British Empire Liberal Mission

7/28/2019 British Empire Liberal Mission

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/british-empire-liberal-mission 1/21

The British Empire and Its Liberal MissionAuthor(s): Andrew SartoriReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 623-642Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509149 .

Accessed: 31/10/2012 20:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The

Journal of Modern History.

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509149?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509149?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress



The Journal of Modern History 78 (September 2006): 623–642᭧ 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2006/7803-0003$10.00All rights reserved.

Review Article

The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission*

Andrew SartoriUniversity of Chicago

Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire has been enthusiastically received by asurprisingly broad range of scholars of empire as a powerful contribution to the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism. Mehta’s carefully argued and impressively limpiddiscussion gives articulate voice to themes that have gained significant footing inrecent scholarship: a suspicion of abstraction and universalism and a correlative as-sertion of cultural difference and the power of representations. Yet, viewed from the

perspective of a historian, his argument provokes some fundamental questions abouthow we are to interpret the emergence of modern ideologies that identify “empire”—and, for the purposes of both Mehta’s text and this essay, the British Empire specif-ically—as a vehicle for both the maintenance and the dissemination of modern “civ-ilization.” In this essay, I shall begin by examining Mehta’s core proposition: thatliberal abstraction contains within its basic argumentative structure an immanent pro-pensity for colonial domination. In parts 2 and 3 of this essay, I will draw on somerecent interventions in British intellectual history to suggest that this irreducibly his-

* The books to be discussed in this essay are: David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context, ed. Quentin Skinner, Lorraine Daston, Dorothy Ross, and JamesTully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. xi 239, $60.00 (cloth), $21.99 (paper);C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons,Blackwell History of the World, ed. R. I. Moore (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), pp.xxiv 540, $73.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper); Eugenio Biagini, Gladstone, BritishHistory in Perspective,

ed. Jeremy Black (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. ix 138, $65.00; David Cannadine,Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.xxiv 264, $15.95; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800– 1947 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), pp. xiii 273, $74.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper); Niall Ferguson,

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (London:Allen Lane, 2002; New York: Basic Books, 2003), pp. xxvi 351, $17.95; Manu Goswami, Producing

India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning, ed. JeanComaroff, Andreas Glaeser, William Sewell, and Lisa Wedeen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2004), pp. xi 401, $50.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropoleand Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),pp. xviii 556, $79.00 (cloth), $29.00 (paper); Bruce L. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish Question (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. x 292, $63.00; Uday SinghMehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. xii 237, $45.00 (cloth), $17.00 (paper); Anthony Pagden,Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, fromGreece to the Present, Modern Library Chronicles (New York: Modern Library, 2001, with newepilogue 2003), pp. xxv 216, $10.95; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and

Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. xv 282, $80.00 (cloth), $24.95(paper). I would like to thank the editors of this journal (especially Jan Goldstein), Ralph Austen,David Como, Spencer Leonard, Steve Pincus, and Robert Travers.



624 Sartori

torical claim needs to be qualified and complicated in the face of, on the one hand,early-modern liberalism’s deep reluctance to endorse the imperial project, and, on the

other hand, Victorian liberalism’s deepening embrace of a historicist-contextualistmode of social analysis and policy advocacy. I suggest that the key to unraveling theshifting ambiguities of liberal attitudes toward empire might lie in a more rigorousattempt to embed the conceptual structure of liberal thought in the sociohistoricalcontexts of its articulation. In the fourth and final part of this essay, I will argue thatthe dominant historiographical trend toward discourse analysis in the field of Britishimperial studies has prevented current scholarship from engaging seriously with pre-cisely this problem of the sociohistorical constitution of forms of liberal subjectivity.

I

Mehta wrestles with one of the great paradoxes in the history of modern politicaltheory: that a society that already by the end of the eighteenth century was beginningto consider itself a democracy was at the same time coming to govern an enormous

empire without consent from or representation of its subject populations (Mehta, 7).More remarkably still, it turns out on closer examination that it has generally been“liberal and progressive thinkers such as Bentham, both the Mills, and Macauley, who. . . endorse the empire as a legitimate form of political and commercial governance”(Mehta, 2). In contrast, it was Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism anda virulent critic of democracy, who in the annals of modern political theory mostconsistently expressed “a sustained and deep reluctance toward the empire” (Mehta,2–3).

Two mutually related factors conditioned the liberal encounter with the non-Western world. First of all, there is “the fact and the awareness of the inequalityof power” that gives to liberal thought its confident, assertive expansiveness (Mehta,11–13). This first condition is itself tied to a second, more profound one—a moralflaw residing at the very heart of liberal thought, constantly tempting it with an “urgeto dominate the world” that, even if it does not inevitably lead to imperialistic practicalconsequences, is nevertheless internal to its discursive logic (Mehta, 20). This deeperflaw is in fact the true villain of Mehta’s work, in relation to which liberalism canstand only metonymically: namely, abstraction. The universalism of what Mehta callsthe “cosmopolitanism of reason” positions “the unfamiliar” as always already an-swerable to an abstract schema of thought that had itself been established through thecontingencies of the particular cultural configuration of just one part of the world:“Liberalism . . . was self-consciously universal as a political, ethical, and epistemo-logical creed. Yet, it had fashioned this creed from an intellectual tradition and ex-periences that were substantially European, if not almost exclusively national”(Mehta,1). Through a careful reading of Locke, Mehta shows how liberal thought from thebeginning had had to manage the gap between the alleged universalism of its con-ception of human nature and the actual realization of responsible liberal subjects.“Locke presumes on a complex constellation of social structures and social conven-tions to delimit, stabilize, and legitimize, without explicitly restricting, the universalreferent of his foundational commitment” (Mehta, 57). In colonies like India, whosesocieties were characterized by dense and long-established relations of sentiment,hierarchy, and dependence, British liberals found themselves confronted forcefully bythe hidden parochialism and exclusionary logic of their creed. But cushioned by theasymmetry of power at the heart of this encounter, they were able to foreclose the



The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission 625

challenge through an intellectual sleight of hand that used the concepts of “history”and “civilization,” as social homologies of Locke’s discourse of “education,” to me-

diate the relationship between the abstract universalisms of liberal thought and theconcrete unfamiliarity of other ways of life. Just as for Locke children were not yetpolitical subjects, so too in nineteenth-century liberalism the nonwhite colonies hadnot yet reached their maturity and so required paternal rather than consensual gov-ernance.

The hero of Mehta’s text is Edmund Burke—albeit a Burke refracted through thelens of twentieth-century phenomenologism. At the core of Mehta’s admiration isBurke’s refusal to plug India into a preestablished category of difference— his refusalto deny the coevality of the West and India; to foreclose the conversation by dis-missing those unfamiliar “sentiments, feelings, and attachments through which peoplesare, or aspire to be, ‘at home’” as evidence of backwardness; or even to be temptedby the mastery implicit in the subsumption of the “singularity” of the unfamiliar intothe more familiar intelligibility of the “general” (Mehta, 19–20). By recognizing theuniversal role of “prejudice”— the irreducible embeddedness of individuals in inher-

ited structures of sentiment and attachment that are always local and finite (Mehta,21)—Burke challenged teleological rationalism in the name of a “cosmopolitanismof sentiments” that grasped the deep attachments to locality and community that haveso bemused liberal thinkers.

II

One inevitable correlate of the textualism of a political theorist like Mehta is—andthe irony will presumably not be lost—an abstraction of the logic of the texts fromtheir historical context. “Political ideas,” he acknowledges, “do not just have impli-cations that flow from them with the frictionless ease of a mathematical deduction. . . .Their meaning, as ideas, has everything to do with the context of their provenanceand reception, and the friction they encounter in their engagement with reality”(Mehta, 9–10). But on a more careful examination it becomes clear that historical“context” enters Mehta’s argument only as either an external variable subsequent tothe articulation of the ideological form (the relationship of domination as a precon-dition for the transformation of liberal ideology into colonial policy) or a consequenceof a structure of ideas (empire as a logical extension of liberal exclusionism). Mehtais here deeply representative of the wider trend in contemporary historical scholarship,wherein sociohistorical context is most often seen to inflect or orient, rather than morefundamentally to constitute, the conceptual terrain of discourse and hence the worldsof meaning inhabited by determinate historical subjects.

Mehta does of course argue that the “psychological aspects of experience,” includ-ing reason itself, “always derive their meaning, their passionate and pained intensity,from within the bounded, even if porous, spheres of familial, national, or other nar-ratives” (21). But questions remain: Does abstraction, as a psychological mode, alsopartake of this contextual contingency? And, if so, what has made it so very differentfrom other, allegedly less aggressive forms of social or political discourse, such asBurke’s protohermeneuticism? What is it about liberalism’s meaning-giving context,in other words, that makes its logic abstract ? Leaving these kinds of questions un-addressed inevitably opens the door to the all too common tendency to position ab-straction as a kind of “original sin” of the West— the kind of transhistorical reificationwhose ideological origins lie in Nietzsche. Edward Said’s contention that there is a



626 Sartori

deep civilizational root to the West’s will-to-power over the East would be an influ-ential case in point.1 Mehta is careful to elide the issue entirely.

Whether the phrases that implied this lofty vision [of liberal cosmopolitanism] . . . weremerely strategic terms of art designed to support a noble patron or humble a monarch ortwo in a local conflict, in a context where the protocols of political pamphlets and theo-retical texts were much the same, is now a mute [sic] point. If these were mere localmetaphors they are by now literally inscribed with a universalistic referent. The reason forthis, in part, is that successive generations of liberal thinkers have endeavored to give moreglobal and concrete expression to this original imaginary, while simultaneously their com-patriots— adventurers, traders, evangelicals, generals, and even occasionally the professedliberal theorist himself—succeeded in marking more and more of the globe in the colorassociated with the Union Jack. In the empire, one might say, liberalism had found theconcrete place of its dreams (Mehta, 36–37).

Western—or perhaps even more specifically, British—exceptionalism became ab-

stract universalism through the institutional vehicle of empire. But this does not reallyresolve the fundamental issue; it accounts (adequately or otherwise) for the univer-salization of liberal discourse, but still not for its original inclination toward an ag-gressive mode of abstract thinking.

The problem is far from being just Mehta’s. Rather, it inheres deeply in conven-tional narratives of Western civilization, where the primal inclination to abstractionmight be as easily celebrated as condemned. Anthony Pagden has reiterated the storyof the Western linkage of empire and universality in his recent popular survey of European expansion “from Greece to the present,” Peoples and Empires. And whereelse should he begin his panorama but with Alexander the Great’s ambitions to builda world empire through which he might act as “the conciliator and arbitrator of theuniverse” and thus “unite East and West, Asia and Europe, Hellene and barbarian,”effacing an old enmity apparently lodged in the primordial collective unconscious of the West given its “origins . . . in the myth of the rape of Europa—an Asian princess

abducted to western shores—and in the story of the Trojan War—a struggle over awestern woman abducted to eastern shores” (Pagden, 13). From Alexander, it is moreor less a straight shot to Rome, which added both new possibilities for prosperity and,perhaps more importantly, a universal system of codified law. From Caracalla’s dec-laration of universal citizenship within the Roman world in 212 AD “it was but abrief step to declaring that Rome was the ‘common homeland’ of the entire world,and an even shorter step to declaring that those who were not citizens, and showedno desire to become citizens, should, if only in their own long-term interests, beobliged to do so” (Pagden, 31). In this narrative, the immanent aggression Mehta seesin liberalism would really stand in metonymic subordination to a more general ten-dency toward aggressively universalistic abstraction in the Western tradition. WithConstantine’s conversion in 312 AD, a final ingredient was added to this Westernstriving for imperial universality as a pluralistic polytheistic pagan societytransformedinto a monotheistic Christian one (Pagden, 36). Of course, with the decline of Rome

and the rise of Islam, the two world-conquering monotheisms would have to duke itout for universal supremacy for a millennium or so, until the West was reawoken inthe period of early modernity gradually to encompass the globe with its thirst for

1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).




power and its mission of Christian salvation, whether by force (Sepulveda) or per-suasion (Las Casas).

Pagden’s own widely read scholarship has served to register the significance of amajor historical disjuncture separating the territorial logic of the Iberian empires fromthe new “empires of trade” that celebrated not the older aspiration to “universal em-pire” but rather “the civilizing and humanizing power of commerce” (Pagden, 86). 2

At the core of this new model of empire was the belief that “commerce and successfulcapital accumulation can take place only in free societies” (Pagden, 89). Yet, by theend of Peoples and Empires, slavery and the deepening racism of Britain’s secondempire have effectively converted this very ideology of commercial freedom into anew incarnation of the aspiration to universal empire. “The vision of empire as theexpansion of civilization, of the benevolent rule of the more gifted and more able . . .[was] the one aspect of the Roman world that the modern imperialist could adopt withpride” (Pagden, 98). The conclusion Pagden arrives at in his final chapter is thus theinevitable outcome of a narrative that began back with Alexander and Caracalla:namely, that “the modern heirs of Alexander tend to assume that a rule of law that

respects individual rights and liberal democratic government (as practiced in theUnited States) is a universal, and not, as it most surely is, the creation of Greco-Roman Christendom,” and that the modern “law of nations” embodied institutionallyin the United Nations is merely a more modern, glossier version of the Western willto universality embodied by Caracalla’s vision of a universal civitas (Pagden, 168–69). In other words, when the British wrapped themselves in togas, it was not solelya historical appropriation serving either interpretive or legitimating functions but morefundamentally the acknowledgment of a real and constitutive historical filiation. Weare left with a vague sense that Western universalism—the abstraction that is the trueobject of Mehta’s critique—is at root a “civilizational” affair, part of the West’s con-stitutive cultural legacy.

Not all historians would go along with Pagden’s subordination of the historicalspecificity of the early-modern conception of an “empire of trade” to the overarchingcontinuity of his civilizational narrative. In The Ideological Origins of the British

Empire, David Armitage has turned his attention to the crucial moment of the emer-gence of a new imperial imagination during Britain’s first empire, sidelining bothliberalism and universalistic abstraction entirely in his examination of the origins of a peculiarly “British” conception of empire. Armitage carefully disaggregates the mid-eighteenth-century self-identification of the British Empire as “Protestant, commercial,maritime, and free” (Armitage, 8) to show how each of these elements was the out-come of specific political debates that occurred within the context of a negotiation of the relationships between the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in thecrucial era of early-modern state-formation of the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenthcenturies. Armitage shows successively how each of the key discourses that organizedthese debates fell short of adequately grounding the conception of the British Empirethat emerged at the end of his period of study: imperium fails to provide a model of assimilation; Protestantism’s hostility to Catholic universalism led English authorsgenerally to eschew arguments from grace; and classical republicanism struggled withthe classical contradiction, posited by Sallust and reinforced by Machiavelli, betweenliberty and empire. Armitage is clearly trying to offer a genealogy of the conception

2 Compare Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500 to c. 1850 (New Haven, CT, 1995).



628 Sartori

of a “British Empire” that emphasizes the contingency of its emergence upon a conjunctural configuration of discourse and political interest rather than on some under-

lying motive-agency such as the Protestant belief in a doctrine of grace. Thus therepublican (n.b., not “liberal”) effort to reconcile liberty and empire only finds a wayforward once both these terms come to be grounded in commerce as the modernsafeguard of the salus publica. In the end, it was only by taking cognizance of thenondiscursive fact of the expanding trade linking the interests of the three kingdomsand their transatlantic colonies that it became possible to integrate the different dis-cursive elements of these debates into a coherent notion of a “British Empire.” Bygrounding empire in this new form of expansion, a specifically British maritime em-pire (wherein liberty, a concept still drawn from an enduring republicanism, bothencourages and is encouraged by commercial activity) could avoid the dangers of territorial empires (wherein the weight of imperial expansion must inevitably crushcivic life). Political economy thus came to serve not just as a technical language of administration but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, as a language of “politicaland constitutional argument” through which could be imagined a new form of polity,

in which colonies and metropole were linked by a common set of interests (Armitage,166). For Armitage, then, there is no deep logic to that peculiarly Britishreconciliationof liberty and empire—it was rather an ideology formed out of a peculiar discursivenexus in which liberalism would seem to have had no constitutive role at all.

Armitage is implying that the peculiar British paradox of a freedom-loving empirehad already arisen in British thought as a conjunctural curiosity even before liberalismhad achieved any real political significance. That, of course, might not really changeanything for an analysis of liberalism’s heyday in the nineteenth century—though wemight well imagine that a historian as committed to contingency as Armitage seemsto be would be nonplussed by the abstract logic of Mehta’s argument. Yet there isalso reason to think that a form of liberalism was playing a crucial role in Britainmuch earlier than Armitage suggests. Steve Pincus seems to agree with Armitage thatthe emergence of the British conception of an empire of liberty is better understoodin terms of an ideological claim rather than as a form of identity.3 In contrast toArmitage, however, he has argued compellingly for the rise of a specifically “liberal”form of ideology in the 1650s, one that drew on the republican language of libertyand public weal to make political-economic arguments that were utterly incompatiblein their core postulates and ultimate social aims with the neo-Roman theory of Ma-chiavelli. Most defenders of the Commonwealth in the 1650s did not share the hostilityof Harrington and Milton to commercial society—a hostility grounded in the repub-lican claim that “the only proper basis of political power lay in landed wealth.” In-stead, they saw in the “massive expansion of English trade, domestic and foreign, inthe early modern period” the basis for a new theory that “valued human choice [and]the human capacity to produce wealth” as the most powerful forces that could beharnessed and deployed to underpin both the public good and the strength of anewly emerging state.4 By the 1680s, this radical Whig espousal of human labor as a

3 For a summary of approaches to the study of the formation of a British imperial “identity” (incontrast to the formation of ideological claims about British imperial identity), see Jack P. Greene,“Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in The Oxford

History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 208–30.

4 Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society




potentially infinite source of wealth underpinned the embrace of the Glorious Revo-lution and the financial revolution with which it is associated. In contrast, it was

Jacobites and Tories who took over the republican theory of political economy, pos-iting that land was the source of all real wealth, that wealth itself was consequentlyfinite by its very nature, and that the new Bank of England could serve only toreinforce the corruptive influence of commercial society. The logical sequelae of thesetwo different visions of political economy for the theory and practice of trade were,according to Pincus, fundamentally different. The Tory argument, which through thepower and influence of Sir Josiah Childe dominated the policies of the East IndiaCompany, implied that trade was a zero-sum game in which one nation could onlybenefit at the expense of another by accruing more of the earth’s finite product foritself. A central aim of overseas policy would necessarily be territorial acquisition.The radical Whig argument, in contrast, saw trade as an encouragement to commercialsociety and hence wealth creating and eschewed territorial ambition in favor of peace-ful exchange. As a result, this early liberalism was profoundly critical of the policiesof the East India Company. Indeed, radical Whigs sought (and very nearly attained)

its abolition in the 1690s, and they supported the endeavors of the “interlopers” whosought to trade in India outside of the Company framework.5

The implications of Pincus’s argument for the relationship between liberalism andempire are profound in at least two key ways that I think warrant emphasis. First of all, we have to recognize that it was in fact early-modern liberalism itself that devel-oped an elaborate critique of both territorial imperial expansion and the activities of the East India Company. From this perspective, the idiom of moral outrage expressedby Burke was surely drawn from the anti-Company attacks of Lockean liberals (asmuch, perhaps, as his antibourgeois rhetoric and his faith in “the noble ancient landedinterest” were grounded in the Tory tradition).6 Pagden cites Richard Price (the radicalliberal against whom Burke would later fulminate at such length in his Reflections on

the Revolution in France) condemning in 1776 the East India Company’s conquest,plunder, depopulation, and ruination of “millions of innocent peoples by the mostinfamous oppression and rapacity” (Pagden, 95). In the same year, Adam Smith ar-gued that the Company’s interests qua company and its interests qua sovereign wereincommensurable and that if a company could not pursue trade in the East Indieswithout a monopoly, it ought not to trade there at all. Viewing the disastrous milita-rization of the English and French mercantile presences in India as undertaken underthe “pretence of securing their persons and property from violence” at the hands of what was in reality a “mild and gentle people,” he was clearly drawn to the visionof a free trade in the East Indies carried on by private merchants to the benefitof both parties.7 It was only after the fact of the East India Company’s acquisition of

and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 103 (June 1998):705–36, at 707, 708, 716.

5 Steve Pincus develops these arguments in greater depth in his forthcoming book, The First Modern Revolution, part of which he has kindly allowed me to read in manuscript form.

6 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, 1987),34, 43, 96. I am also indebted to Spencer Leonard, and to his (unpublished) paper, “Interest, Ideology,and Retroactive Agencies: Formation of Imperial Intent toward India in the Metropole, 1758–1765.”

7 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannon(Chicago, 1976), 2:149–58, 254, 343–44. See also on the conceptual problems posed by globalcommerce and empire for the early economists, Emma Rothschild, “Global Commerce and the Ques-tion of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces,” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004):3–25.



630 Sartori

sovereignty that he considered the only possibility for such a mutually beneficial freetrade to lie in an intervention by the British government to establish the crucial dis-

tinction between commercial and governmental functions. It is certainly true, as Su-dipta Sen has highlighted, that Smith’s mode of argument would ultimately serve tohelp transform the Company state’s interventions in Indian society into a form of moral agency, for it was only through political intervention that the ground for a freemovement of goods in India could be cleared.8 This in turn would allow Smithianpolitical economy to be integrated into the patriotic moral rhetoric that linked libertyand dominion as elements of Georgean state formation (including in the colonialinstantiation of that process, the Company state).9 Yet this still leaves an importantqualification: Smith’s argument only practically entails a liberal imperialism oncesovereignty over India has been acquired. In other words, it implies a mode of rulein domains already acquired under morally, politically, and economically unsavoryconditions, nevertheless maintaining a principled stance against imperial expansionas such. Until the end of the eighteenth century, liberalism would appear to haveremained hostile to the kind of territorial expansionism pursued in India—a historical

periodization that the existing literature generally offers us little help in explaining.If liberalism had a logically immanent propensity for imperial aggression in thisearlierperiod, it was surely toward the nonagricultural native peoples of North America, whohad failed to appropriate land through labor. Native Americans would not appear tofare much better in Burke’s hands, however, for it is precisely in contrast to American“gangs of savages” that he sought to establish the political rights of Indians (Mehta,186).

The second implication of Pincus’s argument is perhaps the more fundamental.Pincus is quite explicit in connecting the emergence of liberalism not merely to thestrictly contingent illocutionary dimensions of political debate and the claustrophobichorizons of inherited political discourses from which Armitage proceeds but also toliberals’ “political experiences, and the realities of their daily social and economicengagements.”10 In other words, the abstractness of the categories of liberal thoughtemerges not in spite of an array of concrete relationships and institutions (parentage,gender, etc.) on which they in reality depend but rather in some kind of constitutiverelationship to the new social, economic, and political practices of the first “truly self-conscious commercial society.”11 The logical implication would be that the abstractionthat characterizes liberalism’s basic mode of thought is not simply a misleading dis-avowal of the secretly constitutive role of particular concrete institutions, and there-fore it cannot simply be unmasked through disaggregative gestures toward paternalpower or pedagogical discipline. Rather, that abstraction must have emerged in re-flective response to (as much as through political advocacy of) a real abstract logicinherent in the forms of practice characteristic of this new commercial society. It wassurely just such a form of practical abstraction that Smith elaborated so clearly withthe juxtaposition of, on the one hand, concrete human relationships of benevolence,sympathy, and love, and, on the other hand, the exchange of labor that binds individ-

8 Sudipta Sen, “Liberal Government and Illiberal Trade: The Political Economy of ‘ResponsibleGovernment’ in Early British India,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in

Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, 2004), 136–54.9 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New

York, 2002).10 Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism,” 712.11 Ibid., 707.




uals in relations of objective social interdependence (regardless of sentiment, personalfamiliarity, or even bare physical encounter) that can be grasped through the (abstract)

categories of political economy.12 Pincus effectively writes against the attempts of thepast several decades to dissolve the novelty of Locke’s arguments into the contingen-cies of the political moment in which he wrote and the Western intellectual traditionfrom which he drew. He grounds the irreducible modernity of the liberal vision notin cultural particularity, but in a new form of social organization whose “Westernness”was neither primordial nor constitutive.13

III

Mehta’s theoretical juxtaposition of liberal and Burkean positions is surely legitimateat a certain level of abstraction, and it works well when applied to the unapologeticbrutality and radically optimistic energy of James Mill’s utilitarian conception of rationality. It does, however, present historians with something of a challenge whenthey try to think historically about liberalism as a Victorian ideological formation. Inhis understanding of the role of the Mills in India, for instance, Mehta implicitlyprivileges Eric Stokes’s masterpiece, The English Utilitarians and India, over morerecent work by Lynn Zastoupil. This is not coincidental, as Stokes not only identifiedthe same sharp juxtaposition of theoretical abstraction and Burkean historicism in theapproaches of different colonial policy makers, but he was also interested in seeinghow utilitarian ideas were put into action—tested out, as it were—in the subconti-nental laboratory.14 This, of course, fits well with Mehta’s own sense of liberalism asoperating from a fundamental erasure of the landscape of colonial lifeworlds. ButMehta’s sidelining of the implications of Zastoupil’s work effectively allows him toavoid confronting some of the difficulties of his reading of the younger Mill that areposed at a specifically historical level. For Zastoupil has argued that Mill’s engage-ment with India transformed his earlier, broadly Benthamite approach to the colonialcontext into one deeply shaped by precisely the kind of conservative, Burkean tra-dition that we might call romantic historicism. His defense of East India Companyrule against the move to abolish it in favor of direct metropolitan control in 1858, forexample, took the form of an argument that the apparently baroque irrationality of itsinstitutional structure, though lacking “theoretical recommendations to render it ac-ceptable,” had ultimately (after the initial abuses of its mercantilist origins) proved aprogressive agent of government precisely because it “grew up of itself, not frompreconceived design, but by successive expedients, and by the adaptation of machin-ery originally created for a different purpose.” Rather than leaping to action on thebasis of abstract theoretical criteria, in other words, the rulers of foreign countriesneeded gradually to acquaint themselves with “the laws, customs, [and] social rela-tions” of their subjects precisely because of the opacity of their unfamiliar social andpsychological environments.15

12 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:18.13 A convenient summary of such arguments is to be found in James Tully, “The Possessive Indi-

vidualism Thesis: A Reconsideration in the Light of Recent Scholarship,” in Democracy and Pos-sessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C. B. Macpherson, ed. Joseph H. Carens (Albany,NY, 1993), 19–44.

14 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi, 1989).15 Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, CA, 1994), 176–80.



632 Sartori

In England’s Disgrace? an exhaustive reading of Mill’s lifelong engagement withIrish issues, Bruce Kinzer traces broadly the same transition in thought that Zastoupil

described in Mill’s thoughts on India. In his earliest writings on Ireland from the1820s, Mill saw its poverty and oppression through the lens of a classically Bentham-ite critique of aristocracy (Kinzer, 18–19). In other words, Ireland’s problems were just an exacerbated version of the problems in England, whose aristocracy and estab-lished church were the object of the same kind of vehement critique from the stand-point of utilitarian rationality that would be directed at Indian society (Kinzer, 27–28). Kinzer’s reading could in certain respects be seen to reinforce the thesis of immanent aggression in liberal thought: James Mill’s discussions of Irish issues barelyspoke of Ireland at all, “subsuming the particular under the general so completely asto make it almost invisible” (Kinzer, 10); the younger Mill rejected any notion of arepeal of the Act of Union, supported by his father, on the moral grounds that Englishmisgovernment had failed to prepare Ireland for a responsible self-rule (Kinzer, 33–34); and even as late as 1848 (well after his engagement with romanticism) he wroteof the Famine as an unparalleled opportunity—a “terrible calamity” that had “quelled

all active opposition to our government” so that “Ireland was once more a tabularasa, on which we might have inscribed what we pleased” (Kinzer, 47–48).

Like Zastoupil, however, Kinzer also shows how John Stuart Mill’s interest inIreland gradually shifted, beginning with an increasing interest in the moral and ma-terial conditions of the Irish peasantry that was largely absent from his early writings(Kinzer, 28, 45–48). Mill increasingly advocated forms of peasant proprietorship asleading to the transformation of an indolent, ignorant, and uneconomical cottier-tenantry into an industrious, prudent, and thrifty peasantry (Kinzer, 60–64). In this,however, Mill was moving against the grain of more narrow arguments regardingIrish agricultural reform in mid-century English liberalism, which sought fundamen-tally “to make Ireland more like England” by reinforcing forms of contract againstcustomary claims embodied most importantly in the Ulster tenant right (Kinzer, 90–95). Mill would increasingly shy away from advocating the authoritarian exercise of state power in Ireland to leap directly to the liberal values he unquestionably continuedto espouse, siding with Gladstone’s moderate liberalism over J. E. Cairnes’s stridentespousal of secularism in the Irish university controversy. Mill espoused in his laterwritings a deeper commitment to adapting legislation to the specific circumstances inwhich it was to act, increasingly defending both peasant proprietorship and customarytenurial rights from the more conventional criticisms drawn from classical liberalismand political economy. In the words of Philip Bull, Mill thus “contributed substantiallyto a renewed assertion in Ireland of instinctive and inherited beliefs about land oc-cupancy” (cited in Kinzer, 213).

As Kinzer has underlined, Mill’s most trenchant statements of liberal confidencein On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government were written at themoment of his greatest distance from Irish affairs (Kinzer, 104). It remains a puzzleto be sorted out, however, how the axiomatic hostility to “custom” that Mill expressedin On Liberty fits with his own contemporary moves toward the embrace of “custom”as a form of colonial governance in India. Mill’s arguments are surprisingly congruentin their basic formal structure with those of Victorian conservatives like Sir HenryMaine, who similarly matched his espousal of liberal individuality (“contract”) withhis seminal recognition that political economy’s flawed attempt to “generalize to thewhole world from a part of it” led it to underrate the “great body of custom andinherited idea” manifest in Indian social institutions—institutions that were “equally




natural, equally respectable, equally interesting, equally worthy of scientific obser-vation” as those of modern Europe.16 And just as one might expect, this ambivalence

was not confined to the great political theorists of the Victorian era. Eugenio Biagini’sshort overview, Gladstone, argues that Gladstone’s turn to liberalism always remainedat heart a “conservative radicalism” aimed at renewing the stability of social, religious,and political traditions through reform (Biagini, 71 –72). Even his efforts at franchisereform partook of this overall drive for national moral restoration, juxtaposing therespectability and rectitude of artisans and working men to both the landed gentry,who “no longer exercised their privileges with Peelite self-denial,” and the middleclasses, who “were unfit to discharge their electoral duty on behalf of the rest of thecountry” (Biagini, 43, 57–58). He thus not only portrays the Grand Old Man of nineteenth-century liberalism as deeply motivated throughout his career by the faithof a providentialist High Church man but also portrays his thought and policy asfundamentally grounded in beliefs about the organicism of the state, the importanceof historical specificity, and a common national past, “a historicist approach to con-stitutional conservation through reform, a ‘restorative conservatism,”’ and even (de-

spite his assertive conception of “Christendom”) a profound sense of responsibilityfor the rights of the colonized, all inspired by the writings of Burke (Biagini, 10– 15).

One might be tempted to see such equivocations merely as forms of gradualism—that is to say, an argument that the full entry into political responsibility is necessarilypreceded by a period of parental or political tutelage (Mehta, 195–200). But Mill wassurely arguing that the path to political responsibility in Ireland could travel onlythrough passages demarcated by the logic of Irish agricultural society. If that is thecase, then Mill’s liberal gradualism comes to look a lot like Burke’s conservativesensibility, or, for that matter, like Sir Thomas Munro’s sense that the British role inIndia was to strengthen an Indian constituency of individuals already forming a na-scent civil society that had begun to emerge from an indigenous process of fragmen-tation of ascriptive communal social bonds.17 Indeed, David Cannadine’s recent essay,Ornamentalism, serves precisely to remind us of a broad-based formal recapitulationof Burkean conservatism in the high colonial period—even if it eschews any seriouseffort to explain the periodicity of this mode of imperial imagination. Cannadinehimself is primarily concerned to show how the British Empire of the high-imperialperiod operated in terms of interpretive and institutional analogies between Britishclass-formations (by which he means structures of status and deference rather thanobjective relationships to the means of production) and forms of aristocracy and privi-lege in its colonies (both white and nonwhite). One direct implication of this argumentwould be that liberalism underwent a major retreat in the imperial ideologies of thisperiod. Surely James Fitzjames Stephens’s rejection of the universality of liberal prin-ciples through a reassertion of the authoritarian impulses of utilitarianism is merelythe converse of the younger Mill’s retreat from the aggressive confidence of his fa-ther’s judgments to a more cautious, proto–social-scientific historicism. Both pointtoward a deepening culturalist identification of liberalism with Westernness beginningin the later nineteenth century.

16 Sir Henry Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West (New York, 1880), 183, 224, 233.See also George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine, 1822–1888(London, 1969), esp. 91–106, 119–22; Zastoupil, Mill and India, 183–91.

17 See Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire(Delhi, 1989).



634 Sartori

I am certainly not suggesting that the way to grasp the historical tendency of liberalabstraction and Burkean romantic historicism to converge partially beginning around

the mid-nineteenth century is through a laundry list of conceptual ambiguities. It isin the end the clarity of Mehta’s theoretical juxtaposition that is the most appealingaspect of his approach—something that distinguishes the rigor of his analysis fromthe more conventionally biographical mode of Kinzer’s work. But it is only by ex-tending the analysis to include the sociohistorical constitution of liberal ideology thatwe might reconcile Mehta’s insights into the theoretical logic of nineteenth-centuryliberal attitudes toward empire with Kinzer’s insights into its attempts to engage withromantic historicism. In order to understand this antinomy of liberal abstraction andconservative contextualism in a way that does not constantly fight against, but rathermight help elucidate, the complexities of the ideological formation that wasnineteenth-century liberalism, it is necessary to go beyond the reification of abstractthought and concrete lifeworld to think about how both terms of this antinomy weresocially and historically produced in relation to each other. Such a project wouldnecessarily have to begin by locating both these tendencies within a more complex

understanding of the historical dynamics of colonialism, balancing attention to themodernizing or civilizing project with a correlative emphasis on the contradictory,antimodernizing dimensions of colonial rule: the marginalization of regions like SouthAsia from their relative centrality within the world’s manufacturing economy duringthe precolonial era, the formation of India’s “traditional” peasant society through thesettling of mobile populations and the destruction of the precolonial indigenous manu-facturing sector, and the rigidification of “traditional” forms of hierarchy and theinstitutional affirmation of scriptural religious authority.18 Seen from this perspective,Mehta’s oversimplification of the attitude of the liberal tradition toward empire wouldseem to stem from a primary reduction of empire itself to the single dimension of thepedagogical project of modernization or civilization.

IV

Catherine Hall’s recent study of abolitionist Baptist missionaries, Civilising Subjects,

sets out to braid narratives of the refashioning of political and social identities inJamaica and Birmingham in a way that resituates both locations (colony and metro-pole) within a single analytical field. Hall’s narrative first traces the aspirations andimplications of radical evangelical liberalism in which universal emancipation througha baptismal purgation of the burden of the past (slavery and ignorance) would producea society of free petty producers modeling their new life on the English middle class.

18 Some important contributions on these issues include Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge, 1981); C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the

Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge History of India, ed. Gordon Johnson, C. A.Bayly, and John F. Richards (Cambridge, 1988), 2.1; Susan Bayly, Castle, Society, and Politics in

India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, The New Cambridge History of India, ed.Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards (Cambridge, 1999), 4.3; Nicholas B. Dirks, The

Hollow Crown: Et hno-History of an Indian Kingdom, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993); Lata Mani,Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998); Rajat Kanta Ray,“Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 508–29; DavidWashbrook, “India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism,” in The Oxford History of the British

Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 395–421.




She then proceeds to show the subsequent declension of this discourse in the face of the new realities of postemancipation Jamaican society, realities that included both

the resurgence of African traditions in a “distinctive peasant culture” that defined thepostemancipation “African-Jamaican way of life” and the correlative unwillingnessof many black Jamaicans to remain humbly subservient in perpetuity to the whitemissionary’s exemplary function as a performer of middle-class domestic and socialvirtues (Hall, 137–38, 198). As a result, the missionaries were increasingly led to juxtapose their own (British) manly individuality to the effeminized laziness and mis-chievousness of the ex-slaves—a process that helped reconstitute a British “manlycitizenship” that ultimately fed into the new franchise inaugurated by the Reform Billof 1867. Reinforcing a growing body of scholarship that has shown a hardening of racial attitudes from around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hall argues that thisshift also produced, even within missionary discourse, an increasing naturalizationand essentialization of the differences between colonizer and colonized as innate char-acteristics of the races (in sharp contrast to the earlier missionary critique of circum-stantial disadvantages belying the reality of a universal brotherhood of man).19

Hall has certainly produced an engaging, archivally rich narrative. Yet her work ultimately falls short of its stated aim to examine the constitution of raced and gen-dered forms of colonial and metropolitan subjectivity. While she dutifully cites thework of Thomas Holt, she effectively marginalizes his most important insights. ForHolt, transformations in Jamaican racial ideologies were inseparably connected to thedynamics of capitalist society, which set in motion two contradictory movements:while “the economic [conception of liberal freedom] demanded greater scope forindividual expression,” both the necessity that the freed slave be available for wagelabor and the impossibility of granting full rights of citizenship to freed slaves without“threatening an economic system based on inequality” meant that political exigency“required greater constraint” on those same individuals.20 In contrast to this dynamicsocial analysis, Hall provides us with a sensitive examination of the shifting coordi-nates and complexities of the “subject-positions” of historical agents—that is to say,how they were contingently positioned as white or black, civilized or savage, mas-culine or feminine, in relation to other historical subjects. But the basic categoriesthat structure the possibilities of such subject positionality are divorced from thestructural dynamics of social context and simply assumed as given. Neither the (West-ern?) discourse of labor shared by missionaries and planters nor the “African” tradi-tions that reemerged from latency among the emancipated appear, in the culturalistterms of Hall’s account, to have been constituted in the specifically “imperial” contextthat is the subject of her study; rather, they seem to have emerged from what can onlybe understood by default as a residual yet ultimately foundational “local” historicity.Moreover, her use of key terms like “gendered” and “raced”—unexceptionable inthemselves as descriptive analytics of subject positionality—presumes the availability

19 Also on Jamaica, see Thomas Holt, TheProblem of Freedom:Race,Labor andPolitics in Jamaicaand Britain, 1832–1938, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, ed. Rebecca J. Scott,Sidney W. Mintz, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Baltimore, 1992). For a discussion that links devel-opments in Indian racial discourse with events in Jamaica, see Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj,The New Cambridge History of India, ed. Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards(Cambridge, 1995), 3.4. And for a brief discussion of Africa, see T. C. McCaskie, “Cultural Encoun-ters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in Porter, TheOxford History of theBritish Empire,3:665–89.

20 Holt, Problem of Freedom, 6.



636 Sartori

of these discursive categories as markers of difference rather than explaining thepotency and significance of their role in the (inter-)subjective lives of people on both

sides of the colonial divide. If she had been content merely to show the ascendanceof a hyperracialized identity in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the term “raced,” de-noting an ideological categorization new to that period, might carry more explanatorypower. But since she is broadly in accord with Mehta in seeking to unveil the coevalityof liberal universalism and racial consciousness, we are left without a clue as towhence might have come the fundamental salience of “race” as a category constitutiveof identity across the divide of liberal and postliberal missionary discourses. Andwhereas Mehta is able to locate the motivation of liberalism’s discriminatory logic inthe disjuncture between abstraction and unfamiliar, concrete lifeworlds, Hall can onlygesture toward the historically unmotivated, prejudicial category of “race” as thehistorical means to resolve the contradictions between liberalism and colonial rule(Hall, 203). It is true that she takes great care to argue that racial representation(including the subject positions constituted thereby) is “not a closed system” but rather“operated in relation with historical events, playing a part in the constitution of mean-

ing in those events, but also being reconstituted in those moments” (Hall, 276). Thisis an unexceptionable formulation, as far as it goes, of how objective circumstancesand subjective orientation are mutually mediating. Yet the movement of this mediationbegins by taking a structure of representation as given and then showing how it wassubsequently impacted by performative contradictions. Since “race” enters the anal-ysis already constituted, subject positions can only really be reconfigured and reori-ented within the structuring logic it provides, while the sociohistorical constitution of the structure itself (assuming that it is just one structure that perdured through thetransition she recounts) is never analytically approached. It is not so surprising, then,that her language comes close to implying at times that missionary radicalism andplanter racism were just minor variations on the same fundamental racism (Hall, 435–36).

Just about everyone working on British imperial history in the American academyat this point seems to accept Hall’s contention that “British” and “Western” identitieswere, as discursively produced forms of subject position, fundamentally marked byinstability and flux. Indeed, the approach on which the self-declared “new imperialhistory” has staked its claim to newness has been a sharper focus on the specificallycultural dimensions of empire, on conjunctural contingency and performative ambiv-alence, and on the mutually constitutive effects of the connections linking metropoleand colony. The Island Race, a collection of essays by Kathleen Wilson (one of themost prominent advocates of the new imperial history), sets out to decenter the his-torical constitution of eighteenth-century English identity with a deliberate focus onEngland’s embeddedness within imperial relationships. Proceeding from a postcolon-ialist and poststructuralist emphasis on the productive power of “difference,” her aimis to show how the “solitary and singular” insularity of the national subject of Britishhistory was always engaged in a mutually constitutive relationship with its colonialothers and was always internally fractured.21 “As a historical process,” Wilson pro-poses, “identity is tentative, multiple and contingent, and its modalities change overtime” (3). From Wilson’s standpoint, it is inadequate merely to say that Englandmastered the seas and ruled an empire, for “England” itself came into being through

21 On the centrality of “difference” to the new imperial history, see especially Wilson’s introductionto Wilson, A New Imperial History, 1–26.




its mastery of the seas and rule of its empire, “the product of its own potent andirreducible ties to a larger world,” and remained in continuous conceptual flux in

response to changes in the dynamics and structure of that wider imperial context.“National identity . . . provided neither a stable and continuous frame of referencenor a full and final recognition” (Wilson, 203–4). “Britain” is not, then, a real his-torical subject perduring through time, but rather a discursive effect produced withina decentered “network” of imperial institutions of commodity exchange, communi-cation, exploration, travel, and so on that served to link metropole and colony sys-temically “as interconnected analytical fields” (Wilson, 16).22 England’s essentialistself-conception could thus only be sustained through a profound effort of denial. Infact, it was “at the precise moment when England was less an island than ever before”that “English people were most eager to stress the ways in which their island wasunique, culturally as well as topographically” (Wilson, 5).

With her emphasis on the reconstitution of “England” itself as a category of bothnational identity and civilizational mission, Wilson shares with Hall the project of intimating an approach to historical processes of subject constitution. But her ability

to pursue this agenda is fundamentally compromised by the framework of her analysis,which remains strictly confined to the investigation of subject positionality and thediscursive production of contradiction, inversion, and ambivalence in practices of subjective identification. Her mode of discourse analysis certainly extends beyond themerely linguistic, putting sharp emphasis on the importance of practices. But, oncloser inspection, it becomes apparent that she interprets “practices” almost exclu-sively as instances of the “performance” of (discursive) categories of subjective iden-tity. It is thus “performativity” that serves as the crucial site for the production of thekind of symptomatic ambivalences that she uses to deconstruct essentialist concep-tions of English nationhood (Wilson, 151). Practice, in other words, produces feed-back effects that reconstitute and rearrange the positionality of subjects within therepresentational order; but, as with Hall, the representational order always takes prec-edence in the analytical sequence, and the fundamental representational matrices thatorganize identity (race, gender, class, etc.) are themselves never disturbed. Wilson’sapproach in the end falls short of Foucault’s more stringent analysis of the constitutiveeffectivity of practices in the production of forms of discourse, leading her into aweaker, almost intentionalist form of nominalism according to which the kinds of “difference” encoded in categories like race and gender are “less a verifiable descrip-tive category than a highly mobile signifier for power relations” that serves “not . . .to describe a social reality but to assist in its construction” (Wilson, 93).23 Discursivecategories can thus be “wielded by the guardians of order or reform to fix or refashionthe expectations and values of men and women alike,” without Wilson offering anyserious explanation of those categories’ general persuasiveness or plausibility (Wil-son, 93).24 On the one hand, then, Wilson’s sophisticated emphasis on the complexitiesof discursive processes leaves surprisingly underexamined the assumption of utilitar-ian social interests: one is left to guess whether what lurks behind the performance

22 For a more general discussion of the rise of the concept of “networks” in recent historiographyon the eighteenth-century British empire, see Natasha Glaisyer, “Networking: Trade and Exchangein the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” Historical Journal 47 (June 2004): 451–76.

23 Foucault’s return to the category of “practice” after his earlier structuralism is most pronouncedand powerful in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977).

24 Emphasis added.



638 Sartori

of categories of identity is in the end anything more than the rather conventionalnotion of a self-interested (individual or collective) bearer of instrumental reason. On

the other hand, meanwhile, the eighteenth-century “technologies of the self” thatWilson uses to elucidate the performative dimensions of identity “also required class,gender, sexual, and national identifications” to mark the distinctiveness of this per-formed self (2). Yet now we are back to Hall: what explains the salience, the prioriti-zation, and the specific mode of apprehension of these particular markers of difference?In the end, then, Wilson’s approach matches its inattention to the instrumentalism atthe heart of its model of subjectivity with a correlative inattention to those very cate-gories of difference that are at the heart of her analytic apparatus and that form themost basic coordinates of the matrices of eighteenth-century imperial identity for-mation. Once again, as with both Hall and Mehta, sociohistorical context enters theanalysis too late, as an external variable acting on representational orders that aresimply posited as given.

It is precisely this gap that E. M. Collingham has attempted to supplement throughher invocation of Norbert Elias in her recent monograph, Imperial Bodies. Col-

lingham’s text fits broadly within the Foucauldian investigation of how particulardiscursive regimes serve to define and control bodies, and the result is a rich andinventive archival history of how British bodily practices operated both as a site of internal social control and as “an instrument of authority”—a signifier of social pres-tige— “within a specifically Anglo-Indian ruling strategy” (Collingham, 53). But Col-lingham also seeks to supplement this emphasis on the effectivity of discourses of thebody with an analysis of what Elias would call the “sociogenesis” of bodily practices.“The behaviour of individuals takes place within a structure which is created by theactions of individuals but which has implications and effects which are greater thanthose individual acts. Elias argues that these ‘blind’ structures have a dynamic of theirown” (Collingham, 5). She thus points toward social dynamics that originate not inthe functionalistic domain of strategies of control but in transformations in the socio-historical context that constituted the bodily experience of the British in India. So indealing with the de-Indianization of the British body in early nineteenth-century Indiaand its reconstitution in accord with a more individuated, bourgeois model of subjec-tivity, Collingham emphasizes not only “increased communication with Britain” butalso “changes in the structure of Anglo-Indian society itself” stemming from theconsolidation of British power and the correlative growth in density of the Britishpresence (63–65, 185). Collingham’s invocation of Elias’s theory seems often onlyvaguely elaborated, and in the end it primarily serves only to lay a general groundwork for subsequent discussions that focus primarily on the Anglo-Indian body as “a cate-gory of discourse” (Collingham, 79). Furthermore, while she acknowledges that “onfirst reading, Foucault and Elias appear to be incompatible,” there is little in heridentification of a mere common object of study (“the body as the locus of powerstruggles”) to reassure us that their approaches are in fact theoreticallycommensurable(Collingham, 6). Yet the very fact that she invokes a specifically “social” (rather thandiscursive) theory of the constitution of subjective experience seems to press at thelimits of the discourse-centered analyses of Hall and Wilson. Moreover, in contrastto Mehta, Collingham sets out to ground the constitution of an individuated Anglo-Indian subjectivity in the South Asian context itself, affirming both its similarity toits metropolitan model and the colonial difference that resulted from the displacementof such individuation into a form of other-directed social prestige. As Collinghamherself notes, it is the sociogenetic dimension of her approach that could (at least in




principle) allow her to grasp transformations in British bodily practices in their rela-tionship with contemporary transformations in Indian bodily practices (64).

One might be tempted, following C. A. Bayly’s approach in his magisterial syn-thesis The Birth of the Modern World, to compensate for the narrowness of the focuson representations by multiplying the planes of analysis. For Bayly, the ideologicaldomain of religious and national consciousness becomes just one of several major“prime movers” of the dynamic tendency toward uniformity in the modern world,complemented by the development of a capitalist economy, modern state formation,and the modern public sphere (Bayly, 478–86). Like the new imperial historians,Bayly draws on the concept of “networks” to show how decentered global develop-ments helped to constitute “the West” as the dominant player on the global stage. Yetin some ways Bayly is more committed to challenging narratives of Western excep-tionalism than are practitioners of historical deconstruction like Wilson: he consis-tently tries to make connections between tendencies and events in the West and thenon-West to highlight how tight the linkages that bound together an increasinglynetworked world were becoming in the course of the last three centuries. But what is

really striking in his work, from the perspective of this essay, is that in the face of allhis efforts to demonstrate the broad parallels between different locations within globalnetworks at the level of state formation, economic transformation, identity formation,the emergence of public spheres, and the renewal of religious discourses, “liberalism”alone retains its status as an undisputed moment of “Western exceptionalism” whosedevelopment he traces by gesturing to a narrowly intellectual genealogy (Bayly, 290–93).

Liberalism is hardly an insignificant exception, articulating as it has the ethicalcategories (property, freedom, rights, and equality before the law) of one major tra- jectory of modern political and economic discourse— ethical categories that, in theend, not even Mehta is willing to give up. Yet this reassertion of Western exception-alism must inevitably be the conclusion of an approach that, even as it works hard toshow the mutual impact of economic, political, ideological, and informational “net-works,” proceeds from a primary reification of those networks as fundamentally dis-tinct causal domains. That is to say, if the analytical framework within which onelocates the emergence of liberal discourse is identified from the beginning as a distinctideological domain (intellectual history), then the indisputable absence of any majorparallel development anywhere else renders liberalism a cultural peculiarity of West-ern civilization. To say more would require that the emergence of liberalism be treatedin quite different terms—terms that cannot be contained within the narrower, Skin-nerian model of intellectual history that has achieved such prominence in the Britishacademy. It would have meant treating the development of an intellectual form as partand parcel of wider sociohistorical processes—and correlatively recognizing that boththe modernity and the transmissibility of the practices born of those processes rendertheir ethnicization as “Western” or “British” fundamentally problematic. All Baylycan do to soften the blow of the recognition of this ultimate horizon to the plausibilityof his parallelisms is to add hastily that liberalism was in fact quickly taken up in thenon-West by intellectuals like Rammohun Roy, and so it soon ceased to be a form of exceptionalism (Bayly, 293– 94). At a descriptive level, Bayly is quite right. But thatstill leaves open the larger question of why it was taken up by non-Westerners if itsintrinsic coherence was grounded in a parochial intellectual tradition. Bayly’s answeris that “the rapid expansion of the international market and of European empiresrequired people across the world to adapt these new intellectual tools for their own



640 Sartori

use” (290). But that word “required” can be read in two quite different ways. On theone hand, Bayly can be understood to be endorsing Mehta’s argument that, if liber-

alism emerged from a peculiarity of the Western intellect, it achieved universalitythrough colonial imposition. That would leave us once again to wonder if liberalabstraction is, in the end, just the West’s original sin. On the other hand, Bayly mightbe read as impugning his own schematic separation of causal domains, suggestingthat “ideological,” “political,” and “economic” developments must be understood asintrinsically connected from the beginning.

No one, to the best of my knowledge, is disputing that liberalism did in fact findits earliest articulation in the West. However, much rides on how we interpret thesignificance of this “origination.” As a product of a civilizational impulse, liberalismis irreducibly consigned to cultural particularity. The only way to grasp the globalavailability of its categories is, then, through the pedagogical imposition of a newcultural norm—though it remains to be shown how this approach, so easily pursuedin the Indian context, would work in places where direct colonial domination was nota significant factor (e.g., Japan or Russia). But if we follow the impulse of Pincus’s

work and grasp liberal discourse as a set of subjective categories embedded withincertain constitutive social practices, then we have a much broader canvas of socialtransformation and imperial practice on which to paint the history of liberalism’sglobal dissemination, without having to give up the crucial role played by the BritishEmpire as an (ambivalent) institutional vehicle of the global dissemination of liberaldiscourse precisely in its capacity as the institutional linchpin of the nineteenth-century global political and economic order.25 Liberalism could be grasped as both alanguage of power and legitimacy (as Mehta, Hall, and Wilson argue) and as a his-torically determinate form of thought that is not ultimately reducible to this dimensionof its performative deployment. Ironically, it is probably precisely as a result of thehistory that Hall relates—that of the increasing identification of “liberalism” as anessentially “Western” set of ultimately nontransmissible values— that this deeper di-mension of the constitution of liberal discourse has been so difficult to grasp.

If historical agents act, it is because they are subjects who apprehend the world inparticular ways and pursue particular ends. This does not mean, however, that theirsubjectivity can be conceived as an external variable to sociohistorical structures,since, as the new imperial history itself intuits, sociohistorical context and subjectivepropensity are mutually mediating moments, each serving to reconstitute, and poten-tially also to problematize, the other.26 I take courage from Manu Goswami’s recentanalysis of colonial nationalist and nativist discourses, Producing India—a text thatgoes beyond both the focus on subject position that is characteristic of the new im-perial history and the pluralism of Bayly’s reified causal domains to show how bothcolonial and nationalist forms of consciousness were “coproduced within a common,if asymmetrically structured, social field” (Goswami, 25). Goswami argues that a“territorialization of colonial state power” (33) through the post-Mutiny development

25 For three influential, and analytically quite distinct, analyses that all highlight the institutionalcentrality of the British Empire to the operation and stabilization of the global economy in this period,see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times(London, 1994); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688– 1914 (London, 1993); and Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revo-lution (New York, 1999).

26 See Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Towards a Sociohistorical Concep-tion of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 4 (2002): 770–99.




of communication and transportation infrastructures was a crucial element in the con-solidation of a Britain-centered global economy in the second half of the nineteenth

century, but that that same process of territorialization contradictorily fragmented thehomogeneity of the global political, economic, and social space within which theimperial liberal imagination was at home. The resultant disjuncture in turn constitutedthe practical premise from which the conception of “national space” at the heart of the new indigenist critique of imperialism proceeded. In Goswami’s analysis, practicesare grasped not only in terms of the “performance” of representational structures butalso as constitutive of such representational structures. The result is an analysis of theformation of both objective processes of spatialization and the subjective apprehen-sion of spatial categories that are neither radically contingent nor civilizationallyrooted.

Goswami’s central problem is not the liberal, “civilizing” subjectivity of the col-onizer, but rather the emergence of a counterdiscourse of nativist nationalism. Herwork aspires to grasp how the very conceptual terrain of Indian nationalist dis-course—the basic categorical structure within which subject position operated— was

“sociohistorically” generated in the later nineteenth century through the contradictorylogic of India’s embeddedness within Britain’s imperial economy. We have little ideaof what Britain’s civilizing mission would look like if we followed Goswami’s ap-proach in locating its discursive logic more systematically in sociohistorical structuresof the kind she uses to analyze Indian nationalist discourse. It is clear, however, thatif we want to understand how liberal ideas of imperial responsibility and civilizationalduty were constituted, we must move to fill in the hiatus that separates Pincus’ssuggestive analysis of the emergence of seventeenth-century liberalism from Gos-wami’s analysis of an anti-imperial counterdiscourse itself produced from within thevery same dynamic imperial political-economic structures that provided liberalismwith, in Mehta’s words, “the concrete place of its dreams.” This, of course, wouldmean challenging Mehta’s too-easy separation of abstract logic and concrete lifeworldby insisting on the necessity of embedding both within the complex structures of Britain’s imperial social formation.

It is in the end the failure to address this dimension of liberalism’s historicity thathas made it so difficult to counter at a theoretical level the core proposition of NiallFerguson’s blockbuster tract, Empire: namely, that for all itsfailings theBritishEmpireshould be celebrated for its role in spreading liberal modernity around the globe.Mehta’s work provides no answer to Ferguson because in the end Ferguson’s argumentlargely replicates, albeit with an inverted ethical valuation, the core structure of Mehta’s argument— that a radical British universalism has sought to sweep aside localcolonial parochialisms. What is the real challenge that Ferguson’s argument presentshistorians, regardless of its patently ideological temper? It is the fact that it offers anaccount that links liberalism to the socioeconomic transformation of the modernworld. Even if we discard Ferguson’s nonsense about the underlying and ultimatelytriumphant nobility of the British character (e.g., Ferguson, 302), we are still left withhis stark claim that the empire served to assimilate most of the world into a singleglobal system of economic interdependency, based on the liberal practice of com-mercial exchange, and leading to “the optimal allocation of labour, capital, and goods”(Ferguson, xx–xxi). From the perspective of an argument that locates the most fun-damental and enduring achievement of the empire’s liberalism in objective structuresof institutional and economic practice rather than in a civilizing pedagogy, what pur-chase does the new imperial history’s insistence on the flux and instability of forms



642 Sartori

of subjectivity gain us? An answer to Ferguson cannot cede this dimension of im-perialism in the way that the cultural emphasis of the new imperial history risks doing,

but in the end it would have to confront him at this practical-institutional level of argument. What is the real significance of the text’s one-sided misrepresentations thatmagically transform early-modern mercantilist aggression into the beginnings of whatFerguson understands to be a multilaterally beneficial process of “globalization,” orthe callous imperial regime that presided over some of the worst famines in Indianhistory into a relatively benign “incorruptible bureaucracy” (e.g., Ferguson, 14, 180–82)?27 It is the role these strategic elisions perform in flattening the complexity of theBritish Empire’s position within the global economy as an agent of both modernizationand traditionalization, of both global integration and regional peripheralization. Rec-ognizing this allows us to show how the empire served to deepen the social forms of “backwardness” it simultaneously sought to reform; to show how liberalism’s linkageto the global economic order of modern capitalism was fraught with perilous contra-diction; to show how empire could be an institutional obstacle to the realization of liberal values as easily as (surely, on balance, more easily than) their vehicle; and

ultimately to show how the liberal practices of exchange cannot be prophylacticallydisembedded from the larger, and contradictory, social processes within which theyhave operated and continue to operate in the era of globalization. The current literaturehas evolved an extraordinarily refined understanding of the complexities of subjectpositionality, but it seems ill-equipped to grapple with these larger questions of thehistorical constitution of the basic categorical logic of liberal thought.

27 For an evaluation of some of the specific arguments made in Empire, see Frederick Cooper,“Empire Multiplied: A Review Essay,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (2004):247–72; and the forum on “The British Empire and Globalization,” Historically Speaking: The Bul-letin of the Historical Society 4 (April 2003): 21–36. It is also instructive to read Ferguson’s excul-patory account alongside a work he dismisses without any serious argumentative engagement, MikeDavis’s Late Victorian Holocaust: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London,2001).

British Empire Liberal Mission

Documents

Transcript of British Empire Liberal Mission