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John Stuart Mill: Servant of the East India Company*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Abram L. Harris
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It is generally known that John Stuart Mill spent his working career in the service of the East India Company, but very little has been written about him in this capacity. As an administrative official of the company, the home government of India, John Mill's activities have been greatly overshadowed by the influence exerted upon Indian policies by his father, James Mill, historian of British India and a member of the Examiner's Office of the Company from 1819 until his death in 1836. Like his father, John Stuart recognized the company's government of India for what it actually was—a despotism of an alien race, which, despite the good accomplished by it in the last decades of its existence, was established by conquest, treaty, and annexation. And yet, he spent almost half of his life as an official of this establishment, drafting dispatches to the India government, and, in defence of the company's rule against extinction by Parliament, wrote what Lord Grey described as the ablest state paper he had ever read.

How did John Mill, the great exponent of nineteenth century liberalism, reconcile his employment as an official of a despotic government with his espousal of the principles of civil and political freedom? How, in other words, did he reconcile this freedom with colonialism? What conceptions did he entertain concerning: (1) the place of India in the history of civilization; and (2) its eventual emergence from British rule as an industrially transformed self-governing nation? These questions, arising out of Mill's career with the East India Company, have not been discussed in any of the numerous treatises on the great man. In considering them here we hope to fill this gap in the literature. Other questions, such as Mill's administrative skills and his influence upon the company's policies, cannot be taken up in this paper. The author does not share the view that Mill's influence at India House was insignificant. He is inclined to a moderate version of Henry Fawcett's opinion that all the important principles for governing the great dependency of India were laid down by Mill in the documents he drafted for the East India Company.

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Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , May 1964 , pp. 185 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1964

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Footnotes

*

Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council enabled the author to spend the summer of 1960 at the East India Office Library, London, examining and microfilming dispatches to the government of India drafted by J. S. Mill during his official career with the Company. The present and final stage of the research has been assisted by the American Philosophical Society, and, at the University of Chicago, by the Social Science Research Committee, the Committee on Research in the Division of Humanities, the College Dean's Office, the Walgreen Foundation, and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. I am greatly indebted to the India Office Library for the use of its facilities and to Mr. S. C. Sutton, the Keeper of Records, for numerous courtesies and his continued interest in my study of Mill as an administrator in the East India Company.

References

1 “James Mill's famous book, the History of British India published in 1817, brought together for the first time, to use the author's words, ‘a history of that part of the British transactions which have an immediate relation to India.’” Spear, Percival, ed., Oxford History of India, 3rd ed., (Oxford, 1961), 19.Google Scholar Mill's book was continued by Wilson, H. H., History of British India from 1805–1835, 3 vols. (London, 1938).Google Scholar According to Eric Stokes, the publication of the History “resulted in the employment of Mill and his sons after 1819 in the East India House and firmly fixed Utilitarian influence in Indian affairs.” Mill's purpose “was principally an attempt to make a philosophic analysis of Indian society and assess its place in the ‘scale of civilization.’ Undoubtedly, one of his main aims was to dispel what he considered the silly sentimental admiration of oriental despotism which had marked the earlier thinkers of the Enlightenment.” The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), xii and 53.Google Scholar

2 Packe, Michael St. John, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1954), 389.Google Scholar

3 Stokes, , English Utilitarians and India, Part II, 81 ff.Google Scholar

4 For a brief history and the organization of the East India Company, see Phillips, C. H., The East India Company (Manchester, 1961)Google Scholar, or Foster, William, The East House (London, 1924), 199.Google Scholar

5 Mill, J. S., Autobiography, Laski, Harold, ed. (London, 1924), 72.Google Scholar

6 Elliott, Hugh S. R., ed., The Letters of John Stuart Mill, 2 vols. (London, 1910), II, 236.Google Scholar

7 Bearce, George D., British Attitudes Toward India, 1784–1858 (Oxford, 1961), 283.Google Scholar

8 Mill, , A System of Logic, 8th ed. (London, 1949), 590.Google Scholar

9 Mill, , Principles of Political Economy, Ashley, W. J., ed. (London, 1929), 325.Google Scholar

10 Mill, , Dissertations and Discussions, 4 vols., IV (London, 1875), 143.Google Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 Cornwallis was Governor-General of India from 1786 to 1793.

13 Maine, Henry Sumner, Village-Communities in the East and West (London, 1876), 104–5.Google Scholar

14 Baden-Powell, B. H., “The Origin of Zamindari Estates in Bengal,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, XI, 1897.Google Scholar

15 Elliott, , Letters of J. S. Mill, II, 170–1 and 188.Google Scholar

16 Principles of Political Economy, 229–37.

17 Ibid., 121; and memorandum on the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years (London, 1858), 10.Google Scholar

18 Maine, Village-Communities.

19 Dissertations and Discussions, IV, 239–40.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 139, and Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53, XXX, 301–3 and 331.

21 Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53, XXX, 313–14.Google Scholar

22 “The public opinion of one country is scarcely any security for the good government of another. The people of one country, whether represented by the public authorities of this country, or by the nation itself, cannot have the same acquaintance with the circumstances and interests of the other country as they may have with their own. The great security for the good government of any country is an enlightened public opinion; but an unenlightened public opinion is no security for good government. The people of England are unacquainted or very ill acquainted, with the people and the circumstances of India, and feel so little interest in them, that I apprehend the influence of public opinion in this country on the government of India is of very little value, because there are very few cases in which public opinion is called into exercise, and when it is so, it is usually from impulses derived from the interests of Europeans connected with India, rather than from the interests of the people of India itself.”

23 Stokes, , English Utilitarians and India, 255.Google Scholar

24 Dispatch, no. 34, Sept. 29, 1830, Madras, Public Department, Native Education, Indian Office Records.

25 The covenanted civil service was distinguished from the uncovenanted by the covenants executed in England by which the members engaged to subscribe to pension funds, and not to accept gifts or to engage in trade on their own account. Members of the lower service were recruited in India and executed no covenants. See O'Mally, L. S. S., The Indian Civil Service, 1601–1930 (London, 1931), 83–4.Google Scholar

26 Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53, XXX, 324–5.Google Scholar Mill was asked: “Do you think that the natives of India are admitted to as large a share in the civil government of the country as they ought in the present state of education and knowledge to possess?” He replied (p. 325): “There is a great and growing desire to admit them to all offices for which they are considered sufficiently qualified in point of trustworthiness. Hitherto they have not been admitted to any situations in which there is not a controlling European authority over them; but there is hardly any situation, admitting of that control, to which they are not now eligible; or if there be any such, there is a constant tendency to open such situations to them. They have now, especially in the Bengal and Agra provinces, almost the whole of the administration of justice in the first instance, subject to appeal to Europeans. They are also largely employed as deputy collectors, that is, in the branch of the Government, on which the prosperity of the country depends more than on any other; and those situations are sought for by natives of the highest rank and connexions. …”

27 Sharp, H., Selections from Educational Records, I, 1781–1839 (Calcutta, 1920), 126.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 130.

29 To the General Committee of Public Instruction. See ibid., 107–17.

30 Ballhatchet, K. A., “The House Government and Bentinck's Educational Policy,” Cambridge Historical Journal, X, 1950–1952, 224.Google Scholar

31 The Macaulay myth has been exploded by Ballhatchet, ibid., but especially by Spear, Percival, “Bentinck and Education, I, Macaulay's Minute,” Cambridge Historical Journal, VI–VII, 1943, 78–9.Google Scholar

32 Legislative dispatch to India, April 14, 1836, Dispatches to India and Bengal, 8, pp. 741–44, India Office Records.

33 The Report of the University Education Commission, Dec. 1948–Aug. 1949 (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1950), I, 17.

* Ed. Note. A citation for this dispatch is given in Bearce, , British Attitudes Towards India, 284n.Google Scholar

34 Hobhouse to Carnac, Chairman, Court of Directors, 1835–1837, India Board, Dec. 1836: “Having considered the various documents connected with the question with the attention which the controversy deserves, I have come to a conclusion entirely different from the writer of the dispatch. The facts appear to me to be mistated, the reasoning to be inconclusive and the decision tainted with manifest partiality towards a Party whose mode of conducting the argument was anything but decorous. If therefore I were to offer any alterations in your P.C. [Previous Communication, meaning Mill's draft] I should change almost every paragraph and a debate might ensue between us as litde profitable as that which occurred at Calcutta. I thought it therefore preferable to return the dispatch and suggest the expediency of sending short acknowledgement of the receipt of the Minister's Consultations, etc., to Calcutta without delivering any opinion as to the past occurrences in reference to the Education question. In support of this view, I enclose an extract from one of Lord Auckland's letters to yourself which seems to me decisive of the propriety of the course which I recommend.” India Office Records, Revenues, Judicial, and Legislative Committee, Miscellaneous Papers, 9.

35 Auckland to Carnac, June 17, 1836: “I should be sorry if by any new order you should revive the differences upon which so much heat prevailed at the beginning of last year in regard to the application of the funds destined to the purposes of education. With the Mohammedans wnatever there was of jealousy and alarm has entirely subsided. Their schools are still open and kept up for those who choose to attend them. A bounty is no longer given for scholars in branches of business comparatively useless to the common objects of life, and the Schools of European Literature and Science are well attended. Unhappily in the discussions upon this subject, there was much of heat and exaggeration, and the manner with which the measure was effected, something of roughness and want of consideration; but all this is nearly forgotten, except with a few, and I should be sorry to see it revived. I cannot say that I attach much importance to the Ancient Oriental Literature, but nevertheless I think that assistance might fairly be given by us towards the printing in translation of any work to which interest or curiosity might be attached. At the same time I shall think it strange if you compel us to spend large sums upon those branches of literature and education, whether they should be useful or useless, sought after or neglected.” India, Public Department F.O., 1828, Home Miscellaneous Series, Vol. 723, India Office Records.

36 Sharp, , Educational Records, I, 116.Google Scholar

37 Mill was strongly opposed to “forcing English ideas down the throats of the Natives,” to proselytising, and to measures or acts repugnant to the religious feelings of the people. Representative Government, p. 136.

38 Sharp, , Educational Records, I, 22.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., 91.

40 Ibid., 147.

41 Dispatch from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to the Governor-General of India in Council, no. 49, July 19, 1854, Richey, J. A., Selections From the Educational Records Of the Government of India, Part II, 1840–1859 (Calcutta, 1922), 365.Google Scholar For developments in the succeeding years, see the Report of University Education Commission.

42 Hansard, , Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, CXXVII, 06 3, 1853, 147–8.Google Scholar

43 Principles of Political Economy, 324.