Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill's Defense of British Rule in India

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 586-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Tunick
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
The West ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British East India Company

Some critics of John Stuart Mill understand him to advocate the forced assimilation of people he regards as uncivilized and to defend toleration and the principle of liberty only for civilized people of the West. Examination of Mill's social and political writings and practice while serving the British East India Company shows, instead, that Mill is a tolerant imperialist: Mill defends interference in India to promote the protection of legal rights, respect and toleration for conflicting viewpoints, and a commercial society that can cope with natural threats. He does not think the principle of liberty is waived for the uncivilized or that the West should forcibly reshape them in its own monistic image. Mill's tolerant imperialism reflects a tension between liberty and moral development that also surfaces when Mill thinks about the scope of government in civilized societies.

INDIA-U.K. Trade: A phenomenon of sliding scenario

2012 ◽  
Vol 01 (09) ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
S M Shafi
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
European Community ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Mutual Trust ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Market Opportunities ◽  
The Relationship

Until 1973 when U.K., was not the member of European Community (now European Union , India’s trade was not geographically as diversified. This was purely due to the reason that India’s Trade was almost exclusively with U.K. Indian merchandise would find other destinations in the European continent only as re-exports from Britishers. India’s trade relations with U.K., are based upon long nourished relationship fostered during British rule in India with British East India Company as its promotor plateform. Based upon mutual trust between the trading communities of the two countries and facilitated with market opportunities, the relationship got further stronger even after India’s independence from Britain. However, with U.K. joining European Union, India’s trade started getting diversified and trade volumes with U.K started showing falling trends. The present paper traces out the behaviour of falling trade scenario with U.K.

John Stuart Mill on China’s Stationary State

2021 ◽  
pp. 833-856
Author(s):  
Yue Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Stationary State ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Mutual Effect ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Stationary States ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Stagnation

Current literature on John Stuart Mill’s writings about Asia have focused mainly on his relationship with India because of Mill’s thirty-five year career in the East India Company. Scholars in both China and the West have not paid attention to Mill’s views on China. This paper delves into Mill’s notion of China’s stationary state from two perspectives: (1) a stationary state of capital accumulation and (2) a stationary state of human improvement. In Principles, Mill explained his conception of stationary state. He linked China’s economic stagnation to the low desire for capital accumulation. In On Liberty and Considerations, Mill explored the reasons for China’s stagnancy in human improvement. He discussed the negative impact of the “despotism of custom” on individual liberty and the defects of a bureaucratic government in nineteenth-century China. Mill thought that a stationary state of capital accumulation does not necessarily imply a stationary state of human improvement. However, he seemed to argue that, in China, these two types of stationary states have a mutual effect upon each other.

Colonial Deindustrialisation of India

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
Brijesh K. Mishra ◽  
Siddhartha Rastogi
Keyword(s):  
Economic Impact ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Unequal Exchange ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British East India Company

While it is quite well accepted that the British rule imposed a heavy cost on India in terms of financial and industrial losses, the economic impact of the Company rule is still far from settled. Rule of the British East India Company (BEIC), and later the crown, has the scholars divided on whether the colonial India suffered a systematic draw down of its economic resources—the so-called drain theory. While the British version underplays or denies such a drain, the nationalists suggest it was a major long-term damage. This article reviews and critiques the economic policies of the British Raj in detail to know whether there was at all a drain of resources out of India and, if yes, to what extent. It was found that while the nationalists exaggerated effects of the drain, their arguments hold significant value. Finally, drain theory is assessed in the backdrop of the theory of unequal exchange.

scholarly journals John Stuart Mill and the practice of colonial rule in India

2020 ◽  
pp. 175508822090334
Author(s):  
David Williams
Keyword(s):  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British State

John Stuart Mill’s justification for British rule in India is well known. Less well known and discussed are Mill’s extensive writings on the practice of British rule in India. A close engagement with Mill’s writings on this issue shows Mill was a much more uncertain and anxious imperialist than he is often presented to be. Mill was acutely aware of the difficulties presented by the imperial context in India, he identified a number of very demanding conditions that would have to be met if Britain’s imperial mission was to be successful, and he was very troubled by the dangers posed to this mission from politics in Britain. Toward the end of his life, Mill become much more pessimistic about the progressive possibilities of British colonialism, in part because of what he thought had happened after the transfer of British rule from the East India Company to the British state. A focus on Mill’s arguments about the practice of British rule in India goes some way to providing a more nuanced account of what Mill thought about colonialism.

Shipped but Not Sold

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Um
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The West ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Yemen hosted a lively community of merchants that came to the southern Arabian Peninsula from the east and the west, seeking, among other products, coffee, at a time when this new social habit was on the rise. Shipped but not Sold argues that many of the diverse goods that these merchants carried, bought, and sold at the port, also played ceremonial, social, and utilitarian roles in this intensely commercial society that was oriented toward the Indian Ocean. Including sumptuous foreign textiles and robes, Arabian horses, porcelain vessels, spices, aromatics, and Yemeni coffee, these items were offered, displayed, exchanged, consumed, or utilized by major merchants in a number of socially exclusive practices that affirmed their identity and status, but also sustained the livelihood of their business ventures. These traders invested these objects with layers of social meaning through a number of repetitive ceremonial exercises and observances, in addition to their everyday protocols of the trade. This study looks at what happened to these local and imported commodities that were diverted from the marketplace to be used for a set of directives that were seemingly quite non-transactional.

Know Your Rights: The (un)making of the colonial legal subjects in rural North India, circa 1770–1857

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
DU FEI
Keyword(s):  
Rural Population ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
British Rule ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
Revenue Administration ◽  
Legal Subjects ◽  
Education And Law ◽  
Law Making

Abstract This article examines the entanglement of administration, education, and law in North India under early British rule. While there exists extensive discussion on each of these three themes, historians have not paid enough attention to the processes in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, the official minds of the East India Company gradually came to imagine its revenue administration in North India at the institutional intersection of state bureaucracy, village schools, and the law courts. I will argue in this article that through this intersection of knowledge/law-making, the Company wished to foster an ‘enlightened’ but simultaneously obedient subjecthood among the Indian rural population. The contested relationship between the state, the local Indian officials, and the villagers in general, however, thwarted this patronizing ambition.

John Stuart Mill and Royal India

Utilitas ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Policy Statements ◽  
Daily Occupation

Though John Stuart Mill's long employment by the East India Company (1823–58) did not limit him to drafting despatches on relations with the princely states, that activity must form the centrepiece of any satisfactory study of his Indian career. As yet the activity has scarcely been glimpsed. It produced, on average, about a draft a week, which he listed in his own hand. He subsequently struck out items that he sought to disown in consequence of substantial revisions made by the Company's directors or the Board of Control. He also listed items that achieved publication (mostly only in part) as parliamentary papers and they amount to about ten per cent of his drafts. The two lists, published in the most recent volume of his Collected Works, reveal, at the least, the ‘political’ despatches from which he did not seek to dissociate himself. The despatches were not entirely his work and authorship in the conventional sense may not be assumed. They were the product of an elaborate process, in which many hands were engaged. At worst, they were his work in much the same way that an Act of Parliament is the work of the Crown Solicitor who drafts the bill. At best they were his as are the drafts of a civil servant who believes in policy statements that he prepares for his political masters. The greatest English philosopher and social scientist of the nineteenth century was, in his daily occupation, an employee. His Company was charged with initiating policies for the Indian states and they were subject to the control of a minister of the Crown.

scholarly journals Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sutapa Dutta ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British History ◽  
National State ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Complex Phenomena

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted

scholarly journals Socio-Religious and Political Changes in Punjab during the Second Half of Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karanbir Singh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
The State ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Precautionary Measures ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Anglo Indian

<div><p><em>After the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the East India Company defeated the Khalsa Army of Lahore Darbar in two Anglo-Sikh Wars. Being astute political masters, the British felt the lurking fear of simmering discontent among the Punjabis against their rule. For safeguarding the logistics of administration, efficacious precautionary measures were undertaken by them to satisfy the grievances of certain sections of the society so that British rule would face lesser political instability and enmity of the natives. After 1857, the British conducted a thorough study of ethnographic, fiscal, geographical, political, social and religious conditions of Punjab and oriented their administrative policies to suit the best interests of the Empire.  Far-reaching political, economic and social changes were introduced by the British to strengthen their hold over all branches of administration. A new administrative hierarchy, composed of Anglo-Indian elements was firmly established and it embraced every activity of the state.  </em></p></div>

scholarly journals Translocal Anglo-India and the Multilingual Reading Public

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-298
Author(s):  
James Mulholland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Poetry ◽  
Anglo Indian

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)

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