Domesticating Chemical Weapons: Tear Gas and the Militarization of Policing in the British Imperial World, 1919–1981

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Previous articleNext article FreeDomesticating Chemical Weapons: Tear Gas and the Militarization of Policing in the British Imperial World, 1919–1981*Erik LinstrumErik LinstrumUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt least since the Hague Convention of 1899, formal and informal expressions of world opinion have branded the use of chemical weapons as illegitimate—a "taboo" strikingly persistent if not always observed in practice.1 And yet respectable Western states as well as rogue regimes have used one kind of chemical weapon for decades. Beginning in the 1930s, British authorities employed tear gas to combat riots and insurgencies in colonies from India to the Middle East to the West Indies. When they first did the same in the British Isles—during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969 and then in response to unrest in Liverpool in 1981—it was not only a chemical formula but also a set of tactics that arrived in Britain from the colonies. The use of violence against bodies was less an end in itself than an instrument for fulfilling other aims: establishing control over physical space, frustrating collective action, intimidating and demoralizing opposition. Applying the logics of colonial counterinsurgency to homegrown unrest marked a notable step in the militarization of the police in Britain.In her essay On Violence (1969), Hannah Arendt identified a recurring anxiety of British imperialism: the prospect that "rule by violence in faraway lands would end by affecting the government of England." She described this as a "boomerang effect" or a "backlash" and wondered whether "the last 'subject race' would be the English themselves."2 This rhetoric drew on a tradition stretching back to Victorian anti-imperialists like Richard Cobden and earlier still to Edmund Burke. Historians now recognize that some techniques of governance—from fingerprinting and city planning to public health and psychiatry—did indeed migrate from colony to metropole, raising questions about the liberal and democratic pretensions of European states at home.3 A fuller answer to Arendt's question has, however, remained elusive. Did the instruments of state violence, exacting submission through the use of force when unable to do so otherwise, follow the same path from empire to nation?4In the British case, an array of techniques long considered alien to the traditions of metropolitan policing—from shields and masks to military-style formations—originated in the colonial laboratory and gradually migrated to Britain.5 Weaponized gas belonged to this bundle but also stood apart from it, because no other instrument deployed by British police attracted so much controversy for so long. This article traces two phases in the evolution of attitudes that gradually decoupled lethal substances like mustard gas and phosgene, on the one hand, from tear gases, on the other, transforming the latter from objects of international condemnation and public opprobrium into everyday mechanisms of social control.6 After 1918, British soldiers, officials, and scientists advocated the use of chemical weapons of all kinds to combat unrest in the colonies. When political leaders in London ruled out the deployment of deadlier gases, they reasoned that tear gas could accomplish many of the same aims, blending humanitarian and techno-utopian rhetoric to conjure a vision of clean, efficient counterinsurgencies. Then, beginning in the late 1960s, concerns about radical protest and racial militancy at home prompted authorities in the metropole to adopt repressive technologies that had been confined to the colonies for decades. Veterans of colonial counterinsurgency played a leading role in linking the disorder of 1970s and 1980s Britain to the strife of decolonization.The risk of "militarization" as a concept is to conjure an idealized liberal realm contaminated by the alien forces of war.7 Such idealism would be misguided, to put it mildly, in the case of British policing. The treatment of crowds from Peterloo to Tonypandy, the intelligence-gathering mechanisms of the Special Branch, the weaponry stockpiled by the Metropolitan Police, and the career paths of police personnel all point to the deep roots of military influence.8 Yet there are reasons to mark a new departure in the twentieth century. One is that military men, pressed into the business of domestic security after the First World War, worked tirelessly to extricate themselves from it. As they transferred those responsibilities back to civil police forces, they transferred methods, materials, and mentalities, too.9 Another reason is that the cultural valence of policing changed significantly over the same period. The image of the unthreatening, unarmed "bobby," however romanticized, long served as a talisman of British identity; it incarnated a brand of liberty incompatible with American-style police squads and French-style gendarmeries.10 The use of tear gas against British crowds on British streets, once unthinkable, both reflected and accelerated the bobby myth's decline.This is a history that unfolded in space, as long-standing boundaries between the metropolitan "zone of law" and the imperial "zone of violence" came under pressure.11 But it is also a history in time. Even as master concepts like secularization, democratization, and industrialization have lost their luster, grand narratives linger in histories of violence. Many scholars have followed Michel Foucault in tracing a path from spectacular, public, and painful punishments to internalized forms of discipline—a shift in the target of coercion from the body to the mind and the soul.12 Others, taking their cue from Norbert Elias, have seen violence retreat with feudal ideas of honor.13 Some have even insisted that decreasing tolerance for physical violence is a hallmark of life in the West today—a product, among other factors, of humanitarianism, visual media, increased life expectancies, and the traumatized aftermath of world war and genocide.14 Yet another narrative, taking a different lesson from the Holocaust, posits that modern technology has enabled ever more brutal violence by anonymizing and depersonalizing it.15The case of tear gas offers a counterpoint to these sweeping histories. The spectacular, public, and painful character of tear gas always played a central role in its appeal to state authorities. While proponents often made a humanitarian case for its adoption, by heralding nonlethal gas as an improvement over deadly gunfire, the dichotomy was misleading. British state violence in response to serious disorder at home most often took the form of beatings with clubs or batons. Tear gas complemented and intensified this crude physical force rather than replacing it. Since British leaders sought to recapture the demoralizing and disorienting effects of more toxic gases without the political blowback of creating martyrs, the bodily suffering and visible prostration inflicted by tear gas were not merely incidental but essential. Indeed, it was not until government scientists in the 1950s perfected a more potent form of tear gas, which simulated the experience of suffocation, that authorities deemed it worthy of deployment on a wide scale. This is less a story about heightened squeamishness or humanitarian scruples than about the fluidity of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate weapons.16Although tear gas in some ways offered the promise of increasing the distance between police and protesters, its violence was hardly impersonal. Using it effectively required close attention to the physiological and psychological responses it produced. Moreover, tear gas in the British context—for all its futuristic novelty—was never an unambiguous symbol of modernity because of its deep association with the colonial frontier. Its indiscriminate violence was seen as a fitting punishment for supposedly savage enemies; its spectacular effects were deemed especially potent where so-called primitives were concerned. Assumptions like these help to explain why so much of the early history of chemical weapons took place beyond Europe, in its colonies above all.17 They also help to explain why British authorities proved so reluctant for so long to use chemical weapons at home, even when those weapons were ostensibly nonlethal, and even as they did so with increasing frequency in the empire. The eventual introduction of tear gas on the British mainland represented the unraveling of norms against militarized policing deeply woven into British assumptions about their own society. As a result, what once aroused outrage now barely elicits notice.IIn the years between the wars, lurid visions of the dangers posed by chemical weapons most often came from leftist critics of rearmament. H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933) detailed the possibility that London or New York could be reduced, "after some clamor and running and writhing and choking, into a cityful of distorted corpses."18 Antiwar pressure groups like the Union of Democratic Control warned that masks, drills, and other preventive measures amounted to "a very cruel deception" because the destructive potential of the new weapons was so immense. Other pacifists argued that stockpiling weapons at the behest of "militarists and war-mongers" would only increase the likelihood of war—the ultimate aim of "Capitalist Imperialism."19 Norman Anglin's polemical play Poison Gas (1928), set two decades in the future, depicted an arms manufacturer floating on an airtight yacht in the Mediterranean and triggering a chemical war in the name of social Darwinism: "Gas for strikers, gas for malcontents, gas for all who won't behave themselves. … The world is overpopulated, there is not food to go round, therefore those who won't work, and won't help, must go to the wall."20On the other side, support for weaponized gas was not exclusively a right-wing phenomenon: perhaps the best-known proponent, Cambridge scientist J. B. S. Haldane, was an ardent Marxist. But the case for chemical warfare between the wars was dominated by military officers, imperial officials, and the scientists who advised them. Like Haldane, they seized on the language of expertise to portray scruples against chemical weaponry as the product of ignorance—an irrational fear of the novel and the unknown. Chemicals, like aviation, promised a new kind of combat in which technological prowess might substitute for mass armies and the massive casualties that went with them.21 Pointing out that gas had inflicted far fewer fatalities as a proportion of total casualties than artillery or gunfire during the First World War, its champions touted chemical warfare as a humane innovation because it opened the way to achieving battlefield objectives in a relatively bloodless way.22 As British chemist James Kendall, who served with British and American forces, put it, "the direct object of war … is not to massacre the enemy, but to force him into submission." Soldiers incapacitated by nonlethal wounds imposed a greater logistical burden on the enemy than their dead counterparts. War fought by chemical means thus promised fewer deaths, less expense, and outcomes determined by technical sophistication rather than brute force.23This rationalist humanitarian rhetoric always coexisted with another kind of argument for chemical warfare—one based on futuristic visions of gas as a uniquely powerful superweapon. The surreal capacities that military officials imagined for gases of the "near future" in 1919 included dissolving the masks of enemy troops and jamming machine guns by clotting the oil in them.24 Other champions of chemical warfare ascribed to gas an almost mystical capacity to penetrate and reshape the environment by diffusing through the air. According to Brigadier General Harold Hartley, a chemist who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel on the Western Front, "gas is the only weapon that can produce continuous effects in both time and space." In contrast to a barrage of gunfire or artillery shells, gas might linger for days, and "there need be no gaps in a gas cloud." Even when the precise location of an enemy was unknown, gas dispatched in the right direction might drift, sink, and seep until it found its mark. The black smoke employed by Martians in H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1898) worked in exactly the same way, Hartley marveled. Captain Basil Liddell Hart agreed that gas could occupy space more effectively than "even the quickest firing gun."25Like the bombing campaigns that also rose to prominence during the First World War, chemical attacks were seen as powerful weapons for psychological as well as technical reasons. What military planners later called "shock and awe" was then termed the "moral effect": demoralization through anxiety and confusion.26 Hartley tallied up the nerve-racking qualities of gas: "the ill-understood danger, the constant strain of watchfulness, the fear of new gases with more painful properties, and even the feeling of confinement when wearing a respirator." Hart, too, argued that noiseless and invisible gas attacks contained a useful element of surprise.27 Here, ironically, the proponents of chemical warfare echoed critics like the Union of Democratic Control, whose members warned against the potential to cause "panic, fear, and physical incapacity over a wide area." The case for chemical warfare navigated an uneasy tension between awestruck appreciation for its apparently unprecedented power and dispassionate insistence on the irrationality of imposing restrictions.28The use of gas, like the use of aerial bombardment, emerged as an alluring solution to the rebellions that roiled the postwar empire in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. While serving as war secretary in 1919, Winston Churchill infamously advocated the use of weaponized gas against rebels in Iraq—an idea first mooted by Royal Air Force (RAF) officers in the country—although his cabinet colleagues strenuously disagreed and logistical difficulties prevented British troops from deploying it anyway.29 Undeterred, Churchill then proposed waging chemical war in another troubled region. In June 1919, his War Office sent Brigadier General C. H. Foulkes on a three-month tour to investigate the possibility of gassing the perpetually restive tribes on the North-West Frontier of India. Although the majority of military officers on the frontier favored the use of gas, political administrators mostly opposed it. So did the viceroy, Frederic Thesiger, and the commander-in-chief of British forces in India, Charles Monro. But Foulkes and his allies mounted an energetic case for the benefits of chemical weaponry nonetheless.30In many ways, the North-West Frontier made a natural setting for gas warfare. The long-standing tactics of the "punitive expedition"—practiced by, among others, Churchill in his time in the Indian Army—aimed at displacing fractious populations by destroying their homes and their means of subsistence.31 Like other technologies of violence, gas promised to advance these goals not simply by inflicting injury but also by regulating space and restricting movement.32 Precisely because it lingered, gas could "[deny] certain points to the enemy … lay traps for him, or … contaminate ground in villages or at sources of water supply." Mountainous terrain not easily held by British troops might at least be rendered inhabitable to others. In this way, Foulkes concluded, "punitive expeditions would be much facilitated by using gas shells."33 In a striking metaphor, the spiritual godfather of British counterinsurgency, T. E. Lawrence, described guerrilla forces as "a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting like a gas … a vapor blowing where we listed." Traditional armies, by contrast, were like deeply rooted "plants."34 Gas promised to even the playing field by mimicking the elusive, ethereal quality of the enemy.Mirroring for the use of aerial against of chemical warfare in India that the of sophistication among frontier would its psychological A British on the frontier "the of gas the more because of its A because unrest more effectively than the wars of a the had been with mustard gas rather than simply with Foulkes Thesiger, who in the that would have … that the of its would a the Frontier that would of chemical warfare the possibility of Foulkes had to earlier that that from … was to in the of the it But even the of mass was to advance one of the humanitarian for gas: that it had the potential to in the long by and thus of chemical warfare in this did not a between toxic gases like mustard gas and gases that only of gas, after had been deployed in the to the of were seen as means of the same fear and and restricting in certain Hart advocated the use of gases which can and Haldane, tear gas as "the most humane weapon ever the to "gas of a Churchill about the potential for tear gas to and … a and yet … no serious effects on most of those Foulkes argued that tear gas the same as mustard gas the West at of less than "the of as a of the enemy as The War Office to chemical weapons to India in 1919 the of as well as Foulkes and his allies their case for the use of gas on the frontier they that the same logics also held for the very different of The of of by British troops at in 1919 over which only two like the tribes by Foulkes protesters, and on city could be by techniques that and for a of the because was still considered Foulkes out that to British posed a only when it into a collective has to be through and was not merely a of bodies through physical space but also an on the of The but effects of gas, Foulkes and were well to J. C. the life of crowds as but also to treatment attacks of that and crowds were to or for a with an to was another way to combat the of the of gases which … cause to go to or their a of the to its tear gas in counterinsurgency promised all the mustard gas the of deadly imperial in Tear gas in the by its of as well as As war secretary argued in nonlethal gas no to a Tear gas thus represented the the a bloodless counterinsurgency, imposing the of the imperial state through technological sophistication rather than brute did for gas and tear gas to British officials at they found it to the burden of that on the and of gas and outrage at home, than the tactics of colonial ever One observed that "the of the years earlier to explain the … in the mind to the use of gas in Even in secretary remained that the use of gas was a time had and against were less in the of the As far as was for could the visions by the of aerial the boundary between and the of gas could be as easily in the of London as on the North-West the British in the possibility that in the empire might be against at home Many political were of mimicking anxiety about the effects of a time when imperial were to their with the language of public opinion beyond Britain also in the least one that chemical warfare in India for and so what remained of a public in the a means of against it and without the for the of its would outrage the of the East as to its from the other of the in as India secretary later that in Indian was not only in this but in the and in the where a of for the cause In the risk of "moral the world "a against the use of this of opinion did more to Britain from chemical warfare than the formal of international Although Britain in the which from using chemical weapons on the it never came into was not until that Britain the more the right to use gas against states and who used chemical weapons In case, the and the only to the use of gas by between states rather than the colonial campaigns described in of a when the of in the that officials in were the possibility of a the of chem

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