With the increasingly sophisticated study of power following the application of Foucault's ideas, imperial and post-colonialist historians logically and decisively turned to examine violence as state power made manifest. In the history of the British Empire, as well as their European counterparts, colonialism has become synonymous with violence as a result. In the best scholarship, race is the explanator of the rule of colonial difference, pointing toward the triadic intersection of race with colonialism and violence. Ofttimes, in the broader field, however, it is unclear what is colonial about colonial violence, for violence was neither the invention of the European powers, nor were the sovereigns of non-colonial and pre-modern empires loathe to sanction campaigns of violence against their subjects or else subjugate them through enslavement or subjection to harsh (human) tithes. Other times, when scholars draw attention to the peculiarly insidious and diverse forms of violence – against the body and labour, the natural landscape and social institutions, for instance – that they render visible in colonial regimes, it seems that colonialism or colonial power is actually substituting for either the modern (‘Western’) state or modern (‘Western’) capitalism, deeply entangled though these three sets of structures were. The nineteenth-century ‘peasantisation’ of the Indian economy and the rise of plantations and systems of indenture with all their attendant brutality, for example, was the other side of the coin to the global division of labour in which much of the British workforce was relocated to the factory floor and ‘proletarianised’ in a different but no less inhumane transformation. Yet, it would make little sense to analyse the latter under the rubric of colonialism even though the fates of colonised peoples and their subaltern brethren in the imperial metropoles were inextricably linked.
Ultimately, therefore, this scholarship has reified and puffed-up colonial power, imbuing it with an apparently historically-unique relationship to the exercise of violence of a historically-unparalleled virulence. The book under review also tends to concretise colonialism but is an important and timely contribution precisely because it abrades the notion that colonial violence was the product of extraordinary power and confidence. Rather, the central argument of this book is that the need for violence was the product of perpetual insecurity and perceived vulnerability, a paradox of colonial power thrown into relief most apparently in Punjab. The first chapter traces this anxiety to the genesis of the Company's empire but focuses predominately on the insecurity emanating from imperial expansion in the first-half of the nineteenth century, its embedding in the colonial mind as a ‘permanent siege mentality’, and the general efforts – such as greater surveillance or the restriction on freedom of circulation – to deal therewith. Crucially, the author then juxtaposes the 1857 Rebellion, during which Punjabis famously joined the Company's banner to be subsequently rewarded with preferential recruitment into the British Indian police and military, with the 1848 Siege of Multan, when Punjabis violently turned on the East India Company precipitating the Second Anglo-Sikh War and the conclusion of the annexation of Punjab. In so doing, Condos makes more complex the relation of race to colonial rule and violence, for it was those empowered by new racial theories towards the top of the social-racial hierarchy who not only enacted but actually necessitated the production of violence. Condos thus shows that the British had much to fear even in (what became) the most loyal and prosperous province of their Indian empire: the roots of Punjab as a ‘garrison state’ lay inherently within the ‘insecurity state’/state of insecurity in Punjab.
Chapter 2 explores this tension in more depth, for the only way to placate their ‘warlike’ and ‘turbulent’ new subjects was to support their transformation into wealthy yeomen, while also protecting household incomes (and themselves) by relying more heavily for military labour on those same restive and martial groups they distrusted. Any upset to this balance between the colonial state and its soldier-cultivators could be disastrous – as demonstrated, Condos shows, by the Punjab Disturbances of 1907. Chapters 3 and 4 centre on case studies of the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872 and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867, respectively, which together show how colonial law in Punjab came to embody arbitrary power by enshrining the absolute power and dispensation of ‘justice’ by those colonial officials who perpetually quivered with fear for personal safety around their ‘fanatical’ Sikh and Muslim subjects. These chapters also show that the state was not paralytic, for anxiety proved itself a constructive emotion in provoking new institutions into being to deal with the (ouroboros-like) problem of security and, in turn, the production of new forms of state authority and power. Chapter 5 returns to the dominance of Punjabis in the imperial military and police, showing how preferential recruitment of the ‘martial races’ thus transported the insecurity state from Punjab to every locale of the empire in which its hot-headed and potentially rebellious menfolk were in service. Colonial anxiety reached fever pitch and precipitated further draconian measures where fears or reports emerged of Punjabis migrating to the territories of Britain's imperial rivals, as notably exemplified by the case of the Ghadar Party founded by Punjabis in North America that supported independence for India from British rule.
This is an excellent book that deserves wide reading by historians of south Asia and of empire more broadly, as well as historians of the emotions, although this book is not directly located within that scholarly agenda. Yet, it falls to this reviewer to raise a minor matter, which may fruitfully position this book as the point of departure for new lines of inquiry. At issue is the uniqueness of colonial insecurity. In the Mughal Empire, too, anxiety was an important emotional driver of imperial politics well beyond wars of succession at times of regnal change. Anxiety structured the mansabdari and other imperial institutions that incentivised and strengthened vertical bonds of loyalty to the emperor over horizontal alliances against the centre, while also necessitating performances that made examples of rebels through extreme violence or signalled imperial power through the exercise of mercy. Anxiety was the impetus for pacification and payment of subsidies to restive frontier tribes (the very same that later troubled the British) as well as the removal from the landed elite of gentry remnant from previous dynasties (a strategy analogous to colonial-era policies that created a new intermediary layer loyal to British rule). In other words, once again, colonialism is too quickly rendered exceptional. What, if anything, it may be asked, was unusually or uniquely disruptive about colonial anxiety (and, thus, violence) except its relation to modernity?
