Kim A Wagner
Biographic Data
| ID | 1263952 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kim A Wagner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kim A |
| FAMILY NAME | Wagner |
| SIGNATURE | WAGNER K A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 112 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Beyond redemption
Commentary as part of the book symposium on Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic’s, Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings (2022): In Perpetrator Disgust, Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic provides a fascinating exploration of the emotional anguish experienced by perpetrators of atrocity during the 20th century. One of her most poignant insights is that physical discomfort rarely, if ever, compelled perpetrators to stop or reconsider the morality of …
Confessions of a Thug
Originally published in 1839, a story in which an imprisoned Indian, while confessing to a white 'sahib', recounts his life as a member of the Thuggee, a religious cult that practises ritual mass murder and robbery.
Confessions of a Thug
Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern
Often falling short of its putative aims, subaltern resistance has throughout history played a significant role in shaping the political landscape of states and empires. This chapter examines some of the more recent developments, as well as criticisms, of the broader study of subaltern resistance and rebellion within a global context. The empirical case studies are drawn primarily from the European imperial expansion during the long nineteenth ce…
Expanding Bullets and Savage Warfare
The authors of ‘Studying Mars and Clio’ (History Workshop Journal 88, 2019), the preceding article, claim that my argument concerning the British use of expanding bullets during colonial campaigns against non-white enemies during the 1890s1 is unfounded and that ‘in fact, Britain adopted expanding ammunition for use against all adversaries’. This claim appears to be based exclusively on evidence from the Hague Conference in 1899, where British of…
Fear and Loathing in Amritsar
This essay revisits the events surrounding one of the most emblematic instances of colonial violence, namely the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, through the diary of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Melicent Wathen. Where most histories of the Amritsar Massacre emphasize British brutality and Indian suffering, Melicent’s experience was instead characterized by fear and the uncertainty of what became a headlong flight from Empire. Her diary thus offers an intimat…
Savage Warfare
Even as a growing body of literature has in recent years revealed the ubiquity of racialized violence within Western colonies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, another historical narrative remains insistent that the British Empire constituted a notable exception to the rule. This nostalgic narrative of a uniquely British ‘soft approach’ rests in part on the belief that colonial officers possessed a deep cultural understanding of the people and…
Calculated to Strike Terror
Coinciding with widespread unrest in Ireland and in Egypt, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 is usually examined in terms of the radically transformed political landscape of the British Empire following the First World War. The Amritsar Massacre is thus commonly seen to mark the beginning of the process that came to its conclusion with Indian independence in 1947. This article suggests that the nature of colonial violence of the twentieth century, ho…
Treading Upon Fires
Journal Article ‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India* Get access Kim A. Wagner Kim A. Wagner Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 218, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 159–197, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts026 Published: 18 November 2012
‘In Unrestrained Conversation’
With these lines, the British officer, Captain James Paton, introduced the interviews he conducted with captured Thugs at Lucknow in northern India in 1836, emphasizing the spontaneity of the exchange and authenticity of the responses. The British believed the Thugs to be a sect of prolific murderers who operated in secret along the highways of the subcontinent, guided by a deadly devotion to Hindu goddess-worship. Ostensibly, the purpose of Pato…
Introduction
In the long history of European overseas expansion, an immense and diverse collection of texts, images, drawings, and maps has been produced and accumulated, part of which survives today in archives and libraries around the world. As a legacy of colonization and empirebuilding, the 'knowledge' embodied in this diverse material has been identified with projects of imperialist or colonialist domination, and as such simply labelled as 'colonial'. Th…
Recruiting the ‘martial races’
British rule in India was entirely reliant on local troops, and the mobilization and recruitment of Indian communities gave rise to a multiplicity of discourses, traditions and identities reflecting the peculiar relationship between colonial power and indigenous military labour. Through the late nineteenth century, these discourses became increasingly racialized: only certain native communities were deemed to possess the ‘spirit’ necessary for mi…
The Marginal Mutiny
This essay considers the main developments within the historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857 over the past decade
Engaging Colonial Knowledge
Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and S
Confessions of a Skull
This article presents a micro-study of seven Indian skulls, labelled simply as ‘Thugs’, which are kept in the Medical School of the University of Edinburgh and were originally presented to the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1833. It seeks to unravel the wider story behind the collection and develop a biography of the seven skulls, from living persons to inanimate objects. The seven men earned their livelihood as bandit-retainers in early nine…
Thuggee
Based largely on new material, this book examines thuggee as a type of banditry, emerging in a specific socio-economic and geographic context. The British usually described the thugs as fanatic assass
From Sindouse to Sagar
It should be apparent from the preceding chapters that the account of thuggee usually found within the colonial tradition, and beyond, is only loosely based on the historical records. Sleeman did not discover thuggee in 1829, he did not single-handedly convince the Government to mount the thuggee campaign, nor did he alone unravel the murderous fraternity or even suggest the necessary measures to obtain that goal. The use of approvers and rewards…
The Thuggee Campaign
On 19 November 1830 Smith submitted a ‘Plan for the eventual destruction of the association of Thugs which have of late infested Central India’, which he and Sleeman had worked out. 1 The plan consisted of the following main points: An officer should be appointed Superintendent for the Suppression of Thugs whose sole task it was to seize, try and punish the thugs. He should be issued with a warrant valid in all of India under the British Governme…
Engaging the Colonial ‘Archives of Repression’
The first and most immediate obstacle that faces the historian of thuggee is the fact that the thugs did not leave us any written sources of their own. They did not have any religious texts, iconography or artefacts that related specifically to thuggee and which would allow us to examine their practices independently. With few exceptions, the material we have was produced by British officials with — at best — a limited knowledge of the language a…
The Itinerant Underworld
One of the characteristics of the colonial representation of thuggee of the 1830s is the endlessly diversified ramifications of thuggee, recorded as extensive lists of thug subgroupings thought to be operating in unison all over India. In 1838 Sleeman wrote that: 'We have always had reason to believe that a great part of the Byragis, Gosaens and other religious mendicants that infest all parts of India were assassins by profession ...'2 Such clai…
Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered
Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had…
The Deconstructed Stranglers
Maunsell, a lieutenant in the 23rd Native Infantry of the Bengal Army set out on horseback in October 1812 from Agra, in what were then called the North-western Provinces, on a visit of inspection to Etawah, seventy-five miles south-east, accompanied by two sepoy orderlies and a horse carrying his belongings and equipment. All three were armed, Maunsell with sword and holster pistols, the sepoys with the Brown Bess musket and bayonet
Calculated to Strike Terror
Coinciding with widespread unrest in Ireland and in Egypt, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 is usually examined in terms of the radically transformed political landscape of the British Empire following the First World War. The Amritsar Massacre is thus commonly seen to mark the beginning of the process that came to its conclusion with Indian independence in 1947. This article suggests that the nature of colonial violence of the twentieth century, ho…
Treading Upon Fires
Journal Article ‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India* Get access Kim A. Wagner Kim A. Wagner Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 218, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 159–197, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts026 Published: 18 November 2012
Savage Warfare
Even as a growing body of literature has in recent years revealed the ubiquity of racialized violence within Western colonies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, another historical narrative remains insistent that the British Empire constituted a notable exception to the rule. This nostalgic narrative of a uniquely British ‘soft approach’ rests in part on the belief that colonial officers possessed a deep cultural understanding of the people and…
Recruiting the ‘martial races’
British rule in India was entirely reliant on local troops, and the mobilization and recruitment of Indian communities gave rise to a multiplicity of discourses, traditions and identities reflecting the peculiar relationship between colonial power and indigenous military labour. Through the late nineteenth century, these discourses became increasingly racialized: only certain native communities were deemed to possess the ‘spirit’ necessary for mi…
Engaging Colonial Knowledge
Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and S
Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered
Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had…
The Deconstructed Stranglers
Maunsell, a lieutenant in the 23rd Native Infantry of the Bengal Army set out on horseback in October 1812 from Agra, in what were then called the North-western Provinces, on a visit of inspection to Etawah, seventy-five miles south-east, accompanied by two sepoy orderlies and a horse carrying his belongings and equipment. All three were armed, Maunsell with sword and holster pistols, the sepoys with the Brown Bess musket and bayonet
Confessions of a Skull
This article presents a micro-study of seven Indian skulls, labelled simply as ‘Thugs’, which are kept in the Medical School of the University of Edinburgh and were originally presented to the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1833. It seeks to unravel the wider story behind the collection and develop a biography of the seven skulls, from living persons to inanimate objects. The seven men earned their livelihood as bandit-retainers in early nine…
Fear and Loathing in Amritsar
This essay revisits the events surrounding one of the most emblematic instances of colonial violence, namely the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, through the diary of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Melicent Wathen. Where most histories of the Amritsar Massacre emphasize British brutality and Indian suffering, Melicent’s experience was instead characterized by fear and the uncertainty of what became a headlong flight from Empire. Her diary thus offers an intimat…
The Deconstructed Stranglers
Maunsell, a lieutenant in the 23rd Native Infantry of the Bengal Army set out on horseback in October 1812 from Agra, in what were then called the North-western Provinces, on a visit of inspection to Etawah, seventy-five miles south-east, accompanied by two sepoy orderlies and a horse carrying his belongings and equipment. All three were armed, Maunsell with sword and holster pistols, the sepoys with the Brown Bess musket and bayonet
Thuggee
Based largely on new material, this book examines thuggee as a type of banditry, emerging in a specific socio-economic and geographic context. The British usually described the thugs as fanatic assass
From Sindouse to Sagar
It should be apparent from the preceding chapters that the account of thuggee usually found within the colonial tradition, and beyond, is only loosely based on the historical records. Sleeman did not discover thuggee in 1829, he did not single-handedly convince the Government to mount the thuggee campaign, nor did he alone unravel the murderous fraternity or even suggest the necessary measures to obtain that goal. The use of approvers and rewards…
The Thuggee Campaign
On 19 November 1830 Smith submitted a ‘Plan for the eventual destruction of the association of Thugs which have of late infested Central India’, which he and Sleeman had worked out. 1 The plan consisted of the following main points: An officer should be appointed Superintendent for the Suppression of Thugs whose sole task it was to seize, try and punish the thugs. He should be issued with a warrant valid in all of India under the British Governme…
Engaging the Colonial ‘Archives of Repression’
The first and most immediate obstacle that faces the historian of thuggee is the fact that the thugs did not leave us any written sources of their own. They did not have any religious texts, iconography or artefacts that related specifically to thuggee and which would allow us to examine their practices independently. With few exceptions, the material we have was produced by British officials with — at best — a limited knowledge of the language a…
The Itinerant Underworld
One of the characteristics of the colonial representation of thuggee of the 1830s is the endlessly diversified ramifications of thuggee, recorded as extensive lists of thug subgroupings thought to be operating in unison all over India. In 1838 Sleeman wrote that: 'We have always had reason to believe that a great part of the Byragis, Gosaens and other religious mendicants that infest all parts of India were assassins by profession ...'2 Such clai…
Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered
Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had…
Confessions of a Skull
This article presents a micro-study of seven Indian skulls, labelled simply as ‘Thugs’, which are kept in the Medical School of the University of Edinburgh and were originally presented to the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1833. It seeks to unravel the wider story behind the collection and develop a biography of the seven skulls, from living persons to inanimate objects. The seven men earned their livelihood as bandit-retainers in early nine…
The Marginal Mutiny
This essay considers the main developments within the historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857 over the past decade
Engaging Colonial Knowledge
Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and S
‘In Unrestrained Conversation’
With these lines, the British officer, Captain James Paton, introduced the interviews he conducted with captured Thugs at Lucknow in northern India in 1836, emphasizing the spontaneity of the exchange and authenticity of the responses. The British believed the Thugs to be a sect of prolific murderers who operated in secret along the highways of the subcontinent, guided by a deadly devotion to Hindu goddess-worship. Ostensibly, the purpose of Pato…
Introduction
In the long history of European overseas expansion, an immense and diverse collection of texts, images, drawings, and maps has been produced and accumulated, part of which survives today in archives and libraries around the world. As a legacy of colonization and empirebuilding, the 'knowledge' embodied in this diverse material has been identified with projects of imperialist or colonialist domination, and as such simply labelled as 'colonial'. Th…
Recruiting the ‘martial races’
British rule in India was entirely reliant on local troops, and the mobilization and recruitment of Indian communities gave rise to a multiplicity of discourses, traditions and identities reflecting the peculiar relationship between colonial power and indigenous military labour. Through the late nineteenth century, these discourses became increasingly racialized: only certain native communities were deemed to possess the ‘spirit’ necessary for mi…
Treading Upon Fires
Journal Article ‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India* Get access Kim A. Wagner Kim A. Wagner Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 218, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 159–197, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts026 Published: 18 November 2012
Calculated to Strike Terror
Coinciding with widespread unrest in Ireland and in Egypt, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 is usually examined in terms of the radically transformed political landscape of the British Empire following the First World War. The Amritsar Massacre is thus commonly seen to mark the beginning of the process that came to its conclusion with Indian independence in 1947. This article suggests that the nature of colonial violence of the twentieth century, ho…
Fear and Loathing in Amritsar
This essay revisits the events surrounding one of the most emblematic instances of colonial violence, namely the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, through the diary of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Melicent Wathen. Where most histories of the Amritsar Massacre emphasize British brutality and Indian suffering, Melicent’s experience was instead characterized by fear and the uncertainty of what became a headlong flight from Empire. Her diary thus offers an intimat…
Savage Warfare
Even as a growing body of literature has in recent years revealed the ubiquity of racialized violence within Western colonies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, another historical narrative remains insistent that the British Empire constituted a notable exception to the rule. This nostalgic narrative of a uniquely British ‘soft approach’ rests in part on the belief that colonial officers possessed a deep cultural understanding of the people and…
Expanding Bullets and Savage Warfare
The authors of ‘Studying Mars and Clio’ (History Workshop Journal 88, 2019), the preceding article, claim that my argument concerning the British use of expanding bullets during colonial campaigns against non-white enemies during the 1890s1 is unfounded and that ‘in fact, Britain adopted expanding ammunition for use against all adversaries’. This claim appears to be based exclusively on evidence from the Hague Conference in 1899, where British of…
Confessions of a Thug
Resistance, Rebellion, and the Subaltern
Often falling short of its putative aims, subaltern resistance has throughout history played a significant role in shaping the political landscape of states and empires. This chapter examines some of the more recent developments, as well as criticisms, of the broader study of subaltern resistance and rebellion within a global context. The empirical case studies are drawn primarily from the European imperial expansion during the long nineteenth ce…
Confessions of a Thug
Originally published in 1839, a story in which an imprisoned Indian, while confessing to a white 'sahib', recounts his life as a member of the Thuggee, a religious cult that practises ritual mass murder and robbery.
Beyond redemption
Commentary as part of the book symposium on Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic’s, Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings (2022): In Perpetrator Disgust, Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic provides a fascinating exploration of the emotional anguish experienced by perpetrators of atrocity during the 20th century. One of her most poignant insights is that physical discomfort rarely, if ever, compelled perpetrators to stop or reconsider the morality of …
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