A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (review)

Liberalism's conjunction with imperialism continues to attract the attention (and bewilderment) of modern liberal scholarship, and Jennifer Pitts takes us further down the road by examining some British and French theorists of liberalism between around 1770 and 1850. She does not say very precisely what she means by "liberalism" other than that its spokesmen—her protagonists are all men—believe in "equal human dignity, freedom, the rule of law, and accountable, representative government," with a commitment to "universalism" and a rejection of racism (3). This platform validates her choice of authors who are divided into the virtuous and the culpable. Virtue belongs to Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and, with a nervous look over her shoulder, Edmund Burke. Blame attaches to Alexander de Tocqueville in France and James and John Stuart Mill in England. The first group is virtuous because it does not allow various forms of universalism to lead toward condoning the domination of Asian, African, and Indian people by metropolitan powers. The second group, which should have known better because of the first group, locks its liberalism in paradox by declaring, on the one hand, in favour of human freedom, dignity, and the rest while defending, on the other, forms of imperial governance: in Tocqueville's case over Algeria, in James Mill's over India, and in John Stuart Mill's over most peoples who failed to match his understanding of civilization. This, then, is the "turn": an alleged movement from a liberalism that respects difference and attacks subjugation to one that argues for human respect within the metropolitan community while closing eyes to "official violence" (151) overseas and leaving doors open to imperial projects.

This project faces two challenges. The first is to describe what is happening in this transition; the second is to explain it. Pitts succeeds admirably in the first task, less so in the second.

Perhaps readers of Uday Singh Mehta's Liberalism and Empire (1999) will hear echoes of his striking thesis that imperialism derives from the essential nature or logic of nineteenth-century liberalism itself through its commitments to universality at the expense of particularity. If so, the echo is false. While Pitts is happy to accommodate Mehta's notion of "strategies of exclusion" as an analytical tool, her book comes into focus as a reply or corrective to Mehta's account. She wants to show how anti-imperial in their thought were not only Burke (whom Mehta identifies as a crosscurrent) but also Smith and Bentham, who we are meant to take as exemplars of late-eighteenth-century thought. What she says of Smith, indeed, is intended to be said of many: "a theory of progress need not imply a pejorative assessment of less 'advanced' peoples or support for European colonial expansion"(26). Off she then goes in search of quotations that rescue these years for modern liberal values, avoiding "the self-congratulatory note" (30) in imperial discourse and "the presumptuous theorist who would impose his vision on a society" (33), seeking instead "a less condescending, less de-humanizing account of savages" (37), one that "did not preclude the possibility of cross-cultural moral judgments" (47). Burke comes next in the account, and he is more awkward: the tenor of his ideas remains as "unattractive and implausible" (62) as ever, but he got empire right by seeing imperialism as a sort of "geographical morality" in which sauce for the home goose could never become sauce for the distant gander. So Burke benefits from being permitted a "peculiar universalism," like an Irish Hegel, which tolerates the otherwise-baffling juxtaposition of domestic elitism and colonial populism. Bentham, finally, is transformed in an important chapter and emerges a violent anti-colonialist whose teaching has been blurred by James Mill's later distortion of the Utilitarian tradition.

The latter bears no small responsibility for the "turn" for having valorized British rule in India and...