THE VIOLENCE OF ACCUMULATION AND THE ACCUMULATION OF VIOLENCE

THE VIOLENCE OF ACCUMULATION AND THE ACCUMULATION OF VIOLENCE

Dr. Jonathan Saha, ISRF Mid-Career Fellow, 2018–19

From at least as early as Karl Marx, histories of capital accumulation have drawn attention to the violence that attends it. Marx’s formulation of “so-called primitive accumulation” was plotted through the forcible dispossession of English peasants. In her critique of Marx’s formulation, Rosa Luxemburg drew out the centrality of imperialistic military expansions and state force in facilitating capital accumulation. Eric Williams foregrounded the systematic, racialised violence of slavery in the capital accumulation that laid the groundwork for the English industrial revolution. More recently, David Harvey has made the case for the centrality of violent dispossession as a perennial dynamic in capital accumulation. And scholars such as Donna Haraway and Jason Moore have highlighted the forms of violence accompanying capital accumulation that have affected other creatures beyond humans alone. 1 It seems that studies of accumulation necessarily entail an analysis of the violence that enables and perpetuates accumulation. Without wanting to play down this important area of study, it is possible—and perhaps productive—to reverse this line of enquiry to ask: can violence itself accumulate? That is, to examine how violence, and physical bodily violence in particular, has been iteratively reproduced in an expanded form over time.

Histories of British imperialism over the last twenty years have been reinvigorated by breaking down the staid geographic model of an imperial core impacting upon a colonised periphery, in favour of conceptualising empires in terms of networks and circulations. 2 I contend that further possibilities might be opened up by considering the concept of accumulation as an analytical lens for scholars of imperialism. This is not to advocate a return to critical political economic analyses of the relations between imperialism and world capitalism, at least not alone. Instead, the concept of accumulation can be abstracted from its application to capital and deployed to understand the movement of objects, knowledge and social practices in Empire. As historians of these different aspects of imperialism have demonstrated, violence was present in the imperial accumulation of objects, knowledge and social practices. Looting and imperial wars constituted the provenance of much of Britain’s contemporary museum collections of artefacts. The construction of colonial knowledge has been studied as a form of epistemic violence that often relied upon the deployment of physical violence on the bodies of the colonised. And everyday violence was necessary for the establishment and maintenance of racial and gendered hierarchies in colonised societies. We might glean insights about the accumulation of violence itself by focusing on one particular site in the imperial accumulation of capital, objects, knowledge and social practices: the elephant camp.

J. H. Williams, Elephant Bill (London: Hart-Davis, 1950).

British imperialism in Myanmar was a more-than-human affair, as it was across the globe. Asian elephants were particularly entangled and affected by colonial rule. In the late-nineteenth century and earlytwentieth century, colonial Myanmar became one of the world’s largest exporters of hardwoods, particularly teak. Large British timber firms dominated the industry in the colony, in no small part because of their domination of the elephant market. The extraction of teak in remote forests relied upon elephant labour. Their dexterity, strength and ability to work with humans enabled the felling, in-country transportation, processing and shipping of the teak. Here then, elephants not only enabled the accumulation of capital; they were themselves a form of capital to be acquired and deployed in the labour process. They were, of course, not willing workers. Their capture was only possible through violent methods, such as driving them into pits, snaring them, or corralling them into stockades. Their employment was coerced through a regime of routine physical violence. Their training entailed deliberate starvation and corrective beatings in order to instil obedience. Their work was physically demanding and they were directed, in part, through the repeated infliction of pain. Outside of work, their movements were limited through the use of physical restraints on their limbs, keeping them “semi-captive”. Violence was not the only tool at the disposal of Burmese elephant drivers and timber firms, however, as elephants’ physical needs had to be met and affectionate relations were established across the species divide. 3 Nevertheless, this was a routine of “violent care”. 4

This physical violence not only enabled the accumulation of capital, it was central to the production and circulation of some quintessentially imperial artefacts in Britain and across the Empire, such as teak furniture. More macabrely, the elephant camps were a site for the accumulation of elephant remains. This could take the form of ivory tusks, either as commodities or scientific specimens. It also took the form of gruesome furniture, such as stools made from elephants’ feet. The elephant camp was also a site for the appropriation and generation of colonial knowledge. European supervisors employed by British timber firms learned about common elephant ailments and methods of treatments from their Burmese workers, and compiled these findings into their own textbooks. Imperial scientists also used the elephant camps in Myanmar’s forests to conduct veterinary experiments, eventually producing a vaccine for anthrax in elephants. And, in addition to these accumulations of capital, objects, and knowledge, these elephant camps expanded certain social practices. In the camps of British timber firms a clear hierarchy was maintained between white, European supervisors and Burmese employees. This extended the bureaucratic divisions of the colonial state into the commercial sphere. The camps were also the primary site in which a particular performative masculine archetype was produced and reproduced, the so-called “jungle wallah”. This was a supposedly hardy, stoic and manly figure who could thrive in the solitude and privations of Myanmar’s remote forests. Although each of these accumulations (the accumulation of objects, knowledge and social practices) could be linked to capital accumulation, the ways in which they were reproduced and expanded was distinct from and not determined by the logic of capital.

Expanding the concept of accumulation to analyse violence itself, and particularly physical bodily violations, also enables us to also uncover the relative autonomy of its expanded reproduction. The violence of keeping elephants in forest camps was not one-directional. Through their resistance to their captivity and labour, elephants could, and did, attack and harm their human co-workers, overwhelmingly their Burmese riders. In at least one instance an elephant employed in a British timber firm killed five riders before being deemed unworkable. As timber exploitation expanded, the violent regimes in which both elephants and human Burmese workers were made vulnerable to one another also expanded. As the firms sought harder-to-reach timber in depleted forests, their elephant power needed sustaining and growing, with the numbers of creatures brought into these violent relations approaching 10,000 by the 1940s. This was a regime of routinised bodily violence that can be mapped as it spread and moved in the colony. And focusing on the expanded reproduction (or accumulation) of this regime of “subjective violence”, as Slavoj Žižek calls it, 5 can help uncover both the deeper “systemic violence” and the more abstract “epistemic violence” at work. It reveals how elephants, and the Burmese human workers attending them, were made vulnerable; the former existentially so through the ecological destruction of their forest homes and the unsustainable depletion of wild populations through capture. It also reveals the ways in which elephants were re-imagined as resources for exploitation and the recasting of Burmese elephant knowledge to facilitate their exploitation.

Studies of imperialism that focus on the circulations of people, objects and ideas across a networked empire do not necessarily preclude analysis of violence. However, such a focus does not inherently keep violence in the frame. By contrast, a focus on violence is embedded in accumulation as a concept. It may also be productive to consider physical violence itself as something that accumulates. The study of the accumulation of these routine inflictions of pain and bodily violations may, in turn, enable us to uncover complimentary histories of systemic and epistemic violence—all too often forms of violence either valorised or marginalised in academic studies in contrast to the study of physical violence.

1. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), i; Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Deutsch, 1964); David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Clarendon Lectures in Geography and Environmental Studies (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Jason W. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44.3 (2017), 594–630.

2. Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass, 4.1 (2006), 124–141.

3. Jonathan Saha, ‘Colonizing Elephants: Animal Agency, Undead Capital and Imperial Science in British Burma’, BJHS Themes, 2 (2017), 169–89; Jonathan Saha, ‘Do Elephants Have Souls? Animal Subjectivities and Colonial Governmentality’, in South Asian Governmentalities, ed. by Stephen Legg and Deana Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 159–77; Jonathan Saha, ‘Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities, c.1840-1950’, Journal of Social History, 48.4 (2015), 933–55.

4. Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

5. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile, 2008).25