This research revealed that soldiers had a significant impact on public debate about empire in Britain, though not always in the ways we might expect. Rather than protesting through official channels, many military officers chose to correspond privately with EIC shareholders, MPs, and newspaper editors. These public figures then used soldiers’ testimony to hold the EIC to account. While officers were able to exercise the greatest influence within parliament and the EIC, from the 1830s writing by the rank and file was also given a public platform, particularly in the provincial press. Letters and memoirs published by soldiers of different ranks supplied the public with evidence of mismanagement, incompetence, and breach of military convention, particularly relating to the deaths of women and children and the execution of prisoners of war. The letters that appeared in newspapers were not usually written for public consumption, however; instead, they were submitted to newspaper editors by soldiers’ friends and family in Britain. These accounts caused controversy and inspired widespread distaste with wars of conquest in India. The growth of organized pacifist societies in the second half of the nineteenth century was fuelled by, and in turn helped to amplify, soldiers’ descriptions of the horrors of war. Pacifists circulated excerpts of soldiers’ writing in cheap tracts, specialist periodicals, and books, thereby giving certain texts a long afterlife.
This research revises conventional understandings of public debates about empire and develops new approaches to the subject. First, WAR_WITNESS shows that imperial politics were not monopolised by the political and intellectual elite. Instead, it illuminates the important role played by military personnel and their families, including the mothers, wives, and daughters who actively participated in public debate by forwarding letters to the newspapers. Second, WAR_WITNESS demonstrates the value of studying this neglected aspect of media and print history. It shows that soldiers’ letters from the front constitute a distinctive journalistic genre which had an important impact on public attitudes to war and empire. Third, this research reminds us that ideas and practices of military secrecy are not set in stone. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, even military authorities were often unwilling to constrain soldiers’ freedom of speech, while soldiers themselves insisted on their right to participate in public debate. By drawing attention to this previously overlooked history of negotiation and resistance, this research indicates the need for further research on the relationship between soldiers and civil society.
