In many ways, this comparative volume by two self-described political historians is a return to an older way of writing imperial history. While acknowledging the importance of the cultural and postcolonial turns, the authors analyze official French and British justifications of expansion at key moments of competition between the two empires. Rhetorical conflict at the highest echelons had the power either to escalate or defuse Franco-British rivalries, and the results mattered for the colonized. In the end, of course, Britain and France never went to war. Instead, they remained squabbling co-imperialists, alternately threatening and cooperating with each other. How official statesmen managed this “co-imperialism” as international norms shifted over time is the subject of this book.
An introduction, seven chapters, and a short conclusion make up the volume, in which Martin Thomas and Richard Toye emphasize the social nature of rhetoric and define it primarily as public speech; their lodestar is J. G. A. Pocock rather than Edward Said, and to explore such speech in context they rely primarily on diplomatic correspondence and the press. Although an extensive literature comparing France and Britain exists, Thomas and Toye offer something new: a series of case studies of crisis between France and Britain in the parts of the world where the two empires rubbed up against each other most, that is, North/Northern Africa and the Middle East. Individual chapters follow on Tunisia and Egypt (1881–82), Fashoda (1898), the Moroccan Crises (1905 and 1911), the Chanak Crisis (1922), World War II crises, and Suez (1956).
Thomas and Toye open the book with the French invasion of Tunis in 1881 and its British “near-cousin” (19), the Egyptian crisis of 1882. France's hastily executed annexation of Tunisia raised Britain's hackles; Britain had vital interests of its own to defend in the Ottoman empire. British hostility toward France over Tunisia, along with rivalry between Gladstonian Liberals and Conservatives within Britain, in turn encouraged the British to go it alone in Egypt a year later. In the process, Gladstone developed “new Liberal languages of contractual duties, international cooperation, hostility to despotism, the aspiration to national freedom and the rule of (moral and actual) law” (47).
Thomas and Troye then move from “equivalent” conquests to confrontation. The famous 1898 clash between France and Britain at Fashoda was as much a rhetorical battle as it was a political triumph for the British. The outcome, given British military prominence in the Sudan, was never in doubt. In an age of volatile mass politics epitomized by the Dreyfus Affair, however, the French could not be utterly humiliated if peace in Europe was to hold. When the French bowed to the inevitable and ordered Colonel Marchand to retreat before General Kitchener's superior forces, they insisted that they alone had morality on their side—Republican France had upheld international law and preserved Europe's peace in the face of a duplicitous and rapacious Albion. In contrast, British politicians, anxious already to repair their battered relationship with la grande nation, decided to praise Marchand as an “emissary of civilization” (81).
And repair it they did. After Fashoda, co-imperialist cooperation within the context of the Entente Coloniale of 1904 became the norm until the 1920s. The two Moroccan crises are a case in point. Britain was no longer expansionist, and it proved willing to accommodate French (but certainly not German) ambitions in the region. Thus, in 1905 and again in 1911, when Germany threatened French influence in a test “of the changing diplomatic waters of inter-imperial competition” (97), France and Britain closed ranks. Lloyd George's bellicose 1911 Mansion House speech in particular convinced Berlin to back down, signifying that “rhetorical posturing supplanted inter-governmental negotiation” (121). Co-imperialism faced new challenges from the 1920s through 1945; in one of the most interesting chapters, Thomas and Troye take up the Anglo-Turkish war scare of 1922. France was pro-Kemalist Turkey, Britain pro-Greece in a poisonous dispute over who would control the Allied occupied territories overlooking the Dardenelles. In public debates and behind closed doors, Briand's republican legalism and concern for France's Arab mandates clashed with Lloyd George's impetuous adventurism; this time Britain was forced to back down.
Franco-British cooperation was immensely complicated by France's defeat in 1940 and the emergence of both Vichy and de Gaulle's Free French. Clashes between Churchill and de Gaulle erupted most seriously after 1941, yet again in the Middle East. While the British by 1945 were transitioning from empire to Commonwealth, de Gaulle sought to turn back the clock from Syria to Morocco. The French leader was painfully aware that Britain was only too willing to “speak the language of self-determination (selectively) at France's expense” (194). Yet when push came to shove, both imperial powers were determined to resist the tide of history; how else to account for “the last gasp of empire” that was Suez, which saw France and Britain acting in concert, albeit with different rhetorical justifications? The language of internationalism was ubiquitous on both sides, now that international opinion rejected the very words “imperialism” and “empire.” But where the Conservative Anthony Eden stressed Colonel Nasser's lawlessness and British traditions of working for peace, Socialist prime minister Guy Mollet insisted that the wider stability of North Africa was at stake.
A short summary cannot do justice to the richness of this lucidly written and well-illustrated contribution to what certain French historians are calling “histoire croisée”—entangled history. If “new imperial historians” have neglected high politics and relations between empires, Thomas and Toye here convincingly redress the balance. As they point out, the extensive public debates that occurred in both countries at moments of imperial crisis were absolutely critical to arriving at a position on Anglo-French issues. This said, readers with a prior knowledge of the two national politics in question will get the most out of Arguing about Empire. And, in the spirit of ongoing Anglo-French rivalry, I would note that British imperial rhetoric is more thoroughly explored in these pages than that of France. But then, who had the bigger empire?
