The Auto-Ethnographic State: Information Panic, Intermediary Agency, and the Shift to Indirect Rule

About this event

In 1857, a widespread uprising against British rule in India led to the end of a company state, and the beginning of a new era of imperialism justified less on a principle of ‘civilisation’ and modernisation than of custom and conservation. This form of rule would go on to structure the governance of hundreds of millions for over a century, and to shape the birth of the international system. Recent accounts of this shift tend to be silent about its causes: not about the crisis or its resolution, but about the interpretive process that led from one to the other. This paper assesses the primary sources relied on by British Indian civil servants to construct their official history of “the mutiny”. It finds that the key interpretive voices telling a custom–focused story of the rebellion were not British intellectuals or officers, but almost exclusively Indian elites. I use their interventions to sketch an outline of a particular type of intermediary emerging in that era, and suggest some insights this account could offer about the politics of information in imperial crises and imperial rule more broadly.

Eric Haney studies the international relations of empire, both as a form of order and as a foundation of the contemporary international system. He is finishing a book on the politics of British imperial ‘customary rule’ in South Asia and Africa, and the groundwork it laid for the world of self-determination that followed. This work combines archival research and game-theoretic ideas to explore interactions between anti-colonial resistance and the imperial crises and order that emerged in its wake. Eric recently completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford, and is an incoming postdoctoral researcher with the CIPSS project on Institutions in Turbulent Times.

*This event will take place on Zoom.