Colonial hesitation, appropriation, and citation: Qāsim Amīn, empire, and saying ‘no’

This chapter examines the complex and ambiguous thought of Egyptian jurist Qāsim Amīn. Amīn’s work is fraught with issues of gender and freedom, which are occasioned by ideas about the sociological conditions of modernity that include the premise of natural selection in the competition between societies. Amīn worried that Egypt had made itself unable to compete fully in the evolutionary conflict between societies and linked the competition to normative questions about individual freedom and, especially, the position of women in society. At the same time, Amīn also sought to counter the universalist claims of certain interpreters and critics of Islam. Thus he sought to navigate unsteady terrain in describing the meaning of a progressive society without simply reproducing European ideas. Idris’s chapter demonstrates the difficulty of writing in ambiguous and profoundly asymmetric colonial circumstances. Seeking both to defend and reform Islamic societies – and both admiring and fearing colonial power – Amīn wrote divergent texts for different audiences: in French, he made defensive arguments; in Arabic, reformist. The conclusion of the chapter powerfully illustrates the ways in which the strategy would misfire: European commentators would in the end deploy Amīn’s Arabic language work as support for further imperial entrenchment.

Intellectual flows and counterflows: the strange case of J. S. Mill

This essay re-examines the fact that J. S. Mill’s published work registers surprisingly few direct examples of influence from India, despite his lengthy East India Company career. Situating Mill’s contact with South Asia in the rich history of Anglo-Indian intellectual exchange that colonialism engendered, it argues that this missed opportunity to connect is striking because of the confluence of extraordinary motives and opportunity in Mill’s early life. During the 1830s, European intellectual influences and colonial imperatives combined to lead Mill to advocate a form of Einfühlung—sympathetic understanding of others—at the very moment when the visiting Indian reformer Rammohun Roy was being celebrated across Britain by many individuals close to Mill, such as Jeremy Bentham. Yet Mill never met Rammohun and he virtually ignored the celebrated Bengali in his correspondence and published work. This neglect, the chapter argues, is astounding: not only did Mill and Rammohun campaign alike for freedom of the press in the 1820s, but numerous people that Mill knew used Rammohun’s example to argue that social progress depends on such liberties, a view of progress that Mill shared at the time. The essay concludes that Mill’s rejection of this foundational idea of liberty in favour of the famously restrictive one espoused in On Liberty awaits proper investigation, as does the abandonment of Einfühlung in his later publications.

The indigenous redemption of liberal universalism

This chapter focuses on the uptake of liberal universalism by indigenous thinkers in the settler societies of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. It focuses on five thinkers—Peter Jones (Canada), Charles Eastman and Zitkala-Sa (U.S.), Apirana Ngata (New Zealand) and William Cooper (Australia)—who accepted the Christian faith and belief in the perfectability of human beings of their settler overlords. Here, we see the ideas of the colonizers taken up with little revision. Where there was little chance that the colonizers might go away, these figures took up the ideas of the colonisers and sought to show that they held implications for social life much different than the practices currently in existence. They took the principle of human perfectability seriously, by saying that it applied truly universally—to all human societies, their own and the colonizers’ alike. ‘What was important about liberal universalism’, Rowse concludes, ‘was that every branch of humanity, including those that colonized, must be measured against a civilized standard.’

Introduction: when ideas travel: political theory, colonialism, and the history of ideas

Ideas travel. The history of political thought as it has generally been studied is deeply interested in these forms of travel and in the transformations that occur along the way. Ideas of a social contract first crystallize in the England of Hobbes and Locke, and then travel in branching ways to Jefferson’s North America, Robespierre’s France, Kant’s Prussia, and elsewhere. In their travels, these ideas hybridize with others, are repurposed in new social contexts, and often take on political meanings deeply divergent from what their originators intended. Students of the history of political thought are acutely aware of these complexities in the development of European political ideas during the early modern and modern eras, given the centrality of such ideas for shaping the political worlds in which we now live....

Marxism and historicism in the thought of Abdullah Laroui

This chapter investigates the contemporary Moroccan scholar Abdullah Laroui, who has been active since the late 1960’s in a variety of works and genres. Daifallah demonstrates that Laroui’s thinking has continued to use Marxism as a central intellectual resource up to the present, even as his work has become less explicit about that source given changes in time and circumstance. Throughout his prolific corpus, Daifallah argues, Laroui deploys Marxist forms of historicism as a tool for envisioning a more appealing future that bypasses the colonizing and other problematic tendencies of liberalism. In this way, Laroui seeks to sensitize readers to the contingency of their current circumstances and to open space for envisioning new, heretofore novel, possibilities for a world free of colonialism and domination. This future, Laroui suggests, will adopt many of the ‘principles and dreams’ of European thought, while shaking free of its brutality, domination, and exploitation. Laroui’s Marxism illustrates the continuing fecundity of rival universalisms, and demonstrates that debate about the stakes of divergent social theories is by no means concluded in the contemporary world.

Confronting colonial otherness: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the limits of imperial legal universalism

This chapter examines British imperial rule of law and its relationship to colonial difference. The ideal of impartial legality within the British Empire was embodied in a supreme right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a right continues in force even in a few locations today. During its more active periods, the Privy Council saw itself as the instantiation of the idea of rule of law across the empire, and therefore as a profound force toward world-spanning legality and social order. Yet this universal aspiration toward the rule of law did not lead toward simple assertions that all peoples throughout the empire should immediately adopt British social forms. Instead, the judges sought to assimilate existing patterns of social life to a shared juridical order. Theirs was a universalism that did not insist upon the same rights for everyone, regardless of who and where they might be, but rather emphasized the submersion of all local legal orders to the rule of the empire’s central court. As Ibhawoh notes, many of the questions that occupied the Privy Council continue to matter today as developing systems of international law replay many similar, difficult debates.

The other Mahatma’s naive monarchism: Phule, Paine, and the appeal to Queen Victoria

Jyotirao Phule, often called ‘the other Mahatma’, drew on writings of Thomas Paine and the experiences of the American Civil War to argue for the rights of Sudras and other non-Brahmins to govern themselves as a people free of Brahmin domination. Phule was inspired by arguments about the constituent authority of the people to choose their own form of political life. Yet, in his view, the long intellectual domination of Sudras by Brahmins had left them far less ready for freedom than recently-freed American slaves, unable even to conceptualize the need for their freedom. Curiously, given his admiration for the anti-monarchical Paine, this led Phule to appeal to Queen Victoria to improve British rule by freeing it of corruption and error. The chapter argues that this is not simply a naïve monarchism, but in many ways a canny one, which appeals to—and calls to account—the one figure in a position to end both British abuses and deeper, more abiding patterns of Brahmin domination. The movement and hybridity of ideas here is both clear and surprising: the anti-monarchic Paine is wedded with the epitome of monarchy, Queen Victoria.

Rethinking resistance: Spencer, Krishnavarma, and The Indian Sociologist

Given both a traditional Sanskrit and an English education in Gujarat, Shyamji Krishnavarma became known in India as a Sanskrit scholar at a young age, and this reputation eventually brought him to England. Yet Krishnavarma was no simple Anglophile: deeply committed to the reformist Hindu Arya Samaj movement, he became a radical voice for anti-colonialism through the pages of his journal The Indian Sociologist (1905-1922), which was published first in London to wide international circulation, before moving to Paris and eventually Geneva to avoid legal repercussions. As this chapter outlines, Krishnavarma scorned the passivity of India’s moderate nationalists in favour of violent opposition to British rule, yet he also avoided the spiritualism and romantic attachment to violence of many of India’s ‘extremist’ leaders. Krishnavarma turned, instead, to the social theory of Herbert Spencer as the inspiration for a cosmopolitan anti-colonialism. In his work, ones sees the uptake of Spencer’s British anti-colonialism for Indian purposes. But far from simply echoing Spencer or British liberalism, Krishnavarma was an active adapter and creator, with a particular goal of putting theoretical conceptions drawn from those sources into political practice.

Troubling appropriations: Pedro Paterno’s Filipino deployment of French Lamarckianism

This chapter traces the unsettling ways that racial thought sometimes travelled in colonial contexts. In the late nineteenth century, Filipino intellectual Pedro Paterno wrote creatively about the ethnology and history of the Philippines, arguing that history revealed that particular qualities were inherent to certain races and racial mixtures, and further arguing that one such group of the Philippines was doomed to extinction whereas another was destined for a bright future. His arguments derived from contemporary French political and intellectual debates about race in the context of (increasingly anti-Semitic) nationalism, which themselves creatively appropriated the conclusions of the earlier Lamarck. But the connections are not as straightforward as they might seem: Paterno used arguments that opposed each other in the French context to support his claims about the contrasting qualities, and so destinies, of these two groups in the Philippines.

The New World ‘sans-culottes’: French revolutionary ideology in Saint-Domingue

This chapter focuses on the Haitian Revolution and its brief moment of impact in France’s National Assembly. During the early portions of the Revolution, Haitian revolutionaries – former slaves – asserted their claims to the ‘rights of man’ in strong and direct ways, following up on their successful military action with petitions to the new government in France. For a moment in the midst of the two revolutions, the idea of the ‘rights of man’ reached across boundaries of race and geography, as the National Assembly voted to end slavery in Haiti and other colonies. These thin trans-Atlantic bonds did not last long, however, as the rights of man were overridden by racism, violence and, finally, the resumption of slavery. The flow of ideas back to the metropole was thus profoundly incomplete. The chapter illustrates, moreover, the dangers in interpreting the Haitian Revolution too strongly through these French terminologies. The Haitian revolutionaries who adopted the language of the rights of man were themselves few in number and unrepresentative. A far larger portion of the Haitian population identified much more strongly with a different kind of universal practice, one lacking its own theoretical canon: the process of marronage, of running away from enslaving and domineering social structures to live on their own terms in any way possible.