53. Ibid., p. 4, emphasis in original.
54. Ibid., p. 56.
55. Ibid., p. 7.
56. Ibid., p. 14.
57. Ibid., pp. 18–19.
58. Ibid., p. 7.
59. Ibid., p. 55.
60. Ibid., pp. 55–6.
61. Ibid., p. 56.
62. Ibid., p. 59.
63. Ibid., p. 60.
64. Ibid., pp. 62–3.
65. Ibid., p. 62.
66. Ibid., p. 59.
67. Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, p. 305.
68. Norton, Rebellion in India, p. 62.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., p. 326.
71. Ibid., p. 62.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 137.
74. Ibid., p. 173.
75. Ibid., p. 175.
76. Ibid., p. 119.
77. Ibid., p. 146.
78. Ibid., p. 198.
79. Ibid., pp. 195–6.
80. Ibid., p. 197.
81. Ibid., p. 196.
82. John Bruce Norton, Topics for Indian Statesmen (London: Richardson Brothers, 1858), p. 35.
83. Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 6.
84. Ibid., p. 28.
85. Tim Pratt, ‘Ernest Jones’ Mutiny: The People’s Paper, English Popular Politics and the Indian Rebellion 1857–58’, in Chandrika Kaul, ed., Media and the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 89.
86. Ibid., p. 89.
87. The People’s Charter demanded ‘manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, no property qualifications for MPs, and payment for MPs’. See Hugh Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain 1832–1918 (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 47.
88. Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 138.
89. John Belchem also notes ‘constitutionalism offered the most successful formula in British politics: patriotism, retrenchment and reform’. John Belchem, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 104–5.
90. Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 107.
91. Jones famously defended the Irish Fenians. See ‘Introduction’, in John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist – Selections from the Writings and Speeches of Ernest Jones with Introduction and Notes by John Saville (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1952).
92. Ernest Jones, ‘How Our Indian Empire Is Ruled’, People’s Paper, 14 May 1853. Included in Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist, pp. 211, 212.
93. ‘The Bengal Mutinies’, People’s Paper, 20 June 1857.
94. ‘Whence Shall We Get Our Cotton?’, People’s Paper, 27 June 1857.
95. Ibid.
96. Ernest Jones, ‘The British Empire’, People’s Paper, 18 July 1857.
97. Ernest Jones, ‘Hindostan’, People’s Paper, 4 July 1857, and ‘Hindostan’, People’s Paper, 11 July 1857.
98. The term is Trouillot’s.
99. Ernest Jones, ‘The Indian War’, People’s Paper, 8 August 1857.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Jones, ‘British Empire’.
103. Ernest Jones, ‘The Revolt of Hindostan’, People’s Paper, 29 August 1857.
104. Jones, ‘Indian War’. It is worth noting that although Jones frequently uses ‘Hindhus’ to describe the ‘nationality’ of India, he is not leaving Muslims out of the equation. He notes in this piece, for instance, that although there had been ‘Mahommedan invasions’, the Muslim ‘presence’ had not ‘dimmed’ anything. On the contrary, India’s ‘art and science, material prosperity and imperial grandeur were but enhanced by the admixture of the chivalric element that swayed more than half the then known habitable globe’.
105. Ibid.
106. Pratt, ‘Ernest Jones’ Mutiny’, pp. 91, 92.
107. Ibid., p. 95.
108. Pratt, ‘Ernest Jones’ Mutiny’, pp. 90–1.
109. Guha, ‘Prose of Counter-insurgency’, pp. 76–7.
110. Jones, ‘Indian War’.
111. Ernest Jones, ‘Palmerston and India’, People’s Paper, 15 August 1857.
112. Ibid.
113. Pratt, ‘Ernest Jones’ Mutiny’, p. 96.
114. Guha, ‘Prose of Counter-insurgency’, p. 33.
115. Ibid. Taylor argues: ‘But of most significance were not so much his views as the forums in which they were being expressed. Jones was now speaking alongside the very parliamentary radical and “middle-class” reformers whom he had dismissed as the enemy for most of the 1850s. Had he moved over to their way of thinking, or had they come round to his?’ Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics, p. 182.
116. Pratt, ‘Ernest Jones’ Mutiny’, p. 98.
117. Guha, ‘Prose of Counter-insurgency’, p. 2.
118. Jones, ‘Palmerston and India’.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid.
121. Ernest Jones, ‘Progress of the Indian Insurrection’, People’s Paper, 19 September 1857.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid.
124. Ernest Jones, ‘Who Is the Torturer?’, People’s Paper, 12 September 1857, emphasis in original.
125. Ernest Jones, ‘Indian Insurrection and British Democracy’, People’s Paper, 26 September 1857.
126. Ernest Jones, ‘The Men of New York and the Working Classes’ (signed), People’s Paper, 10 October 1857.
127. Rico Vitz, ‘Contagion, Community, and Virtue in Hume’s Epistemology’, in Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz, eds, The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 205, emphasis in original.
128. Cited in Bender, 1857 Indian Uprising, p. 75. This book provides a useful overview of concerns that the Indian uprising might provoke similar rebellions across the colonies, including Jamaica, New Zealand and Ireland.
129. Jones, ‘Men of New York and the Working Classes’.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid.
132. Ernest Jones, ‘The Indian Struggle’, People’s Paper, 5 September 1857.
133. Ibid.
134. Ibid.
135. Ibid.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid.
138. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 15, 12.
139. Knud Haakonsen, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., p. xiv.
140. Ernest Jones, ‘India’, People’s Paper, 24 October 1857.
141. Ernest Jones, ‘How to Secure India’, People’s Paper, 2 January 1858.
142. Syed Abdoolah, ‘Importance of the Study of the Indian Language’, People’s Paper, 23 January 1858.
143. Ibid.
144. Ernest Jones, ‘The True Position in India’, People’s Paper, 17 October 1857.
145. Pratt, ‘Ernest Jones’ Mutiny’, p. 99.
146. Jones, ‘India’.
147. Jones, ‘How to Secure India’.
148. Ibid.
149. Ibid.
150. Ernest Jones, ‘The Siege of Lucknow’, People’s Paper, 10 April 1858.
151. Thierry Drapeau, ‘ “Look at Our Colonial Struggles”: Ernest Jones and the Anti-colonialist Challenge to Marx’s Conception of History’, Critical Sociology, 17 November 2017, p. 2.
152. Ibid., p. 3.
153. Ibid., p. 2.
154. Ibid.
155. ‘Dispatches from India’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The First Indian War of Independence 1857–1859 (Moscow/London: Foreign Languages Publishing House/Lawrence & Wishart, 1960), p. 56.
156. Pranav Jani, ‘Karl Marx, Eurocentrism, and the 1857 Revolt in British India’, in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds, Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Ca
mbridge University Press, 2002), pp. 88, 82.
157. ‘The Indian Insurrection’, in Marx and Engels, The First Indian War of Independence, p. 65.
158. ‘British Incomes in India’, in ibid., p. 90.
159. ‘The Indian Revolt’, in ibid., p. 91.
160. Ernest Jones, ‘England’s Rule in India, and the Cry for Vengeance’, People’s Paper, 31 October 1857.
161. Ibid.
162. Ibid.
163. Richard Congreve, India [Denying England’s Right to Retain Her Possessions], with an Introduction by Shyamaji Krishnavarma (London: A. Bonner, 1907), pp. 5, 12.
164. Ibid., p. 12.
165. Ibid., p. 4.
166. Ibid., p. 8, my emphasis.
167. Ibid., p. 8.
168. I am referring here to Claeys’s observation that Positivist anti-imperialism was generally based on these principles and on a respect for ‘earlier forms of religious expression’. Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 57.
169. Congreve, India, p. 9.
170. Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008 [1968]), p. 27.
171. Ibid., pp. 28–9.
172. Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 59. Positivism, with its commitment to ‘The Religion of Humanity’, came to England in the 1840s via the British disciples of Auguste Comte who sought to replace Christianity with a god-free religion rooted instead in morality and natural affections, which would, at the same time, acknowledge the virtues of other religions. Congreve emerged as the leader of a small band of fairly dedicated Comteans who included Frederic Harrison, Edward Beesly and John Henry Bridges.
173. Ibid.
174. Congreve, India, p. 37.
175. Ibid., p. 11.
176. Ibid., p. 15, my emphasis.
177. Ibid., p. 18.
178. Ibid., p. 9.
179. Ibid., p. 8.
180. Ibid., p. 20.
181. Ibid., p. 16.
182. Ibid., p. 22.
183. Ibid., p. 18.
184. Ibid., pp. 18, 23.
185. Ibid.
186. Ibid., p. 19.
187. Ibid.
188. Ibid., p. 24.
189. Ibid., p. 31.
190. Ibid.
191. Ibid., p. 32.
192. Ibid., p. 34.
193. Ibid., p. 35.
194. Ibid.
195. Ibid.
196. Ibid.
197. Ibid.
198. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 11.
199. Ibid.
200. Congreve, India, p. 37.
201. Ibid.
202. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 13..
203. Congreve, India, p. 37.
204. Ibid. Congreve’s language is explicit with regard to this pressure: ‘It is time that you should make clear to them the difference of your judgment from theirs. You should enforce on them a total change of policy, a concentration on home questions of the energies now wasted abroad’. Ibid., p. 38.
205. Ibid. p. 37. The ending of the pamphlet feels like a return to a more formulaic Positivism at odds with the tenor of the text as a whole: ‘Listen then to no revolutionary appeals, accept no revolutionary doctrines, however time-honoured’, suggesting instead a union of working class and philosopher as moderating influences towards social change. Ibid., 34.
206. Frederic Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, Vol. 1, 1831–1870 (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 181, emphasis in original.
207. Ibid., p. 173.
208. Ibid., p. 174.
209. Ibid.
210. Ibid., p. 175.
211. Ibid.
212. Ibid., p. 176.
213. Ibid., p. 177.
214. Ibid.
215. Ibid., p. 175.
216. Ibid., p. 181, emphasis in original.
217. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, p. 158.
218. Thompson, Other Side of the Medal, p. 86.
219. Ibid., p. 97: ‘In January 1872, Deputy Commissioner J. L. Cowan responded to a minor émeute among the Kuka Sikhs by summarily executing sixty-eight prisoners by having them blown from cannon in the small principality of Malerkotla in Punjab’. See Kim A. Wagner, ‘ “Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past and Present 233: 1 (1 November 2016).
220. Ibid., p. 121.
2. A Barbaric Independence
1. This cautious bill, which sought to enfranchise some working-men – householders who were earning a minimum of twenty-six shillings a week – would be defeated in 1866. The Representation of the People Act 1867 was an even more limited measure; it doubled the number of enfranchised adult males to 2 million.
2. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 48.
3. Marouf Hasian, Jr, ‘Colonial Re-characterization and the Discourse Surrounding the Eyre Controversy’, Southern Communication Journal 66: 1 (Fall 2000), p. 90.
4. Catherine Hall, ‘Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies 1833–66’, in Bill Schwarz, ed., The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 132.
5. Tim Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 156.
6. Ibid., p. 154.
7. R. W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 461.
8. Ibid., p. 25, emphasis in original.
9. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 309.
10. Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), p. 199.
11. Watson, Caribbean Culture, p. 157.
12. Kostal, Jurisprudence of Power, p. 468.
13. Ibid., p. 20.
14. Edward Bean Underhill, The Tragedy of Morant Bay: A Narrative of the Disturbances in the Island of Jamaica in 1865 (London: Alexander & Shepheard, 1895) – reprinted by Forgotten Books (2012), p. 136.
15. Holt, Problem of Freedom, p. 309.
16. Hall, ‘Imperial Man’, p. 132.
17. ‘Indignation Meeting on the Jamaica Atrocities’, Bee-Hive, 8 September 1866.
18. Charles Dickens, ‘Letter to William de Cerjat, 30 November 1865’, in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Jenny Hartley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 397.
19. Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Maier, 1978), pp. 180–1.
20. Hall, ‘Imperial Man’, p. 132.
21. For a fuller account, see Gad Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1994).
22. Jamaica Committee, Jamaica Papers No. 1: Facts and Documents Relating to the Alleged Rebellion in Jamaica and the Measures of Repression including Notes on the Trial of Mr Gordon (henceforth JC1) (London: Jamaica Committee, 1866), p. 13.
23. As excerpted from the Colonial Standard, 21 October 1865, in JC1, p. 13.
24. Ibid.
25. Heuman, Killing Time, p. 13.
26. Ibid., p. 22, and Jamaica Royal Commission, Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission 1866, Part 2: Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (henceforth JRC2) (London: George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1866), p. 34.
27. Jamaica Royal Commission, Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission 1866: Part 1 (henceforth JRC1) (London: George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1866), p. 41.
28. Ibid., p. 40.
29. ‘Despatch from Maj. Gen O’Connor to Eyre’, in JRC2, p. 621.
30
. The Times, 13 November 1865, cited in Kostal, Jurisprudence of Power, pp. 25–6.
31. Kostal provides a detailed and clear account of the sequence of events. Ibid.
32. ‘Governor Eyre’s Despatch’, in JC1, pp. 84, 91.
33. Ibid., p. 91.
34. Ibid., p. 86.
35. Ibid., p. 89.
36. Ibid., p. 92.
37. Ibid., p. 93.
38. Frederic Harrison, Jamaica Papers No. V – Martial Law: Six Letters to ‘The Daily News’ (London: Jamaica Committee, 1867), p. 37.
39. Kostal, Jurisprudence of Power, p. 37.
40. For a succinct account of various meetings held and representations undertaken, see ibid., pp. 40–8.
41. For a full account of the constitution of the Jamaica Committee, see Bernard Semmel’s hugely important early study of the Eyre affair, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon & Lee, 1962). Semmel notes that the membership of the committee included ‘virtually all of the leading figures in the two principal pro-Northern societies’ in relation to the American Civil War (p. 62).
42. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, vol. 2 (London: Watts & Co., 1926 [1904]), p. 143.
43. ‘The Negro Controversy’, Saturday Review, 13 October 1866. Cited in Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, p. 178.
44. Hall, Civilising Subjects, p. 48.
45. Holt argues that during this period ‘British elite ideology and official policy moved from nonracist to racist premises, at the same time that the destruction of slavery cleared the way for that elite’s more robust embrace of imperialist ambitions.’ Revisiting the debate around Eric Williams, Holt notes that even Williams’s critics now admit that ‘the advent of slavery abolition was a function of the rise of capitalism’. Holt, Problem of Freedom, pp. xviii, 23.
46. Spectator, vol. 41 (London: John Campbell, 1868), p. 666. Cited in Semmel, Governor Eyre Controversy, p. 171.
47. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 323.
48. Semmel, Governor Eyre Controversy, p. 140.
49. Cited in Sidney Haldane Olivier, The Myth of Governor Eyre (London: L. & Virginia Woolf, 1933), p. 305.
50. The Times, editorial, 13 November 1865. For a collation of such responses, see Anonymous, Jamaica; Who Is to Blame, by a Thirty Years’ Resident, with an Introduction and Notes by the Editor of the ‘Eclectic Review’ (London: E. Wilson, 1866).
51. JC1, p. 59.
52. Ibid., p. 60.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., p. 59.
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