These words of a German officer in early colonial India reflect an extreme expression of identification on the part of a non-British mercenary with the British colonial establishment in late eighteenth-century India, and at the same time, the limits of such identification. While merging the English and the Germans into an all-embracing “Nordic Nation,” the author identifies the colonial establishment through the national term “English,” rather than referring to “the Company,” as a British author would most likely do in similar circumstances. Defining the government of Madras as English serves the comparison that the author makes between the English East India Company and the colonial establishments of other European nations. The author's transition from “our entire Nordic nation” to “the English” reflects his initial positioning of the colonial establishment against the indigenous Indians, to positioning it against the colonial establishments of other European nations. In relation to the Indians, the author is one with the British, while relating to other European nations reestablishes his personal difference from the British. Clearly, while he considers himself a full member of the military forces of the Company, he considers the Company itself a body to which he must remain an outsider. The distinction reflects the reality of the matter, since the non-Indian forces of the Company were indeed composed of people from all over Europe,Footnote ² while the high-ranking Company officials were exclusively British, albeit by no means predominantly English, having a very high representation of Scots.Footnote ³

Linda Colley discusses the important role that the experience of empire played in the formation of British identity in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴ This paper asks if this was also the case for the non-British European servants of the imperial enterprise, among whom there was a high proportion of Germans. Did they consider themselves representatives of a European, rather than only a British enterprise? Did they to some extent begin to see themselves as British? To what extent did the colonial experience erode the distinctions between German and British fellows-in-arms as it did regarding the distinctions between English, Scots, Welsh, and even Irish?

The anonymous author quoted above belonged to an expedition of two regiments of the army of Hanover that served the East India Company in southern India between 1782 and 1792. They were sent as auxiliary troops to the Madras Presidency of the Company after the Indian ruler of Mysore, Haidar Ali, stormed the Company territories in 1780, thus initiating the second Mysore war (1780–1784). Until 1783, this war was part of the global struggle that the British were also waging in North America, Gibraltar, and South Africa against the American colonies, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch. The Hanoverians were badly needed in India because of the global dimensions of the struggle.

The force of about two thousand soldiers was organized in two regiments established especially for the expedition to India. Since it was feared that the use of Hanoverians for purely British interests would be resented in the Electorate, the soldiers were recruited in adjacent German territories while the officers, who volunteered, were from existing Hanoverian regiments. The Hanoverians reached Madras in 1782 and early 1783 and assisted the British in the second Mysore war against Haidar's son Tipu Sultan and his French allies. They remained in India after the war as garrison troops until 1792. An additional eight hundred soldiers were recruited and sent to India in 1786 to replace casualties of war and disease.Footnote ⁵ About thirty letters sent by these soldiers were published in German magazines, and three soldiers later published books on their experiences in India. The letters and books reflect how these soldiers viewed their position as German participants in a British colonial war, to what degree they identified themselves with the British colonial establishment, and finally, how their perspective reflected their understanding of India.

The theory that Germans held a special position toward European colonialism has been implied by Edward Said and put forward by Russell Berman. According to this theory, intellectuals such as Georg Forster were able to take the role of critical observers of colonial politics in which Germany did not participate.Footnote ⁶ Susan Zantop views this attitude as a part of the colonial fantasies of German intellectuals trying to take part, at least in theory, in the colonial game,Footnote ⁷ while Jürgen Osterhammel argues that there was no special German attitude to the non-European world in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁸ The debate mainly concerns the attitude of intellectuals. Many Germans took an active part in British and French colonialism as soldiers, settlers, merchants, and missionaries, long before the beginning of Imperial German colonialism, however, and it is intriguing to examine their attitudes.Footnote ⁹

While most of the German agents of western European colonialism acted as individuals, the Hanoverians who served in India were a group with a distinct identity. Most of their letters were published in the local Hanoverian periodical, the Hannoverisches Magazin. The editors of this semi-official, typically Enlightenment periodical for the general public viewed the expedition to India as an issue that directly concerned its readership.Footnote ¹⁰ They published calls for letters from expedition participants.Footnote ¹¹ The editor responsible for publishing the letters was Georg Friedrich Wehrs, a jurist and economist who was a frequent contributor to the magazine. The letters were published anonymously or under initials, but all were attributed to officers, mostly captains. These officers served in India in their own regiments, under Hanoverian commanders, and their language of command was German, all of which could contribute to maintaining their special identity during their service in India. Such a separate identity would have been very different from that of German intellectuals observing European colonialism, since the officers were actual participants. As Europeans in a colonial establishment in India, they shared the British feeling of deep political and cultural differences from indigenous Indians. The fact that their separate identity was Hanoverian could further strengthen their receptivity to a British approach. After all, eighteenth-century Hanoverian historian Ludwig Timotheus Spittler pronounced the current view in the Electorate when he said, “We are happy to be half-English here, and surely not just in our clothes, manners, and fashion, but also in our character.”Footnote ¹² As Hanoverian soldiers, they brought with them not only loyalty to George III, but also a tradition of fighting alongside and for the British. Some of the older officers in India enjoyed a reunion with British fellows they had known during the Seven Years' War.Footnote ¹³ We should also bear in mind the role of Protestantism in the construction of British identity.Footnote ¹⁴ Because the Hanoverians were mostly Lutherans, they shared many of the British sensitivities and prejudices toward the Catholic nations of Europe.

In reports on sea travel to India, the authors frequently used the first person plural. The we-group of these descriptions almost always referred either to the Hanoverian regiments or sometimes only the officers, or to the ship in which the officer was traveling. The first letter that appeared in the Hannoverisches Magazin, written by chaplain Friedrich Langstedt on board the ship Benjamin and Ann off the English town of Sheerness in Kent on November 27, 1781, began by describing boarding the ships off the north German town of Stade: “On October 27, we were brought by eleven ferry-boats on board our transport ships. Due to adverse winds we did not sail until November 7.”Footnote ¹⁵ Here the “we” refers both to the entire corps of Hanoverians and to the ships on which they sailed. This pattern is retained throughout the narratives about the sea journey. Often “we” referred to the maneuvers and the adventure of a particular ship on which an officer sailed. But it also distinguishes the Hanoverians from the other troops on board. Langstedt wrote, “On the day we sailed from Portsmouth, our ship … had 320 heads on board, 191 of our people, 29 English recruits, 12 Irish cadets, and 88 seamen.”Footnote ¹⁶ Such we-group references sometimes extended to the entire British fleet sailing to India, but never to the entire British navy. British warships that they met on the way were referred to simply as English ships, never our ships. An officer wrote, “On September 10, 1782, a signal was given from our convoy to pull anchor, on the morning of the eleventh we sailed out of Portsmouth. The warships went around the Isle of Wight, while we sailed between the island and the English mainland, since this passage is dangerous for warships.”Footnote ¹⁷ Another officer, Major Offeney, described the capture of a French ship by the British, without identifying the British as his own side: “On the twenty-first an English cutter encountered a French privateer with eight cannons and a crew of thirty-five men. It was taken during the night near the French coast, and after the English took it over, they brought it to [the town of] Deal with the captured crew.”Footnote ¹⁸ In an extreme case, Colonel Reinbold described a naval battle between the British and the French, in which his own ship was involved. The Hanoverian officer referred to the rivals in the battle as the English and the French, not us and the enemy, evaluating the performances of the two admirals, and concluded by saying, “it was a unique experience to witness and even take part in a naval battle, something that is rare for us Germans.”Footnote ¹⁹ Here the Hanoverian colonel expressly put himself more in the position of an outsider than a participant, and linked that to being German.

Other motifs in the narratives also point to a perceived cultural difference that the Hanoverians felt toward the British. In pointing out these differences, the authors often referred to themselves as Germans rather than Hanoverians. Many of the narratives include descriptions of English coast towns and the manners of their inhabitants. None of the narratives included descriptions of the German town of Hamelin, where they were trained, or of Stade, where they boarded the ships. Surely not all the officers had been familiar with these towns before, but they still regarded them as part of home, while they did not England and the English that way. On the ships, too, some of the officers observed the manners of the British, but not of their fellow Hanoverians. Major Offeney wrote, “Generally speaking, we noticed that even the most humble Englishmen were more polite and friendly than they are usually portrayed.”Footnote ²⁰ Langstedt wrote in his journal on April 1, “The English fooled their compatriots as much as the Germans.”Footnote ²¹ The letters point to a language problem in communication with the British. Senior officers often dined or went ashore with the British commanders of their ships, who acted as their hosts.Footnote ²² But there is no mention of social intercourse with the British troops that were being transported to India on the same ships. A junior officer wrote, “The captain of my ship and his other officers are all good people. It's a pity that we cannot better understand each other. At table they chat in English and we in German.”Footnote ²³ In the lower ranks the problem was worse, with quarrels developing between soldiers of the regiments and British sailors.Footnote ²⁴ Several officers described the encounter with Johann Heinrich von Böhm, the German commander of the Portuguese forces in Brazil, whom the Hanoverians had met during their stop in Rio de Janeiro in May 1782. They all mentioned the fact that Böhm had been a garrison commander in Bremen before going to Brazil, a fact that made him their regional compatriot as well, but they always defined him as German.Footnote ²⁵ Even in their observations of natural phenomena in tropical regions, the authors often compared them with Germany rather than applying the more general concept of Europe. In these comparisons, Germany, rather than Europe, served to define what was taken as normal and home.

Upon landing in Madras, the situation changed immediately. There the new identification category of “Europeans” emerged, in contrast to natives, Indians, or blacks. An officer writing from Madras on January 7, 1783, wrote, “The natives are as black as Africans, but their faces and their stature are similar to us Europeans.”Footnote ²⁶ The Europeans were a group to which both Hanoverians and British unconditionally belonged, but not only them. According to one officer, the Europeans he met in Madras included Danes, Russians, Swiss, English, Dutch, Germans, French, Italians, and Hungarians.Footnote ²⁷ Not included in this group were those referred to as Portuguese, signifying the half-caste inhabitants of Madras. They were distinguished not only by mixed European and Indian descent but also by their special jargon and by the Catholic beliefs they often held. According to one Hanoverian officer, “the above mentioned Portuguese are so degenerated and deformed by the Indians that one could surely hold them for Malabarians, although they retain their Roman beliefs.”Footnote ²⁸ Their adherence to Christianity kept the Portuguese from completely assimilating into Indian society, but also distinguished them from British colonial society. Such attitudes were common among the British in India during the closing decades of the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁹

When the Hanoverian authors in India said “we” in their narratives, what did they mean? Often it was the Hanoverian regiments or that part of them to which an officer belonged at a given moment. “We” also referred to a specific British troop with which the author was marching or fighting. These are uses of the pronoun that were already encountered during the sea journey. But in India the pronoun “we” also referred to the entire army in a campaign, for example, the army that marched to the town of Cuddalore and fought the only major battle in which the Hanoverians participated. This was an army of ten thousands, a much larger unit than an individual ship at sea. It was similar to the size of the entire British fleet with which the Hanoverians sailed to India, but the references to it as the we-group of the Hanoverians were much more frequent than references to the entire fleet as their we-group. An officer writing in 1784 wrote of “our government” and “our high officials,” meaning the government and the officials of the East India Company in Madras.Footnote ³⁰ One of the most generalizing applications of the pronoun “we” appeared soon after the battle of Cuddalore, when a Hanoverian author said “it looks like Tipu is about to offer us peace, and we will probably agree to it.”Footnote ³¹ Here the author clearly identified himself with the East India establishment in Madras.

The language barrier also changed its position. Some officers continued to have difficulties with English, but the Indian languages clearly posed a much greater problem. One officer wondered if he would ever be able to speak Tamil, a language that appeared to him to be without any rules.Footnote ³² Another officer wished that Tipu's agent who came to Madras to hold peace talks had given his public speech in an understandable language.Footnote ³³ This understandable language could only be English. English was transformed from a linguistic barrier into the only means of communication with the world outside the regiment. This inevitably makes the speakers of the language important interpreters of that world to the Hanoverian officers.

Yet, the identification of the Hanoverian officers with the British establishment around them was far from comprehensive. The Hanoverian regiments remained their most obvious reference group. The colonial establishment as a whole was most often designated “the English” rather than “the Company,” a term that stressed the foreign position of the Hanoverians within the establishment. An officer describing the battle of Cuddalore wrote, “We Hanoverians and the 101^st Royal regiment stood at the center, under the brigade of English colonel Elphinstone. Many rows of our good regiments fell dead or wounded…. to our great astonishment we saw that the 101^st regiment did not advance with us but instead we Hanoverians were alone.”Footnote ³⁴ The distinction made here is not between two military units, or at least not between two military units belonging to one army. The author distinguishes his own unit by its Hanoverian identity. This is not a national difference. It is based on the sense of belonging to a different military organization and tradition, as well as the sense of solidarity with old fellows-in-arms. Another officer describing the battle wrote, “At seeing my good compatriots (Landsleute) falling on both my sides, I forgot the danger I was in and called, ‘Children, aim and hit the enemy.’”Footnote ³⁵ Here, too, the fact that the officer saw his own people falling played a part in his motivation. That this was not national identity is shown by the same officer's description of the circumstances after the battle: “We are still near Cuddalore, but we are the best friends of the French, we eat and drink together, and we all hope to see our beloved Europe soon.”Footnote ³⁶ Enemies in battle became best friends right after it because the motivation for fighting was purely professional, and they were now united by a longing for their common European homeland. In fact, the composition of the French army was no less cosmopolitan than the British army. Not only was it composed mostly of Indians, its European part, too, was far from being exclusively French, including as it did the German regiment La Marck.

The Hanoverians did not serve in India for patriotic reasons, either. An officer who wrote just before the battle of Cuddalore assured his readers that when the battle comes, “I will be conscious of my duty and my birth.”Footnote ³⁷ The dedication to the glory of Britain, often declared in British texts on colonial wars in India, would have been irrelevant for the Hanoverians, but neither was loyalty to the King ever mentioned as a motive for fighting, implying that the duty they were fulfilling was to their profession as officers. Although better chances for promotion were among the strongest motives for going to India, several officers soon realized that their chances for a colonial career were not very promising, since the better positions were reserved for Company officials.Footnote ³⁸

The limited identification of the Hanoverians with the British was further reflected in the fact that even the term “British” rarely appeared in their letters. Instead, the Hanoverians constantly referred to the “English.” It is hardly extraordinary to refer to the British as English even now, more than three hundred years after the United Kingdom of Great Britain was declared in 1707, let alone in the eighteenth century; however, the almost complete absence of the term British from the letters of the Hanoverians stands in striking contrast to the usage of their British colleagues, who used it much more often in referring to the various agents of the colonial establishment. After all, many of these British were not English at all, but Scots. In preferring the term English, the Hanoverian authors were consistent with common practice in Germany. The Index deutschsprachiger Zeitschriften 1750–1815, which includes 100,000 articles from 195 German magazines, shows 380 articles whose titles include the word England, in comparison to 62 articles whose titles include the words Britannien or Großbritannien, a proportion of more than six to one. In contrast, the British Eighteenth Century Collection Online, a digital collection of 150,000 books published in the eighteenth century, yields for the period 1750–1800 a total of 3,481 titles with the word England and 2,104 titles containing the word Britain, a proportion of only 1.65 to one. These figures imply that the use of the new term, referring to the United Kingdom as a whole, was four times greater in Britain than it was in Germany. As early as 1755 an English author protested against what he considered to be a deplorable disappearance of the words England and English from public use, and this tendency became much stronger during the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ The application of the term British was naturally stronger among the Scots than among the English.Footnote ⁴⁰ The difference between British and German usage is reflected in the fact that when Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz published his free translation of Robert Orme's History of the Military Transaction of the British Nation in Indostan (London, 1763–1780), he gave his book the title Die Engländer in Indien (Leipzig, 1786–1788). The fact that the Hanoverian officers even referred to Scottish officers, such as the above-mentioned Colonel Elphinstone, as English, is significant. It shows that the Hanoverians, far from accepting the British identity of their colleagues, did not even adopt the terms with which those British colleagues identified themselves. The Hanoverians continued to apply the terms that were in current use in Germany.

The German identity of the Hanoverians was less evident in their letters from India than it was in the letters from the sea journey. While their military identity was Hanoverian, their cultural identity was clearly European. Indeed, encounters with Germans in India were reported as noteworthy events, usually without specifying the regional origin of those Germans. German missionary Friedrich Swartz, who rendered important diplomatic services to the British, is reported upon with some pride,Footnote ⁴¹ but the Germanness of others is also mentioned. An officer who reported on his stay in a Dutch station wrote, “Colonel Martin and Captain Moost (a German) kept us company.”Footnote ⁴² Some officers mentioned the presence of the German regiment La Marck in the French army in Cuddalore, whose officers socialized with the Hanoverians after peace was declared.Footnote ⁴³ But it is also noteworthy that some officers tell of socializing with the French in Cuddalore without mentioning the German regiment, displaying indifference to their origin.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both Swartz and the German regiment of the French in Cuddalore drew less attention from the Hanoverians than the German commander of the Portuguese forces in Rio, who is mentioned in all Hanoverian reports on their stay in the Brazilian town. The cultural and natural peculiarities encountered in India were usually compared to Europe rather than to Germany, although comparisons with Germany were also made.

In the books published by some officers after returning home, there is greater emphasis on encounters with Germans than there is in the magazine letters, and it appears that the reason for that was that these books, which were written or at least rewritten and edited in Germany, tried to appeal to a wider German public. Judging from the letters that were published soon after their composition, the stay in India did not enhance the Hanoverians' consciousness of being Germans. While the German identity was deemed the most appropriate one for dealing with the encounter with the British on the sea journey, the colonial encounter with India necessitated supplementing this with a strong European identity that was enforced by the political and social relationships in colonial India. While the letters contain many references to social intercourse with Europeans of various origins, very few point to social intercourse with Indians. At the same time, the German identity of the Hanoverians was preserved, especially vis-à-vis the British, who represented the hegemonic part of European colonial society in Madras.

How was the partial identification of the Hanoverians reflected in the way they portrayed the colonial environment in southern India? Did they view the Indians differently than the British did? All the Hanoverian authors accepted the colonial situation as a given fact. Criticism of the British government in Madras was very rare. Explicit criticism occurred only once, when an officer remarked that in the areas that border with Mysore, there were much fewer poor and beggars in the European settlements, and he saw evidence here of oppression.Footnote ⁴⁵ On the other hand, attempts to defend the Company from criticism of its practices were also very rare. The only real instance of such a defense referred to Governor Sir Archibald Campbell, “a just and order-loving man, who is at the same time very active in respect to service, and does not tolerate any abuse and oppression of the natives of the country.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In another case, an officer who acted as correspondent to the Politisches Journal wrote:

It appears that the soldiers whose conduct the author is defending are in his own unit, thus this is not a general defense of the conduct of the British army, and in any case, his defense does not apply to the political issue of Company rule, at least not explicitly. Accusations of brutality by British soldiers played an important role in the political debate on India taking place in Britain, especially in relation to the question of the supposed Oriental despotism of Tipu Sultan and his treatment of British captives.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Hanoverian officer's remark is not situated within this context, although it could be a reflection of it. The passage quoted at the beginning of this article praises Company rule as compared to the colonial establishments of other European nations and not, as was the usual practice of British critics and defenders of the Company, to the conditions under Indian governments. Again, while his remark may reflect the influence of the British debate, it is situated in a different context. The rarity of such expressions in the Hanoverians' letters is interesting because both criticism and apologetics of Company rule were dominant in British texts of the period. Criticism came not only from outside the Company, but from Company officials as well.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Hanoverians did not take part in the hot debate that raged in so many British publications. The absence of polemics regarding colonial rule in India points to their position outside the colonial establishment and distinguishes them from British authors.

Some letters did contain reflections on questions of British colonial policy in India, especially in respect to the conduct of the war with Tipu Sultan. Some said that the Company should strengthen its cavalry or maintain a sufficient number of sepoys, the Indian soldiers in British service.Footnote ⁵⁰ There were more general reflections that questioned the ability to preserve colonial rule in India for long.Footnote ⁵¹ These ideas were not original and were expressed by British officers as well. British officer Thomas Munro, the future governor of British Mysore, wrote about the need for a sufficient number of sepoys.Footnote ⁵² Colonel William Fullarton, who commanded the southern Army of the Company, including the Hanoverians in the campaigns of 1783 and 1784, proposed a plan for strengthening the Company cavalry.Footnote ⁵³ Such more general reflections were especially frequent in letters published in the Politisches Journal, where emphasis was on the political significance of the Mysore war rather than on the regional Hanoverian dimension that was emphasized in the letters published in the Hannoverisches Magazin. The Politisches Journal even engaged one of the Hanoverian officers as a regular correspondent, who sent an annual report on the events.Footnote ⁵⁴ The general reflections in these letters no doubt resulted from the guidelines that the authors received from the editor, Gottlob Benedikt von Schirach, as to what would constitute interesting material for publication. These letters, however, did not include any consideration of the morality of colonial rule, either. The Politisches Journal, one of the most popular magazines in Germany, did not usually criticize governments, since they were its main source of information.Footnote ⁵⁵ Criticism of the English East India Company, however, was not equal to criticism of the British government. The Politisches Journal did not hesitate to publish the British criticism of the Company, including moral criticism coming from Edmund Burke's circle. In 1784, the magazine published a complaint by the Raja of Varanasi, Chait Singh, on his attempted arrest by Warren Hastings, the British Governor-General of India, taken from the debates on the India Bill in Parliament.Footnote ⁵⁶ The absence of criticism or apologetics of Company rule in the reports of the Hanoverian officers cannot be explained, then, by the editorial policy of the magazine, but rather by the fact that these authors were not familiar with the internal British discourse on India.

This does not mean that colonial ideology was not reflected in the Hanoverian texts. It is clear from the texts that the Hanoverians were extremely dependent on the British for making sense of the situation in India. This can be seen from the detailed descriptions of Indian society and castes that some authors sent shortly after arriving in Madras, sometimes referring to the situation in Bengal or including historical anecdotes. An officer writing in December 1782 informed his readers:

Since none of the Hanoverians had ever been to Bengal, the information on the situation in Bengal could only have been obtained from the British. Several motifs characteristic of British colonial texts appear in their letters. One officer, identified as Captain Hermann Martin von Wersebe, wrote of the road to Madurai, “This pretty avenue, which is no longer kept orderly as it may have been in the past,… [is] evidence of the good taste of the ancient Indians for usefulness and beauty.”Footnote ⁵⁸ His remark reflected the notions of decay and of the superiority of ancient India over contemporary India that was common in British representations of India. William Fullarton, with whom Wersebe was marching, wrote of Madurai:

Almost all the letters told of the manipulation of Hinduism by the Brahmins, “who know very well how to exploit the superstitions of the people.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These images of India were widely available in Europe and the Hanoverians may have been exposed to them before coming to India. Most officers were not highly educated, but they had been to schools where they would have received some general notion of world geography. The aristocrats among them probably studied in military academies, while those from bourgeois families studied in municipal schools, but both kinds of institutions gave lessons in geography and history.Footnote ⁶¹ In the municipal school of the Hanoverian town Einbeck, for example, travel accounts were extensively used in both geography and German lessons.Footnote ⁶² The ideas that officers had of India before their service there, however, must have been very vague.

Several letters describe Indian rulers who lived in great luxury and pomp without enjoying any real power. Wersebe described the wedding procession of the Raja of Little Marawa: “He conducted this procession ten evenings in a row with full pomp; but other than that, he is not allowed to leave his palace.”Footnote ⁶³ The empty pomp of Indian rulers was a common motif in European travel literature on India, especially on the Mughal Empire. In the colonial period, it served to justify the British takeover, since the legitimate ruler no longer held power. Two Hanoverian authors repeated the British condemnation of Tipu as a cruel tyrant.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was the colonial motif that one would most expect to find in the writings of the Hanoverians, who came to India to fight Tipu. Considering this fact, references to the despotism of Tipu in the magazine articles were remarkably few. They were more prominent in the books, but even there they were not frequent compared to British texts. The harsh treatment of Haidar's and Tipu's British prisoners, which was frequently debated in British publications, was almost completely absent from the publications of the Hanoverians. The alleged tendency of Indians, especially the servants, to steal and lie, often stated by British writers, was also only rarely mentioned.Footnote ⁶⁵ One officer wrote, “There are no European servants here, only the local inhabitants, who unfortunately are almost all thieves and liars.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Regretting that the chances for converting the Hindus seemed to be very small, the same author wrote, “and anyway very few of them would be able to observe the seventh commandment.”Footnote ⁶⁷ That, in Lutheran numbering, is “thou shalt not steal.”

Many basic motifs of colonial ideology do not appear in any of the magazine letters, however. Their descriptions of the sepoys, the Indian soldiers of the British, always point to their being good soldiers, better trained even than German soldiers in Europe, who set an example for the Europeans with their courage. When referring to the fact that the sepoys always had European commanding officers, they never mentioned the reason for that, which was British mistrust of the sepoys when left without European command.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Indian effeminacy and indolence, which supplied the basis on which the entire British view of Oriental despotism was built,Footnote ⁶⁹ did not find expression in any of the letters. Also absent was the greed that many British authors attributed to the Indians, which helped Robert Orme explain why the indolent Indians produced so much cotton.Footnote ⁷⁰ The common British conception of the indifference of Hindus to foreign rule is also absent. Wersebe, writing on the advance of the British army into Mysore, reported, “The whole area was fully cultivated, full of good villages that were already abandoned when we arrived.”Footnote ⁷¹ This description was in contrast to many British accounts of peasants continuing with their work as the British marched on.Footnote ⁷² Another officer wrote, “Many examples are known of the warlike spirit that inflames almost all the Indians.”Footnote ⁷³ His remark was exceptional in that he attributed the warlike spirit to Indians as a whole, without reserving this quality to a specific group, as British writers usually did.

Some of the colonial motifs that did not appear in the periodicals did appear in the books that two Hanoverian officers published after returning home. This was probably motivated by the desire of their authors to supply a more general view, and they may have been encouraged by their editors to do so. One of these authors, Carl Best, wrote:

Here the submissiveness and softness of the Indians are explicitly stated. Other colonial motifs appeared in a confused and contradictory manner. Best wrote:

Since Best compared this quality of the Indians to “our Jews,” it was probably not meant as a compliment. Unlike Robert Orme, however, from whom this idea was borrowed, Best failed to explain that it was the climate that made Indians indolent, and that they specialized in the cotton industry because it was the easiest profession. Instead, Best goes on to describe the great proficiency and reliability of Indian artisans in a wide variety of occupations, remarking that “though their work method appears simple, they do the prettiest work with their rude tools, are very quick to learn, and very easily grasp how one wishes something to be done.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus he rendered the argument concerning their greed seemingly pointless and out of context. This resulted from his misunderstanding of the function that the attribution of greed to Indians fulfilled in colonial ideology. Something similar happened to the only reference to the indolence of the Indians in these texts. An anonymous author wrote in his book, “Although this entire nation of Indians is especially indolent and lazy, they are still capable of performing hard work, carrying heavy weights and undertaking exhausting journeys. Examples of that can be seen every day.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In this case, the author was confronted with a contradiction between the general characterization of the Indians as lazy that he learned from his surroundings and his own observation of hard-working Indians, and supplied his readers with contradictory images.

The texts of the Hanoverian officers show the partial integration of a German military body into colonial society in India. The level of integration into colonial society and identification with it were substantial, but were not complete even after ten years. The categories through which the officers differentiated themselves changed substantially between the sea journey to India and the time they lived in southern India under colonial conditions. During the sea journey they regarded themselves primarily as Hanoverians and Germans vis-à-vis a British military environment, which they rarely recognized as their own. In India their main category of self-identification was of Europeans, and they often felt themselves to be part of colonial society as opposed to indigenous society. Yet, their identification with the colonial establishment, which was not identical to colonial society, was far weaker. While they sometimes regarded themselves part of it, especially during intense military efforts, they usually continued to view this establishment as English and always defined themselves as outsiders. Unlike British observers, they rarely recognized the goals and problems of the East India Company as their own, apart from the short period when they hoped for a successful conclusion of the war. Their motives for remaining in India and fighting there were never declared to be general, let alone perceived as such.

This attitude was reflected in the way the Hanoverian officers described the Indians that they met. The Hanoverians clearly perceived India through British eyes. They needed the British interpretation to make sense of the complex environment into which they were thrown. Their representations of the Indians reproduced many British perceptions. Some of these perceptions corresponded to accepted images of India that the Hanoverians could have brought with them from Europe, such as the rigid division of castes and the status of Brahmins. Yet, the ideas they had of India must have been very vague and they could only have learned more particular prejudices, such as the unreliability of Indian servants, from the British.

Still, their involvement in the British discourse on India remained limited. This is evident both in the absence of a debate on the morality of Company rule in India and by the confused way in which they represented some of the most fundamental British colonial notions. While the British colonial ideologies were themselves contradictory and diverse, the Hanoverians texts differed from most British texts in that they did not attempt to reconcile these contradictions. The contradictions in Hanoverian texts resulted not from the employment of different strategies to justify colonial rule but rather from an indifference to such attempts and from a misunderstanding of the ideological function of the various British representations of India. This resulted from their being strangers to the colonial discourse itself. The British in India were familiar with the discourse on India before entering the Company service, simply through their exposure to the debates in the British press at home. While the German press also reported on colonial events in India, as the Politisches Journal clearly shows, its coverage of British colonial interests was not as elaborate as the coverage in Britain, where Indian issues were considered British political issues. Thus, unlike British colonial officers, the Hanoverians did not come to India with sufficient previous knowledge to be able to understand the complexity of the colonial discourse, and their confusion was evident in their texts.

The case of the Hanoverian officers in British India may serve as a further indication of the plurality of European attitudes in the eighteenth century toward non-European peoples. Even within one colonial military force, no single colonial ideology was accepted by all. While the internal differences and subtleties within British discourse have been analyzed, it is important to realize that significant numbers of those who composed the colonial establishments came from European nations other than the one to which a specific colonial establishment belonged. These differences in country of origin may have led to a more limited and complex acceptance of the dominant ideologies regarding the control of colonial subjects. Germans, even Hanoverians serving loyally in a British environment, may have developed a different attitude than their colleagues because colonial discourse in Germany differed from the prevalent discourse in Britain or France. This was not yet the nineteenth-century national consciousness that would be manifested in explicit rejection of the colonial ideology of another nation. Even relatively uneducated eighteenth-century people, who were only superficially familiar with the colonial discourse in their own country, responded differently to a foreign colonial discourse, largely because this was a discourse with which they were entirely unfamiliar. The colonial identity of British India was more British than European. It was less effective vis-à-vis non-British than its own nationals, and this was only imperfectly offset by the unifying power of a common European identity.