Unintended Consequences: Imperial Federalism, Colonial Self-Government, and the Convoluted Histories of Britain’s Partition

When talking about partitions, most of us are thinking of the postwar partitions of Palestine and India in 1947, which could not be separated from the decolonization and the British imperial breakdown. But the genealogies of these two partition could be traced far back into interwar years, and are not disconnected from the story of the Irish partition of 1921-2. What was the connection between these pre-WWII partition proposals for Ireland and Palestine, and the British imperial federalist vision that had been crystallizing during the same year? And how should we move beyond comparative politics towards a transnational history of these partitions?

This paper begins to answer these questions by looking at Sir Reginald Coupland (1884–1952), the prolific colonial historian, author and policy advisor, who was involved in all three major partitions that changed the contours of the British Empire during the first half of the twentieth century. Setting Copland against the backdrop of imperial federalist thought originating in the late Victorian era and revived in Edwardian era and following WWI, this paper argues that, paradoxically, these partitions were designed as mechanisms of imperial containment, not nationalist secession, and that despite its top-down image, partitions in fact were often based on an intimate dialogue between policy makers from the imperial metropole and the actors on the colonial periphery. Moreover, this reconstruction also reveals partition less as a single idea and more as a “package deal,” or a set of interrelated theories that included new notions of ethnic “un-mixing,” population exchange, and statehood-within-Commonwealth. Such a reconceptualization underscores the historical specificity of the three partitions of Ireland, India and Palestine, and permits us to re-evaluate their enduring legacies.