Civil War by 'Other Means': Internal Strife in British Colonial Culture

This dissertation is anchored in the question: what does civil war mean in empire? Postcolonial critics have argued that nationalism saturated the politics of empire and defined the nation-state in opposition to an outside. For the metropole, this "outside" was the colonies; for the colonies, it was the colonial regime. I argue that internal antagonisms---namely, civil wars--- were equally constitutive of metropolitan and postcolonial nationhood. By reading Victorian and anticolonial literature alongside early Marxist accounts of class war and postcolonial historiography, I find that ruptures to national unity materialize as violent episodes, but are also coextensive with nationalism as they take on latent forms during times of peace. These figures of civil war, violent and non-violent, animate how the nation-state defines itself in empire.;Chapter one looks at how Dickens's Bleak House premises England's unity on standardized time, and dramatizes its fragmentation as a way to shift from a domestic to an imperial framework. My second chapter argues that Kipling's Boer War short stories justify the extension of the metropole to the colonies by treating imperial conflicts as civil wars. As the empire increasingly saw itself as a nation-state, wars at the frontier bore a likeness to domestic conflicts. In contrast, anticolonial writers disavow the territorial logic of civil war in empire by recasting it in a temporal register. Chapter three looks at how Ambedkar describes a latent civil war as a "virus of dualism" which he claims is a legacy of the colonial nation-state. My final chapter argues that Gordimer's July's People describes civil war in the postcolony as an "interregnum" in which colonial and postcolonial regimes inhabit a single chronotope. In redefining civil war as a temporal category, authors see the postcolonial nation-state in relation to its colonial past rather than in opposition to a territorial outside. These readings discover that the specter of civil war intertwines imperialism with postcolonialism, and reveals that the nation-state desired divisions as much as cohesion.