Looting: A Colonial Genealogy of the Contemporary Idea

September 21, 2020 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 27, Number 1, September 2016

Amanda Armstrong (bio)
University of Michigan

Abstract

This article deploys a genealogy of looting to mark out a history of the present. Looting entered the English language in the mid-nineteenth century. During its first decades of use, the term helped naturalize racial violence enacted along imperial infrastructures. Looting’s early history not only gives us insight into the lineaments of imperial liberalism, but also provides ways of reconceptualizing neoliberal racial capitalism. Insofar as we see the afterlives of imperialism at work in the present, we can better grasp the racial structuring of circulation – a sphere of accumulation that has, since the 1970s, gained a renewed centrality.

We can begin with two images of the recent past. In the first, a sixteen-wheeler idles on California’s I-880, having been blocked by a crowd of people who now sit on the road. A message is projected onto the side of the truck: Black Lives Matter. In the second, a different perspective: a news helicopter looks down on a Charlotte highway, whereupon protesters have opened the rear doors of a tractor trailer and are emptying its contents onto a fire in the middle of the road. Both images were captured during 2016 protests against anti-black police violence. Together, they allow us to see supply chains and police violence as parts of a whole, the blockades entailing mediated confrontations with securitization in its various senses.

The rise of the highway blockade, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, combined with the emergence of cognate tactics across various movement contexts, suggests the need for theories of the present capable of conceptualizing together dynamics of race, accumulation, and carcerality. Exemplary in this regard is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007), which considers the expansion of incarceration in 1980s California in terms of the way that the prison construction boom allowed those managing capital to address surpluses of capital, labor, and land that had emerged from the economic stagnation of the 1970s. In the making of mass incarceration, more intensive techniques of policing were developed, particularly in the Los Angeles area, and revised ideologies of race came to naturalize emergent forms of criminalization and intensities of police violence. In From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016), Elizabeth Hinton draws the story of mass incarceration back two decades to the 1960s, when, in the wake of urban uprisings, state officials introduced into anti-poverty initiatives a series of policing and surveillance devices, which over the 1970s would emerge as dominant features of state intervention in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods. Such was the context for the racially disproportionate and exponential growth in prison populations beginning in the late 1970s. Hinton’s work thus shows some of the concrete mechanisms by which the postwar welfare state was converted into a carceral apparatus. The history of this carceral turn tracks fairly closely with historical narratives of postwar political-economic restructurings, which generally hinge around the 1971 collapse of profitability in metropolitan industries. This drop in profitability sparked a management offensive, the effects of which would be codified by the 1980s in neoliberal state reforms and in new strategies of circulation-oriented accumulation, including financialization, the privatization of transit infrastructures, real estate development (including in prisons), and globally distributed just-in-time production.

An August 1977 Time cover article, “The American Underclass,” signaled the combined carceral and circulatory turns outlined above, while also molding for its readers an ideological relation to such historical transformations:

The barricades are seen only fleetingly by most middle-class Americans as they rush by in their cars or commuter trains—doors locked, windows closed, moving fast. But out there is a different world, a place of pock-marked streets, gutted tenements and broken hopes. … Behind its crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass…. If you keep giving people stuff, that’s why they loot when the lights go out. Working is out of their minds. They think everything must be taken. (Qtd. in Mitchell 250–1.)

In opening with a reference to the barricades, the article gestures back to Watts, Newark, Detroit, and other uprisings of the 1960s, as well as to the more immediate, widespread looting of July 1977, which took shape in the midst of an electricity blackout in New York City. This opening figure of the barricade, a technology for stopping up circulation, also sets off the figures of mobility that follow: the “cars or commuter trains—doors locked, windows closed, moving fast,” which allow “middle-class Americans” to see, fleetingly, the signs of the underclass. The magazine’s readers are assumed to rely for their safety and mobility on such motorized vehicles and transit infrastructures, whose smooth operation, the essay implies, is threatened by barricades, blackouts, and looting alike. The article’s reference to cars is particularly notable in the context of the 1977 blackout, as a widely reported tactic of those lifting goods from stores was to hitch cars to metal security grates and then to drive forward and drag the grates off storefronts, thereby freeing up what was inside.

Following Gilmore’s account of racism as the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” we can read the August 1977 Time cover article as helping remake racist ideology at a moment of historical transition. The article naturalizes racialized populations’ vulnerability to premature death in a number of ways, including by crafting an imaginative grid that allows acts of direct appropriation– “looting” – to appear worthy of criminalization and violent repression; by recoding surplus populations’ separation from the wage and state-mediated social goods as a failure of personal responsibility rather than an effect of structural dynamics and political choices; and by suggesting that lives worth regarding (those whose perspective the article takes up) are sustained by a system of circulation that operates at some remove from racialized populations. The article associates life-worth-living with infrastructures of circulation, while suggesting that those who would barricade, block-up, repurpose, or take from circulatory networks are threats to the health and well-being of those whose lives are worthy of regard. In this way, the criminalization and even police murder of racialized individuals can appear not as an attack on lives that matter, but rather as force exerted for the protection of life.

In what follows, I am interested in thinking genealogically about the contemporary ideological complex – apparent in “The Underclass” – that is stitched together in part through the notion of looting. The origins and early history of the term looting perhaps hint at a structural similarity between the second British Empire and the post-1970s US carceral state. Across the second British Empire, and particularly in colonial India – where looting entered the English language in the 1840s – dynamics of circulation-oriented accumulation, racialization, and carcerality were woven together and helped constitute a contradictory imperial liberalism. As Lisa Lowe shows in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), imperial liberalism, justified on the basis of the purported capacity of the British to oversee global circuits of trade and migration effectively, involved the making of new mechanisms for regulating and hierarchizing the movements of populations. Under British rule, so-called free trade and liberty of movement were materialized through racializing technologies, including pass laws, labor market segmentation, the cordoning of urban space, the recrudescence of indentured labor regimes, differential modes of policing and border enforcement, and the segregation of rail stations and carriages. Emergent racial regimes in the era of imperial liberalism thus were effects in part of the spatial delineation of populations realized on and through transit infrastructures.1 The category of looting was suited to these racial regimes, as it marked a range of acts, often undertaken on or near transit systems, that appeared to contravene the racially hierarchizing imperatives of imperial circulatory networks. The category not only offered a way to grasp disparate acts that unsettled prevailing regimes of circulation and racial hierarchies, but also, as I discuss, was instrumental to the violent repression of such acts and their agents.2 By tracking looting’s early contexts of use, we see how this colonial keyword was variously made to act in concert with other technologies of imperial power.

This journey through the archives of looting’s early life not only gives us insight into the lineaments of imperial liberalism, nor does it merely offer a case study with which to think through relations between language and other technologies of power; rather, above all, this study also provides ways of reconceptualizing neoliberal racial capitalism. Insofar as we see the afterlives of imperialism at work in post-1970s conjunctures, we are able more clearly to grasp the carceral underpinnings of contemporary circulatory networks and the racial structuring of circulation – a sphere of accumulation that has, since the 1970s, gained a renewed centrality. With respect to the state, circulatory networks have undergone an apparently contradictory set of transformations since the 1970s: on the one hand, they have been restructured to more directly align with the interests of capital, often by being sold off to private corporations; on the other hand, they have been further securitized, both by state and non-state agencies. As they have become more central to processes of accumulation, transit infrastructures have also become more salient as sites of racist state violence.

The history of looting helps bring into view the racial logics sedimented in, and reproduced through, the infrastructures that daily undergird the movements of the present, showing how biopolitical and necropolitical modes of governance have been built out of, and maintain integral links to, infrastructural imperatives. This history also suggests the importance of situating accounts of nineteenth-century racial regimes and their aftereffects within a transnational and imperial frame – as modeled by Saidiya Hartman’s work on the afterlives of slavery in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008). Hartman’s work links up with a body of research, at once emergent and longstanding, that studies the ways that legacies of racial slavery continue to shape regimes of governance and/as carcerality, particularly in the US (Hartman, Scenes ; Davis; Dillon). This research has shown the ways that carceral systems were built from technologies of surveillance and control associated with chattel slavery, and thus the ways that policing and prison systems have been conditioned, up through the present, by histories of racial slavery and its co-implicated anti-black discursive formations. Such a historical perspective helps clarify the inadequacy of reformist strategies that rest upon a distinction between the excesses of racist police violence, on the one hand, and an imagined, non-socially hierarchizing essence of policing that could be recuperated through legislative or judicial intervention, on the other hand. Research on the afterlives of slavery shows that policing can only be other than white supremacist if it is abolished. A similar effort to show the constitutive imbrication of circulatory systems and regimes of racial subordination animates this essay.

In this, the essay builds upon Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), which argues not only that circulatory networks are integrally bound up with racial subordination, but also that the sphere of circulation (as opposed to production) has, since the 1960s, come to form the central terrain of social struggle, which cannot be other than struggle for black liberation, which in turn cannot be other than struggle against state violence – violence that is at once ubiquitous, devastating, and normalized across such circulatory networks. Clover’s account of recent dynamics of capital accumulation and social antagonism is undergirded by an ambitious periodization of the history of capital – a periodization that marks out shifts in the leading spheres of accumulation (production versus circulation), in the prevailing modes of class struggle (strikes versus riots), and in the relative proximity of the state to proletarian social reproduction. With respect to the first two, Clover tells a story of the rise and fall of production-centered accumulation between 1840 and 1970 that is linked to a story of the emergence and decline of the strike as a central oppositional tactic. In this account, the 130-year phase of productioncentered accumulation appears to have been bounded by stretches of circulation-oriented accumulation and by the oppositional tactic tailored to regimes of circulation – namely, the riot – such that the eighteenth-century waves of export and grain riots appear to rhyme with cycles of anti-racist rioting that have unfolded since the 1960s. These cycles have not dissipated up through the present, as rioting and cognate tactics appear to hold priority in struggles against the nascent far right: from Berkeley to the Parisian banlieue, riots against the right have shaped this most recent Spring.

Against this framework of the rhyming early modern and postmodern eras, Clover overlays a linear account of changes in the relative proximity of the state to proletarian social reproduction, in which an early-modern non-invasiveness of the state (revealed most starkly in the absence of standing police forces) gives way over time to a ubiquitous presence of the state (revealed, again, in the ramification and militarization of racialized policing, but also in the management of education, healthcare, and other socially reproductive spheres). This narrative of the becoming-ubiquitous of the state helps explain why recent riots, despite their determination by the dynamics of accumulation, appear responsive to forces typically understood as political rather than economic: above all, racialized policing. Taking a cue from Stuart Hall’s assertion that “race is the modality in which class is lived,” however, Clover argues that the racialization of surplus populations in an era of circulation-centered accumulation creates a situation in which class antagonism appears most starkly in the riotous confrontation, on the ground of circulatory systems, between black populations and the police. Reading a passage of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “Riot,” Clover asserts:

Insofar as riot is a category recognized by state, law, and market, blacks coming down the street will always be a riot, or the moment before, or the moment after. Both socially and economically, blackness here is surplus – to the state, to the law, to the market. It promises always to exceed order, regulation. The riot is an instance of black life in its exclusions and at the same time in its character as surplus, cordoned into the noisy sphere of circulation, forced there to defend itself against the social and bodily death on offer. A surplus rebellion. (122)

This essay engages genealogically with the surplus rebellions of the present, and in doing so offers some critical revisions to periodization such as Clover’s of modern histories of capital, race, and state violence. By considering the early history of looting, we see how a significant intensification of racialized policing took shape in the context of late-nineteenth-century imperial relations, particularly in colonial sites where circulation was central to dynamics of accumulation. While Clover generally restricts his analysis to the capitalist core, and is careful to acknowledge that his periodizing claims likely do not hold up for colonial and post-colonial contexts, he does allow that the surplus rebellions of the present bear a genealogical relation to colonial histories, noting that the “arrival of riot to the deindustrializing west” is a double arrival, having “come down from the export and marketplace riots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and come inward from periphery to core (167). My reading of looting’s early history shows the way that aspects of carceral regimes, built up around colonial systems of circulation, “came inward” from periphery to core at the fin de siècle, and more generally the way that social antagonisms around circulation crisscrossed core and periphery during the period that Clover casts as the heyday of production-centered struggles. This inquiry helps clarify how the state, and particularly the policing power of the state, ramified through circulatory networks and thus came to play a more central role in orchestrating the lives and premature deaths of proletarianized and racialized populations at the dawn of the twentieth century – a role that such power has not ceased to play up through the present.

A Genealogy of Looting

“Looting,” the English gerund, derives from the Hindi verb lut (to rob). The word entered the imperial archive during the Anglo-Sikh wars, clothed in the anxious, belligerent tones of British colonial administrators. An 1845 London Times report from India records General Napier’s reply to insurgent Bijar Khan’s proposed terms of surrender: “Let him and his followers all come in and [lay down their arms]. I may then spare his life and grant him, perhaps, some land on the other side of the Indus – but if I hear any more of looting and murder, I’ll hang every one of them” (“India,” 21 April 1845). Elsewhere in the same report, we read that Napier’s war strategy had been to “drive [Khan] gradually to starvation.” This early archival appearance of looting anticipates the keyword’s mature colonial career. Late-nineteenth-century British administrators in India responded to recurrent, devastating famines—themselves exacerbated by colonial enclosures and trade policies that encouraged the export of grain via rail systems—by shoring up the capacity of the state to repress grain riots. Reports from British India register acute anxiety at the looting of food stores: “The second grain riot at Kurnool appears to have been more serious than the former one. The looting of shops went on for six hours” (“India,” 23 Nov. 1891); “Prospects considered serious in Behar. Grain riot at Sholapur; Bombay police fired, killed one, wounded two” (“Latest Intelligence”).3 In the 1890s, armed guards regularly accompanied grain shipments by rail, and colonial administrators established a system of work camps to incarcerate those suffering from famines (M. Davis, 120–170; Guha and Gadgil, 141–177; Premansukumar; Arnold).4 In this way, late-nineteenth-century British imperial responses to famines—characterized by measures that kept hungry people from accessing grain stocks, including by threats of violence, and more generally by the ramification of carceral technologies—echoed Napier’s 1845 acts of war. While imperial efforts to discipline looting thus resonated across historical distance, such efforts were materialized through discrepant practices, protocols, and institutional contexts of rule, and were imbricated with non-identical discursive complexes, such that the martial associations of looting evident at the midcentury gave way, by the end of the century, to discursive complexes conditioned by infrastructural imperatives. The vignettes to follow track this transformation, while also demonstrating how the notion of looting acquired layers of meaning as it moved across colonial contexts and from colony to metropole up through the First World War.

Over its first decades of use, looting was made into a civilizational marker. While British writers would occasionally concede that their soldiers had engaged in looting campaigns (the “scenes of the Crimea” were sometimes referenced in this regard [“China,” 26 Feb. 1858]), they would nevertheless find some way to shield British soldiers – “their boys” – from the stigma of the act, often projecting it onto rival imperial armies, colonial forces, and/or colonized subjects.5 Letters and parliamentary transcripts published in the Times concerning the 1860 Anglo-French looting of the Summer Palace, for example, are unanimous in asserting that French soldiers had acted first, British men having only then reluctantly taken part in their own, more orderly sort of pillage.6 While French soldiers’ having broken ranks to loot the Summer Palace was seen as a strike against the otherwise well-developed state of civilization across the Channel, looting enacted by sipahis (colonial Indian soldiers) was viewed rather differently, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the 1857 uprising led by colonial Indian soldiers working for the East India Company. Reporting on the 1858 occupation of the port city of Guangzhou (Canton), a Times special correspondent notes that recently arrived sipahis “addicted themselves to looting.” The correspondent then devotes a few sentences to exculpating French guards for having shot three of these newly arrived colonial Indian soldiers:

The evidence upon the court of inquiry which followed was very contradictory; but that they were looting and that they resisted the police were two uncontested facts. Perhaps the French were hasty; but a Sepoy in his undress is undressed in the literal sense of the term, and it is not quite to be wondered at that the Frenchmen had recourse to their arms to rid themselves of the blows and brickbats of a crowd of half-naked black ruffians. No two human creatures can be more different than a Sepoy dressed in his red coat and faultlessly clean belt, and the same animal stalking about on his long, lank shanks with a white girdle round his loins. (“China,” 30 Mar. 1858.)

Colonial Indian soldiers’ looting is read here through a white supremacist ontological grid. The act appears to nullify sipahis’ conditional inclusion in the order of humanity, the latter indexed by the red coat and clean belt of the service. We see a similar process of racialization at work in an article published a few months later, which suggested that “the Sikhs” are “versed so far in looting that it is said one of them can appraise the value of articles in a house by walking past the hall-door, and that they can ‘smell’ gold, silver, and precious stones” (“The British Army”).7 Here, a propensity to loot is figured as a group trait, cultivated in the sensorium over generations. This racialized association of looting with Sikh soldiers functioned variously within colonial discourse. First, it projected onto a subordinate group in the colonial army practices of looting that were sanctioned for, and widely practiced by, British officers and troopers: the ubiquitous disavowal of the latter groups’ looting (“we know our boys loot, but …”) was enabled in part by the insistent condemnation and scrutiny of the former group’s looting. The racialized association of Sikh soldiers with looting also contributed to a discourse of masculinity in late-nineteenth-century colonial India that sharply distinguished between so-called “martial races” (including Sikhs) and purportedly effeminate groups of educated men, particularly Bengali men. As Mrinalini Sinha has shown, this colonial discourse of masculinity worked to exclude Indian men from posts in the colonial bureaucracy, from volunteering regiments, and from work in the higher grades of the railways (69–99). Insofar as looting was framed as a group trait cultivated over generations, the racialized polarity of essentially martial and non-martial groups, along with the forms of exclusion and subordination enabled by this polarization, could be maintained.

Up through the 1870s, looting almost invariably appeared in a cluster of martial terms, even where the event at issue did not involve armed men or battlefields.8 An 1879 “Letter to the Editor,” for example, uses martial metaphors in arguing for the abolition of the English county fair:

I live in East Grinstead, a sort of hobbledehoy village through which runs the high road between London and Lewes. Twice a year the street is blockaded by the undiluted offscouring of the home counties. Neither your carriage nor your wife can pass through it. A state of siege is proclaimed, and we endure it as best we can. The great majority of the respectable inhabitants are against it—as well they may be—for their horses are stolen, their hen-roosts robbed, their pockets picked—while our railway offers great facilities to London thieves to pay for their return ticket by contributing their talents to the process of general looting. (Quousque Tandem?)

Here, the county fair—a “public nuisance and anachronism,” insofar as transit improvements, “monthly stock markets, and other results of civilization have entirely superseded the necessity of congregating spavined horses and half-starved cattle in a public thoroughfare”—appears as the site of a pitched battle, involving a blockade, a state of siege, and general looting. This “Letter to the Editor” is, notably, the first piece in the London Times wherein “looting” is used to describe actions taken by Britons in Britain. Such a leap to the metropole appears to be enabled by the discourse of criminality. The antagonists in the battle of East Grinstead are described as “thieves” and as the “undiluted offscouring of the home counties”—as a criminal underclass that ironically utilizes the above-mentioned transit infrastructures (“the rail, macadam, the improved communication between this place and that”) to congregate, blockade the street, stop up carriages, and make off with the wealth of respectable villagers.

The link drawn here between looting and modern transit networks appears in a range of contexts over the 1870s and ’80s – a transitional period, as far as the discourse of looting is concerned. In April 1885, telegrams from Panama to London warned “that communication across the isthmus remains interrupted, and that there are rumors that looting is going on along the Panama Railway lines” (“Central America”). The uprising in Panama shortly thereafter faced repression by US marines acting in the name of a treaty the US government had signed in 1846 with the Republic of New Granada:

The United States are not concerned with insurrections or civil wars in Central America, but they have guaranteed by treaty free and uninterrupted transit across the isthmus. For the present this is at an end, since, notwithstanding the defeat of the insurgents with great loss at Aspinwall (Colón), their marauding bands are looting the places along the line and constantly cutting the telegraph wires. (“Central America, Although”)

The counterinsurgent violence enacted by US forces was directed in particular against black people:

Several negroes engaged in looting premises which were burning were shot down by the marines who had been landed from the Galena. … It is said that 150 Jamaicans were shot. The general feeling expressed by the sufferers is that, had the Jamaicans not joined the rebels, the city would not have been fired. (“The Insurrection”)

Gratuitous anti-black violence is here retroactively justified through the racialization of particular insurgent tactics (looting and burning infrastructure, above all).9 The tactic of destroying rail and telegraph lines in the context of nationalist or anti-imperialist uprisings was widely deployed over the 1880s and ’90s, following a burst of imperial rail investment and construction across the global South. In 1895, insurgents in Cuba, for example, looted and sabotaged rail lines upon which Spanish reinforcements were travelling (“The Revolt”). Attacks such as these spurred imperial powers to seek out new ways to secure transit infrastructures and nodes (as well as, ultimately, means for making imperial forces less dependent upon such vulnerable infrastructures, i.e., via aerial transit and bombing10). The securing of strategic transit corridors had been a longstanding imperial priority, as evidenced, for one, by the treaty signed between the US and the Republic of New Granada in 1846, a few years prior to the construction of the Panama Railway.11 Lauren Benton has argued that over the long span of 1400–1900, European imperial rule tended not to be organized in terms of a logic of territoriality, but rather to involve a somewhat more patchwork effort to secure corridors of control: “Enclaves such as missions, trading posts, towns, and garrisons were strung like beads along interconnected corridors” (10). But with the construction of new ports, railways, and telegraph lines over the late nineteenth century, which both ramified key transit networks and involved the dispersal of valuable fixed capital, imperial administrators felt the need to experiment with novel techniques for controlling these ever-expanding networks, above all through the establishment of standing police forces throughout a given territory. As Carolyn Steedman’s work on the history of policing in Victorian Britain has shown, the establishment of standing police forces in every British county and borough did not occur until the mid-1850s, when rail lines had begun to link previously isolated regions into a national network (21–26). Meanwhile, in colonial India, as massive construction projects laid rail networks across much of the subcontinent following the uprising of 1857–58, higher grade railway employees – uniformly British or Anglo-Indian in origin – were deputized and armed by the colonial state to police segregated railway carriages, stations, and lines (Das and Verma; Goswami). Thus, the quantitative increase in track mileage across the second British Empire was linked with qualitative changes in the modes of imperial governance, including more concerted turns to logics of territoriality, materialized through dispersed, standing police forces.

A particularly striking illustration of the way that territorial logics of rule were associated with late-nineteenth-century railway imperialism appears in a correspondent’s report from Egypt in 1884:12

It was most unlikely, indeed well nigh impossible, that in the event of a rebel advance on Upper Egypt Halfa would be in the enemy’s line of march, and the poverty of the village rendered it secure against the raids of looting parties. The railway stores, however, needed protection, against foes, as was then thought, nearer to us than the Mahdi’s declared leaders …. Along the bank, between the station and the village, lies scattered nigh £1,000,000 worth of railway material of every kind …. The arrival of English troops has worked numerous and rapid changes in the appearance of Halfa. The hitherto slumbering railway workshops are now lively and hideous with the grating of saws on metal, the squeaking of steam drills, the clatter of hammers, and all the thousand sounds attendant on active labour. (“The Nile”)

The first two lines here recall the “Letter to the Editor” on county fairs, insofar as they suggest that the threat of looting along the railways comes not only from armed forces, but also from more dispersed, anonymous populations, the “offscouring of the home counties” in the letter’s version. The report on Halfa’s rail station eschews such colorful language, opting instead to mark the threat more obliquely, as “foes … nearer to us than the Mahdi’s declared leaders.” With this line, the report’s author alludes at once to a generalized threat of brigandage and to the local context (and to earlier reports on Egypt published by the Times), insofar as British officers had blamed the looting of Alexandria and adjacent cities in 1882 on troops opposed to European rule, who purportedly had disguised themselves as local residents.13 In any case, the underlying view is that railway infrastructures are perpetually vulnerable to looting, whether by armies or by local, non-insurgent populations.14 As the dispatch from Halfa tells it, British officers’ recognition of this generalized vulnerability spurred them to occupy the rail station and to compel Egyptian men to work on the materials ready to hand—a decision also explained in terms of a desire to overcome the forces of rust and idleness. Given their capital-intensity and propensity to fall into disrepair, railway infrastructures thus seemed to call for the establishment of territorially dispersed forms of governance and labor discipline. The emergence, during the era of high imperialism, of such territorial logics of rule, linked to the ramification of capital-intensive circulatory systems, thus marked a key shift in the relation of the state to proletarianized and colonized populations. To use Joshua Clover’s language: with the fin de siècle turn toward territorial logics of rule, the state moved nearer to such populations, orchestrating in more intimate ways their lives and premature deaths.

From Colony to Metropole

In the parade of nineteenth-century references to looting reproduced above, we’ve seen that certain periodizing distinctions can be made with respect to patterns of usage. In the decade or so after the 1857 uprising of colonial Indian soldiers, questions of military discipline were centrally at issue in most of the references to looting that appeared in the Times of London, the primary source base for this study.15 By the 1880s, while such issues had not fallen out of looting’s discursive field, the problem of anonymous expropriations along trade infrastructures had come to the fore. Cutting across these broad, temporally defined clusters, though, were certain persistent demarcations, some of which come into focus insofar as we consider looting’s recognized agents and legitimate punishments. With respect to the former, there was a persistent tendency to racialize looting—that is, to assume that racialized populations were prone to looting, while unseeing the systemic looting perpetrated by white Europeans. Some seepage between these racial demarcations occurs, however, through discourses of criminality and, secondarily, of class.

In 1879, a letter writer could express anxiety at looting perpetrated by the “undiluted offscouring of the home counties.” The Times also ran stories on Italian railway workers’ looting of respectable passengers’ bags (“Luggage”), and participated in the general uproar following an 1886 unemployment demonstration held in London by the Social Democratic Federation, which turned by late evening into a window-smashing and goods-taking affair along West End boulevards. At the conclusion of unsuccessful legal prosecutions of SDF agitators, official opinion and the public discourse of the radicals were in consensus that the looting had been perpetrated by an incorrigible criminal element that had opportunistically attached itself to the demonstrations, and thus had little if anything to do with the properly political concerns over unemployment articulated by those who stood before the crowd.16

The riot of 1886 also sparked a debate over municipal policing. While at least one “Letter to the Editor” criticized police use of force against demonstrators, the overwhelming majority of pieces published in the Times expressed outrage that the police had not acted more effectively to prevent or repress rioting. Hearings were held and reforms were announced. The Metropolitan police force was to be expanded, communications and coordination between different divisions of the force were to be improved, and the use of mounted police was to be considered for crowd control situations. While such debates about policing were peppered with references to the policing of colonies, and while coordination between the cavalry and mounted police forces was proposed,17 participants generally took for granted that the use of force against looters and rioters in the metropole should be restrained, and that, except in extreme cases, lethal force should remain out of bounds. This shared view would be tested in 1893, when two miners in Featherstone were shot and killed by soldiers called out to repress a riot at the colliery. Public outcry compelled parliament to hold an inquiry into the shootings, which resulted in the imposition of restrictive conditions on the domestic deployment of military forces—conditions that, as we will see in relation to the mass strikes of 1910–12, were evidently subject to certain unstated exceptions.

Meanwhile, in the colonies, norms concerning legitimate repressive violence were less stringent and in some ways haphazard. At times, British soldiers faced military discipline for unauthorized forms of looting; at other times, superiors looked the other way, or retroactively authorized the looting that had occurred.18 In contrast, when looters were construed as insurgents or military antagonists, imperial administrators sanctioned the use of fatal violence against suspected looters. In 1886, the same year as the Times was hosting debates about the use of force against London rioters, a series of reports from Burma matter-of-factly noted the number of looters shot and killed by military police: “Colonel Middleton came upon the dacoits while looting a village, and gave them a severe lesson, killing and wounding 30, nearly all Shans” (“Burmah”).19 As we have already seen, logics of race were reproduced by, and enabling of, these discrepant norms of sanctioned violence. Racialized populations—particularly those read as black—were seen by imperial administrators as predisposed to looting, just as their unauthorized acts of taking—that is, their efforts at social reproduction—were more likely to be seen as acts of war, whether or not those doing the taking understood themselves to be insurgent subjects.

The tensions and racializing fissures of this late imperial discourse of looting were activated and set dramatically in motion following an early-twentieth-century wave of mass strikes in Britain. From 1910 to 1912, British miners, transit employees, and their working-class supporters led a wave of mass strikes that threw key industries of the metropolitan economy into crisis and that brought about pre-revolutionary sequences in a number of British cities and regions, from Liverpool to South Wales. This sequence of class struggles and the aftershocks it registered in parliament can help us see how the late colonial discourse of looting reshaped the discursive terrain of the metropole, but also how discussions of looting in the metropole became occasions for relatively privileged actors to re-articulate discrepant norms of sanctioned violence, or, in Gilmore’s terms, to produce and exploit “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In response to the mass strikes of 1910–12, Winston Churchill and other representatives of Westminster infamously called the military against mass picketers, first during the 1910 Rhondda riots in the South Wales coalfields, and then again during the transit strikes of 1911. In the small South Wales city of Llanelli, soldiers deployed to ensure the continued operation of railway systems shot and killed two picketers in the summer of 1911. The attack followed bayonet charges against mass picketers, who had gathered at the central rail crossing in order to prevent trains from passing. After the shooting, soldiers retired to the safety of the station, while enraged working class residents looted and burned a hundred or so railway carriages, as well as the warehouse owned by a local notable seen as having encouraged the deployment of soldiers.

Around the time of the shooting in Llanelli, national railway unionists agreed to state-mediated settlement terms with rail owners, winning little more than a government inquiry into the question of union recognition. The close of the strike was followed by protests in London against military repression, by a wave of anti-Semitic looting in South Wales (which followed the anti-Chinese riots that had occurred in Cardiff around the time of the strike [Greenberg; “Renewed Riots”; Cayford]), and by parliamentary debates on the legitimacy of Churchill’s decision to deploy troops. Keir Hardie, an Independent Labour representative from Methyr Tydfil, took up the case against the Home Secretary.

In attempting to justify the deployment of troops, Churchill portrayed the national railway strike as a threat to the survival of working class British populations, insisting that, “had the stoppage continued for a fortnight, it is, I think, almost certain that in a great many places to a total lack of employment would have been added absolute starvation. … I do not know whether in the history of the world such a danger has been known” (“House of Commons”). Given the threat of mass starvation, Churchill implied, two working class deaths at the hands of military forces acting to ensure the circulation of trains should be weighed as relatively minor, justifiable losses. In suggesting that the strike threatened mass starvation to an historically-unprecedented degree, and that the smooth circulation of transit infrastructures ensured the proper distribution of food to subordinate populations, Churchill at once repurposed an ideological complex about the salvific effects of rail circulation for starving populations that had been built up by imperial administrators in response to recurrent famines in the Indian subcontinent, and sought to draw his audience toward a shared forgetting of these same recurrent, devastating famines in late-nineteenth-century South Asia—famines that British imperial efforts, including the expansion and securitization of railway networks, had exacerbated and prolonged. With respect to both colonial and metropolitan contexts then, imperial administrators came to maintain a fantasy that the smooth circulation of transit infrastructures indexed the health of local populations. Looting, the direct appropriation of enclosed goods by racialized, subaltern, and/or working-class populations, threatened to puncture this fantasy, suggesting possibilities of taking, sharing, and reproducing life beyond the commodity form or imperial order.

While Churchill’s overheated defense of his decision to deploy troops involved the active forgetting of British imperial responsibility for famines in South Asia, Keir Hardie’s polemics entailed disavowals of their own. Much more than Churchill, Hardie found use for colonial comparisons. In attempting to downplay the significance of working class looting in South Wales, for example, Hardie noted: “Some working men’s wives had carried away some clothes. Did the right hon. gentleman put that forward as a justification for the employment of troops? Did he forget that during the Boxer rising at Peking, Ladies of title and of presumably good character looted the Palace to an extent that would shame a working man’s wife?” (“House of Commons”. Then again, in defending Llanelli strikers’ efforts to stop trains, Hardie insisted that those on strike

did not go and shoot the driver or pelt the train with stones. They planted themselves on the rails. There was no finer example of British heroism in history than that of these men placing their lives in peril to advance the cause. (Laughter.) Had that same thing been done on the field of battle hon. members on both sides of the House would have shouted about the courage of the British bulldog. But it was done in a battle which would have far greater consequences for our country than any battle against foreign enemies. (“House of Commons”)

Hardie attempted in these two moments to cast strikers’ actions in a favorable light by comparing them with the sanctioned—if not, in the former case, widely celebrated—activities of imperial civilians and soldiers. Perhaps in aligning syndicalist and imperial violence, Hardie was seeking to avoid the sort of backlash he had faced in 1908 from settlers in South Africa and from public opinion in Britain for having criticizing British policy in India while on a colonial tour (Hyslop 349–50). In any case, his efforts appear to have been met with scorn in the chamber. Presumably other members of parliament found it absurd to compare working class radicals with imperial soldiers or with Ladies of title; perhaps they also saw in his remarks an implicit challenge to the colonial unseeing of white looting. But more was at stake in Hardie’s colonial comparisons than a challenge to imperial bad faith: his comparisons can also be read symptomatically, as efforts to disavow forms of racial violence in which he, as a representative of Labour, was implicated. As mentioned in passing above, the 1911 Seamen’s strike in Cardiff was characterized by anti-Chinese riots, in which strikers attacked all of the laundries in town owned by Chinese immigrants. Hardie’s attempt to compare looters favorably to the “Ladies of title” whose looting of the Forbidden City would have “shamed a working man’s wife” ironically invoked the specter of more immediate and embodied anti-Chinese violence in South Wales, perpetrated by those whom Hardie sought to defend.

The case of Keir Hardie in 1911 opens up the matter of European class radicalisms’ historical complicities with empire and white supremacy, in this way complicating a too-easy alignment of metropolitan working class expropriations with anti-colonial and anti-racist insurgencies—an alignment implied in the above paragraph’s reference to the possibilities of taking, sharing, and reproducing life glimpsed in histories of looting. In his debate with Churchill, Hardie drew upon colonial frameworks in order to insist that white working class British subjects should be granted certain prerogatives, including to acts of direct appropriation and to embodied violence in defense of their interests – prerogatives denied as a matter of course to colonized and racialized populations. In this way, his class radicalism was bound up with a defense of imperial whiteness. The coloniality of Hardie’s justificatory discourse of looting should give those of us interested in recuperating this tactic for ongoing struggles occasion for critical reflexivity. For if, as Joshua Clover notes, the riot has “come down” to the deindustrialized West from a long history of class radicalism, and has “come inward” from periphery to core, part of what this historical lineage presents to us is a history of the white riot, or a history of imperial looting. An adequate theory of looting – including a theory attentive to the potentials of this tactic in the present – should thus account for the coloniality of the category. Any emancipatory recuperation of looting as a tactic of class struggle must contend with the category’s longstanding co-implication with colonial relations of power, passing through this history rather than attempting to articulate, sui generis, a politics of looting for our deindustrialized, post-colonial present.

The notion of looting entered the English language in nineteenth-century colonial India, a deindustrialized carceral society, and was carried across the second British Empire by telegraph lines, trains, and steamships, which were at once infrastructures of circulation, media of communication, and technologies of war. The term was integral to emergent discourses of race, as it worked to naturalize group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death: pervasive white looting was systemically naturalized and disavowed; acts of direct appropriation by racialized populations, particularly on and around transit infrastructures, were seen as looting and formed a pretext for state murder. These historical realities continue to weigh on the present. The early history of looting helps us see the ways the (discursive, infrastructural, and other) technologies of circulation that daily animate the present are form-determined by the racial necropolitics of (post)modernity.

Footnotes

1. The formulation here concerning the racializing effects of transit and other infrastructures in colonial contexts is indebted to Nemser.

2. Another such category, instrumental to the East India Company’s policing of road systems in 1830s India, was “Thuggee” (an etymological predecessor of the contemporary anti-Black category, “thug”), which referred to an alleged cult whose members were said to engage in highway robbery and murder.

3. See also Our Correspondent.

4. On the guarding of food stores, see also FB.

5. The family metaphor here is not accidental. British fathers not infrequently composed Letters to the Editor defending their sons from charges of looting. Thomas Cape, for example, wrote the Times in 1858 to note that he had

seen private letters and Indian newspapers with reference to this sad affair, but more immediately connected with my son, and I feel assured that nothing was further from the thoughts of those two young and gallant officers than ‘looting.’ One letter was from my son’s superior officer, who speaks in the highest terms of his good conduct and soldierly bearing. It appears to me, from the concurrent testimony of many persons, that there is not the slightest ground for such a charge. It is very hard upon a bereaved father, having lost a brave and beloved son, only 19 years and a half old, to see his character thus reflected upon.

See also The Father of a Soldier.

6. See, for example, “House of Commons, Friday, May 27”; D et al.; One Who Was There; Foley.

7. On the racialization of looting, see also “Holborn”; “The Rebels.”

8. An interesting exception, from 1861:

The Presidency of Bengal, as will be seen by the letter of our Calcutta correspondent, is in a very angry state. From the largest to the smallest every pot is bubbling away at boiling point. There is not a contented mind or tranquil tongue in all the province. In the rural districts the Indigo manufacturers have shut up their factories for lack of labourers, and are crying aloud to be delivered from Mr. Grant, to whom they attribute that their Ryots have turned out upon the “strike,” looting and pillaging and blockading the factories against all who were willing to labour. (“London”)

9. On gratuitous anti-black violence, see Wilderson; RL.

10. Cf. Lindqvist.

11. The railway was constructed between 1852 and 1855. Something like 12,000 workers died over the three-year construction process.

12. On railway imperialism, see Davis et al.

13. See, for example: Our Correspondents, “The Destruction”; “Egypt,” 17 July 1882; “Egypt,” 24 Aug. 1882; “(By Eastern Company’s Cable”; and “Egypt,” 22 Sept. 1882; “House of Lords.”

14. An illustration of this perennial exposure of rail infrastructures to minor acts of appropriation can be found in recent reports of organized efforts to take goods from train cars stationed overnight along Chicago’s rail lines and in yards. See, for example, Delgado.

15. As is probably evident by now, the research process underlying this essay began with a keyword search for “looting” in the digitized archive of the London Times – a research technique that has only become possible in the last decade or so. Such an approach is not without its problems: aside from the scanning technology’s inevitable misapprehensions (so many references to “a proper footing” and to “Tooting, London”…), more consequentially, as Lara Putnam has argued, it offers merely a window into the ways the empire talked publicly to itself about its everyday incidences of violence (377–402). While this archive, as sorted by the keyword search, is marked by at least occasional dissonances and counter-imperial voices, its critical potential lies more in the possibilities it offers for tracking official histories of concepts, and for attending to the chance encounters of seemingly unrelated, though nearly simultaneous news items, reports from the colonies, parliamentary transcripts, and letters to the editor. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, drawing upon Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, suggested that newspapers and novels have been organized above all by the temporality of meanwhile: “The structure of the old-fashioned novel,” he writes, “is clearly a device for the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogenous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’” (25). In tracking references to particular keywords in the Times, it is possible to see the ways that similar discursive complexes were mobilized simultaneously in disparate settings, or the ways that differences in setting (i.e., colonies versus metropole) correspond with differences in usage. Tracking references over time also allows us to trace the way that a category makes the jump from one colonial context to another, and from colony to metropole. Thus, the research method employed here offers a way to see the simultaneities and chance encounters of the imperial paper—to traverse Anderson’s meanwhile—while also opening onto historical questions concerning change over time. Anderson himself takes up a similar project in Under Three Flags, which charts the trajectories of repressive technologies and of anti-colonial and anarchist politics as these forces circulate between Cuba, Spain, the Philippines, and other sites within and beyond the late Spanish Empire.

16. “The Unemployed”; “There”; “The Social Democrats”; “The Monster Meeting”; “We”; “House of Commons, Friday, Feb. 26.”; “Central Criminal Court.”

17. See A Well-Wisher and West-End; “The Police.”

18. Cf. “China,” 26 Feb. 1858.

19. See also “Upper Burmah”; Hallett.

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