Nick Lloyd (historian)

Nick Lloyd FRHS, is Reader in Military and Imperial History at King's College London.^[1] He has written several books on the First World War.

The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day

Lloyd's most controversial work is his 2011 revisionist history of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre entitled The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day in which Lloyd sought to putting the events of 1919 in its historical context and in the publisher's description, "[dispels] common myths and misconceptions surrounding the massacre and offers a new explanation of the decisions taken in 1919."^[2] Lloyd’s book was written as a rebuke of both the Indian nationalist account of the event, as well as ore contemporary works like Nigel Collett's.

Lloyd's narrative focused upon the increasing civil disorder in Punjab after WW1, particularly in the context of the Rowlatt Act. In Lloyd's account, which drew heavily from the Hunter Commission report, previous accounts of the massacre had significantly downplayed the extent of violence by Indian nationalist crowds, stating that British officials "did not imagine the crowds in Amritsar or think they were worse than they really were. They did not suffer from some kind of mass hysteria or information panic. They encountered violent crowds and had to deal with them as best as they could" and stating that the nationalist accounts "confuses victims with aggressors and acts as an apologist for that violence."^[3]

In a brief review for Asian Affairs, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, described the book as "thought-provoking, engaging" and described Lloyd’s portrait of Dyer as "compelling"^[4] Far more extensive and critical were reviews from Collett and Kim Wagner, both of whom had written their own accounts of the massacre. In an acerbic review for the University of London, Wagner described the book as "a complete whitewash" and "deeply problematic, never mind poor scholarship" The book was criticised for excluding relying on British police and official reports to the exclusion of Indian accounts, as well as failing to engage with more contemporary scholarship on post-war Punjab and colonial administration. Wagner's primary criticism however, was that Lloyd took seriously the idea of Punjab as being in open violent rebellion to the extent of making Dyer's decision at the Bagh a credible act of public security as opposed to a calculated act of punishment.^[3] In his response, Lloyd asserted his position that "Dyer did not know what he was doing, panicked and then lied about it afterwards." He also highlighted the numerous personal attacks in Wagner's review and accused him of acting with " selectivity, narrow-mindedness, intolerance and hysteria."

Collett's review was more extensive, quoting heavily from The Amritsar Massacre and was noticeably more measured in tone, but accused Lloyd of blatantly politicizing the matter. Like Wagner, he accused Lloyd of reaching his conclusions through the selective use of evidence from Dyer and O'Dwyer's own writings and statements that challenged the thesis that Dyer panicked, stating "As with the rest of his thesis, Lloyd reaches [his] conclusion by ignoring much of the evidence"^[5] Collett also pointed to several inaccuracies in Lloyd's text, such as an erroneous description of the Baloch. Collette's criticism of the thesis that Dyer panicked was based upon four points, namely Dyer's choices prior to the order to fire, accounts by witnesses to whether he panicked, the duration of the shooting, and finally, Dyer's own words to the Hunter Commission, and his writings later in life.

Selected publications

• Loos 1915. Stroud: Tempus, 2006.
• The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011
• Hundred Days: The End of the Great War. London: Viking Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-670-92006-8
• Passchendaele: A New History. London: Viking Press, 2017.
• The Western Front: A History of the First World War. Penguin, 2021.
• The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War. Penguin, 2024.

References