Sepoys, Slavery and the Global Colour Line: The Indian Uprising of 1857 in Southern US Newspapers

Abstract

Within southern US newspapers, the Indian Uprising of 1857 was reported and read across a global colour line, which posited the superiority of whiteness against the "darker races", thereby developing a framework through which white Southerners could amplify their own internal fears about the possibility of slave rebellion. News printed in southern newspapers about the events in India can be seen through a lens of the South's racial hierarchy and can also be analysed as part of a wider global system of nineteenth-century white supremacy. Despite Anglophobia and fear of abolitionists, southern enslavers could also find it within themselves to support the British when it came to the maintenance of a global hierarchy of whiteness. The news from India could be read as a form of contextual substitution, in which southern slaveholders could see perceived racial parallels between themselves and the British in India, and between the "darker races"of the world, whether that was the enslaved African American or the Indian Sepoy.