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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2024
Chapter One examines the historical and legal context that resulted in the abolition of the East India Company and the formal transfer of political sovereignty from the Mughal state to the British Crown. It focuses on the Uprising of 1857 and is arranged around two questions: How did the colonial state attempt to erase the memory of Mughal sovereignty and the popular character of the violence enacted in its name, and what role did mercy play in this story? The chapter positions the trial and punishment of Bahadur Shah Zafar II as a founding trial of colonial sovereignty which exposed both the extraordinary violence and the absolute limits of colonial sovereign power. A former sovereign would be transformed into a criminal and brought within the British imperial order, but for the sake of the future legitimacy of this political project, he could not be killed.
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