Theories:

Liberal non-marxist Radical marxist

-Domestic under consumption- hobson
-peaceful resolution by the capitalist class (kautsky)
-withering away of imperialism under progressive capitalism (Schumpeter)
-structural view of connectivities in centre and periphery (Galtung)
-Continuous capital accummulation and penetration into primitive societies (rosa
luxembourg)
-finance capital (rudolf hilferding)
-Monopolies of banks and corporations in advanced stage of capitalism (lenin)
-monopoly and oligopoly of capital surplus (baran and sweezy)

-multinationals and US expanding trade and aid (Magdoff)

Post colonialism: write from reader

Liberal Perspective

Intro from shekharb, imperial ideology

“Liberal reformers who were frustrated at home saw immense

opportunity in the imperial project in India as a subject peoples

had little means of protesting. As a result India became a

laboratory for liberal experimentation as cherished measures

such as state sponsored education, the codification of laws, and a

competitively chosen bureaucracy were all introduced in India

first, and then implemented in Britain after success became

apparent “

Thomas R. Metcalf, 1995, Ideologies of the Raj,

Saw indians as savage

the

establishment of colonial administration in India was a long drawn process. This

establishment coincided with the emergence of a school of thought in Europe

which was sympathetic to the ideas of empire and colonialism. The fact that it
was a foreign rule colonial administration needed some kind of justification both

for the people they were ruling, the so called ‘natives’, and people back home

(Sullivan Eileen P 1). In order to gain legitimacy, the British Administration

promoted this kind of history writing which was sympathetic to their mission in

India. It portrayed colonial subjects as trapped in time, if not as savages, who

needed some kind of external force to liberate themselves and make them

modern and civilised.

As British patriotism gradually developed in the eighteenth century,

it was closely associated with the grandeur and glories of having

overseas territorial possessions. In a post-Enlightenment intellectual

environment, the British also started defining themselves as modem

or civilised vis-a-vis the Orientals and this rationalised their imperial

vision in the nineteenth century, which witnessed the so-called 'age

of reform'. In other words, British imperial ideology for India was

the result of such intellectual and political crosscurrents at home.

officials looked at themselves "as inheritors rather than innovators,

as the revivers of a decayed system".'

Orientalism (from shekhar b)

The idea of this "decayed system" however originated from a teleological construction of India's past. The early image of India in the

West was that of past glory accompanied by an idea of degeneration.

There was an urge to know Indian culture and tradition, as reflected

in the endeavours of scholars like Sir William Jones, who studied the

Indian languages to restore to the Indians their own forgotten culture and legal system-monopolised hitherto only by the learned

pundits and maulvis (Hindu and Islamic learned men). By establishing a linguistic connection between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin - aJl

supposedly belonging to the same lndo-European family of languages-Jones privileged India with an antiquity equal to that of

classical West. This was the beginning of the Orientalist tradition

that led to the founding of institutions like the Calcutta Madrassa

(1781 ), the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784) and the Sanskrit College
in Banaras (1794 ), all of which were meant to promote the study of

Indian languages and scriptures. One should remember, however,

that while discovering India, primarily through analysis of ancient

texts, these Orientalist scholars were also defining Indian "tradition"

in a particular way that came to be privileged as the most authentic

version or true knowledge, for it was legitimated by the power of the

colonial state. Some scholars like Eugene lrschick have argued that

contrary to the supposition of Edward Said (1978) that Orientalism

was a knowledge thrust from above through the power of the Europeans, it was produced through a process of dialogue in which the

colonial officials, Indian commentators and native informants participated in a collaborative intellectual exercise. One could point out

though that even when Indians participated in this exercise, they seldom had control over its final outcome. However, while emphasising
the importance of the Indian agency, Irschick does not deny the

most important aspect of this cognitive enterprise, that Orientalism

produced a knowledge of the past to meet the requirements of the

present, i.e., to service the needs of the colonial state.

Orientalism in practice in its early phase could be seen in the policies of the Company's government under Warren Hastings. The fun

damental principle of this tradition was that the conquered people

were to be ruled by their own laws-British rule had to "legitimize

itself in an Indian idiom". 7 It therefore needed to produce knowledge about Indian society, a process which Gauri Viswanathan

would call "reverse acculturation". It informed the European rulers

of the customs and laws of the land for the purposes of assimilating

them into the subject society for more efficient administration. 1 It

was with this political vision that Fort WilJiam College at Calcutta

was established in 1 800 to train civil servants in Indian languages

and tradition. The Orientalist discourse, however, had another

political project, as Thomas Trautmann (1997) has argued. By giving

currency to the idea of kinship between the British and the Indians

dating back to the classical past, it was also morally binding the latter

to colonial rule through a rhetoric of "love".

These scholars not only highlighted the classical glory of Indiacrafted by the Aryans, the distant kin-brothers of the Europeansbut also
emphasised the subsequent degeneration of the once magnificent Aryan civilisation. This legitimated authoritarian rule, as
India needed to be rescued from the predicament of its own creation

and elevated to a desired state of progress as achieved by Europe.

Changes from 1800

Around 1800 the Industrial Revolution in Britain created the necessity to develop and integrate the

Indian markets for manufactured goods and ensure a secured supply

of raw materials. This required a more effective administration and

the tying up of the colony to the economy of the mother country.

There were also several new intellectual currents in Britain, which

preached the idea of improvement and thus pushed forward the

issue of reform both at home and in India. While the pressure of the

free trade lobby at home worked towards the abolition of the Company's monopoly over Indian trade, it was Evangelicalism and
Utilitarianism, which brought about a fundamental change in the nature

of the Company's administration in India. Both these two schools of

thought asserted that the conquest oflndia had been by acts of sin or

crime; but instead of advocating the abolition of this sinful or criminal rule, they clamoured for its reform, so that Indians could get the

benefit of good government in keeping with the "best ideas of their

age". It was from these two intellectual traditions "the conviction

that England should remain in India permanently was finally to

evolve"

evangelicalism

Evangelicalism started its crusade against Indian barbarism and

advocated the permanence of British rule with a mission to change

the very "nature of Hindosran", In India the spokespersons of this

idea were the missionaries located at Srirampur near Calcutta; but at

home its chief exponent was Charles Grant The principal problem

of India, he argued in 1792, was the religious ideas that perpetuated

the ignorance of Indian people. This could be effectively changed

through the dissemination of Christian light, and in this lay the

noble mission of British rule in India To convince his critics, Grant

could also show a complementarity between the civilising process

and material prosperity, without any accompanying danger of dissent or desire for English liberty. His ideas were given greater publicity
by William Wilberforce in the Parliament before the passage of

the Charter Act of 18 13, which allowed Christian missionaries to

enter India without restrictions

(similarity of views between evangelicans and free trade merchants)

The idea of improvement and

change was also being advocated by the free-trade merchants, who

believed that India would be a good market for British goods and a

supplier of raw materials, if the Company shifted attention from its

functions as a trader to those of a ruler. Under a good government

the Indian peasants could again experience improvement to become

consumers of British products. Fundamentally, there was no major

difference between the Evangelist and the free-trade merchant positions as regards the policy of assimilation and Anglicisation. Indeed,

it was the Evangelist Charles Grant who presided over the passage of

the Charter Act of 1833, which took away the Company's monopoly rights over India trade.

Utilitarians

This was also the age of British liberalism. Thomas Macaulay's

liberal vision that the British administrators' task was to civilise

rather than conquer, set a liberal agenda for the emancipation of

India through active governance. "Trained by us to happiness and

independence, and endowed with our learning and political institutions, Inclia will remain the proudest monument of British benevolence",
visualised C.E. Trevalyan, another liberal in 1838.is It was

in this atmosphere of British liberalism that Utilitarianism, with all

its distinctive authoritarian tendencies, was born Jeremy Bentham

preached that the ideal of human civilisation was to achieve the

greatest happiness of the greatest number. Good laws, efficient and

enlightened administration, he argued, were the most effective agents

of change; and the idea of rule of law was a necessary precondition

for improvement. With the coming of the Utilitarian j ames Mill to

the East India Company's London office, India policies came to be

guided by such doctrines. Mill, as it has been contended, was responsible for transforming Utilitarianism into a "militant faith". In The

History of British India, published in 181 7, he first exploded the

myth of India's economic and cultural riches, perpetuated by the

"susceptible imagination" of men like Sir William Jones. What India

needed for her improvement, he argued in a Bcnthamite line, was an

effective schoolmaster, i.e., a wise government promulgating good

legislation. It was largely due to his efforts that a Law Commission

was appointed in 1833 under Lord Macaulay and it drew up an

Indian Penal Code in 1835 on the Benthamite model of a centrally,

logically and coherently formulated code, evolving from "disinterested philosophic intelligence"

(from metcalfe)

With the coming of Lord William Bentinck as Governor-General in

1828, the British avowedly embarked upon a thorough-going programme of reform.

Building upon what had previously been little

more than a vague expectation that somehow British rule ought to

bring 'improvement' to India, free traders, utilitarians, and evangelicals created a

distinctive ideology of imperial governance shaped

by the ideals of liberalism. From Bentinck's time to that of Lord

Dalhousie (1848-56) this reformist sentiment gained a near universal

ascendancy among the British in India.

One can identify as liberals, among others, men of such diverse

political view

Common features

Those who may be considered liberals shared, nevertheless, a set of

fundamental assumptions which set them off sharply from Burke's

oligarchic Whigs, or, subsequently, from Disraeli's Tory conservatives. Above all,
liberals conceived that human nature was intrinsically

the same everywhere, and that it could be totally and completely

transformed, if not by sudden revelation as the evangelicals envisaged,

then by the workings of law, education, and free trade. Liberals

differed over the urgency of reform and the relative importance of

particular measures of reform, say of law or education. But invariably

they sought to free individuals from their age-old bondage to priests,

despots, and feudal aristocrats so that they could become autonomous,

rational beings, leading a life of conscious deliberation and choice.

Liberals had for the most part little sympathy with established institutions that were
sustained by simple antiquity alone. What shaped a

proper society was individual self-reliance, character, and merit, not a

hierarchy that rewarded individuals on the basis of patronage and

status.

What entailed in india

India could become something of a

laboratory for the creation of the liberal administrative state, and from
there its elements - whether a state sponsored education, the codification of law, or a
competitively chosen bureaucracy -

For the most part evangelicals, free traders, law reformers, educational

reformers, and utilitarian theorists worked amicably side by side in

India

Mill’s history of british india

The liberal view of Indian society found its fullest expression in

James Mill's classic History of British India,

Informed with

the historicist ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment, which laid out a

series of stages by which the degree of 'civilization' of any society

could be measured with 'scientific' precision, Mill set himself the task

of ascertaining India's 'true state' in the 'scale of civilization'

After scrutinizing India's arts, manufactures, literature, religion, and laws, he

concluded, vigorously disputing Sir William Jones's claims, that the

Hindus did not possess, and never had possessed, 'a high state of

civilization'.

To free India from stagnation and set it on the road to progress,

James Mill proposed a remedy which was at once, as he saw it, simple

and obvious. All that was required was a code of laws that would

release individual energy by protecting the products of its efforts.

'Light taxes and good laws', he insisted, in good Benthamite fashion,

'nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all

over the globe.

Nor did it matter to him that India's government remained

unrepresentative. For James Mill, as for his mentor Bentham, happiness and not
liberty was the end of government, and happiness was

promoted solely through the protection of the individual in his person

and property.

John stuart mill

John Stuart Mill inherited from his father both the mantle of liberal

leadership and the family tie with India.

J.S. Mill is best known

for his On Liberty, in which he argued, against his father, that liberty

possesses an intrinsic value of its own beyond mere happiness. In his

Representative Government, however, he made clear his view that this

'ideally best polity', as he called it, was not suited to all peoples. Only

those capable of fulfilling its 'conditions', he argued, were entitled to

enjoy the benefits of representative government. For the rest, subjection to 'foreign
force', and a government 'in a considerable degree

despotic', was appropriate, and even necessary

(eventual end of british rule)

Mill was adamant in his insistence that 'leading strings' were 'only

admissible as a means of gradually training the people to walk alone'.

The great advantage of 'the dominion of foreigners', like that of Britain

in India, was that it could, more rapidly than any but the most

exceptional indigenous ruler, carry a people 'through several stages of

progress', and 'clear away obstacles to improvement'. For Mill this

'training' in self-government involved much more than simple codification of the laws.
Unlike his father, the younger Mill did not see men

as inherently selfish, moulded only by the external sanctions of law.

They could be taught to pursue the public good, and to develop the

'active self-helping' character that self-government required.

Together, he argued, good government and education could so transform India's

peoples that in the end their claim to freedom would be

irresistible

Nor was John Stuart Mill alone in looking forward without hesitation to the eventual
end of British rule. 'Trained by us to happiness

and independence, and endowed with our learning and political institutions', as
Trevelyan put it, 'India will remain the proudest

monument of British benevolence.'

\Most stirring perhaps was Macaulay's peroration in his speech on the 1833 renewal of
the Company's

Charter.

“It may be [he said], that the public mind of India may expand under our

system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may

educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having

become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age,

demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know

not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be

the proudest day in English history”

(heirarchical ordering of civilisation)

At its heart, therefore, liberalism can be seen as informed by a

radical universalism. Contemporary European, especially British,

culture alone represented civilization. No other cultures had any

intrinsic validity. There was no such thing as 'Western' civilization;

there existed only 'civilization'. Hence the liberal set out, on the basis

of this shared humanity, to turn the Indian into an Englishman; or, as

Macaulay described it in his 1835 Minute on Education, to create not

just a class of Indians educated in the English language, who might

assist the British in ruling India, but one 'English in taste, in opinions,

in morals and in intellect'. The fulfillment of the British connection

with India involved, then, nothing less than the complete transformation of India's
culture and society. Its outcome would be the

creation of an India politically independent, but one that embodied an

'imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our

laws'.

This liberal idealism was inevitably fraught with troubling implications. With neither
racial nor environmental theories to sustain it,

culture alone remained to distinguish Europeans from those overseas.

As a result, the more fully non-European peoples were accorded the

prospect of future equality, the more necessary it became to devalue

and depreciate their contemporary cultures. The hierarchical ordering

of societies on a 'scale of civilization' reflected not just the classifying

enthusiasms of the Enlightenment, but was a way to reassure the

British that they themselves occupied a secure position, as the arbiter

of its values, on the topmost rung. It was not some chance prejudice,

but the liberal project itself, that led Macaulay in 1835 t o

scorn the
'entire native literature of India and Arabia' as not worth 'a single shelf

of a good European library'.

New institutions, new laws

By its very nature the liberal transformation of India meant the

flowering on Indian soil of those institutions which defined Britain's

own society and civilization. Among the most important of these, as

we have seen, were private property, the rule of law, the liberty of the

individual, and education in Western knowledge.

(implication of right to property)

notion of the

'rule of law'. In nineteenth-century England the legal order was meant

above all to guarantee the rights of property, conceived of as vested in

individuals and secure from arbitrary confiscation. In India too, from

Cornwallis's permanent settlement of 1793 onward, private landed

property was made the cornerstone of Britain's commitment to an

India transformed. In the hands of James Mill and his utilitarian

disciples, as Eric Stokes has pointed out, this ideal carried with it

radical implications.

men like Holt Mackenzie

and R. M. Bird in the North-Western Provinces instead used utilitarian theory to

advocate what Stokes called 'an agrarian revolution'

that, ousting 'parasitic' intermediaries, would vest all property rights

in the actual cultivators of the soil.6

In keeping with this ideal, during the settlements of the 1820s and

1830s in the upper Gangetic plain, the revenue-collecting taluqdars

and zamindars were largely set aside, and ownership rights were

Yet property relations in the north Indian

countryside were for the most part not transformed. Theory meant

little to many settlement officers as they struggled to make sense of the

complex patterns of landholding they encountered, nor for their part

did the courts vigorously promote the rights of individuals as a way of

ushering in a new liberal order.

Separation of religious from secular

At the same time the British sharply distinguished the 'religious'

from the 'secular'. They sought to confine the activities of the state to

what they considered 'secular' affairs, and, consequently, to withdraw

it from such activities as the management of Hindu temples and

Muslim shrines. Such a distinction contrasted sharply with practice in

England, where an 'established' church drew support from a state

whose monarch was also the head of that church. In India as well

pre-colonial states traditionally had secured much of their legitimacy

from association with the institutions of religious faith. Raja and priest

always depended on, and sustained, each other. Yet the British in

India, anxious to distance themselves from any appearance of supporting 'heathen'

faiths, insisted that the spheres of the 'religious' and the
'secular' should be identified and kept separate. Such views were not

easily implemented. The disassociation of the Company's government

from Hindu and Muslim religious institutions, a long and arduous

process involving the establishment of local managing committees, still

left the government with the task of mediating disputes over succession and the
control of property held by temples and shrines. Despite

the colonial state's hostility to religions whose beliefs it did not share,

it remained locked in an uneasy embrace with them

Rule of law

Yet the vision of the transforming power of the 'rule of law' was

never abandoned. It triumphed above all in the codes of civil and

criminal procedure, proposed by Macaulay's Law Commission and

finally enacted in the 1860s. The process of codification marked an end

to an India seen as a land of 'Oriental despotism'. By their very nature,

codes of procedure introduced into the law predictable rules and

regulations for the adjudication of disputes, and so did away with the

wilfulness, and by extension the immorality, that marked despotism.

Further, codified law created a public sphere - a place where equity

and justice were seen to be meted out - in place of what was imagined

as the despot's 'dark and solemn' justice executed in private, and often

at midnight. Codifying procedural, rather than substantive, law had

the additional, great advantage that such codes could incorporate the

Benthamite, and utilitarian, desire for unity, precision, and simplicity

in the law; yet they could do so without challenging Hastings's and

Jones's decision to utilize the ancient Sanskrit texts as the basis of the

Hindu civil law. The legal system of colonial India thus accommodated both the
assimilative ideals of liberalism, which found a home in

the codes of procedure, and the insistence upon Indian difference in a

personal law defined by membership in a religious community.

(about civilising mission)

The British were nevertheless determined always to mark out the

Raj as a moral, 'civilized', and 'civilizing', regime. For this purpose a

'rule of law', conceived of as the use of standardized impartial procedures for the
settlement of disputes, was in their view essential. The

British could not give to India their own, English, law; that was

impractical. But they could give India codes of legal procedure. In this

fashion, even though they could not introduce into India the substance

of their law, the British could, or so they thought, bring its spirit. In so

doing they could fulfil, to their satisfaction, their avowed 'civilizing'

mission.

(education)

In the reformers' programme, next only in importance to law, stood

education in Western learning. By education alone, as Macaulay made

abundantly clear in his Minute on Education, could India truly be

reshaped in England's image. Yet the educational enterprise was beset

by many of the same difficulties and contradictions as that of law

reform. Altogether apart from enduring fiscal constraints, which

meant that the government never founded more than a very few
schools, a further fundamental problem stood in the way of using

English education to transform Indian society. In England in the early

Victorian period all schooling was religious in nature. Although the

government eventually awarded them grants-in-aid, the schools were

run by various Christian sects, and they taught Christianity as an

integral part of their mission. Indeed, intellectual training was not

conceived of as existing apart from the moral training of Christianity.

The mission societies, as they set up their schools in India, followed

the same pattern, for they conceived of them as elements in a strategy

of religious conversion. The British government, however, dared not

introduce the teaching of Christianity into the schools it sponsored in

India, for its officials, even those who looked forward eagerly to the

Christianization of India, realized any such patronage of religion

might well provoke intense hostility.

(dalhousie’s reforms)

Nevertheless, liberal ideals, although less apocalyptic in their expectations, continued

into the 1850s to shape British perceptions of their

imperial mission in India. Dalhousie's years as governor-general can

even be seen as constituting a 'second age of Indian reform'; for

Dalhousie at once consolidated British dominion over the subcontinent by his policy
of annexation and set firmly in place the

structures of the modern administrative state. To him India owes its

railways and telegraphs, its central Public Works Department, its

Legislative Council, and a commitment, confirmed by Sir Charles

Wood's education despatch of 1854, to a broader vernacular education.

Liberal critique of colonialism

liberal nationalist writers of india. They are quite willing to see the failure of
colonialism in india and even to criticise it freely. But they see the failure of
colonialism mainly in terms of the failure of colonial policies. Their critique basically
pertains to the negatuive role of the colonial state as expressed in its policies.
For eg, the liberals criticise the role of the state in
Preventing industrialisation and in inhibiting growth
This critique assigns the primary resoponsibility for underdevelopment to the failur
and unwillingness of the colonial government to take positive steps to aid the
process of internal capitalist developments.
It concentrates on such matters as the british govt’s imposition of free trade upon
india, its failure to give tariff protection to indian industries and to aid and
encourage them through direct state support in the form of state subsidies,
purchase of stores, encouragement to credit institutions and other measures and its
negative policy towrads irrigation.

(how these laws did not help much, increased notion of difference)

Though dedicated to rooting out the evils of Indian 'barbarism', the

liberal enterprise had itself the effect of disseminating more widely

than ever before notions of Indian difference. Indeed, somewhat

paradoxically, the attack on 'difference' served often to embed in the

popular imagination persisting images of Indian exoticism, linked to a

fascinated horror at practices that involved death or the mutilation of

the body. The campaign against sati, or widow burning, for instance,

as we shall see later, reinforced notions of Indian women as helpless

victims of religion, while lurid tales of the doings of the thags powerfully reinforced
the idea of Indians as treacherous and unreliable.
Stranglers in the service of the goddess Kali, thags were perceived as

roving bands of men, linked by hereditary ties, who preyed upon

travellers along the roads, luring them into their company and then

ritually murdering them. The discovery of tbagi afforded the British

once again an opportunity to take pride in their commitment to

reforming a depraved Indian society. Yet thagi was never a coherent

set of practices, nor could thags easily be differentiated from other

armed robbers, who were known more generally as dacoits. What gave

thagi its distinctive appeal was rather the way it enabled the British to

give voice to their own enduring fears and anxieties. Uneasily dependent upon native
intermediaries, whom they could not bring themselves

to trust, but without whose collaboration the Raj could not function,

the British saw deception and deceit everywhere in India. Thagi thus

became a metaphor for the representation of what they feared most in

India, the inability to know and control their colonial subjects. By

projecting these fears outward onto thags, and then destroying this

threatening conspiracy, the British could in some degree contain what

they could not openly avow and hence reassure themselves of their

mastery of India. Despite W. H. Sleeman's acclaimed extirpation of

thagi, this successful campaign did not put an end to a fear of 'criminal

communities', nor did it eradicate apprehension of Indian duplicity

and dishonesty. On the contrary, the fascination with thagi, and with

it the idea that there existed 'deceivers' who lived at the heart of Indian

society, lived on, and found a place in novels, films, and the English

language itself, where 'thug' came to mean a particularly nasty kind of

ruffian or tough

The origin of these colonial policies is seen in a lack of understanding, colour and
racial prejuice, the basically foreign character of the bureaucracy and the regime
itself.

This liberal critique led to the belief that once political or state power was taken away from the
foreign rulers and the full weight of the new power was thrown behind the indiogenous
economic effort, the colonial content of the economy would gradually disappear.the new
independent state would release the full forces of dev and modernisation that colonialism had
arrested.