Defining Revolution

A fairly recent paper in the History syllabus at Oxford is 'Disciplines of History'. The traditional methodological paper had three essays required to be written in three hours. In new-fangled 'Disciplines', it is two essays in three hours. So deep thought is required!

Usually, for the 'Comparative History' half of the Disciplines Paper, the topic of 'Revolutions' comes up. 'Revolution', of course, lends itself to transnational comparison. Following Perry Anderson's cogent reasoning, but to be honest also with some mind to manageability, I normally recommend to the students that they define 'revolution' as 'punctual': i.e. radical, but limited in time and space, even if the effect is quite diffuse. (Acute revolutions, natch, can succeed or fail to lesser or greater degrees; I'd be a poor Irishperson who refused a nod to the Memory of the Dead). But overall the definition of 'revolution' is up to my extraordinarily fab students. It can be quite non-political and drawn-out. Here's an invaluable guide, for example, to the 'Scientific Revolution'

https://vimeo.com/36015837

If students want to look at a long-drawn out process of revolution, 'Industrial', 'Scientific' or whatever, I say, 'go for it, emergent intelligentsia!'. I shall, however, have to pass you over to experts for guidance.

Here's Emma Dougherty, animator extraordinaire, and co-author of video above:

http://www.emmadougherty.com/contact.html

Perry Anderson: Comparing Ireland and India.

There's a characteristically pellucid and absorbing article in the latest LRB by Perry Anderson, this time on Ghandi. As one might expect, Anderson is less than enamoured by the Ghandi myth. He is critical particularly of Ghandi's religious obscurantism, and of his unwillingness wage timely revolutionary war in the 1920s. In Bourgeois Liberty, I’m rather more inclined to look somewhat benignly on religiose cloaking for democracy, as diminishing traditionalist hostility to it.

Here's an interesting comparison Anderson makes between India and Ireland:

Since the mid-19th century, Britain had always stationed a much higher number of troops relative to population in Ireland than in India, with a lower proportion of local recruits: typically, a military establishment of about 25,000, and a constabulary of 10,000, for an island of 4.5 million inhabitants, less than a hundred miles from England – a ratio of 1:130. In India, 4000 miles away, where the machinery of repression mustered some 400,000 for a population of 300 million, the ratio was 1:750. Yet within less than three years, an Irish guerrilla of not more than 3000 combatants at any one time had destroyed the colonial police and effectively driven the colonial army – upped to 40,000 for counter-insurgency – from the field in the larger part of the country. Had there been any synchronised campaign in India, with its hugely more favourable balance of potential forces, not to speak of logistics, the issue could hardly have been in doubt. ... The price of national liberation was not small in Ireland: division of the country and civil war. But it was tiny compared with the bill that would eventually be paid in India.

 Of course, religiose cloaking was hardly absent from the Irish War of Independence.