Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 35-47

  Purdy, Jedediah ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 4844228887     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2003.tb00437.x     Document Type: Article

References (7)

1. A fine introduction to the views of the senior Mill is William Thomas's abridged version of The History of British India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
2. In his discussion of “The Civilization of the Hindus,” for instance, Mill observes “the necessity of regarding the actual state of the Hindus as little removed from that of half-civilized nations” (p. 231)
3. reckons that “despotism and priestcraft taken together, the Hindus, in mind and body, were the most enslaved portion of the human race” (p. 237)
4. quotes with approval Adam Smith's judgment that Asian “despotism is more destructive of leisure and security, and more adverse to the progress of the human mind, than anarchy itself ” (pp. 249–50).
5. John Stuart Mill, in his chapter, “Government of Dependencies,” in Considerations on Representative Government, wrote more systematically: “[Rule by a foreign power] is as legitimate as any other [mode of government] if it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people most facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement. There are … conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization.” Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government (Rutland, Vt.: Everyman, 1993), p. 415.
6. Montaigne's view of these matters is expressed in two of his essays, “Of cannibals” and “Of coaches,” translated into supple English in Donald M. Frame's Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
7. Burke's extraordinary speeches on imperial policy are well represented in David Bromwich's Burke on Empire, Liberty, and Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).