Week Fourteen – Liberalism and Colonialism
Core Questions:
1. Is John Stuart Mill's support for colonialism consistent with his views on liberty and
representative government? Can we separate it out from the rest of his views and set it
aside, or does it run deeper? Does it give us reason not to read, or take seriously, Mill's
work today?
2. Do liberal ideas necessarily lead to, or naturally tend to lead to, the justification of
colonialism (or to hide its injustices)?
3. What exactly is it that makes colonialism morally wrong? Can we use liberal ideas to
answer this question?
Lecture
- Whilst John Stuart Mill was a devote campaigner for political rights, he was an active
defender of imperial and colonial relationships.
- The British East India Company was formed in 1600. It established trading posts on
the Indian costs, and elsewhere. It deployed military forces to its area of domain.
- In 1757, military victory gave the East India Company control over huge chunks of
Indian territory.
- Through further military conflicts, the Company increased its control.
- In some areas of India, the Indian rulers were left in place but controlled by the
company (puppet rulers).
- The Company performed many tasks normally fulfilled by governments: tax
collection, imposing of social reforms (banning the Sati).
- 1857 was the year of violence: it saw many battles occur all over India between
Indian populations and the East India Company. Some of these, such as the Battle of
Cawnpore were incredibly violent. This was a time which saw many violent acts
targeted specifically towards white women (the house of ladies). These battles were
suppressed by the East India Company.
- The British Raj, a period of British direct rule over India lasted between 1858-1947.
India was ruled by viceroys appointed in Britain, and governed according to British
economic interests. Indian populations were relegated to subordinate status. This
succeeded rule by the East India Company. At this time in history Britain had
developed other imperial relations with different nations (the Americas and
Australia).
- John Stuart Mill for a long time in his life, was an employee of the East India
Company.
- James Stuart Mill, Mill’s father, wrote The History of British India. This booked
openly disparaged Indian people and their culture. It was a popular reference point
during the British imperial period. It presented Indian society as ‘primitive, barbaric,
and corrupt, and the people as ignorant, lazy, dishonest, and degenerate’ (Habibi,
2016).
, Week Fourteen – Liberalism and Colonialism
- One quotes from the book reads as follows: ‘A duly qualified man can obtain more
knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during
the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India’.
- Children are influenced by their parents. JSM happened to be educated directly by
his father from an early age, and this book was part of his education.
- Mill opposed racism. He despised the idea that ‘one kind of human beings are born
servants to another kind’.
- However, he believed that colonialism would be good for the colonised. He believed
colonised peoples to be simplistic compared to European standards. His profound
belief in developmental individualism and progress meant he believed that
colonisers could advanced colonised nations. He saw it almost as a parent-child
relationship.
- Freedom and representation could only apply to societies sufficiently advanced.
Before representative government is introduced, society must be taught how to
obey law.
- Other liberals, such as Locke, argued along similar lines.
- There can be two approaches to the relationship between liberals and colonialism.
The first is that Liberals, like Mill, because of prevailing attitudes/ prejudices of the
time, failed to extent their liberal principles to non-European people. But that isn’t
the fault of liberalism directly. Another way to approach this is to say that liberalism
inherently/ inevitably leads to the justification of colonialism.
- Uday Singh Mehta has argued that liberals’ encounter with empire reveals a deep
problem with liberalism more generally. He believes that liberalism contains within it
a inherent justification of colonialism. The core feature of liberalism that Mehta
focusses on is universalism: Liberal theory treats all people as alike and tends to
assume that all humans, or rational beings, have in common universal rights. The
issue with this, is that liberals take the white European male experience to be
universal for all people, which excludes those who don’t fit in with this specific
category. Essentially, imperialism in India involved an encounter with the unfamiliar:
‘where the historical connection between these two peoples was limited – and
where moreover there were constraining traditions, self-understandings, and
extant political and social practices, belief systems: in a word, diversities of
experience and life forms’. [1999, 8-9] The tendency for liberals, Mehta suggests,
was to look for commonalities, and to attempt to understand unfamiliar people and
practices in terms of familiar generalisations that didn’t fit them. This imputes ‘to the
unfamiliar an impenetrable inscrutability that eviscerates their potential as forms
of life and terminates the quest for understanding them’ [1999, 18]. This leads,
according to Mehta, to the understanding of colonial subjects as children (as we saw
in Mill). Therefore, imperialism is seen as necessary for development, like parental
authority.
- Charles Mills has suggested that liberal theory, and particularly the social contract
theory, generalises from experiences of some, and ignores the subordination of
others. Liberal social contract theory is part of a domination contract: a contract
formed in the interests of a dominant class and secures submission to an unfair
