief History of Scotland’s Constitutional Debate’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (2) https://doi.org/10.51428/dsoc.2021.02.0003

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The Quality of Empathy

Moushumi Bhowmik

I came to Ranajit Guha’s work only recently, late in my life. If I had been a first year at university then my teachers and peers would tell me what to read and how to read him. Now I must seek assistance in writings on Guha, from his readers, scholars and critics; in interviews and reminiscences.

The good thing about coming so late to someone’s work, especially to work as vast and deep as an ocean, is that by now I have a measure of my own self, I know that I have not learned to swim and I can’t even stay afloat, but barely dip my ankles in the water. I also know a thing or two about what I can take home after hours of sitting by the shore; some sand sticks to my feet, that I must  dust off before walking in through the door. But I keep with me the sights of the rising waves I have seen and their sound as they come crashing, ships which cross the horizon, small fishing boats, even drowning people I was unable to save.

It is with such sounds and sights and feelings that I tried to loosely sketch an impression of Ranajit Guha, translating what I have understood to be some of his lifelong concerns and questions, into song.   

On 20 October 2023, when we had gathered at the University of Sussex to remember Ranajit Guha, two weeks of systematic destruction of life in Palestine had passed, following the 7 October bloody Hamas operation against Israeli occupation. Is there no daya left in our hearts? Where is the quality of empathy? There was an all-pervasive feeling of helplessness, even on the faces of those who were courageously marching to stop the killing spree. 

Around 2008, Ranajit Guha had started to write a Bengali book entitled Daya: Rammohan Roy O Amader Adhunikata (Empathy/Compassion: Rammohan Roy and Our Modernity) which was first published in 2010. 

‘We easily forget’, he wrote in its Prelude, which he subtitled ‘The Victory of Cruelty’. ‘If we couldn’t forget, then perhaps our very existence would be unbearable under the weight of remembrance. So, we need to forget. Even to those who witnessed Partition [of India] in their childhood and youth, that experience has faded now as [the colours and details] in an old scroll painting. The dust of Mahakal (Endless Time) falls on the past and everything fades away. Dust has begun to settle on the communal frenzy in Gujarat which happened barely seven or eight years ago. Which is why millions of people are unable to see in their minds’ eyes what they had actually seen. However, we know that the discipline of history and forgetting are sworn enemies. Hence, with my belief in justice [attainable through remembrance], I have picked up my pen to write about a much older time, to remind ourselves of 2002. [Lest we forget.]’ (Guha, 2021: 13; translation mine). 

‘Daya diye hobe go mor jiban dhute/Noile ki aar parbo tomar charan chhnute‘ (I must wash my life with daya/ How else can I touch your feet?) Rabindranath Tagore’s 1910 song rang in my ears. Ranajit Guha wrote extensively on Tagore and I wonder if this was one his favourite songs? His student, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, wrote after his death that in writing only in Bangla/ Bengali during the last decades of his life, Ranajit da was ‘returning home’.  In her memoirs Danube, Ganges, and Other Life Streams, Methchild Guha wrote: ‘Ranajit and I discussed many times what our roots were. He feels rooted in Bengali language and culture irrespective of where he lives, and, believing it crucial to maintain this sense of identity, he kept pressing me to similarly acknowledge the culture and language that had formed me,’ (Guha, 2014: 49).  

The Bengal of Ranajit’s birth is where I have travelled over the past decades, listening to songs and stories and making recordings of what may be considered ‘small voices’ of history, with my machine and in my memory. But ‘small’, says who? In the pouring rain of the monsoon month of Sraban, the women of Barisal are singing songs to the snake goddess Manasa; the song rises above the sound of the rain, then it drowns, and rises again–one female voice leads, others repeat the lines. I have heard them and imagine that Ranajit had also heard such sounds when he was a small boy, for Barisal was his birthplace. Perhaps this was also the language and culture that had formed him? Why did he not write about these little things of his own history? 

Ranajit Guha ‘turned down all requests to write an autobiography,’ wrote Partha Chatterjee. ‘He even did not want to give any long interviews on his life and work. He would refuse saying, “It is not possible to write the truth about one’s own life. Whatever autobiographies you read, know that they are full of lies.”” (Chatterjee, 2023: 86) But for some reason he did give Partha Chatterjee a long interview on 1 and 2 July 2018 in his home in Purkersdorf on the edge of the Vienna Woods; he was 95 at the time. They talked about books he read as a boy, the library at home, his grandfather, teachers, early friendships, introduction to communist ideology, Tagore, Bankim, his comrades, literature, politics, history-writing, subaltern studies and so much more, but not much about the interior of his childhood home and other realms of feeling. The conversation is marked by the stark absence of voices of women. There was an externality in that conversation, such as there is in Bengali male intellectual addas.

How to listen to that absence? How to interpret it? In The Art of Listening, Les Back wrote about the need for deep sociological listening, which is ‘tied to the art of [‘thick’] description’. (Back, 2007: 21). We must be able to listen to both the presence and absence of sound.

It is interesting that Ranajit Guha had opened up in a different way during another conversation that he had with the Bastar folklorist Harihar Vaishnav in Canberra in 1991. The master dhokra or bell metal sculptor Jaydev Baghel of Chattisgarh was also present in the room, along with anthropologist Chris Gregory. Ranajit Guha was talking in Hindi and this translation by Pritha Banerjee is from a  special volume  dedicated to him which was published after his death by Anushtup in Kolkata, edited by Simool Sen. ‘I am a Dukkhabadi (I incline towards sorrow),’ Ranajit had said to Harihar Vaishnav. ‘I see both happiness as well as dejection. I have seen both. But I perceive a sense of remorse in the unprecedented fate of mankind. […]  But the battle must be waged. It doesn’t matter whether you triumph or fail. The struggle must go on.’

Vaishnav then asked him if there was any one incident he remembered which gave him both inspiration and pain?  ‘I don’t know about any specific event,’ Ranajit said, ‘but there is one that I can recall. You people are all young, born after Independence. There is one event before Independence that has left a mark on all people’s lives — British Rule. Before our independence, the era of British rule was an era of humiliation. I cannot begin to tell you how deeply humiliating the situation was. An Englishman had the power to come to this country and demean its own citizens. My childhood was situated within this corridor of humiliation. My family was an elite, upper class family in Bangladesh. We were big Hindu landowners. When I was a child, I saw peasants being thrashed with shoes by members of zamindari (landowning) families like mine. There was a farmer who lived near my house. He was older than me. I used to call him Dada. Although I belonged to a wealthy family, he brought coconuts for me. When he went fishing in the river, he used to take me along in his boat. I saw my uncle and his servants in our zamindari family pummel him with shoes. One day, he was heartbroken and left his home and the village. He thought my family was affectionate towards him. But they beat him with shoes – that was sheer insult! He left in a small boat. My young mind was affected by this. This agony occupied my mind since childhood. This is a short anecdote. It’s not political. It is empathy. It is sympathy. My discernment, my anger come from that place.’ 

I think it was a real political act on the part of Ranajit Guha to draw from the deep well of empathy and fight the battle ‘that must be waged’, throughout his long life. 

Here is a clip from my presentation at a memorial event for historian Ranajit Guha (1923-2023) at the University of Sussex on 20 October 2023. My presentation-performance was entitled ‘Some Small Voices of History: Listening after Ranajit Guha’. The composition I sing, first setting the context, is of the Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, written in 1910.

References

Back, Les 2007. The Art of Listening (Oxford, New York: Berg)

Guha, Methchild 2014.  Danube, Ganges , and Other Life Streams  (New Delhi: Permanent Black)

Chatterjee, Partha ed. 2023 Ranajit Guha Sahityer Satya (Kolkata: Anushtup)

Guha, Ranajit 2021. Daya: Rammohan Roy O Amader Adhunikata (Kolkata: Adom)

Sen, Simool ed. 2023. Ranajit Guha Bishesh Sankhya (Kolkata: Anustup)

Moushumi Bhowmik is an Indian singer-songwriter, writer and researcher based in Kolkata.

Header Image Credit: The Travelling Archive

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Bhowmik, Moushumi 2024. ‘The Quality of Empathy’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):

Property and the Political Economy of Colonialism

Gurminder K Bhambra

Ranajit Guha, as set out so clearly in the other articles in this issue, was a complex man. He was at the University of Sussex for close on twenty years and is most well-known for work that he did at the end of that period; that is, his work on historiography and the setting up of Subaltern Studies. My own initial encounter with Guha’s work was through these very studies. In particular, I was taken with the way in which he used historiography to investigate the exclusion of the subaltern from the structure of academic disciplines and thereby revealed the parochial and partial nature of the histories produced. Here, I want to return to his earlier work; to his first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the idea of Permanent Settlement.

Guha had started work on this topic in the 1950s and it was published in 1963 by a French publisher around the time that Guha started as a lecturer at Sussex. By all accounts, Asa Briggs, then Dean of the Social Sciences, who would go on to become Vice Chancellor, had invited Guha to apply for the job on the basis of this work. Around the same time, Briggs was also involved in bringing the economic historian, Donald Winch, to Sussex. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, was published two years after Guha’s and ostensibly dealt with similar themes. It was developed from his dissertation which dealt with ‘the optimal conditions for colonial economic development’ and was primarily focused on Britain’s settler colonies with only a brief discussion of India via the work of the Mills.

The overlap between their concerns is sufficient, however, for it to be a puzzle – at least ostensibly – as to why they never appeared to acknowledge the work of the other. Winch did reference Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India, which had been published just prior to Guha’s book and with which it was often compared and addressed in tandem. One reason could be that provided by David Fieldhouse in his review of Winch’s book which notes that while Winch ‘is good on economic theory, … [he] is obviously less strong on colonial history’. However, this would be to point to an intellectual divergence that was confirmed only through Guha’s later work directly addressing the colonial context. A Rule of Property is as much focused on economic theory as is Winch’s text and I will discuss the implications of their similarity subsequently. First, to the text itself.  

A Rule of Property addresses the debates that took place between East India Company administrators in Bengal in the late eighteenth century around the status of land, how it was best to be managed, and the consequences of this for the possibility of colonial governance and deriving revenue over the longer term. The focus of the debates was the idea of a ‘permanent settlement’ or solution. The primary impetus was that a new way of organising the ownership of the land was required and that this would be best served by entrusting its care to ‘a class of native entrepreneurs who had solid interests in the land and were politically reliable’ (p9). That is, the proposals being debated were around establishing a right of private property in land. The security of landownership was deemed to be necessary for the creation of a sound administration.

It was acknowledged by the colonial administrators of the time that they held no good title to the land. Alexander Dow, for example, noted that while the provinces were held ‘in appearance, by a grant from the present emperor’, in reality, they were only maintained ‘by the right of arms’ (quoted in Guha p25). As such, what was necessary was to establish the legitimacy of dominion beyond that which was provided through the act of conquest. This was done by developing economic theories that saw the territory governed as if it were a Company estate. This estate could then be parcelled out to local zamindars who would come to own the land, permanently, as property and be made responsible for the payment of taxes on it, thus ensuring a steady stream of revenue for the colonial government. It was this separation of the right of ownership from the right to collect revenue that would establish the permanence of dominion.

Guha, impressively and rigorously – as Sanjay Subrahamyam notes in his obituary – ‘took apart the minutes, proposals and counterproposals that were presented and debated in the administrative councils of the time’. He set out their different economic premises – deriving from mercantilist, physiocratic, and classical political economy – and demonstrated that, despite their differences, they nonetheless shared a common political focus, establishing the permanence of orderly dominion. However, this political orientation, is much less a concern for Guha in A Rule of Property, rather, his focus is on the detail of the economic debates.

As an aside – as I was reading in preparation for this, I came across reference to a review of Guha’s book, by Sarvepalli Gopal, published in 1966, who regarded it primarily as an exercise in British intellectual history, with the implication being that it was therefore of little concern to historians of India. A Das Gupta similarly suggested that the book had little to do with India ‘because India existed beyond the thoughts of Englishmen’. Guha rebutted this critique in the 1981 preface to the second edition of his book (comment and critique took longer in the times before social media) by stating that if the historical origins of the concepts and theories underpinning the most important land reform introduced by the British in India, which led to the statute of permanent proprietary rights, wasn’t important to the study of Indian history, he didn’t know what would be. Nonetheless, there was something to the critique.

While the importance of Guha’s book appears clear, to me at least, I am interested in the place of colonial histories in the book, or, rather, their absence. It is obvious that Guha is not unaware of them and, given his subsequent work, he is alert to the relationship between power and knowledge in the construction of disciplines and the production of histories. So, what accounts for his failure to locate the discussions of the East India Company administrators within their colonial context and discuss the implications of their theories with regard to that? I suggest that this is where the overlap between Guha and Winch is perhaps more pertinent.

The illegitimacy of colonial rule may have been so obvious to Guha that it was regarded as otiose to even mention that this was the context in which he was working. However, another explanation could be that, as a Marxist – as he was then and later – he worked within a frame of political economy that regarded capitalism as the more significant historical moment. One whose unfolding through time and history had to be understood in its own terms.

In Guha’s presentation of the discussions that were happening among colonial administrators about how best to organise the ownership and distribution of the land under their control, there is no questioning of their right to do so. The act of conquest is seemingly naturalised and forms no part of the contextualisation of the subsequent discussions oriented to establishing a permanence of dominion. As Subrahmanyam notes, Guha also had very little to say about ‘the complex property regimes [of the Mughal period] that had been in place before Company rule’. Something that was not omitted by at least one of the administrators under discussion, Dublin-born Phillip Francis.

This flattening of history and elision of its complexities enables colonial conquest to be made subordinate in an account of political economy oriented around ideas of capitalist development. This is also enabled through the way in which the debates constructed Mughal rule as despotic or feudal, at the same time as establishing a neo-feudal settlement. The British established despotism in the provinces and then claimed that Oriental despotism was the reason that they were needed in order to bring progress and modernity to these benighted areas!

While Guha’s political commitment to Marxism shifted over time – with him coming to support the Maoist Naxalbari peasant movements in the 1970s – the refusal to consider colonialism as central to the emergence and development of capitalism perhaps blunted the force of his arguments. Even in the terms of his own book, A Rule of Property, the question of colonialism is central to the emergence of the very need, on the part of the colonial administrators themselves, for a Permanent Settlement and yet this context is relegated to a few paragraphs.

I remember giving a lecture that mentioned British colonial rule in India and a student coming up to me afterwards and asking, ‘but what were the British doing in India?’ ‘Well, quite,’ I replied.

What were the British doing in India? And under what authority were they seeking to determine the patterns of land ownership and distribution there? And further, how do their understandings of property in the colonial context continue to shape our understandings in the present and how are our contemporary understandings inadequate to the extent that we do not acknowledge the significance of colonialism to the emergence of the very idea of property?

Not taking colonial histories seriously in the development of economic ideas is a shared elision in the work of Guha and Winch. While their political orientations may well have been different – Winch identified strongly as working class, whereas Guha saw himself as belonging to the Third World – what they had in common was a failure to acknowledge the significance of colonial histories to the emergence of a global political economy.

Guha’s identification with the struggles of the peasantry in the 1970s no doubt went on to shape his reflections on history and historiography, even if he did not return to consider the implications for political economy. This was also a moment when, as Vinita Damodaran notes, postcolonial nationalism was beginning to devour its children. Fifty years on, as political figures in India seek to decolonize from the ‘double empire’, it would be a shame – to put it mildly – if postcolonial perspectives were mobilized in the turn to populist ethno-religious nationalism as opposed to being the counter to it. Guha’s political commitments would undoubtedly have been with the latter.

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sussex. She is author of Connected Sociologies and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. She is also co-editor of Imperial Inequalities and co-author, with John Holmwood, of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory.

Header Image Credit: Book cover

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Bhambra, Gurminder K 2024. ‘Property and the Political Economy of Colonialism’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):

Ranajit Guha: An inspirational and challenging teacher

Adi Cooper

I had the opportunity to share my reflections regarding being taught by Ranajit Guha at an event at Sussex University celebrating his career on 20th October 2023. I have had, and continue to have, a very varied career – I am a long away from where I was in 1984 submitting my PhD on the tebhaga movement, the sharecroppers’ struggle that took place in Bengal in the late 1940s. I have worked in the charity sector, as a paramedic, as a qualified social worker, manager and senior leader in Adult Social Services. I continue to work in the specialist field of safeguarding adults in England. This may appear quite random but there is a connection between then and now. People requiring safeguarding are often the most marginalised and vulnerable in our society in England; sharecroppers were amongst the most oppressed and dispossessed in rural communities in Bengal.

Tebhaga

It is no exaggeration to say that Ranajit Guha changed my life; first in motivating me to undertake my degree in the School of African and Asian studies (AFRAS) in Sussex University, and then to undertake a PhD on sharecroppers’ struggles, particularly the tebhaga movement. In 1976, when I was choosing a subject for my PhD, no one had studied the tebhaga movement, which grew from a pre-history of peasant activism and was led by the Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party of India.

Ranajit supported me to do my PhD in so many ways – significantly by advising me to do a PhD in the first place. I wanted to go to India after 3 years of studying Indian history and he said – ‘don’t go as a tourist but go as a scholar’, so I did. In Kolkata his connections sent me to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences where I was supervised, befriended and supported by so many people through different networks, scholars and students. His name opened doors.

I had read – probably directed by Ranajit – Sunil Sen’s memoirs of being an activist in Dinajpur in the tebhaga movement. I wanted to know more: how, what, when and where the movement had taken place. I wanted to understand how marginalised and oppressed Bengali sharecroppers became the fighters, resisters, and activists in the tebhaga movement, demanding to keep a larger share of the crop, challenging the landlords and oppression in their lives. I wanted to record their history. I undertook conventional research and found written records in the Writers Building in Kolkata and government archives in Dhaka. I wanted to go beyond and behind these texts to find out from people who were still alive in the late 1970s what they remembered, and I was fortunate as so many people were able to tell me their stories.

I learnt Bengali before I left England and spent 2 years meeting and interviewing over 200 people who had been involved in the tebhaga struggles. I searched out people, followed up leads, used different networks to find them. I collected their memories, stories and songs. I spoke to so many different people, in towns and villages, young and old, men and women, in West Bengal and Bangladesh; landlords, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, peasant activists and communists, including a Minister in the West Bengal CPM government. I travelled all over Bengal and then returned to England to write the PhD thesis. I tried to do justice to their experiences.

Studying the tebhaga movement was unconventional because it was about Bengal – both East and West Bengal, now Bangladesh and India. My privilege as foreign scholar was that I could do this, at that time, when local historians couldn’t cross the international border. This helped me with my own issues about being a white English woman doing this work. Local scholars assured me that in this way I could make a helpful contribution. In current discussions and debates about decolonising, I can frame this discomfort in a clearer way.

The post-colonial legacy of guilt haunted me even though my own family were immigrants to the UK, and anti-imperialists. They were communists. In this context I remember walking through some paddy fields with an interpreter (because my Bengali wasn’t adequate for understanding all the local dialects), in single file behind an elderly peasant activist who was walking ahead of us, whom I was going to interview, talking to himself. ‘What was he saying?’ The interpreter told me – ‘he was asking himself, ‘why has this English woman come all this way to speak to me. This because of international communism’. This has stayed with me for decades. There was some truth in his reflection because I had been brought up with an internationalist perspective in a communist family.

Studying in Sussex

Ranajit had been my tutor throughout my undergraduate course, as well as supervising my PhD. I had met him in 1972, arriving in Brighton after travelling overland from Pakistan. Coming back to Sussex I really wanted to know more about the history of the non-European world. A schoolfriend introduced me to Ranajit and I was inspired. I moved across to AFRAS and this changed the course of my life. University life in Sussex in the 1970s was very different to how I understand it might be now. Sussex had a radical reputation both academically and in terms of the student experience. The radical approach to learning was why I had applied to go there: the inter-disciplinary schools of studies and the more fluid approach to curriculum, with courses based on cross-cutting themes like ‘millenarian movements’, rather than historical periods. I was attracted to the radical political activism that Sussex was known for. I was already involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement, anti-Vietnam demos, school student radicalism in London. Sussex was perfect for me.

It was a privilege to be taught by Ranajit although I don’t think I recognised this at the time – you take for granted that your experience is normal when you are young and have little to compare it with. I have memories only of tutorials with 2 or 3 other students. Ranajit spoke about whatever the subject was – he was hugely knowledgeable, and there were discussions and debates. I remember him talking about the way in which Greek philosophers taught their students through discourse. So, his teaching methods did make sense. What was this like for students? Exciting and scary. Writing essays to explore ideas. Being pushed to think and consider different ways of thinking. Light bulb moments. Stimulating and intellectually challenging. Terrifying and I was always in awe of him. Our essays would be tightly critiqued with respect and ambition. Correcting our use of language. ‘Inspirational and challenging’ as I called this piece.

He was an intellectual giant – Anna (another student of Ranajit’s in the 1970s) reminded me that he learnt Gujarati to read Gandhi’s work. He referenced Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, structuralism and post structuralism, semiotics. We learnt how to deconstruct text – being able to read other stories from what was on the surface, to see through to what was behind and the stories that weren’t told. This was his biggest legacy. Anna reminded me of her arguments with him about feminism – would sexism fade away with capitalism as a relic of feudalism? And he always had the last word. Studying with Ranajit was never dull. He always went to what was most important – issues of justice and human rights, class analysis. He also said that history was the true and only worthwhile academic discipline. He was so astonishingly erudite; he would use literature and multiple cultural references; unapologetically an intellectual.

AFRAS had a very strong identity – we learnt about imperialism and post-colonialism from radical scholars. So different to history in school. It was a great place to be and learn. Ranajit was part of that – he had his own style and brilliance. Additionally, it was special but not unusual to be invited to academics’ homes to meet other students. I did feel privileged but a bit overwhelmed to meet the scholars that Ranajit brought together. It was helpful to know that there was a community of interest, in which he was the centre. The connections were helpful when I went to India and in validating what I was doing, which always felt niche and isolated, particularly when I was in England.

When I came back to England in 1979, I experienced serious culture shock on re-entry. Looking back, I think Ranajit’s high standards of scholarship and his critique of my writing triggered a writer’s block and I made the very difficult decision to change supervisor. I moved to work with Terry Byres at SOAS, who helped me through this. I completed my PhD on sharecroppers struggles and sharecropping in Bengal in 1930s and 1940s. It was published in Kolkata and part translated into Bengali and published in Bangladesh. I was driven to ensure that at least there was a record of what I had been able to find out. I owed it to all the people that I had met. Decades later I emailed Ranajit, prompted by Shireen Huq, a mutual friend who visited him in Austria (she also studied with Ranajit in the late 1970s). I said what I’d been doing over the many years and got a lovely response from Mechtild Guha; there was closure.

Remembering those years, I want to also reflect on our politics at that time. We were intellectually and academically applying a Marxist lens and critiquing it – so my PhD was about the economic history of sharecropping as a semi-feudal mode of production, as well as a political history of a peasant struggle. Ranajit introduced us to what was happening in Indian communism at the time, including the Naxalite struggles. This had significant personal resonance for me; coming from a communist family, as a child living through the 1950’s Cold War backlash of anti-communism, parents who had been deported from America due to McCarthyism. This was another connection. I had a tutor who could make some sense of that. Researching a peasant struggle led by communists was amazing on a personal level. I was in West Bengal when the CP(M) came to power after Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule: this was an extraordinary experience for me. All the hammer and sickle graffiti on the walls and communist red flags waved in demonstrations on the maidan. This was incredible for someone whose grandfather, a Polish tailor, had heard Lenin speak in Paris. In India and Bangladesh, my communist party family identity was an asset, not something to hide. People trusted and helped me in my research because of it. As the elderly peasant activist said – I had come to speak to him ‘because of international communism’.

Postscript/legacy – some final words

Looking back, I just feel very grateful to have had the experience of being taught and inspired by Ranajit. In subsequent decades I have randomly come across people who knew his work, so belatedly I have understood that during those years he was developing his subaltern studies approach. It is always such a surprise and a gift to have those conversations. I have continued to utilise the skills I learnt, and I have always maintained my values and commitment to supporting people who are most marginalised and excluded. For the last 15 years as a social work leader this has taken the form of transforming the ways vulnerable adults are safeguarding in England.

I ceased my academic career once my PhD was published, although have developed one in social work. But I have come back to this part of my life. An American professor sought me out a few years ago; I showed her the notebooks recording the interviews that had been kept in the loft, unopened for 25 years. She wrote a blog about the encounter. That was a key turning point. Subsequently Dr Layli Uddin contacted me and with her encouragement and support, I have been transcribing the interview notes. I want to place the transcripts in archives so others can access them, reflect, analyse, and learn from these stories.

This is also part of Ranajit’s lasting influence. I still believe that this work is so important – there is an ongoing interest in subaltern studies; in the histories of people, seen to be at the margins but really at the centre. There is so much richness in these recollections of their experiences, their memories. This is a legacy that I want to pass on to others. A legacy that wouldn’t exist, if not for Ranajit Guha.

References

Adrienne Cooper Sharecropping and Sharecropper’s Struggles in Bengal 1930-1950, K.P.Bagchi, Kolkata, 1988

Sunil Sen Agrarian Struggles in Bengal 1946-47 P.P.H. Delhi 1972

The full text of the presentation is in the upcoming volume:

Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): Bishesh Sankalan (Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): A Special Commemorative Collection). Edited by Sourav Chattopadhyay, Kolkata: Alochana Chakra, 2024. ISBN: 978-93-83208-15-9.

Adi Cooper OBE is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, Independent Chair of two Safeguarding Adults Boards in London and Adviser for safeguarding adults (Partners in Care and Heath). She is a Non-Executive Director of Social Work England. She also works as a safeguarding consultant and has published books and articles on safeguarding adults. She is a qualified social worker and worked in Adult Social Care for over 30 years, including as Director of Adult Social Services, Housing and Health for nine years. Her PhD thesis about the tebhaga movement was published in Kolkata on ‘sharecropping and sharecroppers struggles in Bengal 1930-50’ and she studied as an undergraduate and post-graduate with Ranajit Guha at Sussex University. Twitter @adi_coo

Header Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons (government open data licence, India)

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Cooper, Adi 2024. ‘Ranajit Guha: An inspirational and challenging teacher’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):