The British Man Who Called the 1857 Revolt a Noble War

Jones’s views show that, contrary to the popular narrative, the British reaction to the rebellion that began on May 10, 1857, was not a monolith. This also foregrounds an understudied aspect of British working-class radicalism in the Victorian era — their internationalism and anticolonialism. That radicalism had been challenging Britain’s liberal consensus for more than two decades. Chartism was the first major working-class movement in Britain and advocated for Parliamentary reform, including voting rights for the non-propertied classes. At its core was a commitment to the democratic dissemination of knowledge — evidenced by the varied body of literature it left behind — which it sought to advance through the press and by creating a distinct plebeian public sphere. At war with an increasingly dominant liberal knowledge system, the Chartist press sought to challenge and redefine what counted as knowledge across politics, literature, political economy, and the empire.

The First Opium War is a case in point. The liberal press and the pro-war lobby had created a narrative to justify British aggression against China through the construction of that nation — sarcastically called the “Celestial Empire” — as the Other, antithetical to progress and modernity, and by extension free trade. The Chartist press criticised this portrayal and depicted the Chinese government as a benevolent one trying to defend its sovereignty against British rapacity. Borrowing from Napoleon, one Chartist editorial argued that the British government and the mercantile interests behind the war had proved themselves to be “mere shopkeepers”. The same editorial inverted the usual racialised representations of the Chinese people and the British merchants by depicting the former as moral and heroic and the latter as tyrannical and blasphemous. The Chartists saw the colonial war as an extension of domestic misrule, and, therefore, urged readers to see the Chinese as suffering under the same socioeconomic system as the working classes of England.

After the failure of the third Chartist petition to Parliament in 1848, the movement petered out. Jones, a major Chartist leader, was imprisoned that year for sedition, and it was in prison that he composed an epic poem, ‘The New World’, published in 1851. It narrates the history of human civilisation as one of systemic oppression while alluding to the misgovernance of contemporary Britain. Highly critical of British imperialism in India and the world over (“We murdered millions to enrich the few”), this work remains, as Ronald Paul has argued, “one of the most remarkable and elaborate examples of a poetic critique of imperialism produced in the whole of the Victorian period”. Notably, it prophesies a sepoy rebellion in India: “Victorious deluge! From a hundred heights/ Rolls the fierce torrent of a people’s rights/ And sepoy soldiers, waking band by band/ At last remember they’ve a fatherland!”

After his release from prison, Jones was committed to reviving the Chartist movement and launched The People’s Paper in 1852. When rebellion broke out in India in 1857, Jones retitled his prescient epic ‘The Revolt of Hindostan’. Early articles published in the Paper from May 16 onwards saw the rebellion as the harbinger of the end of the British Empire in India, even as the official narrative portrayed it as a mutiny that would soon be crushed. Although Jones described the “minie rifle balls” as the revolt’s immediate cause, he traced its real source to Indian discontent with British misrule. The Paper also published a series of articles titled “Hindostan”, intended to give the public “a full insight into India, as it is, and as it is misgoverned”; their content ranged from pre-colonial agricultural and scientific achievements to manmade famines under British rule. By July, Jones was calling the mutiny “the patriot war in India” and a “national insurrection for independence”, writing that it was “shaking the British oligarchy to its foundation”. As news of the conquest of Delhi reached Britain in early August, Jones, in a rare instance of British solidarity with the Indian rebels, called for revolution: “Revolutions do not fly like wildfire: they grow out of circumstances — they grow out of each other. Let Delhi remain uncaptured — let the British force receive a check — then Madras and Bombay will do what Bengal has done.” He urged the working people of England to back the Indian cause, writing, “We bespeak the sympathy of the English people for their Hindhu (sic) brethren. Their cause is yours — their success is, indirectly, yours as well.” Jones argued that the English working classes had gained nothing from the Indian empire, and that war would only burden them with more taxes.

By mid-November, as a victory for the Indian side seemed entirely impossible, the Paper’s editorial wrote about the need to record and pay tribute to the “heroic bravery of the Hindhu (sic) force”: “…contemporaries continue to stigmatise them as ‘cowards,’ and ‘dastards’… Shame on the ungenerous dastards who apply such words to such a gallant foe!”

The emergence of Britain as an imperial state towards the later part of the 19th century was achieved through the resolution of internal contradictions — suppressing the voice of dissent against the state and empire, leaving only the voice of the establishment. “On its colonies the Sun never sets, but the blood never dries,” Jones wrote of the British Empire. The Sun has set. Yet those two voices echo down to the present, one mobilising sentiment in support of imperial wars, and the other articulating resistance.

The writer has completed a PhD on the British working-class press in the 19th century