‘The Imperial International: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930-32’

This seminar will explore the three sittings of the Round Table Conference (1930-32) in London, which worked to establish the constitutional future of India within the British Empire. It will explore the extent to which this imperial gathering adopted the form of the international conference, pioneered by the League of Nations in pursuit of international order and international law. It will argue that we can profitable view this event space as one of the many configurations of the “imperial international” in the interwar years. It will also, however, show how the performative space of the conference allowed that imperial design to be upturned, through the interventions of Mahatma Gandhi at the second sitting of the conference. Through frustrated by the constitutional wrangling of the conference, and by Hindu-Muslim intransigence, Gandhi’s body-politics at the conference appealed directly to the British public, via the press.