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By Root 967 0

whooped it up as they plunged the regulation twelve-inch spike bayonet—renamed the Cawnpore Dinner because it went “straight to the stomach”—into Indian captives. It was at Peshawar that suspected rebels were tied to cannons and blown to pieces; back in London, cartoons depicted severed Indian limbs flying amid clouds of smoke. At Delhi, the British “hanged all the villagers who had treated [the] fugitives badly until every tree was covered with scoundrels hanging from every branch.” At Cawnpore, Muslims were forced to eat pork and Hindus beef before they were executed in front of jeering soldiers. Not only mutineers but young boys, old men, and faithful domestic servants were shot in cold blood. “I felt as if my heart was stone and my brain fire,” a British lieutenant later recalled of a day when he had killed twelve and was desperate to kill more.30

The Mutiny provoked paroxysms of recrimination and self-questioning in England. The British, as had become unpleasantly clear, were not exactly universally adored by the millions of dark-skinned heathens living under British rule. So what exactly was Britain doing in places like India—or Jamaica, where in 1865 there was an almost equally vicious uprising of ungrateful freed black slaves?

Fierce debates ensued, but by the 1870s one thing was certain. Far from retreating, the English would embrace the idea of imperial Britain. The East India Company was abolished, and India was placed under direct crown rule. In 1876, Queen Victoria, amid great pomp and fanfare, was declared empress of India. In a famous speech, Disraeli challenged his countrymen to choose between “a comfortable England” and “a great country—an Imperial country” commanding “the respect of the world.” The English chose the latter. More than ever, the empire became a defining source of national pride for Britons, working class and aristocracy alike.

But what kind of empire? Britain's two primary political parties had different answers, both riddled with inconsistency. The Conservatives, or Tories, glorified hierarchy. They romanticized the Roman and Mughal empires and allied themselves with India's native princes and feudal landowners (zamindaars). At the same time, they often explicitly avowed white racial superiority. For many late-nineteenth-century British Conservatives, immutable racial differences—which became the subject of voluminous pseu-doscientific investigation—explained not only the inherent right of the British to rule over their darker Indian subjects but also the internal divisions within Indian society. Thus, H. H. Risley, ethnologist and India's census commissioner, developed a “nasal index,” which simultaneously vindicated white supremacy and India's caste system. If, he wrote, “we take a series of castes…and arrange them in order of the average nasal index, so that the caste with the finest nose shall be at the top, and that with the coarsest at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social precedence.”

On the other side were the Liberals, who at least in their rhetoric were more reluctant imperialists. Unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals paid lip service to and in some cases genuinely sought to implement the principle of universal human equality. For them, British imperial rule was justified not because the Indians were racially inferior but because, for reasons of history and culture (and perhaps even climate), the Indians were backward, uncivilized, and unready for self-government. Like children, they were in need of tutelage. As the famous philosopher and India hand John Stuart Mill put it, self-government was not “suited” to all of Britain's subject peoples, some of whom ranked “in point of culture and development…very little above the highest of beasts.” The good news was that progress was possible for all races, and with help—primarily through education and law—Indians could one day (in the far distant future) be just like Englishmen.

In the aftermath of the Mutiny there was at least one point on which Liberals