Book Review: How Historians and Intellectuals Justified the British Empire's Conquest

In the 19th century, history and history writing were handmaidens of British imperialism. Historians wrote to justify empire; politicians and public figures used history to rationalise acts of conquest. Dominating the intellectual landscape at that time was the idea of progress which was derived from the Enlightenment and from the development of capitalism subsequent to the Industrial Revolution.

Well-intentioned people in all good conscience were convinced that it was their duty, their moral responsibility, to civilise people who had still not encountered “progress” – by which they meant capitalist modernity. Capitalist modernity did not just mean an economic system but it denoted an entire intellectual apparatus and institutional practices. British imperialism originated as an organised system of economic exploitation through which Britain enriched itself at the cost of conquered and colonised territories.

By the third decade of the 19th century, this economic exploitation had come to be buttressed by policies that sought to reform and civilise the people who lived in India, Africa and other parts of Asia that had been conquered by Britain. This project of reform was informed by a particular historical sensibility which first denied that places like India had histories of their own and then proceeded to argue that the only possible history was the one that the British Empire was creating and fashioning. Historians and intellectuals, as Priya Satia shows persuasively in her book Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, were complicit in this project.

At the intellectual level, there was a two-pronged approach to justify conquest: empire and reform. India is not only the most typical but also the most important case. The first move was to deny that India and Indians had any history of its/their own. James Mill in his very influential History of British India declared that the whole of the history of India could be written up as a part of British history. The German philosopher, Hegel, admired India’s literary and cultural achievements but did not believe India had a history. Hegel wrote:

“It is obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the treasures of Indian literature that this country, so rich in spiritual achievements of a truly profound quality, has no history.”

He made the same point more than once. Even Karl Marx argued that India was caught in the warp of “changelessness” (read no history) which was a characteristic he conceptualised as the “Asiatic mode of production”. The absence of history made India inferior to Europe and therefore India was not yet ready to receive the gifts of democracy and liberty that the Enlightenment had provided. India had to be prepared (reformed) to receive the gifts of liberty, democracy and capitalist modernity. This was the second move: the reform of India which was necessitated by India’s inferiority and backwardness. Until the training in liberty and democracy was completed, the best that a country like India could hope for was a benevolent despotism.

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John Stuart Mill (the son of James) wrote in On Liberty – one of the foundational texts of liberalism – that, “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any of state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”

This clear statement left unclear how long the tutorials on liberty and democracy would last. This nurtured what the historian Francis Hutchins called “the illusion of permanence”. In 1872, the liberal prime minister Gladstone was writing to the then viceroy of India, Lord Northbrook, “When we go, if we are ever to go.” And, of course, there was no acknowledgement that the British Empire, on which, it was assumed, the sun would never set, was based on violent conquest, loot, plunder and systematic exploitation of the people and the resources of India. All these features of the Empire were justified by the civilising mission of the British – the onerous White Man’s Burden. It was also never admitted that the conquest and the exploitation was part of a design – products of well thought out policies. The Empire was acquired, as the historian J.H. Seeley (in)famously declared, in a fit of absentmindedness.

It is important to make a critique of Seeley and his ilk – and Priya Satia does so with great power –because his influence has lasted well beyond the 19th century. In the second half of the 20th century, under the influence of the method of historical analysis introduced by Lewis Namier, historians began to analyse the operations and functions of the English East India Company in terms of “self-interests” of individuals or of groups of individuals. Thus, plunder and conquests were not the products of policies but of self-seeking ambitions of men at the outposts, be they governors-general or private traders. Imperialism thus disappeared as a category to be replaced by the competition of interest groups.

As an extension of this kind of analysis, the obverse of imperialism – nationalism – also came to be seen as the outcome of competing self-interests of frustrated elites. More recently, on both sides of the vast pond called the Atlantic Ocean has emerged a “new imperial history” that seeks to deny that imperialist policies had a coherence. Instead, there were a range of projects of varied orientations and there was always the tantalising possibility of many imperial futures. The empire, the implication is, emerged out of this muddle.

Similarly, it is equally important to underline – and this is at the heart of Satia’s book – the double standards that British historians, intellectuals and policymakers of the 19th century deployed: liberty and democracy at home, despotism in the conquered territories. Conquest and empire building to which most Britons, wittingly or otherwise, were complicit, engendered these double standards. The social scientist Partha Chatterjee has called this “the rule of colonial difference” which works, in Chatterjee’s words:

“when a normative proposition of supposedly universal validity…is held not to apply to the colony on account of some inherent moral deficiency of the latter. Thus even as the rights of man would be declared in the revolutionary assemblies of Paris in 1789, the revolt on Saint Domingue (now Haiti) would be put down on the ground that those rights could not apply to black slaves.”

The operation of this rule was powered by the conviction that what had happened in one small part of the world – Europe – the institutions and the ideas that had developed there were inherently superior to what existed in other parts of the world. A province of the globe claimed to be the globe.

I admire the power and the lucidity of Satia’s arguments but I am a trifle troubled by the use of “conscience”’ as a category of historical analysis. Are human beings – even good, well-intentioned ones – motivated always by their conscience or are they always true to their conscience? Let us look at a group of highly gifted individuals of the 20th century who chased in all good conscience an illusion. Three of the greatest historians (in my opinion) of the second half of the last century – E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Ranajit Guha – were/are all individuals of great intellectual rectitude and integrity. By no reckoning can they be described as men without conscience. But all three for a large part of their adult lives – till the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 – as members of communist parties endorsed and justified Stalinism, a regime that brutally oppressed the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This phenomenon of chasing an illusion until a disturbance destroys innocence is difficult to explain through conscience.

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Satia, very significantly, notes the example of the historian Margery Perham, or dame Margery as she was referred to in Oxford, who moved from being a liberal imperialist into a sceptic of empire because of the rediscovery of her Christian faith. One could give the example of Edward Thompson – E.P.’s father –  or of Charles Freer Andrews, who as Christian missionaries could never reconcile themselves with British imperialism and remained lifelong friends of Indian nationalists.

The larger point I am trying to make through these examples is that conscience almost by definition is an individual-centric entity. Empire building, imperialism, most emphatically is not. Individual convictions and anxieties – conscience, if you like – operate at a different level and register than State policy that drove imperial expansion and the discourse that justified that expansion. In the 19th century, the views of the paladins of Empire were moulded by the prevailing discourse emanating from the intellectual apparatus of the Enlightenment. Even individuals with “conscience” could not quite escape the contagion of that discursive formation. Witness Karl Marx, who in spite of his awareness of the violence associated with British rule in India (see his articles on the revolt of 1857), saw British rule as an unconscious tool of history.

In our times, the historian who sought to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper” and so on from “the enormous condescension of posterity” (the phrases quoted are from. E.P. Thompson); the historian who brought to life those who wanted to turn the world upside down in the middle of the 17th century; and the historian who resurrected the subalterns in Indian history and reconstructed the narrative of the tragic death of Chandra, an obscure woman in rural Bengal – all of them, despite their training as historians, failed to see a terrible and bloody history unfolding before their own eyes because they had been persuaded by the discourse that said “history is on our side”.

Priya Satia’s book dazzles by its brilliance but also points to other enigmas and mysteries that historians, especially self-conscious radical historians, have to confront and unravel.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee is chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University. All views expressed are personal.