John Stuart Mill on colonies

Political Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 34-64

  Bell, Duncan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Character; Civilization; Colonization; Empire; John Stuart Mill

Indexed keywords

EID: 73149123570     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709348186     Document Type: Article

References (191)

1. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963-1991), 3:963 [hereafter CW].
2. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions of Empire, ed. Cooper and Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4.
3. See, for example, Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
4. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) J. S. Mill's Encounter with India, ed.
5. M. I. Moir, Douglas Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)
6. Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
7. Valuable exceptions include: Margaret Kohn and Daniel O'Neill, "A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America," Political Theory 34 (2006): 192-228
8. Katherine Smits, "John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes: Settler Violence against Indigenous Peoples and the Legitimacy of Colonial Rule," Australian Journal of Politics and History 51 (2008): 1-15
9. Both Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
10. and Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill (London: Overlook Press, 2007) underemphasize colonization.
11. Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
12. Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965)
13. R. N. Ghosh, "John Stuart Mill on Colonies and Colonization" in John Stuart Mill, ed. John Cunningham Wood (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1987), 4:354-67
14. Samuel Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill, 2 vols. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1985), 2:753-58.
15. George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (London: John Murray, 1841)
16. Arthur Mills, Colonial Constitutions (London: John Murray, 1856)
17. Henry Jenkyns, British Rule and Jurisdiction Beyond the Seas (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1902), 1-9.
18. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, CW, 19:562 [hereafter Considerations]. He defines a dependency as: "outlying territories of some size and population... which are subject, more or less, to acts of sovereign power on the part of the paramount country" (p. 562)
19. See also Mill, "The East India Company's Charter" (1852), CW, 30:49-50.
20. See also Robert Hind, "We Have No Colonies': Similarities within the British Imperial Experience," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984): 3-35
21. Cf. Bruce Buchan, Empire of Political Thought (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008).
22. This type of argument is today often characterized in terms of terra nullius- the occupation of "empty land." This idea is ancient (as are the practices of conquest that can follow from it), but the terminology is a product of the late nineteenth-century
23. Andrew Fitzmaurice, "The Genealogy of Terra Nullius," Australian Historical Studies 129 (2007): 1-15.
24. Marx, Capital, vol. 1
25. in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975-), 35:751n.
26. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
27. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 6. On Tocqueville's rhetorical moves
28. see Cheryl Welch, "Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria," Political Theory 31 (2003): 235-64.
29. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 31.
30. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1776]), 4:556-641
31. James Mill, "Colony" (1818), in Essays from the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Collected Works (London, 1995 [1823]), 3-33
32. J. C. Wood, British Economists and the Empire (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1983), chap. 1.
33. William Nassau Senior, Remarks on Emigration (London: R. Clay, 1831)
34. William Nassau Senior, An Outline of a Science of Political Economy (London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1836)
35. Robert Torrens, Colonisation of South Australia (London: Longman, 1835)
36. Robert Torrens, Self-Supporting Colonization (London, 1847)
37. and Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1841).
38. On Wakefield, see Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream, W. Metcalf (Ed.) (Wellington: GP Publications, 1997).
39. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 33
40. J. S. Mill, "Wakefield's Popular Politics," Examiner, January 29, 1837, CW, 24:788.
41. Mill still professed adherence to Wake-field's views decades later J. S. Mill, "The Westminster Election of 1865," [1], July, 3, 1865, CW, 28:16
42. letter to A. M. Francis, May 8, 1869, CW, 17:1599.
43. It was published initially (and anonymously) in the Morning Chronicle; it appeared as a book, edited by Robert Gouger, and entitled A Letter from Sydney, the Principal Town in Australasia, Together with the Outline of a System of Colonization (London, 1830).
44. For Bentham on colonies, see Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 8
45. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, chap. 4. On his conversion
46. see Richard Mills, The Colonization of Australia (1829-1842) (London, 1968 [1915]), 152-53
47. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America, A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 2:252n.
48. J. S. Mill, "The Labouring Agriculturalists," Examiner, December 19, 1830, CW, 22:218.
49. On the aims of the group, see Edward Gibbon Wakefield, The New British Pro ince of South Australia (London: C. Knight, 1838).
50. The philosophic radicals were divided over Wakefield's ideas, with Bowring, Perronet Thompson, and the Westminster Review, critical; the more influential, including Grote, Moles-worth, Roebuck, Buller, both Mill's, and the London Review, supported the plan.
51. J. S. Mill, "Wakefield's The New British Province of South Australia," Examiner, July, 20, 1834, CW, 23:739, 742.
52. Mill, Wakefield's The New British Province of South Australia, 739
53. On his admiration for the "Greek empire" see also Mill, "Grote's History of Greece," II [1853], CW, 11, esp. 321-4h
54. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, 107
55. He later bought land in New Zealand, although he never visited the country: letter to Henry Chapman, November 12, 1845, CW, 18:687.
56. Jonathan Riley, "Mill's Political Economy: Ricardian Science and Liberal Utilitarian Art," in The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. John Skorupski (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 294-95.
57. Scholars disagree over whether Mill's support for Wakefield signalled a break from Ricardo and Say. Much turns on whether Wakefield's arguments on economic growth were-as he proclaimed-inconsistent with them, or whether he had misread Ricardo (as Mill claimed: Principles, 735-36). Donald Winch argues that Mill only supported Wakefield's policy proposals
58. Winch, Classical Political Economy, 139-40, while Samuel Hollander argues that Wakefield and Mill consistently extended
59. Ricardian insights (Economics of John Stuart Mill, 1:166, 475-79). I here follow Hollander.
60. For an example, see Mill, letter to Arthur Helps, March 28, 1870, CW, 17:1710.
61. For an early articulation, see Mill, "Wakefield's The New British Province of South Australia," 740-41.
62. Mill argued that emigration, while vital, remained insufficient (Principles, 194).
63. J. S. Mill, "The Emigration Bill," Examiner, February 27, 1831, CW, 22:271, 272.
64. For the debates over the issue, see H. J. M. Johnson, British Emigration Policy, 1815-1830 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972).
65. J. S. Mill, "The New Colony," [1], Examiner, June, 29, 1834, CW, 23: 733, 734.
66. J. S. Mill, "The New Colony," [2], Examiner, July, 6, 1834, CW, 23:737.
67. J. S. Mill, "The Sale of Colonial Land," Sun, February, 22, 1837, CW, 24:792.
68. Mill, Principles, 711
69. See also J. S. Mill, "Torrens's Letter to Sir Robert Peel," Spectator, January 28, 1843, CW, 24:841
70. J. S. Mill, "On the Necessity of the Uniting of the Question of Corn Laws with that of the Tithes," Examiner, December 23, 1832, CW, 23:539.
71. On emigration as "palliative," see J. S. Mill, "The Claims of Labour," Edinburgh Review (1845), CW, 4:387.
72. Mill, Principles, 958.
73. Mill, Principles, 958-59, 965-66.
74. See also J. S. Mill, letter to Cairnes, December 12, 1864, CW, 15:1046.
75. For the republican view, see Duncan Bell, "Republican Imperialism: J. A. Froude and the Virtue of Empire," History of Political Thought 30 (2009): 166-91.
76. Wakefield, England and America, 2:215-17
77. Mill, "The Emigration Bill," 273.
78. See also J. S. Mill, "Female Emigrants," Examiner, February, 26, 1832, CW, 23:419.
79. Marx, Capital, 753, 758.
80. For his views on empire more broadly, see Gareth Stedman Jones, "Radicalism and the Extra-European World: The Case of Marx" in Victorian Visions of Global Order, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 186-215.
81. Mill, Principles, 800.
82. Ibid., 965-67. He also discusses hours of labor. On Mill and collective action
83. see Richard Tuck, Free Riding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 133-35.
84. Mill, Principles, 959.
85. Ibid., 963
86. See also Mill's letter to John Campbell, April 4, 1866, CW, 16:1155.
87. J. S. Mill, letter to Arthur Helps, March 28, 1870, CW, 17:1710.
88. Mill, Principles, 963.
89. Ibid. Mill had long utilized the argument about differential labor productivity
90. Mill, "The Emigration Bill," 272.
91. Miles Taylor, "The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire," Past & Present 166 (2000): 146-80.
92. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?
93. Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998).
94. Increasing political independence was accompanied, however, by growing economic dependence: P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 2002), chap. 8.
95. Letter to Hardy (1856), 511. This was despite the fact, Mill stated, that the plan had only ever been properly executed in New Zealand. He wanted to show that Australian growth could not be explained by the gold rush in the early 1850s. He also claimed that the "opinions" of the Australians were generally "ahead" of those in Britain: Letter to Henry Chapman, October 5, 1863, CW, 15:888.
96. He also claimed, and that he and Harriet "read every book we can get about the Australian colonies always with fresh interest" (Letter to Hardy [1856], 511).
97. Mill, Principles, 378.
98. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2002 [1848]), 224.
99. See also Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill, 2:754-55, 756-57.
100. See, in general, Robert Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
101. The argument is found in Mill, Principles, vol. 5, chap. 10, sec. 1.
102. J. S. Mill, letter to W. L. Johns, January 22, 1867, CW, 16:1230
103. And conversely, "the colonies will not allow us to cast our paupers into them": letter to Henry Chapman, January 14, 1870, CW, 17:1685.
104. The argument is found in Mill, Principles, vol. 5, chap. 10, sec. 1.
105. See, for example, his letters to Frederick Miles Edge (of the Chicago Tribune), February 26, 1866, CW, 16:1150-51
106. Henry Soden, May 2, 1865, CW, 16:1043-44
107. George Kenyon Holden, July 5, 1868, CW, 16:1419-20. He notes in a letter to the political economist
108. J. E. Cairnes, on February 4, 1865 (CW, 16:989-90), that he had modified various passages in the 6th edition (book 5, 919-21) to "give a fuller expression of my meaning."
109. J. S. Mill, letter to Archibald Michie, December 7, 1868, CW, 16:1516
110. letter to Edward Stafford, December 11, 1868, CW, 16:1520-21.
111. Wakefield, England and America, 2:105-6.
112. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 3
113. Janice Carlisle, John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991)
114. Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) and, on India, Pitts, A Turn to Empire, chap. 5.
115. J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), CW, 21:277
116. cf. J. S. Mill, System of Logic, CW, vol. 8, book 6, 904-05.
117. On Mill's writings on women, democratic institutions, and himself, as ethological "case studies"
118. see Terence Ball, "The Formation of Character: Mill's Ethology Reconsidered," Polity 33 (2000): 25-48.
119. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 37.
120. J. S. Mill, "New Australian Colony," Morning Chronicle, October, 23, 1834, CW, 23:750.
121. Letter to Edward Lytton-Bulwer, March 5, 1838, CW, 13:382.
122. See William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979), chap. 8
123. Michael Turner, "Radical Agitation and the Canada Question in British Politics, 1837-1841," Historical Research 79 (2006): 90-114.
124. A smaller uprising followed in Upper Canada in December 1837. See Peter Burroughs, The Canadian Crisis and British Colonial Policy, 1828-1841 (London: Macmillan, 1972)
125. P. A. Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1985).
126. Lord Durham's Report on the Affairs of British North America, ed. C. P. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912 [1839]). Wakefield played a significant role in formulating the report. For a harsh indictment
127. see Ged Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1972).
128. On imperial legitimacy, see also Randi Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996).
129. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, chap. 5
130. Bell, "Republican Imperialism."
131. J. S. Mill, "Lord Durham and his Assailants," London and Westminster Review (1838), CW, 6:448.
132. J. S. Mill, "Radical Party and Canada: Lord Durham and the Canadians," London and Westminster Review (1838), CW, 6:414.
133. See also J. S. Mill, "Penal Code for India," London and Westminster Review (1838), CW, 30:30.
134. Mill, "Radical Party and Canada," 417. "A constitution, once conferred, is sacred..." (p. 418). The point at issue was a series of punitive resolutions passed at Westminster in March 1837 which removed various powers from the Lower Canadian assembly, including the power of refusing to grant money for local administration, originally enshrined in the 1791 Constitution.
135. Mill, "Radical Party and Canada," 429.
136. Ibid., 433-34.
137. See also Mill's letter to John Robertson, December 28, 1838, CW, 13:393-34.
138. Mill's article on "Lord Durham and his Assailants" was heavily shaped by Charles Buller's inaccurate account of Durham's plans
139. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals, 402-03.
140. Mill, "Lord Durham and his Assailants," 458, 459.
141. On Mill's "heterotic" view of national absorption, see Georgios Varouxakis, Mill on Nationality (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. 15-19.
142. Cf. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 53
143. where Mill is accused of advocating "coercive assimilation."
144. Mill, "Lord Durham and his Assailants," 461.
145. See also J. S. Mill, Autobiography, (1873), CW, 1: 164-66, 223.
146. For Mill's recognition of this, see his letter to Robertson, April 6, 1839, CW, 13:396-97.
147. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 148.
148. Letter to Beaumont, October 18, 1839, CW, 17:1990-92.
149. See, in general, Bruce Kinzer, England's Disgrace? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), esp. chapters 2-3.
150. J. S. Mill, "The Condition of Ireland," (11), Morning Chronicle, October, 26, 1846, CW, 24:915.
151. Ibid., 973.
152. J. S. Mill, "The Condition of Ireland," (25), Morning Chronicle, December 2, 1846, CW, 24:973. Mill argued that the abject conditions meant that "Ireland is once more a tabula rasa, on which we might have inscribed what we pleased." Letter to the Examiner, May 1848, CW, 24:1098.
153. Mill, Considerations, 565. For his defence of the colonial system
154. see also his letter to Cairnes, November 8, 1864, 964-66.
155. Mill, Considerations, 562-63, 565.
156. Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler, The Security Dilemma (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
157. Mill, Considerations, 565.
158. Ibid. On the morality of free trade, see Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).
159. Mill, Considerations, 563-64.
160. J. S. Mill, letter to Arthur Patchett Martin, October 10, 1871, CW, 32:232. But, he argued, "[t]he renunciation of them was by no means a necessary consequence of the introduction of responsible government" (p. 232). See also letter to Chapman (1870), 1865-66.
161. As detailed in Smits, "John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes." Cf. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 159-60. For an argument that there is a general shift in justifications of British imperial rule during the closing decades of the century, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
162. Benjamin Madley, "From Terror to Genocide: Britain's Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia's History Wars," Journal of British Studies 47 (2008): 77-106.
163. The issue was raised, for example, in Herman Merivale's Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies, 2:150.
164. Mill certainly read the second (1861) edition of these lectures: Letter to J. E. Cairnes, November 8, 1864, CW, 15:647-48.
165. Letter to A. M. Francis (1869), 1599.
166. See also the following letters: to Robert Pharazyn, August 21, 1866, CW, 16:1194-96;
167. Henry Chapman, August 7, 1866, CW, 16:1135-36
168. Charlotte Manning, January 14, 1870, CW, 17:1685-87.
169. Welch, "Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion," 251-52.
170. Mill, Considerations, 564.
171. A similar account of colonial "quasi-federalism" can be found in L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, ed. P. F. Clarke (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1972 [1904]), 154.
172. Cf. Duncan Bell, "The Victorian Idea of a Global State," 136-59.
173. J. S. Mill, "England and Ireland," 4th ed. 1869 [1868], CW, 6:524-25.
174. Mill, Considerations, 564, 565.
175. Mill thought that a "loose federation" of the European states was a future possibility: letter to T. E. Cliffe Leslie, August 18, 1860, CW, 15:703
176. letter to M. C. Halstead, January 19, 1871, CW, 17:1800-01.
177. On deliberation, see Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
178. Edmund Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with America" (March 22, 1775), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. W. Elofson with John Woods (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3:152.
179. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 622
180. Jeremy Bentham, "Emancipate Your Colonies" (1830), in Rights, Representation, and Reform, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Cyprian Blamires (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 292.
181. Mill, letter to Arthur Patchett Martin (1871), 233.
182. See also, Mill, letter to Henry Chapman (1870), 1865.
183. A point also made in Mill, "Civilization," CW, 18:117-49.
184. Mill, "England and Ireland," 525.
185. Mill, "Lord Durham and his Assailants," 460.
186. J. S. Mill, letter to Henry Chapman, August 7, 1866, CW, 16:1137.
187. See, for example, John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883).
188. I analyze this debate in Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)
189. and Bell, "Imagined Spaces: Nation, State, and Territory in the British Colonial Empire, 1860-1914," in The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660-2000, ed. William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (Basingstoke, forthcoming). 109.
190. Robert Somers, "Emigration" (1878), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., Thomas Spencer Baynes (1875-1889), 8:176.
191. Cf. Alistair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), chap. 1.