Bearing Witness in Wartime: East India Company Soldiers in the British Public Domain, 1757–1857

Despite a longstanding scholarly fascination with how media shapes public experiences of distant wars, much of this scholarship is in practice a history of professional journalism. Yet, war correspondents did not become a permanent fixture until the mid-nineteenth century, by which point Europeans had long waged war on a near-global scale. How did earlier generations of editors, publishers, readers, and consumers learn about war? This poster will highlight the recognized but critically understudied role of soldiers (primarily, though not exclusively, officers) as vectors of information about Britain’s imperial conquests. Their testimony was particularly important with respect to Asia, the main theatre of imperial expansion, where communicative circuits were circumscribed by the East India Company’s (EIC) commercial monopoly. This poster will show what soldiers communicated to the public and what impact this had on debates about the EIC’s operations.

Using textual and visual material, including letters to the editor, pamphlets, illustrations, and prints, this poster will engage with wider discussions about war in the media. Following Susan Sontag, scholars have debated the ethics of viewing graphic photos, questioning whether images evoke suffering in ways words cannot. Working with very different materials, scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries disagree about whether the tendency to portray imperial campaigns in the picturesque mode helped to obscure violence or inspire ambivalence about Britain’s imperial aspirations. Yet, these art histories have prioritized the work of professionals, which they treat in isolation from the wider information environments within which images circulated. What visual techniques did soldiers use and how did these techniques compare with the rhetorical strategies deployed in their memoirs, pamphlets, and letters? How might visual and textual depictions interact to shape common attitudes to overseas campaigns, as reflected in newspaper editorials and contemporary reviews in leading periodicals? What difference did the advent of photography make to these debates? Using a combination of images and extracts, the poster will illustrate how soldiers responded to and attempted to reshape popular understandings of imperial warfare.

In recovering these acts of public engagement, this research not only elucidates the conditions in which public attitudes to empire took shape; it also contributes to our understanding of the historical role of soldiers in civil society. While some soldiers emphasized the heroic nature of combat, others produced damning criticism of the EIC’s wars of conquest and pacification. These criticisms, in turn, generated debate about what soldiers could, or should, make public. Critics questioned whether, as servants of the state, soldiers could legitimately sit in judgement of their superiors, and even posited that military personnel signed away their rights as public individuals when they enlisted. Soldiers themselves, by contrast, argued that their status as eyewitnesses, combined with the sacrifices they made in the service, meant that they had unique authority to speak. Over time, the legal category of ‘injurious disclosures’ began to crystallize, but its contours remained highly contested. This poster will identify the generic conventions, ideological frameworks, and acts of dissent that shaped how combat was depicted to the public.