Robert Kaplan draws a comparison in the NYT between this blog's namesake revolt and the war in Iraq. He argues that rather than evangelizing instant democracy, the U.S. should temper its ambitions:

... Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India - to make it more like England - were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule... The bloody debacle... did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.

Kaplan's description of the British Empire pre-Sepoy Rebellion is oddly enervated. Modernize India? Methinks the evangelicals were mainly interested in conversion. To them, heathen Hindus were the sub-Saharan Africans of the 19th century, a teeming continent of raw material for Christianity. Alexander Pope chastised Hindu beliefs in his 'Essay on Man':

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler Heav'n,
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no Angel's wing, no Seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Similarly, Utilitarian icon John Stuart Mill was a lifer in the British East India Company...

... although he is often regarded as a champion of liberty and one of the greatest nineteenth-century Western philosophers, he spent most of his career serving an administration that exercised authoritarian rule over a culture that modern scholars might describe as the epitome of "the Other."

... although he had redeeming qualities:

Governor-General Bentinck, influenced in part by Macaulay's now-infamous "Minute on Indian Education", where the languages and literatures of India are summarily dismissed as worthless, scarcely worthy of the attention of even children, ruled in favor of the Anglicists... Mill decried the attempt to denigrate Indian learning and demean the integrity and knowledge of the country's traditional intelligentsia.

And the 'more pragmatic' British empire Kaplan refers to was one focused more purely on strip-mining its colonies of assets. At arm's length, it was strictly business once again.

Like Kaplan, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria also draws a parallel between Iraq and colonial India.