This chapter explores the historiographical project developed by the sixteenth-century mestizo chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo, son of a Spaniard and a Native woman from Tlaxcala in New Spain. His project develops in three iterations and in each version tells the history of his mother’s ethnic group: Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1584), Suma y epíloga de toda la Descripción de Tlaxcala (1588-1589) and Historia de Tlaxcala (1592). This essay looks at how Muñoz Camargo’s three-stage project responded to, in varying ways, the 1577 relación geográfica questionnaire that was devised by the imperial powers to learn about and better control the subjugated regions in the New World. Muñoz Camargo sought to insert the non-European history of Tlaxcala in a colonial Spanish narrative framework.

Focusing on commemoration over the course of the first twenty years which followed the uprising, this chapter argues that official commemoration was a direct and often conscious attempt to mollify the British population which anxiously anticipated further insurrection. With elevated levels of intercommunal antipathy characterising the post-conflict colonial relationship, this chapter shows how commemoration was designed to produce a conciliatory memory of the uprising consciously shaped to soothe tension and reassure the colonial community about the stability of British India. Responsible for a greatly sanitised memory of 1857, commemoration attempted to mould the conflict into a heroic narrative in which British and Indian soldiers fought side by side to win a magnificent victory in the name of empire. As this chapter further explores, however, despite the enormous ideological energy expended by the administration over this period, fears of further insurrection tied to memories of 1857 were never far from the surface during these practices of commemoration and could still erupt in ruthless outbursts of colonial violence even decades later.

Focusing on Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s commemorative painting, In Memoriam, this chapter traces British responses to the uprising over the course of the conflict itself. Painted at the height of the insurrection, In Memoriam originally depicted the Cawnpore Massacre and was therefore part of a broader discourse which had dramatic material implications for British counter-insurgency by legitimising the ruthless acts of violence used to suppress the rebellion. A continued focus on this artwork reveals, however, the extent to which this depiction of the conflict quickly became unacceptable in its aftermath. With the spectre of armed rebellion haunting the colonial psyche, popular sentiment convinced Paton to make a number of significant alterations to his commemorative composition which transferred the imagined space of the painting from Cawnpore to Lucknow. Employing a range of methods including the use of X-ray and ultraviolent light, this chapter uncovers what the original painting would have looked like at the same time as analysing what the final composition can tell us about the prevalence of colonial anxiety in the years that followed the uprising.

This chapter takes stock of geopolitical ventures in advancing colonialism from the nineteenth century to the present day. The chapter spotlights protest movements of colonized and displaced communities as they contend with forced mobility and militarized blockade by colonial forces.

This chapter aims to provide a conceptual overview of the role of violence in the workings of the colonial state in British India, with reflections on how various modalities of violence constructed concepts of the nation, shaped anti-colonialism, hardened communal identities, and informed the constitution of the early independent Indian state. In this we bring theoretical interventions on violence and the state to the historiography of the Indian nationalist movement, with the aim to underscore the violence of colonialism and to de-centre the emphasis on non-violence in anti-colonialism. We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism’. Such a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was among other things marked by the extraordinary violence of partition. The independent state inherited many of the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it.