John Stuart Mill and the practice of colonial rule in India
| Author | David Williams |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220903349 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220903349
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 412 –428
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088220903349
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John Stuart Mill and the
practice of colonial rule
in India
David Williams
Queen Mary University London, UK
Abstract
John Stuart Mill’s justification for British rule in India is well known. Less well known and
discussed are Mill’s extensive writings on the practice of British rule in India. A close
engagement with Mill’s writings on this issue shows Mill was a much more uncertain
and anxious imperialist than he is often presented to be. Mill was acutely aware of the
difficulties presented by the imperial context in India, he identified a number of very
demanding conditions that would have to be met if Britain’s imperial mission was to be
successful, and he was very troubled by the dangers posed to this mission from politics
in Britain. Toward the end of his life, Mill become much more pessimistic about the
progressive possibilities of British colonialism, in part because of what he thought had
happened after the transfer of British rule from the East India Company to the British
state. A focus on Mill’s arguments about the practice of British rule in India goes some
way to providing a more nuanced account of what Mill thought about colonialism.
Keywords
Colonialism, India, John Stuart Mill, liberalism
As is already a common, and is rapidly tending to become the universal condition of the more
backward populations, to be held in direct subjection by the more advanced . . . there are in this
age of the world few more important problems than how to organize this rule, so as to make it
a good instead of an evil to the subject people . . . But the mode of fitting the government for
this purpose is by no means so well understood as the conditions of good government in a
Corresponding author:
David Williams, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University London, Mile End
Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: David.williams@qmul.ac.uk
903349IPT0010.1177/1755088220903349Journal of International Political TheoryWilliams
research-article2020
Article
Williams 413
people capable of governing themselves. We may even say that it is not understood at all. (Mill,
1977c: 568)
Introduction
John Stuart Mill’s justification for British rule in India has received a good deal of
attention.1 This rule, he said, was “as legitimate as any other if it is the one which in
the existing state of civilization of the subject people most facilitates their transition to
a higher state of improvement” (Mill, 1977a: 224; 1977c: 576). According to Mill, the
“almost only hope” for improvement in India was if it was subject to a “good” despot-
ism provided by a more “civilized” society (Mill, 1977c: 576). The fact that Mill’s
justification for British rule in India flowed from some of his wider theoretical commit-
ments (rather than being a departure from them) has been a key piece of evidence for
the many critics of liberalism’s historical complicity in European colonialism (Mehta,
1999; Parekh, 1985; see also Marwah, 2011). Mill’s justification, and what is often
taken to be its accompanying conceptual apparatus, has been taken as exemplifying the
self-confident and Eurocentric understanding of the “civilizing mission” characteristic
of much of liberal thought (Chakrabarty, 2000; McCarthy, 2009; Pitts, 2005; for a dis-
cussion, see Marwah, 2019: chap. 5). And Mill’s reputation as the nineteenth-century
liberal imperialist is obviously reinforced by the fact that he worked for the East India
Company (EIC) from 1823 until 1858.
A concern with the historical and contemporary normative significance of Mill’s jus-
tification for British rule in India, and indeed its importance in the history of liberal
thinking about relations with diverse others, has not been matched by a concern with
what Mill had to say about how this rule should be conducted.2 As the quote above indi-
cates, for Mill this was the important question about British rule in India, and there has
been relatively little engagement with what Mill said about this issue. This neglect is
perhaps explicable. Mill himself downplayed his work with the EIC (where Mill engaged
most seriously with this question) in his Autobiography (Mill, 1981: 83–85; Moir, 1990:
vii–viii). And in the context of the “colonial turn” in the history of political thought, and
the post-colonial and decolonial critiques of liberalism, Mill’s justification for British
rule in India and its accompanying conceptual apparatus have received most of the
attention.
This article examines Mill’s arguments about the practicalities of British rule in India.
What emerges from this is a different picture of Mill’s imperialism. Far from being a
self-confident liberal imperialist, Mill appears as a much more anxious, uncertain, and
circumspect imperialist (more generally, see Philips, 2019). Mill was acutely aware of
the great challenges facing British rule in India, as well as the many dangers to it, includ-
ing dangers that derived from the attitudes and behavior of the British themselves. One
of Mill’s most pressing concerns was that Britain’s tutelary mission in India was threat-
ened by those who did not understand its exacting requirements. Toward the end of his
life, Mill’s anxieties about the ability and willingness of Britain to successfully pursue
this kind of mission became much more pronounced. This was in part because of what
he thought had happened after the transfer of the government of India from the EIC to the
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