K im A. W agner . Amritsar 1919

Tales of savagery and violence have predictably peppered the history of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, providing in some cases the basis for an impressive historiography on law, power, and violence—the work of Shahid Amin, Anupama Rao, and Rudrangshu Mukherjee being some cases in point. Mukherjee’s work on the Mutiny of 1857 and the brutal massacres that were perpetrated by rebels and their colonial masters is especially salient, as it demonstrates how the logic of violence played out in the complex interstices of power; how violence was endemic to the structure of British rule; and how violence alone devolved as the instrument for its subversion. It is therefore surprising that Wagner chooses not to engage with Mukherjee’s Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (1998) even as he asserts that brutality was the driving force behind the British Raj. Amritsar 1919 sets out to document with vigor and...

Ancient history · Colonialism · Criminology · Historiography · Mutiny · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Subversion · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies