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THE CANNIBALIZED CAREER OF LIBERALISM IN COLONIAL INDIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2014

NEILESH BOSE
NEILESH BOSE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, St John's University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, who themselves claimed liberal terminologies and pressed forth liberal arguments. Are they to be assessed by the same criteria as European liberals who argued for the rights of the individual, the free press, and individual property rights?

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 475 - 484
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 See Mehta, Uday, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Thought (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar.

2 Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Chatterjee, Partha, Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Sartori, Andrew, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA, 2004)Google Scholar.

6 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 290.

7 See Haakonssen, Knud, ed., Traditions of Liberalism (Sydney, 1988)Google Scholar, for a clear overview of the philosophical roots of liberalism, particularly on Adam Smith, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill.

8 Bayly, C. A., “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–1830,” Modern Intellectual History, 4/1 (2007), 25–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Chatterjee, Black Hole of Empire, 156.

10 Ibid., 157.

11 See Kelly, John D., Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar, for an elaboration of this position.

12 Recent companion pieces that would be read productively alongside Bayly include Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mishra's, PankajFrom the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York, 2012)Google Scholar. For a review that places Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World in conversation with other works on liberalism and empire see Andrew Sartori, “The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission” Journal of Modern History, 78/3 (Sept. 2006), 623–42.

13 Bayly sidesteps the proposition that liberalism, as a self-limiting form of government, cannot be understood outside the growth of the modern state. See Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Sennelart, Michel, trans. Burchell, Graham (New York, 2008)Google Scholar. Foucault asks, “what does ‘the self-limitation of governmental reason’ mean? What is this new type of rationality in the art of government, this new type of calculation that consists in saying and telling government: I accept, wish, plan, and calculate that all this should be left alone? I think that this is broadly what is called ‘liberalism’” (20).