“In this unprecedented book, Karuna Mantena engages in a dialogue with the history of political thought, the history of nineteenth-century imperialism, and the genealogies of modern social theory. It will be widely influential.”–Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

“Karuna Mantena provides the first comprehensive account of the centrality of Henry Maine in the transformation of British imperial ideology in the late nineteenth century. With great insight and erudition, Mantena elucidates the connections between Maine’s sociotheoretic model of traditional society and the ideology and practice of British indirect rule.”–Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia University

“Alibis of Empire offers indispensable correctives to the standard intellectual histories of empire. It shifts the focus from political to social theory and concentrates attention on Henry Maine, a figure whose contribution to British imperial ideology was probably greater than that of any other thinker of his time. The book is written with economy and subtlety, and its argument is persuasive and important. It will be of great interest to a variety of readers, especially intellectual historians, historians of empire, and political theorists.”–David Armitage, Harvard University

“This is an important contribution to scholarship on the British empire, one that provides new insights into debates about the changing nature of colonial discourse in nineteenth-century England, the relative strengths of social and political theory at the time and well into the twentieth century, the meaning of ‘culture,’ and the legacy of Henry Maine’s writings for English colonial practice in India and beyond.”–Barbara Arneil, University of British Columbia

“In this unprecedented book, Karuna Mantena engages in a dialogue with the history of political thought, the history of nineteenth-century imperialism, and the genealogies of modern social theory. It will be widely influential.”–Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

“Karuna Mantena provides the first comprehensive account of the centrality of Henry Maine in the transformation of British imperial ideology in the late nineteenth century. With great insight and erudition, Mantena elucidates the connections between Maine’s sociotheoretic model of traditional society and the ideology and practice of British indirect rule.”–Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia University

“Alibis of Empire offers indispensable correctives to the standard intellectual histories of empire. It shifts the focus from political to social theory and concentrates attention on Henry Maine, a figure whose contribution to British imperial ideology was probably greater than that of any other thinker of his time. The book is written with economy and subtlety, and its argument is persuasive and important. It will be of great interest to a variety of readers, especially intellectual historians, historians of empire, and political theorists.”–David Armitage, Harvard University

“This is an important contribution to scholarship on the British empire, one that provides new insights into debates about the changing nature of colonial discourse in nineteenth-century England, the relative strengths of social and political theory at the time and well into the twentieth century, the meaning of ‘culture,’ and the legacy of Henry Maine’s writings for English colonial practice in India and beyond.”–Barbara Arneil, University of British Columbia

Karuna Mantena is assistant professor of political science at Yale University.

ALIBIS OF EMPIRE

HENRY MAINE AND THE ENDS OF LIBERAL IMPERIALISM By Karuna Mantena

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12816-0

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION The Ideological Origins of Indirect Rule…………………………………………..1CHAPTER ONE The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism………………………………………………….21CHAPTER TWO Inventing Traditional Society: Empire and the Origins of Social Theory…………………56CHAPTER THREE Codification in the East and West………………………………………………..89CHAPTER FOUR The Nineteenth-Century Debate on Property………………………………………….119CHAPTER FIVE Native Society in Crisis: Conceptual Foundations of Indirect Rule…………………….148CODA Liberalism and Empire Reconsidered……………………………………………………….179Notes………………………………………………………………………………………189Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………..227Index………………………………………………………………………………………255

Chapter One

THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL IMPERIALISM

In the latter half of the nineteenth century—at the height of British imperial power—moral justifications of empire, paradoxically, receded from the forefront of debates about the nature and purpose of imperial rule. Just as British expansion assumed its greatest geographic reach, an ethically orientated theory of imperial legitimacy, exemplified in the liberal model of imperialism that had become prominent in British imperial discourse since the early nineteenth century, retreated in political significance. Moral justifications of empire were displaced as new sociological understandings of subject societies began to function as alibis for the maintenance of empire.

Since the origins of empire in India in the eighteenth century, major figures of British political thought had struggled not only to make sense of what they considered to be the “strange” and “anomalous” character of British rule in India, but also to construct a politically legitimate and morally justifiable framework for imperial governance. For many, British India was considered to be an unprecedented and contradictory political formation; in Henry Maine’s words, it was a “most extraordinary experiment” involving “the virtually despotic government of a dependency by a free people.” Thus models of imperial government were forged that could stem the flow of the potentially corrupting influences of despotism on metropolitan political institutions as well as offer a form of rule that was, in principle, beneficial for the subject people. And while there were great debates concerning which models of law and governance best fulfilled these goals, in the writings of Edmund Burke, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill there existed a common attempt to frame these debates in ethical terms, specifically in terms of a standard of moral duty concomitant to the status of the ruling power as a free, civilized people.

The liberal model of imperialism, which tied together a theory of imperial legitimacy with the project of improvement, represented the most fully developed moral justification of empire in nineteenth-century Britain. Liberal imperialism came to embody a coherent ideology marked by an intersecting set of justifications and governing strategies centered on the duty of liberal reform as the primary purpose of imperial rule. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the coherence of this vision as well as the political consensus underlying it began to unravel. The central tenets of liberal imperialism were challenged as various forms of rebellion, resistance, and instability in the colonies precipitated a broad-ranging reassessment of the means and ends appropriate to ruling a disparate and expanding empire.

In particular, the equation of “good government” with the improvement of native society, which was at the core of the discourse of liberal empire, would be subject to mounting skepticism. Influential critics such as James Fitzjames Stephen and Henry Sumner Maine cast doubt upon the philosophical assumptions underlying, and political consequences entailed by, the liberal-imperial idiom of improvement. In contesting the theoretical and practical viability of reshaping subject societies such as India along modern (English) models, late Victorian critics provoked a fundamental transition in imperial ideology.

This chapter explores the origins and consequences of the crisis of liberal imperialism as the fulcrum for understanding the transformation of imperial ideology in nineteenth-century Britain. I seek to demonstrate how this distinct shift in attitudes was enabled, in part, by tensions in the theoretical development of liberal imperialism, tensions that were effectively exploited by liberal empire’s sharpest critics. The crisis of liberal imperialism was part and parcel of the waning of moral justifications of empire. As modes of justification became more tentative in terms of their ethical and political aspirations, late imperial ideologies were presented less in normative than pragmatic terms, as practical responses to and accommodations with the nature of “native society.” In this context, new sociological and anthropological theories of native society proved particularly effective as alternative modes of imperial legitimation; they functioned less as justifications than as alibis for the fait accompli of empire.

THE MORALITY OF EMPIRE

… at first English power came among them unaccompanied by English morality. There was an interval between the time at which they became our subjects, and the time at which we began to reflect that we were bound to discharge towards them the duties of rulers. —T. B. Macaulay

Determining the moral constraints on imperial power—the conditions under which imperial rule in India could be deemed legitimate—was central to Edmund Burke’s agenda in the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings (the first Governor-General of India), the founding political drama of British India. Burke’s indictment of early East India Company rule would loom large throughout the nineteenth century and accounts (revisionary and otherwise) of the Hastings trial would be a recurring terrain on which the justification for empire would be debated.

Burke began the impeachment trial by arguing that it was “according to the Judgement that you [the House of Lords] shall pronounce upon the past transactions of India, connected with those principles, that the whole rule, tenure, tendency, and character of our future government in India is to be finally decided.” In doing so, Burke construed the Hastings affair to be a verdict on the moral basis of future empire in India. Alongside Burke’s charges of violations against “the eternal laws of justice”—in the form of treaty violations, arbitrary and despotic government, and acts of corruption committed by Hastings—was a pressing concern to articulate “some method of governing India well, which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill.” In searching for the grounds of good government, Burke’s vehement condemnation of Hastings never extended into a wholesale criticism of either the fact of overseas empire or indeed the precarious means by which the East India Company initially came to acquire territorial dominion. Burke famously argued that the legitimacy of government could not depend on the question of the justice of its founding moments. Governments, more often than not, were founded upon unlawful acts of violence, conquest, and usurpation. And, for the sake of stability,

there is a secret veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments. They had their origins, as the beginning of all such things have had, in some matters that had as good be covered in obscurity…. But a wise nation, when it has made a revolution itself, and upon its own principles, there rests. The first step in revolution is to give it power; the next good laws, good order, to give it stability.

For Burke, the East India Company wrested sovereign power by extraordinary and unjust means, yet its chief errors lie not in this “revolution” but in its inability to secure stable and lawful governance. Instead, the process of acquisition was followed by yet more revolutions that subverted any semblance of the rule of law; undermined native rights, liberties, and industry; and thus laid to waste a once prospering society. Burke’s linking of the question of legitimacy to the securing of sound, lawful institutions set the stage for the succeeding generation of reformist arguments—such as those put forward by philosophic radicals like James Mill and evangelicals like Charles Grant—that likewise rested the moral basis of empire on the possibility of good government. However, the definition of good government, its structure and purpose, varied dramatically between Burke and the liberal reformers to come.

For Burke, to govern India well required, firstly, some kind of constitutional reform, that is, the creation of institutional checks to reign in what he saw as the arbitrary and “peculating despotism” of Hastings’s rule. The tendency toward despotism was partly based, for Burke, on the fact that the Company acted like a tight-knit corporate entity, composed of young men not yet formed by education and society, and unmoored from any form of social and political restraints; they were “a Republic, a Commonwealth without a people.” The problem of this strong esprit de corps among Company officers was that “they consider themselves as having a common interest separated both from the Country that sent them out and from the Country in which they are; and where there is no control by persons who understand their language, who understand their manners, or can apply their conduct to the Laws of the Country.” The consequence of which was the exercise of power without anyone to watch over, question, or regulate it. Burke’s institutional solution was Fox’s East India Bill (1783), which attempted to subject the Company more tightly to Parliamentary oversight and thus render the Company accountable.

Accountability for Burke was the essence of government understood as a trust. But a true trust, from which all political power and authority ultimately stemmed, must be oriented toward the welfare of those over whom power is exercised. Hence, the government of India ought to be instituted so as to work for the benefit of the people of India, for their security, protection from oppression, and the preservation of rights and liberties. For Burke, if India could be so governed, Company rule would command a legitimacy based upon the implicit consent of the people governed, an essential feature of the idea of trusteeship. In an early speech on India, Burke elaborated the connection between trust and consent via the question of law. When considering upon which principles—English or Indian—law and legal reform should be based, Burke’s answer was unequivocal: “men must be governed by those laws which they love. Where thirty millions are to be governed by a few thousand men, the government must be established by consent, and must be congenial to the feelings and habits of the people.” The deference to the customs and habits of the people, moreover, was linked to a normative principle in which the “empire of opinion” and prejudice were not only the grounds of everyday morality but also, for Burke, the key sources of happiness. It was due to this moral conception of the sources of obligation and action, and not just as a matter of stability (as later nineteenth-century imperial policymakers would stress) that Burke argued “that we, if we must govern such a Country, must govern them upon their own principles and maxims and not upon ours, that we must not think to force them to our narrow ideas, but extend ours to take in theirs; because to say that that people shall change their maxims, lives, and opinions, is what cannot be.” This was one of Burke’s central criticisms against Hastings. Hastings, having ignored this fundamental principle thus undermined the possibility of both stable and moral government.

Burke was certainly mistaken to construe Hastings as a zealous innovator, bent on implementing English ideas and institutions with no regard to native customs and institutions. Hastings was a patron of Oriental learning, instrumental in the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the attempted codification of Hindu and Muslim law for integration into Anglo-Indian legal administration. The heated debates of the Hastings trial tend to elide the more fundamental consensus between Burke and Hastings that took as their premise the creation of an imperial regime that was consistent with the “ancient constitution” of India, however differently they may have construed it to be. The most important distinction between Burke and Hastings, in this regard, was in their starkly opposed interpretations of whether Indian polities could be understood under the rubric of “Oriental despotism.”

In countering the thesis of Oriental despotism, Burke articulated a reverent image of the ancient laws, customs, and institutions of India, an image that would stand in dramatic contrast to the nineteenth-century view of India’s downgraded civilizational status. Throughout the Hastings trial, Burke attempted to “awaken something of sympathy for the unfortunate natives” of India by painting a tableau of India’s geographical, social, and political landscape. In doing so Burke hoped to overcome the remoteness of India and what he considered to be the usual tendency to view its people as mere “strangers.” But it was by appealing to the antiquity of India, of its laws and religion, that Burke hoped to evoke a humility and appreciation that would deter the instinct toward premature and prejudicial conclusions. Thus Burke warned, “God forbid we should go to pass judgment upon a people who formed their Laws and Institutions prior to our insect origins of yesterday.”

It was precisely the reverence for Indian antiquity that James Mill and Charles Grant would target in their influential characterizations of Indian society and history. As Francis Hutchins has aptly shown, these writers sought to undermine the eighteenth-century view of India as a highly developed civilization (as depicted in the work of famed Orientalist William Jones and Scottish philosophical historian William Robertson) and replace it with an account that portrayed Indian society as exhibiting and promoting the most extreme forms of moral degradation. For both, tarnishing the prevailing assessments of India was, paradoxically, the necessary ground upon which to formulate a more expansive and elaborate notion of a “just rule.”

James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill and leading figure among radical and utilitarian reformers in early nineteenth-century Britain, was employed by the East India Company from 1819 to 1836. Mill’s monumental The History of British India signaled a key shift in imperial ideology, and Mill himself, through his various theoretical writings and his prominent institutional position as Chief Examiner, became one of the most important intellectual influences in the shaping of Indian policy. As a radical reassessment of Indian civilization, Mill’s History was a full-scale assault upon every claim made on behalf of the achievements of Indian arts, science, philosophy, and government. Mill argued that Orientalists like Jones, through long personal contact with India and empathy for the natives, had become partial and thus susceptible to the exaggerated claims of its scholarly and scientific advances. Mill’s history would be fundamentally different in that it would be a critical history, that is, “a judging history.”

The principal task of such a judgment, for Mill, was to accurately ascertain India’s position in “a scale of civilization.” To do this, one had to form a “joint view of all the circumstances taken together” rather than be misled, as the Orientalists had been, by one or two marks of advancement—such as the grandeur of the Mughal courts, the existence of philosophy, or the intricacies of ancient legal treatises. And with this general view one could then compare and contrast India with past and present societies in “different stages of social progress.” Mill used this method to meticulously prove that the so-called accomplishments of Indian thought and practice, if he could not reject them as outright fabrications (as he did in the case of Indian chronology), were consistent with the sorts of institutions and practices prevalent in a “rude and simple” state of society. Although Mill was not as precise as other Scottish historians, the appellation rude implied that Indian thought and civilization were the stilted products of a barbarous society, that is, a preagricultural society.

More crucially, for Mill, this reevaluation of Indian society was not merely a scientific endeavor; it was essential for determining the structure and purpose of imperial rule:

to ascertain the true state of the Hindus in the scale of civilization, is not only an object of curiosity in the history of human nature; but to the people of Great Britain, charged as they are with the government of that great portion of the human species; it is an object of the highest practical importance. No scheme of government can happily conduce to the end of government, unless it is adapted to the state of the people for whose use it is intended…. If the mistake in regard to Hindu society, committed by the British nation, and the British government, be very great, if they have conceived the Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they in reality made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization, it is impossible that in many of the measures pursued for the government of that people, the mark aimed at should not have been wrong.

(Continues…)

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