Episode 176

In England, the MP for Hertfordshire (and future Colonial Secretary),E. B. Lytton, sought to capture the severity of the situation by compar-ing it to the recent Crimean War. The “war” in India, he explainedto his constituents, “is not, like the Russian war, for the assertion ofan abstract principle of justice, for the defence of a foreign throne, orfor protection against a danger that did not threaten ourselves, morethan the rest of Europe.” Instead, he argued, “it is for the maintenanceof the British Empire. It is a struggle of life and death for our rank amongthe rulers of the earth.”7 Britons throughout the empire did not dismissthe 1857 Indian rebellion as a distant crisis, with no immediate impli-cations. Rather, they recognized the uprising as an imperial crisis, withwidespread repercussions.This book, too, acknowledges the 1857 Indian uprising as a con-flict with empire-wide consequences, and traces its ramifications acrossIreland, New Zealand, Jamaica, and southern Africa. In doing so, thisstudy seeks to “decenter” the empire, demonstrating that London,although important, was not always at the center of activity.8 In responseto the uprising, Britons throughout the empire debated colonial responsi-bility, methods of counter-insurrection, military recruiting practices, andcolonial governance. Even after the rebellion had been suppressed, theviolence of 1857 continued to have lasting effect. The fears generated bythe uprising transformed how the British understood their relationshipwith the “colonized” and shaped their own expectations of themselves as“colonizer.” Placing the 1857 Indian uprising within an imperial contextreminds us that methods of colonial rule were developed neither in onelocation nor by one individual, and the flows of information from onecolony to another played a crucial role in shaping imperial practice.