In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Focusing on key crisis-moments in the history of colonial India, 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 debates about terror generated by the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how extra-judicial violence was integral to colonial sovereignty and explores how the terrorizing threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized. Based on original archival research and drawing on recent theoretical work on sovereignty and the exception, Terrorism, Insurgency and Empire, 1830-1947 examines Indian-English literary traditions in transaction and covers fiction and journalism by both colonial and Indian authors, tracing their contending engagements with terror. It includes critical readings of several significant early Indian works for the first time, from neglected fictions such as Kylas Dutt's fable of anti-colonial rebellion A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 (1835) and Sarath Kumar Ghosh's epic The Prince of Destiny (1909), to dissident periodicals like Hurrish Chunder Mukherji's Hindoo Patriot (1856-66) and Shyamji Krishnavarma's Indian Sociologist (1905-14). These are analysed alongside canonical works by Anglo-Indian authors such as Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1838), Rudyard Kipling's short fictions, and novels by Edmund Candler and E.M. Forster. As a reflection on the cross-cultural experience of terror, this highly original study concludes with a reappraisal of Gandhi's political philosophy of ahimsa or non-violence as an inspired tactical response to the terror-effects of colonial rule.