Abstract
From before the Great War until the early 1920s, East Africa was the focus of an especially bitter battle between Asian and European settlers to determine the nature of colonial government and the future political development of the region. The Government of India, through its efforts to advance the interests of Indians overseas and uphold their rights, became entangled in this East African imbroglio. The struggle for East Africa coincided with important changes both in Africa and in India. Although the war granted new opportunities for Indians and the Indian government, it also created a host of new challenges and dilemmas. The prospect of an Indian colony in the former German East Africa and the campaign to achieve equal rights for Asians in Kenya posed particular problems for the Indian government at home and abroad. Against a background of reform and repression, nineteenth-century notions of Indian sub-imperialism clashed with emergent Indian nationalism and the newly heightened status of British India on the Imperial and world stage. The efforts to accommodate Indian ambitions in East Africa were to prove more than an attempt to extend the Indian sphere: they were part of British India’s painful adjustment to post-war, post-reform realities, which ultimately helped to define India’s place within the British Empire-Commonwealth.1
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Notes
R.K. Tangri, ‘Early Asian protest in E. Africa, 1900–1918’, Africa Quarterly (Delhi), 7, 2 (1967), p. 153
On the repartition of Africa, see Digre, Imperialism’s new clothes; G. Smith, The British government and the disposition of the German colonies in Africa, 1914–1918’, in P. Gif ford and W.R. Louis (eds), Britain and Germany in Africa: imperial rivalry and colonial rule (London, 1967), pp. 275–99; P.J. Yearwood, ‘Great Britain and the repartition of Africa, 1914–19’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 18, 3 (1990), pp. 316–41
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© 2003 Robert J. Blyth
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Blyth, R.J. (2003). ‘A Colony for India’: The Struggle for East Africa, c. 1914–1924. In: The Empire of the Raj. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599116_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599116_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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