In the early morning hours of August 6, 1857, the governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner of South Africa, Sir George Grey, awoke to find that a ship had arrived with urgent news from India.Footnote 1 The sepoys, Grey was informed, had mutinied. But the dire news did not end there. Not only had the Indian soldiers mutinied, but they had marched to Delhi, seized control of the town, and were “daily receiving large reinforcements” from the surrounding country.Footnote 2 Much of northern India, it seemed, was up in arms against British power, and the governor of Bombay sought assistance before the situation worsened. Twenty-five years later, Grey could still recall his initial alarm that the rebellion posed “a great danger” to the British Empire as a whole, and that the proper response would necessitate “instantaneous changes in every part of South Africa.”Footnote 3 Grey, the most senior colonial official in southern Africa, recognized that the impact of the 1857 uprising would not be confined to India.Footnote 4
Grey was not alone. Ireland's Nation reported in July 1857: “The latest intelligence from India has struck terror throughout the length and breadth of the British dominions.”Footnote 5 From Ireland to New Zealand, the revolt unnerved colonial officialdom. The commanding military officer of New Zealand's imperial forces argued that the “onslaught” would affect not only India, but also “the interest of the nation at large.” It was a revolt that “every British subject” had “an individual interest in suppressing.” And, local difficulties aside, New Zealand had a “bounden duty” to respond.Footnote 6
In England, the MP for Hertfordshire (and future Colonial Secretary), E. B. Lytton, sought to capture the severity of the situation by comparing it to the recent Crimean War. The “war” in India, he explained to his constituents, “is not, like the Russian war, for the assertion of an abstract principle of justice, for the defence of a foreign throne, or for protection against a danger that did not threaten ourselves, more than the rest of Europe.” Instead, he argued, “it is for the maintenance of the British Empire. It is a struggle of life and death for our rank among the rulers of the earth.”Footnote 7 Britons throughout the empire did not dismiss the 1857 Indian rebellion as a distant crisis, with no immediate implications. Rather, they recognized the uprising as an imperial crisis, with widespread repercussions.
This book, too, acknowledges the 1857 Indian uprising as a conflict with empire-wide consequences, and traces its ramifications across Ireland, New Zealand, Jamaica, and southern Africa. In doing so, this study seeks to “decenter” the empire, demonstrating that London, although important, was not always at the center of activity.Footnote 8 In response to the uprising, Britons throughout the empire debated colonial responsibility, methods of counter-insurrection, military recruiting practices, and colonial governance. Even after the rebellion had been suppressed, the violence of 1857 continued to have lasting effect. The fears generated by the uprising transformed how the British understood their relationship with the “colonized” and shaped their own expectations of themselves as “colonizer.” Placing the 1857 Indian uprising within an imperial context reminds us that methods of colonial rule were developed neither in one location nor by one individual, and the flows of information from one colony to another played a crucial role in shaping imperial practice.
India and 1857
Unrest among the sepoys of northern India, which had been apparent for months, erupted in rebellion on May 10, 1857, when troops stationed at Meerut turned against their European officers. Within twenty-four hours, the mutineers had marched the thirty-six miles to Delhi, taken control of the city, and secured the support of additional regiments. The mutineers’ capture of the former capital of the Mughal Empire was as much a symbolic success as a military victory. Upon their arrival in the city, the mutineers declared the aged heir to the Mughal throne, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to be the emblematic leader of the uprising.Footnote 9 The rebellion spread from Delhi – both demographically and geographically – as peasants, artisans, laborers, and others joined the fighting.Footnote 10
The rebels, who often outnumbered the small British garrisons, experienced considerable success during the early months of the uprising. Most famously, in June 1857, the European garrison at Cawnpore surrendered to their Indian opponents with the understanding that all survivors would be permitted safe passage to Allahabad via the Ganges.Footnote 11 The rebel commander, Nana Sahib, and his followers ambushed the Europeans as they were boarding the boats, however, killing nearly all of the men and taking approximately two hundred women and children captive. Two weeks later, as British troops approached, the rebels killed the women and children and deposited their remains in a nearby well.Footnote 12 The events at Cawnpore immediately went down in the annals of the British Empire as a striking example of Indian barbarity. For example, Surgeon A. D. Home was still en route to India when he received word of the killings. On board ship, anchored off the coast of India, he reported that the massacre was “uppermost in everyones [sic] mind.” Two months later, he had the opportunity to visit the scene, concluding that “Altogether, it had a most saddening effect on one to think that our shame was still unavenged.”Footnote 13 Throughout the empire, the Cawnpore massacre provided the British the impetus for retribution and seemingly justified the already growing use of brutal force.
The 1857 Indian rebellion was recognized at the time (and remembered) as an extraordinarily violent conflict during which both sides committed horrific atrocities.Footnote 14 For the British, the Cawnpore massacre was often at the center of these memories, as many argued that it exemplified the cruel tendencies of the sepoys – illustrating “all that an Indian imagination could conceive of horrible bestiality.”Footnote 15 The British, for their part, destroyed entire villages rumored to have ties to the rebels. They hanged Muslims with pork stuffed into their mouths and forced Hindus to lick the bloodstains from various sites, including the Bibighur at Cawnpore. Additionally, British troops blew mutineer-rebels from guns – a method of punishment that not only made identification difficult and decent burial nearly impossible, but also demonstrated British control over Indian bodies.Footnote 16 As Frederick Sleigh Roberts, a young subaltern at the time of the uprising, noted: “The death that seems to have the most effect is being blown from a gun. It is rather a horrible sight, but in these times we cannot be particular.”Footnote 17 Indeed, British officials would require other Indians to watch the execution by cannon. Sprayed with the blood and bone of the killed individual, the message was not lost on observers. According to the memoirs of Esther Anne Nicholson, the practice “seemed at the time a somewhat cruelly severe sentence, but probably those in authority were even then aware that a dangerous spirit of disaffection was wide-spread among the native troops throughout India and considered it necessary to make an example to overawe others.”Footnote 18 While the atrocities committed at the hands of the Indians allegedly reflected the barbaric nature of the colonized, those committed by the British were explained as purely reactive and the only legitimate way to reestablish control.
With the fall of Delhi in September 1857, the tides began to turn in Britain's favor. During the following months, British authorities took Bahadur Shah Zafar captive and hanged twenty-one of his sons for their involvement in the uprising. Following the recapture of Delhi, the British were free to focus their efforts on regaining control of Lucknow, where Europeans and loyal Indians were under siege in the British Residency. Although assistance arrived in September, British troops did not successfully evacuate the Residency until November, and the city itself remained in rebel hands until March 1858. Regardless, the November relief of Lucknow persuaded the British that they had regained the upper hand and they shifted their attention from suppressing the uprising to rebuilding British control. Officially, the British declared the fighting over in July 1858; sporadic guerrilla warfare, however, continued to challenge their power.
After the rebellion had been suppressed, many Britons were consumed by questions of what had gone wrong in India. The realization that the sepoys, “all thought so faithful and true,”Footnote 19 had rebelled against their European officers shocked many and elicited widespread discussion and debate on why the uprising had occurred and how future rebellions might be avoided. Initially, many blamed the unrest on British plans to distribute the Enfield rifle among Indian regiments. First manufactured in 1853, the Enfield rifle represented a technological improvement. To simplify the loading process, the bullet and powder had been combined into a single paper cartridge, one end of which was coated with grease to protect the cartridges from the elements and improve the loading process. To load the gun, a soldier had to bite off one end of the cartridge, pour the powder into the muzzle, and then push the bullet down into the barrel. As the manufacturers reportedly used beef or pork tallow to grease the cartridges, this loading process posed a problem for both Hindu and Muslim soldiers. For Hindus, any contact with beef fat would result in pollution; Muslims, on the other hand, were strictly forbidden to eat pork.Footnote 20 The uprising, many authorities argued, began in response to these religious insults and any civil revolt that followed was nothing more than the effect of mob mentality.
The cartridge affair provided a convenient explanation for the rebellion, one that did not openly challenge the legitimacy of British colonial control or validate Indian unrest. Still, questions emerged regarding the East India Company, and its military practices and methods of administration came under scrutiny. The Company, critics argued, had become so complacent in its rule that military authorities had taken the sepoys for granted and failed to maintain a disciplined military or civil base. As a result, by 1857, the Indian Army was rumored to consist of discontented sepoys under the incompetent leadership of “gout-ridden invalids of seventy.” Similarly, the Company's administrative rule in India had become increasingly “impersonal and remote.”Footnote 21 According to Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Company officials rarely left the boundaries of Calcutta and lacked any knowledge of those individuals under their control.Footnote 22 The very decision to issue the Enfield rifle in an environment ripe with unrest showed little awareness of the Indians’ beliefs or their growing discontent.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, colonial authorities expressed concern that the Enfield rifle was only one demonstration of the Company's lack of cultural awareness. Beginning in the 1820s, the Company had introduced legislative measures designed to reform Indian economic and social practices and introduce policies of Anglicization; the reform impulse increased under the leadership of Lord Dalhousie during the 1840s and 1850s. Following the uprising, these reform measures were subjected to significant criticism as colonial authorities argued that Company interference in Indian social practices and customs had encouraged unrest. Similarly, support for Christian missionaries also waned. Initially, the Company had discouraged efforts to proselytize directly to the Indians, arguing that such practices would disrupt or damage commercial interests and trade relations. Revisions to the East India Company charter in 1813 and again in 1833 relaxed Company policy, however, and ended many of the restrictions on missionary activities.Footnote 23 By 1857, missionaries and the colonial state had begun to collaborate on reform projects.Footnote 24 As a result, when the uprising erupted in 1857, European missionaries found themselves subject to blame. For those skeptical of the missionary enterprise and reform impulse, the 1857 Indian uprising appeared an inevitable rejection of Christianity. Indians were cast as religious fanatics, who missionaries had pushed toward a conversion for which they were not yet prepared. In doing so, the missionaries had destroyed the trust established between the British and their Indian subjects. As James Graham, a member of the Commissariat, explained to his sister in July 1857: “Yes, my dear Sarah, know yourself and let all your friends know that by your subscriptions to missionaries you are purchasing the murders of your friends and relations.”Footnote 25
Whether one pointed to the cartridges, the military, the East India Company, or the missionaries to explain the uprising, many concluded that the British knew little about their Indian subjects. These interpretations revealed a “gap in knowledge” between the Company and Indian society. As Tony Ballantyne has argued, it quickly became “clear to most British that the rebellion represented a failure to understand the native mind.”Footnote 26 In response, authorities introduced a series of political, economic, and military changes designed to strengthen British control and diminish the possibility of another uprising. Politically, the Government of India Act (1858) abolished the East India Company and consolidated control in the hands of the Crown. After 1857, a Crown viceroy took the leadership position once held by a governor-general. Additionally, a member of the British cabinet acted as secretary of state for India and exercised control over Indian affairs, effectively replacing the Company's board of directors.
On the ground in India, South Asians became increasingly eligible for low-level government positions, allowing them to be involved in the functioning of the state – particularly at the local level. It was thought that having Indian input into policies would minimize future chances of rebellion. Economically, the British moved toward a system of direct taxation and land policies favorable to landlords and cultivators. Militarily, the Crown assumed control of the Company's regiments and established a new Indian Army, officered entirely by Europeans. Furthermore, the British took control of the artillery, increased the number of European regiments, decreased the number of Indians in the army, and shifted their recruiting efforts to regions that had remained loyal to the British. Socially, the changes reflected British distrust of the Indians and an effort both to improve surveillance of and avoid intervention in Indian cultural practices.Footnote 27 Many of these changes were announced throughout India via the Queen's Proclamation (1858), in which the British also assured their South Asian subjects that they were not looking to enlarge their territorial holdings and would uphold the rights and customs of India's traditional leaders when administering the law.Footnote 28
Conventionally, the historiography of 1857 coalesced around questions of causation. Britons – often with ties to either the Company's civil or military administration – began to pen histories of the uprising before the fighting had even come to an end. These first interpretations reflected existing debates regarding methods of colonial rule in India: many of the Company's civil administrators insisted that the uprising had been a mutiny, while military authorities often argued that the insurrection reflected widespread discontent.Footnote 29 According to Gautam Chakravarty, the first Indian histories of the uprising veered little from these early British accounts and provided the authors with a means to express their loyalty to the colonial government.Footnote 30 With the growth of Indian nationalism during the late nineteenth century, this changed. In particular, in 1909, V. D. Savarkar published his controversial work, The Indian War of Independence, 1857, which depicted the uprising as an organized, nationalist movement.Footnote 31 Although banned in India almost until independence, Savarkar's book sparked additional nationalist accounts, and the “mutiny or war” debate continued to define histories of the uprising well into the twentieth century.Footnote 32
Following the event's centenary, the 1857 uprising became a subject of sustained academic attention. Historians shifted their focus from narrative accounts of the uprising to its impact, examining the lasting implications for British rule in India.Footnote 33 Furthermore, with the development of the Subaltern Studies project, scholars moved our understanding of the rebellion from a story told through the filter of Company and military archives to one that includes local sources such as land revenue and judicial records, vernacular sources, and newspapers.Footnote 34 The subject also captured the attention of literary and cultural studies scholars, who have addressed the cultural impact of the rebellion, recognizing its implications for notions of gender, race, popular culture, and British identity.Footnote 35
Much of this research has revealed the diversity of those involved and shaped by the events of 1857–1858. With the renewed interest in imperial history, scholars have also begun to explore the colonial and global dimensions of the uprising. In various articles, chapters, and collected volumes, they have assessed the response to 1857 in Ireland, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, the Caribbean, and continental Europe. Most recently, drawing inspiration from the Subaltern Studies project, the multi-volume Mutiny at the Margins has sought to invoke marginality historiographically, geographically, and socially.Footnote 36 Of the series’ seven volumes, the second engages the most directly with the intentions of the “new imperial history,” especially the assertion that Britain and its colonies be studied within one analytical frame. Although the chapters define marginality in a variety of ways (including, class, religion, national identity, and race), most focus on Britons, Indians, or Eurasians in Britain and India. As a result, the volume effectively reveals the “bidirectional impact and dialogic nature” of imperialism, but misses the multi-directional connections so crucial to the mid-nineteenth-century British imperial project.Footnote 37
Other scholars have begun to consider the uprising's reverberations in multiple colonial sites. In particular, studies of Indian migration and transportation have provided insight into the rebellion's widespread social and economic repercussions. For example, Clare Anderson has turned to the uprising as a window into “the nature and meaning of incarceration in colonial north India.”Footnote 38 Although her primary focus is penal practices on the subcontinent, she also examines the outcry that arose among Singapore's European population in response to proposals to transport convict-rebels to the Straits Settlements.Footnote 39 Ultimately, Anderson concludes, colonial authorities opted to establish a penal colony in the Andaman Islands. Similarly, Marina Carter and Crispin Bates have revealed a variety of responses to the proposal to disperse the suspected mutineers throughout the British Empire. The 1857 uprising, they point out, coincided with an increase in global sugar prices and colonial authorities were as likely to view the convict-rebels as cheap labor than to see them as a threat to colonial security. The resulting debates and diverse responses, Carter and Bates argue, demonstrate the “influence of local interests over empire-wide concerns.”Footnote 40
These studies and others have provided a fascinating glimpse into the widespread suspicion surrounding Indians in the wake of the uprising.Footnote 41 Furthermore, as Kim Wagner and D. K. Lahiri Choudhury have demonstrated, fear continued to shape colonial practices in India during the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.Footnote 42 All of these studies examine British fears surrounding Indians, specifically. This book, however, acknowledges that colonial authorities and settlers often transposed their fear of Indian rebels on to other colonized peoples. In the wake of 1857, Britons scattered throughout the colonies recognized the uprising as a colonial resistance movement, one that could be replicated most anywhere under British rule. Drawing from official documents, the correspondence of key administrators posted throughout the empire, and the publications of the colonial press, this study demonstrates that 1857 was a significant moment for the empire, unleashing lasting fear throughout the colonies.Footnote 43
Over the following pages, my use of terminology is intentional and designed to highlight the significance of the 1857 uprising for Britons throughout the empire. For example, I frequently refer to the events of 1857–1858 as an uprising or a rebellion in order to acknowledge that they were more than a military mutiny. At times, I also refer to the uprising as simply “1857.” Certainly, the uprising, its suppression, and its impact lasted well beyond a year. Boiling the event down to one year, however, emphasizes the shock of the uprising and stresses the lasting impact of the violence on colonial attitudes. As Rudyard Kipling wrote nearly fifty years later, “They called it the Black Year” when “All earth knew, and trembled.”Footnote 44 Finally, at times I also refer to the uprising as the “Mutiny” in order to reveal the collective ways in which colonial authorities understood and remembered the rebellion. Historians have accepted that the Indian uprising was not an aberrationFootnote 45; contemporaries, however, often understood 1857 as a watershed moment – a seminal event that changed their perceptions of their own imperial strength. While there were many mutinies in the history of the British Empire, there was only one “Mutiny.”
The British Empire and 1857: networks, people, and places
By the mid-nineteenth-century, Britain's imperial holdings were extensive and growing. Furthermore, these territories were home to a large number of people. There was no one response across this vast space to the Indian uprising. Even in India, many Indians did not rebel and there were reports of Europeans assisting those who did. The responses to 1857 were similarly varied throughout the colonies. This study does not pretend, or even seek, to uncover all of the individual reactions to the violence in India in 1857. Instead, I focus on the response of colonial officials, located in particular colonial sites, for insight into the impact of the 1857 Indian uprising on notions of colonial rule and imperial power. What follows is an explanation of my methodology, designed to capture a cross-section of the mid-nineteenth-century British Empire.
In recent years, scholars have turned to the study of webs, networks, and systems to understand the interconnected nature of the British Empire. Such studies have much to offer, allowing historians to move beyond the binary model of metropole and periphery to examine, instead, multiple sites across the empire. Furthermore, these studies have revealed the multiplicity of forces involved in the construction and maintenance of Britain's empire.Footnote 46 A host of economic, political, and cultural networks permitted people, ideas, and resources to flow from one disparate location to another. These links existed at a variety of levels – from kinship networks to trade organizations – and often united the empire as an imagined community or multiple communities. As Zoë Laidlaw, Alan Lester, and David Lambert have reminded us, however, these networks began and ended with people. For example, individuals followed career opportunities from one colony to another and, as they did so, they carried with them ideas shaped by previous colonial experiences. As a result, ideas regarding race and colonial governance “were not simply exported from the imperial centre” nor were they “imported from the periphery.” Instead, as individuals moved across colonial boundaries, they regularly compared colonial sites and situations, and in doing so they developed transimperial ideas.Footnote 47
Much of my research has focused on three key individuals in the nineteenth-century empire: Sir George Grey, Edward John Eyre, and Sir Hugh Rose (Lord Strathnairn). All three individuals were active in colonial administrations in 1857 and afterwards, and, as they moved from one colonial site to another, they drew conclusions regarding imperial subjects and proposed methods and policies designed to respond to disaffected populations. Grey has already appeared in this study. Having received a military education at Sandhurst, his first appointment was to Ireland during the 1830s. He is predominantly remembered, however, as one of the most prominent colonial governors of the nineteenth century. In 1857, as governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner of South Africa, he contributed regiments, horses, and artillery to British efforts in India. Following his success in the Cape Colony, he was reappointed governor of New Zealand, where he was renowned for his response to the wars of the 1860s. Edward John Eyre was born in England, but, as a young man, migrated to Australia where he achieved distinction as an explorer during the 1830s. Soon after, he began his career in the colonial service as Grey's lieutenant-governor in New Zealand; at the time of the 1857 uprising, he was lieutenant-governor of the island of St. Vincent. Eyre is most widely known for his controversial handling of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion while governor of Jamaica. The event became a cause célèbre in Britain, and ultimately ended Eyre's colonial career. Finally, Sir Hugh Rose served in the British Army during the 1857 uprising, and quickly made a name for himself as an effective leader. He was appointed commander-in-chief of the Bombay Army in 1860, then commander-in-chief of the Indian Army three months later. As the rumbles of Fenian unrest grew louder, Rose was named commander-in-chief of Ireland – a position he held until he retired in 1870.
Tracking these men through archives in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand has uncovered a wealth of material on the colonial response to the 1857 Indian uprising. The Colonial Office records at the National Archives in the United Kingdom revealed that colonial officials in distant colonies were not only aware of the 1857 uprising, but were contacting London to offer assistance to British efforts in India. Research trips to Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand provided insight into the ways in which the uprising was understood outside of Britain and India and the widespread fear that the rebellion might encourage unrest in other colonial regions. The correspondence in these archives revealed that colonial officials communicated directly with one another regarding India, and did not always contact London first. Finally, this project also draws from the colonial press, which has provided insight into the ways in which the rebellion was reported in each of the colonies in 1857, and the ways in which it was recalled during later crises.
In addition to the individuals, the locations examined in this study are equally important to my argument. This book focuses on the repercussions of the uprising in four different colonial sites: Ireland, Jamaica, southern Africa, and New Zealand.Footnote 48 Each of these locations represented a significant British colonial possession in the nineteenth century. They were sites that were on Britain's formal imperial map. At the same time, however, they were also sites of significant unrest. Each of these colonies experienced its own colonial crisis in 1857 or during the following decade. The political and cultural variations of the four colonial sites, thus, provide an interesting cross-section of the British Empire. The shared colonial crises offer insight into the ways in which the Indian rebellion penetrated and informed colonial experiences elsewhere in the empire. Below, I have provided a very brief history of each colony in the years before and after 1857. In particular, I have highlighted the European arrival, the British political presence, and the often strained relationship between colonizer and colonized.
Ireland
Ireland's very status as a colony has received significant academic attention. Historians appear to readily accept Jamaica, the Cape Colony, and New Zealand as historical sites of British conquest. Ireland's engagement with the British Empire has sat uneasily with many scholars, however.Footnote 49 Initially, much of this academic discomfort stemmed from Ireland's changing political relationship with Britain. By the close of the seventeenth century, English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers had spread across much of the island and English legal, political, and administrative norms were in place. Similarly, “all landed and commercial transactions were now recognizably English.”Footnote 50 During the eighteenth century, Ireland had its own parliament, suggesting a degree of autonomy. Yet, as Thomas Bartlett has pointed out, this was not unique to Ireland; at the time, representative institutions also existed elsewhere in the British Empire.Footnote 51 The Irish Parliament met infrequently and, with the exception of a brief period during the 1780s and 1790s, exercised little power and was frequently dismissed by English politicians as a subordinate assembly.
The Act of Union (1801) changed this political arrangement. Passed by both the Irish and British parliaments, the legislation abolished the 300-member Irish Parliament and, instead, allotted approximately 100 seats at Westminster for Irish MPs. As a result, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Ireland appeared to be a part of the United Kingdom. The Act of Union, however, did not ensure that Ireland would become Britain's equal partner. Economic and administrative integration failed to accompany the political change, and questions regarding control over trade, currency, and taxation remained. Furthermore, the island continued to be administered by a chief secretary and a lord lieutenant based in Dublin, an executive arrangement that later influenced British rule in post-1857 India.
Although subject to British colonial rule, the Irish played a prominent role in the expansion of Britain's empire. From the eighteenth century onward, Irish soldiers, administrators, medical doctors, policemen, clergy, missionaries, lawyers, and settlers surfaced throughout the empire in disproportionately high numbers. They assisted in the administration, defense, population, and spiritual upkeep of Britain's imperial territories and constructed economic, political, and cultural networks of their own.Footnote 52 Initially, many scholars considered the history of the Irish as both a conquered and conquering people to be problematic, and deemed Ireland's position within the British Empire to be paradoxical or contradictory.Footnote 53 Kevin Kenny has dismissed these claims, commenting: “Colonized by their more powerful neighbour, the Irish lived at the heart of the world's greatest Empire; most Irish people saw themselves as part of that Empire in some way; many participated, at a variety of levels, in its workings overseas. There is no contradiction here, merely a fact of imperial history.”Footnote 54 Indeed, the same can be said of most people within the British Empire, whether they were born in London, Dublin, Meerut, or Dunedin.
More recently, scholars of Irish studies have largely accepted Ireland's history as that of a colony; or, as Michael de Nie has concluded, they have acknowledged that “Ireland's relationship with Britain shared at least some features with those of the dominions and colonies.”Footnote 55 At the same time, however, scholars of the new imperial history have not been as inclined to incorporate Ireland into comparative studies of imperialism.Footnote 56 This book recognizes Ireland as an integral part of the nineteenth-century British Empire – with individuals who supported as well as resisted the imperial connection. Indeed, Ireland reminds us that the very concepts of “colonizer” and “colonized” were not always obvious; instead, they were constructed and reconstructed, often during moments of conflict.
When the uprising erupted in India, the situation in Ireland appeared similarly volatile to many observers. Less than ten years earlier, Ireland had suffered a prolonged series of famines, during which the island's population had been nearly halved at the hands of death and emigration. Britain's maladministration of Ireland during the famine years famously fueled Irish nationalist efforts. One decade later, these nationalist movements continued to flourish as individuals adopted the Indian struggle as evidence of widespread opposition to British imperial rule. At the same time, exhausted by the famine years and facing dwindling land prospects, many Irish continued to turn to British imperial service for financial opportunities and social advancement. For example, although Ireland's population accounted for 20 percent of the United Kingdom in 1857, approximately 40 percent of Britain's European regiments in India were Irish.Footnote 57 Similarly, that same year, Irish universities were responsible for 33 percent of the Indian civil service recruits.Footnote 58
Questions regarding Ireland's relationship to Britain and the empire were not resolved with the suppression of the Indian uprising. Instead, the decade following 1857 was a busy one for Irish nationalists and, consequently, also for their opponents. Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Irish nationalist movements (republican and parliamentarian) continued to grow in strength and numbers, and many Irish nationalists looked to India for collaborative support and further evidence of British misrule.
Jamaica
Like Ireland, Jamaica had long felt the British presence. The British seized the island from Spanish control during the mid-seventeenth century as a part of Oliver Cromwell's “Western Design.” Shortly after, in 1662, the island's governor established an elected House of Assembly and nominated Legislative Council. Under the political arrangement, the governor continued to represent the Crown, but the Assembly exercised significant control over legislation and taxation. Jamaica's House of Assembly remained the “operative premise” of the island's government for the following two hundred years.Footnote 59
Throughout the eighteenth century, Jamaica was among the most lucrative colonies of the expanding British Empire. Together, the West Indies accounted for approximately 40 percent of the transatlantic sugar shipments to Europe in 1700, 30 percent during the mid-eighteenth century, and 60 percent in 1815. Such numbers were not inconsequential; sugar represented Britain's single largest import from the 1750s to the 1820s.Footnote 60 Jamaica's most prosperous years were 1740 to 1775, during which the total value of the island's economy increased by more than 300 percent and its slave and sugar plantations more than doubled in number.Footnote 61 Indeed, with the island's increasing economic dependence on sugar came a corresponding labor dependence on slavery. As a result, the “black” to “white” ratio was approximately twelve to one, and, by 1815, another segment of the population, “free people of colour,” had also grown significantly in number and in influence.Footnote 62 Despite the island's demographics, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jamaica continued to be politically dominated by local and absent “white” planters.
If the eighteenth century represented Jamaica's heyday, the nineteenth century represented the colony's decline. The Napoleonic Wars resulted in a post-war economic slump and, from 1816, the price of sugar steadily decreased. In the 1840s, once protective tariffs on sugar had been repealed, sugar prices collapsed completely.Footnote 63 Alongside the economic crisis was a corresponding labor crisis. Following the abolition of slavery during the 1830s, planters actively sought to recruit European laborers, both to replace the former slaves and also to offset the colony's racial imbalance.Footnote 64 Despite these efforts, more often than not indentured laborers were drawn from distant locations within the British Empire – especially India. When sugar prices not only rebounded, but escalated in 1857–1858, colonial producers increased cane production and heightened recruiting efforts. In particular, colonial officials throughout the empire debated transporting suspected mutineers and disbanded sepoys from India to the sugar colonies.Footnote 65 Although authorities ultimately decided against the proposal, opting instead to develop a penal settlement on the Andaman Islands, Indians continued to represent a significant portion of the indentured laborers destined for the West Indies during the latter half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 66 Furthermore, Europeans remained the minority in Jamaica – a reality that generated considerable concern among the “white” population.
The economic difficulties, island demographics, and political atmosphere led to significant unrest. Riots and rebellions were not uncommon in the West Indies, nor were they restricted to the pre-emancipation era. This unrest informed British notions of identity and influenced their expectations of the racialized “other.”Footnote 67 As Elizabeth Kolsky has posited, the “lawless” response to slave resistance in the Caribbean set a precedent for “how slaves and ‘niggers’ could and should be treated,” permitting a similar resort to “white” violence in India.Footnote 68 Kolsky's study focuses on the use of “everyday” violence in India – the micromoments, she explains, when “the violence central to the workings of empire” was most evident.Footnote 69 Yet, as this study demonstrates, macromoments, such as the 1857 Indian uprising, also dramatically shaped the accepted use of force in the colonies. In the following chapters, particularly Chapter 5, I examine the lessons of violence absorbed by the British during the 1857 uprising and applied to later colonial conflicts, including the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica.
Southern Africa
The British did not begin to establish themselves in southern Africa in any significant numbers until 1820, when a government-sponsored emigration scheme recruited some four thousand settlers to the colony. Even then, over the following decades, southern Africa's European population increased only gradually and sporadically. The colony's territorial holdings, however, grew extensively over the same period – doubling between the mid-1830s and the mid-1850s.Footnote 70 The British presence, as a result, increasingly stretched beyond the formal boundaries of the Cape Colony and encroached upon Xhosa ancestral lands. The outcome was one of constant conflict. From 1779 to 1879, the Xhosa fought nine wars with the European settlers, Dutch as well as British.Footnote 71 In 1847, following their success in the War of the Axe, the British established British Kaffraria as a “security buffer” between the settlers and the Xhosa – an answer that likely created more problems than it solved.Footnote 72 Indeed, the majority of the Xhosa communities were placed under the control of the newly annexed region, and only the Gcaleka Xhosa remained independent. War erupted again on the eastern frontier in 1850. The imperial scorched-earth policy devastated the region; many Xhosa were forced into migrant labor by the dire economic situation, and the power of the chiefs continued to decline.
Colonial policy further weakened Xhosa power. In 1856, the colonial governor, George Grey, introduced his “native policy” and magistrate system, in which a special European magistrate was appointed to each of the Xhosa chiefs. The system, Grey explained, was designed to introduce British norms and laws to southern Africa, and to guide the Xhosa toward “advancement.”Footnote 73 Or, as one colonial official later recalled, it provided a method to depose the chiefs, “who by their wars had done so much harm to the whole country, and had cost England such large sums of money.”Footnote 74 Grey's magistrate system effectively removed judicial authority from Xhosa hands, undermining the chiefs’ power and control. The Xhosa responded to these economic and political pressures with a millenarian movement, during which they slaughtered 400,000 cattle in preparation for a prophesied ancestral resurrection. The Cattle-Killing of 1856–1857 is among the most tragic stories of colonial history in southern Africa, and it will be further discussed in later chapters.Footnote 75 For now, it is sufficient to say that approximately 40,000 Xhosa died from the resulting famine, and those who survived began to enter the Cape Colony in search of relief. The influx of Xhosa, however, only heightened the tensions between the colonists and the Africans.
These tensions, in turn, surfaced in the political arena. In 1853, the colony had adopted representative political institutions, but not full responsible government. While both the House of Assembly and the Legislative Council consisted of elected members, Crown officials were also permitted to participate in parliamentary debates (although they could not vote). Despite the representative institutions, the colonists occasionally expressed concerns regarding the seemingly endless power of the governor. The constitutional status of British Kaffraria, in particular, raised concern. The Cape Colony governor exercised relatively unlimited and certainly undefined power as the high commissioner of South Africa. He answered only to the British government and, as most colonial governors knew, “they were thousands of miles and many months away.”Footnote 76
Furthermore, the high commissioner was not required to attend to the concerns of the settlers on the eastern frontier of the colony, where the British were most likely to come into contact with the Xhosa.Footnote 77 Owing to their distance from Cape Town, settlers in places like Grahamstown and elsewhere on the Eastern Cape frequently felt disconnected from the colony's political institutions. And, when the high commissioner ignored their concerns, they also felt at a loss in local affairs. The result was considerable tension – between the governor and the colonists, between the colonists in Cape Town and those on the Eastern Cape, and between the colonists and the Xhosa. By the mid-nineteenth century, in other words, the Cape Colony stood in a position of significant unrest and colonial officials often looked to the larger empire to make sense of local events or disorder. This was particularly true of Grey, who – as will be explored in later chapters – frequently pointed to 1857 to explain and “justify” his response to colonial conflicts in southern Africa.
New Zealand
Although several stories suggest there were earlier European visits to New Zealand, the first documented expedition occurred in 1642 under the leadership of the Dutchman, Abel Tasman. The expedition was short and, from the perspective of the Dutch, it was also a failure. Local Maori attacked one boat, killing three individuals and fatally wounding another. In response, the Dutch quickly left without establishing any presence or trade relations – although, as one historian has noted, they did not leave before naming the bay “Murderers” and declaring the Maori “enemies.”Footnote 78 Following Tasman's departure in January 1643, Europeans did not reappear for more than a century. In 1769, British interest in the region was piqued by the scientific voyages of James Cook of the British Royal Navy who circumnavigated and mapped the islands. The late eighteenth-century expeditions incorporated New Zealand into the commercial and cultural networks of Britain's growing empire. Over the following half-century, British whaling, sealing, and missionary communities established stations on both the North and South islands.Footnote 79 In 1840, Britain formally annexed New Zealand as a colony of the British Empire.
British settlement of New Zealand began in earnest during the 1830s, although there was some debate regarding the appropriate nature of this expansion. Missionary communities initially resisted a formal British presence, fearing it would prove fatal to Maori, but later advocated the development of a Protestant protectorate designed to resist French encroachment.Footnote 80 Others, most notably Edward Gibbon Wakefield, advocated a method of “systematic colonization.” According to Wakefield, the colony's social structure needed to recreate that of Britain, without the highest and lowest stratums. Adherents of the plan argued that it would benefit both Britain and New Zealand, relieving the metropole of its excess population and surplus capital and providing the colony with much-needed labor and resources. In 1837, Wakefield and his supporters established the New Zealand Association (which quickly became the New Zealand Company) and proposed that land be purchased cheaply from Maori and sold at a profit to immigrants and investors.Footnote 81
Starting in 1840, the New Zealand Company founded numerous settlements according to Wakefield's design. That year also witnessed a significant growth in the Pakeha (European) population.Footnote 82 In 1830, approximately 300 Pakeha called New Zealand “home”; by 1840, that number was closer to 2,000. Within twenty years, the Pakeha population had increased to 59,000, and outnumbered that of the Maori by nearly 3,000 individuals.Footnote 83 The population explosion did not slow down. Instead, scholars have estimated that the non-Maori population reached more than 250,000 during the gold rush years of the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 84
This massive growth in the colony's European population facilitated British control, and also fueled conflict between Pakeha and Maori communities. In 1840, both Maori and Pakeha notables had signed the Treaty of Waitangi, designed to clarify future relations in the colony. Unfortunately, there was no one copy of the document.Footnote 85 Instead, the leaders presented, discussed, and approved multiple versions – in both the English and Maori languages. As a result, while many now recognize the treaty as “the founding document of New Zealand as a bi-cultural society,” the various translations and interpretations of the document have been and continue to be heavily debated.Footnote 86 Much of this discussion has focused on the definition and conception of “sovereignty.” The English text, many have argued, acknowledges a complete “transfer of power.” The Maori text, on the other hand, “predicates a sharing of power and authority in the governance of the country between Crown and Māori.”Footnote 87
The very introduction of the treaty reveals a British effort to obtain Maori consent or acceptance of the settler presence. This effort is understandable given that in 1840 the Maori continued to outnumber the non-Maori in the colony. The British effort to gain approval, however, should not be confused with an effort to establish complete equality between the colony's two main communities. In 1840, the British assumption that European norms were superior to Maori customs remained intact. As Alan Ward has explained, “though a superior kind of barbarian the Maori was a barbarian nevertheless, not capable, without tutelage at least, of exercising actual command, co-equally with settlers, of British-style governmental and legal institutions.”Footnote 88 As a result, throughout the early nineteenth century, settlers welcomed Maori leaders into only the most menial positions in colonial society. In particular, some argued that military service provided the ideal means to secure settler respect for the Maori and Maori loyalty to British institutions. As one individual reportedly commented in 1840, only months after the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed, “I suppose that they [the Maori] might be trained to act with the same fidelity as so many Seapoys [sic].”Footnote 89
Yet, as in India, military service did not guarantee devotion to British norms. Like the sepoys and the British, the Maori and the British came to odds with each other. Violent clashes and large-scale conflicts characterized much of the 1840s. And, although 1847 to 1860 was relatively peaceful, Maori resistance adopted a more organized, pan-tribal form with the establishment of the Maori King Movement in the 1850s. Fighting again erupted in March 1860 and continued with relative consistency until 1872. Initially, the wars of the 1860s were fought between imperial troops and the Maori of the North Island. Following the withdrawal of imperial troops in 1865–1866, the fighting continued between Pakeha and Maori. As is true in most conflicts, however, the sides were never entirely black and white. Throughout every stage of the New Zealand wars, the imperial troops and Pakeha benefited from the assistance of kupapa, or “loyal” Maori. Indeed, as the conflict drew to a close, New Zealand settlers and officials sought to reward the states’ “native” allies and, simultaneously, anchor traditional leaders to the colonial government – policies likely shaped by those introduced in post-1857 India.Footnote 90 As this study will demonstrate, the Indian uprising informed methods of both conciliation and coercion adopted in the final years of the New Zealand conflict.
The empire
From Crown rule to responsible government, from historic slave colonies to colonies of “white” settlement – the four sites examined in this study were distinct locations. These differences are important, and I try not to lose sight of them over the following pages. At the same time, it is equally important to remember that each of these colonies was also part of one empire. As noted above, historians have increasingly turned to the study of networks to understand the nineteenth-century British Empire as an “interconnected zone.”Footnote 91 Colonial networks, however, are not merely the intellectual products of recent scholars; nineteenth-century imperial actors also recognized the importance of such links. Administrators moved from one colonial appointment to another, members of the military were transferred from one colonial conflict to another, and individuals wrote family members living in distant colonies. Britons throughout the empire, in other words, recognized the empire as an empire.
These colonial networks proved crucial to Britain's global power as well as its imperial strength.Footnote 92 The British Empire, John Darwin has argued, is (and was) best understood as a “system” of composite parts. Britain's colonial possessions were united by “dynamic” links, which, in turn, were subject to and powerfully shaped by “geopolitical forces at the global not just imperial level.”Footnote 93 Similarly, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have recently argued that perceptions of imperial and global networks were mutually constructed. Empires alone were not necessarily representative of the world or the global, but rather were informed by and also informed global factors.Footnote 94 Placing the British Empire within a global context reminds us that British power was not natural. Rather than an inevitable result of British global hegemony, the British Empire was a source of British power – Britain's global strength lay in the ability to manage such disparate components “through the various linkages of ‘imperial politics’: some persuasive, some coercive, some official, some unofficial.”Footnote 95
Whereas Darwin and others emphasize the role of external competition in determining British imperial power, this book focuses on the role that colonial conflicts played in informing the larger imperial project. Indeed, Britain's construction and restructuring of imperial networks were often reactive and the product of internal pressures. The 1857 uprising especially shaped colonial Britons’ perceptions of their own empire – revealing the possibilities of an integrated empire that could provide the resources to generate and “justify” British power. Many defined imperial power according to the ability to draw from, distribute, and reassemble colonial resources. In the midst and aftermath of the uprising, the very connections between the disparate colonies played a crucial role in British perceptions of colonial control, as colonial officials embraced imperial networks as a means to maintain the existing empire.
Throughout this study, I adopt an integrated method of analysis, examining multiple colonies at one time rather than treating each colonial site as an independent case study. This approach allows me to examine the mid-nineteenth-century British Empire as a unified entity or cohesive whole. The next two chapters examine the multiple colonial reactions to news of the 1857 Indian uprising. In particular, Chapter 2 explores the efforts of colonial officialdom to assist the British in India and the resulting debates on colonial responsibility. Chapter 3, on the other hand, examines the response of colonial officials to rumors of unrest and concerns of anti-British solidarity elsewhere in the empire. In the wake of the 1857 uprising, the British feared that colonized peoples might draw affinities with each other, overlooking cultural and ethnic differences and uniting along a shared sense of “non-Britishness.”
The following three chapters explore the lasting repercussions of 1857 for methods of colonial defense, British perceptions of colonized peoples, and notions of imperial power. Chapter 4 is a pivotal chapter, moving the study from the immediate responses to 1857 to the longer-term impact of the uprising and its suppression. In particular, I examine British proposals to recruit and deploy “martial races” throughout the empire, both as a means of colonial discipline and as a method of imperial defense. Chapter 5 explores the impact of the 1857 Indian uprising on the British colonial response to the major conflicts of the 1860s: the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, Fenianism in Ireland, and the New Zealand wars. In the wake of 1857, colonial officials accepted – even embraced – brute force as a legitimate response to resistance movements and an effective means to maintain imperial control. Certainly violence had long been a part of the colonial enterprise, but following 1857 the threshold for violence lowered significantly and the kind of violence embraced by colonial officials intensified. The final chapter explores how colonial officials continued to turn to 1857 to explain colonial fears and “justify” the use of brute force to discourage rebellion and assert British power.
This book tracks a particular event through the official and private papers left by elite individuals and colonial organizations; it is not an exercise in uncovering the subaltern or marginalized voices. But their impact is evident in the persistent anxiety of widespread rebellion. Although the threat of pan-imperial resistance movements is difficult to assess, the fear of such movements permeates the archives. Concerns can be found in the margins of colonial documents – both literally and figuratively – as colonial officials penciled in and debated “what ifs.” Although such fears did not always have direct political impact, the sustained debate surrounding these concerns reveals an empire that perceived itself to be under threat from within. Furthermore, with time, the 1857 uprising became an important tool of persuasion or negotiation. The Indian “Mutiny” sparked lasting fear.Footnote 96 Even once the British had suppressed the rebellion, colonial officials continued to draw on memories of the violence to explain concerns of later conflict and to “justify” the use of colonial force. The “Mutiny,” in other words, became a discursive tool to express colonial concerns across the disparate locations of the mid-nineteenth-century British Empire.
