White officers’ claim that they alone could wield that blade that “ruled” India became a dominant ideology within the colonial state in the early nineteenth century. This chapter argues that this “stratocracy” was the product of two entangled phenomena, rooted in the Company’s growing paramountcy over India’s military landscape. At the turn of the nineteenth century, sepoys, European soldiers, and officers faced a diminished military labor market with few opportunities for employment outside of the Company’s aegis. In 1806, frustrated at these limits and changes in the Company’s service, sepoys launched a violent, but brief mutiny at the garrison of Vellore, galvanizing a wave of colonial panic about further unrest. When in 1809 white officers launched their own mutiny in Madras, they warned that refusing their demands would shatter their control over their sepoys – leading to another Vellore. The gambit worked: The civilian governor of Madras was recalled in disgrace and the mutinying officers escaped without punishment. For decades to come, the rhetoric first articulated in 1809 remained a powerful tool through which military officials overruled civilians in Company affairs.

By the late eighteenth century, it was cliché to observe that the British East India Company ruled India “by the sword.” Scholarship on the colonial state, though, has tended to pay more attention to the Company’s civil infrastructure. This chapter argues that the army was in fact an influential part of this empire, at times approaching a “stratocracy” – a state ruled by its army. It situates the Company’s armies simultaneously within India’s political landscape and British imperial networks and provides a brief overview of these contexts. It further explores what it means to bring soldiers to the forefront of historical analysis. Such an approach requires acknowledging the sharp inequities in the Company’s military, most dramatically between its white officer corps and the Indian sepoys (soldiers) and officers who made up the bulk of its forces. Such inequities pose difficulties for historical research, since the former group is far more visible in the archive, but also points to a key historical process. White officers used the systemic inequity to their own advantage – not just to assert power over sepoys but to claim influence in the colonial project.