John Stuart Mill and Royal India

Utilitas ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin J. Moore

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.

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-645
Author(s):  
Betto van Waarden

AbstractAs a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a contested aspect of his theory. Mill advocated democracy and expert bureaucracy and, although researchers see tension between these systems, I argue that Mill saw them as compatible. Consequently, Mill's theory might be more consistent and complete than many believe, and the public administration debate should perhaps no longer be seen in terms of an opposition between expertise and democracy.


Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.


1972 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Kern

As Great Britain passed into the second half of the nineteenth century, she stood on the thresholdof universal manhood suffrage. Precedent for reform had been set in 1832 but in many ways the soul-searching which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1867 was much more traumatic. Rule by a hereditary aristocracy had been weakened in 1832. Narrow suffrage based on property, nevertheless, preserved the principle of elitist rule. Because of this, Parliament was more of an “equalitarian aristocracy” than a modern democratic institution. The system seemed more rational after 1832 but Parliament still represented “property and intelligence” and the political position of the vast majority of people remained unchanged.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDE MARKOVITS

AbstractThis article looks at the political economy of opium smuggling in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in particular in relation to Sindh, one of the last independent polities in the subcontinent. After a description of the smuggling of ‘Malwa’ opium (grown in the princely states of Central India) into China—in defiance of the monopoly of the East India Company over ‘Bengal’ or ‘Patna’ opium, grown in Bihar—it considers the role of Indian merchants and capitalists in its emergence and development, and critiques the argument put forward in a recent book by Amar Farooqi that it represented both a form of ‘subversion’ and that it contributed decisively to capital accumulation in Western India. This article concludes by analysing the role of the opium trade in integrating Sindh into the British imperial trading system, arguing that it was more effective in boosting Empire than in nurturing indigenous capitalism in India.


2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-64
Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Wilson

Abstract When scholars consider Shakespeare’s rise and lasting popularity in modern culture, they usually tell us how he assumed his position at the head of the canon but not why. This essay contends that Shakespeare’s elevation in the early nineteenth century resulted from the confluence of his strategy as an author and the political commitments of his canonizers. Specifically, Shakespeare’s ironic mode made his drama uniquely appealing to the political liberals at the forefront of English culture. In their own ways, Shakespeare and his proponents were antiauthoritarian: the literary antiauthoritarianism in his drama (the irony granting audiences the freedom of interpretation) perfectly matched the political antiauthoritarianism (liberalism) advocated by the likes of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Thus it is possible to speak of bardolatry as an allegorical intertext for liberal politics.


Balcanica ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 85-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivana Pantelic

The paper deals with the reception of J. S. Mill?s writings by contemporary Serbian intellectuals. As shown in the paper, the impact that Millean ideas made on many important Serbian politicians and philosophers from all parts of the political spectrum was broad and profound. Special attention is paid to the work of liberal and socialist thinkers, notably Vladimir Jovanovic and Svetozar Markovic. The influence of Mill?s ideas on Serbia?s political development is also examined, as well as how Mill?s attitude towards the question of women?s rights impacted contemporary Serbian political thought.


1993 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wynne Williams

In his journal for December 31st, 1851, Thomas Babington Macaulay recorded an encounter with Thomas Love Peacock: ‘I met Peacock; a clever fellow and a good scholar. I am glad to have an opportunity of being better acquainted with him. We had out Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and several other old fellows, and tried each other's quality pretty well. We are both strong enough in these matters for gentlemen. But he is editing the Supplices: Aeschylus is not to be edited by a man whose Greek is only a secondary pursuit’ (Life II, 556). This encounter is an illustration of the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain the close study of the Greek and Latin languages was far from being the exclusive preserve of professional scholars and teachers of the classics. Macaulay once wrote that he read Greek ‘like a man of the world’ (Letters III, 111), that is, as someone actively involved in public life, not cloistered in a university or a school. This applied to Peacock as much as it did to Macaulay. By 1851 Peacock had already published six of the seven novels for which he is best known today, but he had also spent about thirty years in the service of the East India Company, during which he had risen to the rank of Examiner: he was in effect a very senior civil servant. His formal schooling had ended when he was twelve, so that he was largely self-taught as a classicist. It was perhaps characteristic of such an autodidact that ‘he delighted to ask an Oxford first-class man who Nonnus was, and to find he could get no information’, and that he should pepper his novels with recondite classical quotations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-351
Author(s):  
Omar Velasco Herrera

Durante la primera mitad del siglo xix, las necesidades presupuestales del erario mexicano obligaron al gobierno a recurrir al endeudamiento y al arrendamiento de algunas de las casas de moneda más importantes del país. Este artículo examina las condiciones políticas y económicas que hicieron posible el relevo del capital británico por el estadounidense—en estricto sentido, californiano—como arrendatario de la Casa de Moneda de México en 1857. Asimismo, explora el desarrollo empresarial de Juan Temple para explicar la coyuntura política que hizo posible su llegada, y la de sus descendientes, a la administración de la ceca de la capital mexicana. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the budgetary needs of the Mexican treasury forced the government to resort to borrowing and leasing some of the most important mints in the country. This article examines the political and economic conditions that allowed for the replacement of British capital by United States capital—specifically, Californian—as the lessee of the Mexican National Mint in 1857. It also explores the development of Juan Temple’s entrepreneurship to explain the political circumstances that facilitated his admission, and that of his descendants, into the administration of the National Mint in Mexico City.


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