“’A Power Able to Overawe Them All’: Criminality and the Uses of Fear,” begins with a discussion of criminality in The Queen v. Eduljee Byramjee (1846). At the heart of the case was the question of whether criminal convictions could be appealed to the Privy Council. On the one hand, to limit appeals to the Queen would implicitly serve to undermine her absolute sovereignty. On the other hand, granting the right to appeal would undermine the authority of the colonial courts and intervene in the social, political, and economic uses to which Indian criminals were put. This chapter also shows how the fiction of Indian criminality became useful to the exercise of British sovereignty. As the last ready supply of working bodies after the abolition of slavery, and the end of British penal transport, Indian criminals provided essential physical labor for the territorial expansion of Empire. The rhetoric of Indian degeneracy, then, was central to both the ideological and material terms by which the British consolidated and expanded their sovereignty. (Word Count: 10,500)

Chapter Two, “The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug” reads the oppositional evolution of criminal justice in England and India by comparing the two novels. I begin with the observation that the movement toward rehabilitation and the humanization of the criminal in nineteenth century England occurs in tandem with the rise of corporal punishment and penal transportation in India. Taking the two novels as instances of this contradictory impulse, I examine the figure of the thug as a cipher for racialized fears of Indian criminality. In particular, I look at representations of paternity and masculinity within both novels. I show that Abel Magwitch becomes humanized in Dickens’s novel by taking on the mantle of fatherhood for Pip. By contrast, Ameer Ali is condemned for his paradigmatic inability to foster a viable childhood. I argue that criminality emerges within a Victorian matrix of race and patriarchy in which to be a father, or father figure, is to be properly human.

This chapter analyzes some of the ethereal figures that populated the colonial imaginary in India during the nineteenth century, including thugs, pirates, and fanatics. While each of these figures had its own unique features, a significant degree of slippage and overlap can be found between them and – more importantly for the purposes of this study – in the legal and security measures adopted by the colonial authorities to contain them. Operations of ‘pacification’ undertaken with the goal of rooting out secretive groups of thugs, criminal tribes, pirates, or fanatics were typically directly linked to the project of establishing British sovereignty in and around the Indian subcontinent, by land and by sea. In this process, colonial administrators, judges, soldiers, police, and scholars produced, repurposed, and recycled a set of tropes portraying certain groups of Indian men as barbaric, violent, cowardly, secretive, or superstitious threats to colonial order.