colonialism ! its cruelty continues.

Many early campaigns in India in the 18th century were characterised by sepoy disaffection. Britain's harsh treatment of sepoy mutineers at Manjee in 1764, with the order that they should be "shot from guns", was a terrible warning to others not to step out of line. Mutiny, as the British discovered a century later in 1857, was a formidable weapon of resistance at the disposal of the soldiers they had trained. Crushing it through "cannonading", standing the condemned prisoner with his shoulders placed against the muzzle of a cannon, was essential to the maintenance of imperial control. 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/19/end-myths-britains-imperial-past?intcmp=239

                                                    THE RESIDENCY. LUCKNOW


"We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers." So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for "police purposes in outlying places". Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against "uncivilised tribes", had called "a lively terror". Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/07/britains-empire-richard-gott-review?intcmp=239