On the late Victorian, pre-history of the Boomerang effect

A few days ago (here) I noted (echoing many others) that the war on terror has created a so-called ‘boomerang effect’ in the battle against immigration and smuggling. I then mentioned that the term ‘boomerang effect’ was coined in Aimé Césaire in his (1950) Discourse on Colonialism and in Arendt’s (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hereafter: Origins). I noted that the concept was visible in somewhat earlier writings of Arendt, and I remarked in a footnote that Arendt and Césaire didn’t refer to each other. I also observed in that footnote that “In Origins Arendt’s wording suggests that the phrase was common currency already and that fear of it was already known much earlier in the twentieth century.”

After reading my Digression, my friend, Joshua Miller, then sent me the Césaire passage in French. And it’s pretty clear that there are no boomerangs in the French. “Choc en retour” is the closest Césaire gets. I don’t fault the translator for using ‘boomerang effect,’ although I think ‘backlash’ would have been my preferred translation via simile.

By coincidence, yesterday, I read Liberalism and the Empire: three essays (1900) by Francis W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray, and J. L. Hammond. This collection is clearly building on, and in the same intellectual orbit as, Hobson’s (1900) War in South Africa (which is cited by Hirst). For my own purposes the Three Essays is quite important because the references to and citations from anti-imperialist passages in Adam Smith and Cobden are copious and instructive.

Even in its own time, Three Essays has been nearly entirely overshadowed by Hobson’s (1902) Imperialism: A Study. When it comes to Hirst’s long opening essay, “Imperialism and Finance” this is not much of a neglect. Hobson’s and Lenin’s version of the argument are analytically clearer and also rhetorically more powerful than his version. (Although Hirst’s polemic against Joseph Chamberlain’s imperialism is worth reading at least once.)

Gilbert Murray’s middle essay “The exploitation of inferior races in ancient and modern times: an Imperial labor question, with a historical parallel” and J.L. Hammond’s closing essay “Colonial and Foreign Policy” are both rather brief and distinctive. Both are quite explicit on the massacres and (now quoting Murray) “cruelties perpetrated by white men upon coloured men” (p. 152). And both are alert to the role of mass extermination of people in colonial projects. I hope to return to Murray’s essay soon (Murray was a rather important classicist), but today I focus on a singular and rather significant feature of Hammond’s argument.

I had not read John Lawrence Hammond (1872 – 1949) before. He seems to have co-authored quite frequently with his wife, Barbara, so it’s not impossible she was involved in this piece, too. At the time he was editor at The Speaker, a liberal leaning weekly magazine. As Hammond notes, the debate over imperialism was also an intra-liberal debate. In fact, Hammond introduces his version of the boomerang effect with a reminder on this very point. I quote:

The new morality into which some of our professional moralists have imported a false flavour of naturalism is a matter of life and death to Englishmen, and especially to English Liberals. For if it be granted that it is only for the ultimate illumination of mankind that we are making this bonfire of our moral scruples, it is still pertinent to ask how much of our conscience is to survive. There are some who assume that the flames will only singe it. It is a dangerous optimism…And after setting up two standards, one for conduct in Imperial affairs and the other for conduct in domestic affairs, it is asking a good deal of the rigour of human nature to expect that men will not come to apply the lower standard to both. (p. 180 [emphasis added])

The ‘new morality’ is a kind of bastardized Darwinism in which might makes right. (Hobson also attacks it in his famous book on Imperialism.) The propaganda justifying aggressive imperialism of Rhodes and Chamberlain is founded on it. Hammond quite clearly worries that before long the new morality will be applied in domestic affairs, too. In fact, Hammond thinks the boomerang effect will produce a slippery slope toward moral anarchy: “And yet there are people who think that an outlaw nation with high principles runs no risk of degenerating into a nation of outlaws with none, and that if in the name of civilization you habitually snap your fingers at public law, you are somewhere else than on the highway to moral anarchy.” (p. 182)

Hammond himself does not claim originality. He credits Herbert Spencer and John Morley (the great biographer of Cobden and Gladstone). In the following quote it becomes clear Hammond is not just focusing on a moral boomerang, but mores and practices more widely.

Herbert Spencer has indicated deductively, and Mr. Morley has shown by positive illustration, that the vices of an aggressive spirit do not reserve themselves for display abroad, but cut inwards, sapping the vigour and the independence of States. The last few years have accumulated new and terrible examples. It is only by careful reflection that Englishmen will picture how much of their humanity, of their respect for truth, of their love of justice and fair-play they have already been called upon to sacrifice to this recrudescence of a Jesuitical spirit, which, when it showed itself in the service of religion, they were so quick to condemn as the invention of the devil. (pp. 181-182 (emphasis added)*

The subsequent paragraphs make explicit that Hammond is especially worried about the impact of condoning massacres.* As Hammonds puts it, “in civilizing the world we are in danger of relapsing into barbarism.” (p. 185) And, among the examples, he mentions critically are the journalistic tendency to appeal to “pseudo-scientific” use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to capture racial characteristics of imperialists (pp. 185-186); and the sacrifice by imperialists of “our tradition of free speech” and to embrace and “to imitate in South Africa the methods of repressive governments.” (p. 186)

Let me wrap up. My main claim here is that something like the risk of the Boomerang effect was already diagnosed at the height of imperialism. In fact, it’s pretty clear that liberal thinkers are using this risk to attack their erstwhile liberal friends who have become full-on imperialist. When she introduced the term in Origins, Arendt herself was clearly aware of this. This is itself no surprise because, as I suggested in my earlier post, when she is writing about the sources without using the term in 1945 and 1950, she is describing the Boomerang concept already.

In preparing today’s Digression, I realized that some of these points were already anticipated by Christian K. Melby in his (2023). "War, Public Opinion and the British Constitution, c. 1867–1914." Journal of Modern European History 21(4): 441-457. He notes that the Boomerang effect was discussed from the “1880s onward” (p. 453). In an accompanying footnote (in which he discusses Arendt), Melby points to the intra-liberal debate about the contrast between practices in imperial periphery and metropole. Melby then writes (p. 453 n. 59):

For liberal commentators at the time, including Herbert Spencer and L. T. Hobhouse, this was an impossible distinction: Spencer argued that slavery abroad also made a captive of the ‘master’, see H. Spencer, ‘Imperialism and Slavery’, in:… Facts and Comments, London 1902, 112–121. As L. T. Hobhouse saw it, democracy had contradicted itself in allowing for imperial expansion – as the ‘negation of liberty’ abroad, imperialism could not coexist with democratic ideals. ‘Self-government’, he therefore argued, ‘it may be said, has in practice broken down’ (L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, London 1904), 167 and passim

That is to say, Hammond’s (1900) essay is part of a wider set of arguments by late Victorian liberals about the risks to liberty at home following from imperial conquest.+ Put like that we are made alert to the fact that the Boomerang effect is itself a rather Machiavellian theme; it is central to Gilbert Murray’s argument (who credits Gibbon) to which I turn soon.

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*See also this subsequent passage (which I altered so as to avoid quoting the N word):

I am not now concerned with the revolting hypocrisy with which a chivalrous protection for the weak is claimed as the object of this war by the organs and the admirers of the men who exhausted the resources without recognising the restraints of civilization in annihilating Mashonas, Matabeles, and Bechuanas, and who contemplated methods of exterminating [Africans] too revolting to describe. There is another moral to be drawn from our complacent indifference to Mr. Rhodes's conduct. The Matabele were first duped and cajoled into making concessions to the Goldfields Company, then deliberately provoked into war, and finally crushed with every circumstance of brutality and horror. Mr. Rhodes, after securing the transfer of British Bechuanaland to Cape Colony in 1895, made a slight disturbance the pretext for a great campaign, hunted, shot down, and starved out the Bechuana, and deported 2,000 of them to Capetown. The Chartered Company introduced, as Sir Richard Martin reported, a system of forced labour into Rhodesia. These things were done in the name of England. There are a good many Liberals who, at the risk of being sneered at by a British Proconsul as 'an anti-slavery faction,' believe that it is a much greater dishonour to England that she should allow her flag to fly over murder and treachery and pillage, than that she should refuse its shelter and protection to a motley group of marauding financiers, who measure civilization by their fortunes, and select their fatherland as other men select their banks. We would deliberately prefer that these territories should be left to unredeemed barbarism rather than capture them for civilization under a black flag. But how many Englishmen, in ordinary life humane and civilized, regard all these as the inevitable incidents of expansion! The youth who 'never missed seeing a [African] shot in Buluwayo' confessed that he could never have brought himself to watch a man hanged in England. Where is this brutalizing development to end? (pp. 183-183)

+ Why these arguments were forgotten is worth asking.