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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

Toronto’s Asian Institute.
A Genealogy of Terrorism
Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea

Joseph McQuade
University of Toronto
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108842150
DOI: 10.1017/9781108896238
© Joseph McQuade 2021
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
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ISBN 978-1-108-84215-0 Hardback
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URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For Emily
It is a principle of the law of nations, recognized I believe by every
civilized people, that assassins by profession shall find in no country a
sanctuary, but shall every where be delivered up to the Sovereign who
reclaims them and in whose dominions they have perpetrated their
crimes; and as the crimes of these assassins are never confined to the
country in which they reside, and as every country in India must now be
considered as under the protection of the Supreme Government in
some relation or other, that Government very properly undertook the
duty which seemed to be imposed upon it by the laws of humanity
and of nations, and determined to reclaim them from every State in
which they might seek shelter.
– W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana; or A vocabulary of the peculiar language used by
the thugs (Calcutta: G. H. Huttman, Military Orphan Press, 1836), pp. 48–9.

Authority is, it seems, at one all the world over, and we must recognize
that there is now no longer the least illogical loophole of escape for a
fleeing man on this earth or in its waters; it is merely a question of which
uniform shall arrest him. In old days there was always some leakage,
some chunk for escape between the machineries of different
nationalities. … But the nets are drawn closer now … daily the
elaborate international system for maintaining the status quo becomes
more perfect, and from it there is no appeal. The fugitive – ‘assassin’, or
‘patriot’, ‘avatar’ or that weird monster the ‘anarchist’ of the
newspapers, whatever he may be … can find no corner of the globe to
shelter him, and the only doubt is under which precise code of
regulations he shall be judged, punished, and put away.
– Josiah Wedgwood, Essays and Adventures of a Labour M.P. (London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1924), p. 153

The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I’ve
directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement
communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.
We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed
these acts and those who harbor them. … America and our friends
and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the
world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism.
– George W. Bush, Statement by the President in his address to the nation,
11 September 2001
 Contents

List of Figures page x

Acknowledgements xii
Abbreviations xvi

Introduction: The Colonial Prose of Counterterrorism 1

1 Ethereal Assassins: Colonial Law and ‘Hereditary Crime’
in the Nineteenth Century 35
2 ‘The Magical Lore of Bengal’: Surveillance, Swadeshi,
and Propaganda by Bomb, 1890s to 1913 83
3 ‘The Eye of Government Is on Them’: Anti-Colonialism
and Emergency during the First World War 125
4 Indefinite Emergency: Revolutionary Politics and
‘Terrorism’ in Interwar India 163
5 Terrorism as a ‘World Crime’: The British Empire,
International Law, and the Invention of Global Terrorism 204
Conclusion: Empire, Law, and Terrorism in the
21st Century 240

Glossary 249
Select Bibliography 251
Index 274

ix
 Figures

0.1 Colonial India and neighbouring states, 1909. Redrawn by Cox

Cartographic Ltd from ‘Map of the British Indian Empire from
Imperial Gazetteer of India’, Oxford University Press, 1909.
Edinburgh Geographical Institute; J.G. Bartholomew and
Sons (via Wikimedia Commons). page 29
1.1 A depiction of the goddess Kali. Images like these
were sold to pilgrims and colonial British travellers
and administrators, who would have brought
them home as souvenirs, highlighting the ‘exotic’
nature of Indian religion. Creator Gabriel Huquier
(French, 1695–1772). (Photo by Heritage Arts/Heritage
Images via Getty Images.) 43
1.2 An artistic rendering of thugs strangling a traveller,
drawn by Frances Eden in 1838. (Photo by Apic via
Getty Images.) 45
1.3 Execution of two rebels following the uprising, or
‘mutiny’, of 1857–1858. (Photo by Photo 12 /
Universal Images Group via Getty Images.) 66
3.1 Indian soldiers marching through France, 1914.
(Getty Images.) 128
3.2 Ghadar pamphlet depicting India as a mother goddess.
This kind of imagery was common in revolutionary
publications. (Courtesy of University of Toronto
Libraries.) 130
3.3 A unit of Malay States Guides at Alexandra Barracks with
Captain Moira Francis Allan Maclean, a European officer
killed during the Singapore Mutiny of 1915. (Courtesy of
National Archives of Singapore.) 138
4.1 Mohandas Gandhi leading the famous Salt March in 1930.
(Photo by Mansell / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty
Images.) 188

x
 List of Figures xi

5.1 Police chase after the assassin of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia

during a state visit to Marseille. This high-profile killing provided
the catalyst for a special League of Nations convention on
international terrorism. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch
Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.) 206
5.2 The first session of the League of Nations in Geneva.
India became the only non-self-governing member of the
League as a result of the place afforded to it at the Paris
peace negotiations following the First World War.
(Photo by Hulton Archive via Getty Images.) 211
6.1 Funeral procession of Mohandas Gandhi in Allahabad,
following his assassination at the hand of Hindu nationalist
Nathuram Godse in 1948. (Photo by Keystone via Getty
Images.) 242
6.2 BJP President Amit Shah paying tribute to anti-colonial
revolutionary Khudiram Bose during a political rally in
Kolkata in 2018. More than a century after his death,
Khudiram and others like him continue to be
commemorated by Indian politicians, while many
colonial-era counter-terrorism laws remain in place.
(Photo by Shubradip Ray / Hindustan Times via
Getty Images.) 244
 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 instru-
mental 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 under-
stand 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 Ran-
ganathan, Devyani Gupta, and Upendra Baxi. Amitava Chowdhury has
seen this research develop since its inception and has been an irreplace-
able element in my intellectual development over the past eight years. If it
wasn’t 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, confer-
ences, 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

xii
 Acknowledgements xiii

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.
I am grateful to scholars at the University of Toronto for first introdu-
cing me to the academic study of South Asia as an undergraduate, as well
as providing me with an intellectual home while I shepherded this project
into completion during two postdoctoral fellowships. The opportunity to
work with bright and enthusiastic students while teaching in the Con-
temporary Asian Studies program has been as instructive for me as I hope
it was for them. I am especially appreciative of my Research Assistant,
Bonnie Lao, for her help fine-tuning the index. Colleagues including
Christoph Emmrich, Beatrice Jauregui, Rachel Silvey, and Shannon
Garden-Smith have helped make my years here a genuine delight.
A special word is reserved for my mentor, Ritu Birla, who is always a
source of equal parts wisdom and humour. Working with Robert Baines
and several dozen talented interns as Editor-in-Chief at the NATO
Association of Canada has helped me refine my own writing and,
I hope, improved the readability of this text.
This research would simply not have been possible without the
generous funding provided by the Gates Cambridge Trust. I would
also like to thank the Trust staff for reliable and prompt responses to
all matters, whether logistical, financial, or otherwise. Fellowships at
the University of Toronto’s Asian Institute, one funded by the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and one by the
Richard Charles Lee Asian Pathways Research Lab, gave me the
freedom and breathing room to complete this project. Other sources
of funding over the course of this research include travel grants from
Trinity Hall and from the Smuts Memorial Fund and a foreign lan-
guage instruction grant from the Schools of Arts & Humanities and
Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The
Master’s research that provided the initial spark for this dissertation
was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council
of Canada.
The global scope of this research required visits to archives around the
world, where I encountered helpful and informative staff who made this
project possible. First and foremost, Kevin Greenbank, Rachel Rowe,
xiv Acknowledgements

and Barbara Roe at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge
always provided cheerful assistance with any inquiry, no matter how
big or small. The staff at the National Library, Kolkata, helped me track
down an out of print collection of the writings of Rash Behari Bose,
which I have not seen cited anywhere else. Sugata Bose and Krishna Bose
from the Netaji Research Bureau were prompt and gracious in respond-
ing to my inquiries. Jacques Oberson and his colleagues at the League of
Nations Archives in Geneva provided such efficient guidance that what
was intended as a preliminary one week reconnaissance trip ended up
furnishing far more useful material than I anticipated. Naoya Inaba from
Waseda University Library helped me track down the full collection of
New Asia volumes, justifying my trip to Tokyo. Thanks are also due to
the many archivists and librarians who responded to countless inquiries
at the British Library, National Archives, Kew, and the National Arch-
ives of India, as well as the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library, the University of Toronto Libraries, and the National Archives
of Singapore. I am grateful to Shachi Chotia for her patient attempts to
teach me Hindi, and to her family for their hospitality and kindness
during my time in Jaipur. I am confident I speak for all of her students
when I say that she is sorely missed. The superb editorial team at
Cambridge University Press, especially Lucy Rhymer, Emily Sharp,
and Neena Maheen, made sure that my publishing experience was as
smooth and stress-free as possible. I also thank Beth Morel for an
excellent job as copy-editor. A section of Chapter 5 providing context
for India’s joining of the League of Nations first appeared in the Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History. I am grateful to the publishers of
this journal for giving me permission to republish this section and to the
Journal of World History for permission to republish some of the material
on Rash Behari Bose.
On a personal note, I would like to thank my father for sharing with me
his passion for history through a childhood filled with museum visits and
books about the pharaohs. I appreciate that my sister Katherine visited
me in England on multiple occasions during my time abroad. Family,
both old and new, have provided cheer and encouragement throughout
this process, and I am pleased to share the result with them all. Regret-
tably, two of the most important people in this process will never see the
finished book. My grandfather, Richard Jennings, whose stories of the
past started me down this path, recently passed away just months short of
his hundredth birthday. It saddens me deeply that my mother, an avid
reader who always encouraged me to write, will never have an opportun-
ity to add this book to her impressive list.
 Acknowledgements xv

My final and deepest thanks go to Emily, my partner in all things, who,

along with our dog Finnegan, has been my staunchest supporter and
closest companion during this process. For accompanying me to archives
around the world when she could, tolerating my extended absences when
she could not, and her heroic efforts to expunge the passive voice from
my writing, I dedicate this book to her.
 Abbreviations

BL British Library
CID Criminal Investigation Department
CRT Comité Répression Internationale du Terrorisme
CUL Cambridge University Library
HC House of Commons
HL House of Lords
IOR Indian Office Records, British Library
LNA League of Nations Archives, Geneva
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
NLI National Library of India, Kolkata
PRO Public Records Office, Kew
SAAA Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives
SAADA South Asian American Digital Archive

xvi
 Introduction
The Colonial Prose of Counterterrorism

On 16 March 2011, an unmanned drone killed around forty people in

Datta Khel, a town in Pakistan’s rural region of North Waziristan. While
initial reports claimed that the strike had been directed against a
gathering of militants, it has since come to light that the meeting was in
fact a tribal jirga, a traditional community gathering convened, in this
case, to settle a dispute regarding ownership of a local chromite mine.1
Even assuming that members of the Taliban were present, as some
accounts do seem to confirm, the bulk of those killed in the attack were
tribal elders, many of whom had previously provided a bulwark against
radicalization among their communities.2 Unlike most earlier drone
attacks,3 the Datta Khel strike immediately attracted the strong criticism
of Pakistan’s foreign ministry, who called it ‘a flagrant violation of all
humanitarian rules and norms’. An unnamed US official dismissed the
criticism, telling the Wall Street Journal, ‘These guys were terrorists, not
the local men’s glee club.’4
Although the Datta Khel drone strike is a particularly controversial
example, there have been thousands of deaths caused by unmanned
aircraft in the past two decades throughout the remote regions of a
growing list of Muslim-majority countries that include Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.5 Human rights groups and investigative
journalists have roundly condemned the uncounted civilian casualties
produced by this aerial bombardment. Despite a clinical language of
‘targeted’, ‘surgical’, or ‘precision’ strikes, the civilian death toll is easily

1
Salman Masood and Pir Zubair Shah, ‘C.I.A. Drone Kills Civilians in Pakistan’, The New
York Times (17 March 2011).
2
Chris Woods, ‘Covert Drone Strikes and the Fiction of Zero Civilian Casualties’, in Mike
Aaronson et al., Precision Strike Warfare and International Intervention: Strategic, Ethico-
Legal and Decisional Implications (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 99–101.
3
See, for example, Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War
at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 108–9.
4
Tom Wright and Rehmat Mehsud, ‘Pakistan Slams U.S. Drone Strike’, The Wall Street
Journal (18 March 2011).
5
As of 2015, the estimate was 2,800 or more. See Woods, ‘Covert Drone Strikes’, p. 95.

1
2 Introduction

in the hundreds and likely higher. In the first three years of Barack
Obama’s presidency alone, sixty-four children died as a direct result of
these strikes.6 This ‘Secret War’ is part of the ‘Global War on Terror’
that began as a response to the horrific attacks carried out by Al Qaeda
against America on 11 September 2001. Originating under President
George W. Bush, drone strikes increased in frequency during the Obama
administration and have expanded further under the instructions of
President Trump, who has rolled back the safeguards finally put in place
by his predecessor to track civilian casualties.7
Of special concern to human rights groups are so-called signature
strikes, a lethal form of aerial warfare that targets unknown individuals
whose behaviour is considered similar enough to that of terrorists to
warrant pre-emptive assassination. In regions where terrorists are known
to operate, the simple fact of being a ‘military-aged male’ is sometimes
considered sufficient grounds for establishing guilt. This heavily cri-
tiqued extrajudicial framework makes it virtually impossible, based on
publicly available data, to assess how many of the alleged ‘militants’
executed in this manner were actually members of extremist networks.
Counterterrorism expert Naureen Shah of Amnesty International has
expressed the concern that the application of ‘signature strikes’ risks
creating a new norm in which the US government, in assuming the a
priori guilt of its targets, may be creating a positive feedback loop
detached from the realities on the ground.8 How does a liberal democ-
racy, ostensibly grounded in the rule of law and a commitment to human
rights, find no contradiction in waging a covert, extrajudicial assassin-
ation program in which a person can be targeted for execution based only
on patterns of behaviour or physical markers? The simple answer is that
political liberalism and an extrajudicial ‘state of exception’ are not con-
tradictory, but rather adhere to a mutually constitutive logic embedded
in the structures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century empire.9
While the technology that has enabled the recent proliferation
of unmanned drones is quite new, historian Priya Satia has demonstrated
how the underlying philosophy is a direct legacy of colonial aerial
surveillance and bombardment conducted during the ‘pacification

6
George Monbiot, ‘In the U.S., Mass Child Killings Are Tragedies: In Pakistan, Mere
Bug Splats’, The Guardian (17 December 2012).
7
Dan de Luce and Sean D. Naylor, ‘Report: The Drones Are Back’, Foreign Policy (26
March 2018).
8
Naureen Shah, ‘Drone Attacks and the Brennan Doctrine’, The Guardian (2 May 2012).
9
The relationship between liberalism and empire is most famously explicated in Uday
Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Thought (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
 Introduction 3

operations’ of the interwar period.10 Then, as now, military officials

regarded the north-western frontier region that separates Pakistan from
Afghanistan as an ‘unruly’ place full of ‘barbaric’ cultural practices and
religious ‘fanaticism’.11 Aerial bombardment carried out by Britain’s
Royal Air Force (RAF) in interwar Afghanistan attracted the vociferous
criticism of Indian activists like Mahendra Pratap, a revolutionary Pan-
Asianist who petitioned the League of Nations in 1933, calling on the
international community to raise their ‘pious voices against every barbar-
ous trespass on the rights of Man’.12
The idea that our current global order has been shaped by, or con-
tinues to be shaped by, the processes of nineteenth and twentieth century
colonialism is certainly not new. Scholars from a range of disciplines have
been making this point for years, seeking to ‘provincialize Europe’,13 or
indeed to show that current political conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, or
Palestine constitute a ‘colonial present’.14 Perhaps the most famous of
these critiques is Edward Said’s seminal text on ‘Orientalism’, wherein
he describes the ‘Orient’ as Europe’s ‘cultural contestant, and one of its
deepest and most recurring images of the Other’.15 For Said, the forms of
knowledge-production established under colonialism share a direct rela-
tionship with enduring Western representations of Asia and the Middle
East, a fact with obvious relevance for the current ‘War on Terror’.16
Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a growing number of
scholars have located America’s – now waning – global hegemony within
a deeper history of imperialism, knowledge, and power.17 With the
dramatic reappearance of Western chauvinism articulated in the Brexit

10
Priya Satia, ‘Drones: A History from the British Middle East’, Humanity: An
International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 5, no. 1
(2014), pp. 1–31.
11
Mark Condos, ‘License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in
Colonial India, 1867–1925’, Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 2 (2016), pp. 479–517.
12
Mahendra Pratap to Secretary-General of the League of Nations, 1st August 1933,
LNA, R3637/6266, p. 1.
13
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
14
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004).
15
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 1.
16
See Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of
the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). The entangled relationship between
colonial knowledge and European perceptions of Islam as a ‘problem’ are also
addressed from the standpoint of the Dutch East Indies in Dietrich Jung, ‘“Islam as a
Problem”: Dutch Religious Politics in the East Indies’, Review of Religious Research 51,
no. 3 (2010), pp. 288–301.
17
For example, Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
4 Introduction

campaign in the United Kingdom, the presidency of Donald Trump in

the United States, and the rise of ethno-nationalist populism in Europe,
this scholarship will likely continue for some time.18 Still, such
approaches require a degree of care and sophistication. As Ann Laura
Stoler points out, even when one recognizes the colonial trajectories or
antecedents of current power relations, the very nature of the now-
popular term ‘postcolonial’ can create an artificial sense of distance
between researchers and a colonial history that is also alive and well even
in less obvious, but no less durable, manifestations.19

Terrorism, Security, and the State of Exception

The three quotes with which this monograph opens capture three snap-
shots in an evolving ‘prose of counterterrorism’ that traces its roots to the
early nineteenth century. When Bush made his famous address to the
nation following the 9/11 attacks, in which Al Qaeda operatives hijacked
and weaponized four commercial airliners to devastating effect, he was
drawing on a repertoire of cultural idioms, categories, and narratives that
were already familiar to Western audiences. While 9/11 brought ‘terror-
ism’ into the realm of public consciousness in an unprecedented manner,
the term ‘terrorism’ already carried with it a malleable yet intelligible set
of connotations. Terrorism was evil and indiscriminate, it was something
carried out by ‘them’ against ‘us’, it implied a ‘barbaric’ worldview,
culture, or religion, and it threatened not only America but everyone
who desired ‘peace and security in the world’. Throughout the early
2000s, international and domestic authorities, legal experts, activists,
and law enforcement operatives would discuss and debate the possibility
of a universally agreed-upon definition for ‘terrorism’, but the basic
features emphasized in Bush’s speech have become remarkably
widespread.20
Bush’s invocation of ‘the terrorists’ as a global foe that divides the
world into a Manichean order of moral certitude – ‘You’re either with us
or you’re with the terrorists’ – has generally been interpreted through the
theoretical framework provided by mid-twentieth-century German jurist

18
An excellent recent addition to this field that explicitly addresses phenomena such as
Brexit is Robert Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
19
Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), pp. 4–10.
20
Lisa Stampnitsky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 3–4.
 Terrorism, Security, and the State of Exception 5

Carl Schmitt.21 For Schmitt, the central legal innovation of the early
twentieth century was the attempt to outlaw war, rather than simply
bracket it as previous international legal regimes sought to accomplish.
This criminalization of war, accomplished through the League of
Nations’ desire to enforce a perpetual peace, led to the transformation
from a justum bellum – a war between just states – to a justa causa belli – a
just war. Within such a war, ‘the asserted juridical right and moral
legitimacy of one’s own cause and the alleged injustice of the opponent’s
cause only sharpen and deepen the belligerents’ hostility’, according to
Schmitt.22 This in turn would lead to what Schmitt called, ‘the modern
transformation of penal law into social pest control’,23 particularly with
regard to insurgents or partisans, who would be regarded by their very
nature as unjust ‘foes’ unworthy of recognition under the law. Schmitt’s
work has proved highly influential, providing the foundation for much of
the current scholarship on critical terrorism studies.24
We can also observe the direct influence of Schmitt’s thought in the
work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who identifies the sover-
eign as possessing the ability to designate not only who constitutes a foe,
but also who may be excluded entirely from the body-politic. According
to Agamben, sovereignty reflects the ability to divest certain persons of
their claim to citizenship, marking them instead as homo sacer, a figure of
‘bare life’ with no protections under human or divine law.25 The liminal
designation of ‘bare life’ reflects the exclusion of an individual from the
juridical rights which form the basis of the liberal rule of law – a frame-
work that can be highly useful in seeking to understand the nature of
emergency measures directed against criminal categories such as terror-
ists, pirates, or ‘thugs’. Agamben points out that the categorization of
suspected terrorists as ‘detainees’ in Guantanamo Bay, following the

21
Stephen Legg (ed.), Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos
(London: Routledge, 2011). See also Reza Aslan, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting
Extremism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Random House, 2010).
22
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europeaum (New York: Telos, 2003), p. 156.
23
Ibid., p. 124.
24
For some of the other work on contemporary terrorism as understood through a reading
of Schmitt, see Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito (eds.), The International Political
Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (London:
Routledge, 2007), Gabriella Slomp, Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence
and Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Tarik Kochi, ‘The Partisan: Carl
Schmitt and Terrorism’, Law and Critique 17, no. 3 (2006), pp. 267–95, and Stuart
Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009).
25
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 12.
6 Introduction

emergency Patriot Act of 2001, placed them in a liminal space as

neither prisoners of war – with attendant rights afforded by the Geneva
Convention – nor as criminals, subject to the ordinary juridical proced-
ures of US criminal law.26
Although different national and historical legal regimes have used
diverse terms to refer to the phenomenon, the current study follows
Agamben’s lead in referring to emergency legal decrees that demarcate
the limits of ‘ordinary’ judicial processes as ‘states of exception’.27 While
Western legal scholars typically situate the sovereign’s ability to declare
an extralegal ‘state of exception’ within a trajectory of European juris-
prudence dating back to Roman law, there are important, though
inexact, parallels in ancient India. For kings of the Mauryan and Gupta
periods, the wilderness lying at the edges of sovereign territory repre-
sented an exception to ordinary norms of violence and non-violence. In
these contexts, state violence against forest-dwellers throughout the sub-
continent was historically legitimized through a paradigm that demar-
cated the wilderness as a zone of ‘difference’.28 Representations of the
wilderness in ancient Indian scriptures are complex, sometimes connot-
ing a military or economic resource to the state, sometimes indicating a
realm of asceticism and renunciation. Nonetheless, the designation of
tribal peoples as mlecchas (barbarians) and the incorporation of these
peoples into the fold of the state through campaigns of ‘pacification’,
assimilation, and elimination provides an important yet distinctive
source of comparison with Eurocentric accounts – like that of Agamben –
that locate the original ‘state of exception’ within the homo sacer of
Roman jurisprudence.29 Substantial continuities between pre-colonial
and colonial legal regimes in India, especially as reflected in the fluid
and malleable ‘disturbed areas’ in which military law often played a
mediating role, further caution against assuming that European models
of exception can be mapped directly onto colonial settings.30
The other problem with Eurocentric genealogies of the state of excep-
tion is that they do not adequately differentiate between states of excep-
tion deployed within colonial settings and colonialism itself as the state of

26
Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005), pp. 3–4.
27
Ibid., p. 4.
28
Upinder Singh, Political Violence in Ancient India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017), pp. 367–459.
29
Ibid. See also James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
30
Bhavani Raman, ‘The Making of “Disturbed Areas” in Early Colonial India:
Genealogies of a Jurisdiction’ (unpublished paper, 27 February 2020).
 Terrorism, Security, and the State of Exception 7

exception par excellence.31 In focusing only on Western ‘domestic’

settings, we can be deceived into assuming a clear division between
‘ordinary’ law and extralegal executive power, whereas for historian
Nasser Hussain, the colonial ‘jurisprudence of emergency’ illustrates
how ‘norm and exception … function in juxtaposition’.32 Hussain draws
on Schmitt’s famous definition of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the
exception’,33 and asserts that while the concept of emergency has been
studied, the ‘indicative function of emergency as a constitutive relation
between modern law and sovereignty’, as formative in our understanding
of modern power, has not. Instead of understanding the state of emer-
gency as existing outside the rule of law, Hussain argues that the rela-
tionship between the rule of law and emergency is ‘as intimate as it is
anxious’, and that within the imperial context, emergency law is to be
understood as an expression of colonial sovereignty.34 At the level of
colonial law in practice, Partha Chatterjee shows how anti-colonial vio-
lence ultimately served the same function as anti-colonial non-violence,
in that both forced the state to expose its own ‘legal’ violence through the
assertion of emergency measures that violated the ostensible principles
on which colonial rule rested its authority.35 As John Pincince argues, the
very notion of ‘political offences’, while of central importance to British
metropolitan and international law, was thus wholly excluded from the
prosecution of anti-colonial revolutionary activities in India, which the
imperial government instead criminalized as apolitical terrorism. For
Pincince, the colonial state existed in a permanent state of exception,
as challenges to colonial authority revealed the precarious order of the
colonial state at precisely the same time that emergency measures and
increased surveillance highlighted the further criminalization of the colo-
nial subject.36
Many modern states, including those governing in colonial spaces,
have sought to resolve the inherent contradiction of a permanent state
of exception through the paradigm of security. Operating under the
Roman principle of salus populi suprema lex – ‘The safety of the people
is the highest law’ – the modern state can more easily reconcile tensions

31
Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), p. 24.
32
Nasser Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 20.
33
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George
Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 5.
34
Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency, p. 32.
35
Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 289–90.
36
John Pincince, ‘De-centering Carl Schmitt: The Colonial State of Exception and the
Criminalization of the Political in British India, 1905–1920’, Politica Comun 5 (2014).
8 Introduction

between states of exception and a rule of law by casting ‘exceptional’

measures as necessary for public safety.37 The modern discourse of
security is regarded by French philosopher Michel Foucault as marking
a transition towards new statistics-based modes of knowledge production
that give us the modern governmental techniques of social, political, and
economic management. For Foucault, a key characteristic of the modern
state is the replacement of the early modern relationship between sover-
eigns and their subjects with a new dynamic between governments and
populations, a fact reflected in the transformation of modern security
regimes.38 Although Foucault’s arguments provide a useful framework
for understanding the discursive strategies deployed by colonial author-
ities in legitimizing emergency measures in the name of security, his lack
of engagement with colonial history nonetheless poses a problem for any
attempt to transplant Foucault’s theories directly into colonial geneal-
ogies of terrorism.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault famously
argues that ‘discipline’ – surveiller in the original French – replaced older
forms of punishment premised on the violation and destruction of the
criminal’s body.39 But while aspects of this shift can indeed be observed
in the rigid prison schedules and disciplinary regimes deployed against
‘thugs’ and ‘terrorists’ in British India – or, for that matter, in the global
surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the
current ‘War on Terror’ – the violation or destruction of the body of
the rebel nonetheless remains an important expression of colonial power.
British authorities deployed a range of techniques explicitly designed to
terrorize indigenous insurgents into submission by targeting their bodies,
such as sewing Muslims into pig-skins,40 forcibly transporting Hindus
across the kala pani of the Indian Ocean,41 and destroying the bodies of
Sikhs by blowing them from the mouths of cannons.42 Similarly, while
many contemporary terrorists are indeed processed through the

37
Lytton to Birkenhead, 11 December 1924, MSS Eur, F 160/12, p. 43.
38
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 45.
39
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995).
40
Chandrika Kaul, ‘“You Cannot Govern by Force Alone”: W. H. Russell, The Times and
the Great Rebellion’, in Crispin Bates et al. (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New
Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 3: Global Perspectives (New Delhi: Sage,
2013), pp. 18–35.
41
Kim Wagner, Rumours and Rebels: A New History of the Indian Uprising of 1857 (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2017), p. 36.
42
Mark Condos, Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 103–39.
 Genealogies of Terrorism 9

disciplinary apparatus of a global surveillance state, others are subjected

to measures that mark them as outliers to Foucault’s framework. When
we think of the humiliation and sexual abuse of detainees in Abu
Ghraib,43 the deliberate desecration of Taliban corpses by American
soldiers in Afghanistan,44 or the obliteration of suspected militants
through remote drone strikes, we can observe a punitive response at
odds with Foucault’s assumptions regarding the bureaucratized and
rational disciplinary techniques of the modern state.

Genealogies of Terrorism
Although most scholars acknowledge that terrorism has a long history,
many see its existence prior to the Second World War as nothing more
than a prelude that hints towards the prevalence of the phenomenon
beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century and continuing to the
present.45 Scholarly works that do excavate the historical roots of terror-
ism generally fit into one of two approaches. One strand of work analyzes
terrorism as a form of asymmetric warfare stretching back into antiquity,
with examples such as the Jewish Sicarii, the Ismaili Assassins, or the
Thugs of India serving as direct precursors to the terrorists of the modern
age.46 In an influential article published in 1984, political scientist David
C. Rapoport explicitly sought to show how the current phenomenon of
terrorism could be traced back to ancient practices connected to the
Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu religious traditions.47 The problem with this
approach in the case of the ‘thugs’ is that Rapoport’s reading of the
colonial record is overly literal, taking at face value the accounts of
officials who had a vested interest in establishing certain perceptions of
‘thuggee’ as a vast conspiracy stretching across the Indian subcontinent
and inspired by the excesses of a superstitious and bloodthirsty Hindu
cult of the goddess Kali. While there is not space in the current study to
delve into the histories of the Sicarii or the Ismaili Assassins, the colonial
construction of the ‘thugs’ is discussed below and is elaborated at greater
depth in the following chapter. Rapoport’s ‘deep history’ approach to the
phenomenon of so-called holy terror has been popular in policy circles

43
See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
44
Graham Bowley and Matthew Rosenberg, ‘US Deplores Video of Marines Urinating on
Taliban’, The New York Times (12 January 2012).
45
For example, Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998).
46
See Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to
Al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
47
David C. Rapoport, ‘Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions’,
The American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984), pp. 658–77.
10 Introduction

seeking to root current geopolitical crises in primordial traditions of

religiously sanctioned violence, but has been soundly rebutted by histor-
ians such as Kim Wagner.48
The most dangerous manifestation of this school of thought can be
found in the work of scholars like celebrated military historian John
Keegan, who argued after 9/11 that jihadist terrorism constituted an
‘oriental way of war’ derived from an unchanging ‘Islamic mind’.49 In
an article originally published in The Times in 2001, Keegan explicitly
drew on the ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis put forward by Samuel
Huntington to portray the ‘War on Terror’ as a conflict between two
competing styles of warfare.50 While Keegan described Western soldiers
as fighting ‘face to face’ and observing ‘what, to non-Westerners may well
seem curious rules of honour’, he wrote, ‘Orientals, by contrast, shrink
from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring
ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit as the best way to overcome an
enemy.’ Claiming that it was not his intention to stereotype adherents of
Islam, Keegan went on to describe the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as con-
ducted by ‘Arabs, appearing suddenly out of empty space like their desert
raider ancestors’ who ‘assaulted the heartlands of Western power, in
a terrifying surprise raid and did appalling damage’.51 In case there
was any doubt of his political views, Keegan closed his article with a
blatant display of what Partha Chatterjee coined ‘the rule of colonial
difference’,52 in a statement that could just as easily have been written
in the 1830s: ‘It is no good pretending that the peoples of the desert and
the empty spaces exist on the same level of civilisation as those who farm
and manufacture. They do not.’53
Consciously or not, Keegan’s article emulated a central tenet of
colonial counterinsurgency – that the ‘savage’ methods of colonial

48
A leading historian of the ‘thugs’, Wagner has dissected Rapoport’s argument at length,
so I will not go into greater depth here. See Kim Wagner, ‘“Thugs and Assassins”: “New
Terrorism” and the Resurrection of Colonial Knowledge’, in Carola Dietze and Claudia
Verhoeven (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
49
John Keegan, ‘In This War of Civilisations, the West Will Prevail’, The Telegraph (8
October 2001).
50
Huntington’s argument that ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ constitute distinct civilizations has
come to be seen as common sense by many, despite its lack of historicity and failure to
understand that boundaries between ‘civilizations’ have always been highly permeable,
especially where the Islamic world is concerned. See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
51
Keegan, ‘In This War of Civilisations’.
52
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 16–18.
53
Keegan, ‘In This War of Civilisations’.
 Genealogies of Terrorism 11

populations required and justified an equally ‘savage’ response from

imperial forces. Describing the brutality of British tactics deployed
against the ‘Mau Mau’ rebels of Kenya in the 1950s, Frederick Cooper
argued that ‘[t]he savagery of British counterterrorism in Kenya was
built against the belief that the terrorist was a savage’.54 In a recent article
by Kim Wagner, we see that contemporary military historians and
policy makers often draw on colonial-era texts such as C. E. Calwell’s
1898 counterinsurgency manual, Small Wars: Their Principles and
Practice, not as contextualized historical sources but as ‘masterpieces’
containing lessons for twenty-first-century operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan. As Wagner argues, the problem with this approach is that
the forms of ‘savage warfare’ adopted by nineteenth-century imperial
forces were not ‘tactical necessities’ but instead reflect ‘deeply encoded
assumptions concerning the inherent difference of local opponents’.55
Similarly, Achille Mbembe refers to colonies as ‘the location par excel-
lence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be sus-
pended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed
to operate in the service of “civilization.”’ Unlike recognized sovereign
states, Mbembe argues, colonies are not constrained by typical legal
principles, as the lack of humanity ascribed to the colonized means, ‘In
the eyes of the conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a
horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or compre-
hension.’56 For Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, this unrestrained
violence – manifested in innovations of modern warfare first pioneered
under colonial rule, such as aerial bombardment and the concentration
camp – served as a direct precursor to the horrors visited upon Euro-
peans by Europeans during the first half of the twentieth century.57
In contrast to works seeking to locate the roots of terrorism within
primordial histories of religious or cultural difference, a second scholarly
approach identifies the origins of modern terrorism in the spread of
‘propaganda by deed’ following the rise of print capitalism and new

54
Frederick Cooper, ‘Mau Mau and the Discourses of Decolonization’, Journal of African
History 29, no. 2 (1988), p. 317.
55
Kim Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early
British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal 85, no. 1 (2018), pp. 217–37.
56
Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 24.
57
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1973), p. 185. Arendt’s thesis is further developed in Sven Lindqvist’s excellent
‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins
of European Genocide (New York: The New Press, 1996).
12 Introduction

communications technologies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Europe.58 Broadly speaking, this second approach has provided a more
productive framework for understanding the origins of modern ‘terror-
ism’ as a tactic of political communication directly linked to the shifting
global landscape of the modern period. According to the conventional
narrative, the first English-language usage of the term ‘terrorism’ or
‘terrorist’ dates back to conservative philosopher Edmund Burke’s analy-
sis of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. In
1795, Burke mentioned ‘thousands of those hellhounds called terrorists’,
and the following year wrote in his Letters on a Regicide Peace, ‘Scratch any
ideology and beneath it you will find a terrorist.’ The term ‘terrorism’
appears shortly thereafter, in the 1798 supplement to the Dictionnaire de
l’Académie Française.59 For intellectual historian Mikkel Thorup, the
context of the French Revolution is key to understanding what makes
modern terrorism distinct from tactics of assassination or asymmetrical
warfare deployed in earlier times. What made the execution of Louis XVI
such a significant turning point in the history of political violence,
according to Thorup, was the fact that while previous acts of tyrannicide
justified themselves on the principle of upholding justice through the
murder of an unjust ruler, Louis was killed not for his specific actions but
for his symbolic position as king. This means that what made terrorism a
historically new form of violence was the fact that ‘even though actual
persons are being targeted, and perhaps their killing is being legitimated
by specific actions they have committed, the real target of the attack is not
the person but the abstraction of the system’.60
Despite Thorup’s incisive analysis regarding the intellectual underpin-
nings of modern ‘terrorism’, most accounts that seek to explain its
origins are more interested in defining or explaining terrorism as a
phenomenon than interrogating the genealogies of terrorism as a con-
cept. Many attempts have been made to create a framework within which
all acts of terrorism carried out across a range of historical and geograph-
ical settings can be made legible as belonging to a singular – though
multifaceted – category of analysis.61 One of the most influential of these

58
A particularly good study can be found in Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against
Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
59
Walter Laqueur and Christopher Wall, The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and the
Alt-Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), pp. 28–30.
60
Thorup, Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence, and the State (New York: Routledge,
2010), pp. 9–10.
61
For a penetrating critique of the overall field of terrorism studies, see Stampnitsky,
Disciplining Terror.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The brooklet came from the mountain,
As sang the bard of old,
Running with feet of silver
Over the sands of gold!

Far away in the briny ocean

There rolled a turbulent wave,
Now singing along the sea-beach,
Now howling along the cave.

And the brooklet has found the billow,

Though they flowed so far apart,
And has filled with its freshness and sweetness
That turbulent, bitter heart.

—Longfellow.

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

Marcellus. Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!

Bernardo. In the same figure, like the king that’s dead.

Marcellus. Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

Bernardo. Looks it not like the king? mark it, Horatio.

Horatio. Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.

Bernardo. It would be spoke to.

Marcellus. Question it, Horatio.

Horatio. What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,

Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? by heaven I charge thee, speak!
Marcellus. It is offended.

Bernardo. See, it stalks away!

Horatio. Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee, speak! [Exit Ghost.]

Marcellus. ’Tis gone, and will not answer.

Bernardo. How now, Horatio! you tremble and look pale:

Is not this something more than phantasy?
What think you on’t?

—Shakespeare.

Gloucester. Stay, you that bear the corse, and set it down.

Anne. What black magician conjures up this fiend

To stop devoted charitable deeds?

Gloucester. Villains, set down the corse; or, by Saint Paul,

I’ll make a corse of him that disobeys ...
Unmannered dog! stand thou, when I command:
Advance thy halberd higher than my breast,
Or, by Saint Paul, I’ll strike thee to my foot,
And spurn upon thee, beggar, for thy boldness.

—Shakespeare.

Brutus. What, Lucius! ho!—

I cannot, by the progress of the stars,
Give guess how near the day.—Lucius, I say!—
I would it were my fault to sleep so soundly.—
When, Lucius, when? Awake, I say! What, Lucius!

Lucius. Call’d you, my lord?

Brutus. Get me a taper in my study, Lucius:

When it is lighted, come and call me here.

Lucius. I will, my lord.

—Shakespeare.

Note: The following is good for the direct question and direct
answer:

Question. Hold you the watch to-night?

Answer. We do, my lord.

Question. Arm’d, say you?

Answer. Arm’d, my lord.

Question. From top to toe?

Answer. My lord, from head to foot.

Question. Then saw you not his face?

Answer. O, yes, my lord; he wore his beaver up.

Question. What, look’d he frowningly?

Answer. A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.

Question. Pale, or red?

Answer. Nay, very pale.

Question. And fix’d his eyes upon you?

Answer. Most constantly ...

Question. Stay’d it long?

Answer. While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred....

Question. His beard was grizzled? no?

Answer. It was, as I have seen it in his life,

A sable silver’d.

—Shakespeare (dialogue between Hamlet, Marcellus and

Bernardo).

“Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night.

Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let’s have the shutters
up, before a man can say Jack Robinson!”
You wouldn’t believe how those two fellows went at it! They
charged into the street with the shutters—one, two, three—had ’em
up in their places—four, five, six—barred ’em and pinned ’em—
seven, eight, nine—and came back before you could have got to
twelve, panting like race-horses.
“Hilli-ho!” cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk,
with wonderful agility. “Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of
room here! Hilli-ho! Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!”
—Dickens.

What, what, what? ill luck, ill luck?

I thank thee, good Tubal!—good news, good news! ha, ha!—

Where? In Genoa?

Exercises Developing Force and Rate of Speech

The Problem
 Here is a classification of people who speak peculiarly, or
incorrectly, as far as voice is concerned, with exercises for
correction.
1. There are those who speak too fast.
2. There are those who speak too slow.
3. There are those who speak too low.
4. There are those who speak too loud.
5. There are those who speak too short with no melody of tone.
Yet all of these may enunciate and pronounce their words well.
Besides developing distinctness, we must gain control and
adaptability of speech. It is strange, yet true, that many speakers
never increase the force or volume of their voices when addressing a
large assembly. They use the same quiet, even tone appropriate in
addressing a single person. What is the result? They generally bore
the audience, even though their thoughts may be brilliant. There is
no excuse for this, as a few hours’ study and practice will change it.
Above all things one who attempts public speaking must speak so
that he can be heard. It is essential, therefore, to give ourselves
actual practice exercises which demand force of utterance. Each
student should demand of himself daily oral drill upon certain
exercises until he has mastered his own particular difficulty.
The best means of accomplishing this is to use material from good
literature. In the following pages, under several heads, is a variety of
splendid exercises for practice. Commit all, or at least a part, to
memory. Thus, while developing your speaking power, you will be
cultivating a taste for the best that our literature affords.

To Develop Rapid Speech

Note: In developing rapid speech be careful to retain clearness
and precision of utterance.

Now clear, pure, hard, bright, and one by one, like hail-stones,
Short words fall from his lips fast as the first of a shower,
Now in two-fold column Spondee, Iamb, and Trochee,
Unbroke, firm-set, advance, retreat, trampling along,—
Now with a sprightlier springingness, bounding in triplicate syllables,
Dance the elastic Dactylics in musical cadences on;
Now their voluminous coil intertangling like huge anacondas,
Roll overwhelmingly onward the sesquipedalian words.

—Browning.
(The above should be rendered in not less than eighteen
seconds.)

You couldn’t pack a Broadwood half a mile—

You mustn’t leave a fiddle in the damp—
You couldn’t raft an organ up the Nile,
And play it in an Equatorial swamp.
I travel with the cooking-pots and pails—
I’m sandwiched ’tween the coffee and the pork—
And when the dusty column checks and tails,
You should hear me spur the rearguard to a walk!
With my “Pilly-willy-winky-winky popp!”
(Oh, it’s any tune that comes into my head!)
So I keep ’em moving forward till they drop;
So I play ’em up to water and to bed.

—Kipling.

Under his spurning feet, the road,

Like an arrowy Alpine river flow’d
And the landscape sped away behind
Like an ocean flying before the wind;
And the steed, like a bark fed with furnace fire,
Swept on, with his wild eye full of ire.
But, lo! he is nearing his heart’s desire;
He is snuffing the smoke of the roaring fray,
With Sheridan only five miles away.
 —Read.

Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!

Rescue my castle before the hot day
Brightens to blue from its silvery gray.
Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!

—Browning.

A hurry of hoofs in the village street,

A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

—Longfellow.

So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,

So light to the saddle before her he sprung!—
“She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur;
They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.

There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;

Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran:
There was racing and chasing, on Cannobie Lee,
But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see.
So daring in love, and so dauntless in war,
Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

—Scott.
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser,
Wherein all plunged and perished!

—Browning.

To Develop Slow Speech

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all the pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

—Kipling.

Do you know the pile-built village where the sago-dealers trade—

Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?
Do you know the steaming stillness of the orchid-scented glade
When the blazoned, bird-winged butterflies flap through?
It is there that I am going with my camphor, net, and boxes,
To a gentle, yellow pirate that I know—
To my little wailing lemurs, to my palms and flying-foxes,
For the Red Gods call me out and I must go!
He must go—go—go away from here!
On the other side the world he’s overdue!
‘Send the road is clear before you when the Springfret comes o’er
you,
And the Red Gods call for you!

—Kipling.

Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded—

The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber
wind-hounded?
The sleek-barreled swell before storm, gray, foamless, enormous,
and growing—
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing
—
His Sea in no showing the same—his Sea and the same ’neath each
showing—
His Sea as she slackens or thrills?
So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise—hillmen desire their
Hills!

—Kipling.

Slowly the mist o’er the meadow was creeping,

Bright on the dewy buds glistened the sun,
When from his couch, while his children were sleeping,
Rose the bold rebel and shouldered his gun.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.
—Abraham Lincoln.
 On a quiet autumn morning, in the land which he loved so well,
and, as he held, served so faithfully, the spirit of Robert Edward Lee
left the clay which it had so much ennobled, and traveled out of this
world into the great and mysterious land.

It was roses, roses, all the way,

With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day.

—Browning.

Toll for the brave!

The brave that are no more!
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore!

—William Cowper.

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

—Tennyson.

Toll! Toll!
 Toll! Toll!
All rivers seaward wend.
Toll! Toll!
Toll! Toll!
Weep for the nation’s friend.

Every home and hall was shrouded,

Every thoroughfare was still;
Every brow was darkly clouded,
Every heart was faint and chill.

...

Oh! the inky drop of poison

In our bitter draught of grief!
Oh! the sorrow of a nation
Mourning for its murdered chief!

Toll! Toll!
Toll! Toll!
Bound is the reaper’s sheaf—
Toll! Toll!
Toll! Toll!
All mortal life is brief.
Toll! Toll!
Toll! Toll!
Weep for the nation’s chief!

—Carmichael.

Beautiful was the night. Behind the black wall of the forest,
Tipping its summit with silver, arose the moon. On the river
Fell here and there through the branches a tremulous gleam of the
moonlight,
Like the sweet thoughts of love on a darkened and devious spirit.

—Longfellow.
 To Develop Loud Speech

The great bell swung as ne’er before:

It seemed as it would never cease;
And every word its ardor flung
From off its jubilant iron tongue
Was “War! War! WAR!”

—T. B. Read.

Katherine, Queen of England, come into the court.

Where is that infernal boy?
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse.
Jove with us, Jove with us!
Forward, the Light Brigade.
A light! A light! A light! A light!

The words leapt like a leaping sword:

“Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!”

Is the torrent in spate? He must ford or swim.

Has the rain wrecked the road? He must climb by the cliff.
Does the tempest cry “halt”? What are tempests to him?
The Service admits not a “but” or an “if.”
While the breath’s in his mouth, he must bear without fail,
In the name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.

—Kipling.

Ye crags and peaks, I’m with you once again!

I hold to you the hands you first beheld,
To show they still are free. Methinks I hear
A spirit in your echoes answer me,
And bid your tenant welcome home again!
Hail! Hail! Oh, sacred forms, how proud you look!
How high you lift your heads into the sky!
How huge you are! how mighty, and how free!
...
Ye are the things that tower, that shine,—whose smile
Makes glad, whose frown is terrible, whose forms,
Robed or unrobed, do all the impress wear
Of awe divine, whose subject never kneels
In mockery, because it is your boast
To keep him free! Ye guards of liberty,
I’m with you once again! I call to you
With all my voice! I hold my hands to you
To show they still are free!

—Knowles (“William Tell”).

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered.

—Tennyson.

Hurrah! the land is safe, is safe; it rallies from the shock!

Ring round, ring round, ye merry bells, till every steeple rock!
Let trumpets blow and mad drums beat! let maidens scatter flowers!
The sun bursts through the battle smoke! Hurrah! the day is ours!

Fight, gentlemen of England! fight, bold yeomen!

Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head:
Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood;
Amaze the welkin with your broken staves.
A thousand hearts are great within my bosom:
Advance our standards, set upon our foes!
Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!
Upon them! Victory sits on our helms.

To Develop Melody of Speech

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference,—as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
“This is no flattery: these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

—Shakespeare.

I dip and I surge and I swing

In the rip of the racing tide,
By the gates of doom I sing,
On the horns of death I ride.
A ship-length overside,
Between the course and the sand,
Fretted and bound I bide
Peril whereof I cry.
Would I change with my brother a league inland?
(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I!
 —Kipling (“The Bell Buoy”).

Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres

I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.”

—Poe.

Heigh, ho! heigh, ho! unto the green holly: most friendship is
feigning, most loving mere folly: then, heigh, ho! the holly! this life is
most jolly.
—Shakespeare.

Waken, lord and ladies gay,

On the mountains dawns the day;
All the jolly chase is here
With hawk and horse and hunting-spear;
Hounds are in their couples yelling,
Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling,
Merrily, merrily mingle they,
Waken, lords and ladies gay.

—Scott.
 And the humming-bird, that hung
Like a jewel up among
The tilted honey-suckle-horns,
They mesmerized, and swung
In the palpitating air,
Drowsed with odors strange and rare,
And, with whispered laughter, slipped away,
And left him hanging there.

...

By the brook with mossy brink

Where the cattle came to drink,
They thrilled and piped and whistled
With the thrush and bobolink,
Till the kine, in listless pause,
Switched their tails in mute applause,
With lifted heads, and dreamy eyes,
And bubble-dripping jaws.

—Riley.

It was a lover and his lass

With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino!
That o’er the green cornfield did pass
In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,
When birds do sing hey ding a ding:
Sweet lovers love the Spring.

—Shakespeare.

The little bird sits at his door in the sun,

Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o’er-run
With the deluge of summer it receives.
 —Lowell.

O wonderful! How liquid clear

The molten gold of that ethereal tone,
Floating and falling through the wood alone,
A hermit-hymn poured out for God to hear!

—Van Dyke.

Across the narrow beach we flit,

One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry.

The wild waves reach their hands for it,

The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I.

—Celia Thaxter.

If all the skies were sunshine,

Our faces would be fain
To feel once more upon them
The cooling plash of rain.

If all the world were music,

Our hearts would often long
For one sweet strain of silence,
To break the endless song.

If life were always merry,

Our souls would seek relief,
And rest from weary laughter
In the quiet arms of grief.
 —Van Dyke.

When May bedecks the naked trees

With tassels and embroideries,
And many blue-eyed violets beam
Along the edges of the stream,
I hear a voice that seems to say,
Now near at hand, now far away,
“Witchery—witchery—witchery.”

—Van Dyke.

Oh, the throb of the screw and the beat of the screw
And the swinging of the ship as she finds the sea.
Oh, the haze of the land as it sinks from view,
The land that is dear since it harbors you.

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men.

Wee folks, good folks,

Trooping all together,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!

Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair
Under the sea,
In a golden curl
With a comb of pearl,
 On a throne?

I would be a mermaid fair;

I would sing to myself the whole of the day;
With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair;
And still as I comb’d I would sing and say,
“Who is it loves me? who loves not me?”
I would comb my hair till my ringlets would fall
Low adown, low adown,
From under my starry sea-bud crown
Low adown and around,
And I should look like a fountain of gold
Springing alone
With a shrill inner sound,
Over the throne
In the midst of the hall;
Till that great sea-snake under the sea
From his coiled sleep in the central deeps
Would slowly trail himself sevenfold
Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate
With his large calm eyes for the love of me.
And all the mermen under the sea
Would feel their immortality
Die in their hearts for the love of me.

Who would be
A merman bold,
Sitting alone,
Singing alone
Under the sea,
With a crown of gold,
On a throne?

I would be a merman bold,

I would sit and sing the whole of the day;
I would fill the sea-halls with a voice of power;
But at night I would roam abroad and play
With the mermaids in and out of the rocks,
Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower;
And holding them back by their flowing locks.
I would kiss them often under the sea,
And kiss them again till they kissed me
Laughingly, laughingly;
And then we would away, away
To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high,
Chasing each other merrily.

—Tennyson.