Conclusion

Summary

This chapter extends the book’s themes and arguments forward to explore how the Company’s armies were remembered in British imperial history. One of the most celebrated sources purportedly illuminating the experiences of sepoys in the East India Company is the memoir of Sita Ram Pandey, most familiarly published as From Sepoy to Subedar. This concluding chapter explores this source, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century more than a generation after the Company’s dissolution. The chapter argues that the memoir was not the authentic work of a sepoy, but rather the creation of a British officer class that increasingly looked back to the Company era as a lost utopia. It shows the survival of “stratocracy” as an ideology through which elite white officers protested and critiqued the British Raj, even as the imperial government developed its own assumptions about how military force should be used and controlled in India. It further explores how this nostalgic legacy of Company rule has influenced subsequent scholarship, especially analyses of its armies.