AF

After World War I, the United States was keen to immediately create this commercial sector for tear gas. The UK was much more reluctant due to a combination of factors: they were much more present in the war; they were witness to the widespread condemnation of war gases; to the impression that Germans were especially barbaric for their use of gases (even though they were used by both sides). The British memory of the war held that gases were barbaric and uncivilized. So they did not adopt the American position right away. It took a while, and a lot of arguing by the British colonial administrations, to convince the decision makers that they should be able to use it.

There were two major things that legitimated that shift from seeing tear gas as barbaric to seeing it as civilizing — and actually as the benevolent option. The first one is the start of satyagraha practices and the second one is what the administrators call, the women problem.

The first problem was that the administrators found themselves encountering nonviolent forms of resistance during the rise of independence movements, particularly in India but also in other colonies. They did not want to look too excessively violent and barbaric, so they needed an alternative to shooting people, to make it seem like their response to passive resistance was benevolent.

The other one, the women problem, had to do with the Women’s War in Nigeria. Colonial administrators had changed social systems in Nigeria in a way that disenfranchised women.

In the uprisings there, women were at the forefront of direct action protests and the British did not want to appear to be using violence against women. So tear gas again was posed as a solution to make the British look like they are benevolent colonizers.

With these arguments we see both a policy shift towards permitting the use of tear gas, as well as a discursive shift to justify this use. Rather than seeing it as a barbaric poison, the British empire started to rescript tear gas as the benevolent, less lethal, and humane way of responding to political protests.