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Kevin Grant, Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/1462474520915818
Published date01 October 2020
Date01 October 2020
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SG-PUNJ190026 389..412 Book Reviews
565
make complaints and to do so free of reproach. Fifth, provide inmates with better
access to the court system to ensure CSC is accountable to the legal rights of
inmates. Iftene spends the latter half of the book provoking the reader to consider
these reforms as ways forward, as initial steps by which the reader can re-conceive
their relation with inmates. Punished for Aging then culminates much the same, in
provocation, with Iftene calling to the reader to reconsider and transform what is
lawful to bring us closer to a just society. It is our responsibility, as readers, to take
up that call.
Joshua David Michael Shaw
York University, Canada
ORCID iD
Joshua David Michael Shaw
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3930-6501
Kevin Grant, Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire,
1890–1948. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2019; 232 pp.
(inc. index). ISBN: 9780520301016, $85.00, £70.00 (hardcover); $34.95,
£29.00 (paperback)
“We have never been able to achieve anything except when we compelled
England to rule us with the naked sword,” Irish politician E´amon de Valera
declared in 1920.
It is, of course, always by the sword that she has maintained herself in Ireland, as in
India, but she prefers to maintain herself with the sword in its scabbard if she can.
The English are very sensitive to what the world thinks of them. (p. 126)
Kevin Grant quotes de Valera’s speech, delivered in New York four years after
Irish republicans starved themselves in their campaign against British colonial rule,
in Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948. Last
Weapons examines how English suffragists, Irish revolutionaries, and Indian
nationalists used hunger strikes and fasting to expose what they saw as the genteel
violence and liberal hypocrisy of British rule. While Grant is primarily invested in
capturing the complex personal and political significance of hunger as protest, the
book is also a meditation on late-imperial...

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