Anti-Colonialism and the Crisis of Interwar Fascism by Michael Ortiz (review)

Reviewed by: Anti-Colonialism and the Crisis of Interwar Fascism by Michael Ortiz G. Bruce Strang Ortiz, Michael – Anti-Colonialism and the Crisis of Interwar Fascism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 249 p. Michael Ortiz's new monograph examines Indian anti-imperialists' views of five crises in international relations in the latter half of the 1930s. The book's structure is straightforward. Ortiz wrote five chapters, outlining the response of one Indian observer for each of the crises: Rajani Palme Dutt's belief that the British and French negotiated to reward Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia to avoid a continental war in Europe; Jawaharlal Nehru's contention that Anglo-French non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War occurred because Western colonial empires bound them to Europe's fascist states, collaborating to suppress self-determination; Subhas Bose's view that British imperial hegemony directly inspired Japan's invasion of China; Gandhi's belief that the Munich crisis represented merely another example of a sordid deal between empires negotiating away the sovereignty of another nation; and M.N. Roy's argument that Indian anti-imperialists should support Britain despite its imperial depredations, as even a victorious war would exhaust the empire and enable India to gain its independence. Ortiz's coverage of these views is in one sense straightforward and uncontroversial. Ortiz, however, more than merely recounts anti-imperialists' views. He argues that his outside-looking-in approach provides a useful addition to more traditional inside-out narratives. He revives Hannah Arendt's boomerang thesis—that liberal imperialism directly inspired a fascist counterpart; for Ortiz, the boomerang thesis was "indispensable to understanding the origins of totalitarianism" (p. 225). He believes the outside-in approach adds a compelling perspective to conventional Eurocentric studies. For Ortiz, European fascism represented merely a radicalized form of liberal imperial violence; liberal imperialism and fascism "intertwined in kaleidoscopic, often bewildering, ways" (p. 229). Ortiz rightly chides historians who fail to recognize that colonies have influence on the metropole. At the same time, however, his discussion of government policies is sometimes weak. In one egregious example, he cites, with apparent approval, a snarky bromide from A.J.P. Taylor's 1961 The Origins of the Second World War. Few if any specialists in international relations would do so now. Far better researched assessments rooted in deep archival research than was available to Taylor have long since surpassed his idiosyncratic and frequently inaccurate views. Throughout, Ortiz seems to accept uncritically work that proves convenient for his [End Page 218] thesis, while often ignoring more nuanced and convincing understandings of the British government's response to threats to metropole and empire. Ortiz is on solid ground arguing that more similarities existed between fascism and liberal imperialism than liberal imperialists would have wanted to admit. That said, however, Ortiz's argument often lacks nuance. Liberal imperialism is a big tent. For example, British imperialism in its settler colonies in Canada, its mercantilist imperial conquest of India, and its economic, military, and political imperialism in China does have similarities, but also significant differences. He assumes that liberal imperialism provided a template for fascist imperialism that aimed to exceed and defeat its exemplar. Can one axiomatically assume that fascism drew its penchant for violence from liberal imperialism rather than Roman, Ottoman, Spanish, Russian, or even Ethiopian imperialism, or from prior autocratic or despotic regimes, or differing ideologies? Especially so, as twentieth-century liberal imperialism evolved in ways that Hitler and Mussolini derided as weak and dangerously naive. Ortiz recounts a 1937 conversation between Hitler and a "nonplussed" (p. 158) Viscount Halifax, an important cabinet minister and one of the architects of the 1931 Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Hitler advised the British government to shoot Gandhi, and if necessary, 20 or 200 or as many leading members of Congress as was required to force its dissolution. Ortiz uses the episode to assert Gandhi's belief that Nazism represented only a revised version of liberal imperialism. Ortiz, however, seemed unaware that this episode demonstrated fundamental differences between Nazi and liberal imperialist praxis in the 1930s. Ortiz also cites Churchill's pitiless reaction to the 1943 Bengal famine as evidence that liberal and fascist imperialism both harboured...

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