The Sepoys of the Pound and Sandy Row: Empire and Identity in Mid-Victorian Belfast

Abstract

This article examines the place of empire in Belfast’s popular culture during the mid-Victorian era, paying particular attention to how Protestants and Catholics responded to the Crimean War and the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. It argues that Belfast was a remarkably cosmopolitan city during this period, its people well attuned to—and, in many cases, considerably invested in—the vicissitudes of empire. This is intriguing, for it suggests that the city’s people (and their burgeoning sectarian rivalries) were less parochial than is often assumed—that there was, in a sense, an imperial dimension to their identities. The inhabitants’ attitudes toward the empire also demonstrate that mid-Victorian Belfast was a city of surprising ideological fluidity, that the hard-and-fast divisions that characterized later periods were not yet fully formed. This article therefore offers a useful corrective to those who would see Belfast’s sectarian divisions as somehow inevitable, unchanging, or primordial.