Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Christopher Bayly
of the American and French revolutions. As conventional as this theme may
seem, the writings of contemporaries leave no question of the carrying-
power of such ideas. Young people, not just in Western Europe and North
America, but across the world, woke up and saw their situation afresh.
The movement of Russian liberal nobles in 1825, which was dedicated
to securing a constitution from the autocratic tsar, reflected this ideological
tumult. The reforming nobles invoked older notions of the virtuous republic
alongside the rights of man, the checks and balances of the American
constitution and the glorious tableaux of radical nations under arms, which
they had recently glimpsed in Naples, Portugal and Spain (Dixon 1999,
p. 208). One of their key intellectuals declared:
This divine law was decreed for all men in equal measure, and consequently ever yone
has an equal right to its fulfilment. Therefore the Russian people is not the property of
any one person or family. On the contrary, the government belongs to the people and
has been established for the good of the people and the people does not exist for the
good of the government.
3
In a very different context, Ignacio Altamirano (1834–93), the Mexican
Indian radical, urged his countrymen to ‘love the patria and consecrate
themselves to science’, singling out the ideals of the French Revolution as
a permanent goal for Mexico (Brading 1991,pp.663–4). French-speaking
Ottomans had quickly become aware of the ideas of the revolution through
the Gazette Franc¸aisedeConstantinople.By1837 Sadik Rifat Pasha, an
Ottoman ambassador to Vienna, was writing about the relationship between
‘liberty’ and classical Islamic notions of justice (Lewis 2002,p.51).
The works of John Stuart Mill became a bible for Latin American liberals
in the 1850sand1860s. In Brazil, the abolitionist, Joaquin Nabuco stated: ‘I
am an English liberal . . . in the Brazilian parliament’ (Graham 1972,p.263).
The Meiji reformers of the 1870s in Japan secured copies of the life of
George Washington. Low-caste western Indian reformers of the 1850sread
Hume, Voltaire, Tom Paine and Gibbon (O’Hanlon 1985,p.83). Munshi
Abdullah, the first modern writer of the Malay world, drew on Western
liberal themes and Muslim notions of enlightenment when he attacked the
ignorance and corruption of the Malay rajas in the 1820s (Milner 1994,
pp. 10–31).
All these emerging var ieties of political thought appropriated and
reworked the classical European ideologies of liberalism: the stress on
3 P. I. Pestel cited in Vernadsky et al. 1972,p.514.
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European political thought and the wider world
individual rights, property, and the rule of law and the morality of the
market. They developed these themes, however, to a much more limited
degree than the European writers. This was in part because liberal thought
itself registered an enduring tension between the concept of absolute indi-
vidual rights and reverence for traditions and the spirit of nations, as writer s
as varied as Berlin, Himmelfarb and Ryan have pointed out. In the writings
of many continental European thinkers the struggle for individual liberties
was subsumed into an argument for the integrity of nations, their culture
and language. Here Johann Gottfried Herder was an enduring influence. It
was the activist Giuseppe Mazzini, however, who was most widely translated
into Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, Hindi, and many other languages. Liberal-
ism therefore made its journey overseas already wrapped in the integument
of an organic view of the nation. In the British tradition, too, rights theories
were tempered by ideologies of paternalism. The John Stuart Mill of On
Liberty took a strikingly more radical approach than the Mill of the ‘Spirit
of the Age’. This latter essay took the view that most men, even systems of
representative government, should ‘fall back on the authority of still more
cultivated minds, as the ultimate sanction of the convictions of their reason
itself ’ (Himmelfarb 1990,pp.40–1).
Sentiments like these ‘bonded’ with understandings of hierarchical civil
virtue in the political traditions of other societies, to the extent that they
generally eclipsed the more radical formulations of individual rights. So
liberal imperialism among colonial writers was matched by liberal patrio-
tism among non-Europeans. Despite the attacks of James Fitzjames Stephen
on Mill’s supposed radicalism, Mill himself doubted that Asian and African
peoples could properly exercise their individual rights except in the context
of European tutelage. It was out of this conviction that the liberal imperialist
doctrine of ‘trusteeship’ emerged in the late nineteenth century. Yet this
conservative tur n was common to early Asian and African nationalists as
well. They also insisted on the role of tutelage by virtuous elites, a theme
which had been prominent in the earlier traditions of the ‘righteous city’.
In his later works, the Chinese reformer Wang T’ao, mentioned above,
asserted that China’s survival as a nationality and a culture depended on
the cultivation of learned experts to guide the people. Wang applauded
the consultative nature of the English constitution and the French Third
Republic. Yet this was because he saw Britain and France as benevolent
oligarchies, not as incipient democracies. Throughout his writings he advo-
cated the need for ‘men of ability’ trained in the Chinese classics and also
alert to Western science. He wrote to the modernising governor of Canton,
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Christopher Bayly
Li Hongzhang, in 1865 ‘Men of ability are to a nation what energy is to a
human being’ (quoted in Cohen 1974,p.161).
This is not to say that the more radical interpretations of individual rights
associated with the French Revolution, Paine, Wollstonecraft and Gouges
had no effective influence on the nineteenth-century extra-European world.
It is true that most active movements of resistance against European impe-
rialism adopted neo-traditional forms of cultural protectionism as slogans
for activism. All the same, groups of reformers working in the interests of
slaves, low-caste people, peasants and women echoed the Rights of Man.
They did so against the background of linguistic shifts similar to those that
created the sense of ‘rights’ as absolute truths, rather than the gift of kings, in
Western Europe. For instance, the Sanskrit-derived term adhikar originally
meant power devolved by, or derived from a sovereign and had a meaning
similar to recht in medieval Europe. In south India, for instance, there was
a form of local official called an adhigari. In the hands of radical Indian
reformers this word, too, came to mean an absolute and self-evident right.
Apart from catalysing such changes in meaning, European rights theories
stamped a degree of uniformity and mutual translatability onto diverse sets
of sentiments by which subordinated groups in non-European societies
claimed moral worth. For instance in Japan, Shinto-Buddhist ideas of karma
and regeneration gave rise to the idea of the ‘noble husbandman’. A stoic,
peasant-patriot, in the wider moral cosmos, he was worth as much as any
other being, however socially lowly. The husbandman figure was often
compared favourably with deceitful samurai and court hangers-on in the
literature of the Tokugawa period (c.1600–1868). Modernising reformers in
Japan in the 1870sand1880s sought to give the new Meiji constitution a
more popular basis by blending these older ideas with transformed Western
concepts. They sang the praises of the noble husbandman, but they also
distributed Japanese translations of Mill’s On Liberty and Samuel Smiles’
Self-Help during their political campaigns (Sukehiro 1989,pp.480–6). In a
sense, Mill was incorporated into the pantheon of Shinto ancestor-deities.
This hybridising of rights theories took a different form in the case of
low-caste people in India. Here, those who were ritually low in the Hindu
ranking scheme commonly claimed a more elevated lineage on the basis of
caste legends. They might assert, for instance, that they were descendants
of rulers or Brahmin priests or noble warriors who had lost caste as the
result of malign fate. In western India during the 1860sand1870s, low-
caste reformers associated with Joti Rao Phule constructed rights arguments
from a number of different sources. They drew on indigenous traditions of
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European political thought and the wider world
devotional religiosity (bhakti) which proclaimed the soul’s equality before
God (O’Hanlon 1985). They pointed to their historic importance and later
degradation as a result of Brahminical or, sometimes, Muslim tyranny. Yet
they also made direct references to Tom Paine and to Christian missionary
preaching on spiritual equality. These European references energised and
generalised indigenous claims to respect. They did not create them de novo.
It was perhaps in the world of abolitionism and of freed African slaves that
rights theories had their most unambiguous impact. The Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen led directly to the temporary abolition
of slavery in France and its colonies. Condorcet, Siey
`
es and Mirabeau,
among others, built their opposition to slavery on Enlightenment theories of
absolute human rights, even if their practical efforts mirrored the Christian
humanism of Wilberforce. The ‘Black Jacobins’ of the West Indian slave
revolts of the 1790sand1800s localised these arguments and developed them
into a theory of government for the liberated plantations. Hereafter, in the
Americas and the Caribbean black and white anti-slavery activists deployed
both natural rights theories and Christian humanism against slave-owners.
North American slave-owners, in their defence, appealed to something
like Burke’s organic view of the commonwealth. Conservative churchmen
and magnates in central and south America appealed to Aristotle on the
‘naturalness’ of slavery.
Natural rights theories were also received and transformed by Creoles
and people of mixed European and Indian race in Mexico and Peru. Here,
theorists blended them with indigenous forms of civic republican patriotism.
Mexican rebels against Spanish rule as well as post-independence reformers
argued that men were born free. Yet they also enlisted the idea that Mexicans
and Peruvians as a whole inherited the sovereignty of ancient Aztec and Inca
kingdoms to buttress their claim against Spanish despotism. Mexican soil
was not only a land of free peoples originating in Asia, it was also visited by
the Virgin Mary in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe. These doctrines,
did not, of course lead to a rapid emancipation of Indians, let alone black
slaves. Yet they did provide a pool of indigenous radical thinking which
persisted down to the time of the Mexican Rebellion of 1911–15.
3 From liberalism to cultural protectionism
The previous section argued that classical liberal rights theories were often
received in non-European societies in a manner that embedded them in
indigenous traditions of civic virtue. These local traditions were all, to one
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Christopher Bayly
extent or another, imbricated with religious concepts. Indigenous thinkers
generally selected the more conservative elements of liberal ideology which
emphasised the history and organic unity of human communities, rather
than those which asserted unmediated rights. These fitted well into local
understandings of hierarchy and order. More importantly, they spoke to the
need for self-strengthening which spread across all extra-European civilisa-
tions, subject or partially independent, as European dominance of the world
reached its high point after 1850.
One area where this was particularly clear was in the reception and use
of classical political economy. In general, even those Asians, Africans and
Latin American writers who argued for human rights were firm in their
opposition to free trade. Of course, European thinkers in the tradition of
Adam Smith and Condorcet understood free trade as the analogue of ‘moral
independency’ and political freedom. It was a moral as well as a political
theory, as Emma Rothschild (2001) has emphasised. A few writers such as
Ram Mohun Roy and Alexander Crummell, both of whom are discussed
below, accepted the need for free trade on the grounds that it afforded
protection against the violence of armed monopoly companies such as the
East India Company and the various Africa companies. Roy even argued
that the European emigration into the subcontinent which would follow
free trade might create a kind of Indian Brazil in which the common interest
of Anglo-Indian Creoles, Indian indigenes and mestizos would guarantee
some constitutional freedoms to all Indians (Ghose 1887, ii,pp.613–19).
In general, however, economic protectionism was quickly associated with
cultural self-preservation. It was therefore Friedrich List and other advocates
of national political economy who were pressed into service. The assault on
‘Smithianismus’, or ‘animal political economy’ (Rothschild 1998) was more
or less contemporaneous in Prussia, Hungary, Brazil and India. List was read
in Bengal by the 1840s. Calcutta intellectuals also noted those passages in
the writings of Adam Smith and J. S. Mill which conceded that war and
national protection might be valid arguments against free trade. It is not
clear when List was translated into Chinese, but Wang T’ao, Feng and Kang
Youwei all marshalled strong arguments against free trade which worked
in the interests of Britain and wiped out indigenous industries. In works
written after he had visited England and France, Wang compared the mod-
ern international system to China’s early period of ‘warring states’, before
the universal rule of Confucian norms had been established by the empire.
In such conditions, nations had the right and duty to protect their indus-
tries and artisans. In 1865, he wrote to Li Hongzhang that the problem of
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European political thought and the wider world
getting the European barbarians in hand was two-sided. It involved estab-
lishing Chinese ‘economic control’ and the promotion of China’s ‘national
dignity’ (Cohen 1974,pp.60–70). Both these themes were entirely compat-
ible with earlier Chinese norms of statecraft. The Ming had attempted to
discipline ‘King Silver’ and promote righteousness by closing the country.
The Qing had created the state monopoly, the Cohong, and sought to
exclude British opium imports for similar reasons. From Meiji Japan to
Brazil and Argentina economic and cultural protectionism went hand in
hand. The idea of a virtuous royal or natural monopoly to ensure that
artisans and workers secured employment and a just price emerged in dif-
ferent political languages. The concept bonded in different ways with the
inheritance of List.
Alongside free trade, another key doctrine of nineteenth-century radi-
calism was the expansion of electorates towards a universal franchise. Here
again the hierarchical and paternalistic elements within the liberal formula-
tion were in perpetual tension with the dictates of univer sal rights. Outside
Europe, both colonial administrators and indigenous literati adduced fur-
ther arguments to temper such radicalism. Even advanced liberals, headed
by John Stuart Mill, broadly denied the capacity of Indians, Chinese or
Africans to rule themselves on the grounds that their domestic life was
defective and that centuries of oriental despotism had inured them to auto-
cratic rule. This was a view they inherited from eighteenth-century writers.
Native self-rule could only follow on from enlightenment over the longest
possible term. The most radical European reformers, such as Allan Octavian
Hume, founder of the Indian National Congress, resorted to the fiction that
Indians were fit for self-rule because they were ‘Aryans’, honorary white
men, in a sense. Where the British introduced tiny non-European elec-
torates, as in India, Egypt and the Caribbean after 1883, these were seen as
adjuncts to the mechanisms of taxation, or sops to rising nationalist opin-
ion, rather than as schools for self-government. The New Zealand measures
after 1867, which gave seats in parliament and later voting rights to some
Maori, seems to be a partial exception here. Yet these Maori were seen as
a civilising agency for their less tractable brothers (Belich 1996,pp.265–6).
Here the concept of tutelage surfaced again.
Indigenous literati quite often tacitly supported these positions. Islamic
theory contained the theory of the shura, technically a representative body
of all believers. The Koran, Hadiths and medieval reworkings of Aristotle
emphasised the importance of consultation and good counsel. Yet the tra-
dition also gave much weight to the advice of the learned (the ulama)and
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Christopher Bayly
people of property. Both conservatives and populists within the Ottoman
Empire and its dependencies argued against the ‘parliaments’ that were peri-
odically established after 1840 on the grounds that they tended to oligarchy
and corruption and interfered with good government. In other traditions,
the superior weight of Brahmins, Buddhist monks or samurai was similarly
recognised.
Philosophical objections to extending the franchise reached their most
intense in the case of women’s votes, indeed in reaction to any form of
participation by women in public life. British and other European the-
orists argued against women’s votes on the grounds that it would divide
families as well as because of women’s mental incapacity. Where women
franchises were conceded, as in South Australia or Wyoming, leaders argued
that women might domesticate their savage frontier males. Women’s right
to representation was only conceded very late, if at all. The position of
Muslim reformers illustrated this very well. In Egypt, Qasim Amin wrote
of ‘the emancipation of women’ and said Muslim treatment of them vio-
lated Islamic beliefs. He was vigorously attacked (Badawi 1978,p.90). The
reformer, Rashid Rida, wrote ‘A Call to the Fair Sex’ in which he claimed
that women were better treated in Islam than in Western societies and had
unspecified political rights. But when a woman in one of his audiences said
that women should be able to mix with men on a freer basis, Rashid Rida
denounced her as an apostate (Badawi 1978,p.111). These reformers were
mainly concerned with the rights of subject populations and of nations, not
those of individuals, male or female.
4 National essences and race
After 1860 classic liberalism had passed its peak in Europe. Social Dar-
winism stressed the development of societies as organisms, not as bod-
ies bound by social contract. Many theorists, including self-styled liberals
such as Fitzjames Stephen, argued for a greater role of the state. Ideal-
ist philosophers returned to virtue and downplayed rights. This shift was
even more apparent outside Europe and the United States, where lib-
eralism had already been reinterpreted to suit local conditions and local
philosophies. A major factor here was the feeling in Asia and the Middle
East that the virtue of whole civilisations was under threat from increas-
ing Western military and economic dominance. In different ways theo-
rists as varied as Kang Youwei in China, Nakae Chomin in Japan, M. K.
Gandhi in India and Jamal al-din al-Afghani in the Islamic lands invoked
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European political thought and the wider world
religion, nation and culture as entities to be served and protected. At the
same time, surviving predispositions within non-European political philoso-
phies determined the reception, ‘capture’ and use of these new Western
theories.
A classic case was the reception of the thought of Auguste Comte in
the extra-European world, as it has been described by Geraldine Forbes
(1999). Positivism was conceived as a radical prophecy of the passage of
humanity into a new age of reason and science. Even in Britain and France,
however, positivists quickly transformed the doctrine into a kind of secular
religion, emphasising Comte’s transcendent deity rather than the coming
age of reason. In Japan, Comte was understood as a critic of what they
saw as the ‘feudalism’ of the old order. His followers, however, saw no
incompatibility between this and advocacy of a new form of devotion of
the emperor and exaltation of Shinto spirit worship. In India, positivists read
Comte’s works on the banks of the Ganges as if they were sacred scripture.
In Latin America, they were annexed by military modernisers who wanted
to break the residual hold of the ‘Spanish feudal spirit’.
Herbert Spencer stands comparison with Comte as the English-speaking
world’s most celebrated thinker among non-Europeans in the second half
of the nineteenth century. In Europe and America it was Spencer’s individ-
ualism and radical laissez-faire philosophy which attracted most attention.
His The Man versus the State took late nineteenth-century liberals to task
for becoming paternalistic interventionists, as Tories had once been. The
emerging class of industrial magnates on both sides of the Atlantic, notably
Andrew Carnegie, took this to heart.
4
Outside Europe and the United
States, however, it was Spencer’s understanding of polity and society as
evolving organic beings which resonated best with local political sensibil-
ities. Kang Youwei and other Chinese reformers, for instance, used early
translations of Spencer to argue that the Chinese people would evolve
through struggle to a new racial and national perfection. For them, Spencer
seemed to hearken back to Confucian and Daoist notions of the polity as
a harmonious and sentient being. His radical individualism and laissez-faire
principles were given much less attention in their analyses. Spencer’s organi-
cism, like the racial ideologies of some of his contemporaries, seemed to
find an ecological niche in societies whose leaders searched for unity where
caste-like divisions of status were prominent.
5
4 Spencer 1969, editor’s introduction.
5 For Japan see Brown 1955, a study written in the shadow of the Second World War, but still valuable.
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Christopher Bayly
This type of appropriation was later to overtake classical Marxism. Where
non-European thinkers took up Marx’s notions it was the primitive com-
munist ideal of sharing within the ideal polity which came to the fore.
Class struggle and the rights of the alienated worker received much less
emphasis before the radical movements of the 1920s. The struggle against
colonialism became the struggle of cultures, not of classes. In China, too,
the young radicals who began to espouse Marxism in the dismal 1890sfell
back on the traditional denunciations of corruption and the oppression of
the poor which echoed in the Taiping and Boxer rebellions. They thought
that what they believed to be the growing ‘power of the rich’, people out-
side the quasi-Confucian moral community, could be halted by strikes, as
had apparently been the case in the Tsarist autocracy (Spence 1999,p.260).
Here, as in Italy or in revolutionary Mexico, agrarianism, socialism and
populist conservatism developed in the same breeding grounds as what was
later to be called fascism. In China, though, new political ideas were also
subtly adapted to prevailing doctrines. Hu Hanmin, an early collaborator of
Sun Yatsen, wrote of socialism in 1905:
Not all collectivist theories may be applied to China in her present state of development.
But in the case of land nationalisation we already have a model in the ‘Well-field’ system
of the Three Dynasties [a ver y early form of joint holding and irrigation of land] and it
should not be difficult to practice something indigenous to our racial consciousness in
this period of political change.
6
5 Liberalism and culture in South Asia
This chapter now goes on to consider two case studies in somewhat
greater detail. These concern colonial India and early pan-Africanist polit-
ical thought. In the Indian case, we see the reception of first British and,
later, wider European political and social thought against the background
of an intrusive form of colonial rule. British administrators and missionaries
tried consciously to mould the minds of a small Indian elite by inculcat-
ing ‘reason’, science and, if possible, Christianity, by means of a limited
expansion of Western-style education. What is striking, however, is the
virtuosity with which Indian thinkers adapted Western doctrines to their
own circumstances. First liberalism and later versions of idealism and even
racialism were adopted and set working to national ends before the end of
the nineteenth century.
6 Hu Hanmin cited in Bernal 1976,p.71.
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European political thought and the wider world
Between 1750 and 1900, Indians continued to pass down and adapt
traditions of good government which had some common points of reference
with European civic republicanism. Mughal emperors had once prized
works in the Islamic-Aristotelian tradition, such as the Akhlaq-i Nasiri. The
rulers of the post-Mughal successor states continued to patronise this style of
text which advised on the right conduct of princes and householders. The
evidence of early nineteenth-century petitions and vernacular newspapers
suggests that these notions of good counsel remained central to the political
language of the last semi-independent Indian kingdoms and those clerical
people who went into British service.
7
It should not be thought, of course,
that this tradition was necessarily an inclusive or harmonious one. In the
hands of Muslim purists of the transitional period, such as Shah Wali-Allah
and Shah Abd al-Aziz of Delhi, it was deployed with some ferocity against
both Hindus and Shi’ites. Wali-Allah maintained the ideal of good counsel
and civic virtue, but argued that the ideal city had no room for idolaters and
heretics (Rizvi 1980, 1982). A parallel, Sanskritic tradition of righteous rule
continued to develop in works such as the Ajnapatra, an eighteenth-century
text on good government from Maratha western India (Puntambekar 1929,
pp. 81–105, 207–33). Works such as this stressed the role of the king more
centrally than the Indo-Muslim equivalent and conceived the virtuous polity
in terms of a proper ordering of castes. Only after the mid-century, and
partly as a result of the influence of Western conceptions of realpolitik,did
the more ‘Machiavellian’ Indian tradition associated with the Arthasastra of
Kautilya attract the attention of Indian literati.
Traditional understandings of ethical government continued to mark
popular political discourse and the ideology of Hindu and Muslim reformers
throughout the nineteenth century. For instance, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan,
later founder of the Mahomedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, drew
on the akhlaq tradition when criticising the British for unjust rule and
listening to bad counsel before the Rebellion of 1857 (Khan 1858). But over
time, his formulations became much more eclectic. He drew on St Paul in
urging the need for friendship between ruler and ruled. He also modified
European theories of the eugenic decline of races in a call for Indian Muslims
to regenerate themselves through education and physical prowess, one thing
which he had in common with his Hindu contemporaries.
In the meantime, Bengalis, in particular, had been engaging more directly
with the liberal ideologies they read about in British books and newspapers.
7 These themes are explored in greater detail in Bayly 1998,pp.64–85.
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