British Atrocities in Kenya

Warning: do not read this if you are eating or about to eat, going to bed, or going to make love.

This happened between 1952-1956, not in the nineteenth century.

"Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound." 

— Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, 2005

An update from Elkins’s new book (2022):

“White and Black agents of empire perpetrated horrific crimes in defense of British rule in Kenya. They used electric shock and hooked suspects up to car batteries. They tied suspects to vehicle bumpers with just enough rope to drag them to death. They employed burning cigarettes, fire, and hot coals. They thrust bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas. They crushed bones and teeth; sliced off fingers or their tips; and castrated men with specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicles “till the scrotum burst,” according to Anglican church officials. Some used a kiboko, or a rhino whip, for beating; others used clubs, fists, and truncheons. “Bucket fatigue” was a routine practice, as were various forms of human excrement torture. Mau Mau suspects and detainees were forced to clean nightsoil buckets barehanded and run for hours around a compound holding a full nightsoil bucket aloft, which then spilled over, encrusting the person holding it with feces and urine. No Kikuyu—man, woman, or child—was safe.” 

–Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence, 2022, pp. 1036-37 in the ebook version.

I doubt it that even the Syrian regime today is using these techniques. It has been killing countless people, but I don't think it is as creative and imaginative as the British were.