Free spaces are arenas insulated from the control of elites in organizations and societies. A basic question is whether they incubate challenges to authority. We suggest that free spaces foster collective empowerment when they assemble large numbers of people, arouse intense emotion, trigger collective identities, and enable individuals to engage in costly collective action. We analyze challenges to authority that invite repression: mutinies of regiments in the East India Company’s Bengal Native Army in India in 1857. We take advantage of an exogenous source of variation in the availability of free spaces—religious festivals. We predict that mutinies are most likely to occur at or right after a religious festival and find that the hazard of mutiny declines with time since a festival. We expect community ties to offer alternate avenues of mobilization, such as when regiments were stationed close to the towns and villages from which they were recruited. Moreover, festivals are likely to be more potent instantiations of free spaces when regiments were exposed to an oppositional identity, such as a Christian mission. Yet even free spaces have a limited ability to trigger collective action, such as when the political opportunity structure is adverse and prospective participants are deterred by greater chances of failure. These predictions are supported by analyses of daily event-history data of mutinies in 1857, suggesting that free spaces are an organizational weapon of the weak and not a substitute for dissent.
AlaviS.1995The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1830. New York: Oxford University Press.
2.
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions1861Missionary Herald, Containing the Proceedings of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, with a View of Other Benevolent Operations, vol. 57. Boston: T. R. Marvin & Son.
3.
AndersonC.2007The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners, and Rebellion. New York: Anthem Press.
4.
AshforthB.2001Role Transitions in Organizational Life. Marwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
5.
Asiatic Journal1827The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies, vol. 23. London: Parbury, Allen.
6.
BakhtinM.1968Rabelais and His World. H. Iswosky, trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7.
BaratA.1962The Bengal Native Infantry: Its Organisation and Discipline, 1796–1852. Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay.
8.
BaylyC. A.1993 “Knowing the country: Empire and information in India.” Modern Asian Studies, 27: 3–43.
9.
BaylyC. A.1996Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. New York: Cambridge University Press.
10.
BearmanP. S.1991 “Desertion as localism: Army unit solidarity and group norms in the US Civil War.” Social Forces, 70: 321–342.
11.
BenfordR. D.SnowD. A.2000 “Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology, 26: 611–639.
12.
BourchierG.1858 Eight Months’ Campaign against the Bengal Sepoy Army during the Mutiny of 1857. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.
13.
ButaliaR. C.1998The Evolution of the Artillery in India. New Delhi: Allied Publishers.
14.
CadellP.1959 “The autobiography of an Indian soldier.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 37: 3–56.
15.
CalhounC.1980 “Community: Toward a variable conceptualization of comparative research.” Social History, 5: 105–129.
16.
CardewF. G.1903 A Sketch of the Services of the Bengal Native Army to the Year 1895. Calcutta: Government Printing Press.
17.
CarrollG. R.SwaminathanA.2000 “Why the microbrewery movement? Organizational dynamics of resource partitioning in the U.S. brewing industry.” American Journal of Sociology, 106: 715–762.
18.
ChaudhuriS. (ed.) 1991Calcutta: The Living City, vol. 1: The Past. New York: Oxford University Press.
19.
ChweM. S. Y.2001Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
20.
ColemanJ. S.1968 “Community disorganization and conflict.” In MertonR. K.NisbetR. (eds.), Contemporary Social Problems: 657–708. San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
21.
CollinsR.2004Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
22.
CookH. C. B.1987The Battle Honours of the British and Indian Armies, 1662–1982. London: Leo Cooper.
23.
CrookeW.1911 “Songs of the mutiny.” The Indian Antiquary, 40: 123–169.
24.
DalrympleW.2007 The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred Knopf.
25.
DavidS. M.2001 “The Bengal Army and the outbreak of the Indian mutiny.” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, University of Glasgow.
26.
DavisN. Z.1975Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
27.
DiFonzoN.BordiaP.2007Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches. New York: American Psychological Association.
28.
DownsT.2000 “Host of Midian: The chapati circulation and the Indian revolt of 1857–58.” Studies in History, 16: 75–107.
29.
DruryJ.ReicherS.1999 “The intergroup dynamics of collective empowerment: Substantiating the social identity model of crowd behaviour.” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 2: 1–22.
30.
DruryJ.ReicherS.2005 “Explaining enduring empowerment: A comparative study of collective action and psychological outcomes.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 35: 35–58.
31.
DuboisJ. A.1823Letters on the State of Christianity in India. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.
32.
DurkheimE.1915Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
33.
EvansS.BoyteH. C.1986Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America. New York: Harper & Row.
34.
FantasiaR.HirschE. L.1995 “Culture in rebellion: The appropriation and transformation of the veil in the Algerian revolution.” In JohnstonH.KlandermansB. (eds.), Social Movements and Culture: 144–159. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
35.
FarooquiA.1998 “Towards Dussehra 1831: The revolt of Lallaji Patel.” Indian Social and Economic History Review, 35: 147–177.
36.
FligsteinN.McAdamD.2011 “Toward a general theory of strategic action fields.” Sociological Theory, 29: 1–6.
37.
ForrestG. W. (ed.) 1893Selections from the Letters, Despatches and Other State Papers Preserved in the Military Department of the Government of India, 1857–58, vols. 1–3. Calcutta: Military Department Press.
38.
FreitagS. B.1989aCollective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
39.
FreitagS. B.1989bCulture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
40.
GamsonW. A.1996 “Safe spaces and social movements.” Perspectives on Social Problems, 8: 27–38.
41.
GilbertA. N.1975 “Recruitment and reform in the East India Company army, 1760–1800.” Journal of British Studies, 1: 89–111.
42.
GoldstoneJ. A.2001 “Towards a fourth generation of revolutionary theory.” Annual Review of Political Science, 4: 139–187.
43.
GoldstoneJ. A.UseemB.1999 “Prison riots as microrevolutions: An extension of state-centered theories of revolution.” American Journal of Sociology, 104: 985–1029.
44.
GoodwinJ.JasperJ.2004 “Caught in a winding, snarling vine: The structural bias of political process theory.” In GoodwinJ.JasperJ. (eds.), Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning and Emotion: 3–31.New York: Rowman, Littlefield.
45.
GouldR. V.1991 “Multiple networks and mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871.” American Sociological Review, 56: 716–729.
46.
GregoireR.PerlmanF.1969Worker-Student Action Committees: France May ’68. Detroit: Black and Red.
47.
GreveH.PoznerJ.RaoH.2006 “Vox populi: Resource partitioning, organizational proliferation and the cultural impact of the insurgent microradio movement.” American Journal of Sociology, 112: 802–837.
48.
GuhaR.1999Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
49.
HatfieldE.CacioppoJ. T.RapsonR. L.1993Emotional Contagion. New York: Cambridge University Press.
50.
HeathC.BellC.SternbergE.2001 “Emotional selection in memes: The case of urban legends.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81: 1028–1041.
51.
HeathcoteT. A.1974The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–1922. London: Hippocrene.
52.
HeitlerR.1972 “The Varanasi house-tax hartal of 1810–11.” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 9: 239–257.
53.
HolmesT. R.1904A History of the Indian Mutiny: And of the Disturbances Which Accompanied It among the Civil Population. London: Macmillan.
54.
HoughW.1855Precedents in Military Law: Including the Practice of Courts-Martial; the Mode of Conducting Trials; the Duties of Officers at Military Courts of Inquests, Courts of Inquiry, Courts of Requests, etc. etc. London: W. H. Allen & Co.
55.
IlbertC.1922The Government of India: A Brief Historical Survey of Parliamentary Legislation Relating to India. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
56.
INSCR Database2011INSCR Database on Coups d’état, 1946–2010. Vienna, VA: Center for Systemic Peace.
57.
JafarS.1975 Qanun-i-Islam. G. A Herclots, trans., and W. Crooke, ed. (First published in 1921.) London: Curzon Press.
58.
JohalD. S.1984 “[Historical significance of]Jhagra jatti te khatrani da.” In SinghF.AroraA. C. (eds.), Maharaja Ranjit Singh: Politics, Society, Economics: 289–291. Patiala, India: Publication Bureau, Punjabi University Patiala.
59.
JohnstonH.2011States and Social Movements. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
60.
JonesJ.2012Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
61.
JoshiP. C.1957 “1857 in folk songs.” In AshrafK. M.JoshiP. C. (eds.), Rebellion, 185: A Symposium: 271–287. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House.
62.
KayeJ. W.MallesonG. B.1888–1889Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, vols. 1–6. London: W. H. Allen.
63.
KelloggK. C.2009 “Operating room: Relational spaces and microinstitutional change in surgery.” American Journal of Sociology, 115: 657–711.
64.
KhanI. A.1998 “The Gwalior Contingent in 1857–58—A study of the organisation and ideology of the sepoy rebels.” Social Scientist, 26: 53–75.
65.
KhanS. A.1873 The Causes of the Indian Revolt, Written by Syed Ahmed Khan Bahadur in Urdu in the Year 1858, and Translated into English by His Two European Friends. Benares: MH Press.
66.
KolffD. H. A.1990Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labor Market in Hindustan 1450–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press.
67.
KuranT.1989 “Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution.” Public Choice, 61: 41–74.
68.
LammersC. J.1969 “Strikes and mutinies: A comparative study of organizational conflicts between rulers and ruled.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 14: 558–572.
69.
LammersC. J.2003 “Mutiny in comparative perspective.” International Review of Social History. 48: 473–482.
70.
LuntJ. (ed.) 1970From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the Life and Adventure of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the Bengal Army, Written and Related by Himself, Translated and First Published by Lieutenant-Colonel Norgate, Bengal Staff Corps at Lahore, 1873. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.
71.
MalikS.20081857: War of Independence or a Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
72.
MallesonG. B.1858The Mutiny of the Bengal Army: A Historical Narrative. London: Bosworth & Harrison.
73.
MarchiR. M.2005 “Altar images: US Day of the Dead as political communication.” Unpublished dissertation submitted to the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego.
MazumderR. K.2003The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab. Delhi: Permanent Black/Orient Longman.
76.
McAdamD.BoudetH.2011Putting Social Movements in Their Place. New York: Cambridge University Press.
77.
McAdamD.McCarthyJ. D.ZaldM. N.1996Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. New York: Cambridge University Press.
78.
McAdamD.TarrowS. G.TillyC.2001Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.
79.
MetcalfT.1994The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 3, part 4: Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
80.
MolloB.1981The Indian Army. Poole, Dorset, UK: Blandford.
81.
MukherjeeR.2002Awadh in Revolt, 1857–58: A Study of Popular Resistance. New Delhi: Penguin.
82.
MukundcharandasS.2005Hindu Festivals: Origins, Sentiments, and Rituals. Ahmedabad, India: Swaminarayan Aksharpith.
83.
NeillS.1984A History of Christianity in India, 1707–1858. New York: Cambridge University Press.
84.
NormanC. B.1971Battle Honours of the British Army. London: David & Charles.
85.
OberschallA.1996 “Opportunities and framing in the Eastern European revolts of 1989.” In McAdamD.McCarthyJ. D.ZaldM. N. (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: 93–121. New York: Cambridge University Press.
86.
OddieG. A.1969 “Protestant missions, caste and social change in India, 1850–1914.” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 6 (3): 259–291.
87.
PalmerJ. A. B.1966The Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
88.
PandeyG.1990The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
89.
PanikkarK. M.1959Asia and Western Dominance. London: Allen and Unwin.
90.
Peel Commission1859 Reports from Commissioners: Nine Volumes: (1) Army, Organisation of Army (Indian), Session: 3February–19April1859, vol. 5. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (House of Commons, Sessional Papers).
91.
PeersD.1995 “Sepoys, soldiers, and the lash: Race, caste and army discipline in India, 1820–50.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23: 211–247.
92.
PollettaF.1999 “‘Free spaces’ in collective action.” Theory and Society, 28: 1–38.
93.
PollockS.1993 “Ramayana and political imagination in India.” Journal of Asian Studies, 52: 261–297.
94.
PorterA. N.2004Religion versus Empire?British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
95.
RedikerM.1987Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
96.
RizviS. A. A.BhargavaB.1957–1960Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, vols. 1–6. Lucknow: Publications Bureau, Information Department, Uttar Pradesh (India).
97.
RobertsonH. D.1859District Duties during the Revolt in the North-West Provinces of India, in 1857: With Remarks on Subsequent Investigations during1858–59. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.
98.
RoseE.1982 “Anatomy of a mutiny.” Armed Forces and Society, 8: 561–574.
99.
RoyT.1993 “Visions of the rebels: A study of 1857 in Bundelkhand.” Modern Asian Studies, 27: 205–228.
100.
RoyT.1994The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857. New York: Oxford University Press.
101.
SampsonR. J.McAdamD.MacIndoeH.Weffer-ElizondoS.2005 “Civil society reconsidered: The durable nature and community structure of collective civic action.” American Journal of Sociology, 111: 673–714.
102.
SavarkarV. D.1909 The Indian War of Independence of 1857. London: Unnamed publisher.
103.
SaxenaK. M. L.1974The Military System of India, 1850–1900. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
104.
SchellingT. C.1960The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
105.
SchimmelA.1980Islam in the Indian subcontinent, vol. 4, part 3. Leiden-Köln: E. J. Brill.
106.
ScottJ.1990Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
107.
SenS. N.1957Eighteen Fifty-seven. Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India.
108.
SinghM. P.1976Indian Army under the East India Company. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
109.
SinghS.1993Battle Honours of the Indian Army, 1757–1971. New Delhi: Vision Books.
110.
StanleyB.2001 “Christian missions and the Enlightenment: A reevaluation.” In StanleyB. (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: 1–21. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
111.
StanleyP.1998White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India. New York: New York University Press.
112.
SternP. J.2008 “‘A Politie of Civill and Military Power’: Political thought and the late seventeenth-century foundations of the East India Company-state.” Journal of British Studies, 47: 253–283.
113.
StokesE.1978The Peasant and the Raj. New York: Cambridge University Press.
114.
StreetsH.2004Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
115.
TaussigM.1990 “Violence and resistance in the Americas: The legacy of conquest.” Journal of Historical Sociology, 3: 209–224.
116.
TaylorP. J. O.1997What Really Happened during the Mutiny: A Day-by-Day Account of the Major Events of 1857–1859 in India. New York: Oxford University Press.
117.
TaylorV.WhittierN. E.1992 “Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobilization.” In MorrisA. D.MuellerC. M. (eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory: 104–130. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
118.
TullockG.1971 “The paradox of revolution.” Public Choice, 11: 89–99.
TurnerV. W.1979 “Frame, flow and reflection: Ritual and drama as public liminality.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 6: 465–499.
121.
TurnerV. W.1986 “Dewey, Dilthey, and drama: An essay in the anthropology of experience.” In TurnerV. W.BrunerE. M. (eds.), The Anthropology of Experience: 33–44. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
122.
Van der VeerP.2001Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
123.
WagnerK. A.2010The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Witney, Oxfordshire, UK: Peter Lang.
124.
ZaldM. N.BergerM. A.1978 “Social movements in organizations: Coup d’état, insurgency, and mass movements.” American Journal of Sociology, 4: 823–861.
