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.

During the period of Britain’s colonial expansion in the eighteenth century, the ‘cult of sensibility’ emerged across Europe and America. Domestic experience gave meaning to imperial ties, as the British nurtured fond plans for the Antipodean colonies of Australia and New Zealand as children of the British Empire, one day to assume a glorious inheritance. Smith’s emphasis on social nearness rather than feeling at a distance exemplifies the ambivalence of ‘fellow feeling’ or empathy. Resentment, condescension, and fear of degeneration as evoked by the ‘future tourist’ or ‘New Zealander’ undermined this relationship and defined the limits of imperial ‘fellow feeling’, with implications for temporal and racial human hierarchies. By contrast, French naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière’s cosmopolitan re-orientation of these schemes brought humankind into a single political community, in which Indigenous peoples were fully human. Yet Australian Aboriginal people became the objects of a nostalgic imperial discourse of extinction, naturalizing conquest and relegating them to the new colonies’ past.