The East India Company “Unhinged”: Colonial State Authority and the Annexation of Sindh

• In Event: The Armies of the British East India Company: Identity and Authority in a Military Empire

Abstract

The 1843 military annexation of Sindh by the East India Company is an important and often missed chapter in one of the most successful global campaigns of domination—the British Empire. The Company gained ground in Sindh (which straddles the Indus River) through socio-cultural sleights of hand, as well as the initiation of war. Histories, generally, contextualize Sindh’s annexation by connecting it to British debates and policies about Russian imperialism in Asia. This paper turns away from these policy debates and focuses on how the annexation of Sindh brought about the uncoupling of civil and military authority within the Company.

The paper employs private and public correspondences to outline and analyze post facto criticisms of Sindh’s military annexation by James Outram, the Company’s political agent for the Indus River region. Through the analysis of a multi-sited debate between Outram, officials in Bombay and the Governor-General in Calcutta, I illustrate how intra-Company criticisms of Sindh’s annexation resulted from a distinctive series of historical conflicts about colonial state authority. These conflicts pit Bombay-based civil servants against Sindh’s military governor (i.e., Charles Napier) and represent an abrasive tension within the Company. Hinged to military and civil authority and their historical relationship to liberalism and paternalism, this tension reflects broader competing visions of socio-political power and its proper cultural form within the Company. I describe how this tension “unhinges” military and civil authority in post-annexation Sindh and produces a form of colonial rule that is particularly autocratic and despotic.

Author

• Matthew A. Cook, North Carolina Central University