Reading Colonies-Property and Control of the British Far East

1 The Limits of Theory

Introduction

By merely identifying class struggle, Marx did not distinguish himself from a hoard of earlier historians. By attaching the existence of classes to particular phases of production throughout history, however, he did something unique: he proposed that the antagonism between the relations of production was what propelled history from one epoch (or historical phase of production) to another. The interaction of thesis and antithesis produced a new form following evolutionary science. Yet Balibar conceded that the science of history was a problematic idea because Marx had not always been perfectly explicit about his conception of history.

Marxists serially underperform on the impact of nationalism and its decolonizing implications on dialectical process out East. The narcissistic allure of Eurocentrism and the historiographical deficit of good writing on quasi-colonial China are, of course, one and the same thing. Yet the impetus, provided by racist belief in the superiority of Western industrialism, for the installation of an unbridled industrialist-capitalist mode of production in China was weak when compared to its dominance in other spheres of British colonial influence. This lack of colonial selfassurance had big, and largely underrated, implications for how race and antithetical positions on Home Rule informed colonial practices in the Eastern Empire.

If we are to make sense of twenty-first-century East Asia, we must resist the mordant temptation to refer to the modes of production from the mindset of European colonial progress. Aggressive nationalist conceptions coursing around British East Asian colonies especially, after the early 1840s, made the social relations of production indescribably complex. Overseas colonial dependencies could produce their own relations of production in a manner that sternly contested their negative racial characterization by the local British administrations. Enactment of purely metropolitan measures became quite unlikely abroad. The European blind spot caused by assumed superiority of their economic system was not, as Young recognized, a universal problem for post-war Marxists: “Sometimes Althusser seems to imply that different histories may range through different modes of production, at other times it appears that they are specific to each, an effect of the overdetermination of the social formation”. Historical development, then, could take the form of petit bourgeois accretion of capital produced by cottages and workshops, or trade in a scarce commodity, as much of it was rule of the middle class produced by fortunate co-location of water and paddlewheels, or coal and steam engines.

I made a bold claim in the preface; one that makes European conceptions of their influence on historical progress of the East less an issue of comparison or conceptual narcissism than the chafing and struggle between rival economic systems. Western and local modes of production made a compact not to stray into each other’s domain that was expressed in hybrid institutional arrangements in colonial outposts which, themselves, were the way for colonial rulers to slow down historical progress, by numbing subaltern agony or misdirecting bourgeois nationalism away from a path to decolonization.

Althusser was rather indifferent to Third World struggles and especially so when they did not comply faithfully to a Western Marxist expectation of the working class taking a central role as the only truly revolutionary class. Thus, those who felt empathy for the wretched of the earth were, in Althusser’s lexicon, guilty of historicism, racial romanticism, or humanist sympathies. They played for postcolonial compensation born of guilt rather than a major revision of ownership derived from historical process. By not willing on class warfare, or revolution culminating in epochproducing political change, the romantics preferred revelling in exceptionalism to verifying dialectical materialism.

Questioning how historical materialism operated does not make one less of a Marxist. In my case, I argue that the opposition of indigenous and colonial initiatives was stymied by colonial property policy on Far Eastern shores. Bartolovich suggested the need for an overhaul of Marxist theory when she contended that: “Marxism has viewed modernity and capitalism as inextricably bound up with each other”, but that a new formulation of historical progress is needed that “counters the idealist and dematerializing tendencies” of this most central of Marxist assumptions. Chibber’s recent contribution breathed new life into the European conception of historical materialism as an explanation for the rise of the bourgeoisie in India to take the mantle of independent government. According to him, “the theories generated by the European experience” do not have to be “overhauled or jettisoned but simply modified”. Although his reading has provoked much heated debate in the subaltern academy, its significance has been to put historical process back at the centre of postcolonial studies in a way we have not seen for many years.

Throughout the possessions of coastal China, and other British divots of the Far East, local modes of production and distribution were not torn out root and branch by the dominant clench of imperial capital. Colonials enjoyed superior rights in spheres of influence but rarely did they attain political hegemony or hold sway economically outside of their monopolies. Arrighi contended that “European expansion into Asia did not bring the Sinocentric tribute-trade system to an end … it simply influenced its inner dynamics”.6 Reduced to the politics of a single colony, namely Hong Kong, Chiu made it clear that the local colonial government was quite capable of producing political “equilibrium” despite “a very intricate political situation” via “administrative absorption” of local elites.

In Chiu’s view, dialectical tussles were not fought on an uncontested British ground but on the stage of economically savvy Chinese subjects who participated in “elite consensual government” if Home Rule was not in prospect. After 1947, however, despite over a century of economic competition within colonies answered by statutory dialectic busting, the stability that had been manufactured in their possessions out East looked vulnerable. In the end, the British colonial administrations of East Asia proved to be “bean curd tigers” in Mao’s memorable phrase. Why they had declined in the space of a century had more than a little to do with their inability to conquer and remould the pre-existing economic models encountered in the Far East. This has implications for how much of the historical progress of the Chinese colonies colonialism can be given credit for.

The classical Marxian schema has it that the mode of production of slavery, serfdom, or wage labour produced social divisions and social relations of production under which a master, nobleman, or employer respectively took ascendant positions. Marx observed that the capitalist production system reproduced itself not only through property in commodities and surplus value but also by “producing and externalising the social relation between the capitalist and the wage-earner”.

An historical materialist account of the Far East could admit colonial government alternation between neutralization of nationalist movements and capitulation to them as a way to preserve the relations of production in the favour of foreign investment in the last instance. Marx foresaw that the tenacity of the pre-capitalist mode in China and the impossibility of the British garrisoning the mainland would eventually, in times of serious strife, make the colonial grasp very shaky indeed. Most foreigners had abandoned their livelihoods and property in China by 1947 and by 1949 the British toehold in Hong Kong was all that was left of a litany of concessions that once punctuated the Chinese littoral.

Althusserian theory needs to be rewritten in the case of quasicolonial China, and the Far East generally, most particularly on topics such as the influence of race on dialectical process, but also in regard to civilization and credit where it is due for the economic advancement in the Asian colonies. Unless this is done, little sense at all can be made of the British colonial administrations offering subaltern rent control and petit bourgeois land improvement opportunities to so-called “subject races” in their Chinese colonies. The replicated policy of rent control, as I suggested in the preface, is prime territory for theorizing because, as a dialectical inhibitor aimed at the subaltern quarter, it was a compensative way for the delegates of the metropole to help keep as many extractive colonial enterprises in the imperial fold as possible.

This chapter is divided into four parts. I observe in the second part that nationalist political tensions in British colonies prompted use of a purposeful policy mechanism by the British. In the third part, I lay down the argument framework about the competing social and political forces between which British self-preservation pivoted in their East Asian possessions. Lastly, I deal with a few of the obvious challenges from Chinese history to a thesis of relative autonomy in a colonial context. In the first part it is necessary to discuss how far the dialectical model received by Althusser can take us, having regard to how the enactments of race and nationalism by colonial subjects forced British administrations to recognize the constitutional exceptionalism of the Far East in the way that dialectical interactions occurred.

1 The Limits of Theory

Introduction

By merely identifying class struggle, Marx did not distinguish himself from a hoard of earlier historians. By attaching the existence of classes to particular phases of production throughout history, however, he did something unique: he proposed that the antagonism between the relations of production was what propelled history from one epoch (or historical phase of production) to another. The interaction of thesis and antithesis produced a new form followin...

Foreword

Rohan Price's Reading Colonies-Property and Control of the British Far East is a rich journey through the labyrinthine worlds of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century British Far East, of Chinese exceptionalism, decolonization, the politics of race, and the Eurocentricity of Marxist thinking. These intellectual worlds are not my especial areas of expertise, yet I embarked on this adventure with confidence and enthusiasm, guided by Price's engaging prose, and a unifying theme that I did have some knowledge of the: the Anglo common law of property, and its adaptations to the intricacies and nuances of Britain's Far Eastern colonies and concessions.

What is beguiling yet so satisfying about Reading Colonies is its invocation of a disappeared time and place. This book presents a rare opportunity to immerse oneself in faraway legal geographies, to spatio-temporal contexts where time is distant, yet space is somehow comfortably proximate. Like Sarah Keenan's explanation of the diaspora in Subversive Property (Routledge, 2015), the removed place one inhabits in reading this book is a marvellously erudite and colourful locale, detached in its history, yet accessible in its geography. In its linear way, the common law of property law is the tool that takes the reader from then to now. Price’s deep and historical understanding of property, the politics of property, and its place in what was the British Far East, keeps this diverse and complex construct together. It informs the contours of a narrative that is important for scholars to tell.

Central to this book is the argument that "law, in the form of property policy, kept colonial administrations... in charge by alternately deflecting bourgeois and subaltern nationalism at points when their claims seemed to presage decolonization". In particular, Price identifies and evidentially cites the British use of rent control as pivotal, a tenurial device he terms a "dialectical inhibitor". By freezing rent and guaranteeing low-cost, long-term tenures, "colonial administrations of the East offered an interpellating invitation to citizens to constitutes themselves as statutory tenants in order to stave off the appeal of communist political positions and prod bourgeois nationalist exponents into muted positions on the timing of decolonization". With enormous attention to historic, theoretical, and political detail, Price portrays property as a bulwark of colonial control, a pragmatic institution that was exploited skillfully. It is this feature: the setting of common law property in its colonial milieu, a captivating and exotic blend of time and place, that makes this book (from my myopic propertied lens at least) such a compelling and important contribution to the literature.

In closing, I note that Rohan and I are colleagues at the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University. We share the everyday landscape of faculty. Away from that everyday, my foray into Reading Colonies-Property and Control of the British Far East provided a glimpse into another scholarly landscape, one we share through common membership. This book presents a comprehensive, at times nostalgic, yet above all insightful perspective, a window into the British Far East. I am delighted to pen these introductory remarks to my colleague’s fine work, and trust that you will enjoy the journey ahead.



John Page

Associate Professor

School of Law and Justice

Southern Cross University

12 December 2016

Foreword

Rohan Price's Reading Colonies-Property and Control of the British Far East is a rich journey through the labyrinthine worlds of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century British Far East, of Chinese exceptionalism, decolonization, the politics of race, and the Eurocentricity of Marxist thinking. These intellectual worlds are not my especial areas of expertise, yet I embarked on this adventure with confidence and enthusiasm, guided by Price's engaging prose, and a unifying theme that ...

Contents
Chapter 1 The Limits of Theory
Chapter 2 Reading Colonies via Property Policy
Chapter 3 Judicial Autonomy and
Post-War Rent Control
Chapter 4 Property as Anti-Nationalism or Failing Geopolitics
Chapter 5 Reading Capital, Reading Colonies
Chapter 6 Codas

Contents
Chapter 1 The Limits of Theory
Chapter 2 Reading Colonies via Property Policy
Chapter 3 Judicial Autonomy and
Post-War Rent Control
Chapter 4 Property as Anti-Nationalism or Failing Geopolitics
Chapter 5 Reading Capital, Reading Colonies
Chapter 6 Codas