Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

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addressed a series of mass meetings among his Midlothian constituents

that electriﬁed Liberals everywhere when they were published the next day

in the press.

“If we cast our eye to South Africa,” he thundered, “what do

we behold?”

That a nation whom we term savages have in defense of their own land offered

their naked bodies to the terribly improved artillery and arms of modern European

science, and have been mowed down by hundreds and by thousands, having

committed no offence, but having, with rude and ignorant courage, done what

were for them ... the duties of patriotism.

“Go from South Africa to the mountains of central Asia,” he continued.

In the hills of Afghanistan, British troops had been ordered to attack

uncooperative tribesmen and to burn their villages when they dared to

resist.

Those Hill Tribes had committed no real offence against us. We, in the pursuit

of our political objects, chose to establish military positions in their country.

If they resisted, would not you have done the same? ... The meaning of the

burning of the village is, that the women and the children were driven forth to

perish in the snows of winter. [Does that not rouse in British women] a senti-

ment of horror and grief, to think that the name of England, under no political

necessity, but for a war as frivolous as ever was waged in the history of man,

should be associated with consequences such as these?

Gladstone’s eloquent indictment of the Tory government’s imperial

policy certainly demonstrated that he hoped to replace it with a more

humane alternative, but how far did he really believe that people like the

Zulus or Afghanis had “equal rights” or should be allowed to manage

their own affairs? Was the liberal imperial spirit, marginalized in the

metropole since the 1840s, about to be revived by the leader of the

British left? Was the progress narrative to be reasserted in a form that

endorsed the right of Greater Britons of other colors and creeds?

1 Gladstone’s progress: from youthful reactionary

to aging radical

These questions are compli cated, since the leader in question, Gladstone,

had begu n his political life as a Tory, and his circuitous odyssey from High

Church theocrat to the “People’s William” only gradually brought him to

accept democracy as a viable form of government, even in Anglo-Saxon

John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols. (London, 1908), II: 117–79;

Richard Shannon, Gladstone, 2 vols., II, 1865–1898 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 157–247; Richard

Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation (London, 1963).

W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches (Leicester, 1971), quotes on 90–1, 91–2.

Gladstone’s progress 315

lands. As a ﬁrm believer in established ins titutions and authorities, the

young Tory orator had shown scant belief in progress during the 1830s,

when conventional wisdom held it high. At a time when T. B. Macaulay

was anticipating Indian self-government as “the proudest day in English

history,” Gladstone spoke from the opposite Commons bench to excuse

his father’s mistreatment of West Indian slaves. As an able, precocious

advocate for the planters, this young man maneuvered to delay slave

emancipation, scheme d to augment ﬁnancial compensation for the own-

ers, set “apprenticeship” controls on black labor, and sought to promote

the immig ration of Indian indentured servants so that plantation labor

would remain docile and cheap. It was difﬁcult in all this to see the

Christian conscience that, even then, the young Gladstone sententiously

claimed.

It was only during the 1840s, when he attained high ofﬁce in

Peel’s administration, that Gladstone sloughed off the coercive mercanti-

list imperialism he had learned from his father and embraced free labor,

free trade, and free immigration. Du ring a brief stint as Colonial

Secretary, in 1845–6, he went further, tentatively experimenting with

the distinctively libera l approach to the Empire that he would forcefully

articulate three decades hence: the colonies were to be conceived as

maturing children of the motherland. They were to be endowed with

institutions of responsible self-government at the earliest opportunity.

They should be weaned from their dependence and made responsible

for their own defense.

Yet throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Gladstone gave scant evidence

that he believed these institutions of “responsi ble government” could

(or should) be applied beyond the “white settler” colonies of Canada,

Australia, and New Zealand.

As a Philo-Hellene, with somewhat idio-

syncratic notions of ancient history, Gladstone viewed Anglo-Sax on col-

onization of these distant lands as a reprise of the great diaspora that had

been spread across the Mediterranean by the ancient Greeks. Like the

Morley, Gladstone,I:1–85; Shannon, Gladstone,I,1809–65 (London, 1984), 1–43;

H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 2 vols., I, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), 1–58; Peter Stansky,

Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (New York, 1981); S. G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A

Family Biography, 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), 3–262. When Gladstone re-read his

maiden speech many years later, he was duly chagrined.

Morley, Gladstone,I:86–241; Shannon, Gladstone,I:44–196; Matthew, Gladstone ,I:59–102;

Checkland, Gladstones, 263–406; Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and

Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998), 1–87; Paul Knaplund,

Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (Hamden, Connecticut, 1966), 5–63, 167–85.

Although Gladstone was closely involved with questions of native policy during the

1830s and 1840s, he left only a few anodyne public statements on these matters.

Canny politician that he was already becoming, he probably saw that fully articulating

his increasingly “humanitarian” views would probably lose him old friends, without

making him many new ones. Knaplund, Imperial Policy,34–7.

316 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

Hellenes of the post-Homeric era, modern Britons should not be inter-

ested in territorial acquisition, but rather in spawning daughter polities on

other continents that would become self-governing and capable of spread-

ing British values and institutions around the world. In this manner, the

same dispersive energies that had original ly created European civilization

could now be extended outward, on a global scale. Convinced that impe-

rial federation was neither practical nor desirable, Gladstone (by blood,

himself a Scot) was persuaded by E. A. Freeman that Greater Britain

could still hang to gether as a loose coalition of quasi-autonomous states,

choosing freely to bind together in alliance on the basis of mutual interest,

a shared anglocentric cul ture, and the legacy of a common history.

It was only when Gladstone became Prime Minister, in 1868, that he was

forced to confront the fact that the overwhelming majority of British sub-

jects were not white Anglo-Saxons, but racially alien dependents in the

“colored” colonies. Ironically, it was in Ireland, ostensibly an integral part

of the United Kingdom, that Gladstone was ﬁrst obliged to come to terms

with this reality. Having vowed “to do justice to Ireland,” he discovered that

Ireland required different laws, policies, and institutions to become equal

with the other constituent nations in the Union. Having entered politics to

protect the State Church and landlord property, he now discovered that in

Ireland, the Church had to be disestablished, and the sanctity of landlord

property had to be breached. The common history and culture that he once

assumed to underpin the constituent parts of Greater Britain now reap-

peared in a fractured and contradictory form: the triumphs of British

liberalism were disasters for Ireland, and the hopes for liberalism in

Ireland entailed recasting Britishness in an altered frame.

Never entirely

comfortable as an icon of the left, Gladstone hoped to hand these conun-

drums on to the next generation when his government was defeated in the

1874 election. But then came the unexpected departures of the 1876–80

period, when the Grand Old Man returned to the platform, rejuvenated, for

his Midlothian crusade. When the landslide electoral victory of 1880 put

him back in Downing Street, Gladstone was again forced to wrestle with

the contradictions of liberal imperialism, no longer only in Ireland, but

also in the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Egypt, South Africa, Afghanistan,

India, Burma, and other global hotspots.

Knaplund, Imperial Policy,65–139, 185–246; Morley, Gladstone, I: 242–666; Shannon,

Gladstone, I: 197–556; Matthew, Gladstone, I: 103–67.

Knaplund, Imperial Policy,15–139; Morley, Gladstone, I: 667–771, II: 1–77; Shannon,

Gladstone, II, 1865–1898 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 1–156; Matthew, Gladstone, I: 168–255.

Morley, Gladstone, II: 78–179; Matthew, Gladstone, II, 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), 1–98;

Shannon, Gladstone, II: 157–247; Paul Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (Hamden,

Connecticut, 1970), 1–65.

Gladstone’s progress 317

It is ea sy to dism iss Gladstone’s second adm inistration as a failure.

In fact, it was a profoundly consequential failure that produced many

occasions for puzzlement and paradox. The Midlothian rhetoric that

lofted the Liberals into ofﬁce also imposed upon them a series of

mandates that they simply could not fulﬁll. Thus the government that

vaunted its belief in national self-determination ended up ﬁghting

nationalist movements on three continents. Professing its commitment

to protect indigenous peoples, this government stood by as indigenous

peoples were slaughtered in areas under British suzerainty, and even

within the Empire itself. Finally, the government that opposed further

territorial acquisition ended up conquering Egypt, annexing Upper

Burma, and precipitating the scrambles for Africa and southeast Asia

that drove all of Europe into the empire-madness of the high imperial age.

Nevertheless, such justly harsh assessments must not be allowed to

obscure what Gladstone and the Liberals did accomplish during the

1880s. In Ireland and India, in particular, where restive natives were

demanding their rights, more signiﬁcant experiments in liberal imperi-

alism were attempted. Here, the progress narrative was taken seriously,

and the goal of turning the Empire’s racial others into Greater British

citizens was resumed. If these efforts also ultimately failed, they left the

faint trace of an alterative Greater Britain – politically decentralized,

culturally diverse, and ethnically polyglot – a liberal Empire that might

have been. In both cases, it was quickly discovered that the road to a

more inclusive constitutional future had to be wrested through battles

over the understanding of history. To a considerable extent, it was the

Liberals’ failure to win these battles for control of the historical narrative

that insured that their liberal imperial initiatives would collapse.

2 Midlothianizing India: evolutionary objects

or histo rical agents?

Gladstone’s policy in India was initially motivated by his determination

to reverse what he regarded as the ou trages and falsiﬁcations of the

previous Disraeli regime. The failure of the Tories’ Afghan War virtually

guaranteed a fundamental policy reversal, but Gladstone was deter-

mined to expose the “lies” on which this disastrous policy had been

Morley, Gladstone, II: 180–330; Shannon, Gladstone, II: 248–364; Matthew, Gladstone, II:

99–210; C. J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists: British Foreign Policy, 1876–1902 (New

York, 1967), 1–120; D. M. Schreuder, Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and

Colonial “Home Rule”, 1880–85 (London, 1969); Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher,

with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Empire (New York, 1961), 1–26,

53–159.

318 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

based. Indeed, over the previous ﬁve years, Disraeli and his Viceroy,

Lytton, had combined to cook up a new conservative image of British

India, in which the progress narrative would be replaced by a very

different image of oriental immutability. Cleverly combining several of

the strands that we have examined in the last few chapters – evolution-

ism, racial differentiation, peasant stabilization, and indirect rule – this

mix was given a powerful new ideological impetus by the Disraeli–

Lytton team. In a manner not seen since the days of Scott, these two

writer-politicians were able to concoct a new, hie rarchical vision of

trans-imperial union, by reﬁguring the relationship between metropole

and the “orient” around an imaginary pseudo-history.

As an ethnic Jew who had risen to the Prime Ministership by hiding his

alien persona behind an enigmatic mask, Disraeli had long been fasci-

nated by the mystique of race. In his novel Tancred (1847), he had the

sagacious Jew, Sidonia, enigmatically intone, “All is race; there is no other

truth.” To prove the point, an impressionable young English aristocrat is

then sent on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he learns that Jews should

not be persecuted, but rather venerated, because in killing Christ, they

saved the world. Armed with this knowledge, the novel ’s hero prepares to

conquer all of Europe and Asia, assisted by the races of Syria and Arabia.

At this point, the novel dissipates into incoherence, but not before Disraeli

gets in a dig at “some ﬂat-nosed Frank, full of bustle and self-conceit

(a race spawned perhaps in the morasses of some northern forest hardly

yet cleared) talks of progress! Progress to what, and from where? ”

No doubt Disraeli recalled these passages nearl y thirty years later

when Queen Victoria implored him to make her Empress of India.

Here was a brilliant real-life oriental adventure that might attach

India’s teeming millions to the Raj in a simple symbolic language that

everyone could understand. To those who had second thoughts about

modernization on the subcontinent, the British monarch could now be

presented as the dynastic successor of the Mughals – time-hallowed

overlord of the princes and maharajahs who, in their turn, held sway

over jagirdars, talukdars, and zamindars, in stori ed principalities.

Knaplund, Imperial Policy, 203–4; Benjamin Disraeli, Selected Speeches of Lord Beaconsﬁeld

(London, 1882), II: 523–35; R. Koebner and D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and

Signiﬁcance of a Political Word: 1840–1960 (Cambridge, 1964), 27–165.

Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby [1844] (London, 1983); Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred

[1847] (Teddington, Middlesex, 2007); Todd M. Endelman, “Disraeli’s Jewishness

Reconsidered,” Modern Judaism, 5.2 (1985), 109–23; Robert Blake, Disraeli (New

York, 1967), 55–70, 190–220.

Blake, Disraeli, 534–628; L. A. Knight, “The Royal Titles Act and India,” The Historical

Journal, 11.3 (1968), 488–507.

Midlothianizing India 319

Disraeli and Lytton this invention of tradition offered a way of diverting

attention away from the realities of war, taxation, famine, and unrepre-

sentative government, by enlisting Indi ans in a romance of pseudo-

medieval pageantry. A year after the proclamation of Victoria’s new

title (underscored by an Indian visit by the Prince of Wales), Lytton

organized a vast durbar in Delhi, attended by eighty-four thousand,

including most of India’s potentates and nobles, who pledged their

fealty to the great British Mother amid impressive displays and lavish

festivities. This pioneering venture into what David Cannadine has

labeled “ornamentalism ” was designed to bring British and Indian

hierarchies into alignme nt with one another. The myriad caste, race,

religious, status , and linguistic distinctions of “traditional” India could

thus be harnessed to buttress British authority, and vice versa, so that

British aristocrats could obtain appropriate colonial employment, while

India was endowed with a new super-aristocracy.

To Gladstone and his Liberal followers , no part of Disraelian

Conservatism seemed more menacing than this effort to supplant con-

stitutional rights with propagandistic trumpery. Turning Victoria into an

Indian Empress was disputed as a violation of the English Constitution,

which set an alarming Napoleonic precedent for the mother country.

Lytton’s pseudo-feudal Indian extravaganza seemed scarcely less

problematic, since it dovetailed so well with other hierarchy-making

projects, such as W. W. Hunter’s statistical gazetteer, which sought to

count and classify the entire subcontinental population into an elaborate

array of caste, race, and tribal categories. Hunter’s work was by no

means incompatible with liberalism, but to categorize Indians entirely

on the basis of ascriptive group status – to render them exclusively as

evolutionary objects – went against the grain of liberal agendas in the

metropolis, which invested emerging groups (i.e. respectable male work-

ers) as historical agents with the rights of franchised individuality.

Unfortunately, India was a distant problem for which Gladstone

himself had little time and even less expertise. Neither he nor anyo ne

else in his Cabinet knew much about India’s actual past or had any

more authentic alternative to substitute for Tory pseudo-history. Thus

when Lord Ripon replaced Lytton as Viceroy, he was sent out with no

very precise instructions beyond a tentative mandate to restore the

Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in E. Hobsbawm and

T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); David Cannadine,

Ornamentalism (Oxford, 2001).

Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton,

2001); Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India (Cambridge, 1999), 97–143.

320 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

Macaulayite program of increasing the rights and roles of the wester-

nized urban middle class. At ﬁrst, these efforts seemed to go uncon-

tested, as when Ripon repealed Lytton’s Vernacular Press Censorship

Law, proposed opening volunteer militias to native enlistment, and

sought to create new elected local councils that could manage their

own municipal affairs. Yet with the Ilbert Bill, he passed the limit of

white, Anglo-Indian tolerance, as we have seen. By attempting to give

Indian judges potential jurisdiction over Europeans, Ripon found – like

Macaulay and Dalhousie before him – that the British community in

India, both ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial, would not tolerate a serious move

toward racial equality.

In a sense, Ripon’s error had been a mistake of historical interpretation.

Reading the history of Anglo-India through the lens of Macaulay, he

envisioned its future as a land of freeborn Britons, whose union with the

United Kingdom would transcend racial difference, since it would rest on

common notions of democratic citizenship. By contras t, the ICS was able

to demonstrate that Indi a about 1884 still remained a caste-ridden, race-

divided society, in which covenanted civil servants and their allies were

able to consolidate their incipient status as the new master caste. To put it

bluntly, they were demonstrating th eir ability to render India ungovern-

able, by threatening to veto Ripon’s policies with a “white mutiny.” All the

old arguments were trotted out to explain why it was really in the interest

of Indians that the covenanted civil service remain a racially closed, self-

perpetuating power monopoly: loosening the reins and opening the gates

to Bengali babus would put decision-making in the hands of a “micro-

scopic minority” that was entirely unrepresentative of the larger Indian

population, narrowly self-inter ested in its own avaricious careerism, and

fundamentally unﬁtted to the manly responsibilities of political work.

“How can 180 millions of souls govern themselves?” the aged Henry

Maine asked in the London India Council, where he now held a seat.

“Responsible and representative government are terms without meaning

when they are applied to such a multitude.” It was “ethnologically impos-

sible and historically improbable that any human effort or will could ever

weld these [India ’s castes, religions, and races] into one nation,” echoed

Augustus Rivers Thompson, the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal.

Sarvepalli Gopal, The Viceroyalty of Lord Ripon, 1880–1884 (London, 1953); Sarvepalli

Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858–1905 (Madras, 1965), 64–179; Anil Seal, The

Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Late Nineteenth

Century (Cambridge, 1968), 131 –93.

Gopal, British Policy, 166; Nemai Sudhan Bose, Racism: The Struggle for Equality and

Indian Nationalism (Calcutta, 1981), 152–239; Briton Martin, New India, 1885: British

Ofﬁcial Policy and the Emergence of the Indian National Congress (Berkeley, 1969), 26–9.

Midlothianizing India 321

As we have seen, the historiographical basis for questioning these ofﬁcial

assumptions scarcely existed in 1884. Banerjea’s campaigns had not yet

culminated in Congress, Dutt’s major historical writings still lay before

him, and Naoroji was still beginning to formulate his theory of the drain.

Only the most astute among the Raj authorities sensed the ﬁrst stirrings of

change. When Ripon was banqueted by the bhadralok on the eve of his

departure, Sir Auckland Colvin anxiously marveled at the novelty of the

spectacle: in this ancient land of oriental quiescence, a genuinely modern,

national political movement was “at length awakening to the consciousness

of its own powers and the assurance of its own success.”

If Colvin was expert in detecting such symptoms, it was because he

had just arrived from a previous posting in Egypt, where he had

witnessed (indeed he had largely precipitated) the British military sup-

pression of an incipient nationalist movement, led by patriotic ofﬁcers in

the Egyptian army. The leader, Colonel Ahmed Arabi, made it clear

that he and his colleagues were liberal constitutionalists who had

embraced a European model of historical development. They merely

wanted the Khedive (Egypt’s ruler) to hold elections and accept the

limitations of parliamentary control. As representative of the European

bondholders in Egyptian state debt, however, Colvin was determined

that Egypt should not default on its obligations, or even fall into the

hands of people whose European pretensions might lead to awkward

expectations, such as “no taxation without representation.” Colvin’s hos-

tility toward the Arabi movement was precisely a function of its liberal

character, since he believed that parliamentary institutions were unsuited

to a non-European race. “The Egyptian,” he contended, was “incapable

of conducting the administration of affairs,” and “we are rapidly

approaching a state of affairs which differs little, if at all, from anarchy.”

By sending a naval squadron to bombard Alexandria, the Gladsto ne

government turned this prognosis into a self-fulﬁlling prophecy. When

the local residents rioted, killing ﬁfty Europeans, the Cabinet voted to

send in an army of occupation that remained, in effect, for the next

seventy years . The decision to intervene did cause some hand-wringing

among the ministers. “The Government of England would run counter

to its most cheris hed traditions of national history,” warned the Foreign

Secretary, Lord Granville, “were it to entertain a desire to diminis h

that liberty, or to tamper with institutions to which it has given birth.”

Such strictures were swept aside, however. The Egyptian government

Martin, New India, 22; S. R. Mehrotra, A History of the Indian National Congress,I,

1885–1918 (New Delhi, 1995), 1–113.

Robert T. Harrison, Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt (Westport, 1995), quote on 91.

322 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

owed £90 million to European investors, much at exorbitant interest

rates. No less signiﬁcant were control of the Suez Canal and the route

to India. Granville and Gladstone were not about to let these assets

fall into independent hands.

Colvin showed the face of Gladstonian imperialism that gave the lie

to the lofty rhetoric of Midlothian. On his transit from Egypt to India,

however, he was shadowed by a very different character, Wilfrid Scawen

Blunt, who showed why the promises of Midl othian could not entirely be

disowned. Blunt was a colorful ﬁgure – eccentric, romantic, independ-

ently wealthy, and well connected – who chose the life of a trans-Asiatic

borderer two generations after conventional wisdom had deemed this role

to be obsolete. An accomplished horse-breeder who was ﬂuent in Arabic,

he befriended desert Bedouins and haunted Cairo bazaars, witnessing the

Egyptian Revolution ﬁrst-hand. Outraged by Britain’s unprovoked mili-

tary assault, Blunt undertook to organize and ﬁnance Colonel Arabi’s

defense, insuring that this “rebel” was not summarily hanged, tortured, or

shot. Following his convicted client to exile in Ceylon, Blunt took the

opportunity to travel to India, intent on making contact with her nascent

nationalist leaders and on offering unsolicited advice to the beleaguered

Viceroy Ripon.

Blunt’s personal charm earned him the trust of many Hindu and

Muslim community leaders, most of whom were already aware of his

work in saving Arabi. Remarkably free of the blinders of race stereotyping,

he approached his interlocutors as individuals in communities, rather

than as specimens of a given caste or race. The Hindu notables,

in particular, struck him as extraordinarily competent spokesmen for

a public that was intellectually advanced. Fully acculturated to the

western model of representative institutions, they chafed at the limits of

a political system that treated them with contempt. The newspaper editors

in Madras were “intelligent, clear headed men, contrasting by no means

unfavorably with men of their profession in London.” They showered him

with data showing that the ryots of the Deccan were grossly underpaid and

overtaxed. Raganath Rao, a deposed Maratha minister, was “a man of the

highest distinction, much wit, and the widest possible intelligence. There

are not a dozen men in the House of Commons who could hold their own

in talk with him.” In Calcutt a, Surendranath Banerjea’s speech for civil

Harrison, Imperialism in Egypt, quote on 59; D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire,

1830–1914 (Ithaca, 1973), 119. Alone among the Liberal ministers, only John Bright was

sufﬁciently troubled by the decision to occupy Egypt to resign from ofﬁce.

Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt [1979]

(London, 2007), 1–92; W. S. Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt

[1907] (New York, 1922).

Midlothianizing India 323

service reform was “quite as good as I have ever heard in my life.” The

point was reinforced by a highly cultured millowner who told Blunt that

Ripon “was an honest man” who meant well, but “who had been able to

do no thing for them” so long as the ICS stood in his way.

These Indians, Blunt emphasized, were remarkably loyal, and he

was struck that “there should be so few agitators of Indian opinion who

speak even in secret of any real rupture with England.” Yet the “race

hatred” of the English was doing much to squander this devotion. Fueled

by pseudo-scientiﬁc theories of race and evolution, British disdain had

increased with each successive generation, and “if it be not allayed by a

more generous treatment [it] will in a few years make the continued

connection between England and India altogether impossible.” At a

time when English ﬁscal extractions were increasing, the poverty of the

Indian masses was deepening, and the natives were demonstrating their

capacity for better and cheaper government, it was only by establishing

representative government that Britain could preserve a more limited,

conditional version of imperial rule.

Since Blunt had gone out to India with a special interest in her Muslims,

he was disconcerted to ﬁnd them in a more perilous condition than the

Hindus. Where the Hindu leaders looked self-conﬁ dently toward the

future, the Muslim leaders remained anxiously ﬁxated on the past.

Hearkening back to the glory days of the Mughal Empire and ac utely

conscious of what they had lost, they were often embittered toward the

British, who had stripped them of their authority, and envious of the

Hindus, who were outpacing them in the battle of ideas and the competi-

tion for jobs. According to Blunt, Muslim life was most vital in princely

states, such as Hyderabad, where the courtly culture of old India had been

preserved. Unfortunately, such living museums were out of step with th e

needs of modernity. He accused the British of actively conspiring to keep

princes like the Nizam ignorant and infantilized, out of fear that compe -

tence would offer a credible model of native self-rule. Blunt’s solution to

all these problems was to promote Islamic education, which he found

inadequate, and much of his time in India was spent in a frustrating and

abortive attempt to establish a Muslim university.

Blunt urge d Muslims to shelve their resentments and to learn to work

alongside the enlightened Hindus as Indian patriots. However, he

Longford, Blunt, 180–206; W. S. Blunt, India under Ripon (London, 1909), quotes on

36–7, 43, 52, 55, 114, 255.

Blunt, India under Ripon, 233–58.

Blunt, India under Ripon,57–138, especially 110, 278–98; W. S. Blunt, The Future of Islam

(London, 1882).

324 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism