Stopping the Charge of Fanatics: Necessity, Utility, and the Organization of Suffering in the British Imperial Imagination, 1849–1914

Through an examination of late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates concerning the use of expanding bullets, this paper explores the relationship between the epistemological and normative commitments of liberalism and British imperial policies and practices concerning the application of violence. Following troubling reports emerging from the Chitral Campaign that the new Mark II bullet adopted by the British military failed to incapacitate anti-imperial opponents in the North West Frontier of India, the British developed and adopted the Mark III, or dum dum bullet, in order to effectively stop, as the Secretary of the Government of India noted, “the charge of fanatics.” Designed to expand on impact, and virtually identical to the ammunitions used for hunting big game, these ballistic experiments aimed to effectively subdue the fanatic body through both physical and psychological techniques of, as CE Callwell argued, “overawing and terrifying the enemy.”

Tracing the development and deployment of the dum dum bullet as a ballistic technology directed specifically at the moral and embodied sensibilities of ‘the fanatic’, this paper asks how liberal principles of rationality and racialized ideas of bodily alterity shaped notions of necessity and utility that were central to emerging ideas of what constitutes humane treatment. In doing so, this paper seeks to interrogate how liberal sensibilities regarding pain, the body, and difference came to organize how the human was understood, and attendantly, how suffering was applied by the British imperial state.