Lions Entangled: British Press Coverage of the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46)

This paper examines British newspaper coverage of the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-46). The period of Britain’s vast imperial expansion in Asia between Waterloo (1815) and the Indian “Mutiny” (1857-58) remains poorly understood, as scholarship has focussed on internal consolidation and reform. While the post-Napoleonic settlement ensured a long period of Continental peace, ushering in the idea of a “Pax Britannica” worldwide, Britain’s power in Asia oversaw an acceleration of warfare and violence. As European warfare fell away, space opened up in British newspaper columns for the coverage of conflict in Asia, Victoria’s so-called “little wars” (in Afghanistan, Sindh, China, the Punjab and Burma, e.g.).

Drawing from The Times (London), The London Illustrated News, The Morning Chronicle (London), The Standard (London), The Scotsman (Edinburgh), The Delhi Gazette and The Bombay Times, this paper poses the following questions: What image of Asian warfare did British contemporaries have available to them? How did the global English-language media (in England, Scotland and India) frame this contest? What were considered appropriate justifications for warfare? How was bloody conflict on the battlefield organized and presented as a journalistic genre? In what ways was war coverage gendered, especially given the role of a female regent (Maharani Jind Kaur) in Lahore, a new “Messalina” and “Faustina” according to British reporters?

While images of anarchy and savagery characterized the Sikhs in the 1840s, their army was also respected as the most professionally skilled in Asia, having trained in the 1830s under French veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns. Complexities such as these inform my argument that British war coverage was not black and white but fundamentally ambivalent, often defensive in tone, harshly self-critical and surprisingly generous towards its official enemy, though within limits. That ambivalence was a reflection, ultimately, of an empire under fire both at home and abroad.