Insurgent Fictions : The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism

How empire shaped the language—and politics—of terror.

"Terrorism" is often treated as a modern problem, rooted in late nineteenth-century anarchism or contemporary global conflict. Insurgent Fictions challenges that assumption by tracing the term''s meanings to an earlier age of empire. Padma Rangarajan shows how terrorism emerged as a concept during the upheavals of the French Revolution and acquired its enduring associations through British colonial expansion.

Focusing on Anglophone literature of the long nineteenth century, the book examines how legal discourse, political rhetoric, and fiction worked together to define terrorism as illegitimate, foreign, and racially marked violence. These meanings, Rangarajan argues, cannot be understood apart from imperial governance and colonial resistance. Through sustained readings of authors including Edmund Burke, Lady Morgan, Thomas Moore, John Galt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Subramania Bharati, and Philip Meadows Taylor, the book traces how narratives of terror circulated across Britain, Ireland, and South Asia. Literary texts emerge as key sites where terrorism''s meanings were tested, stabilized, and contested—often revealing anxieties about sovereignty, legitimacy, and rebellion that exceeded the nation-state.

By placing empire at the center of terrorism''s conceptual history, Insurgent Fictions offers a transimperial account that reshapes debates in literary studies, history, and terrorism studies. This study shows how debates about sovereignty, empire, and insurgency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries molded a language of terror whose effects continue to structure the present.