Book Launch: A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea

 

Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.  

 

*The book is available for purchase on the Cambridge University Press website here: www.cambridge.org/9781108842150

 

 

 

Joseph McQuade is the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief at the NATO Association of Canada. Dr. McQuade is affiliated with the Queen’s University Global History Initiative and with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, and is a Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.  Dr. McQuade completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with a dissertation that examined the origins of terrorism in colonial India from an international perspective. This research forms the basis of his first book, A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea, published by Cambridge University Press in November 2020. His postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto examines how digital platforms have been used to mobilize vigilante violence in India and Myanmar from the 1990s to the present. His broader research and teaching interests include critical genealogies of terrorism, international relations in Asia, and the global history of political violence.