Economics, imperialism and restorative revolution

Abstract

Few events have given rise to such a variety of historical interpretation as the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857-58. Although the chronology and incidents of the outbreak are almost unanimously agreed upon, there has been a continuing debate as to the causes and nature of the revolt. The traditional interpretation has depicted the uprising as the last hurrah of a feudal aristocracy but recent Indian scholarship has seen it in terms of the “first national war of independence,” that is, the origin of the Indian nationalist movement. Others have emphasized the religious element, casting the struggle as one between the Hindu and Muslim orthodoxies and the messianic aspirations of the East India Company. Some contemporaries saw it as the result of a plot hatched to further Russia's Imperial expansionism, a part of a centuries-old drive for a warm water port. This paper reviews one recent addition to this literature and offers some thoughts on the mutiny viewed in the context of British economic imperialism and its changing shape in the nineteenth century.