Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

144 men and two women were crammed into the fort’s ‘black hole’, a cell measuring 18 feet by 14 feet 10 inches. It was horrendously hot, and the prisoners fought each other to get near the two small windows, and over the limited supply of water, begging for their lives while the guards laughed at their plight. The story goes that the next morning, only twenty-three of the prisoners were still alive, among a pile of corpses. Also, though there’s a strong argument to be made that it was less about race and more about resisting subjugation, both the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 and the Indian Uprising of 1857 featured examples of gruesome violence against the British, with Lord William Bentinck remarking in relation to the former that ‘the white community for many nights together went to bed in the uncertainty of rising alive’; a single monument in a church in Delhi conveys the horrors endured by the British in the latter, marking as it does the deaths of Thomas Collins, a deputy collector of the city, his wife, his mother, his brother and a further twenty-three members of their extended family, including three grandchildren.