The Insecurity State
Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India

A provocative examination of how the British colonial experience in India was shaped by chronic unease, anxiety, and insecurity.

Mark Condos (Author)

9781108407014, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 7 May 2020

272 pages, 11 b/w illus.
15 x 23 x 1 cm, 0.41 kg

'Mark Condos's book offers a compelling insight into the driving principles underlying the British colonial state in Punjab and, in doing so, indicates some wider truths about the nature of imperial societies more broadly.' Catherine Coombs, The English Historical Review

In this provocative new work, Mark Condos explores the 'dark underside' of the ideologies that sustained British rule in India. Using Punjab as a case study, he argues that India's colonial overlords were obsessively fearful, and plagued by an unreasoning belief in their own vulnerability as rulers. These enduring anxieties precipitated, and justified, an all too frequent recourse to violence, joined with an insistence on untrammelled power placed in the hands of the executive. Examining how the British colonial experience was shaped by a chronic sense of unease, anxiety, and insecurity, this is a timely intervention in debates about the contested project of colonial state-building, the oppressive and violent practices of colonial rule, the nature of imperial sovereignty, law, and policing and the postcolonial legacies of empire.

Introduction: fear, panic, and the violence of empire
1. Colonial insecurity in early British India, 1757–1857
2. Re-assessing the 'garrison state': pacification and colonial disquiet in Punjab
3. Law, the Punjab school, and the 'kooka outbreak' of 1872
4. Frontier terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867
5. Imperial recruiting and imperial anxieties, 1870–1920
Conclusion: colonial vulnerability and the insecurity of empire
Epilogue: the insecurity state today.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF], British & Irish history [HBJD1]