Home Rule, Democracy and the Unmaking of the United Kingdom, 1885-1921

Abstract

Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXIV-2 | 2019 10 Yet, in India, the so-called "Mutiny" (or "War of Independence") of 1857-8 demonstrated the limits of paternalism. Ultimately, as Richard Evans has recently reminded us, 'violence lay at the heart of the British Empire.' 9 Indeed, this was well known at the time. As the most 'realist' among the system's champions, James Fitzjames Stephen, noted in 1874, in India as much as in Canada or the Scottish Highlands, peace, law and order depended not primarily on consent, but on force, and "the reason why it work [ed] so quietly is that no one doubt [ed] either its existence, or its direction, or its crushing superiority to any individual resistance which could be offered to it." 10 However, this undemocratic system was restrained