HALE, Harry William.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Terrorism in India 1917-1936. First and only contemporary edition, classified "confidential", number 143 of 265 copies only. Regional chapters are followed by three valuable appendices, which detail provincial and inter-provincial terrorism cases and profile dissident publications.Hale (1905-1957), an officer in the Indian Police from 1923, was seconded to the Intelligence Bureau in 1931. He intended his manual as a sequel to James Campbell Ker's 1917 report Political Trouble in India, 1907-1917. "Aside from the useful primary material that these volumes provide for historians through their comprehensive documentation of various actions undertaken by revolutionaries throughout the early twentieth century, the titles of the books are themselves instructive of an evolving colonial prose of counterterrorism during this period. By the time that Hale composed his volume in 1937, the term 'terrorism' had definitively replaced older labels such as 'sedition', 'conspiracy', or 'political crime' as the primary lens through which acts of anti-colonial revolutionary violence were understood" (McQuade, p. 18).The title page bears the notice, "This book is strictly confidential, and the recipient is responsible for its safe custody", a clue to its rarity today. We have traced only two copies, at the University of Washington and University of Pennsylvania. Neither of these copies are recorded as having a map, suggesting that the pocket on the rear pastedown was provided for convenience.

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