Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

“To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians,” Mill wrote, “is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into, however it may with those who, from a safe and unresponsible position, criticise statesmen.”[48]

Mill was both a product and a shaper of his imperial times. With his formulations, he offered future imperialists on both ends of the political spectrum—ranging from Conservatives like Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph Chamberlain in the nineteenth century to Labour leaders like Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin in the twentieth—a

a conception of paternal despotism.

Britain had declared martial law in Ireland (1798 and 1803), Barbados (1805 and 1816), Ceylon (1817 and 1848), Demerara (1823), Jamaica (1823–24 and 1831–32), Cape Colony (1835, 1846, 1850–53), and Canada (1837–38).[51]

Two questions animated debates: when was state-directed violence a necessity, and was this violence legitimate or lawful?

“It would be the worst of all conceivable grievances—it would be a calamity unspeakable—if the whole law and constitution of England were suspended one hour longer than the most imperious necessity demanded,” Lord Brougham insisted during parliamentary debate on martial law in Demerara,

tiny British sugar-producing colony on the northeastern shores of South America.[52] On August 17, 1823, ten to twelve thousand enslaved people launched a rebellion agains...

Order was restored within forty-eight hours, though martial law remained in effect during the governor-ordered trial of dozens of the rebellion’s

alleged ringleaders. Some were publicly lashed, others were executed and their severed heads nailed to posts, and some were hung by chains outside plantations where their corpses remained suspended for months so that they “might produce salutary effects.”[54]

Brougham’s concern, however, was not for the spectacle’s legality but for the unlawful treatment of a Methodist missionary, John Smith, who had been implicated in inciting the insurrection and was subsequently court-martialed, found guilty, and died in prison while awaiting execution.[55] Had the governor maintained martial...

“If [martial law] survives the necessity on which alone it rests for a single minute, it becomes a mere ...

In Demerara as elsewhere in the empire, the doctrine of necessity suggested a breakdown in the legal system’s ordinary functioning, an incapability of dealing with an existential threat to the state. Regular criminal laws in Britain aspired to define offenses precisely, provide fair trials, assume innocence, avoid double jeopardy, and adhere to the liberal ideal of individual responsibility for everyone, including government officials. While the state maintained its

monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, this violence was increasingly limited by common law requirements.

An expanding list of laws reflected the racialized assumptions and economic needs of the empire, so regulations like master and servants ordinances, which criminalized labor offenses, remained in place well beyond their disuse in Britain.

A different set of laws or regulations, in the form of martial law, statutory martial

law, or some combination of both, had to be deployed. It was in these moments of necessity that exceptions from ordinary legal systems were made and the state’s power to preserve itself spoke most clearly through its colonial agents and their extraordinary acts of violence.

martial law had an ambiguous place in Britain’s legal history.[57] When narrowly defined, it existed during a state of war when the military took over for an inoperative civilian government. In such times of necessity, the military’s powers were wide ranging.

In

the case of an internal rebellion, martial law often operated differently. A still-functioning civil government called in the military to assist police forces in restoring order and authority. This is what typically happened in the empire, as in Demerara.

BRITISH GUYANA

Either way, once martial law was over, regular courts would return and could theoretically hold the military accountable for any of its martial law activities that violated ordinary laws. In practice, this rarely happened, and to ensure that it didn’t, ex post facto indemnity acts were often passed. Nonetheless, there was precedent for prosecution.

Habeas corpus was suspended often in Britain, particularly for those suspected of treason. Suspension acts could delay a person’s speedy trial, and once legal proceedings took place, protections were granted to the British government through an indemnity act.[59] There was also the Riot Act, a statutory response to illegal assemblies.

Once the Riot Act was read to an unlawfully assembled crowd, it had an hour to disperse before the military seized control.

When was it necessary to invoke the Riot Act? How much force was too much or too little? “Now a person, whether a magistrate, or peace officer, who has the duty of suppressing a riot, is placed in a very difficult position,”

“For if, by his acts, he causes death, he is liable to be indicted for murder or manslaughter, and if he does not act, he is liable to an indictment on an information for neglect; he is therefore, bound to hit the precise line of his duty….I

Eruptions in India and Jamaica brought these tense debates to a head and also called into question the ability of so-called native populations to improve along Western lines.

Expected to use cartridges rumored to be greased with beef and pork fat, the sepoys of the company army took up arms in May 1857.

Large swaths of the region remained uncontrollable for over a year, and only suppression restored colonial order.

British forces tied suspected Indian rebels to the mouths of cannons, lit the fuse, and blew them to pieces.[63] They leveled villages and towns as their murderous campaigns against the local population spread.

In Britain, atrocities perpetrated against white civilians shocked the public, and hyperbolic media coverage incited popular opinion during what was called the “Red Year” of 1857.[65] A grim national mood of despair and retribution supported British repressive measures in India. When Britain finally quelled the rebellion at the end of 1858, hardened racial attitudes at home remained and

would impact the nation’s future imperial rule.[66]

On the 30 May [1857] the Legislative Council passed an Act which swept away the time honoured seats of justice, wheresoever rebellion was disporting itself.” Breathtaking in its scope, this new act, the State Offences Act, targeted anyone who rebelled against the Crown or the East India Company and legally enabled their execution, banishment for life, or imprisonment with hard labor.

It permitted local civilian officials to declare a “state of rebellion” in their districts and conduct trials without law officers or rights of appeal. Other acts followed, including the Heinous Offences Act and a Military and State Offences Act, which further circumscribed rights of the accused.

There was also legislation for press censorship ...

“thus making reliance upon martial law in a strict sense unnecessary, though what was involved was a form of statutory martial law.”[67]

Eight years after the outbreak of the Indian rebellion,

Morant Bay, J...

Prior to the boy’s October 7, 1865, trial, events had been tense in Jamaica. Emancipation nearly thirty years earlier was supposed to unburden enslaved people from their past and render them free laborers who would model their lives on Britain’s middle class. This was the expectation, at least, of radical evangelicals and abolitionists like William Wilberforce.

Many Blacks refused to embrace British social virtues or humbly bow to the island’s white population, preferring, as the historian Catherine Hall emphasizes, “their own culture, shaped by slavery, the middle passage, and the plantation…[that molded] their own syncretic forms of religion, their own rituals, their own practices, their own African-Jamaican way of life.”[70]

Nineteenth-century Jamaica Beneath it all was a tension that ran through much of the British Empire. Liberal imperialism’s aspirations for accretive liberties and equalities could not be severed from a colonial capitalism built on racialized economic inequality, regardless of whether labor was free or

unfree. In the empire, these issues were deeply intertwined, impossible to reconcile, and the source of repeated protests, strikes, riots, and full-scale rebellions.

Disputes between the island’s Black and white populations over arbitrary justice, like the rulings Bowen and Walton handed down, as well as draconian labor regimes and property laws ignited a violent protest outside the Morant Bay courthouse on that October afternoon in 1865, leaving several people dead.

Forty-two kilometers away in Kingston, news quickly reached Governor Edward John Eyre, sparking his fears that Blacks were conspiring to overthrow the government and expel all whites from the island.

Eyre convened his council of war and declared martial law for all of Surrey County except Kingston. Unlike those in India, protesters in the Morant Bay rebellion were few in number, with little armed force. Suppression nevertheless ensued.

439 Blacks died, many summarily executed; one thousand dwellings were burned; and no fewer than six hundred Blacks were flogged, with suffering particularly cruel in Bath.

The same year as the Morant Bay rebellion, John Stuart Mill was elected as a Liberal MP, putting his political theories on liberty and good governance to the empirical test.

Far from the empire’s front lines, Mill sat quill in hand, to write Considerations on Representative Government.

“To determine the form of government most suited to any particular people, we must be able, among the defects and shortcomings which belong to that people, to distinguish those that are the immediate impediment to progress,” he concluded. “A people of savages should be taught obedience…for carrying [them] through the next stage of progress.”[79] This, for Mill, was part of “their object improvement, or Progress.”[80]

In the aftermath of events in Jamaica, he was at pains to distinguish his “despotism [as] a legitimate mode of government” in empire from Eyre’s “crimes of violence & cruelty,” which had violated “law & justice as the foundation of order & civilisation…[and] lower[ed] the character of England in the eyes of all foreign lovers of liberty.”[81]

When On Liberty’s theoretical “extreme exigency” played out with barbaric consequences first in India and then in Jamaica, Mill was incredulous, demanding that the law parse legitimate violence from the illegitimate “barbarous” floggings and “burnings…wanton and cruel” contained in “the dry facts of the commissioners’ summary.” Without such distinctions, he told his fellow MPs, Britain’s empire was no different from

the Oriental despotism it was seeking to reform: