The East India Company’s empire rested on its sepoys – its sprawling army of Indian recruits. The emergence of the sepoy army has usually been understood as a tactical innovation, in which European-style discipline was introduced to an Indian setting. This chapter argues instead that the growth of the sepoy army should be seen as an ideological development. The use of indigenous recruits and other non-Europeans for military labor had a long history across the British Empire as a whole. In much of the empire, including the Company’s earliest trading factories, this practice had been coded as anomalous by colonial elites eager to maintain a monopoly on the prestige of formal military service. Efforts by colonists to preserve that exclusive control made armies and militias across the empire some of the first institutions to be formally segregated along racialized lines. In much of the Atlantic empire, nonwhite military labor was marginalized and rendered invisible. In the Company’s settlements, in contrast, the sepoy became a highly visible symbol of empire – rendered valuable only because of an allegedly transformative system of European command, leadership, and discipline.

Armies prepare to fight the last war, or so the adage goes. Napoleon, for instance, won great battles attacking with tight formations of troops, and mid-nineteenth-century military leaders emulated his tactics, even as advances in bullet and rifle technology rendered them increasingly ineffective. This became brutally apparent in the American Civil War as defenders capable of shooting more quickly and accurately at longer distances decimated charging formations. The problem of predicting the nature of future wars by looking to past conflicts can be more generally summed by another adage, this one traceable to Søren Kierkegaard in 1843: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.1

This essay contests the prevalent view of Richard Wright as a proponent of violent black masculinity.  Beginning with Uncle Tom’s Children, I argue, Wright provides a radical critique of the very ‘macho’ violent wish-fulfillment he has been accused of endorsing.  Stories such as "Big Boy Leaves Home," "Down by the Riverside," "Long Black Song" and "Ethics of Living Jim Crow" underscore the cruel ironic bind of black masculinity under Jim Crow: Black male children can be punished as “men” for the slightest perceived misstep, even while grown Black men are forced to assume the permanent position of “boys,” forever deferential to white authority.  Wright confronts us with the trauma of black male vulnerability, while also interrogating the complex and contradictory psychological reactions and socio-political responses such vulnerability gives rise to.  His work grasps the impulse to black masculinism as an understandable response to the particular historical circumstances of Jim Crow, while at the same time underscoring the strategic liability of such violent and individualist reactions.  Ultimately, Wright suggests that it is only the concerted response of the larger black community that offers black boys and men alike a chance of meaningful resistance.