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The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India by Mark Condos (2017)

November 25, 2020

By Amina Marzouk Chouchene, PhD candidate, Manouba University

There has been a consistent recent interest in tracing the fragile nature of the British Empire. An increasing number of historians such as Richard Price, Kim Wagner, Harald Fisher-Tiné, and Jon Wilson have considered the precariousness of empire from different perspectives.[1] The ever-present threats of what was often called “going native,” the debilitating effects of heat, colonial rebellions and insurgencies, and the supposedly treacherous behavior of indigenous peoples were some of the concerns that triggered a sense of colonial vulnerability. Instead of focusing on the strength or successes of the British Empire, there is a now a new emphasis on its fragility. Marc Condos’s The Insecurity State confirms the findings of this impressive wave of research on the vulnerability of empire.

Condos’s book takes special interest in highlighting the precariousness of British rule in Punjab, which was widely viewed as a loyal and stable province. From the outset, Condos persuasively argues that “British colonial rule in India was a fundamentally anxious and insecure endeavor.” Most interesting, Condos suggests that “brute displays of power” like the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, “were actually manifestations of colonial weaknesses and vulnerability rather than strength” (3). This is a key argument in The Insecurity State. Yet the book does not seek only to understand the “logic” of colonial violence. It also examines the tense relationship between the empire’s commitment to the rule of law and the need to maintain its stability on the ground and how the institutions and mechanisms that were assumed to buttress colonial power became persistent sources of insecurity (18).

Condos deals with these questions in five thematic chapters. Chapter one is an overview of British rule in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries during which British colonial power in India was constantly challenged. The British fought, for instance, wars against Mughal successor states mainly the Marathas and the kingdom of Mysore.

“Assassination of Lord Mayo,” from ‘Cassel’s Illustrated History of India’, 1880 (Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter Two, deals with the Punjab government’s determined attempts to tame the “warlike” nature of Sikh soldiers after the demise of their empire through a series of schemes, which aimed to turn them into peaceful farmers. Following the Rebellion of 1857, the Sikhs were perceived to be loyal and were recruited by the Indian Army. Nevertheless, Condos clearly demonstrates, through a wide variety of primary sources including private papers, letters, personal memoirs, newspapers and periodicals, and contemporary monographs, that Punjab authorities were consistently anxious about the persistent threats of a Sikh rebellion. The rural unrest in response to the Colonization Bill commonly known as the Punjab disturbances of 1907 affirmed these fears. They “served as an indelible reminder to colonial officials of the perennially precarious situation which existed in India when even the most ‘loyal’ sections of Indian society could turn against them” (21).

Chapter Three considers the suppression of the “Kooka outbreak” and the extensive violence that accompanied it. The execution of 49 Sikh rebels and sixteen prisoners “by blowing them from the mouths of artillery guns” aroused considerable controversy. It brought to the fore the fraught relationship between the British ideal of the rule of law and the realities of empire where colonial officers’ transgressed laws in order to ensure the stability of the colonial regime (17).

The radicalization of colonial rule is much more evident in chapter four which explores the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867.This gave colonial officials enormous power to instantly execute those identified as so-called fanatics in Punjab. The final chapter discusses how the employment of Punjabi soldiers and policemen in Britain’s overseas empire provoked deep anxieties among British India’s officials. There were intense fears that the “popularity of overseas service” was weakening Indian Army amid widespread rumors that Punjabis were joining military service with imperial rivals such as the Germans and the Ottomans.

‘Unrest in Bengal’, Black & White, 13 July 1907 (via Mark Condos in The Historian).

Taken together the chapters counteract one of the enduring myths that British rule in India was “a powerful, confident, and nearly indomitable force” (10). Most importantly, Condos’s book offers a fresh perspective on the apparently contradictory relationship between a wider colonial sense of vulnerability and the persistent use of violence. While usually perceived as an obvious sign of imperial power and invincibility, colonial violence surfaces in The Insecurity State as the outcome of constant anxieties and insecurities. Although the book lacks a theoretical framework for defining the central concept of anxiety, which can be found for example in the work of Alan Hunt and Joanna Bourke, it is nonetheless highly valuable in providing us with a better understanding of the lived experience of empire.[2] It could also open up new avenues for future research on colonial violence and vulnerability in other imperial settings.

[1] See Richard Price, ‘The Psychology of Colonial Violence,’ in Dwyer P., Amanda Nettelbeck, eds. Violence, Colonialism, and Empire in the Modern World (Cham, Switzerland,2018)Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919: an Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (London,2019), Harald Fisher Tiné, Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Houndmills,2016), Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London, 2016)

[2] See Alan Hunt, ‘Anxiety and Social Explanation: Some Anxieties about Anxiety,’ Journal of Social History, vol.32,no.3,1999,pp.509-528, Joanna Bourke, Fear: a Cultural History (London,2005)

Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

November 11, 2019

by Amina Marzouk Chouchene | First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum

The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was colored and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.”[1] Cultural artifacts such as music, films, cigarette cards, and fiction have long constructed and reflected this rosy vision of the empire as a place of adventure and excitement. Against this widely held view of the empire, Jeffrey Auerbach identifies an overwhelming emotion that filled the psyche of many Britons as they moved to new lands: imperial boredom. Auerbach defines boredom as “an emotional state that individuals experience when they find themselves without anything particular to do and are uninterested in their surroundings.”[2]

Unenthused British Men and Women in India (via Wikimedia Commons)

Auerbach identifies the feeling as a “modern construct” closely associated with the mid-eighteenth century. This does not mean that people were never bored before this, but that they “did not know it or express it.”(p.4) Rather, it was with the spread of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment emphasis on individual rights and happiness that the concept came to the fore.

In a well-researched and enjoyable book, the author argues “that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment.”(p.4) In other words, instead of focusing on the exploits of imperial luminaries such as Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Robert Clive, David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes and others, Auerbach pays particular attention to the moments when many travelers, colonial officers, governors, soldiers, and settlers were gripped by an intense sense of boredom in India, Australia, and southern Africa.

Imperial Boredom by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

In five thematic chapters, “Voyages”, Landscapes,” Governors,” Soldiers”, and “Settlers,” Auerbach shines new light on the experience of traversing, viewing, governing, defending and settling the empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. (p.6) The monotonous nature of the sea voyage, dreary and uninteresting imperial lands, daily routine, depressingly dull dispatches, mind-numbing meetings are some of the sources of an utter sense of imperial boredom.

Although Auerbach’s book traces imperial boredom from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, he makes it clear, from the beginning, that the sense of boredom experienced by many Britons in new colonial settings was much more profound during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the latter was marked by a series of bewildering social, cultural, and technological changes that stripped the empire of its sense of novelty. The development of new means of transport such as steamships, the rise of tourism, and the proliferation of guidebooks jeopardized the sense of risk, newness, enthusiasm that had long been associated with the British imperial experience. (p.5) Consequently, while “the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the nineteenth century was far less exciting and satisfying project.”(p.77)

Map of India from A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon Guidebook, 1911 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Additionally, Auerbach suggests that imperial boredom arose out of a yawning gap between the rosy vision of the empire as a thrilling experience, largely fostered by nineteenth-century fiction, and the realities on the ground. Instead of pure entertainment, colonial officers and governors were fed up with the excessively ceremonial and bureaucratic nature of the empire. They were bombarded with a burdening volume of paperwork and monotonous public duties such as hospital visits, school inspections, and state dinners.(p.8) Soldiers were engaged in mere skirmishes and spent most of their time in barracks suffering searing heat. Rarely were they able to resist the temptations of alcohol. Others deserted the army and went missing “searching for simple and transitory pleasures that might alleviate their monotony.”(p.116) Settler women incessantly complained about the dullness of their lives, interspersed with unexciting social rituals and prohibitions on contact with indigenous people.(p.9)An interesting case in point is that of British women in India, who rarely learned an Indian language or interacted with the local population due to “an imperial culture increasingly rooted in difference and aloofness.”(p.150) As a result, experiences of solitariness and a consequent sense of boredom were a ubiquitous feature of their lives. For example, Maria Graham, who visited Calcutta and Madras in 1810, complained about her inability to know any Indian family due the “distance kept up between Europeans and the natives.”(p.150) Thereupon, she was bored.

A woman sits alone in a field, 19th Century India (Photo Credit: British Library Board via CNN)

All of these examples are compellingly relevant and illustrative of some of the colonial circumstances that drove Britons mad with boredom, challenging one of the enduring myths about the British Empire as a site of exciting adventure.

[1] Jeffrey Richards, “Boy’s own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s.”Imperialism and Popular Culture. edited by John Mackenzie, Manchester UP, 1986, 143.
[2] Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom.

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Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné (2016)

September 16, 2019

by Amina Marzouk Chouchene

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (August 28, 2019)

Twenty-first-century Britain brims with a revival of rosy visions of Britain’s imperial past. Nowhere is such a tendency clearer than in the restless efforts to rehabilitate the empire by prominent conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson. Britain’s imperial glories and its benign influence over the rest of the world are dominant themes in Ferguson’s popular writings such as his Empire: the Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. According to him, the colonies hugely benefited from British colonialism’s gifts of free trade, free capital movements, and the abolition of slavery.

This celebratory examination of the British Empire has also become a part of the official political discourse at the highest levels of government. In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2011, David Cameroon looked back with Tory nostalgia to the lost days of empire. His speech evoked a mythologized version of Britain’s imperial past in which the empire was the ultimate force for good in the world. Theresa May also recently exalted the virtues of a “Global Britain,” “a great, global, trading nation that is respected around the world and strong.”[1] Most importantly, debates surrounding Brexit have highlighted how, for many Britons, the British Empire often reads as “a success story” about Britain’s “ruling the waves.”

In contrast to this rosy vision of Britain’s imperial past, scholars are increasingly interested in tracing British imperial emotions: the feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic that gripped many Britons as they moved to foreign lands. Robert Peckham’s Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (2015), Marc Condos’s The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (2018), the 2018 special issue in Itinerario on “The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule,” and Kim Wagner’s Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019) highlight the sense of vulnerability felt by the British in the colonies. Harald Fisher-Tiné’s edited volume Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature.

From the outset of the book, Fisher-Tiné highlights the pervasiveness of feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic in many colonial sites. He acknowledges that: “the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment, as well as by the regular occurrence of panics” (1). Bringing case studies from the British Empire as well as Dutch and German colonialism, the contributors uncover not only the pervasiveness of these emotions, but also their significant impact on colonial discursive and institutional strategies.

The volume consists of four main parts. The first discusses the effects of anxieties and panics over colonial minds and bodies. In this respect, David Arnold, for example, examines the poisoning panics in British India that were precipitated by Europeans’ fears of the supposed treachery of their Indian servants. Arnold affirms that poisoning panics have long been rife in India. Indeed, “under colonial rule, the country was subject to a long series of alarms and scares, some of which were sufficiently intense, and protracted to amount to ‘panics’” (49). Yet they were attributed to racial and political overtones in the nineteenth century. That is, the white elites were seen as particularly prone to this major threat. Arnold suggests that these excessive emotional states were triggered by three main causes. First, the European population in British India was heavily dependent on Indian servants and subordinates who might retaliate against unfair masters or whose access to European dwellings could be used by malevolent others to empoison the white elite. Second, anxieties about the assumed toxic effects of the Indian climate fuelled also poisoning panics. Diseases such as malaria and cholera were considered to be the ultimate outcome of an “atmospheric poison” (53). Third, Indian therapeutics and the system of medicine were also identified as a potential cause of poisoning European communities. These poisoning panics only helped reinforce the racial categorizations of Indians, the moral supremacy of the white population, and the legitimacy of colonial rule.

The second section of the collection deals with the “various kinds of discursive responses to imperial panics” (13). Focusing on the assassination of a high-ranking colonial official in London in the summer of 1909 by a Hindu student, for example, Fischer-Tiné pinpoints that the incident was used to demonize Indian anti-colonial activists such as Shyamji Krishnavarma. The latter “was one of the most important spokesmen of the Indian national movement in Europe in the early 1900s…and a sober nationalist with liberal leanings” (14). Nevertheless, following the London murder, he “was presented almost unanimously in official and semi-official and media accounts as the loathsome head of an international terror network” (101).

The third part examines the practical and institutional measures that were adopted to contain threats. These included the establishment of new systems of surveillance and discipline and even military intervention. On this subject, for instance, Daniel Brückenhaus considers British and French authorities’ fears of the potential alliances between anti-colonialists and Germans from 1904 to 1939. Interestingly, the author contends that “fears of German anti-colonial alliances motivated governments to extend their surveillance across inner-European borders” (226).

The final section explores “epistemic anxieties.” It focuses on how anxieties and panics led to the production, use, and circulation of colonial knowledge in imperial settings (17). In this regard, for instances, the chapter by Richard Holzl uncovers how missionaries’ panic over native sexual education in German East Africa led to the production of anthropological and religious knowledge in order to enable their fellow missionaries to deal with particular issues such as circumcision, and female genital mutilation.

Taken together, the thirteen contributors show the persistence of fears, anxieties, and panics in a wide variety of imperial settings and how colonial authorities sought to come to terms with this sense of vulnerability. The volume thus expands our understanding of how a sense of fragility rather than strength shaped colonial policies.

[1] Koo Koram, and Kerem Nisancioglu. “Britain: The Empire that never was.” Critical Legal Thinking, 31 Oct 2017, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/10/31/britain-empire-never/

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