The Empire at Home

Trafford James

Description

Modern Britain is forged through the redeployment of structures that facilitated and legitimized slavery, exploitation and extermination. This is the 'empire at home' and it is inseparable from the strategies of neo-colonial extraction and oppression of subjects abroad.

Here, James Trafford develops the notion of internal colonies, arguing that methods and structures used in colonial rule are re-deployed internally in contemporary Britain in order to recreate and solidify imperial power relations. Using examples including housing segregation, targeted surveillance and counter-insurgency techniques used in the fight against terrorism, Trafford reveals Britain's internal colonialism to be a reactive mechanism to retain British sovereignty.

As politics appears limited by nationalism and protectionism, The Empire at Home issues a powerful challenge to contemporary politics, demanding that Britain as an imperial structure must end.

Preface

Acknowledgements

1. The Mouth of a Shark

2. Extractive Entanglements Across Alien Territories

3. Policing Empire after Empire

4. Homeland Warfare and Differential Racism

5. Extinction Politics

6. The End of Britain

Notes

Indicative Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Post-Colonialism
• Political Science
• Internal colonialism
• Imperialism
• Colonialism
• Impérialisme (jeu vidéo)

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786806758
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Empire at Home
The Empire at Home
Internal Colonies and the End of Britain
James Trafford
First published 2021 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright James Trafford 2021
A Virtue of Disobedience by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, 2019, Verve Press; British Values by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, 2019, Verve Press; Calais, onward by Asiya Wadud, 2018, Nightboat Books; Displaced Development by Shareefa Energy, 2019, Burning Eye Books; Home by W. Shire, 2015, Warsan Shire; Migrant Among Us by Marie Ponsot, 2011, Knopf Doubleday; River by Kalul , Kalimba, 2019, Guillemot Press; River by Petero Kalul , 2019, Guillemot Press. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material in this book. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.
The right of James Trafford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4099 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4100 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0674 1 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0676 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0675 8 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
For those who struggle under cover of darkness
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 The Mouth of a Shark
2 Extractive Entanglements Across Alien Territories
3 Policing Empire after Empire
4 Homeland Warfare and Differential Racism
5 Extinction Politics
6 The End of Britain
Notes
Indicative Bibliography
Index
Preface
This book argues that as a combination of neo-imperialism and internal colonialism, the continuation of empire has been a fundamental condition of British life, politics, and economics. As formal empire was transformed into commonwealth and neo-imperial domination, Britain attempted to establish itself as a post-colonial nation. To do so required a spatio-temporal cut from empire, which disavowed the violence in the world that it had terraformed. But through this post-colonial cut, the exceptionalism of a pristine island nation would be rebuilt through the redeployment of structures that had facilitated and legitimised slavery, exploitation and extermination across empire. Shaped in this context, contemporary Britain is existentially, politically, and economically grounded in a geopolitics of exploitation, extraction, and dispossession.
In part, this book attempts to think contemporary political shifts towards regained sovereignty and securitising border regimes. It is an attempt to centre the political and social machinery that is capable of holding together the proposition that Britain can t be racist since it is the most tolerant and lovely country in Europe, with the Windrush scandal, where thousands of Caribbean migrants who had lived in Britain since they were children were illegally detained, threatened with deportation, and prevented from accessing necessary healthcare.
These tensions are explicable against a backdrop of empire and its continuing modes of capitalist accumulation and subjugation. The 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union and the election of Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson in 2019 have sedimented explicit shifts towards nativist nationalism. Johnson was a figurehead for the Vote Leave campaign prior to the referendum, during which he consistently denounced migrants as benefit scroungers, and claimed they have been responsible for a strained NHS and high levels of unemployment. The campaign was fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric, perceived weaknesses at the edges of the EU, and the demonisation of freedom of movement within the Schengen zone. A critical moment in the campaign focused on the idea that Britain would soon by flooded by Muslim people and Middle Eastern refugees with the possibility of Turkey joining the EU. They argued that murderers, terrorists and kidnappers from countries like Turkey could flock to Britain if it remains in the European Union , and their posters proclaimed that Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU: Vote leave, take back control .
As many writers have suggested, Brexit is best understood in the longer context of empire. Concerns over Brexit have been chalked up not only to anxieties over immigration controls but also to patriotism and nostalgia for an empire whose history is grounded both in amnesia and fantasy. 1 Mainstream media painted the vote as England s last gasp of empire carried out by a nation sickened by nostalgia and post-colonial melancholia for its lost colonies. Before the referendum in 2016, a survey carried out by YouGov found most people think that British empire is something to be proud of (59 per cent) rather than ashamed of (19 per cent). 2 This nostalgic pride is founded on the pathological romanticisation of an empire of railway building and the magnanimous dissemination of civility.
However, whilst such denialist nostalgia has certainly been used to characterise and chastise those who voted to leave the European Union, eulogising empire whilst erasing its historical and contemporary realities has been a persistent condition of its perpetuation since its supposed collapse. Framed on these terms, the vote might be seen to sediment the desire for a renewed sovereignty against an other whose claims upon Britain are seen as inherently rapacious and uncivil - with migrant people figured as inherently criminal, security threats, and antagonistic to so-called British values. As such Britain shouldn t be understood as a given - or even as pragmatic political, social, or economic category. Rather, Britain and Britishness are explicable only through the colonial machinery that gives them integrity and ground.
The Conservative party has made explicit its position of nationalist protection, an increasingly cruel and revanchist approach towards immigration policy, and patriotic exceptionalism. However, current leftist arguments are also reliant on the nation as a basic political unit. The left have borrowed from right-wing discourse to support the claim that a strengthened nation-state is required to protect the interests of a fantasy xenophobic white working class. This is given succour by a widely-made argument that anti-immigrant sentiment has resulted from an inability to explain how neoliberalism and globalism are the workers true enemy. Focusing on the latter, the central target of messaging under the Labour party since the referendum has been the crisis in global finance leading to austerity measures. These are seen as the culmination of a longer neoliberal erosion of public services and welfare, with the mobilisation of right-wing ethnonationalism just a protective sheen masking strategies to maintain class power and capital.
But this forgets that neoliberalism and globalism are neo-imperial formations. Both have been directed towards the extraction and expropriation of value from people who have been figured as not the rightful inheritors of this earth. They have relied on extractive modes of capital that hyper-exploit, dispossess, and make expendable. As I show in this book, this violence has been justified and implemented through the redeployment of colonial strategies: of segregation; the retributive protection of property regimes; migrant-subsidised economies; the racialised stratification of labour force; the criminalisation and pathologisation of groups of people; hyper-exploitation; social control; containment; expulsion.
The state s admixture of authoritarianism and privatised responsibility in response to the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 clarified that death is discriminatory. Since the distributions of death are far from unknown and arbitrary, official policies of herd immunity encapsulated eugenic calculations. Britain prepared for lockdown amidst a discourse underpinned by militarised nationalism, nostalgic exceptionalism, and calls for hugely expanded police powers. This desire for increased policing was backed-up with police hotlines and snooper forms overwhelmed by over 200,000 reports in the first few weeks they were open. Police powers under the Coronavirus Bill quickly led to increasing roadblocks, fines, checkpoints, random stops, and a seemingly arbitrary use of powers and disruption of movement that ramped-up and made-explicit the differential policing of Black and Asian people in Britain. It is indisputable that policing shaped the lockdown as crisis - fining the already poor; spurious arrests that forced people into contact; restricting access to parks, exercise, necessary services; enforcing incarceration in already overcrowded and virus-ridden prisons.
The intensification of separation across urban landscapes similarly became more focused - with wealthy Londoners leaving the city or insulated by luxury flats that became permanent panic rooms - a precarious workforce literally servicing their needs. As lockdown under COVID-19 has confirmed, the wealthy are reliant on service workers, cleaners, childminders, and Deliveroo riders, whilst those people are required to live elsewhere. As much as those in healthcare, people in insecure jobs were suddenly figured as essential workers. Forced to continue commutes and contact, this rapidly led to the highest death rates from COVID-19 in the most deprived boroughs on the outskirts of London. The differential contiguity with death