Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Christopher Bayly
The major figure here was Raja Ram Mohun Roy, who is still rightly
regarded as the first modern Indian political philosopher. Roy came from
a Persian-writing Mughal service family and was influenced by Muslim
monotheism and Christian ethics. He read voraciously in English and later
French and died in England in 1833 while upholding the ‘rights’ of the
now powerless Mughal emperor and condemning the abuses of the East
India Company (Ghose 1887, ii,pp.525–79). Ram Mohun Roy argued for
the freedom of the press and in favour of free trade, which, he believed,
would banish the corruption associated with the Company’s monopoly.
His writings display a cosmopolitan vision quite striking by comparison
with the Mills or other English contemporaries. He argued for the rights
of peoples to self-determination. He supported the revolutions in Genoa,
Spain and Portugal. He championed Catholic emancipation and praised
Daniel O’Connell, though there is no evidence that the compliment was
returned.
By contrast, Ram Mohun Roy appears to have adopted Bentham’s view
that the concept of absolute abstract rights was theoretical nonsense. What
he advocated was an extension of Blackstone’s eighteenth-century English
constitutionalism to India. This was reinforced by Montesquieu’s notion of
the separation of powers and the rule of law (Majumdar 1934,pp.16–17).
Parliament should displace the Company and reassert good government.
He thought that the British rulers should be advised by councils of learned
Europeans and Indians. Local magnates, powerful merchants and intelli-
gentsia who knew the ‘sense of the country’ should comment on proposed
legislation (Ghose 1887, ii,pp.554–5).
8
In my view this represented not
only an appeal to Whig paternalist theory, but also a reappropriation of the
Mughal tradition of good counsel. This had long been epitomised by a form
of representation called the mahzar in which the ‘sense of the locality’ was
conveyed to the ruler through the petition of learned men, persons of good
lineage and respectable merchants. Roy did not demand freedom of the
press as an absolute right, but in order that the rulers should be informed of
the errors committed in ‘managing the affairs of a vast empire’ (Majumdar
1934,pp.64–5). Press editors were to fulfil a role similar to that of the
news-writers of the Mughal regime, warning the ruler of corruption and
oppression.
A more robust liberal tradition emerged quite early at the Calcutta Hindu
College. A group of young men of mixed race and Bengali descent drew
8 This was originally Roy’s evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Indian Affairs, 1831.
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European political thought and the wider world
more directly on the thought of Tom Paine and the French revolution.
Called ‘philosophical radicals’ by the historian B. B. Majumdar, Henry
Derozio, Rasik Krishna Mullick (1810–58) and their followers derided
Brahminism and ‘casteism’ while demanding civil rights from the British
(Majumdar 1934,pp.78–155). Equally significant, was the response of a
group of their neo-traditional elders who had come together in a body
called the Dharma Sabha (Society for Righteous Religion) in 1830. These
men were also drawn from the new intelligentsia and burgher class of Cal-
cutta. Yet they complained bitterly against British intervention to suppress
the custom of widows burning themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres
(sati). Ram Mohun Roy had supported this intervention on the grounds of
humanity, even while he rejected other attempts to change Hindu inheri-
tance practices.
The leaders of the Dharma Sabha, however, also found themselves in
opposition to Roy on the issue of free trade and colonisation. Roy believed
that upright British settlers would help temper the Company’s despotism
and bring English liberties to India. Publicists associated with the Dharma
Sabha argued that colonisation had destroyed Ireland and indigenous peo-
ples in North America and Australia. But this early anti-colonialism was
given a particular Indian inflection. The argument was made that European
settlement would compromise the caste purity of Hindus. Moreover, Hindu
merchant people were allegedly debarred from overseas travel because their
caste would be polluted. It was only fair that they should be left undis-
turbed in control of Indian commerce. For both reasons, national political
economy, not laissez-faire was suitable for India’s condition. This pairing of
economic and cultural protectionism appeared later even in the thought of
a modernising liberal such as Bhola Nath Chunder Ghose. It anticipated
Gandhi’s pairing of swaraj (self rule) and swadeshi (home industry) with
the idea of Hindu purity (Chunder 1869, i,p.169). It provides another
good example of the way in which nineteenth-century European political
thought was adapted and transformed in the non-European world when it
could adjust to particular ecological niches.
These themes and the tensions between them resurfaced in the ideologies
of the Indian National Congress and its affiliated reforming associations
after that body was founded in 1885. On the face of it, the Cong ress
was a typical British liberal institution (Wedderburn 1974,pp.1–5). Its early
leaders, European and Indian, used old Whig arguments against the curse of
the military-fiscal state to imply that the Government of India was starving
Indian peasants in order to carry on aggressive frontier wars. On the one
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Christopher Bayly
hand, Congressmen displayed a disinclination to consider any measures of
land redistribution and argued for a permanent settlement of land revenue
to encourage responsible land ownership. On the other hand, they urged
the establishment of agricultural credit co-operative societies and measures
to control rents. Congressmen wished to move rapidly towards a Dominion
Status model of Indian government. If the issues of the rights of women and
low castes were addressed at all, it was from a position of high paternalism.
Low castes would have to give up their dirty habits and achieve self-control
before they could take part in the political process. In this interpretation,
women ought to be guided by their husbands. Conceptions of embodied
worth derived from Indian classical texts were here adjusted to colonial
conceptions of tutelage.
The break towards a more radical position was associated with the Liberal
Member of Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, who argued for national political
economy and protectionism, using reams of data drawn from parliamentary
Blue Books. Broadly, Naoroji’s position was an echo of Friedrich List and of
earlier European and American advocates of protectionism. More distinctive
trends of thought were, however, emerging under this sober and Victorian
surface. The early Congress was implicated in the localities with various
movements broadly called Hindu revivalist. Chief among these was the
Arya Samaj, a modernising association whose leaders rejected ‘polytheistic’
medieval Hinduism and wanted to return to the pure religion of the Vedas,
the most ancient Sanskrit texts. Yet for activists in the mould of the Samaj’s
founder, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the Hindus were a race and a nation
as well as a religious group (Saraswati 1927). Dayananda urged the coming
together of all Hindus, implicitly excluding both Christians and Muslims
from a central role in the Indian community. The protection of Mother
Cow was a central concern of the Arya Samaj. They argued for an end
to cow-slaughter on the authority of the Hindu scriptures, also adapting
Western eugenic arguments that the cow was essential for the physical and
economic health of Indians. Dayananda’s prescriptions for marriage and
sexual hygiene similarly drew on a variety of European and Indian sources.
He reiterated earlier Indian ideas about the proper conditions for breeding,
while at the same time adapting colonial conceptions of masculinity.
Another emerging late nineteenth-century tradition of religious and
social thought, which ultimately became politicised, was the Bengali
movement associated with the Vaishnavite religious teachers, swamis
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. The pioneer of the Ramakrishna social
service movement, Swami Vivekananda, had read Comte, Mill and Spencer
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European political thought and the wider world
(Vivekananda 1960,p.77). He was initially attracted to ideas that stressed
the ineffability and unattainability of Deity. Later, however, Vivekananda
came to reinstate and refurbish a belief in the human need for divine love
for and devotion to the Great Mother and her associated manifestation,
the God Krishna. This was not so much a ‘revolt against reason’, as John
Burrow has termed its analogues in the European context, but an attempt
to energise political and social life by subsuming reason within cosmic reli-
gious passion. Vivekananda’s appearance at the Chicago World Parliament
of Religions in 1893 was decidedly an act of national political self-assertion.
The Eastern holy man had come to prove the superiority of India’s divine
love and mysticism over the greedy and aggressive polities of the West.
Vivekananda’s thought was covertly political and organicist as well as
social and religious. He told a disciple that there were four castes in India
and likewise four castes in the world. The role of the highest, the priestly
Brahmin caste was fulfilled by India, while the warrior function was fulfilled
by the Roman Empire and modern military states. The role of the merchant
(the bania) was played by England, while the United States with its demo-
cratic pretensions was the realm of the shudra or common man (Vivekananda
1960,p.564). A more overtly political stand was taken by Aurobindo Ghose,
ideologue of nation-building through self-sacrifice (Aurobindo 1958). Wor-
ship of the Mother and opposition to the corrupting Western presence
came together in the ideas of the so-called swadeshi (or ‘Indophile’) period
of 1905–10, when Bengali youth turned to mass rejection of Western styles
and Western goods, and instigated at the fringes a cult of terrorism against
British officials. The so-called ‘extremists’ of this period rejected constitu-
tional agitation for a cult of violence, which drew on Russian anarchist and
Irish Fenian precedents. Their aim was a free Indian nation, but increasingly
that nation was defined as a Hindu nation (Sartori 2008).
Many Indian intellectuals now take this to have been the dominant trend
of south Asian ideology in the later nineteenth century. In the twentieth
century it easily evolved, they believe, into what is commonly regarded as the
‘Hindu fascism’ of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the integralist RSS. This,
however, would be to homogenise and caricature Indian political thought
around 1900. Countering this tendency was the communitarian and anti-
statist thought of Mohandas Karamchand. Gandhi wove together themes
from Ruskin and Tolstoy with pacifist and vegetarian Gujarati Vaishnavism.
For him, as pointed out above, self-rule had to be predicated on the basis
of self-control; moral, sexual and dietary. A national community in a sense
was what it ate, what it wove and how it deported itself. Popular versions
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Christopher Bayly
of this inclusive ideology, which appeared to incorporate Muslims and
Christians into the body politic, had emerged in the Indian regions. In
Bengal, for instance, where Muslims spoke the vernacular and used the
Sanskrit-derived script, the Mother Goddess was seen in her nurturing as
well as in her militant form as Kali (Bose 1997).So,too,in1900,India
supported a secular network of voluntary associations, which paralleled the
Ramakrishna missions. The ideals of a body such as the Servants of India
Society urged educated men to devote themselves to service of the poor
in order to create a true national community. The Indian concept of sewa,
the service of a lord or deity, had been translated into the idea of common
service of the body politic. Here again, we see an example of a linguistic and
conceptual transformation brought about by contact with Western political
thought. Yet it was one which had already been anticipated in indigenous
traditions of spiritual love (bhakti).
6 The African triangle: religion and emancipation
Over most of Asia and North Africa, intellectuals adapted European polit-
ical ideas against the background of sophisticated indigenous traditions of
thought which also claimed universal validity. In sub-Saharan Africa ethical
traditions were oral and particularistic. Early pan-African political thought
evolved instead in the triangle of slavery between Western Europe, West
Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Here African intellectuals seized on
European theories of human rights. But, once again, these were adjusted
to the sensibilities of African Christianity, and later to early anthropological
understandings of the African continent itself.
European political thought had little direct impact on sub-Saharan Africa
before 1900 for the simple reason that most of Africa was not conquered
until after 1870. Of course, Dutch settlers in the Cape had evolved both a
conservative Christian ideology of the Chosen People and a ‘liberator’ ide-
ologyofnaturalrightsbythe1790s. But the Western education of Africans
themselves was restricted to tiny pockets on the west and southern African
coast. By the 1880s black Christian churches were springing up in several
parts of the continent. These showed great virtuosity in adapting Chris-
tianity to indigenous sensibilities. They replaced the European emphasis on
redemption with an African concern with mental and spiritual healing, for
instance. Biblical ideas of the Chosen People were also adapted to what
might be called ‘Hottentot patriotism’ of mixed-race and semi-acculturated
858
European political thought and the wider world
Africans on the Cape of Good Hope. Nevertheless, before the end of the
nineteenth century it was mainly in the old ‘slave triangle’ connecting West
Africa, the West Indies and the United States that something which could
properly be called modern African political thought developed.
Initially, this took the form of a religious and millenarian vision of
black emancipation and participation in the Christian republic. Eighteenth-
century preachers among ‘free people of colour’ in the northern British
American colonies pondered on the text of Psalms 68:31, ‘Princes shall
come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto
God.’ Loyalist blacks, escaping to Jamaica in 1783, took the message of lib-
eration and redemption to the West Indies.
9
These prophetic themes were,
however, overwhelmed and transformed by the impact of Black Jacobinism
and the rise of the anti-slavery movement in Britain and France.
10
The
unequivocal statement of human rights for blacks announced by Toussaint
L’Ouverture in Saint Domingue, by Wilberforce in the British Parliament
and by the black republican, Jean Baptiste Belley, in the French Assembly,
galvanised communities of free blacks and, more distantly, slave societies.
The connection was clear since Toussaint had several subordinate comman-
ders who had fought in the French or American revolutions. No less a figure
than Thomas Jefferson tried to censor reporting on Haitian proclamations
of liberty in the USA.
Over recent decades, under the influence of ‘Black studies’ several his-
torians tried to suggest that the great insurrection owed relatively little to
European influence. Instead they depicted it as a form of grand marronage;a
large-scale slave ‘break for freedom’ of the sort which had populated large
parts of the Caribbean with communities of free blacks since the seventeenth
century (e.g. Fouchard 1989). It was suggested that vudun or ‘voodo’, the
neo-African religion, lay behind the millenarian and patriarchal form of
government which emerged in Haiti. It must certainly be true that Jacobin
principles were meaningful to Haitians because they spoke to existing sys-
tems of beliefs. Nevertheless, the political language of the rebels and of the
later free government of Haiti was heavily imprinted with the ideas of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and it was in this form that other black
and white activists understood and used them.
9 The best brief account is by Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Black World’, ‘Pan Africanism’, www.
africana.com/Articles/tt
658.htm.
10 The classic study remains James 1989.
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Christopher Bayly
The message was quickly received in North America. John Brown
Russworm,
11
born in Jamaica in 1799, graduated from Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, Maine, in 1826 as the second black graduate of a US university.
In the same year he celebrated the half-century of the American revolu-
tion with a speech on the virtues of revolutionary transformation. But the
revolution he spoke of was the Haitian revolution. He went on to par-
ticipate in two abolitionist newspapers, Freedom’s Journal and Rights of All.
About the same time, Daniel Walker published An Appeal to the Colored
Citizens of the World, but especially to those of the United States of America. This
tract came close to advocating the need for a just war against oppression.
It was, however, the notion of a Christian rather than a Jacobin republic
which had the greatest purchase amongst American abolitionists, both black
and white, and which registered its earliest impact on the African conti-
nent itself. The foundation at the turn of the century of the freed slave
colonies of Liberia and Sierre Leone provided a context within which a
small African-American intelligentsia could emerge. Alexander Crummell,
founder of the first Negro Academy in the United States (1897), had expe-
rienced racialism in America. He moved in abolitionist circles in Britain,
where he took a Cambridge degree, and had experience of teaching in
Liberia (Langley 1979,pp.23–31).
Crummell had much in common with Ram Mohun Roy. He was uncon-
vinced by the idea of absolute natural rights and also rejected the ‘atonement’
idea that blacks had earned freedom through suffering (Crummell 1861).
12
He held instead that the colonisation of Africa by educated black Christians
was part of God’s plan to create a worldwide republic of virtue (Crum-
mell 1856). Crummell’s vision of the Christian civilising mission appears
to have been heavily influenced by Bishop Butler’s ethical thought. Again,
this ‘black Zionism’ echoed some of the earlier Ethiopian discourse. But
it more obviously drew on liberal imperialist and free trade doctrines. As
with Roy, Crummell believed that commerce would banish the oppression
associated with monopoly and ignorance.
As in India and China, though, this was a relatively brief phase. Before
the end of the century black writers began to argue a relativistic case.
The culture and history of the ‘Negro Race’, it was said, constituted a
particularly favourable environment for true Christianity. Imperialism and
11 ‘Julius S. Scott on John Brown Russworm, Africans to Americans’, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
part 3/3i3131.html.
12 Crummell was one of the first religious and political thinkers to make a transition from the atonement
idea to the idea of Jesus as social exemplar, see Hilton 1988.
860
European political thought and the wider world
European domination was a destructive rather than a creative force. Edward
Blyden was a West Indian-born Christian preacher (Langley 1979,pp.35–
41). He lived in both Liberia and Sierra Leone and became one of the
earliest ideologues of pan-Africanism. Blyden held that the Negro race was
characterised by a ‘communistic’ patriarchy
13
which found both Western
industrialism and individualistic versions of Christianity repellent. In his
book Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) he argued, in effect, that
Islam suited African conditions better than Christianity, especially in its
European missionary version. Orishatukeh Faduma (alias W. J. Davies), a
Yoruba born in British Guyana, developed a more scientific version of the
argument (Moore 1996). He was influenced by Liberal Protestant Theol-
ogy, which had begun to postulate the need to accept African and Asian
cultures in their own right. Animated by the sense that faith and reason
were immanent in all cultures, liberal theologians came to stress the idea
of cultural and racial difference. But they rejected the type of hierarchical
racism promoted by Gobineau.
14
Faduma carefully delineated the thought
underlying the ‘ancient constitutions’ of the Yoruba and Asante kingdoms
of West Africa, displaying the movement’s kinship with early anthropology.
He argued that God uses the evolution of races and cultures to advance the
corporate life of mankind, echoing a theme of Herbert Spencer. Africans
had once created the civilisation of Egypt and, through it, Greece. They
would once again rise to sanctify the world. He wrote:
The fundamental principles [of Christianity and reason] will ever remain the same,
while in their application to meet the necessities of the human race, adaptation is a
desideratum. This is as fair as it is scientific. Upon the Hebrew mind there is, and ought
to be, a Hebrew coloring; upon the Negro mind, a Negro coloring, upon the European
mind a European coloring. (Moore 1996,p.79)
The intellectual position of Blyden, Faduma and their generation is rem-
iniscent of that of Vivekananda. This is no mere coincidence. Protestant
liberalism and pan-Africanism both flourished in the atmosphere created by
the 1893 Parliament of Religions. Vivekananda, of course, elaborated his
socio-political ideology in a context where the living traditions of Vaish-
navite ethics and practice were all around. Blyden and Faduma viewed
Africa from a distance. Their world was the world of the slave triangle and
abolitionism. But pan-Africanism was not simply an invented tradition. It
13 Much of Blyden’s sociology of Africa was written in journals after 1885. It was synthesised in Blyden
1908.
14 For specific refutations of Gobineau by pan-Africanists, see Mathurin 1976.
861
Christopher Bayly
drew on early anthropological observation of African societies and on the
memory and experience of African converts to Christianity.
Within those African societies themselves, as was observed at the begin-
ning of this case study, Christianity was the almost exclusive form of Western
thought to make an impact in the course of the nineteenth century. John
and Jean Comaroff have argued that African reception of Christianity was
a form of ‘colonisation of the mind’ which involved the erasing or total
transformation of earlier ideolog ies. By contrast, J. D. Y. Peel and his pupils
would retort that Africans and Europeans met on terms of discursive, if
not material equality. Peel’s major study of the Yoruba represents the most
exhaustive work on African political thought yet written. Certainly, as early
as the 1830s Africans in the west and south of the continent were ‘convert-
ing’ the Christian message. Africans downplayed the redemptive message
of European Christianity. They stressed instead Christ’s role in cleansing
the body politic, a distant echo of African religion. They saw Christianity
as a means of affirming the proper social order, organised through elders,
age sets and friendship. Above all, biblical ideas of the Chosen People and
the Mosaic Law provided ideological legitimation for the emergence of
new forms of nationality. Amongst the Yoruba, a series of educated con-
verts, of whom Dr Samuel Johnson was the most famous, created a new
narrative of Yoruba history which was compatible with Christianity. These
men erased the memory of earlier ethnic and political conflict within the
‘nation’. They transformed earlier deities into historical figures. They drew
on the example of Saint Augustine’s conversion of the pagan English into
a Christian nation (Peel 2000,pp.278–309). The upsurge of healing cults,
community-based forms of prayer and church organisation pointed forward
to the way in which African churches would become the basic units for
emerging African nationalism and its ideologies of Negritude.
7 Conclusion
A short chapter on a vast topic such as this can only hope to challenge the
student of Western political thought by pointing to a seemingly obvious fact.
This is that people outside Europe consistently and creatively grappled with
abstract political thought during the nineteenth century. The story is one of
how they received and transformed European ideologies within ‘ecological
niches’ created by Asian, African or Latin American philosophical traditions
and local socio-economic conditions. This created new schools of thought
that were neither ‘Western’ nor Asian and African, but spoke to a common
862
European political thought and the wider world
global modernity. Broadly, during the nineteenth century at least, ideologies
of individual rights in the extra-European world were subordinated to
ideas of order, stability and hierarchy to an even greater extent than in
Europe. But there is a broader conclusion here. The very discipline of
the history of European political thought might itself be transformed by
a consideration of the extra-European career of these ideologies. Political
ideas must certainly be understood in the light of the intention of their
authors and their meaning within a wider field of discourse and public
debate. Yet the history of political thought cannot really be divorced from
the history of religion and the history of science, either outside or within
Europe. The category ‘political thought’ is self-limiting. This is especially
true of the nineteenth century when conceptions of polity were inflected
once again with universalising religious themes
15
andexpressedinterms
of metaphors derived from science. Finally, the career of political ideas
outside Europe makes it clear that even before the rise of modern socialist
and democratic ideologies, political practice and popular conceptions of
purity and justice fed back into and transformed theories of government
constructed by elites. To this extent, the ‘hermeneutic turn’ in political
theory has only just begun and the study of transcultural hermeneutics will
be a discipline for the future.
15 Hilton 1988; see also Marx and Engels 2002, editor’s introduction.
863