Abstract
This paper discusses Romanticism’s complicity in the discourse of empire, arguing that the survivor narratives emerging from the Black-Hole of Calcutta incident preemptively mobilized several tropes of Romanticism such as melancholia and sincerity in responding to an event that threatened the status quo of British power in India. The Black-Hole incident involved the incarceration of 146 English people during the night of June 20, 1756. Twenty-three people survived and told tales. Holwell’s narrative, the most prominent of these, positions itself as “a simple detail of a most melancholy event, delivered in the genuine language of sincere concern.” Holwell’s narrative thus aligned itself with the core values of Romanticism and deployed those values in order to garner sympathy for the conqueror, while relegating the conquered to a status of savage barbarity. The survivor narratives ultimately inform the accounts by Robert Orme, the official historian of the East India Company, and lead to the Battle of Plassey, which inaugurated British territorial imperialism in India.
