Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre

Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre - Kim A. Wagner [epub]

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the British Empire, yet it remains poorly understood. In this dramatic account, Kim A. Wagner details the perspectives of ordinary people and argues that General Dyer’s order to open fire at Jallianwalla Bagh was an act of fear. Situating the massacre within the "deep" context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire.

"In this compelling yet exacting study, Kim Wagner combines the intimacy of the storyteller and the distance of the historian to evoke the ‘microhistory’ of the massacre while understanding it as the ‘final stage of a much longer process’, stretching back to the Sepoy Uprising. Mining a variety of sources – diaries, memoirs and court testimonies - he uncovers fresh perspectives and examines the relation between colonial panic and state brutality with sophistication, sincerity and style rare in published accounts of this much-trodden ground."
— Santanu Das, author of India, Empire, and First World War Culture

Kim A. Wagner teaches global and British imperial history at Queen Mary, University of London. His books include The Skull of Alum Bheg, The Great Fear of 1857, and Thuggee.

Hardcover: 360 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (March 26, 2019)