Drone Form: Mediation at the End of Empire

TLDR: In the British Library, dispatches from the front lines of England's merciless counterinsurgency campaign in India, 1857-58, are collected into folders marked “Miscellaneous Indian Mutiny Papers” and “India Office Records and Private Papers.” Copied on thin paper, the documents read as a perverse and staccato kind of poetry as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: At the British Library, dispatches from the front lines of England’s merciless counterinsurgency campaign in India, 1857–58, are collected into folders marked “Miscellaneous Indian Mutiny Papers” and “India Office Records and Private Papers.” Copied on thin paper, the documents read as a perverse and staccato kind of poetry. They shape tidings of insurrection and its brutal suppression into the idiom of war-state bureaucracy. Antiseptic and technical, dehumanizing by design, this administrative jargon is further formalized during its compression into the argot of electronic telegraphy. And if compression names “the process that renders a mode of representation adequate to its infrastructures” (Sterne 35), then telegraphy of the so-called Indian Mutiny is perhaps best understood as conveying not simply the content that any given message contained, encoded, and transmitted— the movement of troops, the reports of losses, the accounts of battle—but a cipher of the war-making infrastructure of nineteenth-century imperialism.1