Centre for Historical Studies
School of Social Sciences
Organising a lecture on
Negotiating Discipline
Order and Honour in the Colonial Armies of India c.1820-1857
Douglas Peers
University of Waterloo
Room No. 326, Committee Room, CHS, SSS-III
11 April 2018, 3pm
Abstract: According to a leading contemporary military writer, military law was not intended to “establish a rational, religious, moral state of society”. Instead, “the object of military law is simply to produce prompt and entire obedience.” This emphasis manifested itself in many ways – the preoccupation with the performative and the spectacular, the stress placed on participatory adjudication and punishment, and the willingness to sacrifice justice for promptness. Yet a purely instrumentalist view of military law fails to acknowledge the cultural and ideological calculations which informed military law, and which were manifested in hierarchies of honour. Nor does it take into account what might best be termed a calculus of orderliness grounded in contemporary constructions of class, race, and gender. Order and honour and their interplay were constantly being negotiated. These negotiations can be retrieved through close scrutiny of how charges were framed, and the subsequent approval or disapproval of them by the commander-in-chief. In this paper I will present some preliminary impressions from a study of courts martials of European officers and soldiers (EIC as well as Royal Army), Indian officers and sepoys, and camp followers which were conducted between 1820 and 1860 in the Bengal, Madras and Bombay presidencies.
About the Speaker: Douglas Peers is currently Dean of Arts and Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early-Nineteenth Century India (1995), India Under Colonial Rule, 1700-1885 (2006), and co-edited with Nandini Gooptu, India and the British Empire (2012), a companion volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire series. He has published more than twenty articles and chapters on the intellectual, political, medical and cultural dimensions of nineteenth-century India in such journals as
the Social History of Medicine, Modern Asian Studies, The Historical Journal, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, International History Review, Radical History Review and Journal of World History. He is currently working on a study of order and discipline in the Bengal, Bombay and Madras armies, ca 1800-1860 as well as a survey of how war helped make and reshape the colonial state in India.
