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

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Duncan Bell

self-government; to guide, in the common familial metaphor of the age, the

children into adulthood. As he wrote in the Considerations on Representative

Government,theimperial

mode of government is as legitimate as any other, if it is the one which in the existing

state of civilisation of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher stage

of improvement. There are . . . conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is

in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is speciﬁcally

wanting to render them capable of a higher civilisation. (Mill 1977b, p. 416)

During the closing decades of the century, and especially in the wake of the

Sepoy Rebellion and the controversy that followed the br utal suppression of

a rebellion in Morant Bay, Jamaica in the 1860s, both the value and the plau-

sibility of the civilising mission were increasingly challenged in Britain.

In his exposition of Liberalism Herbert Samuel, ‘new liberal’ thinker and

later senior politician, praised the civilising potential of imperialism. ‘A

barbarian race may prosper best if for a period, even for a long period, it

surrenders the right of self-government in exchange for the teachings of

civilisation’ (Samuel 1902,p.330). Reﬂective colonial administrators such

as Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, also remained dedicated to the mission

to civilise (Owen 2004,pp.183–349). In the hands of thinkers such as

Henry Maine and Seeley, however, there emerged a somewhat less ambi-

tious, disenchanted vision of empire that sought to defend conquest more

in anthropological, sociological and historical terms than in the name of

universal morality and relentless progress (Mantena 2010). This occurred at

the very time when French thinkers were placing an ever-greater emphasis

on the civilising potential of empire, although the problems that had been

faced in Algeria often tempered their optimism (Conklin 1997,pp.21–3).

One theme that has often been overlooked in exploring Mill’s thought

is the importance he placed on settler colonisation. Whilst it is true that

much of his attention was taken up with India, he also wrote widely and

passionately about the economic and political value of colonies (Bell 2010).

Mill was associated early in his career with the vocal ‘colonial reform move-

ment’, which was inﬂuenced by the philosophic radicalism of his father and

Bentham. He saw colonisation not as the imposition of ‘civilisation’ on the

‘barbarian’, but rather the formation of new and already civilised communi-

ties throughout the world. As he wrote of Wakeﬁeld’s proposed settlement

in Australia, ‘Like the Grecian colonies, which ﬂourished so rapidly and so

17 On the Eyre controversy, which involved many of the leading intellectuals of the day, including (on

opposite sides) Mill and Thomas Carlyle, see Kostal 2005 and Semmel 1962.

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wonderfully as soon to eclipse the mother country, this settlement will be

formed by transplanting an entire society, and not a mere fragment of one’

(Mill 1843,p.739). In the early part of his career he focused chieﬂy on the

socio-economic beneﬁts of an ‘enlightened view of colonisation’ (Mill 1834,

p. 733), arguing in particular that planned (and self-ﬁnancing) emigration

to the colonies would help to alleviate the poverty of the British working

classes, while strengthening the economy as a whole (Mill 1965a, bk. 2,

pp. 962–8). While this remained an abiding theme in his vision of colonisa-

tion, in the last twenty years of his life he placed considerable emphasis on

a mix of socio-economic and geopolitical factor s. In the Considerations on

Representative Government, for example, he argued that colonies were valu-

able for at least three reasons (Mill 1977b, pp. 565–6). First, they reduced

the probability of war by minimising the number of potentially aggressive

sovereign units in the international system. Second, they helped to keep the

markets of the world open, preventing ‘that mutual exclusion by hostile tar-

iffs, which none of the great communities of mankind, except England, have

yet completely outgrown’.

Finally, the colonies offered a shining example

to the world: ‘in the case of the British possessions it has the advantage,

specially valuable at the present time, of adding to the moral inﬂuence, and

weight in the councils of the world, of the Power which, in all existence,

best understands liberty’. Despite this optimism Mill, like Tocqueville, was

critical of the actual behaviour of many settlers, especially in relation to

indigenous communities (Mill 1977b, p. 571). This was a fairly common

lament, and it could even act as a further justiﬁcation for the extension of

empire. At the turn of the century George Bernard Shaw (1900) offered

a Fabian socialist defence of imperialism in Southern Africa, arguing that

states, like landlords, had no special rights over the land they controlled;

political action had to be justiﬁed in the name of a wider humanity. Conse-

quently, in the absence of a world state or federation benevolent imperialism

was warranted in order to protect indigenous populations from tyrannical

rulers, in this case the Boers.

Mill’s vision of the colonies ultimately complemented his views on

despotic rule; both helped spread British values, liberty and good govern-

ment in particular, around the world. Both, that is, fed the ﬂames of progress.

He conceived of the political connection with the settlement colonies as a

18 Mill’s general views on the political economy of colonisation were inﬂuenced by the writings

of Wakeﬁeld, who as well as providing inspiration for Bentham also served as a target for Marx

(Wakeﬁeld 1968;Mill1965a, pp. 120–2, 735–6 and 958–9;Marx1954a, ch. 33; Pappe 1951).

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voluntary one, however, to be rescinded the moment either party dissented.

This view presupposed par ity between metropole and colony in two key

domains: individual rationality and political culture. This parity was entirely

absent from his conception of ‘barbarous’ communities.

4 Liberalism and empire: ambivalence and critique

While liberals were amongst the most fervent defenders of empire, many

also launched harsh assaults on what Constant had labelled the ‘spirit of

conquest’.

Two leading ﬁgures in the evolution of British liberalism, the

individualist philosopher Herbert Spencer and the ‘new liberal’ political

economist John Hobson, illustrate some of ways in which liberals of different

stripes came to view empire and imperialism critically. They also articulated

some of the common liberal ambivalences about empire.

Herbert Spencer has a good claim to being the most widely read philoso-

pher of the nineteenth century, his views ﬁltering widely throughout and

beyond Europe (Harr

e 2003,p.24; Bayly in this volume, Chapter 25).

One of the reasons for this popularity, especially outside Europe, was the

vehemence of his opposition to imperialism in virtually all of its forms.

From his earliest writings in the 1840s through to his last, often desperate,

outpourings in the wake of the South African War (1899–1902), he lam-

basted the greed, arrogance and hypocrisy of empire (Bell and Sylvest 2006;

We i n s t e i n 2005). As public attitudes and imperial thought mutated, and

as ‘jingoism’ took hold of swathes of the British intellectual elite, Spencer

remained steadfast in his opposition. His criticisms of empire should be seen

as an integral element of his wider critique of political authority.

In The Proper Sphere of Government (1842–3), Spencer derided the ‘evils’

of war, and in particular wars of conquest, which diverted attention and

resources away from industry and commerce, the underlying mechanisms of

progress. Violence was ‘inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity’, retarding

the ‘civilisation of the world’ and acting as the ‘grand bar to the extension

of that feeling of universal brotherhood with all nations, so essential to

the real prosperity of mankind’ (Spencer 1992,pp.212–13). Although he

later argued that war was an essential engine for the original development

of human communities, he contended that in the modern world it had

been rendered obsolete, a throwback to a darker age and a threat to the

19 The most consistent critics of imperialism in Britain were the positivist followers of August Comte,

such as Frederic Harrison and F. S. Beesly (Claeys 2010). Many of the positivists (including Harrison)

were liberals.

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Empire and imperialism

hard won transition from ‘militant’ to ‘industrial’ society (Spencer 1992,

pp. 658–731). In an emblematic British radical idiom he decried

imperialism as the preserve of the governing elite, the aristocrats, mili-

tary, clergy and politicians, all of whom he routinely castigated for their

mendacity.

The empire was a ﬁnancial drain on the country, the wealth

it generated ending up in the hands of a select few. ‘But who are the

gainers? The monopolists. And who are the monopolists? The aristocracy’

(Spencer 1992,p.220). ‘[A]rtiﬁcial colonisation is injurious in each of its

several inﬂuences’, he argued, and ‘colonial trade has always been turned

into a monopoly for the beneﬁt of the aristocracy’ (Spencer 1992,p.261).

Spencer’s originality lay in anchoring these long-standing arguments in an

idiosyncratic ‘synthetic philosophy’, a non-Darwinian evolutionary account

of human development.

In an interesting twist on the common trope of ‘civilisation ver sus bar-

barism’ Spencer argued that the pursuit of empire threatened the ‘re-

barbarisation’ of Britain (Spencer 1902b). It was both a cause and a symptom

of the wider re-barbarisation – manifested also in the popularity of blood-

thirsty literature, jingoism over the war in South Africa, the fetishisation of

competitive spor ts (he loathed football), and the general ‘regimentation’ of

church, schools and political life – that he thought was ‘carrying us back

to medievalism’ (Spencer 1902c, p . 138). If left unchallenged, imperialism

promised to return Britain to a state of barbarous militancy. ‘[M]ilitancy’

and ‘imperialism’ were, he warned, ‘different manifestations of the same

social condition’ (Spencer 1902a, p. 113). In 1896 he wrote to his French

translator,

The truth is that, of all the feelings I entertain concerning social affairs, my detestation

of the barbarous conduct of strong peoples to weak people is the most intense . . . To

my thinking the nations which call themselves civilised are no better than white savages,

who, armed with their cannon and riﬂes, conquer tribes of dark savages, armed with

javelins and arrows, as easily as a giant thrashes a child, and who, having gloriﬁed

themselves in their victories, take possession of the conquered lands and tyrannise over

the subject peoples. (Duncan 1908,pp.399–400)

Not only was European imperialism cynical, hypocritical and cruel, it was

also, he argued, a type of ‘political burglary’ that was ‘diametrically opposed

to human progress’ (Duncan 1908,pp.399–400). It was a throwback to a

more primitive age. Like Bentham, Spencer was not in principle opposed

20 On radical attitudes to empire, see Cain 2007b; Claeys 2007b; and Taylor 1991.

21 For further details see Francis 2007;Taylor1992;andWeinstein1998.

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to colonisation when it was understood as a non-violent act securing and

populating ‘new’ territories. But state involvement in such colonisation was

never justiﬁed, as it led inevitably to state militancy, provided a poor deal for

emigrants, and guaranteed the unjust treatment of indigenous populations.

‘Our colonial history, to our shame be it spoken, is full of the injustice and

cruelty, to which the original possessors of the soil have been subjected’, thus

demonstrating the ‘inhumanity attendant upon state colonisation’ (Spencer

1992,p.224). This was an ‘artiﬁcial system’. Given his numerous arguments

in favour of a minimal state his opposition to government involvement in

colonisation was unsurprising. But he was not opposed to a ‘natural system’

of colonisation, whereby people emigrated to form new communities with-

out any government involvement, as long as this was the result of private

initiative, free from the machinery of the state. This would simultaneously

prevent all the dangers attendant on state ‘interference’ and lead to the

just treatment of indigenous populations; Spencer pointed to the expe-

rience of the English in Pennsylvania as an admirable example (Spencer

1992,pp.225–6). Such emigrants, however, were no longer to be regarded

as British citizens and they could not claim ‘protection from the mother

country’ (Spencer 1992,p.221). No gunboats would come to their rescue.

A leading new liberal thinker and a self-professed ‘economic heretic’,

J. A. Hobson also drew heavily from the well of radicalism in order to prof-

fer a sophisticated and inﬂuential critique of imperialism. His account of the

causal dynamics of imperialism shifted over time, as did his normative assess-

ment of the value of empire. Here, however, I will focus on his views up to

and including his seminal Imperialism: A Study (1902), a text that helped to set

the terms for much twentieth-century debate, especially through its inﬂu-

ence on V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin 1917;