J.S. Mill's Encounter with India 0802007139, 9780802007131, 9781442676350

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTRIBUTORS
CHRONOLOGY OF JOHN STUART MILL'S EAST INDIA COMPANY CAREER
Introduction
Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India
The Tree of Utility in India: Panace or Weed?
James Mill's The History of British India: A Reevaluation
John Stuart Mill's Draft Despatches to India and the Problem of Bureaucratic Authorship
John Stuart Mill and Royal India
India, J.S. Mill, and 'Western' Culture
Golden Casket or Pebbles and Trash? J.S. Mill and the Anglicist/Orientalist Controversy
John Stuart Mill, Religion, and Law in the Examiner's Office
Imperial Epitaph: John Stuart Mill's Defence of the East India Company
John Stuart Mill and India

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J.S. MILL'S ENCOUNTER WITH INDIA

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Edited by MARTIN I. MOIR, DOUGLAS M. PEERS, AND LYNN ZASTOUPIL

J.S. Mill's Encounter with India

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1999 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0713-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: J.S. Mill's encounter with India ISBN 0-8020-0713-9 i. Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873 - Views on India. 2. India - History British occupation, 1765-1947. I. Moir, Martin. II. Peers, Douglas Mark, 1960- . III. Zastoupil, Lynn, 1953- . 05463.1751999

954-°3

098-931825-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Contents

PREFACE

Vll

CONTRIBUTORS

ix

CHRONOLOGY OF JOHN STUART MILL'S EAST INDIA COMPANY CAREER

Introduction

xi

3

ALAN RYAN

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 18 F. ROSEN

The Tree of Utility in India: Panace or Weed? 34 ALLISON DUBE

James Mill's The History of British India: A Reevaluation 53 JAVED MAJEED

John Stuart Mill's Draft Despatches to India and the Problem of Bureaucratic Authorship 72 MARTIN MOIR

John Stuart Mill and Royal India

87

ROBIN MOORE

India, J.S. Mill, and 'Western' Culture in LYNN ZASTOUPIL

Golden Casket or Pebbles and Trash? J.S. Mill and the Anglicist/Orientalist Controversy 149 PENELOPE CARSON

vi

Contents

John Stuart Mill, Religion, and Law in the Examiner's Office NANCY GARDNER CASSELS

Imperial Epitaph: John Stuart Mill's Defence of the East India Company 198 DOUGLAS M. PEERS

John Stuart Mill and India S. AMBIRAJAN

221

173

Preface

This collection of essays would not have seen the light of day had we not been given substantial assistance from a number of individuals and institutions. Anthony Parel of the University of Calgary came up with the idea of a conference on Mill and India. Eight of the essays included here were first presented at this conference, which was held in 1990 at the University of Calgary and which coincided with the publication of Mill's Writings on India, volume XXX of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (University of Toronto Press). We wish to thank the University of Calgary and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their assistance in helping us mount the conference. Linda Toth and Carol Murray of the Department of History at the University of Calgary cheerfully helped to prepare the manuscript. We would also like to thank the editorial staff at the University of Toronto Press for navigating us through the publication process. In particular, we are grateful to Suzanne Rancourt, Barb Porter, and Kristen Pederson for their patience and wise counsel. We are also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for identifying those places in the text where we needed to clarify or define our positions more clearly, and also for their constructive suggestions as to how and where this collection could be improved. Publication has been made possible, in part, by a grant from the Endowment Fund of the University of Calgary and a grant from Rhodes College. We are also very grateful to the British Library - in particular to Mr A.J. Farrington of the Library's Oriental and India Office Collections for a generous contribution towards publication costs. An earlier version of Martin Moir's contribution to this volume was published in the Indian Archives, 1-2 (Jan.-Dec. 1993): 1-8. Robin Moore's 'John Stuart Mill and Royal India' was first published in Utilitas, 3 (1991): 85-106. Unless otherwise indicated, references to J.S. Mill's writings are to his Collected Works (Toronto, 1978-), hereafter cited as CW.

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Contributors

S. Ambirajan (PhD Andhra Pradesh and Manchester) has recently retired from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he was Professor of Economics. He is currently Honorary Professor of Economics, Madras School of Economics. His works include Political Economy and Monetary Management, India, 2766-1914 (Delhi, 1984) and Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge, 1977). Penelope Carson (PhD London) is a freelance historian based at Malvern College, Worcestershire, England, who has published articles and reviews on the general theme of missionaries and India in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Indo-British Review, Bengal Past and Present, and English Historical Review. She is now interested in the interaction between missionaries and the indigenous societies in which they worked. Nancy Gardner Cassels (PhD Toronto) taught Indian and Asian history at the University of Toronto and McMaster University. She is the author of Religion and Pilgrim Tax under the Company Raj (Delhi, 1986). Her current research focus is on the East India Company's social legislation. Allison Dube (PhD London) has worked as a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Calgary and is the author of The Theme of Acquisition in Bentham's Political Thought (New York, 1991). Javed Majeed is currently Lecturer in the Department of South Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His DPhil thesis was published as Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's "The History of British India' and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992). He has also published a number of

x Contributors essays and articles in, among others, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Modern Asian Studies, and Journal of Islamic Studies. Martin Moir was Deputy Director of the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections. He is the author of A General Guide to the India Office Records (London, 1988), and coeditor of Writings on India by John Stuart Mill (CW, XXX) (Toronto, 1990). Robin J. Moore (DLit, London) FAHA is a Professor of History at The Flinders University of South Australia. His books include Sir Charles Wood's Indian Policy, 1853-66; Liberalism and Indian Politics, 1872-1922; The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917-1940; Churchill, Cripps and India, 1939-45; Escapes from Empire; and Paul Scott's Raj. He is currently working on a study of George Curzon and the British Empire. Douglas M. Peers (PhD London) is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary and author of Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India (London, 1995). His work has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Medical History, and Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He is currently working on a study of militarism and oriental knowledge. F. Rosen is Professor of the History of Political Thought at University College London and Director of the Bentham Project. Among his most recent writings are Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford, 1992) and a new introduction to Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford, 1996). Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford. His many publications include/.S. Mill (London, 1974) and The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, 1970). Lynn Zastoupil (PhD Minnesota) is an Associate Professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, 1994). He is also the coauthor (with Martin Moir) of a forthcoming set of documents regarding Indian education under British authority during the period 1780-1840.

Chronology of John Stuart Mill's East India Company Career

1817 May 1819 April 1823 May 1823

March 1825

May 1826 1828 Feb. 1828

Dec. 1830 Apr. 1834

1835-40

Publication of James Mill's History of British India. James Mill appointed an assistant to the examiner of Indian correspondence at East India House. James Mill made assistant examiner, ranking next after the then examiner, William McCulloch. John Stuart Mill (aged seventeen) appointed junior clerk in the Examiner's Office (where he served for three years without salary, though awarded a small annual gratuity). Having proved to the Court of Directors his ability to prepare drafts of Indian despatches in the political and public departments, John Stuart Mill transferred to the correspondence branch of the Examiner's Office, and given a gratuity of £100 (raised to £200 in 1826). Having completed his three-year probationary service, John Stuart Mill appointed an established clerk in the Examiner's Office on a salary of £100 p.a., excluding gratuities. John Stuart Mill's article on trade with India published in Parliamentary Review (Session 1826-7). John Stuart Mill promoted to position of fourth assistant to the examiner, with a starting salary of £310 plus a special gratuity of/2oo. He continued to be responsible for drafting despatches mainly in the political and public departments. James Mill appointed examiner, after the retirement of McCulloch. John Stuart Mill's salary raised to /6oo p.a., following the directors' decision to convert the gratuity of £200 previously allotted him into an annual special allowance. John Stuart Mill edits London Review and London and Westminster Review.

xii Chronology June 1836 July 1836

Death of James Mill. Thomas Love Peacock appointed examiner, and David Hill made assistant examiner. John Stuart Mill becomes first assistant to the examiner with a salary of £12.00 p.a. He continued to deal principally with political drafts, and occasionally with those in the public and other departments. Dec. 1836 John Stuart Mill's first draft of a public department despatch criticizing the Bentinck-Macaulay educational reforms rejected by the Board of Control. Aug. 1838 Publication of John Stuart Mill's article on the penal code for India in London and Westminster Review. 1843 Publication of John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic. April 1844 John Stuart Mill's brother George Grote Mill appointed junior clerk in the Examiner's Office on one year's probation. April 1845 After completing his probationary year, George Grote Mill transferred to the correspondence branch of the office, where he was employed in drafting despatches under John Stuart Mill's supervision. 1848 Publication of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy. March 1850 George Grote Mill retired on medical grounds. June 1852 John Stuart Mill gives evidence before House of Lords Select Committee on Indian territories. July 1853 John Stuart Mill's two letters in defence of the East India Company published in the Morning Chronicle. Aug. 1853 John Stuart Mill, concerned about his poor health and that of - June 1855 his wife, Harriet, explores possibility of taking early retirement, but eventually decides to stay on. Aug. 1854 Court of Directors add ^200 to John Stuart Mill's salary in recognition of the high quality of his work. March 1856 Following the retirement of Peacock and Hill, John Stuart Mill appointed examiner, with a salary of £2,000. May 1857 In addition to his own duties, John Stuart Mill takes on the - April 1858 drafting of public works, despatches during the illness of his friend and colleague William Thornton. Jan. John Stuart Mill very active in preparing various official - July 1858 memoranda and reports to defend the Company against the government's plans to abolish it; he also writes five anonymous pamphlets in the same cause. Sept. 1858 With the final dissolution of the Company, John Stuart Mill retires on an annual pension of £1500.

J.S. MILL'S ENCOUNTER WITH INDIA

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Introduction ALAN RYAN

The essays in this volume satisfy a long-felt need. Many of Mill's readers have wondered what the impact on Mill was of his three and a half decades of service at India House, while historians of British India have long debated the extent of his influence on the subcontinent. In their different ways, both have been frustrated by Mill's Autobiography, in which Mill discusses his work for the East India Company briefly, and non-committally. One might readily conclude from the Autobiography that the subcontinent itself had held little interest to him, and that his employment had been what one might in a Marxist vein characterize as 'white-collar alienated labour' a way of earning an adequate income without wasting too many hours at his desk. Certainly, he suggests that its chief virtue lay in allowing him to do other, more interesting things: 'I do not know of any one of the occupations by which a subsistence can now be gained, more suitable than such as this to any one who, not being in independent circumstances, desires to devote a part of the twenty-four hours to private intellectual pursuits.'1 The impression is strengthened by his further observation that he had, 'through life, found office duties an actual rest from the other mental occupations which I have carried on simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently intellectual not to be distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause any strain upon the mental powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to the labour of careful literary composition.'2 Most of us would find being in even partial command of the fortunes of the subcontinent tolerably exciting, but Mill suggests no such thing. The furthest he goes is to say that it was good for him to be concerned with practical affairs as well as theoretical subjects; even that is acknowledged somewhat grudgingly: 'Not, indeed, that public business, transacted on paper, to take effect on the other side of the globe, was of itself calculated to give

4 Alan Ryan much practical knowledge of life.' The benefit, such as it was, lay in the necessity of bringing numerous people of very different opinions to agree on one course of action, and in training himself to learn 'the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential.'3 There is more than a touch of stoicism about Mill's account; if not apathetic, it certainly manifests the stoic virtue of apatheia. Yet, it is evident from Mill's other work that something important rubbed off on him. To be sure, there are places in his work where the most that India provides is a source of examples. In abstract works such as A System of Logic, India provides throwaway illustrations of logical points. Elsewhere and more significantly, India supplies the negative analogies by reference to which Mill wished his readers to think about Britain or the West more generally. On Liberty insists that Mill means his doctrine that we are entitled to unlimited liberty except where we threaten harm to others to apply only to persons 'in the maturity of their faculties,' and to societies that are in something of the same sense 'mature.' It is medieval Europe and India in the recent past whose inhabitants supply the other side of the contrast that Mill makes between those ready for liberty and those unready for it. Many readers suppose that Mill doubted the readiness of the British working class for liberty, but the evidence is that he thought they had attained the maturity of their faculties and their Indian counterparts had not. The British working man could be improved by discussion, but Indians were some way short of that happy state. The subjects of Akbar and Charlemagne were better off under the sway of well-intentioned despots than they would be under a regime of individual liberty. 'Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.'4 The thought that the East India Company was the rightful heir to Akbar's civilizing mission is not far to seek. Nor is the contrast with Representative Government's doubly damning claims that 'good' despots are not to be found, and that if they were they would do more damage than 'bad' despots by enervating their subjects.5 Yet, Representative Government ends with a stirring defence of the Company's rule, and a lament for its extinction. 'It has been the destiny of the government of the East India Company, to suggest the true theory of the government of a semi-barbarous dependency by a civilized country, and after having done this, to perish.'6 Mill partially resolves the tension by claiming that the impossibility of finding a 'good' despot only applies in the case where the despot comes from among the population whose low level of political maturity makes him necessary. Where an advanced country supplies the despot for the less advanced people, it is

Introduction 5 possible to find good despots. Indeed, as we shall see, Mill claimed that the Company was in the curious position of operating as a despotism vis-a-vis its Indian subjects while being held to the standards of representative governments by the British government. The Principles of Political Economy relies on India for examples of land tenure systems that frustrate the advance of peasants and rural populations generally, even though it is not India that Mill mostly has in mind. Like other nineteenth-century British economists, Mill had his eyes on the poverty and misery of rural Ireland, and the impact of these evils both on the Irish and on British politics, but the example of India was readily available to him when thinking about how a peasant economy might be lifted out of poverty and cultural stagnation. Mill's conviction that justice and good policy alike dictated that land should be under the immediate control of the people who cultivated it led him to believe that both in Ireland and in India the system of tenure and taxation ought to reduce the power of tax-farmers in India and absentee landlords in Ireland. If progress was to occur in such a society, the creation of a prosperous, independent, and ambitious class of small farmers was essential.7 During the 18303, indeed, Mill seemed to think that India presented a more fruitful setting for such social engineering than did Ireland. Because the East India Company had a near-despotic control over the Indian subcontinent, it had more chance to determine the speed of progress in India than the British government had in Ireland. After Mill had retired from the East India Company on its dissolution, he could write more freely and critically about the Company's government of the Indian subcontinent, and did so in 'A Few Words on Non-Intervention' and in reviewing Sir Henry Sumner Maine's Village Communities. He could admit in public what he had often minuted in private in his draft despatches for the Company, that all too often the Company had been in a false position: its military power had secured the authority of native rulers over their people, without at the same time ensuring that their rule was just and rational. In the absence of the Company's military support, these native rulers would have been overthrown by rebellions from below, displaced by perhaps more competent relatives, or forced to govern properly by fear of these things. The Company removed these imperfect and unreliable sanctions against misconduct without supplying good government to justify their removal or applying consistent sanctions of its own. Mill had for thirty-five years been deeply implicated in the policies he now condemned, and knew whereof he spoke. Yet he remained convinced that it had been a mistake to abolish the Company, or at any rate a mistake not to preserve the arm's-length system of

6 Alan Ryan administering the subcontinent that had prevailed during the final halfcentury of Company rule. This is the burden of his remarks in Considerations on Representative Government, where he deplores the transition to a system that makes Indian administration as much subject to party politics as the administration of localities in Britain. Disinterested bureaucratic management, supervised but not closely directed by ministers answerable to the British Parliament, seemed to him the most likely arrangement to secure Indian advancement towards economic prosperity, rationality in social affairs, and uncorrupt self-government in politics. It would, therefore, be of considerable interest to students of Mill to discover the answers to two questions: how far Mill brought to his work at the East India Company's head office in Leadenhall Street the ideas and ideals that animated his work as a polemicist outside the office, and what impact on those ideas and ideals his work in the office actually had. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer them. Even were we in full command of the answers, and able to say how important the Company and India were to Mill, it would not take us very far in understanding how important Mill was to the Company and to India. Nor would we be wise to conclude at all quickly that Mill's importance to the Company implies very much about his impact on India. Recent writers on Indian history have been much more sceptical than their predecessors about the depth to which the Company's influence penetrated. Almost everyone has marvelled at the fact that the British governed India both during Company rule and after with such a small number of British officials. Part of the explanation of their success may be that they made less difference to the lives of the great majority of the people under their rule than commentators formerly supposed. The essays in this volume focus more on the importance of the Company to Mill than vice versa, though they have implications for the answers to the question of his impact on the Company. Before I say something about the difficulty of discovering what we are after, and how the essays that follow begin to shed light on some previously unilluminated corners of Mill's life, I should say a little about the peculiarities of British control over India during the years of Mill's employment for readers who have hitherto stopped at Mill's dismissive account of his career. The East India Company had, as its name suggests, begun in 1600 as a trading company, intending to establish its 'factories' - warehouses where imported British goods and about-to-be exported Indian goods were stored, and the Company's 'factors' did business - as and where it could. Factories needed protecting and the commercial business needed managing, and the Company employed two sorts of 'servants' or employees for the purpose,

Introduction 7 military and civil. In due course the Company provided a model for financial, administrative, and legal rationality to the home government itself, but the development of this order was two centuries ahead. The seventeenthcentury Company showed few signs of developing into the organization that employed John Stuart Mill; its operations in Java were destroyed by the Dutch East India Company, and on the Indian mainland, it was initially under some pressure from the Portuguese. It was always vulnerable to political intrigue in Britain, and its position as a monopoly under Crown protection naturally aroused resentment. It was only late in the eighteenth century that the Company developed into the extraordinary entity for which the Mills worked. The British government forced a consolidation of the two rival East India trading associations in 1708-9 into one East India Company, and in India itself the Company's fortunes improved with Job Charnock's creation of Calcutta at the end of the previous century, which left the Company with three secure fortified settlements at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The Company's expansion into a political as well as a commercial entity, however, came when the European struggle between Britain and France became a global conflict. From the 17405 to the 17605, Britain and France were almost continuously at war, and the battle was joined on the Indian subcontinent as energetically as in North America. In the end, the French were driven out of the enclaves in which they had established themselves, and the Company found itself becoming willy-nilly a political enterprise. The British and the French had made innumerable alliances with native Indian rulers, and with each reversal of fortune for one side or the other their Indian allies lost control over their own armies, lands, and revenues. This coincided with the decay of the Mughal Empire; from the late seventeenth century the emperor's control over subordinate rulers became steadily feebler, and the Company more attractive as a protector. The Company was on a slippery slope; every time it established its military superiority over a native ruler, it weakened both his authority and that of most of his neighbours, and so found both good reasons and good excuses for going further. The model for subsequent control was established with the Company's take-over of Bengal. In 1757, after the French threat had been extinguished at the battle of Plassey, the victorious Robert Clive placed Bengal under a sort of tutelary rule; the Company took the authority to raise revenue for military expenses away from the nawab of Bengal, but did not set up a Company-run administration. In 1765, after a series of rebellions and minor wars, the Company replaced the local administration with its own. It is worth noting that this was the first time that the Company had taken over the reins of government, and that even then it did not supersede the local

8 Alan Ryan government in all aspects. Still, it secured the diwani, that is the authority recognized by the emperor in Delhi, to collect the state's revenues; this was in essence the sovereign power, and the move amounted to annexation. From this point to the extinction of the Company in 1858 was less than a hundred years. The entity that Mill worked for was not an immemorial eccentricity, but the last in a series of short-lived expedients. Neither the Company nor the home government was anxious to conquer the whole Indian subcontinent. The Company's own secretary told the British Parliament that it would be absurd and monstrous for a trading company to set itself up as a government, and there is every reason to think he was sincere. The Company's raison d'etre was to make money, and this it, or rather its employees, generally did, though not in great amounts until the de facto annexation of Bengal. During the last half of the century, however, a young man who survived the rigours of the Indian climate and did not succumb to cholera, typhoid fever, or the temptations of drink, gambling, and sex could make large amounts of money very fast. The system was a peculiar one; the Company paid exceedingly small salaries, and its employees were expected to trade on their private accounts. They had great advantages over their Indian competitors because of their exemption from local taxes and because of their connection to the supreme military power of the region. Hence they could make large profits without much effort. During the unsettled years of the eighteenth century, they also received 'presents,' from Indians wanting favours from the Company. Once the practice of taking presents was established, it turned into a regular system of extortion, made all the worse by the exaggerated beliefs of the British about the amount of hidden treasure the Indians had available. Clive did his best to suppress the practice, and Warren Hastings established upper limits to the amount the Company's servants might receive in presents, but the system was patently corrupt. It was also increasingly obnoxious in Britain, where the 'nabobs,' as the self-made Indian adventurers were derisively known, spent their money lavishly and foolishly. They and the Company were also accused of spending their money to suborn Parliament in order to preserve their monopoly over the exploitation of India. Late in the century, evangelicals joined in the clamour against the Company, complaining that its policy of not disturbing the religious attachments of the native population amounted in practice to excluding would-be missionaries from bringing the word of God to the heathen. The British government had reason to view with alarm the Company's transformation into the government of a substantial part of the subcontinent. It presented the risk that some act of folly by the Company would drag the British into a war which could not be won at an acceptable price. Both

Introduction

9

the government and the Company were committed to avoiding wars of annexation, but it was not easy to avoid them on the ground, and it was not easy for the directors of the Company in London to keep a grip on their people in India. Instructions from London might take three months to reach India and a month more to reach officers in the field; officials sent to supervise what was going on in India were almost as likely as not to die on the voyage out. There was also a risk that the Company would become bankrupt, with incalculable consequences for British credit. The riches amassed by the employees of the Company were not matched by the profits of the Company itself. Soon enough, such fears were realized; in the 17705, the Company found itself obliged to ask the government for a loan of £i million. The uproar this created was one of the precipitating causes of Clive's suicide in 1774, and it provided the occasion for the first of the measures that transformed the Company into an agency of the home government. The Regulating Act of 1773 stabilized the membership of the Court of Directors in London, and created a council and a governor-general in India. Until that time, the three branches of the Company's operations had been at best loosely coordinated. The act was not satisfactory as it stood, since it saddled the governor with a council he could not overrule, even though it held him responsible for the Company's actions; but it marked the beginning of the transformation of the Company from a band of merchant adventurers to a government agency. Ten years later, Pitt's India Act laid down the fundamental pattern under which India was governed until 1858. The Company's charter was to be renewed henceforth every twenty years from the original act, and at each renewal a parliamentary committee was to inquire into its work and recommend whatever alterations in the charter were necessary. Almost more significant was the creation of an overtly political, or governmental, counterpart to the Court of Directors. The Company was to be managed by its Court of Directors; its chairman and deputy were charged with the task of instructing the administrators and officials in India in their duties. But its management was to be overseen by a Board of Control, whose president was in essence the British government's secretary of state for India. The government on the ground was to be in the hands of the governor-general, based in Calcutta, with deputies in Madras and Bombay. The governments in neither place had it in mind that the Indian subcontinent should become a British protectorate or part of an empire, but inexorably the Company moved to fill the gaps left by the final collapse of the Mughal Empire. After the deposition of the nawab of Bengal, the Company's magistrates administered justice,

io Alan Ryan and its officials supervised the collection of taxes, leaving the nawab revenues sufficient to maintain his domestic state but not to maintain armies or conduct the kind of diplomacy he would have practised before. This provided a model for the treatment of displaced rulers; the 'native states' were treated differently, though a not entirely dissimilar degree of control was hoped for. The number of European employees involved in the work remained minuscule; it was very much a matter of placing a thin layer of British supervision over Indian tax-collectors and police. Over time, the incompatibility of the Company's political and commercial roles became increasingly obvious; the Company lost its commercial monopoly in 1813, and was confined to raising revenue from the tea trade and from local taxes. The connection of the tea trade with the export of opium from Bengal to China to pay for Chinese tea appears more scandalous in retrospect than at the time, but it was never an attractive way of paying for the Company's work. The Company's relationship with the Indian native states, and with the faineant emperor, was put on a permanent basis in 1818, with the Company recognized as the paramount power but not the direct ruler of most of the subcontinent. The native states, whose political affairs Mill was to spend his working life supervising, were given a limited autonomy; they had to accept a British 'resident,' who kept an eye on the local ruler's conduct of affairs, but they could reckon on substantial freedom of action so long as their affairs were conducted with reasonable probity. They were a strikingly heterogeneous collection of entities ranging from vast regions like Mysore and Hyderabad in the south to tiny principalities of a few square miles. The Company remained attached to its earlier abstemiousness about 'civilizing' India. Warren Hastings had been a genuine scholar as well as a diplomatic and administrative genius, and he had enjoyed the richness and variety of Indian cultural life. There were Indian practices that made even the most culturally pluralist administrators blench, of course - infant sacrifice, widow-burning, thagi, debt-slavery, and the habit of hill-tribes of kidnapping slaves from their neighbours; until the nineteenth century, it was tacitly agreed that the Company was under no obligation to prevent these practices, but ought not positively to assist them, as for instance by helping Indian owners to recover runaway slaves. Education was not the difficult subject it later became; until the administration was thoroughly regularized, there was not the demand for Indians who were literate in English that there was in the nineteenth century, nor was there the pressure from missionaries to be allowed to set up schools where they could teach the Christian religion along with 'western science.' The dispute between the Orientalists and Anglicists was interesting in its own right, but the victory of the Anglicists

Introduction n made little difference to Indian education generally. Primary education remained almost non-existent; Indians who sought employment with the British had a simple material incentive to learn English for the purpose; acquiring the rudiments of a British higher education was attractive to some high-caste Indians. As a means to change the character of the Indian people, the very limited investment that the Company (and even the missionaries) made was quite inadequate. The refusal to proselytize was perhaps the most important element in allowing the Company to rule India with the acquiescence of the native population. The confused state of Indian politics from the time of the Mughal invasions on meant that few Indians had very much in the way of deep loyalty to their local rulers, though like all other generalizations about India, this was subject to innumerable exceptions. The one thing that would surely rouse the entire population against its foreign rulers would be to affront their religious sensibilities.8 By the time Mill came to work for the Company, it was well on the way to extinction. It had lost all its commercial purpose, and in essence had become a privately owned agency for conducting the government of India on behalf of the British government. It was, for all that, an extremely interesting piece of administrative and political machinery. It offered careers to highly intelligent and able young men, who often enjoyed great power at a very early age. Although appointments to writerships and cadetships were not freed from the patronage system until 1853, shortly before the Company's final abolition, the quality of administration in India was certainly higher than that of the home government. The Company's college at Haileybury, founded in 1805, provided a basic training for future administrators, and the system of patronage was rationalized so as to eliminate real incompetence. 'Civil servants' in the modern sense were unknown to the home government until after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854; government offices were staffed by clerks, and it was a surprise to everyone when the Northcote-Trevelyan report envisaged the creation of a mandarin class of permanent officials who would help to determine policy as well as implement it. But just such creatures were a feature of the Company's rule, and Sir Charles Trevelyan had cut his administrative teeth in India, where he had been a notably brisk and unsentimental opponent of Orientalist tendencies. When writers on the very different careers of the two Mills compare them to the disadvantage of the younger Mill, they are not always as careful as they might be to situate their careers in the history of the Company, or to situate the Company in its own career. The Company for which James Mill worked from 1819 to his death in 1836 was still a somewhat flexible institu-

12 Alan Ryan tion, settling its own shape as an administrative, judicial, and tax-raising enterprise. It was during his years that the second part of the tax settlement took place, and his Ricardian views on the virtues of ryotwari tenure were accepted wholesale by his son. But even before James Mill's death, the changes made upon the renewal of the charter in 1833 had placed the Company more completely under the thumb of the British government. In India itself, the Company faced for the next twenty-five years a situation of more or less constant small-scale warfare that left little opportunity for further rethinking of its internal structure. Under these conditions, Mill was as little likely as any other senior civil servant to make a decisive difference to the conduct of affairs. How disappointed we should feel about this is a matter for debate: nineteenth-century governments had fewer ambitions for the elaboration of public policy than their successors, and thus less use than we might think for policy-makers in the twentieth century style. Matters began to change more or less as Mill retired, but Mill belongs to the world before that change. It was not a foregone conclusion that John Stuart Mill should work for the East India Company. His father, James Mill, had spent much of his son's childhood writing his History of British India, a fact that is memorialized in the extraordinary opening of Mill's Autobiography: 'I was born in London, on the 2oth of May 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, author of The History of British India.'9 It seems plausible that it was that book that secured James Mill's appointment as assistant examiner of India correspondence in 1819. Still, it was not a fixed thought that John should accompany his father into the Company's employment. He might well have gone to Cambridge, as his friend Charles Austin did; Mill himself says that his family's first thought was that an obvious career would be at the bar, a profession offering a much larger income and as much leisure as India House did. Moreover, the bar would have been consistent with his political ambitions. He might have started at the bar, made a fortune, and gone on into political life. Until 1840, when he despaired of the prospects of radicals in Parliament and of his own prospects of creating a radical movement outside Parliament with the aid of the London and Westminster Review, the incompatibility of his work at India House with an active political career was intermittently a subject of complaining letters to his friends. Mill, of course, knew that Parliament was a career for a man who need not worry about his income, and he was not in that position until he retired in 1858. However, in 1823, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, Mill was appointed a clerk in his father's office, and there he remained for thirty-five years. Although he began as a clerk, much as young men who went out to

Introduction

13

India began as 'writers/ he was marked for rapid promotion. After the usual three-year unpaid probationary period, he was established as a clerk, but two years later, he was promoted over the heads of his contemporaries, first to the post of fourth assistant, then third assistant, and on the death of his father, to the position of first assistant examiner of India correspondence. His time as the occupant of the highest permanent position in the London office was brief; he became examiner in 1856, and resigned in 1858 when the Company was abolished. His pay was substantial, though not out of the way for a middle-class Victorian. He earned from /6oo to £12.00 as first assistant, £2000 as examiner, and retired on a pension of ^1500. The Northcote-Trevelyan committee heard that a gentleman needed £400 a year, a figure that they took as the basis for thinking about the salaries of home administrative staff. For almost the whole period, Mill was in charge of the political correspondence in regard to the native states. Since the essays below discuss his work in that position in some detail, especially the essay by Robin Moore, it is unnecessary to say anything about it here. It is perhaps worth calling attention now to something that Martin Moir discusses at greater length. As Mill told the House of Lords Select Committee considering the renewal of the Company's charter in 1852, the London office was not really an executive body. Conducting Indian affairs at such a distance, its role was to advise, warn, settle large issues of policy, and remind the officials on the ground of what the Company's standing assumptions were. Mill drew the Select Committee's attention to the fact that the government of India was essentially a 'government of record.' The Writers' Building in Calcutta still stands as a memorial to this truth. Officials in India recorded what they had done and explained their reasons; officials in London recorded what they thought of the actions and the reasons. It was, one might say, a bureaucratic debate conducted in slow waltz time. But Mill did not 'make' the policy his despatches set out; early drafts known as 'previous communications' or 'PCs' went up to the chairs and the board, and were duly altered and perhaps even dropped entirely. What emerged from London was a collective judgment; and during the period of Mill's career, it seems fair to say, the president of the Board of Control played an increasingly important role and the chairmen of the Court of Directors less. Mill says little about life in the office, but he was obviously liked by his colleagues. His hours of attendance were not long, for all his complaints about the scant four weeks' holiday a year that he was allowed. He worked from ten to four. Having walked to work in Leadenhall Street from his house in Kensington, he took tea and a boiled egg for breakfast on his arrival, and settled down to write - often enough, to write his books rather

14 Alan Ryan than draft despatches. Characteristically, he flew into a temper when his colleagues tried to make him a presentation on his retirement - and not, one fears, because of the ugliness of the silver ink-stand they had purchased. They readily forgave him. I am indebted to Martin Moir for a charming vignette from one of those colleagues: 'The son [i.e., JSM], even when in conversation with others, seemed to be preoccupied with own thoughts, all the time moving restlessly to and fro, "like a hyena," as described to me. When particularly inspired, he used, before sitting down to his desk, not only to strip himself of his coat and waistcoat, but of his trousers; and so set to work, alternately striding up and down the room and writing at great speed.'10 The most interesting evidence of what Mill thought about his employers emerges from his defence of their conduct at two points, the first in 1852 when he gave evidence to the Select Committee, and the second in 1858 when he made a gallant but futile attempt to hold up the abolition of the Company. Douglas Peers's essay below says a good deal about this last-ditch defence of the Company; it is, however, worth noticing some features of both occasions. Mill was very conscious of the obvious question that anyone might ask him: what securities for good government could defenders of the Company point to when they defended its 'despotic' rule? I have argued elsewhere that Mill's response is interesting because it reveals something about him and about utilitarianism in a particularly vivid way. One might say that utilitarianism is essentially a 'government house' morality; its goal is, obviously, the welfare of the people whose interests are at stake, but it is always an open question whether self-government serves that welfare. Why would rational people not prefer the rule of a benevolent and competent but undemocratic bureaucracy to the rule of a less competent but democratically answerable government? Conversely, if it was obvious that rational people would not trust an unanswerable government to remain benevolent and competent, why should we expect Indians to tolerate it? Mill's reply was interesting: he thought it was the task of the Company to teach Indians the arts of self-government. Once they had learned them, the Company could withdraw. It was a characteristically Millian trope; unlike his father, for whom it was enough to create good government, he encumbered the Company with a historical task of a sort that must have somewhat startled his employers. The nannyish overtones that strike us painfully - when, we are inclined to ask, will the Indian people be ripe for self-rule, and who, we might add, is to decide? - did not strike his interlocutors anything like as sharply as the mere fact that he envisaged an end to Company rule.11 As a good reader of Tocqueville, Mill also understood that good govern-

Introduction

15

ment required argument - the 'antagonism of opinions.' Yet Indians were on his account of the matter not yet able to govern themselves by rational argument. It was here that he pointed to the peculiar, 'double-government' style of the Company. The fact that the Company had to defend its behaviour to the British Parliament provided the security that the absence of representation in an Indian context did not. To the obvious counter-objection that the whole point of representation is to allow the people whose interests are at stake to protect themselves against misrule, Mill's retort was that the insulation of the Company from the usual processes of British politics allowed a disinterested expertise to prevail. Everyone since has said that Mill was far too sanguine about the degree of disconnection that actually prevailed; it was only after the last renewal of the charter that posts in the Company were competed for rather than being given on a patronage basis. Still, it was a plausible view that Indians had more to fear from simple incompetence, and from the high tax rates that the Company imposed, than from any new attempt at outright exploitation. Parliament wanted India governed cheaply, but did not expect it to yield a profit to the British government or people at large, and certainly not to the Company's employees. One question that Mill could not have raised, of course, but which we find hard to evade is the extent to which liberalism is naturally or intrinsically imperialist. This question slides readily into the question of liberalism's vulnerability to racist beliefs. Mill undoubtedly held views about the Indian people that were both prejudiced and ignorant; he was altogether too quick off the mark in describing them as slavish, indolent, and superstitious. But he was not racist. Given the environmentalist prejudices of the psychological theories on which he had been brought up, he could only believe that, however slavish, indolent, or superstitious Indians might be, it required only a different environment to induce most of them to become self-governing, rational, and energetic.12 It was the task of the Company to create that environment, to the extent that it was possible to do it. If not a racist, however, he was most certainly an imperialist in the sense in which liberals of his stripe could hardly help being imperialists. He believed in progress, and although he did not believe that we have a natural right to go around civilizing people against their will, he had no particular qualms about taking advantage of situations in which we can improve other people. For all his enthusiasm for Coleridge and the sort of cultural analysis Coleridge represented, he had no doubt that Britain was more advanced in obvious ways than the Indian subcontinent. Unlike imperialists whose goal was the greater glory of the imperial power, Mill envisaged self-abolishing imperialism; if it was justified it was as an educative enterprise, and if successful its

16 Alan Ryan conclusion was the creation of independent liberal-democratic societies everywhere, at which point there would be no further imperial powers. This means that Mill turns out to be at odds with almost everyone from democrats who regard all forms of colonialism with abhorrence to imperialists who deplore Mill-like pandering to dissident natives. The essays below take very different views of Mill's relationship with his employers. One issue over which they divide quite sharply is the question of how far Mill brought his larger social concerns into the office. Robin Moore and Lynn Zastoupil represent the extreme positions, the former arguing that Mill's policy in conducting the Company's political dealings with the native states was largely dictated by the exigencies of the Company's position during his career, the latter arguing that, at any rate in the case of Mill's suppressed draft of a view of Indian education sharply at odds with Macaulay's, we can connect Mill's views with his revolt against the Benthamism in which he had been brought up. S. Ambirajan argues most interestingly that Mill's real impact on India was through his books and their readership in the Indian intellectual elite rather than anything he did for the Company. The common tendency to contrast a flexible, benign J.S. Mill with the rigidly utilitarian Bentham and James Mill is neatly subverted both by Allison Dube and Javed Majeed, the former finding more subtlety in Bentham than he is given credit for and the latter finding altogether more condescension towards the Indian people in the younger Mill than in his father. Attitudes towards 'orientalism' - in the old sense of a regard for the riches of the indigenous culture - are explored by Penelope Carson and Nancy Gardner Cassels in the context of education, law, and religion. Martin Moir explains why it is so hard, but happily not quite impossible, to unravel Mill's exact role in the Company, while Douglas M. Peers takes up Mill's final defence of the Company on the eve of its extinction. One thing on which they are all agreed is that it is no accident that it is Mitt, rather than, say, his predecessor Thomas Love Peacock, on whom we all focus. However intractable we find the questions that Mill's career raises, it is the fact that it is his career that makes them significant. NOTES 1 CW,i, 85. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 87. 4 Ibid., XVIII, 224. 5 Ibid., XIX, 400-2.

Introduction 17 6 Ibid., 577. 7 "The case of India is similar in its requirements to that of India,' Principles, 2nd edition (1849), II, x,}, CW, III, 993; in the fourth edition, he looks forward to the day when 'we may hope to see, from the present lazy, apathetic, reckless, improvident and lawless Ireland, a new Ireland arise, consisting of peasant proprietors with something to lose, and of hired labourers with something to gain' (CW, III, 1002). The analogy with India is obvious enough. 8 A good account of the Company's rule is given in Judith M. Brown, Modern India (Oxford, 1994), 46-94. 9 CW, I, 5 10 William Griggs, Relics of the Honourable East India Company: a series of fifty plates by William Griggs, with letterpress by Sir George Birdwood and William Foster (London, 1909), xi. 11 See 'Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy,' in Gillian Sutherland, ed., The Growth of Government in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1973). 12 See above, note 8.

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India F. ROSEN

... for it is my personal belief that to enquire into the nature, and to observe the fate, of ideas and attitudes on which men stake their lives is to experience the highest illumination which the study of history is capable of yielding.1

Eric Stokes's The English Utilitarians and India, first published in 1959, has rightly become a minor classic in the history of political thought. Though its originality was immediately recognized,2 its message (if a complex historical argument can have a 'message') was variously interpreted. One reviewer thought that Stokes was 'writing as an apologist for British rule,'3 while another noted that though India was now independent and the book had no immediate application there, there were important implications for numerous British colonies which had not yet achieved independence.4 These reactions to an avowedly historical study which explored materials relating to nineteenth-century India in a highly scholarly way perhaps reflected the significance of empire or the end of empire felt by the reviewers at that time. But with the decline in interest in imperial issues which followed (until very recently), Stokes's work has not received the careful attention it has deserved, and few studies of British thought in the nineteenth century have fully absorbed his arguments.5 The English Utilitarians and India advanced two substantial theses. The first was that one could not understand British political thought during this This essay represents a development of earlier work which appears in F. Rosen, 'Elie Halevy and Bentham's Authoritarian Liberalism,' Enlightenment and Dissent, 6 (1987): 59-76, reprinted in B. Parekh, ed., Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London, 1993), III, 917-33; and Bentham, Byron, and Greece, Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford, 1992).

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 19 period without considering the impact of the Indian experience on Britain. 'Mentally it reacted upon the English middle class,' Stokes wrote, 'by infusing an authoritarian counter-current into the main tide of Liberal opinion, so that serious men from Chatham onwards wondered whether the possession of a despotically-ruled empire might not prove fatal to the cause of liberty in England.'6 His argument was a complex one, that within British liberalism there were authoritarian doctrines, most prominent in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, which had little success in Britain but were exported to and widely applied in India. This authoritarian doctrine then returned to Britain later in the nineteenth century, most notably in the writings of James Fitzjames Stephen, and was used to challenge popular liberalism and especially J.S. Mill's writings on the theme of liberty. The second thesis was concerned with the application of utilitarian ideas in India in three spheres: economics (the law of rent), government (Bentham's theories of administration and judicial organization), and law (codification and especially the development of a criminal code). This too was a complex argument involving the identification of numerous currents of thought brought to India and the special role within them that was played by utilitarian doctrines. As Stokes worked out the details of both theses, he concentrated especially on the relationship between ideas and practice. He was concerned with ideas 'on which men stake their lives' rather than with the clarity and coherence of the categories and distinctions which he employed.7 As will be seen, his inattention to the fundamental concepts he used and his reliance on other writers, and especially on Elie Halevy, to supply these concepts gave rise to considerable confusion even in the more practical side of his argument. One object of this essay is to explore this confusion. A second object will be to show why Stokes wrongly relegated J.S. Mill to such a minor role in his story of the utilitarians in India, and made Stephen the important conduit for the flow of utilitarian ideas back to Britain. While this essay contains no assessment of J.S. Mill's impact on India, it will have the advantage of removing one obstacle to such an assessment which has followed from the widespread acceptance of Stokes's arguments, and will in this sense support the work which appears in other essays published in this volume. I

When Stokes wrote his study of the utilitarians and India, he accepted uncritically the assumptions and arguments which he found in what was

2o

F. Rosen

the main work on British utilitarianism at this time, Elie Halevy's La Formation du radicalisme philosophique* Halevy's work had dazzled scholars for decades and had been widely accepted as an authoritative study and a useful source of information.9 Stokes mined Halevy for several ideas which he used to greater effect in the work on India than Halevy did in his own study of philosophic radicalism. Nevertheless, Stokes's uncritical use of arguments about philosophic radicalism ultimately led him to conclusions concerning the utilitarians in India which ran counter to the evidence he actually employed. It is worth noting at the outset that Stokes used the term 'utilitarian' as a synonym for 'philosophic radicalism,' and referred to the movement especially associated with James Mill (as a disciple of Bentham) which flourished in Britain and among the British in India in the early part of the nineteenth century. He did not refer to utilitarianism as a philosophical theory associated with a larger tradition, including Hume, Bentham, J.S. Mill, and Sidgwick, and concerned with happiness, pleasure and pain, rational choice, interests, rights and duties, etc., which has remained an important constituent of debates in moral and political philosophy, economic theory, and jurisprudence in the twentieth century. For Stokes (as for Halevy) utilitarianism did not survive the nineteenth century. With the demise of the philosophic radicals as a group, what survived was more an attitude of mind than a philosophical doctrine, an attitude of mind which seemed especially suited to an imperial setting. The omission of the philosophical side of utilitarianism made it appear as a more practical political doctrine than in fact it was. This partial view of utilitarianism enabled Stokes to reduce it to an attitude of mind and a few practical doctrines, a reduction which Halevy's approach encouraged. Perhaps the most important confusion introduced into Stokes's work stemmed directly from his adoption of Halevy's conception of liberalism and his understanding of utilitarianism in relation to it. For Halevy, 'liberalism' was used to depict political ideas which had developed prior to the 18203 when the term 'liberal' (taken from the Spanish 'liberales') first began to be used in Britain to describe a distinct political movement. Somewhat surprisingly, he approached what he called 'Anglo-Saxon Liberalism' through French categories. Liberalism meant a devotion to Whig principles, such as the social contract, the separation of powers, an emphasis on rights, and free commerce, but these principles became liberal' because he saw them through the legacy of Montesquieu and Delolme, whose ideas were widely accepted by French liberals in the nineteenth century. He contrasted this tradition with that stemming from Helvetius, whose ideas were 'des-

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 21 potic, philanthropic, and Utilitarian, but not in the least liberal.'10 Because Helvetian utilitarianism seemed allied to enlightened despotism and not to liberty, Halevy established an opposition between liberalism and utilitarianism. Stokes adopted this position, with serious consequences for his own study. According to Stokes, 'Bentham's political philosophy was in origin authoritarian, a product of the century of enlightened despotism; and when it later took sides with democracy it could not root out its parentage. Its conception of the nature and exercise of political power sprang from Hobbes.'11 Stokes developed this position by pointing out, as did Halevy, that Bentham rejected ideas like natural rights, the separation of powers, and checks and balances, and concluded that because he did so, he opposed liberalism. But such a position was hard to sustain, if only because Stokes's study covered a sufficient period of time that he later had to admit that 'utilitarianism survived as a body of thought which provided the intellectual basis of liberalism'12 - forgetting that he was now talking about liberalism as a midnineteenth-century political movement and not an invention by Halevy from Whig ideas as filtered through French thought. But even if Bentham did reject certain Whig ideas, neither Halevy nor Stokes pointed out that Bentham developed new ideas to replace those which he found defective in earlier thinkers. Although he rejected the idea of the separation of powers as the basis of constitutional liberty, he argued that a representative democracy, based on a wide suffrage, secret ballot, and frequent elections, could replace this doctrine to secure constitutional liberty; and he developed this argument within the tradition of constitutional liberty he inherited from Montesquieu.13 Indeed, Stokes (following Halevy) consistently disregarded Bentham's commitment to liberty throughout his writings, and to democracy, especially in his later writings on constitutional law and government. Instead, Stokes adhered closely to Halevy's argument that utilitarianism was fundamentally an authoritarian doctrine, and he provided the additional argument that the Indian context enabled the authoritarian element to be revealed most fully. But to reach the Indian context, Stokes took yet another idea from Halevy, that Bentham and James Mill could be considered together as providing a utilitarian doctrine for India.14 This move allowed Stokes to treat the utilitarians as a sect which included Ricardian political economy and which stood apart from radical liberal' thought generally.15 What set the utilitarians apart from the others was supposedly 'the immense and indefinite influence which the Utilitarians allowed to the power of law and government.'16 Unlike the evangelicals (with whom they were often allied), the utilitarians did not believe in the power of education

22 F. Rosen alone to reform Indian institutions but looked to fundamental changes in law, administration, and forms of taxation to achieve these ends. Even though this view of reform was compatible with the Whig tradition of Cornwallis, Stokes argued that it was used by opponents of that tradition (e.g., Munro, Malcolm, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe) in an authoritarian manner. According to Stokes, the application of the law of rent (a so-called utilitarian doctrine) in India led to the extension of state power to determine the wealth and status of landed peasants and virtually to the nationalization of the land. Bentham's emphasis on clear chains of command and responsibility was used to empower local officials with undivided authority and resulted in the enhancement of state power. His belief in codification was interpreted in terms of the use of law to transform society in an authoritarian manner. Stokes developed these arguments in great detail, linking a version of Bentham's political ideas, James Mill's critique of Cornwallis in The History of British India, and the theory of rent in Ricardian political economy. Stokes's account of Bentham's political thought is misleading and at times mistaken. Bentham's rejection of the separation of powers and other so-called Whig doctrines was based on his assessment that these ideas could not secure liberty or could not do so for the many as opposed to the few. His early writings were aimed at securing liberty, but he was not content to repeat Lockean ideas which (especially in Blackstone's thought) seemed confused and unlikely to lead to a more extensive liberty. Stokes also never clearly distinguished between Bentham's early writings and his later radicalism, which may be found fully developed in his Constitutional Code.17 But even in the early writings, Bentham was more a follower of Montesquieu and Hume (whom Stokes curiously ignored) than of Hobbes, and in his later writings Bentham certainly did not give to the people the power he supposedly gave formerly to enlightened despots. His ideas followed the Whig tradition rnore closely than Stokes (and Halevy) could see. He sought security of property for all individuals in the state. His emphasis on sufficient state power was directed at providing this security for all citizens. His concern for codification was to extend the rule of law especially over powerful groups in society which had great power in the state because they had an exclusive right to interpret the law. His proposals for competitive examinations for the civil service were aimed at intelligent administration at minimal expense. But administration was not authoritarian if by authoritarian is meant that a minister or judge at the top of the government or judiciary could simply direct all subordinates to do as he wished. If a minister did have an exclusive power of appointment, the power of dismissal rested in several hands, including dismissal through popular petition and vote. There

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 23 were numerous legal, administrative, and popular provisions for redress within various hierarchies for the abuse of power by superior administrators. Nevertheless, consider this comment by Stokes: Bentham condemned the Whig addiction to complexity, and its apparatus of checks and balances, which in India had led Cornwallis to establish collective boards and to set up the judiciary over against the executive. Instead he taught the virtues of simplicity, with power devolved downwards to assignable individuals through a disciplined chain of command.18

Stokes incorrectly assumed that there was a necessary connection between complexity and liberty, because the two ideas were connected in Halevy's conception of Whig thought. Although the separation of powers may have provided the key to constitutional liberty for Montesquieu, it was not because such a separation was 'complex' but because power was divided and checked. Conversely, that there is a link between simplicity and authoritarianism does not follow. Bentham's objection to complexity in this context was to the tendency for corruption to flourish in administrative arrangements where no assignable individual could be held responsible for government actions and these actions were not transparent. Liberty could be built into the system through a careful definition of the functions of government officials and through the development of remedies for the abuse of power to which all citizens had access. Freedom of information, widespread publicity, and the freedom to criticize public officials would also tend to curb the abuse of power. Thus, accountable government through simple chains of command need not (and in Bentham's system would not) lead to authoritarianism. In Constitutional Code Bentham went so far as to argue that where systems were already corrupt, and the securities he proposed were not in place, it would be better to make appointments by lottery so as to minimize the effect of corruption, which could only gain in strength through a simple chain of command.19 Stokes failed to grasp the point of Bentham's argument but instead linked it with the paternalist system as follows: Here is to be found the cult of the district officer, the kindly autocrat dwelling among the people, which forms the heart of Metcalfe's outlook and supplies the key to paternalism. From it stemmed the belief that British rule in India could only be rightly carried out by men vested with full undivided powers, acting from personal observation and experience, and linked into a unitary chain of command.20

24 F. Rosen Bentham's idea of a single local official with numerous duties was taken by Stokes as one source for the paternalist idea of the district officer. But he failed to realize that Bentham was opposed to widespread discretionary power and had numerous controls aimed at limiting the power of local officials. Yet Stokes argued that the district commissioner, eventually used throughout the empire, was advocated in India 'with all the arguments of Bentham, and it may justly be regarded as one of the signal examples where paternalism blended with the authoritarian wing of Benthamite thought.'21 II

It may have been true that those who advocated the district commissioner in India used arguments taken directly from Bentham, but there were few other sources on which to draw at that time, and no one else had written as systematically on government organization. The use of Bentham's ideas by the paternalist camp, however, would not make Bentham an authoritarian; Stokes jumped to this conclusion, because he had already been taught by Halevy to see Bentham as following Helvetius in an authoritarian tradition of enlightened despotism. In fact, Bentham's political ideas were used by those in the Whig tradition as well as by those who were described as paternalists, and by others who were acquainted with his work. Nevertheless, Stokes could not easily sort out this important truth about influence. When he dealt with Alexander Ross, who, like T.B. Macaulay, was a legal reformer in the Whig tradition, this confusion became evident. Stokes described Ross as a disciple of Bentham and particularly of his jurisprudence; Ross was concerned with judicial organization and opposed the view, advocated by Metcalfe, that revenue and judicial powers should be unified in 'an administration almost military in form.'22 Ross followed Cornwallis and sought to keep these two powers separate, while using Bentham's ideas concerning the organization of the judicial system. Stokes should have concluded from this important discussion simply that Bentham's ideas appeared to have influenced policy-makers from opposing camps, as they took from him ideas and proposals which seemed to suit their objects, and that there were good reasons for those in the Whig tradition to use his ideas. This use of Bentham would then not necessarily reflect any overall view of Bentham, himself, but rather that practical ideas might be used in a wide range of contexts and for varying purposes. But Stokes could not reach this obvious conclusion, because he was attempting to work from within the framework provided by Halevy. Stokes argued that

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 25 in Metcalfe's proposal 'one stream of Utilitarian opinion was ready to accept some such authoritarian framework.' Ross, however, rejected this framework, and Stokes commented that 'he was doubtless in the more orthodox Utilitarian tradition.'33 Until this point in the book, there seemed to be only one utilitarian tradition, and Stokes, following Halevy, conflated the ideas of Bentham, James Mill, and Ricardo to produce it. That single tradition supposedly developed in opposition to the Cornwallis reforms as in James Mill's The History of British India. But Stokes could not account for the fact that utilitarian ideas, at least from Bentham, were also employed in the so-called Whig tradition. At first, he expressed his position as follows: 'And inasmuch as the main current of Utilitarian opinion swung away from the bureaucratic and authoritarianism of Bentham and inclined towards liberalism, Ross was the more orthodox in demanding not the destruction, but the remodeling and refurbishing of the structure built by Cornwallis.' In the very next sentence Stokes wrote: 'His [Ross's] actual proposals for the internal government of the Bengal territories are striking parallels of Bentham's ideas.'24 Stokes must have been aware of the difficulty in his argument, as he returned to it briefly in the final chapter of his book, where he asserted (citing Halevy) that Ross 'had not looked close enough or had not cared, to detect how much stronger in Bentham's thought was the principle of authority than the principle of liberty.'25 Nowhere else did Stokes attempt to assess the extent to which the British in India actually understood the 'deeper' significance of Bentham's thought, and to do so here in so off-hand a manner is to suggest that his own argument was in some considerable difficulty. If utilitarianism was an authoritarian doctrine and stood outside the Whig tradition, it is hard to see from Stokes's and Halevy's books how it could be so readily employed within that tradition. Stokes's difficulties in dealing with the relationship between Bentham's utilitarianism and the Whig tradition reappeared when he came to consider the contribution of Macaulay to legal reform in India. Stokes depicted Macaulay's outlook as follows: Macaulay's mind is indeed symptomatic of the assimilation of the Utilitarian science to the Whig outlook. He rejected the Utilitarian ideal of a general renovation of society by means of an abstract universal theory, from which the minutest practical detail was deduced. Instead he adhered to expediency and pragmatism, which he dignified with the authority of Bacon's inductive method. Reform had place only when time and circumstance proved it necessary. The prejudice was in favour of the existing historical society, and the burden of proof on the innovator.26

26

F. Rosen

In these remarks Stokes drew on Macaulay's earlier statement of opposition to some aspects of utilitarian doctrine in the well-known debate between the Edinburgh and Westminster reviews.27 That debate, however, specifically excluded Bentham's jurisprudence, towards which Macaulay was sympathetic.28 Because he followed Halevy in tending to see the utilitarians as a united sect, Stokes seemed to confuse Bentham's theory, which had a strong empirical element, with James Mill's Essay on Government.2'9 Furthermore, he confused a so-called Whig approach to political reform with a philosophical method which might be useful in devising codes of law for various societies. These confusions become evident later in the same chapter when Stokes wrote as follows about Macaulay's penal code for India: Of all his [Macaulay's] springtide hopes of 1835 the draft of the Penal Code was the sole durable monument. The Code had to wait for more than twenty years before it was enacted in 1860 as the general criminal code of India. Despite modifications it retained the cast Macaulay had given it. The cast was Bentham's, a code of law drawn not from existing practice or from foreign law systems, but created ex nihilo by the disinterested philosophic intelligence.30

How could Stokes maintain that Macaulay dismissed a utilitarian ideal based on abstract universal theory while pointing out that he had produced a penal code 'ex nihilo by the disinterested philosophic intelligence'? How could the production of a code e% nihilo be reconciled with Bacon's inductive method? Stokes failed to see that there were no obstacles to Macaulay's developing Bentham's ideas within the Whig tradition. He confused a philosophical jurisprudence with a method of reform. Both Macaulay and Bentham would create a code drawing on logical divisions within jurisprudence; this would not be necessarily opposed to a 'Baconian' approach to reform generally, as the code could be one discrete element in gradual reform. Bentham's approach to codification also used empirical examples; it was the example of successful constitutional democracy in the United States of America that formed the empirical basis of his Constitutional Code. Stokes was correct to point out that Macaulay accepted Bentham's jurisprudence but not his political theory, but he was wrong to depict Macaulay's opposition in terms of a lack of 'sympathy for the planned, centralized, bureaucratic state, which Bentham had envisaged in all its minutiae in the Constitutional Code.'31 Stokes inserted here again the theme of authoritarianism which he took from Halevy as the main difference between the Whig Macaulay and the utilitarians. But the main difference between Whigs and

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 27 radicals at this time was the latter's insistence on the adoption of universal suffrage and the former's fear that the adoption of political democracy would mean the confiscation of the property of the rich by the poor. Stokes ignored this important difference between Bentham and Macaulay and thereby was unable to see why it was easy for Macaulay to use Bentham's legal thought in India, where this issue of democracy was not raised, at least in this form. While rejecting representative democracy, Macaulay could use Bentham's ideas to reform and adapt Whig ideas and to create an effective and efficient legal system. For Macaulay as for Bentham, this meant codification of the law: Macaulay's aim was a code that was not derivative from the laws of any creed or country but sprang from the universal science of jurisprudence. And to neglect this universality of outlook, this cast of mind that was of the eighteenth century philosophe, is to lose the historical atmosphere in which the Code took shape. That outlook, which was Bentham's, is to be seen in Macaulay's insistence on the vital interconnexion of the Penal Code with the prospective codes of procedure and substantive civil law, and in his emphasis on the Penal Code as but one portion of the great pannomium.32

Here we see Bentham and Macaulay as one, and the differences between them seem irrelevant. Only in his discussion of Macaulay's rejection of Bentham's provision for free legal aid so as to give all in society access to legal institutions did Stokes turn to the key difference between them. But even here he depicted the difference as one between Macaulay's 'individualism that was tinged with an element of puritanical sternness' and 'the bureaucratic intervention of the state' he associated with Bentham.33 The real difference was over Bentham's theory of democracy, and his plans in Constitutional Code to give democratic institutions and practices a full role in the state. This was not simply a matter of instituting universal suffrage, but was one which affected all institutions, including the judiciary. The provision of 'access to justice' was a way of shifting power from the few to the many, and the notion of the bureaucratic intervention of the state would make no sense in this context.34 Radicals, like Bentham, sought a reduction of government expense and control, and they saw enhanced democratic accountability as a means of achieving it.35 Although Macaulay was willing to attempt to create not only the penal but also procedure and civil codes for India, a constitutional code, and especially one with democratic foundations, was not on his agenda. But, like Ross, he could draw on and find inspiration in Bentham's writings on jurisprudence and codification which

28

F. Rosen

would enable him to extend the rule of law in India within the Whig tradition of Cornwallis. Stokes failed to appreciate how natural a development from Bentham's thought this extension was. Ill

Between 1859 and 1861 three major codes (penal, civil procedure, and criminal procedure) were finally enacted; it took the Mutiny to end twenty years of hesitation, and the codes not only made Anglo-Indian law 'far superior in order, clarity, and system to its English counterpart,' but also were 'among the most solid and enduring results of the Utilitarian influence.'36 In this later period Stokes was concerned to explore these developments in India and the influence of utilitarianism in England. With respect to both of these, he examined the career of James Fitzjames Stephen, whose Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (1873) was both a critique of J.S. Mill's idea of liberty and a consideration of British liberalism 'in the light of his India experience.'37 In India from 1869 to 1872 Stephen carried on energetically in the tradition of Macaulay, and by the time of his departure he 'had piloted through three provisions of principal importance - the Evidence Act, the Contract Act and a revived Code of Criminal Procedure - along with a very substantial cluster of other enactments.'38 He adopted the utilitarian approach to legal reform and called himself a Liberal, but identified his liberalism with the older utilitarians rather than with the Manchester School. Although Stephen might be considered an important figure in nineteenthcentury utilitarianism, his intellectual hero was Hobbes, and he read Bentham (on whom he lavished considerable praise) as a utilitarian successor to Hobbes.39 As Leon Radzinowicz has pointed out, while Stephen acknowledged the contributions of the earlier utilitarians in fields like law and economics and adopted their empirical methods, in his actual opinions he was 'much more akin to the tenets of Hobbes, Burke or Carlyle than to those maintained by Jeremy Bentham and the two Mills.'40 This view is confirmed by Stephen's belief that India should never achieve selfgovernment. Although at times Bentham, like James and J.S. Mill, seemed to favour continued British rule in India,41 he was for the most part resolutely opposed to colonies and in favour of ultimate self-government for all societies which sought it.42 More importantly, there was a massive gulf between Stephen and Bentham over self-government and democratic institutions generally, which makes it difficult to believe that Stephen was bringing the doctrines of the older utilitarians to bear on problems of later liberalism.

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 29 Yet Stokes developed just this view of the continuity of 'authoritarian' utilitarianism in Stephen's thought and its influence in England: Stephen is important because he illustrates how the authoritarian element in utilitarianism, which had found in India so much more congenial a field for its development and which was given a working expression in the machine of the Indian bureaucracy, was carried back into English thought and helped to produce the crisis within English liberalism which occurred in i886.43

The crisis to which Stokes referred was, of course, the debate over Irish Home Rule, which split the Liberal party in England. Stokes credited Stephen with putting forward the ideas with which those who supported imperialism could align themselves, and he linked this development with the older utilitarians. The so-called authoritarian element in Benthamite utilitarianism 'helped to turn the English educated classes from Gladstone's liberalism of the heart, and to provide an important ingredient in the formation of late-nineteenth-century English imperialism.'44 This assertion is based on a distinction between liberalism of the intellect (associated with Bentham, Stephen, and empire) and liberalism of sentiment (associated with Manchester liberalism, J.S. Mill's On Liberty, and Gladstone), and represents the culmination of Stokes's frequent use of the metaphors of cold intellect and warm sentiment when writing about utilitarianism and liberalism throughout his book.45 In spite of this rhetoric, the pedigree has not been clearly established. Just as in India, where some of Bentham's ideas were accepted by those reformers in the paternalist camp, and others by those who followed in the tradition of the Cornwallis reforms, so in Victorian Britain, Bentham's ideas appeared in various forms in both strands of liberalism. The Bentham who favoured representative democracy, free trade, freedom of the press, widespread individual liberty, and increasing equality and self-government found a home in one strand of liberalism, while another strand was attracted more by some of his legal and administrative theories. Nevertheless, contrary to Stokes, who saw Stephen and J.S. Mill as clearly influenced by Bentham, I find it more accurate to say that while both were influenced, Stephen was more definitely influenced by Hobbes, and J.S. Mill, despite his early rebellion against his father's and Bentham's ideas, ended his life by standing firmly in the utilitarian camp. For J.S. Mill as for Bentham, liberty was an important aim of society and government. Furthermore, there was a fundamental difference between the earlier utilitarians and the later imperialists in so far as the early utilitarians, however much they may have hesitated to apply it to India, accepted the

30 F. Rosen importance of representative institutions and self-government. Bentham's commitment was stronger and more extensive than that of James or J;S. Mill, and Stokes underestimated the nature and extent of the utilitarian commitment to representative democracy in Bentham's political theory. IV

At the outset we noted that Stokes minimized the role of J.S. Mill in his account of the utilitarians in India. In part, this was due to the way he interpreted Mill through the arguments of Stephen and made no independent investigation of Mill's thought in general and his writings with respect to India or other issues concerned with empire in particular. Furthermore, by adopting Halevy's argument that the earlier utilitarians formed a sect apart from liberalism and then linking J.S. Mill with 'sentimental' liberalism, he failed to see how J.S. Mill's later thought followed fairly directly in the utilitarian tradition.46 The recent publication of Mill's writings for India in the edition of the Collected Works has enabled a fresh estimation of Mill's involvement in India to be made.47 Stokes's work should neither deter this investigation nor prevent a new assessment of the influence of utilitarianism generally in India. That assessment should not begin with the assumptions that utilitarianism was authoritarian in character or that utilitarianism, as a political doctrine emerging in the 18205, formed a sect apart from liberalism. It should see utilitarianism as a philosophical theory with profound practical implications but whose practical dimension could be detached from the theory and justified on different grounds.48 Sensitivity to these aspects of utilitarianism in India may well produce different conclusions from the same evidence which Stokes employed. Nevertheless, Stokes did set an agenda and, in addition, raised what remains a crucial question regarding the political thought of the nineteenth century. The agenda will require a series of studies of the application of British thought in India for which Stokes's work, freed from the shackles of Halevy, can form a useful point of departure. The crucial question concerns the impact of India and of empire generally on British political thought from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.49 There is no doubt that empire had a profound impact on the way the British saw the world and sought to govern themselves. For example, British scepticism about the claims of nationalism throughout the nineteenth century might well have been connected with the influence of empire. The development of an authoritarian attitude to politics and society might also have been connected with the impact of empire. The complex interdependence between domestic political

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 31 thought and empire has never been fully explored, and, whatever its defects, Stokes's work remains the most challenging starting point for future inquiry. NOTES

1 This quotation is taken from Eric Stokes's inaugural lecture, which was published just after The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959) and provides valuable insights into his approach to the history of political thought. See The Political Ideas of English Imperialism, An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (London, 1960), 35. 2 See, for example, J.H. Burns in History, new series, 45 (1960): 164. 3 Maurice Cowling in English Historical Review, 75 (1960): 532. 4 Vera Anstey in Economic History Review, 2nd series, 12 (1959-60): 347. 5 See, for example, Stefan Collini, Public Moralists, Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (Oxford, 1991), which begins with James Fitzjames Stephen's return from India and his election to the Athenaeum, but it is the Athenaeum and not India which is of importance. 6 Stokes, English Utilitarians, xi. 7 For a statement of Stokes's methodology, see Political Ideas of English Imperialism, 6-8. 8 Elie Halevy, Laformation du radicalisme philosophique, 3 vols. (Paris, 1901-4). The three volumes have been translated by M. Morris (though without the extensive annotation) in The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London, 1928). References will be given to the French original and to the English translation in parentheses. 9 Only in recent decades has the work begun to receive substantial criticism. Besides Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece, 3-5, 7, 291, and 'Elie Halevy and Bentham's Authoritarian liberalism,' see W. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice 1817-1841 (Oxford, 1979); L.J. Hume, 'Revisionism in Bentham Studies,' Bentham Newsletter, i (1978): 3-20. 10 Halevy, Radicalisme philosophique, 1,152 (85). 11 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 72; see also ibid., note F, 324, where Stokes cited Halevy and wrote: ' Halevy's chief point was to stress the authoritarian elements in Bentham's constitutional and legal thought.' 12 Ibid., 242. 13 See Rosen, Bentham, Byron, and Greece, 25-58. 14 See Rosen, 'Elie Halevy and Bentham's Authoritarian Liberalism,' 61-4, 67. 15 See Stokes, English Utilitarians, 52-3. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 See Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code, vol. I, ed. F. Rosen and J.H. Burns,

32

F. Rosen

Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford, 1983); F. Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy, A Study of the Constitutional Code (Oxford, 1983). 18 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 148. 19 Bentham, Constitutional Code, 381. 20 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 154. 21 Ibid., 155. 22 Ibid., 157. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 234. 26 Ibid., 191-2. 27 See J. Lively and J. Rees, eds., Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford, 1978). 28 Ibid., 153-4,177-8. 29 See Rosen, Bentham and Representative Democracy, 168-82. 30 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 224-5. 31 Ibid., 192. 32 Ibid., 227. 33 Ibid., 208-9. 34 See Rosen, Bentham and Representative Democracy, 153-5. 35 See, for example, the essays collected in Jeremy Bentham, Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized, ed. P. Schofield (Oxford, 1993). 36 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 264. See also 258. 37 Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 2nd ed. (London, 1895), 316. For a recent edition, see James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. Stuart D. Warner (Indianapolis, 1993). 38 K.J.M. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (Cambridge, 1988), 128. 39 See Stokes, English Utilitarians, 258n., 274. For Stephen's assessment of Bentham, see 'Bentham's Theory of Legislation,' Horae Sabbaticae, Reprint of Articles Contributed to the Saturday Review, 3 vols. (London, 1892), III, 210-29. See also 'Hobbes on Government,' II, 1-18. 40 Leon Radzinowicz, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen 1829-1894 and His Contribution to the Development of Criminal Law (London, 1957), 15-16. 41 See Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed (Berlin, 1984), 120-41. 42 See Bentham, Constitutional Code, 1,143 and Colonies, Commerce and Constitutional Law: Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria and Other Writings on Spain and Spanish America, ed. P. Schofield (Oxford, 1995). 43 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 289. 44 Ibid., 290. 45 For the distinction between two sorts of liberalism, see John Roach, 'Liberalism

Eric Stokes, British Utilitarianism, and India 33

46 47 48

49

and the Victorian Intelligentsia,' Cambridge Historical Journal, 13 (1957): 58-81. For Stokes's use of the metaphors of warmth and coldness, see, for example, English Utilitarians, 58, 64-5. See F. Rosen, 'Bentham and Mill on Liberty and Justice/ G. Feaver and F. Rosen, eds., Lives, Liberties and the Public Good (London, 1987), 121-38. See Writings on India, ed. John M. Robson, Martin Moir, and Zawahir Moir, CW, XXX. The relationship between utilitarianism as a philosophical doctrine and early liberal political thought has been examined in detail in Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece. For one interpretation of this impact, see Lynn Zastoupil's contribution to this volume.

The Tree of Utility in India: Panace or Weed?1 ALLISON DUBE

The British involvement in India provides an excellent focus to compare various thinkers classed as 'utilitarians/ and, through the examination of their doctrines and efforts, to analyse this system of thought. Important works in this area have centred on those most directly involved with India, James and John Stuart Mill especially. But without denying the great influence of these and similarly minded people, can their influence properly be regarded as utilitarian? This paper will attempt to answer this question, and in so doing discuss some merits and demerits of utilitarian influence in general. In the first half of the paper the oracle of utility, Jeremy Bentham, will be consulted on two salient points: whether there should have been British influence in India at all, and, granted there was, what ground rules should have governed it. The question of whether his advice was heeded will be addressed, using Eric Stokes's classic The English Utilitarians in India as a reference point, in the second half. Regarding the propriety of British colonial control in general, Bentham's statements are hardly oracular in that they leave no room for cryptic misinterpretation. 'Distant conquests/ he wrote,.'could they be had for nothing, would be worse than useless. You know that every island we take costs money to govern and to defend, without bringing in a farthing of revenue, or of benefit in any other shape.'2 Bentham did not deny that some individuals profited, through colonialism, but he considered such profits akin to those derived from any other artificial encouragement to trade: absorbed wholly by sinister interests, they actually diminished the wealth of the nation.3 Moreover, it was 'not in the interest of Great Britain to have any foreign dependencies whatsoever' because 'distant dependencies encrease the chances of war.'4 Though Bentham generally opposed the control of other lands through

The Tree of Utility in India 35 political or military means, he encouraged the voluntary involvement of individuals of all countries with each other's affairs. Trade in goods and services should be largely unhindered by national borders. But people could also profit from exchanging ideas and theories about such things as law and government. He speaks of the 'school of moral and intellectual virtue' that Britain could be to the rest of the world, stating by way of negative example that if 'Independent America' had learned more carefully from this school, they 'might then have been in all respects equal, and in many respects superior to what Canada is now: and might have escaped the exhibiting that unvaried scene of sordid selfishness, of political altercation, of discomfort, of ignorance, of drunkenness, which by the concurrent testimony of all travellers it presents at present.'5 While Bentham felt that India or any other country could profit by exposure to some British ideas, then, he did not support the forced imposition of such ideas. But one essential trait of a utilitarian must be the ability to take things as they are. Accordingly, Bentham did not hesitate to comment on and in his capacity as a major exporter of principles of morals and legislation, take advantage of - British involvement in India if it existed anyway. After all, he attempted to influence a variety of despots with utilitarian ideas: if the British were despots in India his efforts could be no less. A Benthamic analysis of the situation as it was would address a number of questions. What factors should govern the comparison, and possible transfer, of laws between communities as different as England and India? What general principles should rule the framing of laws? What is the legislator's purpose; and how can she or he call upon time as an ally in it? Bentham is not noted as a man of few words, but the rwenty-four-page Of the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation answers these questions in a text rich in subtle satire and practical, perhaps Machiavellian, advice. Bentham begins with the hypothesis that the laws of England should serve as a standard, being 'the best that can be devised.' (This is the first clue to the satirical dimension of the essay.) The best way to examine the possible export of laws from England was then to select one potential recipient country. After considering the transplanting of laws to Russia and Canada (rejected because it would be too easy), he takes Bengal: the differences between England and Bengal were so great that if the English can transfer their laws to Bengal, 'no other part of the globe can present a difficulty.' This case had an added advantage: this transfer had been made 'or attempted to be made'6 in reality. Bentham proposes a three-stage procedure to differentiate between the

36 Allison Dube best laws for England and the best for Bengal. Firstly, 'the laws which it is supposed would be the best for England, must be exhibited in terminus.' Next, 'the leading principles upon which the differences between those and the laws for Bengal appear to turn, must be displayed.' Finally, these principles must be applied by scrutinizing all of Bengal's laws and revising them accordingly. Two things must be noted about this plan. Firstly, it is of impossible scope. Bentham admits, 'complete perfection requires universal accuracy: universal accuracy requires infinite detail.'7 But the size of the task must not scare one off, because useful insights may come through thinking in these comparative terms. Secondly, Bentham has shifted from stating that the laws of England should be a standard to stating that part of his object is to find the best laws for England. The ramifications of this shift will become apparent. The general purpose of law Bentham reduces to 'the prevention of mischief.' Mischief is the causing of pain or withholding of pleasure, and though pain and pleasure are universal feelings, their causes vary greatly from place to place. Accounts of 'aggravations, extenuations, and exemptions' to existing laws, plus 'a general table of the circumstances influencing sensibility; tables or short accounts of the moral, religious, sympathetic and antipathetic biases of the people for whose use the alterations are to be made,' would ideally be required to transfer laws successfully. Bentham uncharacteristically resists the temptation to provide such tables in favour of illustrating the general plan through examples. Some pains, for example from corporeal injuries, are similar the world over. But climate, custom, and other circumstances become great variables in people's physical and mental sensibilities. One night's confinement in the Black-hole of Calcutta generally proved fatal, says Bentham, whereas the same number of people in a room of equal size may prove beneficial in a Siberian winter.8 Mental pains are as important as physical ones: customs of diet and clothing, for example, must be noted and respected. Particular attention must be given to religious matters. Bentham posits a 'scale of sensibility' of religious feeling, hence susceptibility to offence: the 'Gentoo' is at the top; Mohametans, Jews, Greek Christians, and Catholic Christians follow in descending order. He mentions almost as an afterthought that 'even the pious Protestant' may, in the right circumstances 'suffer in some degree.'9 The reasoning behind this scale may seem ethnocentric; but its purpose is actually to counter such a bias, pointing out that a change in law seeming harmless to a Protestant may involve the greatest offence to a 'Gentoo.'

The Tree of Utility in India 37 Bentham cites an extreme example of a man of a superior tribe, being touched by a man of a perceived inferior tribe, having no qualms about killing him on the spot. But even such an 'altogether unjust and ferocious' prejudice requires 'great forbearance on the part of the legislator.' Art is required to 'soften and combat' it; 'but it would be better to yield to it altogether for a time, than uselessly to compromise his authority, and expose his laws to hatred.'10 Even if a custom clearly offends utility, one cannot just legislate it away. One must understand the customs and biases of a people, and have great patience, to formulate laws both applicable and tolerable. Other examples, from pistol shots causing avalanches in the Alps, to the removal of fences which afford protection from the blast of eastern equivalents of Chinook winds, to the 'infinite diversity' of offences against property are mentioned.11 The general purpose is to emphasize that any transferral of laws must be supported by a diligent examination of, and respect for, the circumstances and sensibilities of those to whom the laws will apply. Bentham then examines a related question. Assuming a given law of the exporting country is, indeed, better than that of the prospective recipient, which is the greater evil - to allow the inferior law to continue, or to perpetrate such evils as may be required to change it (in Bentham's words, 'the evil of the disease, or the evil of the remedy')? This raises the quandary of 'what portion of present comfort is it worth while to sacrifice for the sake of any, and what, chance of future benefit?' At this point (perhaps surprisingly to those who think of him as a 'rationalist'), Bentham states simply that most such calculations are impossible to make, and that this practical impossibility must warn against making such judgments at all. The admission of ignorance should 'humble the pride of declamation.'12 This humbling brings the acknowledgment that the laws, customs, and religions prevailing in a country may indeed be better for it than those of any exporting country. Thus, great hesitancy must be shown in replacing a law, and where such innovation is deemed unavoidable, 'ancient manners' must be disturbed as little as possible. Bentham's rules on the transfer of laws amplify these cautions: he states, for example, 'the changing of a custom repugnant to our own manners and sentiments, to one which is conformable to them, for no other reason than such repugnancy or conformity, is not to be reputed as a benefit.' The only prospective benefit he is willing to consider is 'the happiness and contentment of the public' concerned; and he is very critical of 'hot-headed innovators, full of their own notions, [who] only pay attention to abstract advantage,' and 'reckon discontent for nothing.'13

38 Allison Dube Bentham's rules would operationalize the 'tenderness' required for examining and changing laws. 'Indirect legislation should be preferred to direct; gentle means to violent: example, instruction, and exhortation should precede or follow, or, if possible, stand in place of law.' The legislator must 'soar above the mists' of her or his prejudices, yet acknowledge those of others. Rather than confront prejudices directly, though, she or he should work with them, for example by pitting one against another for a good result. The legislator's greatest need is patience: she or he must 'make an alliance, so to speak, with time, the true auxiliary of all useful changes, the chemist which amalgamates contraries, dissolves obstacles, and unites discordant parties.'14 Bentham's process of evaluating circumstances and sensibilities to facilitate the transfer of laws constitutes a not too well 'hidden agenda.' Initially English law was to be a standard to judge any law. He established, in a sense, a simple equation: the laws of England on one side, the laws of anywhere else on the other, and in between, instead of an equals sign, a set of principles serving the successful interpretation of circumstances and purposes around any potential transfer. But the identification of these principles of transfer 'ups the stakes': inherent in any such transfer process is an analysis of what things are possible and desirable from both a practical and a moral standpoint. For Bentham, this will involve an examination of the effects of laws upon the pains and pleasures felt by individuals - in other words, what, for him, law should have been related to in the first place but rarely was. He thus builds into the method of transfer itself factors which necessitate the search for principles of law and government not just as they are, but as they should be. This pattern being an equation, however, analysis may flow both ways. While Bentham identifies laws and customs in Bengal not up to scruff by the standards of the transfer process, the internal logic also reflects back upon English law. The result is that while Bengal's laws may at times be complex, obscure, riddled with prejudice, and not in accord with the ideal purposes of government, English laws are judged to outdo them on practically all these counts. Bentham thus finds a first cause of the failure of transplanted laws: When attempts have been made to transplant, without revision, the laws of one country into another, and the consequences of such attempts have proved pernicious, it has been partly, indeed, because the laws were bad there, but partly also because they would have been bad anywhere. They were bad in the soil that gave them birth: how should they be tolerable in another?15

The Tree of Utility in India 39 For Bentham, the transfer of laws provides a unique opportunity to truly observe them. People are attached to laws they are used to; and clouds of habit and prejudice make all benefits derived from political society seem to flow from the laws, even if they are bad laws. This cloud also hides the oppressive nature of most laws and the caste of sinister beneficiaries attached to them. Taken from the coverings of custom and prejudice, laws may be seen for what they really are: 'Would you see the worth of any established body of law in its genuine colours, transplant it to a foreign clime: the vicious parts of it (that is, speaking of any system as yet in being, the great bulk of it), no longer veiled by partiality, will display themselves in their genuine weakness and impropriety.'16 This apprehension of the true nature of most law (and custom), and of the relationship of law and custom to the individual, which has been enabled by seeing laws out of their normal context, is mirrored by an intriguing incident in Bentham's life. He lived most of his life in great fear of ghosts. But one day he suddenly realized that he had never seen a naked ghost. This must have meant, he reasoned, that not just people but clothes had ghosts: but this was surely so ridiculous as to prove the whole matter to be one of imagination only. There is a parallel between the relationship of ghosts and ghosts' clothes to Bentham, and laws and custom to the average person. The chance to view laws apart from their customary setting could indeed break the spells of both law and custom, and force people to turn more towards their own powers of rationality.17 Bentham refers to the plight of the English people, 'whose happiness it is to have stumbled upon so invaluable a possession' as the body of English law. 'Examine it piece by piece,' he advises, 'we should find it a vast bundle of inconsistencies; the wisdom of one page being constantly disgraced by the folly of the next.' He tempers his usual criticisms of sinister interests attached to law, however, and emphasizes the sheer folly of its 'formalities, delays, embarrassments, and expense.' These unfortunate aspects of law create great problems in regard to subject peoples: What, then, must have been the sensation of the poor Hindoo, when forced to submit to all these wanton and ridiculous vexations [inherent in English law]? Unable to attribute to an European mind the folly adequate to the production of such a mass of nonsense and gibberish, he must have found himself compelled to ascribe to it a less pardonable cause; to a deliberate plan for forcing him to deliver himself up, without reserve, into the hands of the European professional blood-suckers, carrying on the traffic of injustice under the cloak of law.18

40 Allison Dube Bentham summarizes much of his message in three generalizations: 'ist, That the English law is a great part of it of such a nature, as to be bad everywhere: 2nd, But that it would not only be, but appear worse in Bengal than in England: 3rd, That a system might be devised, which, while it would be better for Bengal, would also be better even for England.'19 In the final analysis, then, the question of British influence anywhere is secondary to that of forming good laws anywhere. Bentham concludes his essay with some comments upon the legislator's ally, time. His purpose seems to be to influence the legislator in two apparently contradictory ways: to induce both confidence and humility. In a 'Retrospective' view, he examines the 'common notion' that refined laws of a civilized nation could not have worked in times past. He grants certain points, such as that in a 'rude age' punishments may have had to be more severe to produce the same effects, but finds that 'this sort of apology has since been much abused; and it has been employed to gain a reputation of wisdom and expediency for many a mischievous, and many a foolish law.'20 For Bentham the notion that laws in such ages were as good as they could be is as erroneous as the one that they are now as good as they could be. Having given confidence to the legal analyst's powers of judgment, Bentham turns to the 'Prospective' view - whether the best laws now can be so for all time. Here, he gives a twofold lesson in humility. Firstly, the lawgiver cannot hope to produce ideal and immutable laws. For even such apparently universally undesirable acts as murder and perjury to be made the subject of law, the circumstances surrounding them, possible exemptions included, must be defined. These qualifying provisions will and must change from place to place and time to time, 'and this,' Bentham adds with a modest facetiousness, 'is the secret history of the universality and immutability of these universal and immutable laws': that is to say, from the standpoint of an actual legislator, they are not universal and immutable at all. Secondly, the legislator's unique and powerful situation requires that she or he devote more time to the 'considerations by which it is expedient [he] should suffer himself to be governed, rather than to any laws which it is expedient he should make for the government of those committed to his care.'21 Bentham warns that the good legislator's lot will be a frustrating one. Having glimpsed the future through the glass of utility, she or he can imagine a time when, among other things, 'the great crimes shall be known only by the laws which prohibit them ... when the courts of justice, though always open, shall rarely be resorted to ... when nations, having laid aside their arms and disbanded their armies by mutual agreement, and not from

The Tree of Utility in India 41 mutual weakness, shall only pay almost imperceptible taxes,' and 'when the law, which should be the rule of human actions, shall be concise, intelligible, without ambiguity, and in the hands of every one.' Bentham does regard such goals as attainable in principle, partly because they are not so much positive in nature as involving 'the absence of a certain quantity of evil.' But all notions of 'perfect happiness' beyond these goals are chimerical, belonging to the 'imaginary regions of philosophy': In the age of greatest perfection, fire will burn, tempests will rage, man will be subject to infirmity, to accidents, and to death. It may be possible to diminish the influence of, but not to destroy, the sad and mischievous passions ... Painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of numbers.

Leaving aside notions of perfection, the seeking of what is attainable 'presents a career sufficiently vast for genius.' But even in the seeking of the attainable, Bentham indicates that a given legislator will always remain in the position of Moses: she may approach an ideal state, and at times may even see it sketched on the horizon, but the human condition will forbid her from ever entering and taking possession of it.22 The oracle having been consulted, the question of whether Bentham's advice on India was heeded may now be addressed. To begin with the punch line, the thesis of this half of the paper is simply this: most of what has passed for utilitarian thought on India - and indeed, the conception conveyed by Stokes - is not utilitarian at all, though parts of it may be awarded the consolation title of liberal. The highest possible attainment the school of thought identified by Stokes as utilitarian could approach - and indeed, evidence shows that it did approach - would be a 'kinder and gentler' empire: kinder and gentler, but still, in a word, an empire. In the early stages of his work, Stokes identifies a 'radical authoritarian strain in Utilitarian thought,' mixed with 'the passion for uniformity, for mechanistic administration, and legislative regulation, which possessed the Utilitarians,' and states that 'the belief [shared with the Evangelicals] in sudden improvement or sudden illumination' gave the utilitarians 'the gift of an untroubled assurance.' Stokes argues that such liberal thinkers as Munro struggled against the utilitarian 'passion for legislation' and 'centrally imposed uniformity, such as the utilitarians seemed to contemplate.' The picture drawn of the utilitarians is of crusading men of system, anxious to stamp their enlightened reason upon the cornucopia of race, culture, and religion of the subcontinent, leaving it in a state of, in Munro's words, 'dull uniform repose.'23

42 Allison Dube College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (London, 1960), 35. of Time and Place: the approach taken there is as 'anti-utilitarian' in Stokes's terms as that taken by Munro. From where, then, did the picture come? One source that looms large is James Mill: indeed, Stokes presents Mill as a doctrinaire and somewhat simplistic thinker. Human nature itself was for James Mill 'as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St. Paul's.'24 Mill's belief that he, more than the indigenous populations, knew what was best for India comes out strongly in his indictment of the 'hideous state of society' of the 'Hindu and Muslim civilizations,' which Mill found 'much inferior in acquirements to Europe even in its darkest feudal age.'25 'So far from any diffidence on account of any personal experience in India,' Stokes adds, 'Mill prided himself that the severity of his judgement was all the more justified by its very disinterestedness.'26 Having tremendous faith in the powers of government, Mill believed that poverty and ignorance could be cured just by framing the right laws. Stokes states that his non-support of programs of education for India and his 'new, coldly scientific and recondite political economy' set him and utilitarianism apart from mainstream liberal thought. When Stokes states that the utilitarians could have 'little sympathy' with the preservation of indigenous institutions of government and law, it is principally James Mill to whom he refers. Stokes also shows that Mill was 'unsympathetic to Indians being admitted to government service,' and 'strenuously resisted any suggestion for establishing representative institutions for India.'27 James Mill was certainly influenced by Bentham, and Bentham, at times, by James Mill; but the positions of the two are not, as C.B. Macpherson suggests (and Stokes seems to agree), so close that it does 'no injustice to either to treat them almost as a unit.'28 Drawing differences between their ideas may help to distinguish between what Stokes calls utilitarianism and Bentham's system of thought.29 Four factors will be noted: the role of the legal analyst and innovator, the structure of government, democracy, and political power. Viewing or even thinking about law out of its normal context could help make clear its flaws. Bentham accordingly identified two potential modes of thinking about law: the expositive, which should explain the law and reasoning behind it, and thus encourage the citizen's interest in the law, and the censorial, which should criticize law and suggest improvements. While the expositor must focus on the laws particular to one place, censors must think of themselves as citizens of the world. This gives them the distance needed for analysis and criticism. Bentham thought that there were indeed universal principles of good law, and that a foreigner (having theoretical distance

The Tree of Utility in India 43 naturally) could be the best censor of a country's laws. He could thus imagine himself the 'dead legislative' of India without ever oppressing India. That he appointed Mill as India's living executive'30 argues that a foreigner could even move one step further, from formulating laws to administering them. Bentham could agree in theory, then, with Mill's belief (reported by Stokes) that 'the great concern of the people of India ... was that the business of government should be well and cheaply performed, but that it was of little or no consequence who were the people who performed it.'31 But this brings up the question of the structure of government. Now there is no doubt about the purpose of government: this is the advancement of the greatest happiness. Since the interest of the community is simply the sum of the interests of the individuals who compose it,32 it must be asked: who is best able to define what will constitute their happiness? By Bentham's view, since each person is the only competent judge of his or her own interests,33 the answer must be the individuals themselves. This answer could result in two models of government, however, and Bentham used them both. In the first model, the assumption would be that the legislator could consult people's interests, and hence organize and wield political power for the greatest happiness.34 But as Influence of Time and Place shows, and as will be emphasized shortly, even in this enlightened despotic model the role of Bentham's legislator is severely limited, and such things as the wholesale judgment and disposal of custom Mill seems to favour would not be permitted.35 A second model of government appears, however, if one does not trust an enlightened despot with even severely rationed and carefully observed power. By the first model, the greatest happiness may even be the object of government; but by this second model, since, as Bentham states, 'on no occasion, in no place, at no time, by no person possessing adequate power, has any such end in view of establishing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, been hitherto entertained,'3*5 even apparently beneficial actions of legislators are assumed to serve their own interests and injure those of the subject-many. The practical requirement of this realization is democratic ascendency; and indeed Bentham felt that when his Constitutional Code came out it would show him to be an 'ultra-democrat.'37 Bentham's 'conversion' to radical democracy (generally dated between 1817 and iSig)38 has created so many problems in the study of his works that it may justly warn scholars against ever changing their minds on anything (and indeed, this advice has been generally well heeded). But if this conversion makes analysis of his thought on India 'tricky,' it turns the study of his influence into a labyrinth. On the one hand, it seems hardly fair to

44 Allison Dube criticize Mill and others for not following Bentham's advice on the development of representative institutions (entailed in the second model illustrated) when much of Bentham's influence occurred before he himself began to stress democratic ascendency in foreign lands. Some criticism may be deserved, on the other hand, if his 'disciples' failed to get the first model right either. The questions of the purpose, use, and limitations of political power, at the heart of the difference between the utilitarianism as presented by Stokes and that of Bentham, may now be addressed. It may be suggested that three rules on power infuse Bentham's system.39 First, the parameters of power the instances in which it may be used - are carefully limited. Second, within these areas the power used must be as great as possible. To have power but limit it and risk hindering accomplishment of a task is to work at cross purposes. Third, especially because of the second element, the use of power must be open to constant and universal inspection. It has been easy to mistake the second rule on the necessity of power for authoritarianism: indeed, without the constraints of the first and third rules, great power would be authoritarian in nature. Stokes's references to the 'radical authoritarian strain in utilitarian thought' are justified in one sense, in that he presents Mill's thought as utilitarianism, and Mill arguably broke the first rule of limiting instances where power may be used. Mill also pays only minimal heed to the third rule of inspection of power: such observation and control of power of British rulers he imagines is exercised by other British rulers, and not at all by the subject-many. References to an authoritarian strain in utilitarianism are not justified, however, to the extent they presume to represent Bentham's system of thought. Stokes writes that the 'authoritarian implications of Bentham's constitutional theories' became evident when these theories were developed by Chadwick and Southwood Smith,40 and frequently refers elsewhere to the authoritarian nature of Bentham's thought.41 By Bentham's view the use of great power, though fraught with danger, is necessary, since the failure to use it is just as problematic. Generally speaking, however, the power Bentham allows government is negative in nature, used principally to create the proper climate for individuals to pursue their interests. His description of the object of organizing a legislature illustrates this in microcosm: In this branch of government, as in many others, the end is, so to speak, of a negative character. The object is to avoid inconveniences, to prevent the difficulties, which must result from a large assembly of men being called to deliberate in common. The

The Tree of Utility in India 45 art of the legislature is limited to the prevention of everything which might prevent the development of their liberty and their intelligence.42

In society as a whole, just as in an assembly, great political power must be used in this negative manner to counter strong forces of sinister interest which hinder people from developing and exercising their liberty and intelligence. In terms of this goal of removing obstacles preventing the exercise of people's liberty and intelligence, the enlightened despotic and the democratic models of government illustrated above are really no different. Bentham came to believe that democracy was the only effective means of controlling the ruling few; but his commitment to the largely negative character of government action remained constant. Under both models of government the removal of similar obstacles was sought. Some obstacles which may prevent people from exercising liberty and intelligence were obvious, being killed or robbed for example, and thus a foremost object under both models would be the maintenance of law. Another apparent obstacle potentially obstructing individuals was government itself. But government obstruction of individuals may take two forms. First, government may actively oppress people: such would be the case in the climate of apparently self-serving and arbitrary decisions of a hereditary ruler, where opportunities for the exercise of liberty and intelligence would be restricted. Stokes seems to argue that British rule in India, influenced by the utilitarian goals of cheaper government and simplification of legal proceedings, did counter such oppression.43 But second, and probably worse for being insidious, even well-intentioned government may oppose development of the very capacities of people to exercise liberty and intelligence. This denial of development of capacities may in turn take two forms. It can be argued that British rule in India was characterized by both these forms of subtle oppression, and that each was influenced by men commonly thought of as utilitarians such as the Mills. In the first genre of more subtle oppression, the important link between law and self-interest is not forged. Good laws, for Bentham, must not only be understandable by all, but necessarily be desired by all. Even the best laws, not linked to those subject to them by interest, would appear to the subjects as nothing less than arbitrary. James Mill's apparent belief that the work was over with the framing of good laws ignores Bentham's advice in Influence of Time and Place that the forging of interest in law was a subtle and lengthy task, involving not the denial of, but the appeal to, custom and prejudice. British laws and policies did not 'take hold,' James Fitzjames

46 Allison Dube Stephen felt, because the 'progress' the British brought was 'forced': 'Indians neither understood the principles of British policy, nor so far as they understood it did they like it, nor could they be trusted to carry it out if they both understood and liked it, except under constant and vigilant European superintendence.'44 This would argue that from a Benthamic standpoint, while the utilitarians in India may have been good censors of laws, they failed miserably as expositors. Kipling, the poet laureate of the British raj, wrote in Plain Tales from the. Hills: 'Never forget that unless the outward visible signs of Our Authority are always before a native he is as incapable as a child of understanding what authority means, or where is the danger of disobeying it.'45 But this state of affairs is the fault of the legislator: if she scorns the task of building interest in her law, it will remain sham law: and as Bentham states, 'scorn should be repaid with scorn: oppression with resistance: sham-rulers should receive sham-obedience.'46 By Stokes's report, the indigenous populations of India took Bentham's advice in this area more to heart than did his disciples. To a great extent the positions of the Mills on Indian questions are identical, and the criticisms offered of James Mill must to a healthy degree apply to his son. As Pradhan notes, J.S. Mill's views on India were formed almost exclusively by his father's History, and to a large extent John became the 'gifted and revered popularizer' of the doctrines of James Mill.47 But J.S. Mill's appearance also hails a second, somewhat more developed genre of subtle oppression that goes beyond the failure to forge links between law and individual interest, to the failure to give credence to the abilities of people to formulate their interests at all. J.S. Mill seems to have adopted the authoritarianism of his father, yet improved on it by adding a far more refined air of moral justification for it. His On Liberty, for example, has inspired many as a statement of the value and necessity of freedom. As Stokes reports, however, J.S. Mill believed that the doctrines of On Liberty 'were only meant to apply to those countries which were sufficiently advanced in civilization to be capable of settling their affairs by rational discussion. He was faithful to his father in holding to the belief that India could still be governed only despotically.'48 J.S. Mill showed perhaps even less reluctance than his father to engage in the wholesale judgment of peoples and civilizations. Mill states in his review of Macaulay's draft penal code, notes Pradhan, that "The Hindus are a more ignorant and passive people than the French Canadians'; In On Liberty he describes Indians as 'barbarians.' He relents a little in Considerations on Representative Government and allows them to be 'semi-barbarians.' The only

The Tree of Utility in India 47 escape from darkness for the Indians was to be led through a long and arduous process of tutelage by those more advanced. But when, one must ask, would Indians be capable of acting without 'our assistance'? One danger is that this would always seem to be a time in the future; and accordingly J.S. Mill's position may easily justify a continued thralldom.49 As Stokes comments, though J.S. Mill 'in theory contemplated with equanimity the progressive admission of Indians to high office, and eventually the granting of self-government to them, he did not consider that the time was ripe in 1853 for the introduction of a single Indian member into the Legislative Council.'50 A greater problem concerns the criteria of judgment to be used. Pradhan asks, 'How does one gauge mental and moral advancement without setting up oneself as the ideal norm?' and goes on to state in rather strong terms, 'John Mill's Indian views reveal him to be a misinformed liberal, an imperialist ideologue, and a myopic Sahib,' supplying 'an eloquent apology for imperial occupation, and ... the first respectable, philosophical expression of what was later to be called "the white man's burden."'51 An interesting question is what Bentham would have made of the 'refinements' to his doctrines made by the Mills. A clue to the answer would be his thoughts on these men. As Bowring reports, Bentham felt that James Mill was 'by no means an amiable man.' 'His creed of politics,' he wrote, 'results less from love of the many, than from hatred of the few. It is too much under the influence of selfish and dissocial affection.'52 A tempting suggestion is that Bentham would assess John as one 'only paying attention to abstract advantage,' who not only inherited his father's hatred of the few, but democratized his affections to a practical contempt for the many. His paternalism restricts the power of the subject-many to define and pursue their own interests, and to participate in decisions affecting their fates. J.S. Mill does envision the development of people's tastes and capacities under the gentle care, in India's case, of the enlightened British. One would never suggest that British guidance could not have been, indeed, enlightened. The questions are, rather, whether people's enlightenment is actually served by such guidance, and whether Indians could really distinguish in kind between British guidance, dispersed by administrators and educators who present the teachings of enlightened masters such as John Stuart Mill, and the guidance they could already get from their own castes of religious and political leaders. In fact, both these guiding castes would have been - by their own accounts - indispensable; yet the individual's capacities of judgment, and capacities for development of powers of judgment, would be as effectively subverted by the former caste system as by the latter.

48 Allison Dube From Bentham's perspective, the Mills erred on at least three important counts: their abilities to judge Indian civilization, their identification of the greatest potential danger to government, and their estimation of the capacities of humankind. Bentham states in Theory of Legislation that 'it needs a very enlightened benevolence, and philosophy very uncommon, to sympathize with tastes different from our own.'53 Both J.S. and John Mill's philosophies arguably fail on this standard of enlightenment. A second fault emerges over J.S. Mill's idea of 'tutelage' of the masses: this idea draws attention away from the real problem of government. As Rosen explains, 'Unlike Bentham, Mill makes the preparedness for representative government his prime concern ... For Bentham, it is always the ruling class and not the people who threaten the constitution.'54 A third flaw in the Mills' accounts is that J.S. Mill especially is missing a vital utilitarian quality, faith in humanity: the belief that the lot of people can improve through time, and moreover, that it is they themselves who must and will improve it. Such a lack of faith would seem to entail either giving human beings up as a lost cause, or adopting a strong paternalism. To say, as Mill does,' notes Rosen, 'that one criterion of the goodness of government is the extent to which it fosters in the people certain qualities is to open the door to a kind of paternalism which in the [Constitutional] Code Bentham avoids.'55 Laski wrote, 'no poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic state [or, presumably, of the potential development of a democratic state] than paternalism.'56 A related problem is that as the paternalism of J.S. Mill that so influenced British rule in India went to seed with that rule, a home-grown 'liberal paternalism' could spring up in its place through Mill's great influence on India's new educated elite.57 To speak plainly, Bentham never hesitated to offer direction to anyone. But that he had faith that individuals would, in the final analysis, be able to look after their own interests was shown when, in 1789, he paid humankind the ultimate compliment (for him) of comparing them to cats - in one notable skill especially: Mankind are very good sort of people, but since I have had the good or ill fortune to become acquainted with certain select parts of it, I begin to be in somewhat less pain about the rest... and less sensible of the great need I once supposed them to be in of my assistance, less apprehensive of their not falling upon their legs though deprived of the unspeakable benefit of my assistance.58

As to the question of whether the 'tree of utility' is a panace or a weed, the following suggestions are offered. Firstly, the true arbor utilitatis is a won-

The Tree of Utility in India

49

drous and good plant indeed; but it is very rare. Moreover, since its form is lodged within Bentham's works (the study of which may not be compared to the plucking of daisies 'by infants as they run'),59 this useful species may at times seem as elusive, and appear as mythical, as the panace itself. Secondly, however, there is a much more common herba inutilis which is often mistaken for the tree of utility: that form of enlarged mental creeping charlie, the paterna liberalitas. Derivatives of this far more ubiquitous plant can at times appear to have the same effects as the true panacea, but sadly, these derivatives often have the properties of an opiate; and, like any other opiate, they may easily give those who use it an enlarged sense of their own powers of judgment. NOTES

1 Bentham refers at various times to the 'tree of utility.' For example: 'What Bacon did was to proclaim - Fiat experimentum; but his own knowledge of natural philosophy was ignorance. What Locke did was to destroy the notion of innate ideas. What Newton did was to throw light on one branch of science. But I have planted the tree of utility - I have planted it deep, and spread it wide.' The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring, n vols. (Edinburgh, 1843), cited as Works, X, 588. Panace was the mythical plant from which the balm panacea could be derived. 2 The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ed. A.T. Milne (London, 1981), IV, 485, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J.H. Burns, J. Dinwiddy, and F. Rosen (London, 1968- ), cited as CWJB. 3 See 'Colonies and Navy,' in Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings, ed. W. Stark, 3 vols. (London, 1952-4), I. 4 Ibid., I, 211. 5 Ibid., Ill, 356-7. Conversely, after Bentham became more radically democratic, he often cited political practices and institutions in the 'Anglo-American United States' as positive examples that Britain should copy. 6 Works, 1,171. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 173-4. 9 Ibid., 174. 10 Ibid. 11 Bentham mentions the 'pecuniary extortion' to which some religions expose their followers, and states, 'those of the Mohametans and Hindoos are particularly subject to this abuse; but they have not equalled the Catholic church in this particular, which, whilst preaching poverty, nearly succeeded in becoming the sole proprietor of all property' (ibid., 176).

50

Allison Dube

12 Ibid., 178. 13 Ibid., 180,181. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., 181-2,180,184. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 184. Works, X, 587. Works, 1,185,187. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 192,193. Ibid., 194. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians in India (Oxford, 1959), 23, 22, 23, 24, 25. Cited by Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. M. Morris (London, 1928,1972), 451; Stokes, English Utilitarians, 24. 25 James Mill, History of British India, 6 vols. (London, 1820), II, 135; Stokes, English Utilitarians, 53.

26 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 53. 27 Ibid., 55, 57-8,145, 65. 28 C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1977), 25. Stokes, like Macpherson, often refers to Bentham and Mill in the same breath. For example, he refers to the 'strong authoritarian reformer, the enlightened despot, which Bentham and James Mill had thought the ideal type for government of India' (English Utilitarians, 249). 29 For an analysis of important differences between Bentham and James Mill, see F. Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy (Oxford, 1983), ch. 9. 30 Works, X, 490, 450.

31 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 64. 32 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London, 1970), CWJB, 12. 33 Jeremy Bentham, 'Deontology,' Deontology, A Table of the Springs of Action, Article on Utilitarianism, ed. A Goldworth (Oxford, 1983), CWJB, 50. 34 Stokes notes that Bentham initially favoured enlightened despotic rule in India (English Utilitarians, 68). 35 Stokes writes that 'Mill was too good a Benthamite to suggest a frontal assault on Indian customs and prejudices'; but it can be argued that he was much less willing than Bentham to grant validity and respect to these customs and prejudices (English Utilitarians, 69).

36 Bentham's Handbook of Political Fallacies, ed. H. Larrabee (Baltimore, 1952), 349. 37 Bentham to J. Quincy Adams, 1826, Works, X, 555.

38 See Rosen, Representative Democracy, 5.

The Tree of Utility in India

51

39 This theme is developed by A. Dube, The Theme of Acquisitiveness in Bentham's Political Thought (New York, 1991). 40 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 60. 41 The authoritarian interpretation of Bentham put forth by Halevy - that Bentham came to value making people happy more than making them free - has influenced many, including it would seem, Stokes. 42 Works, II, 301. 43 Stokes writes that, despite limitations, some Anglo-Indian law was 'far superior in order, clarity, and system to its English counterpart' (The English Utilitarians, 264). 44 Ibid., 303. 45 Rudyard Kipling, 'His Chance in Life,' Plain Tales from the Hills (1888; London, 1986), 57. 46 Works, X, 532. 47 S.V. Pradhan, 'Mill on India: A Reappraisal,' Dalhousie Review, 56 (1976): 6. 48 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 298. 49 Pradhan, 'Mill on India,' 7,17. 50 Stokes, The English Utilitarians, 254. 51 Pradhan, 'Mill on India,' 17, 6. 52 Bowring, noting Bentham's opinion of James Mill, Works, X, 450. 53 Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, trans, from French of E. Dumont by R. Hildreth (London, 1864), 290. 54 Rosen, Representative Democracy, 185. 55 Ibid., 187. 56 H. Laski, Political Thought from Locke to Bentham (New York, 1920), 236. 57 Bentham's words on the 'derailing' of democratic ascendency may seem reasonably prophetic in light of the developments of powerful elites in India and other newer democracies: 'having continued so long - Democratical ascendency - how came it to end? Having preceded so far, - Reform - how came it to stop? Answer: Democratical ascendency was brought to its end by the leaders whom the people, in their character of associated volunteers, had chosen; and in particular by those of them who were in Parliament. Democratical ascendency being stopped, monarchio-aristocratical ascendency was restored, and reform was stopped of course. These leaders - how came it that they deserted and betrayed the cause of those by whom they had been chosen? Answer: Because they had gained everything that in their eyes was for the advantage of the aggregate interest - namely, the aristocratical interest; and if they had preceded with the people any further, the next step they took would have been for the advantage of no other interest of theirs than that which they had in common with the people. Now this brood interest was in their eyes of less value than their own peculiar

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one. As for the interest of the rest of the community, in so far as distinct from their own, it was not, it never had been, it never could have been, of any value in their eyes. In the eyes of here and there an extraordinarily constituted individual, perhaps yes; but taking them as a body, it is inconsistent with the nature of men that it ever should have been so' (Works, III, 617-18). 58 Bentham to Caroline Vernon, 1789, Correspondence, IV, no. 59 Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 10.

James Mill's The History of British India: A Reevaluation JAVED MAJEED

This paper specifies the role which the complexities of British imperial experience in India played in James Mill's formulation of utilitarianism in his History of British India. In doing so, it argues that linguistic and aesthetic attitudes were important components of his views on India. These attitudes were also important in his formulation of utilitarianism as a body of thought committed to reform and for the younger Mill's modification of his intellectual inheritance. James Mill's History of British India, published in 1817, has been seen as transforming utilitarianism into a militant faith.1 In doing so, as H.H. Wilson commented in his edition of the History, Mill had 'entered the lists' against Sir William Jones's 'amiable enthusiasm' for Hindu civilization.2 Jones was in India from 1783 as a Supreme Court judge until his death in 1794. His attitudes both shaped and reflected the nature of British rule at the time, as well as its relationship with scholarly enterprise regarding India. As president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Jones and his colleagues had begun to formulate a methodology to study the ancient Indian past;3 Jones believed a historical narrative could be recovered from Indian legendary and mythological material. But he considered his most important project to be the compilation of a digest of Indian law, based on the manavadharmasastra, in order to help reconstitute a Hindu polity on the basis of a legal tradition which the British would define.4 Indeed, Jones had made clear his support for the British practice in the courts of trying certain types of cases according to the laws of the communities involved before he had even arrived in India.5 Jones's main motive behind compiling the digest, An earlier version of this paper was published in Modern Asian Studies, 24 (1990): 209-24.

54 Javed Majeed which was completed by Colebrooke, was to undermine what he perceived to be the legal authority of the sacerdotal classes of Bengal.6 Jones also considered one of the purposes of the digest to be the introduction of property rights in the soil;7 in this sense the projected digest can be seen to complement Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement of I793-8 Jones's interest in property rights in the soil reflects the preoccupation of British rule at the time with agrarian improvement through the imposition of direct alienable property tenures.9 This project to legitimize British rule in an Indian idiom was also evident in Jones's nine hymns to Hindu deities, which tried to define a renascent Hinduism which could be compared with and contrasted to other cultural idioms.10 The most significant aspect of his Indo-European thesis of the affinity between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin was precisely that it enabled such intercultural comparisons to be made on a firmer foundation than ever before. That there was now an immediate need for such comparisons to be made was evident in the changed nature of the British empire from the late eighteenth century onwards. As P.J. Marshall has stressed, the empire now included numerous peoples who were not British in origin, and who were ruled without representation.11 This presented a host of novel problems, not least of which was the extent to which a system of laws derived from another society could be applicable to different cultures, and the possibility that government overseas might assume a different form from government at home. Jeremy Bentham and James Mill were to provide a set of answers to these problems, which was to place thinking on British India on a different footing. Although there had been a strand of political radicalism in Jones's work before he arrived in India,12 his views became part of the revitalized conservatism of British institutions both at home and abroad, which emerged in response to the Jacobin threat of the French revolution.13 Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had forcefully defined the ideas which he took to be embodied in the polities of anciens regimes; namely, a respect for the uniqueness of cultures, for the way their legal institutions had evolved, and for the past and its importance for the cultural identities of the present. It was these ideas, embodied in the English common law tradition and defined as a political ideology by Burke, which Bentham attacked as the creed of the ruling elite.14 But although these questions about the nature of cultural identity were given more urgency by the French Revolution, they had already been raised by the British involvement in India. In the 17705, Burke had defended and depicted Tanjore in the same terms as he was later to define the French and English anciens regimes,15 and this tendency was evident in the Select Committee reports of ijfa-y.16 It was also during the

James Mill's The History of British India 55

early 17803 that Burke had been in frequent conference with Jones on the question of Indian legislation;17 the views of both coincided on this issue. So whatever Jones's political views had been in England, the main ideas embodied in his work in India became a part of this revivified conservatism. However, it is difficult to make much of the tension between his views at home and abroad unless the criterion of consistency is made clear. It was James Mill who was to provide an idiom which tried to define what constituted consistency between one's views on Britain and one's views on India. This was to put on a different basis the liberal imperialism that Mukherjee argues Jones's views prefigured.18 Although Jones's ideas had acquired a coherence in this context of revitalized conservatism, it was Mill in The History of British India of 1817 who first clearly defined Jones's attitudes as conservative. Mill's views on education and psychology were central to his attitudes to India. Mill was an adherent of Hartley's associationist psychology, which claimed that the organizing principle of the human mind was the association of ideas; on the basis of this Mill argued that, since the human mind was a tabula rasa at birth, education was capable of moulding it by inculcating the ideas best calculated to further individual and general happiness.19 By analogy, his History argued that India itself was a tabula rasa which could be moulded according to utilitarian dictates. Mill did not accept Jones's argument that a historical narrative could be recovered from Indian mythological and legendary material. He also ignored significant advances since Jones's time in the empirical study of the past through, for example, numismatics.20 To some extent, in his disregard for the past Mill was influenced by Jeremy Bentham, who had argued in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) that the legislator should be concerned with censorial jurisprudence, or defining what the law ought to be, rather than with expository jurisprudence, or describing what the law is.21 In Of Laws in General, Bentham envisaged the establishment of a school to teach the 'art of legislation for empires,' which would create a 'universal harmony of the laws.'22 The central importance of censorial and universal jurisprudence in Bentham's conception of the legislative task for the benefit of empires was in direct opposition to the notion of law and legislation which underlay the common law tradition, upon the assumptions of which the legal administration of British India also rested.23 Mill's disregard for the past in assessing cultures and their institutions was in keeping with what Bentham criticized as the 'superstitious respect for antiquity' in common law theory24 and its embodiment of what he colourfully called the 'relentless tyranny of the dead.'25 Arguments from precedence had little weight where the critique and reform of

v institutions were concerned. In his History, Mill made clear the criteria he used to assess cultures: 'Exactly in proportion as Utility is the object of every pursuit, may we regard a nation as civilized.'26 The formulation of this scale was based on the Benthamite notion of the universal legislator, who compared and contrasted legal traditions by using the general principle of utility, on the basis of which existing laws and institutions were criticized. It was also on this basis that the legal systems of both Britain and India could be criticized and reformed through the use of principles arrived at rationally, and the different codes of law in India could be replaced by a single, comprehensive code, formulated in a similar manner. Furthermore, it was on these grounds that Mill argued in the preface to The History of British India that his ignorance of India and its languages did not disqualify him from writing his philosophical history; on the contrary, cultures could be understood more comprehensively from a distance, when the sympathies of the commentator were not engaged in the detail of minute observations.27 So much for the general shape of Mill's program in his History. But there were gaps and tensions in Mill's thought which mean that his utilitarianism was not the confident body of doctrine which scholars have thought it to be. The History suffered a loss of nerve in assessing the role of the British in India. This is indicated by the fact that there is no overall conclusion to it at all. Its last two sentences simply read: 'With regard to subsequent events, the official papers, and other sources of information, are not sufficiently at command. Here, therefore, it is necessary that, for the present, this History should come to a close.'28 To a certain extent this loss of nerve can be traced to Mill's ambivalent attitude to empire. He takes a strict economic view of imperialism in India and argues that the expense of government, administration, and wars has meant that Britain has not derived any economic benefits from India. In a pamphlet of 1807 called Commerce Defended, and later in his Elements of Political Economy of 1821, Mill had moved away from Adam Smith's 'vent for surplus view' of the gains from trade, and argued that the production of commodities automatically creates a market for those commodities, within the nation in which they have been produced, so that foreign commerce does not furnish an outlet for a country's produce. On the basis of this argument, he denies the importance of colonies as markets, and stresses that they do not yield any economic benefits.29 In his 'Essay on Colonies,' written for the 1817 supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mill argued that colonies simply served as a source of power and patronage for the ruling elite, and were used to perpetuate their position.30 But Mill's History was divided between this negative view of contemporary imperialism and a

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vision of the new type of society which could be created in the empire, perhaps more quickly than in Britain itself. The result is that Mill cannot arrive at any firm conclusion about Britain's involvement in India. There is also a deeper contradiction in his philosophy which he never resolved. In his associationist psychology, he argued that the human mind was passive, and yet he also believed that society could be moulded and shaped according to principles arrived at rationally.31 He needed both of these views, of the mind as passive and capable of being formed by careful education, and of the mind as active and vigorously moulding its environment and culture, for his case against India and British rule to stand up. He also needed both these notions for his view of history as progress to stand up. Ironically it was conservative philosophers such as Robert Southey, embracing aspects of Kantian epistemology, who were able to make significant use of the notion of history as progress as part of their defence against radical attacks on the status quo.32 For those who adopted something akin to Kantian epistemology, there was less of a tension between the notion of reason moulding the world in a historical narrative of progress and their concept of mind than there was in Mill's thinking. At any rate, Robert Nisbet's definition of conservatism in terms of its criticism of the 'very centre-piece of modernity,' namely, the notion of history as progress, stands in need of some revision.33 It was because Mill saw the empire as buttressing powerful groups at home that his History was a critique of the legal, political, and religious institutions in Britain, and of their influence on British rule in India. To Mill, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 was a prime example of the ideology of the British ruling elite influencing land revenue policy in India.34 The History also contained Benthamite criticisms of the English legal system.35 In fact, after he had finished his History, Mill contemplated writing a critical history of English law, which would be 'capable of teaching law to all' and which would 'exhibit, in full, a system of jurisprudence to the world.'36 Such a project would have been a logical development from the History. However, central to Mill's critique were aesthetic and linguistic beliefs which have hitherto been largely ignored by scholars. The History indicates how important aesthetic concepts were for political creeds in the early nineteenth century and how they were related to ways of defending societies and envisaging new political orders. If there was a unifying strand in Mill's History, it was a distrust of the imagination, as it had been variously defined by figures such as Jones and Coleridge. In Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham made explicit his aim to invent a new vocabulary to deal with the subject of legislation.37 So in the History Mill attempts to invent a new vocabulary to deal with India. This attempt was rooted in a definite philosophy of

58 Javed Majeed language. Both Bentham and Mill were influenced by ooke, whose Diversions of Purky had argued that all words could be traced through etymology to the names of sensible objects. This meant that language could be analysed in terms of Mill's psychology, by reference to sensation and the association of ideas.38 Interestingly, the adoption of Home Tooke's work by the utilitarians meant that in England the study of language remained philosophical rather than historical or philological much longer than on the continent, where the new philology, founded by Jones, developed into a historical discipline.39 But it was not just in opposition to Jones's notion of language that Mill adopted Tooke for his own purposes. He was also to rebut Jones's aesthetic creed, and in particular his notion of the imagination. In 1772 Jones had argued in an essay entitled 'On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations' for a rejuvenation of European literature through translations of oriental texts. In the companion essay to this, 'On the arts commonly called imitative,' he had expressed a view of art and the imagination which was anti-mimetic in its implications, and which in many ways prefigured Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.*0 Mill followed Hartley, who in his Observations on Man placed the imagination low in the hierarchy of mental activity.41 In his History Mill made clear his views of the imagination. He argued that it was a faculty dictated by the ingenuity and desire, and led the mind to distort reality.42 It was the subservience of this faculty to desire which accounted for English credulity regarding the material riches of India. Mill frequently condemned European travellers in India and East India Company officials for exaggerating India's wealth. He blamed Clive for creating the myth that India 'overflowed with riches,'43 and he castigated English credulity for accepting 'the exaggerations of Oriental rhetoric on the riches of India.'44 Sir William Jones and his colleagues had too often romanticized India; they, and many others, had perpetuated a myth of the cultural and material riches of India, which was a misrepresentation of the true state of affairs, brought about by the irresponsible use of the imagination, and encouraged by the sort of views of the imagination which Jones had expressed.45 It was this misrepresentation which obstructed the cause of reform. Mill's conception of the historian and the writing of history was also defined on the basis of this distrust of the imagination as a faculty easily lead astray by desire. The philosophical historian had to suppress the imagination in order to make accurate judgments based on a careful weighing of facts.46 Furthermore, Mill described Indian historical records and literature as the 'offspring of a rude and ungoverned imagination'; this was typical of the early stages of society in which poetry was held in such esteem.47 There are clear similari-

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ties between Mill's views here and those of his colleague at the East India Company, Thomas Love Peacock, whose influential essay on 'The Four Ages of Poetry' in 1820 was also to argue that poetry played a less important role in advanced than in primitive society.48 Thus, the scale of utility on which Mill based his assessment of cultures in the History was formulated partly on the basis of this distrust of the imagination. So whereas one of Bentham's favourite targets for attack was what he called the 'pestilential breath of fiction' in common law,49 Mill's target of attack in the History was the fiction of economic and cultural riches of India which buttressed the conservatism of British rule. His History was an attempt to undermine the dangerous relationship between the imagination and desire which was responsible for the elaboration of these fictions. It is clear in some of Mill's letters to Francis Place that by the time of the publication of the History in 1817, Mill was conversant with Kantian epistemology.50 This was also the year of the publication of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which represented Coleridge's final break from the radicalism of his youth. The Biographia rejected Hartlean associationist psychology in order to argue for a theory of imagination which was based on Schelling's modification of Kant. This meant defining what Coleridge called the primary imagination as 'the living power and prime agent of all human perception,' and its acts of creation. What interests us here is his definition of the secondary imagination as a faculty which dissolves and diffuses in order to re-create, and also as a faculty which idealizes and unifies.51 In 1812 Mill had vehemently attacked the very notion of an established church.52 The Biographia, on the other hand, used the notion of the secondary imagination to defend the established church, as an institution whose cultural authority, which extended to such matters as setting the standards for the language of the community, consisted of diffusing the principles upon which to unify the nation. This was the only way to overcome sectarianism; and by sectarianism Coleridge was not only thinking of religious sectarianism, but the increasing class divisions of the post-war period as well. The philosophy of the Biographia was developed later in On the Constitution of the Church and State of 1829. This was thoroughly anti-utilitarian in its approach to institutions, and it tried to redefine and thereby salvage the cultural authority of the establishment after Catholic Emancipation. Given the increasing sophistication of ideas of the imagination employed for political ends, Mill was probably being provocative when he published his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind in 1828, which was a restatement of Hartley's psychology. In this work, Mill developed his criticisms of the imagination. He complained about the appropriation of the notion of the imagination to the ideas

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of the poet; since imagination means combining ideas in new sequences, different from those reflecting sense experience, the practitioners of many professions use imagination just as much as the poet. What seems to make imagination the faculty of the poet is that a poet's ideas are not devoted to a useful end like a lawyer's or merchant's, but only to the purpose of delight.53 Mill analysed the notions of the beautiful and the sublime in terms of the association of ideas;54 he did not even consider it worth refuting Kant's notion of the sublime, which had greatly influenced such poets as Coleridge and Wordsworth.55 The increasing importance of the sublime as an aesthetic concept led, as Partha Mitter has shown, to a reinterpretation of Indian art in the early nineteenth century, and a break from the tradition of viewing this art as 'monstrous.'56 In fact, both Mill and Coleridge were trying to forge a new idiom for the middle classes. Much of Mill's 1817 'Essay on Government,' interpreted at the time as the manifesto of the philosophical radicals, was an attempt to give a new language to the middle ranks, in order to prepare them for leadership in a reformed political system.57 Coleridge's purpose was to transform the patriarchalist idiom of the ancien regime to fit new political realities, and thereby ensure that the middle classes would become a pillar of the establishment. As Jonathan Clark has argued, this patriarchalist idiom was not open to criticism in the light of its own principles, or its sense of its own history.58 It was for this reason that Mill had to elaborate principles apparently rationally and ex nihilo.59 In this way, he could attempt to stand outside the powerful idioms of what Clark has called the ancien regime. It was also because Mill had to try to stand outside the powerful idioms of this regime that he attacked it by writing a History of British India, rather than a History of Britain. In India the ideology of the British establishment was writ large against an alien background; it gave Mill the distance necessary to fashion the tools and principles with which to launch an attack on it. So, Mill's attack on Jones in his History of British India was also an attack on aesthetic attitudes which underpinned the revitalized conservatism of the British establishment. There was yet a further reason for Mill's fear of the politics of the imagination, as they were elaborated by Coleridge.60 This was the role that such notions of the imagination could play in defining cultural and national identities. On the whole, Mill's History paid little attention to cultural, linguistic, and religious differences. It embodied a version of what Ernest Gellner has characterized as 'world-levelling, unifactory epistemologies.'61 To a certain extent, this aspect of the History was in keeping with the greatest happiness principle, which was universalistic in character,62 but Bentham's insistence on the importance of circumstances influ-

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encing sensibility as data for the legislator suggests that it would be difficult to attribute such an epistemology to him.63 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a major trend tending to the opposite; cultures were increasingly being defined in relation to newly discovered literary, historical, and mythological material. Jones's work in India could be seen as part of this; his concern for the unravelling of an Indian past and for indigenous legal traditions binding communities, together with his interest in Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit literature, was in this sort of mould. The original and the revised plan of his projected epic, Britain Discovered, is interesting for its fictional attempt to define both an Indian and a British identity.64 In this period, German biblical criticism was reevaluating myth as not mere fable or unworthy fiction, but as an important process by which communities were imagined, and by which they constituted their own sense of the past in relation to which they defined themselves. This new value placed on myth influenced Coleridge; it was one of his lifelong preoccupations to write a mythological epic, which would be a unifying symbol for the community in the process of self-construction.65 Myths were not only unifying symbols; they were the product of that imagination which Coleridge had described as unifying and idealizing, and which he had used in the Biographia to restore a sense of national unity. In fact, in a letter he wrote to the then Tory prime minister, Lord Liverpool, in 1817, Coleridge had explicitly equated the predominance of what he called 'mechanic philosophy,' under which he would have included utilitarianism, with the decay of the organic sense of a historical community. 'We are become,' he wrote, 'like a Herd of Americans, a people without a History. Robert Southey played upon this new-found sense of the value of mythologies in his oriental epics. For Mill, then, the notion of the imagination he attacked was associated with conservatism, and with the construction of identities, in this case both British and Indian, which were a threat to his world-levelling and unificatory epistemology. Mill sought to break not just with the patriarchalist idiom of the ancien regime, but also with the tradition of 'infidel radicalism.' Jones's work on comparative mythology in the Asiatick Research, the periodical published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, could be seen as part of the tradition of comparativism represented by such writers as Volney, Dupuis, Sir William Drummond, Erasmus Darwin, and Richard Payne Knight, all of whom drew parallels between Christianity and heathen mythologies in order to refute Christianity's claims to a unique revelation. These works display a significant interest in fertility rites and cults, with a corresponding celebration of sexuality in opposition to what were seen as the ascetic tendencies of con-

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temporary Christian mores.67 As late as 1822, Coleridge's son, Hartley Coleridge, in an article for the London Magazine entitled 'On the Poetical Use of the Heathen Mythology,' attacked the sceptical use to which this sort of comparative mythology was being put, and defended the exclusive claims of Christianity.68 Jones's hymns to Hindu deities, most of which had been written in 1785, not only emphasized the parallels between the mythologies of different cultures, but were also characterized by an imagery of fertility which was part of the celebration of the notion of sakti (the power of the female). In another of Jones's poems, The Enchanted Fruit; Or, The Hindu Wife: An Antediluvian Tale, there is an explicit association between a liberating celebration of sexuality and matriarchy.69 (Matriarchy was not only associated with India; Thomas Taylor, the Neo-Platonist, wrote a poem, 'The Dream,' published in 1798, which celebrated the goddess Diana as part of what he called the 'vivific series,' of which other goddesses such as Isis were also manifestations70 and which was close to the sakti that Jones celebrated in his hymns.) Thus, the martial note of some of Jones's hymns, and the creativity and fecundity they celebrated, which reflected the rejuvenated Hinduism Jones brought into being, was a potent mixture threatening to Mill's instrumental rationality. Furthermore, they celebrated a mythological and religious system which in Mill's words was characterized by 'grossest images of sensual pleasure.'71 In the History of British India, the imagination was often depicted in terms of a threatening eros. The celebration of sexuality through non-Christian myths was seen not only as part of this eros, but also as a positive comment on certain forms of religious experience. Utilitarianism was very much a secular philosophy, and at least in Mill's formulation of it, there could be no place for such experience. But Mill was not just attacking this tradition of infidel radicalism. He was also reacting against the libertine tradition of radicalism. This tradition consisted of hostility to religious authority and a belief in hedonistic morality with an emphasis on instinctual sexuality.72 Its literature was often antiestablishment and obscene, and highlighted the sexual crimes and hypocrisies of the establishment. John Wilkes's Essay on Woman was part of this tradition, which reached its height during the Queen Caroline affair of 1820-1.73 Some of the London booksellers and publishers in the post-war period, such as George Cannon and John Benjamin Brookes, not only dealt in pornography but also pirated copies of notorious poets such as Byron and Shelley.74 Their aim was to attack the imposition of a code of conduct by the church and ruling elite. If Jones's celebration in his hymns of a mythology which Mill described as characterized by the 'grossest images of sensual pleasure' could be seen as part of this libertine tradition, so, too, could

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Bentham's hedonism. In a manuscript of 1817 entitled 'Sextus/ Bentham defended the principle of utility against asceticism. He also claimed that the 'religious terrors' on which asceticism rested were derived from the teachings of St Paul and not of Jesus, an argument which he was to develop in Not Paul But Jesus.75 Mill was sensitive to the growing influence of evangelicals on the moral tone of the age.76 As a result, he was anxious to present political radicalism as respectable. This could only be achieved if it distanced itself from the libertine tradition. Mill's notion of utility was different from Bentham's. Mill defined utility in terms of usefulness, Bentham in terms of pleasure.77 Mill was not partial to Bentham's hedonism, and regarded temperance as the 'central point of educational precept.'78 So the increasing importance of Mill's brand of utilitarianism had a lot to do with the absorption of the ethic of respectability in some radical circles in the 18205 and 18305. John Stuart Mill's modification and enlargement of his intellectual inheritance in what he described as 'an age of transition in opinions' is the main theme of his Autobiography.79 The role which the relationship between epistemology, aesthetics, and politics played in this modification and enlargement was stressed by the younger Mill when he contrasted what he called 'institutional metaphysics' with the philosophy of'Experience and Association.'80 We have seen how the unifying strand of James Mill's History was an attack on various notions of the imagination which played a part in such metaphysics. It was the younger Mill's strategy of steering between two errors and reconciling the ideas in apparently opposing intellectual traditions which enabled him to overcome some of the tensions apparent in his father's position.81 The main outlines of this intellectual development are clear enough. But the knot of problems James Mill struggled with in his History not only throws this into sharper relief but can also suggest a framework in which to highlight the differences between the two Mills. First, in the elder Mill's epistemology there was an active distrust of the information gathered by local observers in India.82 The younger Mill was more sensitive than his father to the integral role that channels and networks of information and information gathering played in British imperialism in India.83 His notion of information was also more complex. It was not just that he stressed the crucial importance to British rule of studying what he called 'Indian experience' and 'conditions of Indian government,' which was central to his defence of the East India Company's service.84 He also acknowledged how difficult it was for foreigners to acquire the knowledge known 'by instinct' to the indigenous population of the country.85 The problem was to combine this specialized and fragmented knowledge with general principles

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in order to render them useful for administrative purposes. It was in response to this problem that he developed his notion of the state in On Liberty as a 'central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials,'86 and that (in an image echoing Coleridge's own interpretation of Leibniz in chapter 12 of the Biographia Literaria) he described in Representative Government the centralizing of knowledge in terms of focusing 'scattered rays' and of completing and purifying 'broken and coloured lights.'87 Mill's stress on the reciprocity between centralization and localized knowledge in the constitution of the Indian administration in particular was an attempt to circumvent the perils arising from the British dependence on native informants in a complex and heterogeneous society.88 But this concern for a reciprocity between different kinds of knowledge can also be seen in the context of his attempt to counteract the tendency of his education, which 'trusted too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete.'89 This well-defined sense of the reciprocity between centre and periphery brings us to our second point. This is John Stuart Mill's struggle to escape from the determinism of his father's associationist psychology by envisaging character as moulded both by circumstance and by active self-'culture.' This formed the basis of a reciprocity which would ensure the enriching of and enrichment by the personal experiences constituting character, and especially the spirited character which he lauded in On Liberty. Consequently, he tried to formulate a psychology which recognized both the importance of circumstances in the formation of character and the ability of persons to mould themselves.90 In this concept of self-culture, Mill was not only trying to rectify what he saw as another of the main defects of his education, namely the denial of any scope to the development of feeling,91 but also embracing a notion of the imagination which was very different from his father's. He made it clear in his essay on Bentham that the imagination, which he defined in terms very similar to Wordsworth's in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, was crucial in arriving at self-knowledge,92 and in his essay on genius, he described it as a 'kind of self-observation.'93 Furthermore, his depiction of the act of knowing in this latter essay is similar to his characterization of the psychology of writing poetry, in so far as both involve rediscovering truths known to others, not through imitation, but through an imaginative reappropriation which makes them part and parcel of one's emotional life as a character.94 In this way knowingness as part of one's character is like the descriptive poetry of 'poets of culture' such as Wordsworth; it is about the distinctive conception of propositions through the medium of the imagination 'coloured by, and impressing themselves by

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means of, emotions.'95 Such 'conceptive genius' is superior to any shown in the creation of fictitious genius, because the imagination is limited by a set of conditions, instead of, like James Mill's bete noire, ranging at pleasure where it will. Among the examples the younger Mill uses to show this superiority is that of gaining from history or travelling the 'vivid conception' of the mind of a Hindu.96 This brings us to our third point. The importance which John Stuart attached to nationality in his Representative Government is well recognized. This, together with his historicism, was derived from Burke's thought, which stressed the integrity of cultural identities as they had evolved over time, and was in direct opposition to the thrust of his father's and Bentham's thought. Again, this sensitivity is related to his enhanced view of the imagination. What marks the superiority of the conceptive genius is precisely its imaginative ability to decipher the mind of another age or nation.97 What constitutes this 'feeling of nationality' which it deciphers is a union 'by common sympathies,' the strongest of which is an 'identity of political antecedents' and the 'consequent community of recollections.'98 It is this community of recollections which the British Indian administration defined and tapped into, when taking account, as all legislators should, of 'preexisting habits and feelings' to shape its measures.99 John Stuart Mill's positive view of the imagination, which played an important part in the 'romantic' influence upon him, has been seen by some commentators to have made him sensitive to the importance of taking into account indigenous practices and beliefs in British India.100 While this may be so, this brief account of his views of the imagination suggests that closer attention may be paid to his politics of the imagination and their relationship to the imperatives of the British administration in India, among which, as C.A. Bayly has stressed, the acquisition of reliable information was of great, if not paramount, importance.101 This sort of broad framework might lead one to question whether the younger Mill's sensitivity to indigenous practices and beliefs should be taken at face value. It might be more pertinent to see this sensitivity, with its emphasis on sympathy and the imaginative ability to decipher the mentality of an age or nation or culture,102 as being more implicitly involved with British imperialism in India than the elder Mill's thinking was. The elder Mill was equally acerbic in his criticisms of the British and Indian societies and cultures he defined in his polemic. It is quite clear from the passages in On Liberty where J.S. Mill discussed despotism as a 'legitimate mode of government when dealing with barbarians,' and in Representative Government,10^ that this was not the case with his son. Whereas J.S. Mill had articulated a historical scale to justify his

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views, the elder Mill's general scepticism about the uses to which histories were put in bolstering conservative views extended to making little distinction between the 'barbarism' of both the imperialists and their subjects. Furthermore, for the elder Mill British India was not just a testing ground for his ideas; it was a matrix in which his views were structured, and in which his critique of contemporary British society was shaped. This is not the case with John Stuart Mill, whose central ideas were formulated with little explicit relation to British India. This is clear in Representative Government, where British India is treated as an exception to his general principles of government, requiring a distinctive form of administration.104 Thus, he was also keen to ensure that some of the benefits of representative government could be achieved in India without actually having such a government in existence.105 If India was important to the younger Mill, it may have been in a more general way, in the sense that his aesthetic attitudes, and in particular his views of the imagination and the development of feeling, can be placed in a framework in which the broader imperatives and character of British rule in India are important. At any rate, it seems that the elder Mill's History of British India has unjustifiably suffered a bad press.106 The intellectual endeavour in Mill's History was, as this essay has argued, much more complex than has hitherto been recognized, and involved attempting to articulate an idiom in which cultures could not only be compared and contrasted but also criticized. Both Bentham and Mill made it clear that criticizing another culture was inseparable from criticizing one's own. It is this self-reflexive and self-critical aspect of Mill's project which has been largely ignored. At least Mill offered the possibility of some sort of liberating critique, that is, a critique which affords the possibility of changing the way we define ourselves in order to change our practices for the better.107 For such a possibility to exist, it is necessary at times to give little weight to the past. Anyway, the relationship between our past and present selves is far from unproblematic.108 If Mill's History was an exercise in philistinism,109 it was also an exercise in disenchantment, which was necessary to cut through the bolstering of a set of constraining identities with which a set of aesthetic attitudes were in profound collusion. NOTES

1 Duncan Forbes, 'James Mill and India/ Cambridge Journal, 5 (1951-2): 31. 2 James Mill, The History of British India, ed. H.H. Wilson, 10 vols. (London, 1817), I, xii, cited as Mill, History. 3 Jones listed the four 'general media of satisfying our curiosity' about ancient

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India in 'On the Hindus,' Asiatick Researches, i (1788): 421. For a discussion of Jones's contribution to Indian historiography, see S.N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge, 1968), 104-11, and O.P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past 1784-1838 (Delhi, 1988), ch. 2. 4 For example, see Jones, To Sir John Macpherson,' 6 May 1786, and To the second Earl Spencer,' 19 Oct. 1791, The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970), II, 699, 898-9. For a discussion of this project and the British codification of Hindu law in general, see J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India (London, 1968), ch. 8. 5 For example, see his 'Best Practicable System of Judicature for India' in Mukherjee, Jones, 142. 6 See the following letters: To William Pitt the Younger,' 5 Feb. 1785; To Charles Wilkins,' March 1785; To the First Marquis of Cornwallis,' 19 March 1788, Letters, II, 661, 794. 7 Jones, To Arthur Lee,' i Oct. 1786, and To Lady Spencer,' 24 Oct. 1791, Letters, II, 712, 902. 8 Mukherjee, Jones, 132. 9 C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (London, 1989), 6. 10 For a discussion of aspects of these hymns, see J. Majeed, Ungovemed Imaginings: James Mill's 'The History of British India' and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992), ch. i. 11 P.J. Marshall, 'Empire and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century,' Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15 (1987): 115. 12 For a discussion of these views, see Mukherjee, Jones, ch. 4. 13 On this conservatism, see Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 2, n. 14 Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford, 1989), 311. 15 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. India: Madras and Bombay, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford, 1981), n. 16 First Report of the Select Committee, 5 Feb. 1782, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 144-89; Ninth Report of the Select Committee, 23 June 1783, ibid., 194-333; Eleventh Report of the Select Committee, 18 Nov. 1783, ibid., 334-78. 17 Garland Cannon, 'Sir William Jones and Edmund Burke,' Modern Philology, 54 (1956-7): 174. 18 Mukherjee, Jones, 141. 19 In his edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London, 1869, first published 1828), John Stuart Mill was to describe the elder Mill as 'the reviver and second founder of Associationist Psychology' (xi). 20 For an account of these advances, see Kejariwal, Asiatic Society, 57,158.

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21 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (London, 1970), 274. 22 Jeremy Bentham, Of Laws in General, ed. H.L.A. Hart, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (London, 1970), 242-4. 23 Mukherjee, Jones, 59-60,126. For Jones's views on common law, see Jones, 'To Thomas Yeates,' 7 June 1782, Letters, I, 553. 24 Postema, Bentham and Common Law, 279. 25 University College London, Bentham MS., 'Parliamentary Reform,' 1794-5, box 44, £5. 26 Mill, History, II, 105. 27 Ibid., I, viii-xxiii. 28 Ibid., VI, 479. 29 James Mill, Commerce Defended, in James Mill: Selected Economic Writings, ed. Donald Winch (Edinburgh, 1966), 135, and Elements of Political Economy, ibid., 319-20. 30 James Mill, 'The Article Colony, reprinted from the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica' (London, c. 1820), 31-3. 31 W.H. Burston, James Mill on Philosophy and Education (London, 1973), 187. 32 See J. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, ch. 2. 33 Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Milton Keynes, 1986), 92. 34 For Mill's comments on the Permanent Settlement embodying 'aristocratical prejudices,' see History, V, 336-48. 35 Mill, History, III, 352; IV, 220, 242; V, 205, 210, 355, 425. 36 British Library, Mill to Napier, 5 Aug. 1818, Add. MS. 34612, ff. 212-13, Macvey Napier Papers. 37 Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, 102. 38 Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England 1780-1860 (Minneapolis, 1983), 44-69, 71-4, 93-5. For Mill's positive comments on Tooke, see his 'Home Tooke's Diversions ofPurley,' Literary Journal of Domestic and Foreign Literature, i (1806): 1-16. 39 Aarsleff, The Study of Language, 96. 40 Both of Jones's essays appeared in his Poems, consisting chiefly of the Translations from the Asiatick Languages (Oxford, 1772), in The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. A.M. Jones, 6 vols. (London, 1799), IV, 397-561. For a discussion of the similarities between 'On the arts commonly called imitative' and Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, see J. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, ch. 4. 41 David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty and his Expectations, 2 vols. (London, 1749), I, 431.

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Mill, History, I, 239. Ibid., Ill, 307. Ibid., Ill, 213. See also III, 307. Ibid., II, 84. See also Mill's comments on Jones's 'susceptible' imagination in 'Voyage aux Indes Orientale,' Edinburgh Review 15 (1810): 369. 46 Mill, History, I, xvii. 47 Ibid., 1,112,115-16. For his remarks on Sanskrit as characterized by 'redundancy,' see ibid., II, 63. 48 The Works ofT.L Peacock, ed. Henry Cole (London, 1875), III, 33-7. For Mill's discussion of the rival claims of poetry and 'the production of prose compositions' which are 'a record of real transactions,' see Mill, History, II, 33-52. 49 Ross Harrison, Bentham (London, 1983), 24. 50 British Library, Mill to Place, 2 Oct. 1816, Add. MS. 35 152, f. 217; Mill to Place, 8 Oct. 1816, Add. MS. 35 152, f. 127, Francis Place Papers. 51 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817; London, 1975), 167. 52 James Mill, 'Schools for All, in Preference to Schools for Churchmen Only,' in James Mill on Education, ed. W.H. Burston (Cambridge, 1969), 120-92. 53 James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1828); new ed. with Notes Illustrative and Critical by Alexander Bain, Andrew Findlater, and George Grote, ed. with Additional Notes by John Stuart Mill, 2 vols. (London, 1869), I, 242-5. 54 Ibid., II, 230-7. 55 For a dear exposition of Kant's influence on Coleridge and Wordsworth, see Mary Warnock, Imagination (London, 1976), parts 1-3. 56 Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977), 119-22. 57 James Mill, Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press, and Law of Nations. Written for the Supplement to the Encycopaedia Brittanica (London, c. 1825), 3-32. 58 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832; Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), 322. 59 This was how T.B. Macaulay characterized Mill's methodology in a critique of the latter's 'Essay on Government,' in 'Utilitarian Logic and Politics,' Edinburgh Review, 49 (1829): 159-89. 60 I have taken the phrase 'politics of the imagination' from R.F. Storch's article of that title, Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982): 448-56. 61 Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), 76. 62 Frederick Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the Constitutional Code (Oxford, 1983), 205-6.

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63 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, 51-72, and 'Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation/ in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), 1,173. 64 Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, ed. Lord Teignmouth (London, 1804), 475-89. 65 For an excellent discussion of the influence of German biblical criticism on Coleridge, see E.S. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge, 1975), chs. 1-4. 66 S.T. Coleridge, 'To Lord Liverpool,' 28 July 1817, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs 6 vols. (Oxford, 1959), IV, 761. 67 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford, 1981), 78,130. 68 Hartley Coleridge, 'On the Poetical Use of the Heathen Mythology,' London Magazine, 5 (1822): 113-20. 69 Works of Sir William Jones, ed. A.M. Jones, VI, 181. 70 Thomas Taylor, "The Dream,' Monthly Magazine and British Register for 1797, 4 (1798): 375-6. 71 Mill, History, I, 294. 72 Ian McCalman, 'Unrespectable Radicalism, Infidels and Pornography in Early Nineteenth Century London,' Past and Present, 104 (1984): 99. 73 Ibid., 84. 74 Ibid., 99. 75 University College London, Bentham MS., box 161, f. 8. 76 Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 3795-1865 (Oxford, 1988), 219. 77 Harrison, Bentham, 170. 78 J.S. Mill, Autobiography, CW, I, 50. 79 Ibid., 5. 80 Ibid., 269-70. For a discussion of the different subject matters of metaphysics and logic, see A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, CW, VII, 8-9,13, 54, 62-4. 81 This strategy was clearly evident in the essays 'Bentham' and 'Coleridge.' See J.S. Mill, 'Bentham,' Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. J.M. Robson, F.E.L. Priestley, and D.P. Dryer, Colkcted Works, X, 78, 90, 94; also J.S. Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1,176-7. 82 Mill, History, I, xxiii-vi. 83 C.A. Bayly has drawn detailed attention to the importance of these networks of

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information and informers. C.A. Bayly, 'Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India,' Modern Asian Studies, 27 (1993): 3-43. 84 J.S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, CW, XIX, 577. Mill emphasized this point in his defences of the company during 1858; see CW, XXX, 49-50, 83, 86,166, 208. 85 J.S. Mill, Representative Government, CW, XIX, 410-11. 86 J.S. Mill, On Liberty, CW, XVIII, 306. 87 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. George Watson (1817; London, 1982), 141; J.S. Mill, Representative Government, CW, XIX, 544. 88 On the dangers of such a dependence, see ibid., 569. 89 J.S. Mill, Autobiography, cw, i, 27. 90 Ibid., 147,175-7; A System of Logic, CW, VIII, 836-74. 91 J.S. Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1,143,147. 92 J.S. Mill, 'Bentham,' CW, X, 92. 93 J.S. Mill, 'On Genius,' CW, I, 332. 94 Ibid., CW, 1,331-2. 95 J.S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,' CW, I, 358. 96 J.S. Mill, 'On Genius,' CW, I, 333. 97 Ibid. 98 J.S. Mill, Representative Government, CW, XIX, 546. 99 Ibid., 379. 100 Lynn Zastoupil, 'J.S. Mill and India,' Victorian Studies, 32 (1988): 31-54101 Bayly, 'Knowing the Country.' 102 J.S. Mill, 'On Genius,' CW, I, 333. 103 J.S. Mill, Representative Government, CW, XIX, 562. 104 Ibid., 567; also CW, XXX, 49. 105 Ibid., 45. 106 For some criticisms of Mill's History, see R. Iyer, 'Utilitarianism and All That,' South Asian Affairs, 8 (1960): 31; William Thomas, Mill (Oxford, 1985), 68; Ranajit Guha, 'Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,' Subaltern Studies 6 (1989): 284-9; Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990), 45. 107 For a penetrating discussion of these issues, see Charles Taylor, Social Theory as Practice (Delhi, 1983), 28-44. 108 Derek Parfitt, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1986), part 3. 109 Thomas, Mill, 68.

John Stuart Mill's Draft Despatches to India and the Problem of Bureaucratic Authorship MARTIN MOIR

John Stuart Mill's long career (1823-58) in the Examiner's Office of the East India Company's London headquarters, during which he was principally engaged in the drafting of despatches to India, poses certain tantalizing questions that are only now being seriously addressed. These questions mainly revolve around central issues such as the kind of impact Mill had upon the Company's Indian policies, and the extent to which it is possible to trace connections between his general political, social, and economic ideas and the policies he pursued as a leading Company official.1 In this brief investigation I will not be dealing with these very difficult wider questions concerning Mill's role, but with a more particular and basic problem which nonetheless has an important bearing on the wider questions. The problem can be put quite simply: how far can the despatches Mill claimed to have drafted be properly regarded as 'his' compositions in the light of a full appreciation of the peculiarly elaborate decision-making system then followed by the East India Company and the Board of Control? To put it another way, I will aim to examine the extent to which his responsibility for drafting official despatches has to be conceived of as significantly different from his 'authorship' of, for example, On Liberty (which may more conventionally be viewed as exclusively 'his' work, if we leave aside Mill's own claims on behalf of his wife, Harriet).2 A key issue to be explored in this discussion will be Mill's own attitude to disclaiming official authorship: that is to say, under what circumstances did he consider he could no longer claim a particular despatch as 'his'? At first sight, these problems of official authorship may appear somewhat exaggerated. After all, it may be represented, we are fortunate enough to have Mill's own well-authenticated and reliable list of Indian despatches

Mill's Draft Despatches to India 73 (MSS Eur. 6405 in the Oriental and India Office Collections [hereafter OIOC]). In this volume he carefully recorded details of the despatches he drafted between 1824 and 1858, in the political, foreign, public, public works, ecclesiastical, marine, law, commercial, and Prince of Wales Island (or Penang) departments of the East India Company's correspondence, amounting to more than seventeen hundred documents.3 In addition there is the list of Mill's published writings in the Mill-Taylor Collection (in the British Library of Political Science and Economics), which gives references to those of his despatches printed, wholly or partly, in Parliamentary Papers.4 Besides these sources, we also have a variety of authenticating evidence in the form of personal notes and signatures scattered through several long series of draft despatches to India held in the OIOC (especially in the E/4 and L/P&S/6 series). In view of the exactness and extent of these materials, wherein lies the problem of authorship? As earlier indicated, the authorship difficulties arise mainly because Mill was working as an official in a complex bureaucracy, and drafts originally prepared by him were regularly subject to a lengthy and involved process of revision by higher authorities within the Company and the Board of Control. In fact, as various reliable first-hand accounts of the system make clear, the process of 'intervention' by these authorities sometimes began even before Mill or his colleagues in the Examiner's Office had actually put their pens to the draft paper.5 For example, these accounts explain that, in cases concerned with important Indian subjects, the officials responsible were expected to receive preliminary instructions from the Company chairs (the chairman and deputy chairman) before preparing their first drafts. Afterwards, once the first drafts were ready, the officials were further obliged to submit their documents for the chairs' approval. That these sessions were not always smooth or easy for the members of the Examiner's Office is also attested by Mill himself in a brief and interesting note sent to his wife in March 1854. Here he describes the difficulties he had in getting one of his compositions accepted by Sir James Weir Hogg, 'explaining, defending, and altering so as to spoil it as little as I could,' and he goes on to contrast these difficulties with the easier responses of Hogg's successors, Russell Ellice and John Oliphant, who tended to accept what he wrote.6 Earlier, on a more abstract level, Mill had also admitted, in his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Indian affairs in June 1852, that the chairs 'seldom send up a proposed despatch which they know is contrary to the President's opinion.'7 This statement in effect tends to confirm the importance of the chairs' influ-

74 Martin Moi ence upon the first drafts at this early key stage in their formulation, as well as pointing towards the continuous behind-the-scenes influence of the president of the Board of Control. Once the first drafts were 'settled' by the chairs and the drafting officers, they were sent across to the Board of Control in the form known as 'Previous Communication' (hereafter PC), in the course of which they were subjected to intense critical scrutiny before the president decided which, if any, portions should be altered, and in what way. The documents were then returned to East India House where any changes made by the board were considered, and the text of the drafts was finally agreed by the chairs and their assistants. Now treated as official documents - the, earlier PCs were technically regarded as unofficial - the drafts were in turn submitted to (a) the particular committee of the Court of Directors concerned with their subject matter, (b) the court as a whole, and (c) the Board of Control for final approval. At each of these stages fresh alterations might be made, and it was even possible for the court to challenge any last changes made by the board, before eventually sending off the despatches to India. The surviving archival evidence in London for studying the extent to which original PCs, such as Mill's, were altered by others in the course of this elaborate procedure may be described as very ample but by no means comprehensive.8 For instance, for the political and foreign despatches included in Mill's own list (over fifteen hundred items), the whole process by which these documents were reviewed, from the first submission of the PCs to the president to their final approval by the court and the board, can be reconstructed on the basis of the board's annotated copies of the political PCs and drafts (OIOC, L/P&S/6) and the Company's copies of the same official drafts (OIOC, E/4). Only the initial exchanges that may have taken place between Mill and the chairs remain virtually unrecorded. For the 190 or so remaining despatches claimed by Mill in his list (viz., those for the public, public works, etc., departments), the documentary evidence is considerably less comprehensive, being mostly limited to the review of the official drafts by committee, court, and board recorded in the E/4 series. Little is therefore known of the crucial PC stage. In view of the magnitude of the task of checking and sifting through this huge body of archival material, it is not surprising that so far mere has been no comprehensive investigation of the extent to which Mill's own PCs/ drafts were altered by others.9 Meanwhile, some sampling and spot checks of the documentation tend to confirm what might in any case have been supposed, that many, perhaps even most, of his PCs/drafts underwent at least a few slight changes before being finally approved and issued as des-

Mill's Draft Despatches to India 75 patches, and that in a smallish minority of cases they were more substantially changed. It must be stressed, however, that the evidence is so far incomplete and occasionally conflicting. For example, a survey of the thirtynine or so political PCs/drafts included in his list of despatches to the government of India for 1841 (but excluding those sent to Bombay and Madras) shows that about fifteen were altered by the board either at the PC or draft stages (or on both occasions). However, the majority of these changes were of a minor and mostly verbal character, being limited for the most part to a few phrases or sentences in each document. More substantial changes, involving the alteration or omission of whole paragraphs for example, only occurred in a minority of cases. By contrast, a similar brief investigation of his political PCs/drafts for 1851 (again for India only) yields a rather different result. Thus, for that year, thirty out of the thirty-four items included in his list were subject to alterations by the board, with considerably more alterations being of a fairly substantial nature (covering whole paragraphs) than was the case for 1841. The majority of changes, however, continued to be of a minor character.10 There are, of course, obvious difficulties about trying to draw any very definite conclusions from these small samples. And even the data provided here need to be extended to take account of certain other factors, such as the possibility that some of these PCs/drafts may also have been altered within the Company, for example by the chairs, the committees, or the court as a whole. In fact, these and similar illustrations can only give us a rough idea of the extent to which Mill's PCs/drafts were altered within the bureaucracy, and of the fluctuations that occurred over a period of years in the official reactions to his work. More obviously, such examples also serve to underline the dangers of basing conclusions about the content of Mill's Indian views purely on the wording of the final despatches, even though these despatches are included in his own lists. In order to bring out the significance of these considerations for our understanding of the nature of Mill's official authorship, and also to provide a fuller picture of the bureaucratic procedures involved, it may be useful at this point to take a concrete example of one particular PC/draft claimed by Mill which underwent some alteration at the board before being issued. The example to be considered is political despatch to India no. i of 26 January 1853, which is included in both Mill's list of despatches and the separate record of those of his despatches which were printed for Parliament.11 In this despatch the Court of Directors instructed the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, and his council to recognize the adopted son of the recently deceased raja of Kerauli (in Rajasthan) as the latter's successor, even though

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the boy in question was only a distant relative of the late ruler. The court's decision was also taken in the knowledge that Dalhousie himself inclined to take advantage of this situation by applying the so-called 'doctrine of lapse' (the policy that all successions in the dependent Indian states based on adoption should be subject to the approval of the British Indian government, and that, in the event of their rejection, such states should automatically lapse to the paramount power). Despite the inclusion of this despatch in Mill's list, it is clear from the copies of the relevant PC (8028) and draft (982) in L/P&S/6/37I that his original PC was somewhat altered by the Board of Control, and that it was this revised version that was finally approved and issued as the despatch (and later printed for Parliament), In making these changes in the third and the fourth paragraphs of the document, the board, under its president, Sir Charles Wood, justified them to the Company on the grounds that they expressed 'rather more clearly the sentiments entertained by the Authorities in this country.'12 In comparing the two versions (see appendix), we may conclude that the board's changes were of a fairly minor character, not seriously altering the substance of Mill's basic argument in favour of recognizing the Kerauli succession. At the same time it is interesting to note the slight shifts of emphasis and omissions in the board's version. These included the increased stress on the inapplicability of the conclusion reached in the court's earlier political despatch on the lapse of Sattara state (no. 4 of 24 January 1849) to the situation in Kerauli (conclusions which Dalhousie had believed to be relevant), and the curtailment of Mill's comments on the consideration owed to Kerauli as a state under a national government, 'not like so many of the states of India under the rule of foreigners'! Also not without significance is the board's omission altogether of Mill's characterization of the proposed British annexation of Kerauli as 'in all probability so little acceptable to the people' - a small nod in the direction of national feelings, if not democracy, that evidently found no favour at the Board of Control. Thus, although on the whole we may judge that it was not unreasonable for Mill to decide to include the despatch in the corpus of his own 'official writings/ the fact remains that the final wording and points of emphasis were not entirely his. This analysis of the Kerauli succession despatch, plus the earlier general findings about the extent to which Mill's drafts were altered, have obvious implications for our understanding of the scope and character of Mill's lists of despatches. Thus it seems clear that in compiling his own manuscript list (MSS Eur. 6405), Mill was primarily concerned to record all the despatches for which he had been the official drafting officer, even though in some

Mill's Draft Despatches to India 77 cases what he had originally proposed was subsequently changed by others. In other words it would be a mistake to take the implied claim to the authorship of all these items too literally, without regard to administrative context. Somewhat similarly - though this may seem a little more strange to authorial purists - the proprietary claims implicit in the list of his despatches published as Parliamentary Papers have also, it seems, to be understood in a fairly broad and realistic way. For example, several comparisons show that at least in a few cases the final despatches printed for Parliament - and claimed by Mill - include quite significant alterations made to the texts of his original PCs/drafts by the Board of Control - more substantial, for instance, than the board's changes to the Kerauli despatch quoted above.13 Although these examples indicate that in so far as the contents of his inventories are concerned, Mill took a somewhat flexible view of his authorial responsibility, it is important to note certain other features of his lists, easily passed over, which suggest that there were occasionally limits to what he felt he could reasonably claim as his own work. The particular evidence I have in mind here consists of a number of entries in Mill's manuscript list of despatches which are crossed out. Altogether there are about forty-four such entries.14 The majority are of no obvious importance in the context of the present inquiry, since they appear to represent the kind of small errors that anyone keeping a complicated inventory of this type might make (for example, at certain points Mill seems to have started to enter details of a despatch to the Bombay government within the section of his list reserved for despatches to the government of India). But, besides these cases, there are other entries which clearly have more significance for students of Mill's official writings. For instance, there is a small group of about four items which refer to PCs originally prepared by Mill but subsequently for one reason or another cancelled and never formally converted into drafts or issued as despatches. Hence Mill's decision to drop them from what was after all a list of despatches approved and sent. Copies of these abortive PCs do, however, survive in the OIOC, and some of them are of considerable interest. In particular, the entry - crossed out in Mill's list - referring to India public PC 1828 of 1836, which was completely rejected by the then president of the Board of Control, Sir John Hobhouse, is of special importance, since the document in question contains the fullest exposition of Mill's views on the educational reforms of Bentinck and Macaulay and the Anglicist/Orientalist controversy of the i83os.15 In some ways more intriguing than these entries referring to the cancelled PCs is another distinct group of crossed-out entries, consisting of sixteen items (ranging in date from 1834 to 1855) which appear to have a more direct bearing on the circumstances in which Mill might have felt obliged to

78 Martin Moir disclaim 'authorship.'16 A brief investigation of these entries shows that they relate to political PCs (extant in the L/P&S/6 series) which, after having undergone fairly radical alterations at the hands of the board during the PC stage, were subsequently approved as drafts and issued as despatches with a content decidedly different from the original PC versions. Though not all equally important, most of these PCs are concerned with significant issues of policy, such as the sovereignty of the princely states, the treatment of exrulers and feudal elites, and the conduct of senior British officials - all matters about which Mill is known to have had distinct views. Given, therefore, that he had initially entered details of these documents in his list - though without the dates of the final despatches - why did he then decide to remove them? Could it be that in most, if not all, of these cases the board's drastic changes to documents he had originally prepared led him to cancel his first entries, with their implied claim to authorship? Although this supposition has considerable prima facie plausibility (and we may call it the main hypothesis), a moment's reflection suggests that there could also be other explanations for at least some of these withdrawn entries, and, of course, that different explanations could apply in different cases. For example, Mill may have originally expected to tackle certain of these PCs but for some reason was subsequently prevented from doing so perhaps through illness or absence on vacation. In such circumstances the chairs would then presumably have instructed someone else to prepare the PCs, perhaps their chief examiner, Thomas Love Peacock.17 For convenience we may describe this possibility as the second hypothesis. Alternatively (and this may be called the third hypothesis), it is possible to construct a scenario in which Mill may indeed have prepared the PCs in question (or some of them), only to find that the chairs took exception to what he had written, and obliged him to substitute fresh PCs for submission to the board. In this case, of course, his cancellation of the entries in his list would represent his personal response to the chairs' decisions, not to the alterations later made by the board. Before examining the archival evidence for these issues in more detail, it may be useful at this stage to see how far it is possible to simplify the problem by eliminating at least some of the options just presented, either on general probability grounds or by reference to what is already known about Mill's life from other sources. With regard to the second hypothesis, unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any full official or personal record of Mill's attendances at East India House. But a rough check of the available data indicates that he was apparently in fairly regular attendance at the times when most of the

Mill's Draft Despatches to India 79 PCs with which we are concerned were being prepared for, or considered by, the board. Interestingly enough, however, it emerges that the known dates of his two long continental vacations during 1854-5 cut across the dates when at least three of these documents were being considered as official drafts by the Company and the board. This leaves open the possibility that Mill might have prepared the earlier PC versions before departing for France.18 While this biographical data certainly tends to reduce the probability of the second hypothesis, it clearly does not entitle us to rule it out altogether. For instance, it is still conceivable that, at least in the case of one or two of the PCs concerned, another member of the Examiner's Office might, for whatever reasons, have been involved in their drafting, and this possibility needs to be kept in mind when we come later to review the detailed archival evidence. On the other hand, it is equally necessary here to recognize that Mill's official responsibility for the Company's political department correspondence throughout this period renders it unlikely that he would have been relieved of his routine drafting duties, during the times when he was present, in anything other than exceptional circumstances. At this point the third hypothesis also begins to look distinctly doubtful, in terms of its inherent complexity, as well as Mill's probable response to the situation envisaged. For example, it obliges us to imagine that the PCs concerned were in practice rejected twice over - first by the chairs, and then in their revised form by the board's president. It is also, of course, likely that the chairs did on occasions compel Mill to change the PCs he had prepared for them, and this could have happened with some of the documents now under consideration. On the other hand, as we have seen, this would have been the kind of experience to which Mill, as a long-serving Company official, would have been accustomed, and however much such events might have sometimes troubled him, it seems unlikely that he would have felt the need to record his personal disagreements with his immediate employers by striking out the entries for the PCs in question. In any case, in view of the general absence of surviving documentation for these shadowy occasions, it becomes hard to pursue this hypothesis in any effective way. We are now perhaps in a better position to approach the available body of archival evidence to try to determine how far this material tends to support the main hypothesis advanced earlier; viz., that Mill cancelled certain entries in his list because the PCs concerned (which he had prepared) had been largely rejected by the board, and eventually by the Company itself. One substantial set of evidence that lends considerable support to the view that he was at least responsible for preparing most of these PCs con-

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sists in the annotations made by Board of Control clerks in their registers of PCs and drafts (OIOC, Z/F/3). Thus, with two exceptions (one of which is not significant), all the register entries recording the board's receipts of the relevant PCs (i.e., corresponding to the items crossed out in Mill's list), include pencil references to 'Mill,' indicating apparently that he was the Company official regarded by the board as responsible for these PCs.19 It is hardly conceivable that the clerks could have been mistaken in all these cases, though it is, of course, just possible that their references merely mean that the board expected to deal with Mill in these instances because he was normally in charge of the Company's political correspondence. Incidentally, in noting Mill's name, the clerks were not singling him out for special treatment, since they similarly recorded the names of other Company official responsible for the PCs in other departments. Another part of the archival evidence also needs to be brought in here evidence which at first sight seems somewhat equivocal. For it has to be said that with one exception (see note 19), none of the surviving contemporary copies of the PC/drafts in question themselves contain any incontrovertible links with Mill, such as his name or signature. In the case of the board's copies of the political PCs/drafts (OIOC, L/P&S/6), the absence of such links is not significant, since these PCs were hardly ever signed by Mill, though they were very occasionally accompanied by notes to board officials which do bear his signature. Conversely, one particular L/P&S/6 file comprising the board's original papers relating to its review of one of the PCs included in the present inquiry, viz., PC 1939 of 1837, actually contains some correspondence with Thomas Love Peacock (the Company's chief examiner) which could be interpreted as implying that Peacock himself might have been involved in the original preparation of this PC.20 In the case of the Company's drafts (OIOC, E/4), no such specific alternative attributions are suggested by the surviving documentation. On the other hand, as just indicated, the general absence of Mill's name from these particular documents is somewhat puzzling, given that the majority of ordinary political drafts included in these volumes for this period do contain Mill's signatures, usually entered in pencil on the cover sheets immediately preceding the actual documents. This is also the case with the names or signatures of other company officials responsible for preparing PC/drafts in other departments. At this point a fuller understanding of the make-up of the E/4 documents becomes rather crucial. As I have tried to show elsewhere,21 a close study of this series, along with the corresponding L/P&S/6 copies of the political PCs and drafts, shows that some of the E/4 drafts are composite documents.

Mill's Draft Despatches to India 81 That is to say, they sometimes embody portions of the original PCs returned unaltered from the board, as well as pages freshly copied by the Company clerks at the draft stage to conceal the board's more extensive changes (which, because they were part of the unofficial PC process, were 'not for the record'). Such hybrid documents may also include the original cover sheets used to convey the PCs to the board, on which various details are noted, such as the PC numbers and the pencilled signatures or names of the original Company drafting officers (e.g., Mill), as mentioned above. Other important evidence strongly suggests that these signatures were usually, though not invariably, entered on the sheets at the PC stage, and probably before the PCs were submitted to the board.22 By contrast, it is also clear that many, indeed most, of the E/4 documents are more homogeneous compositions, having been entirely recopied at the draft stage, leaving virtually no direct evidence of their relationship to the original PCs, and equipped with new or amended cover sheets. If this reconstruction of a complex and arcane process is generally correct, then it may offer us a partial explanation for the puzzling absence of Mill's signatures from the E/4 documents concerned. Thus, given that the corresponding PCs had been substantially rewritten by the board, and that these changes had been largely accepted by the Company, it would certainly have been normal practice for the Company clerks to have prepared completely new copies for use at the draft stage. This explanation is also borne out by the physical appearance of these E/4 documents: they clearly are fresh copies, having little or no visible links with the earlier PC versions. In most cases too (that is ten out of the sixteen documents concerned) the PC numbers are not there, suggesting that at least in these instances the original cover sheets may also have been withdrawn and new ones substituted, thus perhaps removing the original first-hand evidence of Mill's involvement. Nevertheless, if we suppose that at least some of the cover sheets are in fact survivals from the PC stage (e.g., those on which PC numbers are still visible), the problem pointed out earlier is not entirely resolved, though it is also possible that in these cases Mill's original signatures may either have faded or even been erased. It is tempting to suppose that he might have had a hand in this process, but this would amount to abandoning the cautious uncertainties of historical research for a neat 'whodunnit' solution! There seems little point in trying to penetrate further into the recesses of this archival labyrinth in search of clear and total proof of Mill's authorship. As with other key aspects of his Company career, the evidence is too fragmentary at some of the points that matter most. Nonetheless, we may con-

82 Martin Moir elude that the overall pattern of probability running through the surviving documentation - including what is there and what is not - tends to support the main hypothesis that he was responsible for most, if not quite all, of the PCs identified here through the cancelled entries in his list.23 This in turn allows us to suppose that there were occasionally certain limits in his daily work - not easily reached - when his feelings of personal involvement and responsibility challenged his stoical sense of being a mere cog in the Company machine, a subordinate official in a hierarchy ruled by others. At such times, as his Autobiography claims, he may eventually have sought 'to bear with complete equanimity the being overruled altogether,'24 but at least he was free to record what had taken place, tersely within the pages of his personal notebook. APPENDIX

India Political Department PC 8028/1852 relating to the Kerauli State succession (OIOC, L/P&S/6/37I, pp. 787-99) 1. We now reply to your letter in the Foreign Department dated 7 September (No. 56) 1852, in which you report the death of Nursing Pal, the young Rajah of Kerowlee, after adopting as his son and successor a boy who is a distant kinsman: and request our instructions whether the adoption should be recognized. 2. Colonel Low25 gave his opinion in favour of recognizing the adoption, and Sir Frederick Currie26 supported this proposal. The Governor General, with whom Mr. Lowis27 expressed his concurrence, inclined rather to declaring the State a lapse to the British Government. 3. The Governor General has given a fair and impartial statement of the arguments on both sides of this important question. In deeming however the present case to be identical in principle with that of Sattara, the Governor General does not advert to the distinction constituted by the fact that the Sattara State was derived from the creation and gift of the British Government, while Kerowlee is only in relation to us of a protected Ally, its origin being long anterior to the British power in India. 4. It may be added that the Rajpoot States, of which Kerowlee is one, being under national governments, and not like so many of the States of India under the rule of foreigners, there is no part of India into which the introduction of our government would be so little desirable in itself, or in all probability so little acceptable to the people. 5. For these reasons the force of which you will, no doubt, duly appreciate, we have on full consideration determined to recognize the succession of the adopted son

Mill's Draft Despatches to India 83 Bhurt Pal. The country will continue as at present to be administered by a British Officer, and we trust that before the expiration of the minority, the State will be free from debt and restored to prosperity. India Political Department Despatch No. i of 26 January 1853 (OIOC, E/4/8i8, pp. 1147-55) 1. We now reply to your letter in the Foreign Department dated 7 September (No. 56) 1852, in which you report the death of Nursing Pal, the young Rajah of Kerowlee, after adopting as his son and successor a boy who is a distant kinsman; and request our instructions whether the adoption should be recognized. 2. Colonel Low gave his opinion in favour of recognizing the adoption, and Sir Frederick Currie supported this proposal. The Governor General, with whom Mr. Lowis expressed his concurrence, inclined rather to declaring the State a lapse to the British Government. 3. The Governor General has given a fair and impartial statement of the arguments on both sides of this important question. After having given the fullest consideration to the circumstances of this case we have come to the decision that the succession of Bhurt Pal to the Raj of Kerowlee as the adopted son of Nursing Pal should be sanctioned. 4. In coming to this conclusion we do not intend to depart from the principle as laid down in our despatch of the 24th of January 1849, relative to the case of Sattara, which is referred to by the Governor General, that there is no validity in an adoption for conveying succession to a throne, and to the rights of sovereignty in a dependent principality in India unless the adoption shall have received the sanction of the Supreme Power. But it appears to us that there is a marked distinction in fact between the cases of Sattara and Kerowlee, which is not sufficiently adverted to in the minute of the Governor General. The Sattara State was one of recent origin derived altogether from the creation and gift of the British Government, whilst Kerowlee is one of the oldest Rajpoot States, which has been under the rule of its native princes from a period long anterior to the British power in India. It stands to us only in the relation of a Protected Ally, and probably there is no part of India into which it is less desirable except upon the strongest grounds to substitute our Government for that of the native Rulers. 5. In our opinion such grounds do not exist in the present case and we have therefore determined to sanction the succession of Bhurt Pal. The country will continue as at present to be administered by a British Officer, and we trust that before the expiration of the minority the State will be free from debt and restored to prosperity.

84 Martin Moir NOTES

1 For the latest general studies of the significance of Mill's career with the East India company, see CW, XXX, vii-liv, and CW, XXII, xxix-xl; also L. Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, 1994). 2 CW, I, 259. 3 An edited version of Mill's list of despatches is included in CW, XXX, 239-96, and CW, XXXII, 255. As explained below, the despatches themselves are preserved in various forms in the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) in London (now part of the British Library). It should also be noted that the original despatches as sent by the Company's directors to the governor-general in council are also preserved in the National Archives of India, where they are arranged by department and date, although of course in that form they contain no written evidence of Mill's authorship. 4 The list of Mill's published despatches is included in CW, XXX, 297-308. 5 Ibid., 42-3. 6 Ibid., 178. Hogg was chairman of the Company, 1846-7 and 1852-3; Ellice was chairman, 1853-4, an