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The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission Author(s): AndrewSartori Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Modern

History, Vol. 78, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 623-642 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509149 . Accessed: 31/10/2012 20:19
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Review Article The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission*


Andrew Sartori
University of Chicago

Uday Singh Mehtas Liberalism and Empire has been enthusiastically received by a surprisingly broad range of scholars of empire as a powerful contribution to the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. Mehtas carefully argued and impressively limpid discussion gives articulate voice to themes that have gained signicant footing in recent scholarship: a suspicion of abstraction and universalism and a correlative assertion of cultural difference and the power of representations. Yet, viewed from the perspective of a historian, his argument provokes some fundamental questions about how we are to interpret the emergence of modern ideologies that identify empire and, for the purposes of both Mehtas text and this essay, the British Empire specificallyas a vehicle for both the maintenance and the dissemination of modern civilization. In this essay, I shall begin by examining Mehtas core proposition: that liberal abstraction contains within its basic argumentative structure an immanent propensity for colonial domination. In parts 2 and 3 of this essay, I will draw on some recent interventions in British intellectual history to suggest that this irreducibly his* The books to be discussed in this essay are: David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context, ed. Quentin Skinner, Lorraine Daston, Dorothy Ross, and James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. xi239, $60.00 (cloth), $21.99 (paper); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Blackwell History of the World, ed. R. I. Moore (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), pp. xxiv540, $73.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper); Eugenio Biagini, Gladstone, British History in Perspective, ed. Jeremy Black (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. ix138, $65.00; David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. xxiv264, $15.95; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800 1947 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), pp. xiii273, $74.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper); Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (London: Allen Lane, 2002; New York: Basic Books, 2003), pp. xxvi351, $17.95; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning, ed. Jean Comaroff, Andreas Glaeser, William Sewell, and Lisa Wedeen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. xi401, $50.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 18301867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. xviii556, $79.00 (cloth), $29.00 (paper); Bruce L. Kinzer, Englands Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish Question (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. x292, $63.00; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. xii237, $45.00 (cloth), $17.00 (paper); Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present, Modern Library Chronicles (New York: Modern Library, 2001, with new epilogue 2003), pp. xxv216, $10.95; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. xv282, $80.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). I would like to thank the editors of this journal (especially Jan Goldstein), Ralph Austen, David Como, Spencer Leonard, Steve Pincus, and Robert Travers.
The Journal of Modern History 78 (September 2006): 623642 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2006/7803-0003$10.00 All rights reserved.

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torical claim needs to be qualied and complicated in the face of, on the one hand, early-modern liberalisms deep reluctance to endorse the imperial project, and, on the other hand, Victorian liberalisms deepening embrace of a historicist-contextualist mode of social analysis and policy advocacy. I suggest that the key to unraveling the shifting ambiguities of liberal attitudes toward empire might lie in a more rigorous attempt to embed the conceptual structure of liberal thought in the sociohistorical contexts of its articulation. In the fourth and nal part of this essay, I will argue that the dominant historiographical trend toward discourse analysis in the eld of British imperial studies has prevented current scholarship from engaging seriously with precisely this problem of the sociohistorical constitution of forms of liberal subjectivity.

I
Mehta wrestles with one of the great paradoxes in the history of modern political theory: that a society that already by the end of the eighteenth century was beginning to consider itself a democracy was at the same time coming to govern an enormous empire without consent from or representation of its subject populations (Mehta, 7). More remarkably still, it turns out on closer examination that it has generally been liberal and progressive thinkers such as Bentham, both the Mills, and Macauley, who . . . endorse the empire as a legitimate form of political and commercial governance (Mehta, 2). In contrast, it was Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism and a virulent critic of democracy, who in the annals of modern political theory most consistently expressed a sustained and deep reluctance toward the empire (Mehta, 23). Two mutually related factors conditioned the liberal encounter with the nonWestern world. First of all, there is the fact and the awareness of the inequality of power that gives to liberal thought its condent, assertive expansiveness (Mehta, 1113). This rst condition is itself tied to a second, more profound onea moral aw residing at the very heart of liberal thought, constantly tempting it with an urge to dominate the world that, even if it does not inevitably lead to imperialistic practical consequences, is nevertheless internal to its discursive logic (Mehta, 20). This deeper aw is in fact the true villain of Mehtas work, in relation to which liberalism can stand only metonymically: namely, abstraction. The universalism of what Mehta calls the cosmopolitanism of reason positions the unfamiliar as always already answerable to an abstract schema of thought that had itself been established through the contingencies of the particular cultural conguration of just one part of the world: Liberalism . . . was self-consciously universal as a political, ethical, and epistemological creed. Yet, it had fashioned this creed from an intellectual tradition and experiences that were substantially European, if not almost exclusively national (Mehta, 1). Through a careful reading of Locke, Mehta shows how liberal thought from the beginning had had to manage the gap between the alleged universalism of its conception of human nature and the actual realization of responsible liberal subjects. Locke presumes on a complex constellation of social structures and social conventions to delimit, stabilize, and legitimize, without explicitly restricting, the universal referent of his foundational commitment (Mehta, 57). In colonies like India, whose societies were characterized by dense and long-established relations of sentiment, hierarchy, and dependence, British liberals found themselves confronted forcefully by the hidden parochialism and exclusionary logic of their creed. But cushioned by the asymmetry of power at the heart of this encounter, they were able to foreclose the

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challenge through an intellectual sleight of hand that used the concepts of history and civilization, as social homologies of Lockes discourse of education, to mediate the relationship between the abstract universalisms of liberal thought and the concrete unfamiliarity of other ways of life. Just as for Locke children were not yet political subjects, so too in nineteenth-century liberalism the nonwhite colonies had not yet reached their maturity and so required paternal rather than consensual governance. The hero of Mehtas text is Edmund Burkealbeit a Burke refracted through the lens of twentieth-century phenomenologism. At the core of Mehtas admiration is Burkes refusal to plug India into a preestablished category of differencehis refusal to deny the coevality of the West and India; to foreclose the conversation by dismissing those unfamiliar sentiments, feelings, and attachments through which peoples are, or aspire to be, at home as evidence of backwardness; or even to be tempted by the mastery implicit in the subsumption of the singularity of the unfamiliar into the more familiar intelligibility of the general (Mehta, 1920). By recognizing the universal role of prejudicethe irreducible embeddedness of individuals in inherited structures of sentiment and attachment that are always local and nite (Mehta, 21)Burke challenged teleological rationalism in the name of a cosmopolitanism of sentiments that grasped the deep attachments to locality and community that have so bemused liberal thinkers.

II
One inevitable correlate of the textualism of a political theorist like Mehta isand the irony will presumably not be lostan abstraction of the logic of the texts from their historical context. Political ideas, he acknowledges, do not just have implications that ow from them with the frictionless ease of a mathematical deduction. . . . Their meaning, as ideas, has everything to do with the context of their provenance and reception, and the friction they encounter in their engagement with reality (Mehta, 910). But on a more careful examination it becomes clear that historical context enters Mehtas argument only as either an external variable subsequent to the articulation of the ideological form (the relationship of domination as a precondition for the transformation of liberal ideology into colonial policy) or a consequence of a structure of ideas (empire as a logical extension of liberal exclusionism). Mehta is here deeply representative of the wider trend in contemporary historical scholarship, wherein sociohistorical context is most often seen to inect or orient, rather than more fundamentally to constitute, the conceptual terrain of discourse and hence the worlds of meaning inhabited by determinate historical subjects. Mehta does of course argue that the psychological aspects of experience, including reason itself, always derive their meaning, their passionate and pained intensity, from within the bounded, even if porous, spheres of familial, national, or other narratives (21). But questions remain: Does abstraction, as a psychological mode, also partake of this contextual contingency? And, if so, what has made it so very different from other, allegedly less aggressive forms of social or political discourse, such as Burkes protohermeneuticism? What is it about liberalisms meaning-giving context, in other words, that makes its logic abstract ? Leaving these kinds of questions unaddressed inevitably opens the door to the all too common tendency to position abstraction as a kind of original sin of the Westthe kind of transhistorical reication whose ideological origins lie in Nietzsche. Edward Saids contention that there is a

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deep civilizational root to the Wests will-to-power over the East would be an inuential case in point.1 Mehta is careful to elide the issue entirely.
Whether the phrases that implied this lofty vision [of liberal cosmopolitanism] . . . were merely strategic terms of art designed to support a noble patron or humble a monarch or two in a local conict, in a context where the protocols of political pamphlets and theoretical texts were much the same, is now a mute [sic] point. If these were mere local metaphors they are by now literally inscribed with a universalistic referent. The reason for this, in part, is that successive generations of liberal thinkers have endeavored to give more global and concrete expression to this original imaginary, while simultaneously their compatriotsadventurers, traders, evangelicals, generals, and even occasionally the professed liberal theorist himselfsucceeded in marking more and more of the globe in the color associated with the Union Jack. In the empire, one might say, liberalism had found the concrete place of its dreams (Mehta, 3637).

Westernor perhaps even more specically, Britishexceptionalism became abstract universalism through the institutional vehicle of empire. But this does not really resolve the fundamental issue; it accounts (adequately or otherwise) for the universalization of liberal discourse, but still not for its original inclination toward an aggressive mode of abstract thinking. The problem is far from being just Mehtas. Rather, it inheres deeply in conventional narratives of Western civilization, where the primal inclination to abstraction might be as easily celebrated as condemned. Anthony Pagden has reiterated the story of the Western linkage of empire and universality in his recent popular survey of European expansion from Greece to the present, Peoples and Empires. And where else should he begin his panorama but with Alexander the Greats ambitions to build a world empire through which he might act as the conciliator and arbitrator of the universe and thus unite East and West, Asia and Europe, Hellene and barbarian, effacing an old enmity apparently lodged in the primordial collective unconscious of the West given its origins . . . in the myth of the rape of Europaan Asian princess abducted to western shoresand in the story of the Trojan Wara struggle over a western woman abducted to eastern shores (Pagden, 13). From Alexander, it is more or less a straight shot to Rome, which added both new possibilities for prosperity and, perhaps more importantly, a universal system of codied law. From Caracallas declaration of universal citizenship within the Roman world in 212 AD it was but a brief step to declaring that Rome was the common homeland of the entire world, and an even shorter step to declaring that those who were not citizens, and showed no desire to become citizens, should, if only in their own long-term interests, be obliged to do so (Pagden, 31). In this narrative, the immanent aggression Mehta sees in liberalism would really stand in metonymic subordination to a more general tendency toward aggressively universalistic abstraction in the Western tradition. With Constantines conversion in 312 AD, a nal ingredient was added to this Western striving for imperial universality as a pluralistic polytheistic pagan society transformed into a monotheistic Christian one (Pagden, 36). Of course, with the decline of Rome and the rise of Islam, the two world-conquering monotheisms would have to duke it out for universal supremacy for a millennium or so, until the West was reawoken in the period of early modernity gradually to encompass the globe with its thirst for
1

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

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power and its mission of Christian salvation, whether by force (Sepulveda) or persuasion (Las Casas). Pagdens own widely read scholarship has served to register the signicance of a major historical disjuncture separating the territorial logic of the Iberian empires from the new empires of trade that celebrated not the older aspiration to universal empire but rather the civilizing and humanizing power of commerce (Pagden, 86).2 At the core of this new model of empire was the belief that commerce and successful capital accumulation can take place only in free societies (Pagden, 89). Yet, by the end of Peoples and Empires, slavery and the deepening racism of Britains second empire have effectively converted this very ideology of commercial freedom into a new incarnation of the aspiration to universal empire. The vision of empire as the expansion of civilization, of the benevolent rule of the more gifted and more able . . . [was] the one aspect of the Roman world that the modern imperialist could adopt with pride (Pagden, 98). The conclusion Pagden arrives at in his nal chapter is thus the inevitable outcome of a narrative that began back with Alexander and Caracalla: namely, that the modern heirs of Alexander tend to assume that a rule of law that respects individual rights and liberal democratic government (as practiced in the United States) is a universal, and not, as it most surely is, the creation of GrecoRoman Christendom, and that the modern law of nations embodied institutionally in the United Nations is merely a more modern, glossier version of the Western will to universality embodied by Caracallas vision of a universal civitas (Pagden, 168 69). In other words, when the British wrapped themselves in togas, it was not solely a historical appropriation serving either interpretive or legitimating functions but more fundamentally the acknowledgment of a real and constitutive historical liation. We are left with a vague sense that Western universalismthe abstraction that is the true object of Mehtas critiqueis at root a civilizational affair, part of the Wests constitutive cultural legacy. Not all historians would go along with Pagdens subordination of the historical specicity of the early-modern conception of an empire of trade to the overarching continuity of his civilizational narrative. In The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, David Armitage has turned his attention to the crucial moment of the emergence of a new imperial imagination during Britains rst empire, sidelining both liberalism and universalistic abstraction entirely in his examination of the origins of a peculiarly British conception of empire. Armitage carefully disaggregates the mideighteenth-century self-identication of the British Empire as Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free (Armitage, 8) to show how each of these elements was the outcome of specic political debates that occurred within the context of a negotiation of the relationships between the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the crucial era of early-modern state-formation of the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. Armitage shows successively how each of the key discourses that organized these debates fell short of adequately grounding the conception of the British Empire that emerged at the end of his period of study: imperium fails to provide a model of assimilation; Protestantisms hostility to Catholic universalism led English authors generally to eschew arguments from grace; and classical republicanism struggled with the classical contradiction, posited by Sallust and reinforced by Machiavelli, between liberty and empire. Armitage is clearly trying to offer a genealogy of the conception
2 Compare Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500 to c. 1850 (New Haven, CT, 1995).

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of a British Empire that emphasizes the contingency of its emergence upon a conjunctural conguration of discourse and political interest rather than on some underlying motive-agency such as the Protestant belief in a doctrine of grace. Thus the republican (n.b., not liberal) effort to reconcile liberty and empire only nds a way forward once both these terms come to be grounded in commerce as the modern safeguard of the salus publica. In the end, it was only by taking cognizance of the nondiscursive fact of the expanding trade linking the interests of the three kingdoms and their transatlantic colonies that it became possible to integrate the different discursive elements of these debates into a coherent notion of a British Empire. By grounding empire in this new form of expansion, a specically British maritime empire (wherein liberty, a concept still drawn from an enduring republicanism, both encourages and is encouraged by commercial activity) could avoid the dangers of territorial empires (wherein the weight of imperial expansion must inevitably crush civic life). Political economy thus came to serve not just as a technical language of administration but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, as a language of political and constitutional argument through which could be imagined a new form of polity, in which colonies and metropole were linked by a common set of interests (Armitage, 166). For Armitage, then, there is no deep logic to that peculiarly British reconciliation of liberty and empireit was rather an ideology formed out of a peculiar discursive nexus in which liberalism would seem to have had no constitutive role at all. Armitage is implying that the peculiar British paradox of a freedom-loving empire had already arisen in British thought as a conjunctural curiosity even before liberalism had achieved any real political signicance. That, of course, might not really change anything for an analysis of liberalisms heyday in the nineteenth centurythough we might well imagine that a historian as committed to contingency as Armitage seems to be would be nonplussed by the abstract logic of Mehtas argument. Yet there is also reason to think that a form of liberalism was playing a crucial role in Britain much earlier than Armitage suggests. Steve Pincus seems to agree with Armitage that the emergence of the British conception of an empire of liberty is better understood in terms of an ideological claim rather than as a form of identity.3 In contrast to Armitage, however, he has argued compellingly for the rise of a specically liberal form of ideology in the 1650s, one that drew on the republican language of liberty and public weal to make political-economic arguments that were utterly incompatible in their core postulates and ultimate social aims with the neo-Roman theory of Machiavelli. Most defenders of the Commonwealth in the 1650s did not share the hostility of Harrington and Milton to commercial societya hostility grounded in the republican claim that the only proper basis of political power lay in landed wealth. Instead, they saw in the massive expansion of English trade, domestic and foreign, in the early modern period the basis for a new theory that valued human choice [and] the human capacity to produce wealth as the most powerful forces that could be harnessed and deployed to underpin both the public good and the strength of a newly emerging state.4 By the 1680s, this radical Whig espousal of human labor as a

3 For a summary of approaches to the study of the formation of a British imperial identity (in contrast to the formation of ideological claims about British imperial identity), see Jack P. Greene, Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 208 30. 4 Steve Pincus, Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society

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potentially innite source of wealth underpinned the embrace of the Glorious Revolution and the nancial revolution with which it is associated. In contrast, it was Jacobites and Tories who took over the republican theory of political economy, positing that land was the source of all real wealth, that wealth itself was consequently nite by its very nature, and that the new Bank of England could serve only to reinforce the corruptive inuence of commercial society. The logical sequelae of these two different visions of political economy for the theory and practice of trade were, according to Pincus, fundamentally different. The Tory argument, which through the power and inuence of Sir Josiah Childe dominated the policies of the East India Company, implied that trade was a zero-sum game in which one nation could only benet at the expense of another by accruing more of the earths nite product for itself. A central aim of overseas policy would necessarily be territorial acquisition. The radical Whig argument, in contrast, saw trade as an encouragement to commercial society and hence wealth creating and eschewed territorial ambition in favor of peaceful exchange. As a result, this early liberalism was profoundly critical of the policies of the East India Company. Indeed, radical Whigs sought (and very nearly attained) its abolition in the 1690s, and they supported the endeavors of the interlopers who sought to trade in India outside of the Company framework.5 The implications of Pincuss argument for the relationship between liberalism and empire are profound in at least two key ways that I think warrant emphasis. First of all, we have to recognize that it was in fact early-modern liberalism itself that developed an elaborate critique of both territorial imperial expansion and the activities of the East India Company. From this perspective, the idiom of moral outrage expressed by Burke was surely drawn from the anti-Company attacks of Lockean liberals (as much, perhaps, as his antibourgeois rhetoric and his faith in the noble ancient landed interest were grounded in the Tory tradition).6 Pagden cites Richard Price (the radical liberal against whom Burke would later fulminate at such length in his Reections on the Revolution in France) condemning in 1776 the East India Companys conquest, plunder, depopulation, and ruination of millions of innocent peoples by the most infamous oppression and rapacity (Pagden, 95). In the same year, Adam Smith argued that the Companys interests qua company and its interests qua sovereign were incommensurable and that if a company could not pursue trade in the East Indies without a monopoly, it ought not to trade there at all. Viewing the disastrous militarization of the English and French mercantile presences in India as undertaken under the pretence of securing their persons and property from violence at the hands of what was in reality a mild and gentle people, he was clearly drawn to the vision of a free trade in the East Indies carried on by private merchants to the benet of both parties.7 It was only after the fact of the East India Companys acquisition of
and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth, American Historical Review 103 (June 1998): 70536, at 707, 708, 716. 5 Steve Pincus develops these arguments in greater depth in his forthcoming book, The First Modern Revolution, part of which he has kindly allowed me to read in manuscript form. 6 Edmund Burke, Reections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, 1987), 34, 43, 96. I am also indebted to Spencer Leonard, and to his (unpublished) paper, Interest, Ideology, and Retroactive Agencies: Formation of Imperial Intent toward India in the Metropole, 17581765. 7 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannon (Chicago, 1976), 2:14958, 254, 34344. See also on the conceptual problems posed by global commerce and empire for the early economists, Emma Rothschild, Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces, Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004): 325.

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sovereignty that he considered the only possibility for such a mutually benecial free trade to lie in an intervention by the British government to establish the crucial distinction between commercial and governmental functions. It is certainly true, as Sudipta Sen has highlighted, that Smiths mode of argument would ultimately serve to help transform the Company states interventions in Indian society into a form of moral agency, for it was only through political intervention that the ground for a free movement of goods in India could be cleared.8 This in turn would allow Smithian political economy to be integrated into the patriotic moral rhetoric that linked liberty and dominion as elements of Georgean state formation (including in the colonial instantiation of that process, the Company state).9 Yet this still leaves an important qualication: Smiths argument only practically entails a liberal imperialism once sovereignty over India has been acquired. In other words, it implies a mode of rule in domains already acquired under morally, politically, and economically unsavory conditions, nevertheless maintaining a principled stance against imperial expansion as such. Until the end of the eighteenth century, liberalism would appear to have remained hostile to the kind of territorial expansionism pursued in Indiaa historical periodization that the existing literature generally offers us little help in explaining. If liberalism had a logically immanent propensity for imperial aggression in this earlier period, it was surely toward the nonagricultural native peoples of North America, who had failed to appropriate land through labor. Native Americans would not appear to fare much better in Burkes hands, however, for it is precisely in contrast to American gangs of savages that he sought to establish the political rights of Indians (Mehta, 186). The second implication of Pincuss argument is perhaps the more fundamental. Pincus is quite explicit in connecting the emergence of liberalism not merely to the strictly contingent illocutionary dimensions of political debate and the claustrophobic horizons of inherited political discourses from which Armitage proceeds but also to liberals political experiences, and the realities of their daily social and economic engagements.10 In other words, the abstractness of the categories of liberal thought emerges not in spite of an array of concrete relationships and institutions (parentage, gender, etc.) on which they in reality depend but rather in some kind of constitutive relationship to the new social, economic, and political practices of the rst truly selfconscious commercial society.11 The logical implication would be that the abstraction that characterizes liberalisms basic mode of thought is not simply a misleading disavowal of the secretly constitutive role of particular concrete institutions, and therefore it cannot simply be unmasked through disaggregative gestures toward paternal power or pedagogical discipline. Rather, that abstraction must have emerged in reective response to (as much as through political advocacy of) a real abstract logic inherent in the forms of practice characteristic of this new commercial society. It was surely just such a form of practical abstraction that Smith elaborated so clearly with the juxtaposition of, on the one hand, concrete human relationships of benevolence, sympathy, and love, and, on the other hand, the exchange of labor that binds individ8 Sudipta Sen, Liberal Government and Illiberal Trade: The Political Economy of Responsible Government in Early British India, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 16601840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, 2004), 13654. 9 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, 2002). 10 Pincus, Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism, 712. 11 Ibid., 707.

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uals in relations of objective social interdependence (regardless of sentiment, personal familiarity, or even bare physical encounter) that can be grasped through the (abstract) categories of political economy.12 Pincus effectively writes against the attempts of the past several decades to dissolve the novelty of Lockes arguments into the contingencies of the political moment in which he wrote and the Western intellectual tradition from which he drew. He grounds the irreducible modernity of the liberal vision not in cultural particularity, but in a new form of social organization whose Westernness was neither primordial nor constitutive.13

III
Mehtas theoretical juxtaposition of liberal and Burkean positions is surely legitimate at a certain level of abstraction, and it works well when applied to the unapologetic brutality and radically optimistic energy of James Mills utilitarian conception of rationality. It does, however, present historians with something of a challenge when they try to think historically about liberalism as a Victorian ideological formation. In his understanding of the role of the Mills in India, for instance, Mehta implicitly privileges Eric Stokess masterpiece, The English Utilitarians and India, over more recent work by Lynn Zastoupil. This is not coincidental, as Stokes not only identied the same sharp juxtaposition of theoretical abstraction and Burkean historicism in the approaches of different colonial policy makers, but he was also interested in seeing how utilitarian ideas were put into actiontested out, as it werein the subcontinental laboratory.14 This, of course, ts well with Mehtas own sense of liberalism as operating from a fundamental erasure of the landscape of colonial lifeworlds. But Mehtas sidelining of the implications of Zastoupils work effectively allows him to avoid confronting some of the difculties of his reading of the younger Mill that are posed at a specically historical level. For Zastoupil has argued that Mills engagement with India transformed his earlier, broadly Benthamite approach to the colonial context into one deeply shaped by precisely the kind of conservative, Burkean tradition that we might call romantic historicism. His defense of East India Company rule against the move to abolish it in favor of direct metropolitan control in 1858, for example, took the form of an argument that the apparently baroque irrationality of its institutional structure, though lacking theoretical recommendations to render it acceptable, had ultimately (after the initial abuses of its mercantilist origins) proved a progressive agent of government precisely because it grew up of itself, not from preconceived design, but by successive expedients, and by the adaptation of machinery originally created for a different purpose. Rather than leaping to action on the basis of abstract theoretical criteria, in other words, the rulers of foreign countries needed gradually to acquaint themselves with the laws, customs, [and] social relations of their subjects precisely because of the opacity of their unfamiliar social and psychological environments.15

Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:18. A convenient summary of such arguments is to be found in James Tully, The Possessive Individualism Thesis: A Reconsideration in the Light of Recent Scholarship, in Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C. B. Macpherson, ed. Joseph H. Carens (Albany, NY, 1993), 1944. 14 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi, 1989). 15 Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, CA, 1994), 17680.
12 13

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In Englands Disgrace? an exhaustive reading of Mills lifelong engagement with Irish issues, Bruce Kinzer traces broadly the same transition in thought that Zastoupil described in Mills thoughts on India. In his earliest writings on Ireland from the 1820s, Mill saw its poverty and oppression through the lens of a classically Benthamite critique of aristocracy (Kinzer, 1819). In other words, Irelands problems were just an exacerbated version of the problems in England, whose aristocracy and established church were the object of the same kind of vehement critique from the standpoint of utilitarian rationality that would be directed at Indian society (Kinzer, 27 28). Kinzers reading could in certain respects be seen to reinforce the thesis of immanent aggression in liberal thought: James Mills discussions of Irish issues barely spoke of Ireland at all, subsuming the particular under the general so completely as to make it almost invisible (Kinzer, 10); the younger Mill rejected any notion of a repeal of the Act of Union, supported by his father, on the moral grounds that English misgovernment had failed to prepare Ireland for a responsible self-rule (Kinzer, 33 34); and even as late as 1848 (well after his engagement with romanticism) he wrote of the Famine as an unparalleled opportunitya terrible calamity that had quelled all active opposition to our government so that Ireland was once more a tabula rasa, on which we might have inscribed what we pleased (Kinzer, 4748). Like Zastoupil, however, Kinzer also shows how John Stuart Mills interest in Ireland gradually shifted, beginning with an increasing interest in the moral and material conditions of the Irish peasantry that was largely absent from his early writings (Kinzer, 28, 4548). Mill increasingly advocated forms of peasant proprietorship as leading to the transformation of an indolent, ignorant, and uneconomical cottiertenantry into an industrious, prudent, and thrifty peasantry (Kinzer, 6064). In this, however, Mill was moving against the grain of more narrow arguments regarding Irish agricultural reform in mid-century English liberalism, which sought fundamentally to make Ireland more like England by reinforcing forms of contract against customary claims embodied most importantly in the Ulster tenant right (Kinzer, 90 95). Mill would increasingly shy away from advocating the authoritarian exercise of state power in Ireland to leap directly to the liberal values he unquestionably continued to espouse, siding with Gladstones moderate liberalism over J. E. Cairness strident espousal of secularism in the Irish university controversy. Mill espoused in his later writings a deeper commitment to adapting legislation to the specic circumstances in which it was to act, increasingly defending both peasant proprietorship and customary tenurial rights from the more conventional criticisms drawn from classical liberalism and political economy. In the words of Philip Bull, Mill thus contributed substantially to a renewed assertion in Ireland of instinctive and inherited beliefs about land occupancy (cited in Kinzer, 213). As Kinzer has underlined, Mills most trenchant statements of liberal condence in On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government were written at the moment of his greatest distance from Irish affairs (Kinzer, 104). It remains a puzzle to be sorted out, however, how the axiomatic hostility to custom that Mill expressed in On Liberty ts with his own contemporary moves toward the embrace of custom as a form of colonial governance in India. Mills arguments are surprisingly congruent in their basic formal structure with those of Victorian conservatives like Sir Henry Maine, who similarly matched his espousal of liberal individuality (contract) with his seminal recognition that political economys awed attempt to generalize to the whole world from a part of it led it to underrate the great body of custom and inherited idea manifest in Indian social institutionsinstitutions that were equally

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natural, equally respectable, equally interesting, equally worthy of scientic observation as those of modern Europe.16 And just as one might expect, this ambivalence was not conned to the great political theorists of the Victorian era. Eugenio Biaginis short overview, Gladstone, argues that Gladstones turn to liberalism always remained at heart a conservative radicalism aimed at renewing the stability of social, religious, and political traditions through reform (Biagini, 7172). Even his efforts at franchise reform partook of this overall drive for national moral restoration, juxtaposing the respectability and rectitude of artisans and working men to both the landed gentry, who no longer exercised their privileges with Peelite self-denial, and the middle classes, who were unt to discharge their electoral duty on behalf of the rest of the country (Biagini, 43, 5758). He thus not only portrays the Grand Old Man of nineteenth-century liberalism as deeply motivated throughout his career by the faith of a providentialist High Church man but also portrays his thought and policy as fundamentally grounded in beliefs about the organicism of the state, the importance of historical specicity, and a common national past, a historicist approach to constitutional conservation through reform, a restorative conservatism, and even (despite his assertive conception of Christendom) a profound sense of responsibility for the rights of the colonized, all inspired by the writings of Burke (Biagini, 1015). One might be tempted to see such equivocations merely as forms of gradualism that is to say, an argument that the full entry into political responsibility is necessarily preceded by a period of parental or political tutelage (Mehta, 195200). But Mill was surely arguing that the path to political responsibility in Ireland could travel only through passages demarcated by the logic of Irish agricultural society. If that is the case, then Mills liberal gradualism comes to look a lot like Burkes conservative sensibility, or, for that matter, like Sir Thomas Munros sense that the British role in India was to strengthen an Indian constituency of individuals already forming a nascent civil society that had begun to emerge from an indigenous process of fragmentation of ascriptive communal social bonds.17 Indeed, David Cannadines recent essay, Ornamentalism, serves precisely to remind us of a broad-based formal recapitulation of Burkean conservatism in the high colonial periodeven if it eschews any serious effort to explain the periodicity of this mode of imperial imagination. Cannadine himself is primarily concerned to show how the British Empire of the high-imperial period operated in terms of interpretive and institutional analogies between British class-formations (by which he means structures of status and deference rather than objective relationships to the means of production) and forms of aristocracy and privilege in its colonies (both white and nonwhite). One direct implication of this argument would be that liberalism underwent a major retreat in the imperial ideologies of this period. Surely James Fitzjames Stephenss rejection of the universality of liberal principles through a reassertion of the authoritarian impulses of utilitarianism is merely the converse of the younger Mills retreat from the aggressive condence of his fathers judgments to a more cautious, protosocial-scientic historicism. Both point toward a deepening culturalist identication of liberalism with Westernness beginning in the later nineteenth century.
16 Sir Henry Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West (New York, 1880), 183, 224, 233. See also George Feaver, From Status to Contract: A Biography of Sir Henry Maine, 18221888 (London, 1969), esp. 91106, 11922; Zastoupil, Mill and India, 18391. 17 See Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi, 1989).

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I am certainly not suggesting that the way to grasp the historical tendency of liberal abstraction and Burkean romantic historicism to converge partially beginning around the mid-nineteenth century is through a laundry list of conceptual ambiguities. It is in the end the clarity of Mehtas theoretical juxtaposition that is the most appealing aspect of his approachsomething that distinguishes the rigor of his analysis from the more conventionally biographical mode of Kinzers work. But it is only by extending the analysis to include the sociohistorical constitution of liberal ideology that we might reconcile Mehtas insights into the theoretical logic of nineteenth-century liberal attitudes toward empire with Kinzers insights into its attempts to engage with romantic historicism. In order to understand this antinomy of liberal abstraction and conservative contextualism in a way that does not constantly ght against, but rather might help elucidate, the complexities of the ideological formation that was nineteenth-century liberalism, it is necessary to go beyond the reication of abstract thought and concrete lifeworld to think about how both terms of this antinomy were socially and historically produced in relation to each other. Such a project would necessarily have to begin by locating both these tendencies within a more complex understanding of the historical dynamics of colonialism, balancing attention to the modernizing or civilizing project with a correlative emphasis on the contradictory, antimodernizing dimensions of colonial rule: the marginalization of regions like South Asia from their relative centrality within the worlds manufacturing economy during the precolonial era, the formation of Indias traditional peasant society through the settling of mobile populations and the destruction of the precolonial indigenous manufacturing sector, and the rigidication of traditional forms of hierarchy and the institutional afrmation of scriptural religious authority.18 Seen from this perspective, Mehtas oversimplication of the attitude of the liberal tradition toward empire would seem to stem from a primary reduction of empire itself to the single dimension of the pedagogical project of modernization or civilization.

IV
Catherine Halls recent study of abolitionist Baptist missionaries, Civilising Subjects, sets out to braid narratives of the refashioning of political and social identities in Jamaica and Birmingham in a way that resituates both locations (colony and metropole) within a single analytical eld. Halls narrative rst traces the aspirations and implications of radical evangelical liberalism in which universal emancipation through a baptismal purgation of the burden of the past (slavery and ignorance) would produce a society of free petty producers modeling their new life on the English middle class.
18 Some important contributions on these issues include Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge, 1981); C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge History of India, ed. Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards (Cambridge, 1988), 2.1; Susan Bayly, Castle, Society, and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, The New Cambridge History of India, ed. Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards (Cambridge, 1999), 4.3; Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethno-History of an Indian Kingdom, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998); Rajat Kanta Ray, Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 17651818, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 50829; David Washbrook, India, 18181860: The Two Faces of Colonialism, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 395421.

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She then proceeds to show the subsequent declension of this discourse in the face of the new realities of postemancipation Jamaican society, realities that included both the resurgence of African traditions in a distinctive peasant culture that dened the postemancipation African-Jamaican way of life and the correlative unwillingness of many black Jamaicans to remain humbly subservient in perpetuity to the white missionarys exemplary function as a performer of middle-class domestic and social virtues (Hall, 13738, 198). As a result, the missionaries were increasingly led to juxtapose their own (British) manly individuality to the effeminized laziness and mischievousness of the ex-slavesa process that helped reconstitute a British manly citizenship that ultimately fed into the new franchise inaugurated by the Reform Bill of 1867. Reinforcing a growing body of scholarship that has shown a hardening of racial attitudes from around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hall argues that this shift also produced, even within missionary discourse, an increasing naturalization and essentialization of the differences between colonizer and colonized as innate characteristics of the races (in sharp contrast to the earlier missionary critique of circumstantial disadvantages belying the reality of a universal brotherhood of man).19 Hall has certainly produced an engaging, archivally rich narrative. Yet her work ultimately falls short of its stated aim to examine the constitution of raced and gendered forms of colonial and metropolitan subjectivity. While she dutifully cites the work of Thomas Holt, she effectively marginalizes his most important insights. For Holt, transformations in Jamaican racial ideologies were inseparably connected to the dynamics of capitalist society, which set in motion two contradictory movements: while the economic [conception of liberal freedom] demanded greater scope for individual expression, both the necessity that the freed slave be available for wage labor and the impossibility of granting full rights of citizenship to freed slaves without threatening an economic system based on inequality meant that political exigency required greater constraint on those same individuals.20 In contrast to this dynamic social analysis, Hall provides us with a sensitive examination of the shifting coordinates and complexities of the subject-positions of historical agentsthat is to say, how they were contingently positioned as white or black, civilized or savage, masculine or feminine, in relation to other historical subjects. But the basic categories that structure the possibilities of such subject positionality are divorced from the structural dynamics of social context and simply assumed as given. Neither the (Western?) discourse of labor shared by missionaries and planters nor the African traditions that reemerged from latency among the emancipated appear, in the culturalist terms of Halls account, to have been constituted in the specically imperial context that is the subject of her study; rather, they seem to have emerged from what can only be understood by default as a residual yet ultimately foundational local historicity. Moreover, her use of key terms like gendered and racedunexceptionable in themselves as descriptive analytics of subject positionalitypresumes the availability
19 Also on Jamaica, see Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 18321938, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, ed. Rebecca J. Scott, Sidney W. Mintz, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Baltimore, 1992). For a discussion that links developments in Indian racial discourse with events in Jamaica, see Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India, ed. Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards (Cambridge, 1995), 3.4. And for a brief discussion of Africa, see T. C. McCaskie, Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century, in Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 3:66589. 20 Holt, Problem of Freedom, 6.

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of these discursive categories as markers of difference rather than explaining the potency and signicance of their role in the (inter-)subjective lives of people on both sides of the colonial divide. If she had been content merely to show the ascendance of a hyperracialized identity in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the term raced, denoting an ideological categorization new to that period, might carry more explanatory power. But since she is broadly in accord with Mehta in seeking to unveil the coevality of liberal universalism and racial consciousness, we are left without a clue as to whence might have come the fundamental salience of race as a category constitutive of identity across the divide of liberal and postliberal missionary discourses. And whereas Mehta is able to locate the motivation of liberalisms discriminatory logic in the disjuncture between abstraction and unfamiliar, concrete lifeworlds, Hall can only gesture toward the historically unmotivated, prejudicial category of race as the historical means to resolve the contradictions between liberalism and colonial rule (Hall, 203). It is true that she takes great care to argue that racial representation (including the subject positions constituted thereby) is not a closed system but rather operated in relation with historical events, playing a part in the constitution of meaning in those events, but also being reconstituted in those moments (Hall, 276). This is an unexceptionable formulation, as far as it goes, of how objective circumstances and subjective orientation are mutually mediating. Yet the movement of this mediation begins by taking a structure of representation as given and then showing how it was subsequently impacted by performative contradictions. Since race enters the analysis already constituted, subject positions can only really be recongured and reoriented within the structuring logic it provides, while the sociohistorical constitution of the structure itself (assuming that it is just one structure that perdured through the transition she recounts) is never analytically approached. It is not so surprising, then, that her language comes close to implying at times that missionary radicalism and planter racism were just minor variations on the same fundamental racism (Hall, 435 36). Just about everyone working on British imperial history in the American academy at this point seems to accept Halls contention that British and Western identities were, as discursively produced forms of subject position, fundamentally marked by instability and ux. Indeed, the approach on which the self-declared new imperial history has staked its claim to newness has been a sharper focus on the specically cultural dimensions of empire, on conjunctural contingency and performative ambivalence, and on the mutually constitutive effects of the connections linking metropole and colony. The Island Race, a collection of essays by Kathleen Wilson (one of the most prominent advocates of the new imperial history), sets out to decenter the historical constitution of eighteenth-century English identity with a deliberate focus on Englands embeddedness within imperial relationships. Proceeding from a postcolonialist and poststructuralist emphasis on the productive power of difference, her aim is to show how the solitary and singular insularity of the national subject of British history was always engaged in a mutually constitutive relationship with its colonial others and was always internally fractured.21 As a historical process, Wilson proposes, identity is tentative, multiple and contingent, and its modalities change over time (3). From Wilsons standpoint, it is inadequate merely to say that England mastered the seas and ruled an empire, for England itself came into being through
21 On the centrality of difference to the new imperial history, see especially Wilsons introduction to Wilson, A New Imperial History, 126.

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its mastery of the seas and rule of its empire, the product of its own potent and irreducible ties to a larger world, and remained in continuous conceptual ux in response to changes in the dynamics and structure of that wider imperial context. National identity . . . provided neither a stable and continuous frame of reference nor a full and nal recognition (Wilson, 2034). Britain is not, then, a real historical subject perduring through time, but rather a discursive effect produced within a decentered network of imperial institutions of commodity exchange, communication, exploration, travel, and so on that served to link metropole and colony systemically as interconnected analytical elds (Wilson, 16).22 Englands essentialist self-conception could thus only be sustained through a profound effort of denial. In fact, it was at the precise moment when England was less an island than ever before that English people were most eager to stress the ways in which their island was unique, culturally as well as topographically (Wilson, 5). With her emphasis on the reconstitution of England itself as a category of both national identity and civilizational mission, Wilson shares with Hall the project of intimating an approach to historical processes of subject constitution. But her ability to pursue this agenda is fundamentally compromised by the framework of her analysis, which remains strictly conned to the investigation of subject positionality and the discursive production of contradiction, inversion, and ambivalence in practices of subjective identication. Her mode of discourse analysis certainly extends beyond the merely linguistic, putting sharp emphasis on the importance of practices. But, on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that she interprets practices almost exclusively as instances of the performance of (discursive) categories of subjective identity. It is thus performativity that serves as the crucial site for the production of the kind of symptomatic ambivalences that she uses to deconstruct essentialist conceptions of English nationhood (Wilson, 151). Practice, in other words, produces feedback effects that reconstitute and rearrange the positionality of subjects within the representational order; but, as with Hall, the representational order always takes precedence in the analytical sequence, and the fundamental representational matrices that organize identity (race, gender, class, etc.) are themselves never disturbed. Wilsons approach in the end falls short of Foucaults more stringent analysis of the constitutive effectivity of practices in the production of forms of discourse, leading her into a weaker, almost intentionalist form of nominalism according to which the kinds of difference encoded in categories like race and gender are less a veriable descriptive category than a highly mobile signier for power relations that serves not . . . to describe a social reality but to assist in its construction (Wilson, 93).23 Discursive categories can thus be wielded by the guardians of order or reform to x or refashion the expectations and values of men and women alike, without Wilson offering any serious explanation of those categories general persuasiveness or plausibility (Wilson, 93).24 On the one hand, then, Wilsons sophisticated emphasis on the complexities of discursive processes leaves surprisingly underexamined the assumption of utilitarian social interests: one is left to guess whether what lurks behind the performance

22 For a more general discussion of the rise of the concept of networks in recent historiography on the eighteenth-century British empire, see Natasha Glaisyer, Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire, Historical Journal 47 (June 2004): 45176. 23 Foucaults return to the category of practice after his earlier structuralism is most pronounced and powerful in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977). 24 Emphasis added.

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of categories of identity is in the end anything more than the rather conventional notion of a self-interested (individual or collective) bearer of instrumental reason. On the other hand, meanwhile, the eighteenth-century technologies of the self that Wilson uses to elucidate the performative dimensions of identity also required class, gender, sexual, and national identications to mark the distinctiveness of this performed self (2). Yet now we are back to Hall: what explains the salience, the prioritization, and the specic mode of apprehension of these particular markers of difference? In the end, then, Wilsons approach matches its inattention to the instrumentalism at the heart of its model of subjectivity with a correlative inattention to those very categories of difference that are at the heart of her analytic apparatus and that form the most basic coordinates of the matrices of eighteenth-century imperial identity formation. Once again, as with both Hall and Mehta, sociohistorical context enters the analysis too late, as an external variable acting on representational orders that are simply posited as given. It is precisely this gap that E. M. Collingham has attempted to supplement through her invocation of Norbert Elias in her recent monograph, Imperial Bodies. Collinghams text ts broadly within the Foucauldian investigation of how particular discursive regimes serve to dene and control bodies, and the result is a rich and inventive archival history of how British bodily practices operated both as a site of internal social control and as an instrument of authoritya signier of social prestigewithin a specically Anglo-Indian ruling strategy (Collingham, 53). But Collingham also seeks to supplement this emphasis on the effectivity of discourses of the body with an analysis of what Elias would call the sociogenesis of bodily practices. The behaviour of individuals takes place within a structure which is created by the actions of individuals but which has implications and effects which are greater than those individual acts. Elias argues that these blind structures have a dynamic of their own (Collingham, 5). She thus points toward social dynamics that originate not in the functionalistic domain of strategies of control but in transformations in the sociohistorical context that constituted the bodily experience of the British in India. So in dealing with the de-Indianization of the British body in early nineteenth-century India and its reconstitution in accord with a more individuated, bourgeois model of subjectivity, Collingham emphasizes not only increased communication with Britain but also changes in the structure of Anglo-Indian society itself stemming from the consolidation of British power and the correlative growth in density of the British presence (6365, 185). Collinghams invocation of Eliass theory seems often only vaguely elaborated, and in the end it primarily serves only to lay a general groundwork for subsequent discussions that focus primarily on the Anglo-Indian body as a category of discourse (Collingham, 79). Furthermore, while she acknowledges that on rst reading, Foucault and Elias appear to be incompatible, there is little in her identication of a mere common object of study (the body as the locus of power struggles) to reassure us that their approaches are in fact theoretically commensurable (Collingham, 6). Yet the very fact that she invokes a specically social (rather than discursive) theory of the constitution of subjective experience seems to press at the limits of the discourse-centered analyses of Hall and Wilson. Moreover, in contrast to Mehta, Collingham sets out to ground the constitution of an individuated AngloIndian subjectivity in the South Asian context itself, afrming both its similarity to its metropolitan model and the colonial difference that resulted from the displacement of such individuation into a form of other-directed social prestige. As Collingham herself notes, it is the sociogenetic dimension of her approach that could (at least in

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principle) allow her to grasp transformations in British bodily practices in their relationship with contemporary transformations in Indian bodily practices (64). One might be tempted, following C. A. Baylys approach in his magisterial synthesis The Birth of the Modern World, to compensate for the narrowness of the focus on representations by multiplying the planes of analysis. For Bayly, the ideological domain of religious and national consciousness becomes just one of several major prime movers of the dynamic tendency toward uniformity in the modern world, complemented by the development of a capitalist economy, modern state formation, and the modern public sphere (Bayly, 47886). Like the new imperial historians, Bayly draws on the concept of networks to show how decentered global developments helped to constitute the West as the dominant player on the global stage. Yet in some ways Bayly is more committed to challenging narratives of Western exceptionalism than are practitioners of historical deconstruction like Wilson: he consistently tries to make connections between tendencies and events in the West and the non-West to highlight how tight the linkages that bound together an increasingly networked world were becoming in the course of the last three centuries. But what is really striking in his work, from the perspective of this essay, is that in the face of all his efforts to demonstrate the broad parallels between different locations within global networks at the level of state formation, economic transformation, identity formation, the emergence of public spheres, and the renewal of religious discourses, liberalism alone retains its status as an undisputed moment of Western exceptionalism whose development he traces by gesturing to a narrowly intellectual genealogy (Bayly, 290 93). Liberalism is hardly an insignicant exception, articulating as it has the ethical categories (property, freedom, rights, and equality before the law) of one major trajectory of modern political and economic discourseethical categories that, in the end, not even Mehta is willing to give up. Yet this reassertion of Western exceptionalism must inevitably be the conclusion of an approach that, even as it works hard to show the mutual impact of economic, political, ideological, and informational networks, proceeds from a primary reication of those networks as fundamentally distinct causal domains. That is to say, if the analytical framework within which one locates the emergence of liberal discourse is identied from the beginning as a distinct ideological domain (intellectual history), then the indisputable absence of any major parallel development anywhere else renders liberalism a cultural peculiarity of Western civilization. To say more would require that the emergence of liberalism be treated in quite different termsterms that cannot be contained within the narrower, Skinnerian model of intellectual history that has achieved such prominence in the British academy. It would have meant treating the development of an intellectual form as part and parcel of wider sociohistorical processesand correlatively recognizing that both the modernity and the transmissibility of the practices born of those processes render their ethnicization as Western or British fundamentally problematic. All Bayly can do to soften the blow of the recognition of this ultimate horizon to the plausibility of his parallelisms is to add hastily that liberalism was in fact quickly taken up in the non-West by intellectuals like Rammohun Roy, and so it soon ceased to be a form of exceptionalism (Bayly, 29394). At a descriptive level, Bayly is quite right. But that still leaves open the larger question of why it was taken up by non-Westerners if its intrinsic coherence was grounded in a parochial intellectual tradition. Baylys answer is that the rapid expansion of the international market and of European empires required people across the world to adapt these new intellectual tools for their own

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use (290). But that word required can be read in two quite different ways. On the one hand, Bayly can be understood to be endorsing Mehtas argument that, if liberalism emerged from a peculiarity of the Western intellect, it achieved universality through colonial imposition. That would leave us once again to wonder if liberal abstraction is, in the end, just the Wests original sin. On the other hand, Bayly might be read as impugning his own schematic separation of causal domains, suggesting that ideological, political, and economic developments must be understood as intrinsically connected from the beginning. No one, to the best of my knowledge, is disputing that liberalism did in fact nd its earliest articulation in the West. However, much rides on how we interpret the signicance of this origination. As a product of a civilizational impulse, liberalism is irreducibly consigned to cultural particularity. The only way to grasp the global availability of its categories is, then, through the pedagogical imposition of a new cultural normthough it remains to be shown how this approach, so easily pursued in the Indian context, would work in places where direct colonial domination was not a signicant factor (e.g., Japan or Russia). But if we follow the impulse of Pincuss work and grasp liberal discourse as a set of subjective categories embedded within certain constitutive social practices, then we have a much broader canvas of social transformation and imperial practice on which to paint the history of liberalisms global dissemination, without having to give up the crucial role played by the British Empire as an (ambivalent) institutional vehicle of the global dissemination of liberal discourse precisely in its capacity as the institutional linchpin of the nineteenthcentury global political and economic order.25 Liberalism could be grasped as both a language of power and legitimacy (as Mehta, Hall, and Wilson argue) and as a historically determinate form of thought that is not ultimately reducible to this dimension of its performative deployment. Ironically, it is probably precisely as a result of the history that Hall relatesthat of the increasing identication of liberalism as an essentially Western set of ultimately nontransmissible valuesthat this deeper dimension of the constitution of liberal discourse has been so difcult to grasp. If historical agents act, it is because they are subjects who apprehend the world in particular ways and pursue particular ends. This does not mean, however, that their subjectivity can be conceived as an external variable to sociohistorical structures, since, as the new imperial history itself intuits, sociohistorical context and subjective propensity are mutually mediating moments, each serving to reconstitute, and potentially also to problematize, the other.26 I take courage from Manu Goswamis recent analysis of colonial nationalist and nativist discourses, Producing India a text that goes beyond both the focus on subject position that is characteristic of the new imperial history and the pluralism of Baylys reied causal domains to show how both colonial and nationalist forms of consciousness were coproduced within a common, if asymmetrically structured, social eld (Goswami, 25). Goswami argues that a territorialization of colonial state power (33) through the post-Mutiny development
25 For three inuential, and analytically quite distinct, analyses that all highlight the institutional centrality of the British Empire to the operation and stabilization of the global economy in this period, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688 1914 (London, 1993); and Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1999). 26 See Manu Goswami, Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Towards a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 4 (2002): 77099.

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of communication and transportation infrastructures was a crucial element in the consolidation of a Britain-centered global economy in the second half of the nineteenth century, but that that same process of territorialization contradictorily fragmented the homogeneity of the global political, economic, and social space within which the imperial liberal imagination was at home. The resultant disjuncture in turn constituted the practical premise from which the conception of national space at the heart of the new indigenist critique of imperialism proceeded. In Goswamis analysis, practices are grasped not only in terms of the performance of representational structures but also as constitutive of such representational structures. The result is an analysis of the formation of both objective processes of spatialization and the subjective apprehension of spatial categories that are neither radically contingent nor civilizationally rooted. Goswamis central problem is not the liberal, civilizing subjectivity of the colonizer, but rather the emergence of a counterdiscourse of nativist nationalism. Her work aspires to grasp how the very conceptual terrain of Indian nationalist discoursethe basic categorical structure within which subject position operatedwas sociohistorically generated in the later nineteenth century through the contradictory logic of Indias embeddedness within Britains imperial economy. We have little idea of what Britains civilizing mission would look like if we followed Goswamis approach in locating its discursive logic more systematically in sociohistorical structures of the kind she uses to analyze Indian nationalist discourse. It is clear, however, that if we want to understand how liberal ideas of imperial responsibility and civilizational duty were constituted, we must move to ll in the hiatus that separates Pincuss suggestive analysis of the emergence of seventeenth-century liberalism from Goswamis analysis of an anti-imperial counterdiscourse itself produced from within the very same dynamic imperial political-economic structures that provided liberalism with, in Mehtas words, the concrete place of its dreams. This, of course, would mean challenging Mehtas too-easy separation of abstract logic and concrete lifeworld by insisting on the necessity of embedding both within the complex structures of Britains imperial social formation. It is in the end the failure to address this dimension of liberalisms historicity that has made it so difcult to counter at a theoretical level the core proposition of Niall Fergusons blockbuster tract, Empire: namely, that for all its failings the British Empire should be celebrated for its role in spreading liberal modernity around the globe. Mehtas work provides no answer to Ferguson because in the end Fergusons argument largely replicates, albeit with an inverted ethical valuation, the core structure of Mehtas argumentthat a radical British universalism has sought to sweep aside local colonial parochialisms. What is the real challenge that Fergusons argument presents historians, regardless of its patently ideological temper? It is the fact that it offers an account that links liberalism to the socioeconomic transformation of the modern world. Even if we discard Fergusons nonsense about the underlying and ultimately triumphant nobility of the British character (e.g., Ferguson, 302), we are still left with his stark claim that the empire served to assimilate most of the world into a single global system of economic interdependency, based on the liberal practice of commercial exchange, and leading to the optimal allocation of labour, capital, and goods (Ferguson, xxxxi). From the perspective of an argument that locates the most fundamental and enduring achievement of the empires liberalism in objective structures of institutional and economic practice rather than in a civilizing pedagogy, what purchase does the new imperial historys insistence on the ux and instability of forms

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of subjectivity gain us? An answer to Ferguson cannot cede this dimension of imperialism in the way that the cultural emphasis of the new imperial history risks doing, but in the end it would have to confront him at this practical-institutional level of argument. What is the real signicance of the texts one-sided misrepresentations that magically transform early-modern mercantilist aggression into the beginnings of what Ferguson understands to be a multilaterally benecial process of globalization, or the callous imperial regime that presided over some of the worst famines in Indian history into a relatively benign incorruptible bureaucracy (e.g., Ferguson, 14, 180 82)?27 It is the role these strategic elisions perform in attening the complexity of the British Empires position within the global economy as an agent of both modernization and traditionalization, of both global integration and regional peripheralization. Recognizing this allows us to show how the empire served to deepen the social forms of backwardness it simultaneously sought to reform; to show how liberalisms linkage to the global economic order of modern capitalism was fraught with perilous contradiction; to show how empire could be an institutional obstacle to the realization of liberal values as easily as (surely, on balance, more easily than) their vehicle; and ultimately to show how the liberal practices of exchange cannot be prophylactically disembedded from the larger, and contradictory, social processes within which they have operated and continue to operate in the era of globalization. The current literature has evolved an extraordinarily rened understanding of the complexities of subject positionality, but it seems ill-equipped to grapple with these larger questions of the historical constitution of the basic categorical logic of liberal thought.

27 For an evaluation of some of the specic arguments made in Empire, see Frederick Cooper, Empire Multiplied: A Review Essay, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (2004): 24772; and the forum on The British Empire and Globalization, Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 4 (April 2003): 2136. It is also instructive to read Fergusons exculpatory account alongside a work he dismisses without any serious argumentative engagement, Mike Daviss Late Victorian Holocaust: El Nin o Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2001).

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