The early nineteenth-century campaign against flogging in the army

Lord William Bentinck said in 1835 that flogging had diminished 'a hundred, perhaps a thousand fold' since his early years in the army around the turn of the century. The reformers made much of the comparisons they were able to draw, and in 1835 their case seemed to be strengthened further when Lord William Bentinck, as governor general of India, issued an order prohibiting the flogging of troops in the native army. The ‘New Liberal’ interpretation of early nineteenth-century history offered by J. L. and Barbara Hammond around the time of the First World War laid considerable stress on the role of liberal humanitarians and reformers in parliament — men who could ‘break through the prejudices of their class’ and campaigned for such causes as penal reform, popular education and the regulation of child labour.