Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Duncan Bell

Critics of empire drew different lessons from the past. One of the ﬁercest

detractors of French imperialism, the political economist and parliamen-

tarian Am

ee Desjobert, reached the opposite conclusion to Tocqueville,

arguing that the British experience highlighted the ruinous expense of

empire (Pitts 2005,pp.219–25, 185–9). It was popular to point to the decline

of previous European empires, especially the Spanish, and to utilise the

long-standing argument that Roman liberty had ultimately been destroyed

by the quest for empire. The symbolic capital of the ancient world, though,

could be spent in different ways. Numerous British commentators, includ-

ing Thomas Carlyle (1971,p.202) and the historian J. A. Froude (Froude

1886,pp.8–10;Bell2009) were inspired by the annals of Rome, whilst

others, notably James Mill, John Stuart Mill and William Ewart Gladstone,

preferred the alternative model of settler colonisation presented by Greece

(Gladstone 1855; James Mill 1992a; John Stuart Mill 1843). Even as the

late Victorian proponents of ‘Greater Britain’ hymned the novelty of the

British (colonial) empire, they tended nevertheless to look to America for

inspiration, viewing it as a model for an expansive federal polity. Seeley

(1883) even saw America as providing the template for an Anglo-Saxon

‘world-state’.

Comparison could also be employed as a strategy to ‘deﬂect moral anxi-

ety’ about the actual practices of empire (Welch 2003,p.254). The brutality

of conquest and imperial rule could be relativised, and thus downplayed,

either by comparing it favourably to the gross atrocities of past empires

or by arguing (as was widespread in British debates over India) that the

subject populations were better off governed by the British, whatever their

defects, than by another more violent imperial state. Seeley wrote of the

‘unjustiﬁable means’ by which the East India Company acquired power,

adding the equally common qualiﬁer that their behaviour was ‘not as bad

as many others’, and stressing that such ‘crimes’ as had been committed,

‘have been almost universal in colonisation’ (Seeley 1883,pp.135–6). It

could also be argued that the imperial rulers had done so much damage

to indigenous political structures that if they withdrew the resulting chaos

would be devastating. For the radical politician Charles Dilke, even if the

British Empire in India was secured illegitimately it was essential to remain,

because after withdrawal India would fall prey to ‘Russia or to herself ’

(Dilke 1868, ii,p.383). This was an argument that Marx also raised, with-

out offering a clear answer. ‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no

known history’, he proclaimed in the early 1850s. ‘What we call its history

is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on

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the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question

therefore is not whether the English have a right to conquer India, but

whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by

the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton’ (Marx and Engels 1960b,

p. 76). The implication was that the British were acting as the ‘unconscious

tool of history’ in bringing about social revolution (Marx and Engels 1960a,

p. 37).

Much imperial thought was driven by the logic of international com-

petition. The power and status of a country were often seen as a func-

tion of its physical size and global reach. Combined with a patriotic

desire for national greatness, the concern with size and military strength

led to a widespread belief in the value, indeed the necessity, of imperial

expansion.

The obsession with scale, territory and the control of key

strategic points catalysed the late nineteenth-century emergence of the

ﬁeld of geopolitics, popular especially in Germany, although such topics

had been central to debates over empire t hroughout the century. Imperial

discourses were also infused, although unevenly across national contexts,

with ‘Social Darwinist’ ideas about perpetual struggle and harsh inter-

state (and often interracial) competition.

But the political repercussions

of evolution were rarely straightforward, as proponents of ‘peace biology’

argued that it pointed towards increasing levels of international harmony

and co-operation, and virulent forms of evolutionary racism could be used

to argue against imperial expansion on the grounds that this led to dan-

gerous interracial mixing (Crook 1994;Hawkins1997). Added to the con-

cern with scale was the belief, still strong in the late nineteenth century,

although often challenged by historians today, that great empires generated

great wealth. It should be noted, however, that economic gain, whilst usu-

ally important, was far from the only or even the most prominent reason

offered to justify empire. Even leading promoters of the economic beneﬁts

of empire, such as Joseph Chamberlain, stressed the role of glory, virtue

and character in defending expansion (Cain 2007a). Indeed many imperi-

alists lamented the standing given to economic calculations, seeing them as

debased and lacking in the true spirit and grandeur evoked by the imperial

mission.

10 For a good example of this, which threw in for good measure an account of the civilisational powers

of commerce, see the French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s, De la Colonisation chez les Peuples

Modernes (1874). In 1880 Leroy-Beaulieu became Professor of Political Economy at the Coll

ege de

France.

11 For further discussion of race see Pick (in this volume); Rich 1986 and Mandler 2000.

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3 Liberalism and empire: glory and civilisation

John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville played crucial roles in the evo-

lution of European liberal thought. They were also immersed in imperial

affairs, as both theorists and political actors. Although their conceptions of

liberalism overlapped on many points, their justiﬁcations of empire differed

considerably.

Following defeat in the Napoleonic wars, and under the terms of the

Congress of Vienna (1815), France was stripped of most of its imperial

possessions. This was the humiliating conclusion to a series of imperial

conﬂicts with Britain that had raged throughout the eighteenth century, a

period that Seeley labelled a ‘second Hundred Years’ War’ (Seeley 1883,

p. 24). Donning the mantle of Alexander and proclaiming himself liberator

not conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte had invaded Egypt in 1798, only to be

driven out by 1801. During the ensuing century foreign conquest appeared

regularly on the agenda of French thinkers, who often looked back wist-

fully to Napoleon’s brief foray into extra-European expansion (Pitts 2005,

pp. 163–96). Benjamin Constant, the Swiss-born anatomist of the ‘liberty

of the moderns’, regarded Napoleon’s rule as the embodiment of the ‘Spirit

of Conquest’ (1814). In common with most European nineteenth-century

critics, Constant viewed empire from two angles. He lamented the unjust

denial of self-government to those living in the conquered societies. ‘It is

one thing’, he wrote, ‘to defend one’s fatherland, another to attack people

who themselves have a homeland’ (Constant 1988c, p. 69). And echoing a

long-standing theme in European political thought (Armitage 2002), he also

feared that the pursuit of empire challenged domestic stability and progress,

and in particular that the state centralisation and militarism necessary for

successful empire building threatened liberty. Conquest was a ‘gross and dis-

astrous anachronism’, an option suited to the world of the ancients not that

of the commercially vigorous and increasingly liberal moderns (Constant

1988c, p. 55, 1988b).

As the century unfolded, this sceptical attitude, inherited from the eigh-

teenth century, became increasingly rare in France, although it never disap-

peared entirely. From the 1830s French liberals, disappointed by their failure

to enact radical transformation at home and fearful of the fragility of the

country, looked increasingly to empire (Pitts 2005). Mid-century French

liberal imperial ideology was inﬂuenced in particular by Jean-Baptiste Say

and followers of Saint-Simon, most notably Michel Chevalier who drew

heavily on British and American imperial examples to advocate a global

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civilising role for France (Todd 2011,pp.175–6). Throughout the century

the idea of civilisation played an important, though shifting, role in the

French imperial imagination: the universal claims of the post-revolutionary

French political model should, it was argued, be spread to the benighted

corners of the world. This ideological projection bolstered Napoleon’s

North African expedition and the creation of the Institut d’Egypte in 1799,

and it pervaded the ofﬁcial reasoning behind the conquest of Algeria, which

had begun with the capture of Algiers in 1830. But it was in the second

half of the century and in particular during the Third Republic, that its

hold on French thought was strongest (Giradet 1972). A core aspect of the

argument focused on ‘mastery’: ‘To be civilised was to be free from speciﬁc

forms of tyranny: the tyranny of the elements over man, of disease over

health, of instinct over reason, of ignorance over knowledge and of despo-

tism over liberty’ (Conklin 1997,pp.5–6). The self-proclaimed possession

of such mastery opened the door to empire. Science and the ‘philosophy of

scientism’ were also central to this vision, as inﬂuentially articulated by the

republican French prime minister and colonial advocate Jules Ferry dur-

ing the 1870sand1880s (Petitjean 2004). In a speech to the Chamber of

Deputies in 1884 he argued that ‘the superior races have a right because they

have a duty. They have the duty to civilise the inferior races’ (Ferry 1884,

p. 210). Many French thinkers, administrators and politicians embraced the

grandiose claims of la mission civilisatrice. But as in Britain, intellectuals did

not speak with one voice, and many remained highly critical of imperial

aggression (see, for example, Louis 1905).

Tocqueville’s views on empire need to be seen in relation to the post-

Napoleonic political status of France and the vicissitudes of an emergent

French liberalism. As much a man of the eighteenth century as the nine-

teenth, he combined aristocratic republicanism with liberalism. The cru-

cial function of empire in Tocqueville’s thinking has often been ignored or

downplayed, with Isaiah Berlin even claiming that he was opposed to ‘every

form of rule by outsiders no matter how benevolent’ (Berlin 1965,p.204).

Best-known for his insightful analysis of American and French democracy,

Tocqueville was also an ardent proponent of French colonialism in Algeria

(Boesche 2005; Pitts 2005; Richter 1963). Like his friend Mill, moreover,

he was an active participant, serving as an expert on Algeria in the Chamber

of Deputies (1839–51), visiting the colony on a number of occasions, and

writing parliamentary reports on military and political strategy. But Toc-

queville’s vision of empire was not primarily motivated by a desire to civilise.

Unlike Mill and also unlike many later French writers, he justiﬁed empire

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mainly in terms of securing national glory and on the revivifying effects

of colonialism on French society. Strong national ‘morale’ and an active

citizenry were, after all, antidotes to the dangers heralded by the spread of

democracy (Kelly 1992,pp.31, 54, 65). Power politics and republican virtue

provided the foundations for conquest and colonial government. Striking a

neo-Roman note, he wrote in his Recollections (Tocqueville 1959c, p . 79)that

‘war almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character.

In some cases it is the only check to the excessive growth of certain propen-

sities that naturally spring out of the equality of conditions, and it must be

considered as a necessary corrective to certain inveterate diseases to which

democratic communities are liable.’

The project of empire performed a

similar function.

The colonisation of North Africa would establish the material and moral

foundations for national greatness. Concerned with the moribund state of

French society, which he viewed as deﬁcient in patriotism, increasingly

materialistic, and lacking adequate social cohesion and moral purpose, Toc-

queville sought to reinvigorate the patria through foreign conquest. With

‘time, perseverance, ability, and justice’, he prophesied, ‘I have no doubt

that we will be able to raise a great monument to our country’s glory on

the African coast’ (Tocqueville 1837b, p. 24). His conception of colonialism

changed over time.

In his two ‘Letters on Algeria’ (1837) he offered an

account of the possibility of slowly and sympathetically integrating, and then

assimilating, the assorted indigenous populations with the French settlers,

foreseeing them all living eventually under common laws and bound by

mutual respect and tolerance. Following his visit to Algeria in 1841,how-

ever, he became more pessimistic about the prospects of assimilation, arguing

in his ‘Essay on Algeria’ (1841), which was only published posthumously,

that the French colonists should remain separate from, and dominant over,

local communities. He turned increasingly to address questions about strat-

egy and imperial governance. As the French became embroiled in a brutal

war, he prescribed violence against those who resisted (Tocqueville 1846,

1847a, 1847b). ‘In order for us to colonise to any extent’, he proclaimed, ‘we

must necessarily use not only violent measures, but visibly iniquitous ones’,

and this meant that it was sometimes justiﬁed to ‘burn harvests ...empty

silos, and ﬁnally ...seizeunarmedmen, women, and children’ (Tocqueville

12 Published posthumously, Tocqueville’s Recollections are a highly selective account of his thoughts and

actions during 1848–9.

13 See especially Pitts 2005,chs.6–7, to which this overview is indebted; and also Richter 1963 and

We l c h 2003.

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1841,pp.83, 70). These cruel observations should be read alongside his sym-

pathetic yet ultimately ambivalent account of the American extermination

of the Amerindians in Democracy in America (Tocqueville 2000,pp.302–91).

It was only towards the end of his political career, in his parliamentary

reports on the state of Algerian policy (Tocqueville 1847a, 1847b),thathe

exhibited disillusionment with the methodical violence of the occupation

and acknowledged its counterproductive nature, although he never turned

against the project of colonialism itself. It was here that he invoked, in des-

peration as much as with conﬁdence, the universal creed of the republic.

‘Let us not, in the middle of the nineteenth century, beg in the history

of the conquest of America over again’, he warned. ‘Let us bear in mind

that we would be a thousand times less excusable than those who once

had the misfortune of setting such examples; for we are less fanatical, and

we have the principles and enlightenment of the French revolution spread

throughout the world’ (Tocqueville 1847a, p. 146). Instead he offered vague

suggestions, modelled on British experience, for indirect rule via co-opted

local elites, stressing the coincidence of interests between the colonised and

the colonisers.

Tocqueville, then, saw a double movement, outwards and upwards, as

an escape route from France’s troubles: the quest for empire would force

the metropolitan citoyen to face outwards, substituting a solipsistic and

politically neutered individualism with a wider conception of the pub-

lic (national) good; and France would climb upwards, promoted from a

dethroned and demoralised great power to a resurgent force in global poli-

tics. Tocqueville’s imperial vision highlights the dissonance, typical of many

nineteenth-century liberals, between a belief in the principle that people

have a right to rule themselves and actual support for foreign conquest. It

also demonstrates the different ways in which liberals could justify empire.

There was nothing inherently liberal in Tocqueville’s arguments; they could

have been, and have been, made by non-liberals. Indeed they displayed more

than a passing resemblance to a far older language of republican imperialism.

Such arguments were anathema to many liberals, including Tocqueville’s

British friends and correspondents, who were at pains to criticise them, for

his position was grounded more explicitly in a straightforward concern with

national interest than with the purported welfare of the subject populations.

In Britain, as in France, debates over the nature and justice of empire

led to unusual intellectual alliances as well as to signiﬁcant divergences

between otherwise comparable thinkers. Political radicals, for example,

offered contradictory accounts of empire. Meanwhile, people with distinct

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theoretical and political perspectives often converged on similar justiﬁca-

tions for empire. A common point of agreement was the argument that

the legitimacy of the imperial project derived primarily from the beneﬁts it

generated for subject populations. For example, the utilitarian ‘philosoph-

ical radical’ James Mill argued in 1810 that even if the British occupation

of India failed to produce any economic beneﬁts (indeed even if it resulted

in signiﬁcant losses) it was nevertheless warranted if it improved the lives of

those it ruled over. ‘If we wish for the prolongation of an English govern-

ment in India, which we do most sincerely, it is for the sake of the natives,

not of England. India has never been anything but a burden; and anything

but a burden, we are afraid, it cannot be rendered. But this English govern-

ment in India, with all its vices, is a blessing of unspeakable magnitude to the

population of Hindostan.’ He concluded, in a passage that simultaneously

acknowledged the history of European brutality while dismissing it as of

secondary importance, that ‘[e]ven the utmost abuse of European power,

is better, we are persuaded, than the most temperate exercise of Oriental

despotism’ (Mill 1810,p.371). Such views were not limited to ambitious

radicals, or to utilitarians. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Whig parliamen-

tarian, popular historian and ﬁerce critic of Mill, offered a complementary

defence of empire in a speech in July 1833 addressing the renewal of the East

India Company charter. He argued that India was not yet capable of self-

government, but that at some (unspeciﬁed) future date this would change,

and that when this momentous transition occurred it would be the result

of well-intentioned and skilful imperial ‘good government’. The British

would be able to congratulate themselves on a magniﬁcent deed. ‘To have

found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition,

to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all

the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title of glory all of our own’

(Macaulay 1833,pp.585–6).

The paradigmatic defence of this ‘benevolent’ vision of empire can be

found in the writings of John Stuart Mill.

Following in the footsteps of his

father, Mill worked for most of his adult life in the ofﬁces of the East India

14 Macaulay was the author of a famous intervention in the debate between ‘Orientalists’ and ‘Angli-

cisers’ over how best to allocate money for the teaching of l anguages in Indian higher education (the

former g roup favoured Sanskrit and Arabic, the latter preferred English). His Anglicising ‘Minute on

Indian Education’ (2 February 1835) argued, as James Mill had also done, that the English language

should be supported because it conveyed the teachings of a superior civilisation.

15 Mill’s views on empire have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. See, for example, Bell

2010;Jahn2005; Kohn and O’Neill 2006;Mantena2010;Mehta1999;Moriet al. 1999; Pitts 2005;

Sullivan 1983 and Zastoupil 1994.

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Company, rising to senior rank and leaving only when the government

stripped it of its charter in 1858 following the Sepoy Rebellion (1857). His

life and work were inextricably entwined with empire.

Mill can be interpreted as one of a long line of utilitarian advocates

of empire (Stokes 1959), an arch proponent of what Bernard Williams

termed ‘Government House Utilitarianism’ in light of the elitism, esoteric

nature, and ‘important colonial origins’ of the doctrine (Williams 1995,

p. 166). Many utilitarians were indeed ardent imperialists, including Mill,

James Fitzjames Stephen and Henry Sidgwick (Sidgwick 1891,pp.311–28,

1902,p.236). Stephen, a judge and jurisprudence scholar who also served

as Legal Member of the Viceroy’s Council in India (1868–72), sought to

defend a refor mulated liberalism that would govern with a ‘liberal imperial

spirit’ (Stephen 1862,p.82). And he argued in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,

his stinging assault on John Stuart Mill, that a patriotic citizenry should

bask in the glory of military victories in India (Stephen 1990,p.113). His

authoritarian liberalism exempliﬁed yet another modulation of imperial

political thought. But while Stokes was correct to argue that utilitarianism

had a profound effect on the government of India, not all utilitarians were

staunch imperialists. Bentham was, in general, critical of empire. In offering

(unsolicited) advice to the leaders of the new French Republic, he wrote

that ‘[c]olony-holding is a species of slave-holding equally pernicious to the

tyrant and the slave’ (Bentham 2002b, p. 202). And in his pamphlet ‘Eman-

cipate Your Colonies!’ – written originally in 1793, but only published in

1830, and aimed primarily at the post-revolutionary state

– he argued that

emancipation was essential on the grounds of ‘[j]ustice, consistency, policy,

economy, honour, [and] generosity’:

You will, I say, give up your colonies – because you have no right to govern them,

because they had rather not be governed by you, because it is against their interest to

be governed by you, because you get nothing by governing them, because you can’t

keep them, because the expense of trying to keep them would be ruinous, because

your constitution would suffer by your keeping them . . . If the happiness of mankind is

your object, and the declaration of rights your guide, you will set them free. (Bentham

1830,pp.312–13)

This advice was not only applicable to France, but also to Britain and

Spain. Indeed if the French emancipated their colonies, the British might

16 The document was renamed Emancipate Your Colonies! for its publication, under Bentham’s guidance,

in 1830.

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be forced to follow them (Bentham 1830,p.310). The choice between set-

ting a positive example and coercing reluctant subject populations was stark.

‘Reform the world by example, you act generously and wisely: reform the

world by force, you might as well reform the moon, and the design is ﬁt

only for lunatics’ (Bentham 1830,p.310). He was similarly critical of Span-

ish imperialism in his exhortatory ‘Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria’ (1820–2).

But in common with virtually all self-professed critics of imperialism, Ben-

tham was not above defending some aspects (or an idealised version) of

empire. During his long career, and to some degree inﬂuenced by shifts

in his wider economic and constitutional thought, there were times (for

example in 1801–4 and later in 1831) when he did lend heavily qualiﬁed

support to speciﬁc colonial policies. At the turn of the century, a period

in which he viewed the political world through a dark prism, he offered

some positive comments on the social and economic beneﬁts of settler

colonisation. And towards the end of his life, and inspired by the writings of

the maverick political economist Edward Gibbon Wakeﬁeld, he produced

an unpublished plan for a new colony in South Australia (Schoﬁeld 2006,

pp. 199–220; Semmel 1970). Herbert Spencer was, as we shall see, another

utilitarian who despite his vociferous criticisms of imperialism was never-

theless willing to occasionally justify, and indeed encourage, limited colonial

ventures.

Utilitarianism, like liberalism, was theoretically indeterminate in regard

to empire. Mill’s formulation of liberal utilitarianism, on the other hand,

consecrated imperial rule. He argued that in providing a global public good

the empire beneﬁted the greatest number, bringing prog ress to the back-

ward and helping to secure the stability of the international system. It was

an engine of ‘improvement’. As such, the empire can be seen as providing

an enormous laboratory for his ‘ethology’, the science of individual and

collective ‘character’ that he sketched in the System of Logic (Mill 1974,

vii,pp.861–75). But empire was only justiﬁable, he maintained, if it ulti-

mately beneﬁted those subjected to it. ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of

government in dealing with barbarians’, he wrote in On Liberty,‘provided

the end be their improvement, and the means justiﬁed by actually effect-

ing that end’ (Mill 1977a, p. 224). A Tocquevillian defence of empire was

illegitimate. The connection between his cult of expertise and his views

on empire is also apparent. Mill regarded expert knowledge as the basis

for stable and judicious government, as witnessed in his discussion of the

balancing mechanisms necessary to constrain the excesses of parliamentary

democracy (Mill 1977b, pp. 448–520). He was likewise keen to stop the

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Empire and imperialism

national government interfering in the operation of imperial affairs. The

government of India, he argued, should be left free of the fetters imposed

by invidious political partisanship, bureaucratic amateurishness and moral

myopia, and instead left in the hands of experienced, disinterested imperial

administrators – men like himself .

Mill’s understanding of the beneﬁts and burdens of civilisation was struc-

tured by a notion of universal and sequential progress. Civilisation was a

rare and fragile achievement, a level of development attained by only a

very few communities (Mill 1836a; Kelly 2010,pp.174–218). National self-

determination, that other liberal shibboleth, was likewise reserved only for

those who demonstrated the necessary and sufﬁcient conditions of nation-

ality. His famed deﬁnition of liberty, the ‘one very simple principle’ that

governed his ideal conception of society, did not apply to those who had

failed to reach the ‘maturity of their faculties’. Children, the mentally dis-

abled, and those ‘backward states of society in which the race itself may be

considered as in its nonage’ were not included within its embrace. ‘Lib-

erty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to

the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free

and equal discussion’ (Mill 1977a, p. 224). Only a select few states had

reached this level of maturity. Mill followed his father’s view of the ‘back-

ward’ condition of India, a view elaborated famously in The History of

British India (1818), although his position oscillated throughout his career,

moving from a harsh attitude to race and Indian development in his youth

to a more sympathetic approach in the 1830s–40s, darkening again in the

aftermath of 1857 (Zastoupil 1994,pp.153–4). And like his father, Mill

never visited India, preferring to judge it from afar. And judge he did.

‘[B]arbarians’, he stated, ‘have no rights as a nation,exceptarighttosuch

treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, ﬁt them for becoming

one’ (Mill 1859a, p. 119; see also Mill 1836a, 1977a; 1977b, pp. 566–7).

This was because they were incapable of reciprocity and of following rules,

and as such were not to be accorded equality with more advanced states,

wherein the cognitive and moral qualities of individuals were more highly

developed. The ‘minds’ of those lacking civilisation, he wrote, ‘are not

capable of so great an effort’ (Mill 1859a, p. 118). This argument simultane-

ously denied ‘barbarians’ any rights against imperial conquest and supplied

a justiﬁcation for conquering in the ﬁrst place. Mill argued, then, that the

primary duty of an imperial occupying power was, through a combination

of coercion (primarily legislative) and example setting, to help drag the

indigenous population into a position where it was ‘capable’ of responsible

883