Discipline and Publish

Abstract

Military law, according to one contemporary, was not intended to ‘establish a rational, religious, moral state of society.’ Instead, it ‘is simply to produce prompt and entire obedience.’ This objective was manifested in the preoccupation with the performative and the spectacular, the stress placed on participatory adjudication and punishment, and the willingness to sacrifice justice for promptness. Yet a purely instrumentalist view of military law fails to acknowledge the ideological underpinnings and cultural variables that informed the understanding and application of military law. Nor does it do justice to the calculus of orderliness which considered, sometimes contested, and prioritized contemporary constructions of class, race, gender, and the relative status and respectability of the participants. General courts martial, which addressed the most serious charges, were the critical arena where contemporary definitions of order and honour and their opposites, disorder and dishonour, could be negotiated. These will be illuminated by a study of select general courts martial of European officers and soldiers, Indian officers and sepoys, and camp followers between 1820 and 1860. Military law proved in practice to be more flexible, less prescriptive, and less predictable than what might otherwise appear if the Mutiny Act, the Articles of War, and other published legal authorities are read in isolation.