Sunday, March 16, 2014
Governor's (Omni Shoreham)
This conference paper will examine the impact of South Asians acting through non-governmental entities in the interwar period on international policy making by the British government and at the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization. The Indian Political Intelligence files assembled by the British government and the archival records of the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization demonstrate that the interwar international legal and economic order was altered by the non-state activism of South Asians. Activists worked through two types of organizations, transnational and South Asian. Organizations of the first type, like the League against Imperialism or the International Committee for Political Prisoners, brought individual South Asians into contact both with other colonial subjects across imperial boundaries and with internationally minded anti-imperial activists globally. The second type of organization, like the Indian Home Rule League or the overseas branches of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, were populated primarily by South Asians and forged alliances with other organizations. Both types of organization influenced policy making in Britain and at the international level. The analysis demonstrates the porous nature both of state power in Britain and of inter-state decision making respecting global order. It also demonstrates that, in South Asia, the process of decolonization, understood partially as a shift in authority to South Asians, began much earlier than 1947.
