[Marxism] Kiernan: Historian of Imperialism

["Politicus E." <epoliticus@xxxxxxxxx>]

The following obituary of Victor G. Kiernan, a portion of which I
reproduce below, has been published in the present issue of Economic &
Political Weekly (Volume 44, Number 24).  Interested comrades can find
this article in its entirety at http://epw.in/epw/user/fullContent.jsp
epoliticus

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Victor Gordon Kiernan (1913-2009) died of heart failure on 17 February
2009 at the ripe age of 95. We remember Kiernan fondly in south Asia
not only because he was one of the founders of the seminal historians’
group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (here after historians’
group) or because he was professor emeritus of history at Edinburgh
University. In Edinburgh, Kiernan inspired students
like Prakash Karat, General Secretary of CPI(M) and James Gordon
Brown, present prime minister of the United Kingdom. Karat tried to
repay his gratitude by editing a Festschrift entitled Across Centuries
and Continents on Kiernan’s 90th birthday. Brown, who was a student at
the history department of Edinburgh University, reportedly edited The
Red Paper on Scotland in 1975 with help from Kiernan. All this is
important but there is more to Kiernan than merely his positions,
students and friends.

For us, ex-colonial subjects of Britain, Kiernan is important because
we were important to him. We, victims of imperialism, occupied a large
part of his work. Kiernan spent eight precious years of his youth
(1938-46) in Lahore, his first marriage was with the danseuse, Shanta
Kalidas Gandhi (1917-2002), and he was a multilingual Marxist
historian who took imperialism more seriously than his ilk. Kiernan
blazed a trail of research on cultural imperialism with his The Lords
of Human Kind (1969). Edward Said, the famous literary critic,
systematically followed this theme later. Said’s legendary book
Orientalism (1978) has just about two references to Kiernan but Said
accepts gratefully Kiernan’s characterisation of Orientalism as
“Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient” (Said 1978: 52).

Kiernan was born on 4 September 1913 in a lower middle class family.
Apart from English, he picked Spanish and Portuguese
at home because his father worked as a translator in the Manchester
Canal Company. He learnt Greek and Latin in the Grammar School at
Manchester. Kiernan was multilingual before he joined Trinity College,
Cambridge for his graduation (1931-36) in history. He worked there
later as a Fellow in two tenures, viz, 1936-38 and 1946-48.
Remembering his academic and political life then, Kiernan wrote
poetically (Kiernan 1974b: 24):

"…Doubtless the youthful world we inhabited contained, like all
others, regions of illusion and self-deception, over which Saharas
have long since crept. Much nevertheless is left from that time of
common endeavour and common hope that few of the survivors
would willingly forget."

The Marxist commitments of Kiernan came in the way when he was looking
for a regular teaching assignment. He was refused jobs in the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Finally, he joined the history
department in Edinburgh University in 1948 and retired from there in
1977. Speaking of Kiernan, Geoff Eley says (Eley 2005: 28):

"...[Apart from Hobsbawm] Kiernan was also a true polymath, publishing
widely on aspects of imperialism, early modern state formation, and
the history of the aristocratic duel, as well as British relations
with China and the Spanish Revolution of 1854, with an imposing wider
bibliography of essays on an extraordinary range of subjects."

Kiernan is survived only by his wife, Heather Massey – a Canadian
academic. Kiernan’s book The Duel in European History: Honour and
Reign of Aristocracy (1988) was dedicated to Heather. Both married in
1984 when Kiernan was 70 years old.

Dissident with a Difference

Though a part of the historians’ group, Kiernan is, however, less
celebrated than others like Hobsbawm, Thompson or Dobb. This may have
been because Kiernan was a trifle less polemical, more focused on
historical themes, less spread out on other agendas and could not earn
the halo that someone like Thompson did as a “public intellectual”.
The good thing about Kiernan was that he is as open as Thompson when
it came to intra-left ideological and political problems. Harvey Kaye
says that while others in the historians’ group were primarily
strategists of socialist politics “fanning the spark of hope”,
Kiernan’s vision of history was tragic. He reminded us that the
“the enemy (the ruling class) has not ceased to be victorious” with
the triumph of capitalism (Kaye 1988: 27). The losers will not be left
alone by the victorious ruling class; they will be systematically
misrepresented in history. Therefore, it was on behalf of the losers
that Kiernan took up cudgels in his life and work.

[...]

*****

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