Colonial Violence Deana Heath The following primary sources discussed in this chapter are available to view within the 'Colonial Violence' collection on Biblioboard: [A] “Torture in Madras”, Hansard, House of Lords, 14 April 1856, vol. 141, cc. 964-99. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1856/apr/14/torture- in-madras [B] Chevers, Norman. A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for Bengal and the North-Western Provinces (Calcutta: F. Carbery, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1856). https://archive.org/details/manualofmedicalj00chev [C] Lewin, Malcolm. Is the Practice of Torture in Madras with the Sanction of the Authorities of leadenhall Street? (London: Thomas Brettell, 1856). https://books.google.co.uk/books? id=BxxYAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=madras+torture+commission&hl=en&s a=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=madras%20torture %20commission&f=false [D] Lewin, Malcolm. Torture in Madras, 2nd ed. (London: James Ridgway, 1857).https://books.google.co.uk/books? id=uiFcAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA8&dq=madras+torture+commission&hl=en&s a=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=madras%20torture %20commission&f=false [E] Tobias Smollet, Madras: Its Civil Administration: Rough Notes from Personal Observation, Written in 1855 & 1856 (London: Richardson Brothers, 1858). https://archive.org/stream/madrasitscivilad00smolrich/madrasitscivilad 00smolrich_djvu.txt [F] Report of the Indian police commission, 1902-03 (Simla: Printed at the Government Central Printing Office, 1903). http://police.pondicherry.gov.in/Police%20Commission%20reports/THE %20INDIAN%20POLICE%20COMMISSION%201902-03.pdf [G] “The Torture Commission”, Allen’s Indian Mail, July 17, 1855, p. 384, and “Efforts by the Madras and Punjab Governments to Extinguish the System of Torture”, Allen’s Indian Mail, Oct. 2, 1855, pp. 543-44. https://books.google.co.uk/books? id=p7cOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA384&dq=madras+torture+commission&hl=e n&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=madras%20torture %20commission&f=false [H] Marx, Karl. “Investigations of Tortures in India”, New York Daily Tribune, September 17, 1857 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1857-09-17/ed-1/seq- 4/ [I] “Whipping of a Fugitive Slave, French West Indies, 1840s” (Marcel Verdier, 1849). http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/detailsKeyword.php? keyword=whipping&recordCount=19&theRecord=3 [J] “Singe”, L’Assiette au Beurre, 20 December, 1902. [K] “Punishment Aboard a Slave Ship, 1792” (Isaac Cruickshank, 1792). http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/detailsKeyword.php? keyword=Cruikshank&recordCount=1&theRecord=0 [L] “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave” (William Blake, 1793) http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_ob ject_details.aspx?objectId=1648831&partId=1 Introduction 2  Empires are made and maintained through violence. In the case of the modern European empires, such violence ranged from acts of conquest to the appropriation of land and resources and the decimation of indigenous social, cultural, economic and political systems. Yet, bizarrely, relatively little attention has been paid to violence and its effects, on both the colonized and the colonizers. Such amnesia is even more marked when it comes to popular memory, at least among colonizing societies (those that were colonized obviously have a rather different take on empire) – in a Yougov poll conducted in Britain in January, 2016, 43% of respondents maintained that empire was a ‘good thing’, and in a similar poll conducted two years previously 49% of respondents maintained that the peoples colonized by Britain are now better off than they would have been had they not been colonized (https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/01/18/rhodes- must-not-fall/). Such respondents were clearly not aware that, when Britain began trading in India in the early seventeenth century India was responsible for a quarter of the world’s manufacturing (in contrast to the 2% that Britain contributed to the global GDP) and that per capita income, food consumption and life expectancy were considerably higher than in British India – or, for that matter, in Britain (Davis 2001). India was not alone in such experiences. By the end of the First World War – a war in which millions of colonized peoples had participated, many in the hope of securing independence, or at least ‘concessions’, from their colonizers (although this, too, has been erased from popular memory in the West) – the British empire reached its apogee, spanning a quarter of the earth’s land mass and encompassing almost half a billion people. Such a feat could not have been possible without the imposition of myriad, endemic and ongoing forms of violence. There are a number of reasons that the violence of empire has been largely expunged both from scholarship on empire and from historical memory, at least in the West. To begin with, imperial and colonial regimes were tremendously skilful in generating, to borrow from Gauri Viswanathan (1989), “masks of conquest” to hide the violent and extractive nature of colonial rule. While Viswanathan revealed the way in which 3 English education, in particular English literature, was used in India as a tool of cultural colonialism (in order to enshrine in the colonized a belief in the purported superiority of the English language, and with it British ideas, values and beliefs), in the British case law was arguably a more powerful colonizing tool. Rather than decimating existing legal and political systems, the British claimed, instead, that they were bringing the ‘rule of law’ (namely their law) to peoples who were governed despotically – although the irony that the British were themselves despots, since they governed authoritarianly, was not lost on proponents of this belief (Singha 1998). Law, like the English language and literature, thus operated as what Michel Foucault has termed “discourses”, which are ways of constructing knowledge, and with it social practices and subjectivities (Foucault, 1966 and 1969). They serve, in other words, to construct understandings of truth, or reality. Discourses are therefore central to the ways in which power relations operate. The tremendous and enduring power of the dominant discourses of colonialism – about the purported racial, civilizational and cultural superiority of the West (not to mention the supposedly greater religious, bodily and, in light of the hyper-masculinity that spurred empire, masculinity norms) over the “inferior”, “degenerate”, “irrational”, “unlawful” and “effeminate” “natives” – is evident not only in the YouGov poll but in much of the scholarship on empire. The rise of postcolonial studies in the 1980s, with its attention to the power of colonial discourse, undoubtedly challenged many of the assumptions that sustained empire and the ways in which histories of empire were written. But while postcolonial scholarship mined imperial and colonial texts (books, newspapers, government documents, and so on) to interrogate the epistemological violence of colonialism – of the way, in other words, that it transformed understandings about peoples and cultures (including the cultures of the colonizers) – such a focus on the effects of colonialism on the minds of the colonizers and the colonized served to continue to elide the nature and effects of the violence done to their bodies. This is not to say that the violence of empire has been completely ignored. But the historiography on imperial and colonial 4 violence falls prey to the problems inherent in the wider historiography of violence, in which violence is treated either as heroic grand narrative or as aberrant and deviant, and in which the focus is on everything that happens around violence rather than on the nature of the violence itself, its causes, and its effects. Postcolonial scholarship has, moreover, done little to transform the historical memory of empire in colonizing countries such as France, Britain or the Netherlands – or in their settler off-shoots such as the United States and Australia. Part of the reason for this is the ongoing whitewashing of empire in school curricula. England’s national history curriculum for five to 14-year-olds, for example, which was launched in 2013, while it does cover the slave trade, manages to completely avoid addressing any other aspects of imperial or colonial violence. (https://theconversation.com/school- curriculum-continues-to-whitewash-britains-imperial-past-53577). So while most British students, like their counterparts elsewhere, leave school knowing a considerable amount about the Holocaust, in which 12 million people died, they remain blissfully ignorant about colonial genocides, or the estimated 30-60 million people who starved to death in famines largely induced by colonial laissez-faire economic policies (Davis 2001). This chapter aims, firstly, to change the way we generally talk about empire. As William Dalrymple observes in the case of the conquest of India, we can hardly view such a process as benign if we view India as being conquered not by Britain but by the actual agent of conquest, the most powerful “multinational corporation” the world has ever seen – a trading company by the name of the East India Company – which was not only “dangerously unregulated” but that had its own “private army” (which, at a strength of 260,000 men by 1803, made it one of the most powerful armies in the world), and which it used to conquer, subjugate and plunder vast tracts of Asia in “the supreme act of corporate violence in world history” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india- company-original-corporate-raiders). A second goal of this chapter is to interrogate a wide range of sources that demonstrate the nature of colonial 5 violence, from official and semi-official documents such as parliamentary debates, reports, manuals and pamphlets to unofficial sources such as newspaper accounts, paintings, cartoons and other images. For in spite of the lacunae of scholarship on colonial violence, there is a wealth of evidence to enable us to document and analyse it. Overview To begin thinking about colonial violence we need to reconceptualise our understanding of violence. Violence is generally regarded as an act – as something that is, in other words, carried out by clearly identifiable agents (Riches 1986). When it comes to writing the history of violence, therefore, scholars tend to concentrate on events such as wars, battles, uprisings and genocides, as well as forms of interpersonal violence such as torture, rape or murder. Such “subjective” forms of violence, as Slavoj Žižek terms them, are, however, only the most visible forms; we are aware of them because they disrupt the normal order of everyday life (Žižek 2008). But to truly understand the nature of violence and its effects we need to pay attention to forms of violence that are largely invisible and that lack clear and identifiable agents, such as structural, social or symbolic violence (which may be generated, for example, by administrative systems or economic policies) – what Žižek terms “objective” forms of violence. Such violence can manifest itself in many ways, from starvation to obesity, or unemployment to what Arthur Kleinman refers to as “the violence of oversubscribed time” (Kleinman 2000). Because objective forms of violence often underpin subjective ones, what we regard as violence may simply be a symptom of deeper, hidden layers of violence. Such violence remains hidden, however, because it is central to the construction of what we regard as normality. It is because such forms of violence remain largely hidden, moreover, that scholars of empire have devoted more attention to the violence of those who resist empire (which is often, furthermore, de- legitimated by the use of words such as “terrorism” and “insurgency” to describe such violence) than to the myriad violent and quotidian processes 6 through which societies are transformed – or as the colonizers put it, “modernised” – by empire (Iadicola 2009; Kolsky 2010). There are two main reasons that European colonialism was inherently violent. The first relates to the nature of colonial law. Although European colonial regimes strove to represent themselves as bringing law to lawless places, the act of colonisation entails a process that Walter Benjamin refers to as “lawmaking violence” (Benjamin 1978). Such violence is inherent to the establishment of all legal regimes, and in colonial contexts establishing new regimes of law was crucial to the establishment of the sovereignty of colonial states, not to mention their claims to legitimacy. But as colonial states were, in essence, states of exception, since they operated outside the accepted rule of law in imperial metropoles, such claims to legitimacy were always fraught (Hussain 2003; see also Agamben 2005). But the violence of colonial legal regimes did not end with the imposition of new legal norms because of the nature of what Benjamin terms “law- preserving violence” in colonial contexts. Violence, of course, underpins the maintenance of all legal regimes, and common to all such regimes is that the ultimate aim of monopolizing violence is “that of preserving the law itself” (281). But what made law-preserving violence so brutal in European colonies was that colonial states were predicated on the notion of racial difference – what Partha Chatterjee has termed “the rule of colonial difference” (Chatterjee 1993). It was such notions of difference that ensured that, even if the colonized undertook processes of self-colonisation (a process that is itself inherently violent) that made them conform to the ostensible goal of the ‘civilizing mission’, namely to render the colonized, in the words of the architect of India’s colonial legal system, Thomas Macaulay, “English [or French, Dutch, etc., as the case may be] in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaula y/txt_minute_education_1835.html), they could never be accepted as equals, or as ‘civilised’ – if only because to do so would be to destroy the justification for colonialism (for the process of self-colonisation and how it operates see Fanon, 1963). They would continue to be, in the words of 7 Homi Bhabha, “always the same, but not quite” as the colonizers (Bhabha 1989, 235). Colonial legal systems – not to mention, of course, social, cultural, political and economic norms – were as a result framed upon, and operated through, such notions of difference. The ultimate aim of colonial law was therefore to preserve the power of the colonizers, which of course came at the expense of the colonized. The second reason European colonialism was inherently violent is that the colonized were viewed as being innately violent, and hence as only being governable through violence. The fact that the colonized were supposedly intrinsically violent was one of the ultimate markers of difference between colonizers and colonized, and perhaps the most significant; violence, in other words, was seen as being central to the natures of the colonized. That the colonized were viewed as inherently violent was, of course, more a result of the fears and insecurities of the colonizers than the nature of colonial reality (Cleall 2012) – about their fragile systems of rule, their tenuous claims to cultural and racial superiority, their insecurities about gender roles and norms (particularly about the masculinity of European men) and the precarious dividing line between rulers and ruled. Colonial policies and practices ranging from the exaction of high revenue demands to the forced settlement of ‘tribal’ populations, a variety of forms of forced labour, and even torture were, ironically, regarded as being central to “civilizing” the colonized (Asad 1997) – as well, as Marnia Lazreg argues, to “resocializing” them to make them see the justness and legitimacy of colonial rule (Lazreg 2008, 120). Violence was central, therefore, to disciplining colonized peoples, as well as to producing knowledge about them for the benefit of colonial regimes (so that they could, in other words, be more effectively governed). The problem for the colonizers, however, was that the violence of colonial regimes threatened to undermine the very basis of their claims to superiority by undermining the purported difference between the colonizers and colonized (Rao and Pierce 2006). But expanding our notion of the nature of colonial violence to include ‘objective’ forms also entails that we look beyond the policies and actions of 8 the colonizers to consider interpersonal violence among the colonized, since the social dislocation and economic disorder generated by colonialism led to an upsurge of violent crime in colonial contexts. As David Arnold has demonstrated, violence such as gang robbery (in India known as dacoity) was greater in the initial decades after conquest and at times of dearth (Arnold 1979). But as colonialism operates as a form of unmaking or unworlding that fractures the world of the colonized, then we also need to look at other forms of interpersonal violence among the colonized in order to understand the effects of colonialism (Heath 2016; for an exploration of the ways in which extreme pain unmakes those who suffer it see Scarry 1985). For rather than targeting the source of such unworlding, namely the colonizers, as the Martiniquan psychiatrist and anti-colonial intellectual Frantz Fanon contended the colonized instead turned their frustrations and aggressions “against their own people” (Fanon 1967). As I have argued in the case of sexual violence against men in colonial India, such violence was generally carried out by men who either felt disempowered by colonialism, and for whom sexual violence was a means of regaining a sense of control and restoring a sense of lost masculinity, or who sought to take advantage of the social and economic turmoil generated by colonialism (Heath 2016). The Reuters correspondent for Sierra Leone, Simon Akam, has aptly termed such violence, the remnants of which still endure in post-colonial contexts, “The domestic wreckage of empire. . .” (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/world/88797/british-empire- queen-elizabeth-india-ireland-africa-imperial). For Fanon the origins of interpersonal violence among the colonized were clear. He located them in the trauma unleashed by colonial violence. Such violence, Fanon contended, was as much discursive and epistemological as it was physical, generated by the colonizers’ belief in the superiority of their own cultures and languages and a violating gaze that denied the humanity of the colonized and, with it, their subjectivity (Fanon 1967) – a process of fragmentation that the African-American intellectual and civil rights activist W. E. B. Dubois described as “double consciousness” (Dubois 1903). Fanon was aware, and subsequent scholars 9 have demonstrated, that such trauma does not need to be experienced directly to have a damaging effect; it can, instead, be transmitted intergenerationally (Hirsch 1999). In the case of slavery, for example, scholars such as Gilda Graff, Janice Gump and Joy Degruy Leary have argued that the trauma experienced by slaves in the United States continues to haunt their descendants (Graff 2014; Gump 2010; Leary 2005). Although there is currently little scholarship on colonial trauma and its legacies, scholars have begun to delineate the sorts of issues to consider, and the challenges in doing so (Rothberg 2008; Visser 2011; and Ward 2013). I will now turn to consider the sorts of source materials that can be valuable for analysing and understanding colonial violence. I will look at official sources – i.e. those generated by state bureaucracies, legal systems or officials – as well as unofficial sources and images. Such sources offer varying perspectives on the nature and causes of colonial violence, as well as its effects. Such sources, perhaps unsurprisingly, focus on the infliction of violence on the colonized, and its effects. Although some scholars have observed that colonialism had as profound of an impact on the colonizers as on the colonized (Nandy 1983), and Frantz Fanon examined the trauma experienced by European perpetrators of colonial violence (Fanon 1963), there has been little analysis of the impact of colonial violence on the colonizers or in shaping European society and culture, or of relevant sources. I will therefore restrict my focus to the colonized while drawing attention, where possible, to hints of the impact of colonial violence on the colonized. I will focus, in particular, on British colonialism, especially in regard to India, although I will also consider other contexts. Selecting and Interpreting Sources I will start by analysing official sources, which can be the best place to begin to explore the history of colonial violence. One of the many ironies about colonial violence is that although all European colonial regimes sought to deny the role of violence in constructing and maintaining their systems of rule, their official records are in fact awash with evidence to the 10 contrary. This is in part because such records were only intended for official eyes, and in part because blame for colonial violence was invariably displaced onto its victims (Sharpe 1993). We need to read such sources, however, against the grain – or, as Ann Stoler argues, “along the grain” in order to understand the “consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake” in colonial official archives (Stoler 2002, 101). This is because, as noted above, they are part of the official discourse of colonialism, and as such the statistics, “facts” and “truths” that they claim to embody are instead a projection of how the colonizers envisioned and sought to legitimate their rule. They were, in other words, constructed by particular understandings of the world as well as by particular configurations of power. We therefore need to read them extremely critically to reassess their world view as well as their claims to truth and authenticity (Richards 1990; Dirks 2001; and Burton 2003). We also need to be cautious in what we hope to extract from such sources. We may feel tempted, for example, to use them to recover the subjectivities of the colonized – to use them, in other words, to understand their sense of self and how this was shaped by colonial violence. Post-colonial scholars have, however, questioned the possibility of recovering the voices of the colonized from official records (Spivak 1988; Arondekar 2009). Some have sought to avoid such difficulties altogether by turning to other possible sources, such as oral history (Amin 1995). I will analyse unofficial sources in more detail below. Sources with an Official Origin Former colonies are generally (but not always) the best places to locate official documents that relate to colonial violence, not least because European colonial bureaucracies produced reams of documents (since this was central to the modernizing process that Michel Foucault (1991) has termed “governmentality”) that were then inherited by post-colonial states. But post-colonial contexts can also be better places to locate such documents because of the nature of the material that was sent back to imperial metropoles. Since imperial metropoles were primarily interested 11 in matters that affected the stability of colonial rule, they only involved themselves in matters deemed of importance to such stability. Post-colonial archives can therefore reveal important information about, for example, the banal, everyday nature of colonial violence that metropolitan archives cannot. In the case of British colonialism, a surprising amount can be gleaned, however, from British archives. Many records from the East India Company and later what was known as the ‘Raj’ (the period of British rule in India between 1858-1947), for example, are available in the India Office Records and Private Papers at the British Library (click here http://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do? dscnt=1&fromLogin=true&dstmp=1474295172806&vid=IAMS_VU2&from Login=true to search these collections). Accessing such material requires a trip to the British Library (be sure to check the British Library’s website on how to get a reader’s pass for the library). For other colonial contexts a good place to search is the National Archives, which houses records from the Colonial Office, and whose searchable database offers details not only of collections at the National Archives in Kew, but at over 2,500 other archives in the United Kingdom. Little of this material is, however, available on-line. A gold mine of material that is, however, available on- line, if your library subscribes to it, is the U.K. Parliamentary Papers Database (http://parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers). It contains material such as Parliamentary Debates, which periodically dealt with colonial matters, and official reports which, in the case of colonial violence, relate to subjects ranging from policing to matters such as torture and genocide. Government documents are not, however, the only place to look for official evidence of colonial violence. In addition to generating reams of paper for colonial regimes, colonial officials were often prolific commentators on colonial matters. They published books, articles, and occasionally polemics on subjects ranging from anthropology, history and geography to colonial legal and political systems. As such works were generally not published for government purposes or by official presses they cannot, technically, be labelled “official documents”. But since they were 12 often produced by individuals who were acting in their official capacity they reveal a great deal about the “official mind” of colonialism. I offer examples of such sources below. Non-official Sources There is, as noted above, a somewhat blurry boundary between official and non-official sources when it comes to the writings of colonial officials. We can, perhaps, term such materials “semi-official” sources. But there are reams of other non-official sources that do not have such a cosy relationship with colonial regimes, although they may replicate the views of colonial and metropolitan officials. Sources such as diaries, memoirs, travel literature and various forms of fiction (such as novels and short stories) produced by Europeans during or after a colonial career, often contributed to fashioning of colonial discourse. So too did newspapers, in both colonial contexts and their metropoles. Newspapers produced by colonized peoples, not surprisingly, tended to have a different take on matters such as colonial violence than those produced by the colonizers – although not always (most Indian newspapers, for example, were extremely hostile to the wave of anti-colonial violence – referred to by detractors as “anarchism” or “terrorism” – that began to rock parts of India in the early twentieth century). Since such newspapers tended to be produced by those groups of elites who had benefitted from, or had the most to gain, from colonialism, and were frightened of losing their livelihoods and status in the face of a mass anti-colonial uprising (Fanon 1963) – and who were, moreover, fearful of falling foul of harsh colonial sedition laws – they were often tentative in their critiques of colonial violence. When they did critique it, they focused largely on subjective over objective forms (such as, for example, police oppression). However, newspapers published by expatriate colonized peoples living in Europe or the United States, such as the Hindustan Ghadar (which began publishing in 1913 and remained in print for just a few years thereafter), tended to be much more vocal in their critique of colonial rule, as was the case with 13 pamphlets and polemics published by expatriates or migrants. Colonized individuals also, like the colonizers, produced reams of books, articles and other material that offer insights into the nature of colonial violence and its effects. There are a number of places to locate such materials. For material housed in Britain the British Library’s catalogue is a good place to begin (http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do? dscnt=1&dstmp=1474368546884&vid=BLVU1&fromLogin=true). In addition to books, newspapers and other materials published in Britain, the library also holds an impressive collection of material published in former British colonies, including newspapers. While accessing such material generally requires a visit to the British Library, some of it may be available through inter-library loan. For digitized materials sites such as (https://archive.org) and google books (https://books.google.co.uk/) provide full text editions of a surprising number of colonial books and periodicals. The British Library offers a free on-line searchable database of British newspapers that can, again, turn up a surprising amount of material on colonial matters (http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/). There are now a wonderful array of web sites and databases that provide full text access to newspapers, periodicals and other materials published in colonial contexts, such as the collection of African, Caribbean and South Asian newspapers that have been digitized by the Center for Research Libraries (https://www.crl.edu/collaborations/global-resources- partnerships/news/world-newspaper-archive). Unfortunately, such material can only be accessed if your library subscribes to it, although many of these databases are available free to use in the reading rooms at the British Library (for a list of the databases available see http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/eresblrr/eres.html). Artefacts and images 14  Artefacts of empire literally litter the British landscape, not to mention a myriad cultural and architectural traces. Visit virtually any churchyard, in fact, and you’ll find the graves of individuals who had sought their fortunes in colonial climes, while the insides of churches are bedecked with plaques commemorating the British men who died in imperial and colonial campaigns of conquest and suppression. Statues of imperial ‘heroes’ bedeck our public places and institutions (a matter brought to our attention by the recent – and unfortunately unsuccessful – student campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford University), our museums and stately homes are full of looted and purloined artefacts (see https://theconversation.com/museums-have-long- overlooked-the-violence-of-empire-51269), and the wealth derived from imperial and colonial violence and exploitation fuelled the development of some of our most spectacular cityscapes in cities such as London and Liverpool (for an important analysis of imperial ‘heroes’ and the construction of British masculinities see Dawson 1994). Scholars such as Edward Said (1993) have explored the ways in which British culture – not to mention the English language and literature, and Britain’s political, legal and education systems – has been constructed through, and continues to be saturated with, imperialism and colonialism (see also Pennycook, 1998; Baucom 1999; Appadurai 1996; MacKenzie 1986; Dirks 2006; and Mangan 1988). We don’t need to go far, therefore, to find remnants of the structural, symbolic and discursive violence of colonialism, although we rarely see them as such. If you pay attention, however, you’ll begin to start seeing them everywhere. A final group of sources that can prove fruitful for the study of colonial violence are images ranging from paintings, drawings and cartoons to photographs and films. Artistic representations of Britain’s imperial and colonial violence are, ironically, fairly ubiquitous – generally because such moments were depicted in terms of imperial glory (for a helpful overview of art and empire see http://www.britishempire.co.uk/art/artandempire.htm; see also Fowkes 1999). So, too, are cartoons; try searching the database of the British 15 Cartoon Archive for commentary on aspects of colonial violence (https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/). For photographs, the British Library’s Online Gallery offers a free, searchable database of thousands of photographs, including from colonies such as India (http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/index.html). Although such images generally depict colonialism as benign, they can be examined to explore how violence is erased or aestheticized in colonial photography (Chowdhury 2012; see also Ryan 1998; and Pinney 1997). There are many images, however, that do not strive to erase violence, such as the wealth of imagery produced to support the eradication of slavery, some of which I analyse below. While the intent of the producers of such images may have been noble, they often functioned as what Marior Klarer has termed “humanitarian pornography” through eroticizing the infliction of pain on non-white bodies (Klarer 2005; see also Halttunen 1995; and Sigel 2002 for the relationship between empire and the emergence of modern pornography). Such images therefore reveal the ways in which violence can be turned into spectacle, which serves to reinforce particular power dynamics (Fuoss 1999; Mizoeff 2006; Twomey 2012). Finally, films ranging from newsreels and educational films to movies can be a valuable source for studying colonial violence, although as with all of the above sources it’s vital to deconstruct the ways in which they serve to depict both colonized and colonizers and the nature of colonial rule (Chowdhry 2000; and Jaikumar 2006). An amazing archive of over 6,000 films about colonialism (150 of which can be viewed free on-line) is available at http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/. Practical Advice I will conclude this chapter by offering some practical advice on how to use and interpret sources relating to colonial violence, including on analysing language and imagery. The sources concentrate primarily on torture in colonial India, which is a form of subjective violence that is 16 underpinned by a variety of objective forms (Heath forthcoming). But I will also examine a selection of anti-slavery images, through which we can also read various forms of subjective and objective violence. Official and Semi-Official Sources In the mid-1850s the East India Company was rocked by a scandal about the use of torture in the collection of revenue in the province of Madras, in southern India. Accusations made by a member of Parliament about torture led to the establishment of a commission to investigate the subject, the outcome of which was a report that white-washed the role of the colonial regime in the systematization of torture as a means of collecting excessive revenue demands from impoverished peasants (Report 1855). A debate in the House of Lords in the aftermath of the publication of the report (http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1856/apr/14/torture-in- madras) offers interesting insights into British attitudes towards India and Indians, as well as about Britain’s right to “rule” (i.e. colonise) India, and the extent and nature of the torture inflicted on Indian peasants and who was to blame for it. While few of the participants in the debate denied the existence of torture, they largely displaced blame for it on both Indian “character” and on the previous rulers of India, the Mughals. The first colonial medical jurisprudence manual, published by Dr. William Chevers (Secretary to the Medical Board) a year after the torture commission’s report (https://archive.org/details/manualofmedicalj00chev), reveals how torture was constructed as being inherent to Indians’ “degraded” character, wrought by centuries of “despotic” rule. But although some members of the debate admitted that the Company was ultimately responsible for such systematized brutality, none of them suggested that the root of the problem was the occupation of India 17 by a militarized trading company backed up by the British government, nor of its authoritarian system of government. Indeed, although some commentators on the report, such as Malcolm Lewin, a former Madras judge (https://books.google.co.uk/books? id=BxxYAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=madras+torture+commission&hl=en&s a=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=madras%20torture %20commission&f=false), went so far as to accuse the Company not only of repeatedly ignoring evidence of the pervasive use of torture in the collection of the revenue in Madras (including his own report from 1840 https://books.google.co.uk/books? id=uiFcAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA8&dq=madras+torture+commission&hl=en&sa=X&redir_ esc=y#v=onepage&q=madras%20torture%20commission&f=false), but of governing through terror, their ultimate concern, in Lewin’s words, was how this reflected on the “character of the British nation”. As Nicholas Dirks has revealed, scandal was central to the construction and maintenance of empire (Dirks 2006). He argues that the intent behind inquiries such as that of the Madras torture commission was ultimately not to eradicate a brutal and corrupt system of government, but to purge colonial rule of its worst excesses in order to legitimize it, bring it more firmly under parliamentary control, protect the British “character” – and, in turn, make the colony ripe for more effective exploitation. As Tobias Smollett, agent to the Government of Madras, urged (https://archive.org/stream/madrasitscivilad00smolrich/madrasitscivilad 00smolrich_djvu.txt), eradicating torture in Madras would provide greater opportunities for capital. But as torture ultimately benefitted the colonial regime – it was a cheap and relatively effective method of extracting revenue, and served to legitimate colonial rule by displacing blame for it onto Indian “barbarism” – it continued to persist, and to provoke further scandals, as the report of the Indian Police Commission, set up in 1902, reveals (http://police.pondicherry.gov.in/Police%20Commission 18 %20reports/THE%20INDIAN%20POLICE%20COMMISSION%201902- 03.pdf). Unofficial Sources That the systematized use of torture to oppress the Indian peasantry was allowed to persist, not just in Madras but in other provinces, was doubtless helped by the attitudes of both the Anglo-Indian (i.e. British Indian) and British press. As two articles reprinted from the Anglo-Indian newspaper The Friend of India in the British publication Allen’s Indian Mail reveal (https://books.google.co.uk/books? id=p7cOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA384&dq=madras+torture+commission&hl=e n&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=madras%20torture %20commission&f=false pp. 384. 544-55), the general concern was to absolve the Madras Government from being implicated in the perpetuation of such a system – a task the papers felt could sufficiently be accomplished by simply declaring the practice of torture to be both endemic in Indian society and “repugnant to the national character of England”. British officials were instead depicted as valiant heroes, doing their duty under impossible circumstances, which had in fact been worsened by the publication of the Report, since Indian peasants were now using it to threaten revenue officials and were refusing to pay taxes (the proposed solution for which was to call out the military). There were exceptions to such attitudes, such as among newspapers published outside of India. The New York Daily Tribune, for example, carried an article by Karl Marx (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1857-09-17/ed- 1/seq-4/), who challenged the self-perception of the British as “mild and spotless benefactors of the Indian people” and accused British colonial officials of being both cognizant of, and complicit in, the systematization of 19 torture in Madras, and the British government of trying to hide the truth. Marx was convinced, moreover, that if the British could enact such cruelties “in cold blood”, it was little surprise that Indians could enact torture “in the fury of revolt and conflict. . .” Images In turning to consider images as possible sources for analysing colonial violence I will shift my focus away from torture in Madras to consider the torture of slaves in European slavery in order to think about how European cultures have historically regarded the pain of non-white bodies (Sontag 2003). I wish, in particular, to suggest sources for analysing the way in which images that sought to expose colonial violence could intersect with, and even operate as, pornography – and, by objectifying the victims of colonial violence, could thus operate as a form of objective colonial violence. Take, for example, “Le Supplice de Fouet” (The Agony of the Whip) (http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php? categorynum=16&categoryName=Physical%20Punishment,%20Rebellion, %20Running%20Away&theRecord=26&recordCount=87), painted by Marcel Verdier in 1849. There are several notable aspects of this image, including: the nudity of the man being whipped (and the semi-nudity of another male, looking on, whose lower garment barely conceals his genitals) while the slave women in the picture are completely clothed; the eroticized form and pose of the slave being whipped, as well as of the man (presumably a slave overseer) doing the whipping; the fact that the act of violence is being carried out by a black man on the body of another black man at the behest of his European master; and that a European family, including a small child, watch the scene with fascination (albeit some reluctance on the part of the woman and child) and in the case of the man 20 with what may be an element of desire. The scene is evocative of both horror and desire, in this case not for the female but for the black male body – evidence, perhaps, both of the ways anti-slavery propaganda sought to appeal to women, who were its largest consumers (Forster 2011), and of the complex web of white male desire for and disavowal of non-white male bodies (Heath 2016). Such a scene was by no means unique; indeed, the image published in the French magazine L’Assiette au Buerre in 1902 is almost identical, although in this instance the white colonizer is looking nonchalantly away from the scene before him while his wife and daughter look on eagerly (albeit with pretensions, in the case of the woman, to modesty). Images of black women suffering at the hands of their torturers, such as this anti-slavery cartoon (1793) and drawing (1793), [http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_o bject_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx? assetId=784620001&objectId=1648831&partId=1 and http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/collection/large/Trade- 1.JPG ] generally depicted the victims as even more passive (in contrast, for 21 example, to the agency of the man being whipped in the L’Assiette au Buerre image) and fetishized (note the exposed breasts and torn or dishevelled clothing). As the cartoon reveals, such scenes, and with it the images that depicted them, were intended for a desiring, white male gaze. 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