Imperialist Strategies for Surviving Empire

More Bitterly Ironic Lessons about Zionism from the Empire Podcast

Below is an instructive excerpt from the end of a two-part episode of the Empire Podcast from last summer, one in which co-hosts (and historians) Anita Anand and William Dalrymple interview historian Maya Jasanoff about her 2011 book Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. This episode is about the founding of Sierra Leone, in the 1790s.

At first blush, the book and discussion has nothing to do with Zionism. In particular, it seems to have nothing to do with the question (as I have discussed) of whether Zionism should be regarded as illegitimate insofar as it overlaps with “settler colonial” European movements such as those that colonized The United States, Algeria or Rhodesia. And this Empire Podcast discussion also seems to have nothing to do with the political maneuvers that Zionist leaders undertook at the end of World War I to secure the Balfour Declaration, a pronouncement that (as I have reviewed) Anand and Dalrymple have no sympathy for whatsoever.

And yet.

The focus of the discussion is on the turbulent aftermath of the founding of the Freetown colony, which was set up by the British as a home for former slaves of American colonists. These men had earned their freedom fighting for the British against the Continental Army. Since then, the British had (unsurprisingly) treated these men quite shabbily in various ways (and in various places, including the Canadian Maritimes and London). And after its founding, the Freetown colony had been mismanaged, leading to more suffering. Unsurprisingly, these men turned against the Brits and rebelled.

The Brits played their part as you’d expect, and put down the rebellion. And in this effort at snuffing out rebellion, they called upon a group of Maroons from Jamaica, men who themselves descended from slaves who had gained their freedom by escaping to the highlands of Jamaica and engaging in guerilla war against the British. They subsequently signed a treaty with the British, obliging them to help the British militarily when called upon. A few years prior to the Freetown rebellion, the Maroons’ assistance had been key to putting down a major slave rebellion in Jamaica, Tacky’s Revolt. (This is discussed in a previous Empire Podcast episode, an interview of the historian Vincent Brown)

The next question to ask is obvious, and Anand asks it.

Anand:  Can I just ask? The (Jamaican) Maroons are so problematic… They were problematic … in Jamaica (where they helped the British put down Tacky’s revolt.... And (they are now crushing Freetown, the town that’s trying to be free, with free Black slaves running their own lives. Why are they doing this? Why?

Jasanoff: Empires are systems of coercion. And you have to find a way to work within the coercion in order to get anything that you might want. 

Dalrymple: And the Maroons… are…  themselves runaway slaves who headed for the highlands in Jamaica, created their own lives. And having fought the British, are allowed to remain free if they come to the aid of the British when they need them.

Anand: When they’re called!  

It’s the same question…  that we…  got about India when we talked about India, “Why did so many Indians fight for the East India Company?” It’s because..

Dalrymple: Survival

Anand: … it’s the only way to survive.

Jasanoff: You make the deals you can. You know? And what you see in so many of these cases are people who are fighting something in one scenario, will find a way to get a part of what they want. And it means making compromises in others, and so on. This is a through-line. It’s how you operate in a coercive system when you don’t have power.

OK, so what does this have to do with Zionism? Two things:

First, it reminds us that everything that anyone— especially weak, subjugated actors— does within a particular system is going to be done within the terms of that system. You do what you do to survive. You make the deals you can. And you do it in a way that essentially accepts the terms of that system.

So of course (duh!), the Zionist movement adopted the practices of the imperial-colonial system that governed at that time and place. And of course, they often framed those practices in colonial terms. The same was true for the Black colonialization movements of a century earlier (including the movements to colonize Liberia and Haiti by American freedmen).

To be sure, this wasn’t the only set of practices and frames that marked those movements. These back-to-Africa movements had distinctive elements that were deeply anti-imperial, emancipatory, and inspiring (even though they largely failed). But of course, this was also true of Zionism (which had the apparent misfortune of succeeding): As I have discussed (based on the work of Derek Penslar and others), you are missing a whole heck of a lot about Zionism (and serving to reinforce the Israel-Palestine conflict) if you reduce Zionism to settler colonialism and miss its distinctive (religiously-inflected) nationalist (and indeed, anti-imperial) elements.

Finally, did you notice that these historians are inclined to let the Maroons off the hook, from a moral perspective? At the very least, they are open to considering the possibility that the Maroons faced a difficult choice. This reminds me of the sympathy Anand and Dalrymple (and guest Kim Ghattas) showed for Hezbollah suicide bombers. As I noted then, this sympathy was sharply in contrast with the lack of sympathy they (and guest Tom Segev) showed for the Zionists and for Lord Balfour.

I further suggested that this shifting of the moral goal posts is highly problematic. If we are going to have high moral standards, we need to apply them equally. And if we are going to give moral mulligans, we need to hand those out equally too. Not just to people we regard as non-white and/or non-Western.