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Accepted Paper:

Belligerent empire and military despotism in colonial India, 1800-60  
Mark Condos (Queen Mary University of London)

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how the taint of military conquest in colonial India was rehabilitated by British military officers by the mid-nineteenth century into a theory of governance, known as "military despotism," which openly embraced coercion and conquest as fundamental to colonial rule.

Paper long abstract:

Traditionally, the British Empire has been viewed primarily as a civilian-dominated empire of liberalism and free trade. As opposed to its supposedly more nefarious, military-dominated imperial counterparts like Germany and France, the British Empire has been partially absolved of its imperial sins by some due to its supposedly benign influence as a force of moral and civilizational progress. This paper re-assesses the nineteenth century British Empire in India, not as an empire of civilizational development based on liberalism and free trade, but as a "belligerent" empire, undergirded by militarism and conquest. It traces how a self-purported liberal empire, which was haunted by the taint of military conquest throughout much of the eighteenth century, was able to reconcile and even come to embrace conquest and coercion as not only legitimate, but absolutely necessary tools of imperial rule by the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, the proliferation of increasing amounts of military power and influence within the British Empire more generally during this period certainly helped normalize this shift. Perhaps, more importantly, however, the reason for this embrace of militarism and conquest was the high degree of militarization within the colonial state's governing structure in India itself. With such a high proportion of military officers serving at different levels of government, political discourse in India also became, in a sense, "militarized," and a distinctly militarized theory of governance, known as "military despotism," emerged in order to justify the conquest and continued subjugation of India by the sword.

Panel P14
Regimes of violence and phantasms of good government in colonial India, 1800-1947
  Session 1