Abstract

Chapter 3 considers links between Burke's writings and anticolonial thought (and Raynal), arguing that Burke's writings on India and France are related and even deeply intertwined concerns, rather than merely chronologically contemporary. Burke's underlying disquiet had to do with the question of societies undergoing a complete transformation and whether this was an upheaval to be desired or dreaded. It argues that in both the Indian and the French cases, Burke's response was one of fear: fear of the emergence of class mobility, unfettered by the regulating social customs of Europe and enabled by the space of the colonies. Burke views France and India as having suffered from a "conquest": he views the Jacobins as treating France as a country of conquest virtually indistinguishable from a colonial occupation. Conceptually, there is a surprising link between Burke's critique of French Enlightenment thought, expressed in such terms as "arithmetic reason" (used disparagingly), and his image of the colony. Modernity involves estrangement, and relates to Burke's argument against defining the notion of the citizen in the abstract. Burke argues against an emerging colonial modernity in India being created by the East India Company and the estranged, placeless modernity the Jacobins were establishing in France.

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