VG Kiernan (1913-2009): Historian in the battle against Empire

VG Kiernan, who died earlier this year at the ripe age of 95, was one of the great historians of our time. From a Third World perspective, it was his unrelenting exposure of imperialism (epitomised by his classic, The Lords of Human Kind) that distinguishes his scholarship.  John Trumpbour pays tribute to this doughty fighter against Empire.

VICTOR Gordon Kiernan, professor emeritus of modern history at Edinburgh University and recognised as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians, died of heart failure on 17 February 2009, at his home in the Scottish Borders. Ninety-five years old, he was a man of letters close to the Edwardian era but infused with a radical consciousness from the Great Depression and from a decade of witnessing anticolonial struggles in the Indian subcontinent. While his middle name came from one of British imperialism's greatest heroes, General Gordon of Khartoum, Kiernan emerged as one of the nation's foremost ideological warriors against Empire.

VG Kiernan made immense contributions to the postwar flowering of British Marxist historiography that transformed the understanding of social history. Seeking escape paths from a congealing Stalinism, this intellectual movement grew from several figures, among them the Blakean visionary EP Thompson, the don of 17th-century radical dissent Christopher Hill, the radical medievalist Rodney Hilton, the encyclopaedic Kiernan, and the scholar of primitive rebellion and large-scale economic change Eric Hobsbawm.

Brash and confident in wielding the best of the left's cultural arsenal, they welcomed open-ended dialogue with non-Marxist traditions. Kiernan in his lifetime received fewer public accolades than Thompson, Hilton, Hill and Hobsbawm, provoking the latter two to proclaim that they had created a Victor Kiernan Appreciation Society. Writing in the Telegraph of Calcutta on 22 February, Rudrangshu Mukherjee reflected that most of the British Marxist historians 'believed that [Kiernan] was the most erudite and widely read among them all'. His mastery of Persian and Urdu, as well as an array of modern European languages and classical Greek and Latin, contributed to his intellectual mystique. He wrote works ranging from the classical verse of Horace to the social context of Shakespeare's plays to historical dissections of European empires and the 'new imperialism' represented by the United States, as well as translations and analyses of the golden age of Urdu poetry.

The Lords of Human Kind

Best known for The Lords of Human Kind (1969), Kiernan created a work 'concerned with the impressions and opinions of Europeans and non-Europeans about one another, their attitudes and behaviour towards one another, in the century or century and a half before the First World War, the epoch when Europe's importance in the world was greatest'. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said regarded it as a central influence in developing his modern-day classic Orientalism (1978). Kiernan's work has many haunting themes, including the contrast between liberty at home and tyrannical oppression abroad: 'It did not escape comment that the Dutch were no sooner gaining their freedom at home than they were depriving other people of theirs, an inconsistency repeated by several European nations later on.'

The techniques of oppression abroad brought a pack of plagues back to Europe, observed Kiernan, whether in Lord Salisbury's crass judgment that the Irish were no more fit for home rule than Hottentots or in the imperial manner of warfare that relied on hard-charging offensive techniques designed 'to hypnotise and paralyze the enemy by asserting the firmer will and higher morale of the attacker'. As millions of Europeans were later slaughtered in World War I, the military officers failed to see 'that machine guns and barbed wire were not so easily hypnotised as half-armed' Asians and Africans. The generals doggedly stuck to the bayonet-charging techniques that once worked for them in their youth on the campaign grounds in the overseas colonies.

Kiernan's work also examined a variety of racial hierarchies on display in European literature, perhaps most graphically in Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913). In this work, there is 'a table of ranks among the races, an order of fitness to survive...implied in the sequence in which they succumb to the mysterious etheric poison that the planet has swum into. Africa and the Australian aborigines are speedily extinguished, followed by India and Persia, while in Europe the Slavs collapse sooner than the Teutons, and southern France sooner than the north, after "delirious excitement" and a "Socialist upheaval" at Toulon.'

The mythologies of imperialism

Kiernan carried out a relentless unmasking of imperialist ideologies and white European supremacist justifications for rule over South Asians, Africans, East Asians, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Kiernan noted in particular how British colonialists used existing hierarchies in India to portray their rule as more benign than that of their predecessors.

'The aristocratic streak in these English rulers made for an aloof and chilly manner,' he wrote in The Lords of Human Kind, 'and Indian environment stiffened it. They came to think of themselves, it has been remarked, as a caste, infinitely above the rest. If Hindus complained of being looked down on, they could always be reminded that their own treatment of one another, especially of untouchables, was worse.'

Thomas Paine in 1792 paused to remark about the depredations from British rule, 'The horrid scene that is now acting by the English Government in the East Indies is fit only to be told of Goths and Vandals.'

The famine of 1770 in Bengal may have wiped out a third of the population. And yet, there are still historians who eagerly portray British colonial rule as quite benign, most notably Niall Ferguson, who was rewarded in 2004 with a lifetime tenured chair of History at Harvard by then university president Lawrence Summers. When rival historians bragged of British contributions to India's progress, Kiernan put the gains into perspective through historical verdicts rendered with poetic justice.  Of the benefits from the British Raj, he wrote: 'Dacoits and highway robbers were suppressed, absentee landlords who filched far more were caressed.'

Recognising that European-style colonialism was not the only game in town, Kiernan explored the neo-imperialist patterns mastered by the United States in his America, The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (1978, and re-released in 2005, with a new preface by Hobsbawm).

The folklore of capitalism and conservatism

In essays for New Left Review such as 'Problems of Marxist History' and 'Shepherds of Capitalism', Kiernan called attention to the ways in which feudal remnants and survivals shape the economic order. Capitalists talk a lot about the entrepreneurial spirit, but many of them are quick to abandon industrial investment for speculative and rentier pursuits.

As Kiernan expressed it, 'There have always been easier ways of making money than long-term industrial investment, the hard grind of running a factory. J.P. Morgan preferred to sit in a back parlour on Wall Street smoking cigars and playing solitaire, while money flowed towards him. The English, first to discover the industrial highroad, were soon deserting it for similar parlours in the City, or looking for byways, short cuts and colonial Eldorados.'

As capitalism is shaken by the new financial crisis, Kiernan had withering observations about the ascendancy of financial capital: 'England was the first country to undergo capitalism, first agrarian and then industrial, but it is also (if we leave out Holland) the first to relapse from industrial into financial, speculative, usurer capitalism.

'Long-drawn landowning ascendancy must surely have something to do with this.. England's old ruling class was too busy chasing foxes and poachers, and its chief share in production was to keep up the tone of the labour force by sending objectors to Botany Bay, much as Russian landowners sent recalcitrant serfs to Siberia. It was a class essentially parasitic, like our City sharks and sharpers and harpies, many of them its lineal descendents.'

One of Kiernan's most controversial moves was to rebuff the common conservative charge that the Left is soaked in treason. Commenting on 'another outburst of barking and braying about "Cambridge traitors"' for cooperating with the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the early Cold War, he observed in the London Review of Books (25 June  1987) that 'it has come to be a perennial resort of reaction, when it is left without any fresher topic for claptrap, to indulge in these spasms of virtuous indignation about the wickedness of a small number of idealists of years ago.'   The Right's shamelessness is remarkable given how 'We saw pillars of British society trooping to Nuremberg to hobnob with Nazi gangsters; we saw the "National" government sabotaging the Spanish Republic's struggle, from class prejudice, and to benefit investors like Rio Tinto, blind to the obvious prospect of the Mediterranean being turned into a fascist lake and the lifelines of empire cut.'

Kiernan noted how the Right has short memories, able to forget how many Tories gave enthusiastic support to army mutinies 'when a Liberal government was again about to concede Home Rule' to Ireland or later when 'numbers of officers refused. to take part in any coercion of Ulster'. British officers 'received unstinted sympathy from the overwhelming majority of Tories' when they 'would decline to act against white rebels in Rhodesia'. He added that in the 1980s Tories 'continued to cherish fraternal feelings towards the white savages of South Africa, their partners in upholding the natural right of capitalism to exploit its victims: quite indifferent to the moral damage to Britain, but also to the material losses to be expected from an alienation of black Africa and most of the Commonwealth.'

He added how often these British patriots have given support to Washington in destabilising democratic governments around the world. He thought that the Right had repeatedly deployed accusations of treason to de-legitimise the Left, and it was time to deliver a few bruising counterpunches.

Literature and social change

Rejecting RH Tawney's belief in Social History and Literature (1949) of the absence of links between the art of an epoch and the economic order, Kiernan fought back against the tendency to see genius as beyond any social explanation. 'It may be conceivable, but is extremely unlikely, that Shakespeare could have written as he did about war, death, property, all the while contemplating their grimness from an Olympian peak of detachment,' he countered. Though himself seeking to avoid moralising, Joseph Conrad conceded that 'even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence.'

Kiernan and Urdu poetry

While steeped in Western literature and the classical heritage of Horace, Kiernan called for an appreciation of Urdu poetry, as he translated works from its literary golden age spanning from Ghalib (1796-1869) to Iqbal (1877-1938) to Faiz (1911-1984). He elevated writers from the East who had been largely banished by guardians of the Western canon and then overlooked by stylish post-modern literature professors prowling for more transgressive exemplars of literary craft.

Kiernan's friendship with Faiz began in the late 1930s, and he translated the poems with flair. Faiz conveyed the world of canines in the poem 'Dogs' (1943):

With fiery zeal endowed - to beg,

They roam the street on idle leg,

And earn and own the general curse,

The abuse of all the universe;

At night no comfort, at dawn no banquet,

Gutter for lodging, mud for blanket.

Whenever you find them any bother,

Show them a crust - they'll fight each other,

Those curs that all and sundry kick,

Destined to die of hunger's prick.

- If those whipped creatures raised their heads,

Man's insolence would be pulled to shreds:

Once roused, they'd make this earth their own,

And gnaw their betters to the bone -

If someone made their misery itch,

Just gave their sluggish tails a twitch!

Faiz then returned to the plight of humans under repressive regimes when in the opening stanzas of 'Bury Me Under Your Pavements' (1953) the canines return, this time with renewed overtones of impending menace:

Bury me, my country, under your pavements,

Where no man now dare walk with head held high,

Where your true lovers bringing you their homage

Must go in furtive fear of life or limb;

For new-style law and order are in use;

Good men learn, - 'Stones locked up, and dogs turned loose'

Kiernan wrote that Faiz sought to convey that 'citizens are allowed no means of defending themselves against persecution.'  Kiernan might be regarded as a historian of great colonial wars and distant repressive regimes, but poignant moments emerged when themes of solitude and suffering of individuals came alive in his social criticism.

In 'The Politics of Pain', written for the New York-based Nation (4 January 1971), he spoke of the 15th century Hussite heretic Hieronymus of Prague, 'a man of strong build who struggled and screamed in the flames for a long time'. When Richard Friedenthal in his study of Luther (1970) observed that 'There were many who screamed', Kiernan retorted, 'There are many today.'

He admitted, 'We have lost a great deal of our pleasure in cruelty, but have acquired a faculty for shutting our eyes to it.' In the US of the Old South, 'Urban slave owners. would often send their slaves to the police station to be given so many strokes of the whip, rather than have them whipped at home. Modern Americans would rather trust special police cadres in Latin America to do whatever the safeguarding of their investments may require. It is indeed one of the recommendations of neocolonialism, by contrast with direct imperial control, that a civilised country is not compelled to do the uncivilised part of its work itself.'

As much of the world held out hope that the new presidency of Barack Obama might bring an end to outsourced torture, the new US administration has reassured the national security apparatus that the programme named Rendition remains sacrosanct. The US option of sending captured prisoners to third-party nations will not be repudiated, with administration figures waxing comfortably about business as usual.

While consoling themselves that they are far more humane than Nazi architects of oven-ready torture and final solutions, the contemporary national security oligarchs and their liberal enablers are still eager to preserve the repressive mechanisms of statecraft, this time in the name of democracy and humanitarian interventionist uplift. Kiernan showed us the hellish horror that results from their high-minded projects, but he also let us see there could be better paths for humankind. Marx wondered whether human progress might find a new face, a visage more attractive than 'that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink nectar but from the skulls of the slain'.

Though recognising that imperialism had incredible staying power, aided and abetted by a vast entourage of court intellectuals and supine journalists, Kiernan left us with historical resources and literature with the power to inspire resistance. He urged us not to stay silent when killers and torturers are among us. In such moments, Kiernan turned to his messenger Faiz in the poem 'Speak' (1943), verse with the simplicity to be his epitaph:

Speak, for your two lips are free;

Speak, your tongue is still your own;

This straight body still is yours -

Speak, your life is still your own.

See how in the blacksmith's forge

Flames leap high and steel glows red,

Padlocks opening wide their jaws,

Every chain's embrace outspread!

Time enough is this brief hour

Until body and tongue lie dead;

Speak, for truth is living yet -

Speak whatever must be said.

John Trumpbour is Research Director for the Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School.  He can be reached at john_trumpbour@harvard.edu.  This essay is adapted from obituaries that appeared in Frontline and The Nation online.

*Third World Resurgence No. 224, April 2009, pp 40-43