Welcome to Bearing Witness in Wartime, a project exploring soldiers’ historical role as authors and eyewitnesses. Using soldiers’ writing, I will show how news of distant wars circulated before the advent of the modern war correspondent. At the same time, I will trace shifting definitions of military secrecy and the public’s right to know.
Why the East India Company?
Debates on these topics became particularly heated in relation to the East India Company (EIC), the focus of my project. The EIC was both a trading corporation and a political and military power. Because the EIC controlled British access to India through their commercial monopoly, soldiers became important eyewitnesses of its expansionary activities. Indeed, soldiers’ writing was the primary alternative to official narratives promulgated in army dispatches. Restoring soldiers to the picture therefore produces a more complete understanding of domestic attitudes to empire.
The Genesis of the Project
I came to this topic in a roundabout way. Formerly my interests lay more with diplomacy than with war. Specifically, my first book followed the EIC’s political representatives (Residents) at Indian royal courts in the early nineteenth century. In it, I showed how these men forged increasingly unequal alliances between the EIC and neighbouring Indian kingdoms, thus laying the foundations for a globe-spanning system of indirect rule. While writing this book, I realized that the Residents’ personal papers were replete with complaints about the EIC’s culture of secrecy. In fact, some declared that if the British public only knew what was happening in India, they would never let it pass uncontested. Curious, I set out to investigate these claims. Was the EIC really able to repress information about its unsavoury activities?
As it turned out, the combined forces of censorship, intimidation, and deportation were unable to stem information leaks. To the contrary, Company employees readily succumbed to what contemporaries described as an ‘evil itch’: the irrepressible impulse to write. Interestingly, the most avid correspondents were soldiers. Regardless of official discouragement, soldiers were eager to publicize their combat experiences and conditions of service. In newspaper submissions, pamphlets, and memoirs, soldiers sought to shape public narratives about war in Asia.
Recovering Forgotten Influences and Ideas
Literary scholars have worked extensively with soldiers’ memoirs, but the practical impact of all this writing remains unexplored. Newspaper submissions, in particular, are largely unstudied. While letters from the front are a recognized genre, historians have focused instead on professional war correspondents, taking William Howard Russell‘s coverage of the Crimean War as their starting point.
The history of journalism, and the history of news, are not, however, interchangeable. Early newspapers were not monopolized by professionals but were, instead, collaborative endeavours that relied on reader submissions as well as quoting from books and pamphlets. Through this polyvocal world of print, we see how people outside the political and intellectual elite shaped imperial policy. Significantly, even officers in the Company’s armies often belonged to middling families of tradesmen and manual workers. Preliminary findings suggest that the rank and file, comprised of clerks and agricultural labourers, also claimed column space. These men furnish us with a different view of empire, from the vantage point of the barracks.
Despite their active participation in print, there was little consensus about what soldiers could legitimately say in public. During the nineteenth century, the category of ‘injurious disclosures’ began to crystallize, as military men debated what they could reveal. For many, publishing constituted a potential breach of loyalty and military discipline as well as a risk to operational security. Soldiers who submitted complaints to the press could be charged with seditious and mutinous conduct. The term whistle-blower might be anachronistic here, but these men nevertheless suggest a long and complex history of insiders reporting abuses.
Presence and Absence in Print
While officers’ letters were a valued source of information in the metropole, not every soldier could find a venue for publication. Some voices were clearly valued more than others. Indian soldiers in particular overwhelmingly outnumbered their European counterparts, but their words rarely penetrated the public domain. The Indian women and children who lived and worked within the cantonment have left even fewer traces. One of the challenges of this project is thus to keep these absences and disconnections in view. Above all, I want to highlight how the content of public debates was shaped by race, gender, and class.
Despite these gaps, my preliminary research suggests that criticisms of empire were rife in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print. Some soldiers wrote to defend regimental honour, but others published to expose, and condemn. Through these individual stories of dissent, we can better understand the conditions in which European empires took shape. These histories remind us that people did speak out, forcing us to wonder why so few seem to have listened.