The British Empire and its liberal mission

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 78, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 623-642

  Sartori, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750343260     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/509149     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
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).
3. For a summary of approaches to the study of the formation of a British imperial "identity" (in contrast 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 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 I am also indebted to Spencer Leonard, and to his (unpublished) paper, "Interest, Ideology, and Retroactive Agencies: Formation of Imperial Intent toward India in the Metropole, 1758-1765."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.
8. See also on the conceptual problems posed by global commerce and empire for the early economists, Emma Rothschild, "Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces," Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004): 3-25.
9. Sudipta Sen, "Liberal Government and Illiberal Trade: The Political Economy of 'Responsible Government' 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.
10. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, 2002).
11. Pincus, "Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism," 712.
12. Pincus, "Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism," Ibid., 707.
13. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:18.
14. A convenient summary of such arguments is to be found in James Tully, "The Possessive Individualism Thesis: A Reconsideration in the Light of Recent Scholarship," in Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C. B. Macpherson, ed. Joseph H. Carens (Albany, NY, 1993), 19-44.
15. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi, 1989).
16. Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, CA, 1994), 176-80.
17. Sir Henry Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West (New York, 1880), 183, 224, 233.
18. See also George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine, 1822-1888 (London, 1969), esp. 91-106, 119-22;
19. Zastoupil, Mill and India, 183-91.
20. See Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi, 1989).
21. Some important contributions on these issues include Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge, 1981);
22. 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;
23. 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;
24. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethno-History of an Indian Kingdom, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993);
25. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998);
26. 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;
27. David Washbrook, "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.
28. Also on Jamaica, see Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, ed. Rebecca J. Scott, Sidney W. Mintz, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Baltimore, 1992).
29. For a discussion that links developments 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.
30. And for a brief discussion of Africa, see T. C. McCaskie, "Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century," in Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 3:665-89.
31. Holt, Problem of Freedom, 6.
32. On the centrality of "difference" to the new imperial history, see especially Wilson's introduction to Wilson, A New Imperial History, 1-26.
33. For a more general discussion of the rise of the concept of "networks" in recent historiography on the eighteenth-century British empire, see Natasha Glaisyer, "Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire," Historical Journal 47 (June 2004): 451-76.
34. Foucault's return to the category of "practice" after his earlier structuralism is most pronounced and powerful in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977).
35. Emphasis added.
36. For three influential, and analytically quite distinct, analyses that all highlight the institutional centrality 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);
37. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914 (London, 1993);
38. and Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1999).
39. See Manu Goswami, "Rethinking the Modular Nation Form; Towards a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism." Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 4 (2002): 770-99.
40. 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
41. ; and the forum on "The British Empire and Globalization," Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 4 (April 2003): 21-36.
42. It is also instructive to read Ferguson's exculpatory account alongside a work he dismisses without any serious argumentative engagement, Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocaust: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2001).