In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Organized around key crisis moments in the history of British colonial rule such as the 'Black Hole' of Calcutta, the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 Rebellion, anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London and the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how the terrorizing threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized.