Communal Violence in the British Empire Disturbing the Pax [Hardcover]

Communal Violence in the British Empirefocuses on how Britons interpreted, policed, and sometimes fostered violence between different ethnic and religious communities in the empire. It also asks what these outbreaks meant for the power and prestige of Britain among subject populations.

Alternating between chapters of engaging narrative and chapters of careful, cross-colonial analysis, Mark Doyle uses outbreaks of communal violence in Ireland, the West Indies, and South Asia to uncover the inner workings of British imperialism: it's guiding assumptions, its mechanisms of control, its impact, and its limitations. He explains how Britons used communal violence to justify the imperial project even as that project was creating the conditions for more violence. Above all, this book demonstrates how communal violence exposed the limits of British power and, in time, helped lay the groundwork for the empire's collapse.

This book shows how violence, and the British state's handling thereof, was a fundamental part of the imperial experience for colonizer and colonized alike. It offers a new perspective on the workings of empire that will be of interest to any student of imperial or world history.

Mark Doyleis Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author ofFighting the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast(2009).Mark DoylesCommunal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Paxis an insightful book, as much for its methods as for the arguments and evidence it musters & he wants us to think more carefully about the ways in which liberal imperial ideology worked to sponsor the kind of unrest that, in turn, threw British supremacy into question. Victorian Studies

1. Introduction
2. The Angel Gabriel in the Tropics: British Guiana, 1856
3. Causes: How British Imperialism Conjured the Very Violence it SoulãJ