1 - Forging the Sword

Summary

The East India Company’s empire rested on its sepoys – its sprawling army of Indian recruits. The emergence of the sepoy army has usually been understood as a tactical innovation, in which European-style discipline was introduced to an Indian setting. This chapter argues instead that the growth of the sepoy army should be seen as an ideological development. The use of indigenous recruits and other non-Europeans for military labor had a long history across the British Empire as a whole. In much of the empire, including the Company’s earliest trading factories, this practice had been coded as anomalous by colonial elites eager to maintain a monopoly on the prestige of formal military service. Efforts by colonists to preserve that exclusive control made armies and militias across the empire some of the first institutions to be formally segregated along racialized lines. In much of the Atlantic empire, nonwhite military labor was marginalized and rendered invisible. In the Company’s settlements, in contrast, the sepoy became a highly visible symbol of empire – rendered valuable only because of an allegedly transformative system of European command, leadership, and discipline.