Joseph McQuade - A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea

A Genealogy of Terrorism

Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the thugs, pirates, and fanatics of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of the terrorist in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.

Joseph McQuade is the RCL Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Torontos Asian Institute.

For Emily

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Acknowledgements

Throughout the process of researching and writing this book, I have accumulated a wide range of debts, both intellectual and personal. This project has evolved over the better part of a tumultuous decade, and it would be impossible to credit everyone who helped shape my ideas along the way. Needless to say, any errors or omissions are my own.

During my time at Cambridge University, where the scaffolding of this project took shape, Tim Harper was a generous and insightful supervisor who improved my work in numerous ways. My PhD examiners, Clare Anderson and Saul Dubow, provided rigorous feedback that was instrumental in helping me adapt a doctoral dissertation into a book. I would also like to thank my advisor, Alison Bashford, for helping me think through the international dimensions of the project, and the anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press for helping me to better understand my own arguments. Shruti Kapila was a great help in the early iterations of this work and provided incisive commentary that steered the research in productive directions. Special thanks are owed to Kim Wagner for reading the manuscript at multiple stages and providing patient and frank advice that has undoubtedly made this a far better book than it would otherwise have been.

For helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this work, I would like to thank Sandra den Otter, Christopher Andrew, Susan Pedersen, Surabhi Ranganathan, Devyani Gupta, and Upendra Baxi. Amitava Chowdhury has seen this research develop since its inception and has been an irreplaceable element in my intellectual development over the past eight years. If it wasnt for his encouragement, faith, and friendship at various stages throughout this process, this book might never have been completed. I am also thankful to the participants of numerous workshops, conferences, and conversations who provided advice and inspiration that helped strengthen the final product, including Nonica Datta, Deanna Heath, Lauren Benton, Durba Ghosh, Bhavani Raman, Mark Condos, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Ishan Mukherjee, and Partha Shil, as well as Christopher Bayly and Keith Jeffery, both of whom are sadly no longer with us. I would also like to thank Michael Sugarman for the countless ideas shared over coffee and cardamom buns and Sophie-Jung Kim for always being a provocative interlocutor and confidante. As a sounding board, advisor, travel companion, and roommate, Alastair McClure is unmatched. Although there is no space to mention them all by name, a wide-ranging network of friends, teachers, and colleagues have enriched this experience in more ways than I can count.