Indian Mutiny Research Articles

The Angel of Lucknow, the Hero of Halifax: A Nova Scotian Musical Response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58

Although only a minor conflict from today's perspective, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857–58 inspired a massive outpouring of popular culture responses in Victorian Britain. One of the most frequently used texts was the legend of Jessie Brown, a Scottish maiden who became a heroine during the siege of Lucknow. This fabulous tale was retold and memorialized throughout British theatres, music halls and private homes. Jessie Brown also inspired ‘Dinna You Hear It’, a little-known parlour song that was composed by James Ross and Louis Casseres and published by E.G. Fuller in Halifax, Nova Scotia, around 1858. This article examines the historical circumstances that led to this song's creation and the appeal that this text would have held for the residents of a small colonial city. Halifax may have been a remote corner of the Empire, far removed from the battlefields of India, but Nova Scotians nonetheless shared Britons’ horror and intrigue over the Mutiny – a fascination that was heightened by the fact that Nova Scotia could claim a distinct connection to the victory at Lucknow. By examining the creative and commercial factors that led the authors of ‘Dinna You Hear It’ to produce their own musical setting of the Jessie Brown legend for the Halifax public, this study of a rare Nova Scotian music publication asserts the important role sheet music played within the process of cultural exchange that bridged colony and metropole throughout the nineteenth century.

Spectacular Remedies to Colonial Conflicts: Tableaux Vivants, Proto-Cinema and Global Performance in Dion Boucicault's Jessie Brown

The story of ‘Jessie Brown’ emerged within a faux eyewitness account to the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857. Subsequently elaborated and distributed via a ‘global republic of performance’ (including journalism, ballad poetry, musical compositions, dioramas, exhibitions and stage spectacles), Jessie Brown exposed class- and ethnic-based dissonances within the British imperialist project. The culmination of this process was the elaborate ‘contemporaneous drama’ Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow (1858), by Dion Boucicault. Due to ongoing developments in a real-world colonial conflict, Boucicault employed melodramatic elements non-formulaically, including a sonically enhanced, proto-cinematic tableau vivant in lieu of a conventional dramatic resolution. This article augments the study of nineteenth-century literature by developing a ‘global republic of performance’ model used to analyse and account for the Jessie Brown phenomenon in its various media elaborations.

Sergeev, Evgeny. The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia (review)

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 772 Sergeev, Evgeny. The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central andEastAsia.WoodrowWilsonCenterPressandJohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, 2013. xix + 530 pp. Selected chronology. Notes. Appendix. Selected archival sources and bibliography. Index. $65.00; $35.00. The imperial rivalry in Asia between Russia and Britain played a central role in shaping the international relations of the Great Powers in the half century before the First World War. Sergeev’s book describes the course of the ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia in detail, concentrating on the period between the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and the signing of the Anglo-Russian agreement in 1907. Strangely, the book nowhere mentions that it is effectively a translation of Sergeev’s 2012 work published in Russia (E. Iu. Sergeev, Bol´shaia igra, 1856– 1907: mify i realii rossiisko-britanskikh otnoshenii v Tsentral´noi i Vostochnoi Azii, Moscow 2012). Sergeev begins by putting Russo-British relations into a broader context through discussions of the their development during the first half of the nineteenth century and of the wider phenomenon of imperialism. He suggests that it was the Crimean War which marked the beginning of a period of intense rivalry between Britain and Russia, as both states began to concentrate on expanding their power and influence in Central Asia. St Petersburg, feeling its European ambitions frustrated, began to expand vigorously into Central Asia while the British acted to protect their Indian possessions in the wake of the 1857 revolt (for which Sergeev uses the term ‘Sepoy mutiny’). The book proceeds to trace the course of Anglo-Russian rivalry over the following half century in depth, identifying Afghanistan as the fulcrum for competition between the two states. Sergeev shows how British pressure on Russia in the Balkans and the Near East at the end of the 1870s prompted more assertive elements in the Russian military to propose marching troops into Afghanistan as a step towards threatening British India. Russian intervention in Afghanistan in the summer of 1878 proved, however, to be unsuccessful, as by the end of the year the British had entered Kabul and for almost the next twenty years the two powers faced a stalemate in Central Asia. Changes in the European balance of power at the beginning of the twentieth century, with Germany emerging as a potential threat to British interests, persuaded the London government to try to break the deadlock in its relations with Russia. The resulting Anglo-Russian convention of 1907 essentially neutralized the rivalry between the two states in Asia, opening the way for the wartime alliance of 1914. Sergeev’s book is based on a wide range of sources from both the Russian and British sides and the discussion of this intense imperial rivalry from both standpoints represents the major strength of the work. He shows how threat REVIEWS 773 and counter-threat reinforced each other, and how the process built upon deepseated perceptions of Asia in both Britain and Russia. The Great Game was a central part of nineteenth-century European imperialism, and both Russia and Britain felt themselves justified in bringing what they perceived to be political, economic and cultural benefits to Asian peoples. Sergeev’s book itself continues to perpetuate some of these stereotypes: he asserts that in the mid nineteenth century ‘Central and East Asia were characterized by more or less medieval political, social and political features’ (p. 329), stuck for centuries in ‘social apathy, economic backwardness and political anarchy’ (p. 330). He sees both Britain and Russia as pursuing ‘civilizing missions’ (p. 346) in their desire to cement their power in Asia. The intellectual challenge posed by Edward Said to European interpretations of the wider world is acknowledged in Sergeev’s book, but his view of the rivalry between Britain and Russia is firmly within the tradition that Said ably dissected. This book takes very much a traditional view of relations between European powers and Asia: it places Britain and Russia as the central figures in a struggle for influence, with Asian states and peoples as merely subjects in the interplay between the two European powers. Sergeev rejects the idea that Anglo-Russian rivalry...

WAS THE INDIAN MUTINY CONSEQUENCE OF THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BRITISH INFORMATION SYSTEM?

The Indian Mutiny has an important place in British Colonial History. There were various causes of this rebellion but this research, which was based on the original historical documents, showed that the main reason was the breakdown of the British Information System. This study also considered other aspects which played role in the mutiny such as delay in construction of telegraphic system and railways. Thus, the British government realised that a controlled information line in Indian as well as between India and Great Britain was vital. There was some improvement in governmental communications between the two countries but existence of the electric telegraph line was still slow and unreliable. Over thirty thousand soldiers including Muslims and Hindus rebelled together against the British authority. It spread out to other regions in Northern India involving princes and peasants. If the British authorities had sufficient and accurate information before the revolt occurred, this would not happen as the Empire’s military power was strong enough to prevent such incident

The Fire Dragon. Benavente’s Indian Comedy

El dragón de fuego is a play by Jacinto Benavente, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922, which describes the situation in India during the British Raj. The action takes place in Nirvan, an imaginary country which symbolises India. In an allegorical language the play presents a historical reality: that of the so-called “Sepoy Mutiny”, an armed uprising against colonial rule, which ended in great failure. The article compares the plot of the play with historical events and studies the peculiar position of the author regarding British colonialism, as Benavente, unlike most Spanish intellectuals of the early twentieth century, sided with the Indians who were claiming their independence.

‘Putting the Saddle Back on the Right Horse’: British Suppression of Rural Insurgency in the Benares Division during the Indian Revolt of 1857–58

Standard historical accounts of the Indian Revolt of 1857–58 give the impression that superiority on the battlefield accounted for the ability of the British to defeat their Indian adversaries. Yet, to focus solely on the military campaigns ignores the intricate and multifaceted nature of the British response to the Revolt. Aside from armed force, a number of counter-insurgency strategies were used to suppress rebellion in the countryside. This paper assesses the intent and effectiveness of these measures by looking at how officials responded to the outbreak of large-scale and protracted rural insurgency in the districts of the Benares Division. It is argued that these measures achieved a far greater degree of success in curtailing acts of rural insurgency than the use of military force.

Boria: A Conventional Theatre in Malaysia

Boria: A Conventional Theatre in Malaysia

End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945 ed. by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz (review)

Gilmour, Rachael, and Bill Schwarz, eds. 2011. End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press. $95.00 hc. 272 pp.The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so that they don't know it means, says stuttering Whisky Sisodia in The Satanic Verses (1988, 343). It is precisely this lacuna in postwar British fiction that the present collection addresses. In the volume's afterword Elleke Boehmer argues that the revisionary purpose of this collection is to present several examples of occlusion, tendency in postwar fiction to forget that the empire is crumbling into pieces (2011, 242). Bill Schwartz argues that the essays also seek to address the role that English insularity and parochialism have played in obscuring colonial realities (5). End of Empire discloses what occurred historically at the by analyzing rearticulations of colonial legacies on transnational and regional scale (5). The collection foregrounds the literary dialogue between the provincial and the transnational, the social and cultural networks existing on regional scale and across nations. As James Procter notes, debates on empire and its aftermath have tended to flicker between metropolitan center and postcolonial periphery while paying scant attention to the internal margins of provincial (203). The book seeks to bring into the spotlight the theoretical centrality of marginal discourses located outside the metropolitan context yet participating in the creation of the same cultural and racial dichotomies inherent in the center/ periphery opposition.This collection brings together number of interventions on the ambivalent attitude toward the fall of empire. It draws on wide range of texts by canonical writers such as D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell and less well-known authors including William Boyd, Josephine Tey, and David Peace. The essays are organized around four main thematic blocks: the veiled anxiety perceivable in texts that do not explicitly interrogate the consequences of Britain's decline as an imperial power; critique of Britain's insular mentality; the necessity to adopt comparative stance, bringing together novels by E. M. Foster and Alan Hollinghurst; and the idea that British imperialism is progressively being replaced by the United States' hegemony in the world.In the first grouping, Richard Jones focuses upon ways in which John Masters's novels dealt with key events in the history of India's decolonization. For example, in Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), the Indian Mutiny is regarded as moment of treachery and barbarity by the British hero (132). There is tendency in these and other novels of the decade to subvert the significance of historical events that take place in the colony. Thus, despite Golding's commitment in Lord of the Flies to attack the imperialist ethos, Rachael Gilmour believe that the text tends to create a historically rooted, culturally homogenous-and by implication, exclusionary-vision of Englishness and English literature (93).Essentialist and homogenous notions of national belonging are discussed by Michael Ross in his analysis of Armadillo, in which insular anxiety rather than imperial nostalgia . . . is the major source of laughter (131). If Ross's analysis focuses upon the text's ability to deride English cultural myopia, Huw Marsh's reading of Lively's Moon Tiger suggests bleaker view of the present, the necessity to revisit the past with stern judgment and a skeptical eye (160). …

Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani (review)

Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.168 pp.In an intellectual climate where scholars are increasingly wary of catego- ries like tribal, and traditional, Mahmood Mamdani's lat- est work offers a satisfying unmasking of colonial constructions, and an antidote to their legal and political legacies. As a scholar whose work fre- quently straddles border between law, politics, and culture, Mamdani has a reputation for revealing rational bases for otherwise unconscio- nable histories. From his examination of Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers (2001), to more recent works examining politics, identity, and terrorism such as Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, Cold War and Roots of Terror (2004) and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and War on Terror (2009), Mamdani convincingly traces philosophical foundations of community, citizenship, and policy to evi- dence influence of colonial categories. His latest work stems squarely from this tradition, offering added value of comparative analysis, and demonstrating holding power of as a political identity in post-colonial world.Indeed, while decades of anthropological literature on technolo- gies, philosophies, and legacies of imperialism have located origins of racism in practices of colonial rule, Mamdani asserts that racism is only half story. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Mamdani ar- gues that colonial from British India to Dutch East Indies was specifically based on two different axes of discrimination-race and tribe-through which natives and settlers were legally distinguished, differently ruled, and confined to separate social and political destinies. Mamdani further argues that shift from direct to indirect colonial rule, rather than lax control over colonized populations (which promises of non-interference might suggest), masked colonizers' vast ambitions to renegotiate native's subjectivity. Binding movement to indirect rule with parallel shifts-from civilizing missions to projects of protection, from assimilationism to a preoccupation with defining and managing dif- ference, and towards a new form of govern mentality dependent upon an emerging settler/native binary-Mamdani powerfully asserts that the native was creation of theorists of an empire-in-crisis (6). No longer under clear control of crown rule, colonial subjects became objects in need of stricter rule and, therefore, necessarily more subversive forms of subjugation.1Mamdani places colonial crisis point at 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India: In reflection that followed crisis, Mamdani explains, the colonial mission was redefined-from civilization to conservation and from progress to (8). The movement culminated in 1858 with Queen Victoria's proclaimed doctrine of noninterference in India (8). While this doctrine superficially diluted colonial control of region by abandon- ing assimilationist projects in favor of protecting customary practices, Mamdani suggests that indirect rule achieved opposite, for the pre- rogative to define boundary, substance and of 'customary,' gave vast scope to powers of occupying authority (27). Combining political necessity of social order with an interest in conserving custom, administrators capitalized upon bureaucratic im- plications of indirect rule to emphasize differences that would keep masses divided among themselves.With great attention to colonial political history, Mamdani traces this movement from Indian subcontinent through reforms in British Malaya, Dutch East Indies, and several African colonies, arguing that colonial intellectuals undertook process of defining, and by extension trans- forming, race and tribe as academic and administrative shortcuts to gain- ing control of subject populations. …

Maternity Betrayed: Circulating Images of English Motherhood in India, 1857-1858

In the spring and summer of 1857—throughout what was then denominated the Indian Mutiny and has come to be known variously as the Sepoy Rebellion, Indian Uprising, or First War for Indian Independe...

<em>Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858</em>, by Joseph Sramek

Reviewed by: Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 by Joseph Sramek Durba Ghosh (bio) Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858, by Joseph Sramek; pp. xiii + 250. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, £58.00, $90.00. Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 begins with a puzzle that has dogged the study of the British Empire in India: how could a small group of British men rule over a large and diverse population of multiethnic, multireligous, and multilingual Indians across a disjointed group of territories on a subcontinent? The book spans from 1765 to nearly a hundred years later. However, the most compelling part of the argument is about the period between 1820 and the Indian Rebellion in 1857. Joseph Sramek focuses on the importance that the East India Company’s officials placed in earning the positive public opinion of Indian subjects. They constructed a public image of British officers, soldiers, and civil servants as more trustworthy and morally superior than they were in actuality. As he explains, early colonial officials felt a great deal of anxiety about the debts that British Company men contracted while in India and their proclivity toward drunkenness and violence, so they presented themselves as moral figures, contradicting all evidence to the contrary. Once the British constructed themselves as civilized and moral, the East India Company was bound to uphold this fiction, even though it was continually challenged by the actual behavior of those who drank and gambled. The most interesting example in Sramek’s analysis focuses on the numerical imbalance between Indian sepoys and British soldiers, which was as high as five to one in some areas. Combined with the appearance of dissolute behavior by British-born soldiers, this numerical lopsidedness provoked a crisis of authority that was resolved in unexpected ways. Until the 1820s and 1830s, the British framed the upper caste of the Indian soldiers in the army (the sepoys) as analogous to the class of landed elites who were putatively the officers in the British army. British officials believed that sepoys were upper caste, respectable men of social standing; they did not drink, gamble, and seemed to be faithful to their wives, unlike British soldiers who were often found drunk, indebted, and diseased from visiting prostitutes in the bazaar. Although British officials by and large felt that Indian soldiers were less competent and disciplined, thus requiring British officers to [End Page 124] oversee them, these “racist attitudes were offset by general characterizations among many Britons in India of sepoys as gentleman soldiers” (68). This show of respectful recognition may have been a strategic response to being outnumbered, but sramek argues that there was an ideological consequence: it heightened the anxieties that British officers felt about their tenuous hold on the soldiers in their command. By the 1820s, after a generation of British officials had equated upper caste with class, army officials were arguing that Indian sepoys’ caste identities corresponded to religion and race. This shift, sramek argues, showed a marked change in attitudes and trust between British officials and Indian sepoys. Although scholars including Thomas Metcalf and Heather Streets have argued that 1857 led to the British army bringing in “martial races,” such as Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Muslims, who were seen to be more docile and physically strong, Sramek shows that this shift was already underway in the generation before 1857 (7). By equating caste to something that was anomalous to British society, the British could characterize the sepoy as a kind of superstitious figure whose religious and caste attachments made him insufficiently loyal to be trusted to a high-ranking position. By focusing his study on the period before 1857, Sramek can argue that strategies and ideologies of colonial governance created a racialized and hierarchized discourse that predated the 1857 Rebellion, particularly as colonial observers, officials, and critics in Britain attempted to create a rationale for why a small group of merchants should rule a subcontinent. The goal of maintaining the image of British morality meant that the Company state actively produced and reproduced social distinctions between Indians and Britons, and class distinctions between those who were believed to possess virtue...

The Jungle Book: Another Facet of Childhood

Kipling indicates that The Jungle Books is a book for children in order to easily move it over grown-ups reason prohibitions. The delightful story tackles subjects at the level of children understanding, including a dose of exoticism demystified on the whole by a popular and literary humor of an old English origin. The Jungle Books reveals a world full range, without monotony and uniformity. Jungle life gets epic contours. The adventure takes place at the forest level, ruled by laws given by its creatures. In this context Mowgli, the young man raised by beasts and loved by them, was necessary to Kipling's idea of restoring order in nature.  Index Terms—animals, childhood, humor, nature I. INTRODUCTION For the child who grew-up in his British parents' bungalow, comfortable and civilized, with local ministers, at the margins of the jungle, India looks beautiful and mysterious. Nature with lush flora and fauna, with dangers watching everywhere, opened the child's heart to the fantasy world of stories. The Middle East made Rudyard Kipling a fabulous poet and a storyteller. At the people around, at the locals, he met the surface obedience necessary for the English master, which made him believe strongly in the mission of civilization to accept the English colonialism. The few years of college spent in England, between 1877 and 1882, at the United Services College in Devon, where he started his literary activity editing a literary magazine, only reinforced his idea, of the necessary human discipline could be brought only by the perfect organization, and the iron hand of England in the colonies. It is true that Kipling's love for India was genuine and deep, as evidenced by the dozens of books dedicated to people and places in this country of miracles and especially a number of critical implications for the English - we have seen in his books, even from the early career. But strong England, one that brings order and discipline in the chaos of India is forgiving in Kipling's eyes and this is crucial, not the behavior of individual mistakes in the English part. Naturally, when rebellions are large, armed interventions must restore everything. Thus, in the story The Undertakers in the Second Jungle Book the characters' memories refer to the great memories of the 1857 to the Indian revolt against the British, drowned in blood

War Heroes and Pacifists on the Same Front: Re-reading Heroism in Two Imperial War Memoirs

This article explores the notion of heroism in Victorian war literature by analyzing the figure of the soldier-hero in two imperial war memoirs: Captain Mowbray Thomson’s The Story of Cawnpore: The Indian Mutiny and John Pearman’s The Radical Soldier’s Tale. While The Story of Cawnpore is an emblematic example of what we call the Victorian hero myth, that is, the effective merging of traditional heroism, war as adventure and imperialism in mid-to late-nineteenth century Britain – The Radical Soldier’s Tale appears to posit an alternative to this widely accepted view, challenging its assumed universality and immutability. By analyzing Pearman’s innovative revision of heroism, in contrast to Thomson’s more conventional representation of the theme, this article attempts to illustrate both the traditional construction and a possible re-reading of the subject taking place in the same period. In order to do so, we focus on the three main aspects around which the representation of the nineteenth-century soldier-hero is articulated: the consolidation of traditional heroic manhood in the context of imperial war, the complex social justification of war and the demonization of the Other as a way of validating the heroic self. Particular attention is given to the fact that Pearman’s shift towards a more complex appreciation of the heroic subject appears to anticipate similar patterns occurring in the literature written during and after World War One.

Along the Hindu Kush: Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier

Along the Hindu Kush:Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier Kenneth W. Harl (bio) As a new presidential election approaches, many Americans, when they are not thinking about gasoline prices and unemployment statistics, wonder how the national interests are served by U.S. soldiers and pilots battling in a remote corner of the world, Afghanistan. Americans are aware of the less than ideal alliance with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and the repeated disputes, negotiations, and scandals that have rocked this alliance. Many are aware of how the fighting in Afghanistan has spread over the Hindu Kush— the daunting mountain barrier that divides Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent—into Pakistan. Osama bin Laden sought refuge in Pakistan. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban operatives have found safe havens in Pakistan's rugged borderlands. Political events in Pakistan since 2008 have thus excited reporters and baffled the American electorate. Pervez Musharraf, leading general and ex-president, was compelled to resign and flee from prosecution on grounds of complicity in the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and his suspension of constitutional rule. An exile in London, he plans a political comeback. Meanwhile, the current prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, has had his hands full with his own crises and clashes with his military that have arisen ultimately from the fighting in Afghanistan. Most Americans are aware that the imbroglio in Afghanistan and Pakistan has wider repercussions for Iran, the Republic of India, and the far more remote Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Yet most Americans are also products of today's ahistorical educational system and have no historical reference for comprehending these events, peoples, and lands. Those few remaining of the generation that won the Second World War have such a sense of history. Those few also witnessed the partition of British India, along with its religious and ethnic violence and then fierce fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and Jammu. Indeed, the British imperial legacy in India has dictated much of what goes on today in these newly created nation-states along both sides of the Hindu Kush. The imperial legacy of British India is fundamental for understanding what we face today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Central Asia. Two men are customarily hailed as the founders of the British Empire in India: Sir Robert Clive (1725-1774) and Warren Hastings (1732-1818). They turned the East India Company from a trade monopoly into the paramount military power in the subcontinent with a fiscal and military base in Bengal. Click for larger view View full resolution From Alfred Comyn Lyall, Warren Hastings (London, 1889). To Lord Macaulay, Whig politician, secretary at war (1839-1841), and historian, Robert Clive was a brave and daring conqueror comparable to Julius Caesar, the obvious standard for all proper Englishmen who learned their Caesar and Latin together in public school. Yet, given his dissolute recreation at Madras between campaigns and his appetite for prize money, Clive did not fit the proper Victorian model. Indian nationalists despise Clive because he so adeptly outmaneuvered Indian princes in the duplicitous diplomacy of the era. Clive was also extraordinarily lucky. No commander in the 18th century was missed by more musket balls and shrapnel. His victory at Plassey on June 23, 1757, was both audacious and decisive. It won for the East India Company, commonly dubbed the Honorable Company, control over Bengal and the right to collect taxes from the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal Empire under the Treaty of Allahabad.1 If Robert Clive proved the victor, Warren Hastings, the first governor-general at Calcutta (1773-1785), was the organizer of the empire in India, which came to be called the Raj after the reforms instituted in the wake of the Great Sepoy Mutiny in 1857-1858. Warren Hastings, however, is a far more complex a figure than Clive, and ultimately far more important; for he created India as we understand it today. Hastings started working for the Honorable Company as a clerk when he was 18 and rose quickly, sitting on the councils of both Calcutta and Madras. He was selected to govern British India, then divided into...

Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the HumanPoetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human. Paul A. Bové. Aberdeen: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Pp. viii+159.

<i>Paul A. Bové</i>, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human<i>Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human</i>. Paul A. Bové. Aberdeen: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Pp. viii+159.

Women Warriors and National Heroes: Agustina de Aragón and Her Indian Sisters

Historians of modern Europe have lately become interested in hero cults and what they can reveal about the construction of national identities. This interest has begun to move beyond studies located in individual states to examine this aspect of the politics of the past within a European rather than a purely national context. This article rep­resents an initial effort to explore hero cults in an even broader frame by considering a European woman warrior and national hero, the Spaniard Agustina de Aragón, in comparative perspective. Taking Lakshmi Bai and Jhalkari Bai, two women warriors and heroes from India's First War of Independence in 1857, as the point of departure, the article compares the ways in which the figure of Agustina de Aragón has been rep­resented and used since her act of heroism against Napoleon in 1808. This comparison of hero cults in a European and a non-European country can potentially be a first step toward development of a globalized perspective on the politics of the past.

Imperial contradictions in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four

Despite Britain’s rapid territorial expansion and its marked success in establishing international colonies, the early nineteenth century British public held widely divergent views concerning imperialist endeavors. While the colonies retained their element of exoticism and decadence, attracting the British public to the idea of colonial enterprise, native insurrections against British imperial rule inspired fear within the British public. By calling the loyalties of colonial natives into question, and casting doubt upon the overall security of Britain, popular support of territorial expansion began to wane. To understand these contradictory popular responses to British imperialism, this article will undertake an analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s popular piece of mystery fiction: The Sign of Four, a literary work written in the context of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. By reflecting contemporary attitudes held in response to British Imperialism, The Sign of Four provides a medium through which popular contradictory responses towards British imperialism can be critically examined.

“Suppressed Grief”: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion

“Suppressed Grief”: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion

THE CORPORATION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: HOW THE EAST INDIA COMPANY SHAPED THE MODERN MULTINATIONAL

For over 200 years the East India Company was the world's largest corporation. Set up as a merchant trading house in 1600, it became a permanent joint stock company in 1657, the forerunner of the modern multinational. The tension between investment and speculation was reflected in a share price which rose and fell with its fortunes. In the beginning bullion was brought from Britain to pay for Indian goods, which were then shipped to Britain. But in 1766, not long after Clive's victory at the battle of Plassey, the Company acquired the diwani, the right to collect the taxes, in Bengal. A situation of “unrequited trade” was thus established. Suddenly the profits from tax collecting more than covered the cost of trade goods. The dividend, jumped from six per cent in 1766 to 12 per cent in 1769. The shares soared. Then the Company's position in South India was threatened and the share price collapsed. The Company had overwhelming debts, but was judged “too big to fail”. It had to be bailed out by the British government, which in return secured the right to nominate representatives to the Bengal Council. Corruption and accountability became increasingly important themes. By the time Warren Hastings was Governor-General the company was purchasing vast quantities of tea from China. What could be sold to China in return? Answer: Indian opium. This trade notoriously led to war with China. But by the end of the Second Opium War, the Indian Mutiny had put paid to the Company's rule over India, though the Company continued a financial existence until 1874.

&lt;em&gt;Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857&lt;/em&gt;, by Shaswati Mazumdar

&lt;em&gt;Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857&lt;/em&gt;, by Shaswati Mazumdar