Excluding and Including “Natives of India”: Early-Nineteenth-Century British-Indian Race Relations in Britain

Abstract

he British, Ottoman, and other empires, in contrast to nation-states, claimed by their very nature authority over a variety of subject peoples. This condition drove empires toward contradictory goals: making subject peoples feel they had a stake in the empire while simultaneously differentiating them from the rulers and excluding them from full participation in the actual exercise of state power. The broad bifurcating concepts these empires constructed to distinguish between ruler and ruled often appeared to work adequately overall. In practice, however, such discriminating criteria changed over time and often broke down in particular cases as a result of the defi nition’s inherent contradictions and volatility, the competition among elite groups, and also the resistances and adaptations by individuals subject to such classifi cations. Both the British and the Ottomans, priding themselves on their “modernity” and “rule of law,” sought to separate peoples through legal and administrative regulations, based on allegedly objective criteria. Yet these criteria shifted over time. India and the other British colonies in Asia lay at some remove, encouraging the British to establish distinctions based on “race” (variously defi ned), reinforced by the spatial distance between rulers and ruled. In contrast, the contiguous nature of the Ottoman domains made it more diffi cult for the Ottoman state to carry out similar regulatory action. Instead, the Ottomans applied religion as a major measure of difference between ruler and ruled, stressing the role of Islam as defi ned by the Ottoman sultan, who was simultaneously the Sunni caliph. For both empires, however, diffi culties in applying exact legal boundaries arose from the changing cultural constructions asserted by rival imperial authorities with disparate interests. Simultaneously, these emerging rules were also challenged—for the British in particular—by people of “mixed race,” religious converts, and immigrants from the colony who settled in the imperial metropolis. Such marginal or anomalous examples reveal the constructed nature of imperial binary differentiations and their inconsistent putative underlying principles.