Fragments of Imperial Violence

In 1806 Louisa Calderon, a free woman of colour from Trinidad, became a cause célèbre in Britain as the tragic and suffering victim of picqueting, a form of torture which involved her being suspended by her hand with one foot resting on a sharp point whilst undergoing interrogation. The order for Calderon’s picqueting had come from the British military and civil governor of Trinidad, Sir Thomas Picton. This was not the only offence for which Picton stood accused, neither was it the most brutal. Yet it was Calderon’s torture that captured the imagination of the press, bringing home the anxieties of Empire. In this widely and meticulously researched book, James Epstein examines the story behind the scandal of Picton’s rule and Calderon’s torture in order to bring to light the deeper structures of colonial violence revealed by such scandals. Epstein’s Scandal of Colonial Rule opens with an account of the fleeting disruption that the Picton scandal caused to metropolitan ideas of imperial Britishness. With the revelations of Picton’s violent and arbitrary rule, the comfortable conceit of the imperial civilizing mission was momentarily disturbed. Scandal of Colonial Rule unravels the myth of a benevolent British Empire shocked and appalled by its own lapses, and explores the complicity of networks of white colonists, both ‘at home’ and on the peripheries of empire, in the enacting and silencing of colonial violence. Through his micro-history of Picton’s rule in Trinidad and the unfolding of the scandal, Epstein argues that violence in its many different, and subtle, forms was inherent in the configuration of British imperial identity and rule.

Epstein begins his narrative in London, with the media excitement and court-room drama that Calderon’s testament and Picton’s defence provided for the metropole’s political gossip networks. Defined as a ‘mullatto’ woman, Calderon’s mixed heritage evaded any straightforward racial categorization. Press reports and images represented her differently depending on their political agenda. Examining these representations, Epstein shows how each side of the debate drew on widely accepted ideas of what skin colour, anatomy and bodily demeanour said about moral worth and character. As the victim of Picton’s brutality, for example, Calderon’s supporters adorned her with the ‘virtues’ of white, middle-class femininity. Chaste, sensitive and fragile, this representation drew on hegemonic understandings of whiteness to elicit sympathy from those who followed and judged the scandal. Conversely, Picton’s defendants harnessed the cultural codes associated with darker skin and a lower socio-economic status to portray her as sexually licentious, a duplicitous thief. Disputes over Calderon’s age – was she an adult, barely a woman or still a girl? – centred around the size of her breasts, suggesting further avenues for exploring the ways in which representations of youth intersect with gender and sexuality. Epstein shows how these representations and meanings resonated with those of Gothic literature, turning the case into a titillating exhibition of sexual exoticism. Calderon’s body, and the location of the torture far away from the shores of Britain itself, brought Empire home but simultaneously rendered it a spectacle, packaged in a medium that promoted sensation but which ultimately enabled a sense of distance.

In subsequent chapters Epstein examines the configuration of British imperial identity and imperial rule through a discussion of the lives of Sir Thomas Picton (1758–1815) and his nemesis, William Fullarton (1754–1808). Fullerton had been appointed head commissioner to Trinidad in 1802, and almost immediately upon his arrival set about investigating Picton’s abuses of power, ultimately bringing him to trial. Two radically different characters with competing visions of how an Empire should be run, Picton and Fullarton embody the divisions in elite representations of imperial Britishness. William Fullarton was the first son of a landed Scottish gentry family and his career mirrored the trajectory of many elite male Scots. An ‘enlightened’ education at Edinburgh, under the mentorship of Lord Kames, was followed by...