Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (review)

Karuna Mantena’s Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism argues that the mutiny among the native troops in the East India Company army in Bengal and the wider subsequent rebellion of 1857 to 1859 against British occupation across central India precipitated an epistemic crisis in British liberalism and, by extension, in both theories and practices of imperial governance. An intervention in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century British empire, Alibis of Empire examines the social theory of Henry Maine in order to trace what Mantena characterizes as a shift from “universalist” (integrationist and teleological) to “culturalist” (particularist and atavistic) justifications for British (indeed, European) rule in Asia and Africa (2). Mantena regards this shift as exemplified in the practices of indirect rule associated with imperial soldier and bureaucrat Frederick Lugard’s The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922). She argues that Maine was “the progenitor of a distinct and powerful line of imperial thinking, and [that he] emerges as a pivotal figure in the intellectual history of empire” (6–7). The latter contention being undisputed, the task of Alibis of Empire is to not only establish the distinctiveness of Maine’s thought but also demonstrate the ways in which it enabled a transformation in the ideology and practice of British empire. Whether or not one judges the book as a success depends in great measure on the degree to which a reader accepts Mantena’s methodological assumptions about the relationship between intellectual interventions and the contexts of their generation, circulation, and purchase on the one hand and bureaucratic practice and the contexts of policy implementation on the other.

Fundamental to Mantena’s argument is the claim that “in the context of the post-Mutiny imperial order,” which was “premised upon the conscious disavowal of many of the key aspects of the liberal model of empire, . . . Maine’s account of traditional society, especially his notion of a native society in dissolution, laid the theoretical foundations of indirect rule, the policy characteristic of late imperial ideology” (148). Approaching the question from the perspective of social, economic, and political history, however, one might argue that the Company’s practice of installing Residents at the courts of nominally independent allies in the subcontinent constituted an alternative or complementary model for indirect rule—as well as a catalyst for the events of 1857 to 1859, especially those introduced under Governor-General Dalhousie. As they extended and consolidated control from mid-century over large parts of the Indian subcontinent, the Company Residents exercised not only advisory authority over a ruler’s personal and civic spending and revenues, but also magisterial power over the disposition of property and succession. Notable among Dalhousie’s innovations was the so-called doctrine of lapse that engendered loss of sovereignty for a native state whose ruler lacked a direct male heir or who was deemed otherwise unfit for office—a practice that, arguably, in the case of the annexation of Awadh in 1857 contributed directly to the mutiny and subsequent rebellions that, for Mantena, constitute the critical turning point in British imperial ideology. Acknowledging this lineage in a footnote in her introduction, Mantena explains that the term “indirect rule” operates in her analysis “to not only refer to patterns of rule—actual institutional configurations—but more centrally, for [her] purposes, a distinct philosophy of rule that self-consciously contrasts itself to more direct or interventionist policies” (190). Thus minimizing administrative and policy precedents, she goes on to track the philosophy from Maine’s theory of traditional society and its dissolution under colonial rule to Lugard’s argument for deploying indigenous institutions in Africa for imperial ends.

Mantena argues that “late imperial ideology, especially indirect rule, has always been difficult to conceptualize straightforwardly as ideology, since it was more often defended in practical and strategic terms as founded less upon ideas than expediency. . . . In contrast to the orientation of...