CHAPTER 2

LIBERALISM AND EMPIRE

THE AGE OF REFORM

With the coming of Lord William Bentinck as Governor-General in
1828, the British avowedly embarked upon a thorough-going pro-
gramme of reform. Building upon what had previously been little
more than a vague expectation that somehow British rule ought to
bring 'improvement' to India, free traders, utilitarians, and evan-
gelicals created a distinctive ideology of imperial governance shaped
by the ideals of liberalism. From Bentinck's time to that of Lord
Dalhousie (1848-56) this reformist sentiment gained a near universal
ascendancy among the British in India.
A product of the industrial revolution and the growth of a new
morality, as well as of Britain's worldwide predominance after the
Napoleonic wars, liberalism was in no way simply a vision of how
empire ought to be organized. Informed by the thought of Adam
Smith and Jeremy Bentham, it provided a strategy for the remaking of
Britain itself. A host of legislative enactments, from the Reform Bill of
1832 through the New Poor Law, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the
creation of the administrative state, mark out its progress through
British society. Liberalism was, to be sure, in no sense a coherent
doctrine. Indeed, as Richard Bellamy has pointed out, it is a 'notor-
iously elusive notion', extremely difficult to circumscribe and to
define accurately. It incorporated a variety of heterogeneous views and
evolved piecemeal over a long period of social upheaval. As a result,
within early Victorian England there existed liberals of many kinds.
One can identify as liberals, among others, men of such diverse
political views as aristocratic Whigs, classical political economists,
Tory Peelites committed to economic reform, radicals, and
Benthamite utilitarians. The distance separating, say, the radical John
Bright from the Whig Lord Palmerston was immense. And there was,
of course, no organized Liberal Party until the rise of William Glad-
stone in the 1860s.1
1
Richard Bellamy (ed.)> Victorian Liberalism (London, 1990), chapter 1, especially pp. 1-3.

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Those who may be considered liberals shared, nevertheless, a set of

fundamental assumptions which set them off sharply from Burke's
oligarchic Whigs, or, subsequently, from Disraeli's Tory conserva-
tives. Above all, liberals conceived that human nature was intrinsically
the same everywhere, and that it could be totally and completely
transformed, if not by sudden revelation as the evangelicals envisaged,
then by the workings of law, education, and free trade. Liberals
differed over the urgency of reform and the relative importance of
particular measures of reform, say of law or education. But invariably
they sought to free individuals from their age-old bondage to priests,
despots, and feudal aristocrats so that they could become autonomous,
rational beings, leading a life of conscious deliberation and choice.
Liberals had for the most part little sympathy with established institu-
tions that were sustained by simple antiquity alone. What shaped a
proper society was individual self-reliance, character, and merit, not a
hierarchy that rewarded individuals on the basis of patronage and
status. Necessarily optimistic, liberals never doubted that the
wholesale transformation of society was not only possible but certain.
Nor were the values they cherished relevant only to the reform of their
own society. Universally valid, they belonged to all peoples
throughout the world.
In Britain, despite the new order inaugurated by the 1832 Reform
Act, liberals often found themselves tightly constrained. Local bodies,
backed by riotous urban workers, opposed sanitary legislation; landed
gentry frequently contested the reorganization of local government as
well as repeal of the Corn Laws; aristocrats sought to retain the right
to duel and to purchase army commissions. Though far from a democ-
racy in the 1830s and 1840s, England still possessed vocal constitu-
encies who could not be brushed aside. In India, by contrast, a
conquered people could not as easily protest measures introduced for
their presumed benefit. Hence, India could become something of a
laboratory for the creation of the liberal administrative state, and from
there its elements - whether a state sponsored education, the codifi-
cation of law, or a competitively chosen bureaucracy - could make
their way back to England itself. Furthermore, in India, as we shall
see, the conflicts within liberalism became muted. Away from the
contentious political environment of England, liberalism, as a pro-
gramme for reform, developed a coherence it rarely possessed at home.
For the most part evangelicals, free traders, law reformers, educational

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reformers, and utilitarian theorists worked amicably side by side in

India.
The liberal view of Indian society found its fullest expression in
James Mill's classic History of British India, first published in 1818. A
man who prided himself on his philosophic disinterestedness, Mill
himself served the East India Company for some seventeen years,
from 1819 until his death in 1836, and rose to the post of examiner, the
highest position in the Company's home government. Informed with
the historicist ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment, which laid out a
series of stages by which the degree of 'civilization' of any society
could be measured with 'scientific' precision, Mill set himself the task
of ascertaining India's 'true state' in the 'scale of civilization'. For Mill,
following Bentham, the criterion of utility was the measure of social
progress. 'Exactly in proportion as Utility is the object of every
pursuit', he wrote, 'may we regard a nation as civilized.' After scruti-
nizing India's arts, manufactures, literature, religion, and laws, he
concluded, vigorously disputing Sir William Jones's claims, that the
Hindus did not possess, and never had possessed, 'a high state of
civilization'. They were rather a 'rude' people who had made 'but a
few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization'. There existed in
India, he wrote, a 'hideous state of society', inferior even to that of the
European feudal age. Bound down to despotism and to 'a system of
priestcraft, built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition
that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind', the Hindus
had become 'the most enslaved portion of the human race'. Moreover
- and here Mill agreed with Jones - Hindu society had been stationary
for so long that 'in beholding the Hindus of the present day, we are
beholding the Hindus of many ages past; and are carried back, as it
were, into the deepest recesses of antiquity'.2
To free India from stagnation and set it on the road to progress,
James Mill proposed a remedy which was at once, as he saw it, simple
and obvious. All that was required was a code of laws that would
release individual energy by protecting the products of its efforts.
'Light taxes and good laws', he insisted, in good Benthamite fashion,
'nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all
over the globe.' In fact, of course, the simplicity was deceptive, for
Mill's scheme, with its creation of individual property rights enforced
2
James Mill, The History of British India (reprinted Chicago, 1975), pp. 226-27, 236-37,
246-48.

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by 'scientific' codes of law, involved a wholesale revolution in Indian

society. Nor did it matter to him that India's government remained
unrepresentative. For James Mill, as for his mentor Bentham, happi-
ness and not liberty was the end of government, and happiness was
promoted solely through the protection of the individual in his person
and property. Once secure in their property, the Indians could find in
their own 'industry' the means for their 'elevation'. In England, Mill
supported representative government as the only way to keep power-
hungry elites in check. But he insistently denied that participation in
government was a key to moral improvement. So long as the business
of India's government was 'well and cheaply performed', it was, he
argued, 'of little or no consequence who are the people that perform
it'. From these views came an enduring British belief in the value of
good government provided by British experts.3
John Stuart Mill inherited from his father both the mantle of liberal
leadership and the family tie with India. First employed in 1823 to
assist his father in the office, he remained with the East India
Company until its dissolution in 1858, and he too rose in time to the
post of examiner. The younger Mill's diagnosis of India's ills differed
but little from that of his father. He elaborated more carefully,
however, the rungs on the 'ladder of civilization', and prescribed a
somewhat different plan for ascending them. J.S. Mill is best known
for his On Liberty, in which he argued, against his father, that liberty
possesses an intrinsic value of its own beyond mere happiness. In his
Representative Government, however, he made clear his view that this
'ideally best polity', as he called it, was not suited to all peoples. Only
those capable of fulfilling its 'conditions', he argued, were entitled to
enjoy the benefits of representative government. For the rest, subject-
ion to 'foreign force', and a government 'in a considerable degree
despotic', was appropriate, and even necessary.
Behind Mill's views lay a hierarchical classification of all societies.
'The state of different communities, in point of culture and develop-
ment', Mill wrote, 'ranges downwards to a condition very little above
the highest of the beasts.' At its lowest point were those who lived in
'savage independence', and so required an 'absolute ruler' who would
teach them to obey. Just above them were slave societies, where the
people were being taught the need for 'continuous labour of an
unexciting kind'. The next step upward was that of a 'paternal despo-
3
Stokes, Utilitarians, pp. 64-70.

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tism', where the government exercised a general superintendence over

society but left individuals to do much for themselves. The Inca state
of Peru was of that sort, together with the societies of Egypt, India,
and China, which had reached that point in ancient times. But these
'Oriental' societies were then 'brought to a permanent halt for want of
mental liberty and individuality; requisites of improvement which the
institutions that had carried them thus far entirely incapacitated them
from acquiring*.
Among the 'Oriental races', in Mill's view, only the Jews escaped
this enduring stagnation, and they only because the existence of a line
of 'Prophets' kept alive among them 'the antagonism of influences
which is the only real security for continued progress'. Elsewhere,
since improvement could not come from within, it had to be 'superin-
duced from without', by a 'government of leading strings' that could
break down old institutions. Yet the peoples of Europe, who alone
could provide a government of this sort, were not themselves uni-
formly advanced. The southern Europeans, with the Latin Americans,
fell short of the topmost rungs, for they shared with the Orientals a
debilitating passivity which left them prey to corrupt, if not despotic,
rule. The French too were 'essentially a southern people' who, if they
possessed 'great individual energy', still could not match the 'self-
helping and struggling Anglo-Saxons'.4
A cynic might contend that the rungs on this ladder marked out not
stages of civilization but the relative distance of these societies from
England, or more precisely, from the values cherished by John Stuart
Mill. Yet Mill's object in constructing this scale was not to condemn
those whom he saw as less advanced, but rather to make clear what had
to be done to propel them forward. Above all, Mill insisted that
neither race nor environment dictated whether a people could enjoy
the benefits of representative government. To be sure, there was some
ambivalence. Britain's settlement colonies, he argued, were entitled to
immediate self-government, but whether because they shared with the
'ruling country' a 'similar civilization' or because they were 'of
European race', was not wholly clear. Similarly, his references to the
'indolence' and 'envy' of southern peoples implied a measure of
environmental determinism. Still, for Mill civilization alone truly
mattered, and that was not unalterably fixed either by a people's
4
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government (London, 1957), pp.
197-201, 213-14, 218-27.

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biological nature, or, challenging Montesquieu, by the climatic zone in

which they lived.
Mill was adamant in his insistence that 'leading strings' were 'only
admissible as a means of gradually training the people to walk alone'.
The great advantage of 'the dominion of foreigners', like that of Britain
in India, was that it could, more rapidly than any but the most
exceptional indigenous ruler, carry a people 'through several stages of
progress', and 'clear away obstacles to improvement'. For Mill this
'training' in self-government involved much more than simple codifi-
cation of the laws. Unlike his father, the younger Mill did not see men
as inherently selfish, moulded only by the external sanctions of law.
They could be taught to pursue the public good, and to develop the
'active self-helping' character that self-government required.
Together, he argued, good government and education could so trans-
form India's peoples that in the end their claim to freedom would be
irresistible.
John Stuart Mill was not alone in repudiating the rigors of Bentha-
mite utilitarianism in favour of a more eclectic liberalism. Even in the
1830s, at the height of utilitarian influence, few reformers were strict
Benthamites. Distinguished less by sectarian zeal than by a belief in the
limitless malleability of human character, most combined an interest in
legal reform with evangelical Christianity and a commitment to free
trade, education and moral improvement. The young and ardent
Charles Trevelyan, who served under Metcalfe at Delhi and then in the
Calcutta secretariat under Bentinck, can be taken as representative. As
Macaulay wrote of him in 1834:
He is quite at the head of that active party among the younger servants of the
Company who take the side of improvement ... He has no small talk. His
mind is full of schemes of moral and political improvement, and his zeal boils
over in his talk. His topics, even in courtship, are steam navigation, the
education of the natives, the equalisation of the sugar duties, the substitution
of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet in the Oriental languages.5
Nor was John Stuart Mill alone in looking forward without hesi-
tation to the eventual end of British rule. 'Trained by us to happiness
and independence, and endowed with our learning and political insti-
tutions', as Trevelyan put it, 'India will remain the proudest
5
Macaulay to his sister, Margaret, 7 December 1834, in G.O. Trevelyan, The Life and
Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol. 1 (London, 1876), p. 385

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monument of British benevolence.' Most stirring perhaps was Macau-

lay's peroration in his speech on the 1833 renewal of the Company's
Charter.
It may be [he said], that the public mind of India may expand under our
system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may
educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having
become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age,
demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know
not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be
the proudest day in English history.
At its heart, therefore, liberalism can be seen as informed by a
radical universalism. Contemporary European, especially British,
culture alone represented civilization. No other cultures had any
intrinsic validity. There was no such thing as 'Western' civilization;
there existed only 'civilization'. Hence the liberal set out, on the basis
of this shared humanity, to turn the Indian into an Englishman; or, as
Macaulay described it in his 1835 Minute on Education, to create not
just a class of Indians educated in the English language, who might
assist the British in ruling India, but one 'English in taste, in opinions,
in morals and in intellect'. The fulfillment of the British connection
with India involved, then, nothing less than the complete trans-
formation of India's culture and society. Its outcome would be the
creation of an India politically independent, but one that embodied an
'imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our
laws'.
This liberal idealism was inevitably fraught with troubling impli-
cations. With neither racial nor environmental theories to sustain it,
culture alone remained to distinguish Europeans from those overseas.
As a result, the more fully non-European peoples were accorded the
prospect of future equality, the more necessary it became to devalue
and depreciate their contemporary cultures. The hierarchical ordering
of societies on a 'scale of civilization' reflected not just the classifying
enthusiasms of the Enlightenment, but was a way to reassure the
British that they themselves occupied a secure position, as the arbiter
of its values, on the topmost rung. It was not some chance prejudice,
but the liberal project itself, that led Macaulay in 1835 t o scorn the
'entire native literature of India and Arabia' as not worth 'a single shelf
of a good European library'. Similarly, in looking forward to the
eventual freedom of India, he had of necessity to insist that the Indians

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of the present day were 'sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and
superstition'. The future triumphs of 'reason' demanded as their
counterpart the present existence of 'barbarism'. Such an insistence
was especially necessary in the case of India, where the existence of an
ancient civilization could not be denied. Unlike Africa, whose
'savagery' could be taken for granted, in India the notion of its
'barbarism' required a defiantly assertive rhetorical exercise.
By its very nature the liberal transformation of India meant the
flowering on Indian soil of those institutions which defined Britain's
own society and civilization. Among the most important of these, as
we have seen, were private property, the rule of law, the liberty of the
individual, and education in Western knowledge. The triumph of
liberalism was not, however, to be simple or straightforward. Invari-
ably, contestation with other more conservative visions of empire, as
well as the day-to-day exigencies of colonial rule, shaped the final
outcome of the reform enterprise. The stirring rhetoric of Mill and
Macaulay should not be allowed to obscure the transformations that
did not, as well as those that did, take place.
Central to an understanding of both the contradictions and the
transforming power of British reform in India was the notion of the
'rule of law'. In nineteenth-century England the legal order was meant
above all to guarantee the rights of property, conceived of as vested in
individuals and secure from arbitrary confiscation. In India too, from
Cornwallis's permanent settlement of 1793 onward, private landed
property was made the cornerstone of Britain's commitment to an
India transformed. In the hands of James Mill and his utilitarian
disciples, as Eric Stokes has pointed out, this ideal carried with it
radical implications. Some few theorists, among them James Mill
himself, committed to Ricardian theory, argued that the entire rental
of land, conceived of as an unearned surplus, rightfully belonged to the
government. For the most part, however, men like Holt Mackenzie
and R. M. Bird in the North-Western Provinces instead used utili-
tarian theory to advocate what Stokes called 'an agrarian revolution'
that, ousting 'parasitic' intermediaries, would vest all property rights
in the actual cultivators of the soil.6
In keeping with this ideal, during the settlements of the 1820s and
1830s in the upper Gangetic plain, the revenue-collecting taluqdars
and zamindars were largely set aside, and ownership rights were
6
Stokes, Utilitarians, chapter 2, especially pp. 110-16.

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awarded to the villagers. Yet property relations in the north Indian

countryside were for the most part not transformed. Theory meant
little to many settlement officers as they struggled to make sense of the
complex patterns of landholding they encountered, nor for their part
did the courts vigorously promote the rights of individuals as a way of
ushering in a new liberal order. To the contrary, much of Anglo-
Indian law enshrined a conception of Indian society that in fact placed
the family and community above the individual, and enforced values
seen as embedded in religion from antiquity. The purpose of these
laws was, as David Washbrook has written, 'to keep society in the
structure of relations in which the colonial authority had found it and
to construe the moral problems of the present against standards taken
directly from the past'. This conception of India first took shape in Sir
William Jones's time in the enforcement of 'Hindu' and 'Muslim'
personal law. From there it found its way into British Indian property
law. Despite Cornwallis's permanent settlement, and subsequent
declarations of private property rights, the Hindu joint family, many
Brahmin communities, and cosharing village brotherhoods, among
others, secured rights which sharply restricted the working of the
market in land, and with it prevented any far-reaching transformation
of society or the widespread diffusion of capitalist agriculture. The
more closely, Washbrook concludes, 'is the Anglo-Indian law's
"freedom" of property scrutinized, the more limited does it seem to
become'.7
At the same time the British sharply distinguished the 'religious'
from the 'secular'. They sought to confine the activities of the state to
what they considered 'secular' affairs, and, consequently, to withdraw
it from such activities as the management of Hindu temples and
Muslim shrines. Such a distinction contrasted sharply with practice in
England, where an 'established' church drew support from a state
whose monarch was also the head of that church. In India as well
pre-colonial states traditionally had secured much of their legitimacy
from association with the institutions of religious faith. Raja and priest
always depended on, and sustained, each other. Yet the British in
India, anxious to distance themselves from any appearance of support-
ing 'heathen' faiths, insisted that the spheres of the 'religious' and the
'secular' should be identified and kept separate. Such views were not
7
David Washbrook, 'Law, State and Society in Colonial India', Modern Asian Studies, vol.
15 (1981), PP- 649-60.

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easily implemented. The disassociation of the Company's government

from Hindu and Muslim religious institutions, a long and arduous
process involving the establishment of local managing committees, still
left the government with the task of mediating disputes over succes-
sion and the control of property held by temples and shrines. Despite
the colonial state's hostility to religions whose beliefs it did not share,
it remained locked in an uneasy embrace with them.
In addition to the foot-dragging of those committed to a more
conservative ideology, liberal reform was further thwarted by the
fiscal and military requirements of a government only recently, and
still insecurely, established in power. The East India Company, whose
rule was in some ways little more than that of a 'garrison state' in the
early nineteenth century, simply dared not risk antagonizing its sub-
jects by disturbing the bases of religious authority or interfering too
openly with their intimate personal relations. Even the disassociation
of the government from Hindu temples was undertaken with reluc-
tance, and then largely in response to unremitting pressure from
outraged evangelicals. Beyond this, until 1850 the Company was
caught up in ceaseless military campaigning with a large and expensive
sepoy army. This placed an enormous drain on state finances, and,
together with economic depression throughout the 1830s, forced the
government always to concern itself with the size and security of its
revenue collections. In such circumstances the British had but little
space, or leisure, in which to experiment with measures that might
unsettle society. Of necessity they kept up much of the extractive
mechanism they had inherited from their eighteenth-century pre-
decessors.
Yet the vision of the transforming power of the 'rule of law' was
never abandoned. It triumphed above all in the codes of civil and
criminal procedure, proposed by Macaulay's Law Commission and
finally enacted in the 1860s. The process of codification marked an end
to an India seen as a land of 'Oriental despotism'. By their very nature,
codes of procedure introduced into the law predictable rules and
regulations for the adjudication of disputes, and so did away with the
wilfulness, and by extension the immorality, that marked despotism.
Further, codified law created a public sphere - a place where equity
and justice were seen to be meted out - in place of what was imagined
as the despot's 'dark and solemn' justice executed in private, and often
at midnight. Codifying procedural, rather than substantive, law had

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the additional, great advantage that such codes could incorporate the
Benthamite, and utilitarian, desire for unity, precision, and simplicity
in the law; yet they could do so without challenging Hastings's and
Jones's decision to utilize the ancient Sanskrit texts as the basis of the
Hindu civil law. The legal system of colonial India thus accommo-
dated both the assimilative ideals of liberalism, which found a home in
the codes of procedure, and the insistence upon Indian difference in a
personal law defined by membership in a religious community.
To be sure, the codifying enterprise was never wholly compelling.
Many continued to see India as a land suited for despotism, only now
that of enlightened British officers. In part a nostalgia nourished by
early nineteenth-century Romanticism, this dissident ideal flourished
principally among officials in newly conquered territories, before the
courts had been established, in what were called non-regulation
provinces. It reached its ultimate flowering in the Punjab during the
decade after its conquest in 1849, when the province was ruled by the
brothers John and Henry Lawrence. For the officers of this 'Punjab
School', the ideal, as John Beames described it, was that of 'personal
government', in which the magistrate would 'decide cases either sitting
on horseback in the village gateway, or under a tree outside the village
walls, and write his decision on his knee ... and be off to repeat the
process in the next village'. Not all officers, as the dissident Beames
reported, liked being turned into 'homeless vagrant governing-
machines', and in any case regulation and the rule of law could not
forever be kept at bay even in the Punjab.8 Still, throughout the later
nineteenth century, the self-assurance fostered by the Punjab ideal
permitted officers in that province a wider range of discretionary
authority than was customary elsewhere in India.
This belief in a legitimate concentration of authority drew suste-
nance from a conviction that in the colonies a resort to vigorous
executive action, including even the abrogation of habeas corpus, in
England seen as the guarantor of the subject's liberties, could not
wholly be avoided. Such acts found justification in the Crown's
prerogative to secure order, and generated frequent tension between
the courts and the executive government. At times of perceived crisis
officials unashamedly resorted to exemplary measures of punishment.
To crush an uprising among the Kukas of the Punjab in 1872, for
instance, a local official summarily shot seventy protestors who had
8
John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London, 1961), pp. 101-3.

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been rounded up by the police, and had forty-nine blown from guns,
while his superior, the divisional commissioner, hastening to the
scene, himself hanged another sixteen. Though these two officers were
censured, their vigorous defence of their actions marked out a path
that was to lead in 1919 to the infamous Amritsar massacre.
The British were nevertheless determined always to mark out the
Raj as a moral, 'civilized', and 'civilizing', regime. For this purpose a
'rule of law', conceived of as the use of standardized impartial pro-
cedures for the settlement of disputes, was in their view essential. The
British could not give to India their own, English, law; that was
impractical. But they could give India codes of legal procedure. In this
fashion, even though they could not introduce into India the substance
of their law, the British could, or so they thought, bring its spirit. In so
doing they could fulfil, to their satisfaction, their avowed 'civilizing'
mission. In place of a religious faith shared with its subjects, the British
colonial state thus found its legitimacy in a moralization of 'law'. No
one stated this more vigorously than James Fitzjames Stephen, legal
member of the viceroy's Council from 1869 to 1872. As he wrote:
The establishment of a system of law which regulates the most important parts
of the daily life of the people constitutes in itself a moral conquest more
striking, more durable, and far more solid, than the physical conquest which
rendered it possible. It exercises an influence over the minds of the people in
many ways comparable to that of a new religion.... Our law is in fact the sum
and substance of what we have to teach them. It is, so to speak, a compulsory
gospel which admits of no dissent and no disobedience.9
In the reformers' programme, next only in importance to law, stood
education in Western learning. By education alone, as Macaulay made
abundantly clear in his Minute on Education, could India truly be
reshaped in England's image. Yet the educational enterprise was beset
by many of the same difficulties and contradictions as that of law
reform. Altogether apart from enduring fiscal constraints, which
meant that the government never founded more than a very few
schools, a further fundamental problem stood in the way of using
English education to transform Indian society. In England in the early
Victorian period all schooling was religious in nature. Although the
government eventually awarded them grants-in-aid, the schools were
9
J.F. Stephen, 'Legislation under Lord Mayo', in W.W. Hunter, Life of Mayo, vol. 2
(London, 1875), pp. 168-69.

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run by various Christian sects, and they taught Christianity as an

integral part of their mission. Indeed, intellectual training was not
conceived of as existing apart from the moral training of Christianity.
The mission societies, as they set up their schools in India, followed
the same pattern, for they conceived of them as elements in a strategy
of religious conversion. The British government, however, dared not
introduce the teaching of Christianity into the schools it sponsored in
India, for its officials, even those who looked forward eagerly to the
Christianization of India, realized any such patronage of religion
might well provoke intense hostility. In the end, although men such as
Trevelyan and Macaulay solaced themselves with a vision of Hinduism
as 'identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities
that it gives way at once before the light of European science', the
British of necessity made of religious neutrality, like the notion of the
state as 'secular', a liberal virtue of its own. A symbol of free intel-
lectual inquiry, religious non-interference generated an image of the
Englishman as benign, disinterested, and impartial. Assertion of the
ideals of neutrality and secularism should not, however, be allowed to
obscure the highly interventionist role the colonial state played as it set
out to remake Indian society.
The tension between an increasing involvement in Indian education
and an enforced non-interference in religion, as Gauri Viswanathan
has shown, was resolved through the introduction of English literature
as the central element of the school curriculum. Although education in
India was to be secular, moral training was to be supplied by study of
the great works of England's historic literature. No such schools
existed in England, nor was English literature seen there as a substitute
for Christian training. The guiding ideal was that of 'godliness and
good learning', enunciated by the educator Thomas Arnold. Indeed,
humanistic study in English schools in the early Victorian period
centred around classical literatures, Greek and Latin, not English at all.
Professorships of English literature did not even exist in Oxford and
Cambridge until the 1870s. In India, by contrast, eighteenth-century
neo-classical literature, along with Shakespeare, formed the core of the
curriculum in the government schools. Despite the fierce criticism of
such missionaries as Alexander Duff that education without Christian
training would produce converts only to 'atheism' and 'rebellion', the
government had no choice. As reformed codes of procedure had in
India to stand for, or one might say represent, a commitment to the

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'rule of law', so too in similar fashion did a secular and literary

education represent the larger transformation of character and mora-
lity envisaged by Macaulay and Mill. In British India cultural value, as
Viswanathan has described it, was relocated 'from belief and dogma to
language, experience, and history'.10
Though dedicated to rooting out the evils of Indian 'barbarism', the
liberal enterprise had itself the effect of disseminating more widely
than ever before notions of Indian difference. Indeed, somewhat
paradoxically, the attack on 'difference' served often to embed in the
popular imagination persisting images of Indian exoticism, linked to a
fascinated horror at practices that involved death or the mutilation of
the body. The campaign against sati, or widow burning, for instance,
as we shall see later, reinforced notions of Indian women as helpless
victims of religion, while lurid tales of the doings of the thags power-
fully reinforced the idea of Indians as treacherous and unreliable.
Stranglers in the service of the goddess Kali, thags were perceived as
roving bands of men, linked by hereditary ties, who preyed upon
travellers along the roads, luring them into their company and then
ritually murdering them. The discovery of tbagi afforded the British
once again an opportunity to take pride in their commitment to
reforming a depraved Indian society. Yet thagi was never a coherent
set of practices, nor could thags easily be differentiated from other
armed robbers, who were known more generally as dacoits. What gave
thagi its distinctive appeal was rather the way it enabled the British to
give voice to their own enduring fears and anxieties. Uneasily depend-
ent upon native intermediaries, whom they could not bring themselves
to trust, but without whose collaboration the Raj could not function,
the British saw deception and deceit everywhere in India. Thagi thus
became a metaphor for the representation of what they feared most in
India, the inability to know and control their colonial subjects. By
projecting these fears outward onto thags, and then destroying this
threatening conspiracy, the British could in some degree contain what
they could not openly avow and hence reassure themselves of their
mastery of India. Despite W. H. Sleeman's acclaimed extirpation of
thagi, this successful campaign did not put an end to a fear of 'criminal
communities', nor did it eradicate apprehension of Indian duplicity
and dishonesty. On the contrary, the fascination with thagi, and with
10
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New
York, 1989), chapter 4, especially p. 117.

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it the idea that there existed 'deceivers' who lived at the heart of Indian
society, lived on, and found a place in novels, films, and the English
language itself, where 'thug' came to mean a particularly nasty kind of
ruffian or tough.11
The liberal remaking of India never involved, then, the simple
transplantation of English values and institutions onto Indian soil. The
vision of Indian 'difference', first articulated by Dow, Halhed and
Jones, continued always to make its presence felt, and itself shaped
much of the programme of reform. Nor could the exuberant optimism
of the reformers of the 1830s be indefinitely sustained. By mid-
century, in India and England alike, powerful currents of disillusion-
ment had set in. Mid-Victorian British liberalism defined a consensus
among a people buoyed up by pride and prosperity, and often brought
Whigs, Peelites, and Radicals together in broad based coalition
governments. It did so, however, at the cost of papering over latent
contradictions and circumscribing the objectives of the liberal pro-
gramme. Following Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot, who may
be seen as representative figures of the age, mid-century liberals clung
to the semi-reformed constitution, with its aristocratic bias, and
embraced ideas of deference and dignity as appropriate safeguards
against the feared tumults of mass rule. Even while elaborating the
machinery of the modern state, they sought to avoid what Bagehot
called 'sweeping innovation' as much as the 'old tory way' of keeping
'everything which is because it is'.
Nevertheless, liberal ideals, although less apocalyptic in their expec-
tations, continued into the 1850s to shape British perceptions of their
imperial mission in India. Dalhousie's years as governor-general can
even be seen as constituting a 'second age of Indian reform'; for
Dalhousie at once consolidated British dominion over the sub-
continent by his policy of annexation and set firmly in place the
structures of the modern administrative state. To him India owes its
railways and telegraphs, its central Public Works Department, its
Legislative Council, and a commitment, confirmed by Sir Charles
Wood's education despatch of 1854, to a broader vernacular edu-
cation. The confidence that India could somehow be made over in the
image of Britain was never in subsequent years wholly to disappear.

11
See Radhika Singha, 'Providential Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s
and Legal Innovation', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 27 (1993), pp. 83-146.

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But after 1857 such ideals had to contend with newly powerful,
alternative visions of empire.

1857: THE CRISIS OF THE RAJ

On 10 May 1857 the sepoys of the Bengal Army, refusing to accept
cartridges greased with pork and beef fat, rose in revolt throughout
northern India. Within weeks the mutinous soldiery, who had seized
Delhi and raised anew the standard of the Mughal Empire, were joined
by disaffected groups in the countryside. Landlords and peasants,
princes and merchants, Hindus and Muslims, each for their own
reasons threw off the British yoke and sought their own independence.
Large reaches of the country, above all in the Gangetic plain from
Bihar to the Punjab, remained out of British control for a year and
more. In the recently annexed province of Oudh, where opposition to
British rule was nearly universal, as all classes fought on behalf of their
sepoy brethren and recently deposed king, desperate fighting con-
tinued until the very end of 1858.
For the British the searing trauma of this revolt was but the first of a
series of checks to the expectation of a slow but steady march of
progress whose end point would be the triumph of liberal principles
throughout the world. Eight years later, in 1865, a rising of former
slaves took place at Morant Bay in Jamaica. Together these two
uprisings raised troubling questions about how far the 'blessings' of
British rule, and liberal reform with it, were appreciated by those upon
whom they were conferred. Two years after the Jamaican rising, in
1867, Benjamin Disraeli led Britain's 'leap in the dark' to vastly
extended male suffrage, and thus transformed British politics forever.
The remaining sections of this chapter examine, firstly, the crisis of the
Raj which the Indian revolt precipitated, and, secondly, the sub-
sequent crisis of liberalism in Britain itself. The outcome was to be a
conception of empire grounded ever more firmly in notions of Indian
'difference', and a revitalized conservatism that gave that empire a
central place in Britain's vision of itself.
As the victorious British armies moved on the rebel strongholds, the
1857 revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. Sepoys, even if only suspected
of mutiny, were blown from cannon; villagers were, on occasion,
indiscriminately shot; while the erstwhile Mughal capital of Delhi was
sacked, and its major monuments saved from destruction only by the

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intervention of John Lawrence. The intensity of the punishment

meted out reflected the vulnerability of the British in India, precariou-
sly set over a vast land they barely comprehended. Desperate and
fearful, they sought to quell by a vengeful terror the harrowing vision
of the loyal sepoy or faithful bearer as a treacherous murderer. The
rebel leaders, above all, were never conceived of simply as honourable
opponents. To the contrary, men such as Nana Saheb, responsible for
the massacre at Kanpur, were made into fiends and monsters. Above
all, the murder of English women at his hands stirred a fierce hatred of
those who seemed to put at risk the 'purity' of English womanhood,
and left as an enduring legacy lurid tales of rape and molestation.
Such a demonization of course made it easier for the British to
obscure their own responsibility for the events of 1857, and thus to
justify the continuance of the Raj. But it opened up as well a gulf
between Briton and Indian that could not easily be closed again after
the restoration of order. As G. O. Trevelyan noted in The Com-
petition Wallah, 'Men cannot at will cast aside the recollection of those
times when all was doubt and confusion and dismay; when a great fear
was their companion, day and night ... The distrust and dislike
engendered by such an experience are too deeply rooted to be plucked
up by an act of volition.' From the rage, and fear, of 1857 emerged a
new and enduring sense of the importance of the bonds of race, in
contrast to those of culture.12
Despite the widespread expression of Indian hostility revealed by
the events of 1857, Britain's right to rule India went unexamined.
Unlike the divisive debates over the future of South Africa that
accompanied the Boer War a half-century later, at the time of the
Indian Mutiny no one in Britain, or among the British in India, ever
considered leaving India. To the contrary, with its fierce retribution
against those who had had the temerity to rebel, the 1857 revolt
evoked a cleansing sense of heroism and self-assertion. As Trevelyan
wrote, the struggle 'irresistibly reminded us that we were an imperial
race, holding our own on a conquered soil by dint of valour and
foresight'. Many officials, above all those whose reputations were at
stake, sought by an exercise of denial to exculpate the Raj, and with it
the work of the reformers, from complicity in the revolt. Dalhousie's
disciples, especially, insisted, with John Lawrence, that the cause of
12
CO. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London, 1864), pp. 283-304; Thomas Metcalf,
The Aftermath of Revolt: India, I8)/-I8/O (Princeton, 1964), chapter 8.

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the Mutiny was to be found in the 'cartridge affair and nothing else';
that the people had been 'for the most part in our favour'; and that the
revolt was consequently nothing more than an irrational panic on the
subject of caste among credulous and superstitious sepoys. The endur-
ing representation of the events of 1857 in British historiography as a
'sepoy mutiny' reflected too this determination to preserve Britain's
reputation as an imperial power.
Conservative critics like Disraeli, never an admirer of Dalhousie or
of liberal reform, described the mutinous sepoys as 'not so much the
avengers of professional grievances as the exponents of general dis-
content', and insisted that the events of 1857 were 'occasioned by
adequate causes'. Among these Disraeli included the 'destruction of
Native authority', the 'disturbance' of property rights, and the 'tam-
pering with religion' of a government bent on reform of Indian
society. Yet he never called into question the legitimacy of that
government. He urged only a return to what he saw as the path of
conciliation followed in the pre-reform era. In this recommendation,
most liberals, despite their endeavour to deflect blame for the revolt
from the government, joined with Disraeli. Even for the most enthu-
siastic reformer the Mutiny was a sobering experience. As Charles
Raikes, an officer in the North-Western Provinces, wrote in his Notes
on the Revolt, 'The fatal error of attempting to force the policy of
Europe on the people of Asia ... must be corrected for the future, as it
has been atoned for in the past.' In similar fashion, Sir Charles Wood,
President of the Board of Control for much of Dalhousie's governor-
generalship, although he denied that the Mutiny had revealed the
existence of any widespread popular hostility to British rule, neverthe-
less, when again placed in charge of the India Office after 1859,
acknowledged that the 'mistake we fell into, under the influence of the
most benevolent feelings, and according to our notion of what was
right and just, was that of introducing a system foreign to the habits
and wishes of the people'. Henceforth, he said, 'we ought to adopt and
improve what we find in existence and avail ourselves as far as possible
of the existing institutions of the country'. Indians, in other words,
were not like Englishmen, and it was fatal to treat them as though they
were.13
As they assessed the character of the revolt, no one among the
13
Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, chapter 2, especially pp. 72-79; Rudrangshu Mukherjee,
Awadh in Revolt, 1857-58 (Delhi, 1984).

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British took seriously, or even tried to comprehend, the complex

forces that moved Indians to act. All behaviour during the rebellion
was viewed through the lens of 'loyalty' and 'rebellion', and evaluated
according to notions of how Indians ought to respond. In particular,
the British endeavoured to ascertain the extent of 'gratitude' for
benefits conferred. From this perspective the behaviour of the Oudh
peasantry, above all, came as a rude shock. In keeping with the
principles of liberal reform, the village communities of this mid-
Gangetic state had been made the beneficiaries of its 1856 annexation,
when both the nawab and the aristocratic taluqdars were set aside.
Consequently the British had expected that these men would come
forward in support of the government in its hour of need. Instead, the
peasantry joined the rebellion, and even subjected themselves to their
former taluqdari masters. As a result, frustrated and angry, the British
considered themselves betrayed. As Lord Canning, looking back on
the course of the revolt in Oudh, wrote in October 1858:

Our endeavour to better, as we thought, the village occupants in Oudh has

not been appreciated by them ... It can hardly be doubted that if they had
valued their restored rights, they would have shown some signs of a willing-
ness to support a Government which had revived those rights. But they have
done nothing of the kind. The Governor General is therefore of opinion that
these village occupants deserve little consideration from us.

The behaviour of the Oudh peasantry during the uprising, and

indeed that of their taluqdari superiors as well, cannot, of course, be so
easily explained. Loyalty to the Oudh king and sympathy with the
sepoys, many of whom came from Oudh, as well as a host of particular
interests, not least a desire to secure themselves from plunder in a time
of anarchy, impelled villagers to join the taluqdars. The British,
however, saw none of this. As they had failed to live up to the
expectations imposed upon them, the villagers had become, by defi-
nition, rebels. Hence they deserved to be punished. As an embittered
Lord Canning wrote, 'Their conduct amounts almost to the admission
that their own rights, whatever these may be, are subordinate to those
of the talookdar; that they do not value the recognition of these rights
by the ruling authority; and that the Talookdaree system is the
ancient, indigenous, and cherished system of the country.' In no way
could the British accept any responsibility for the hostility of men
upon whom they had themselves lavished benefits. That the annexation

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itself, or the subsequent level of revenue assessment, might have had

something to do with the behaviour of the villagers in 1857, was
simply dismissed.14
As the participation of the taluqdars gave the revolt roots in the
Oudh countryside, and indeed kept the rebellion alive for a full six
months after the fall of the capital city of Lucknow in March 1858, it
was not surprising that, as the British set out to restore their authority,
they endeavoured to secure the cooperation of men whose power had
been so visibly manifested. Yet the reinstatement of the taluqdars in
their former estates found justification not only as an act of political
expediency, but as the restoration of a legitimate authority. Canning
had spoken of the taluqdari system as 'ancient, indigenous, and cher-
ished'; the Oudh chief commissioner in 1858, Robert Montgomery,
for his part described the 'superiority and influence of these talook-
dars' as 'a necessary element in the social constitution of the province'.
With Oudh rural society conceived of in such a fashion, the British
obviously had no need for an uneasy conscience as they abandoned the
villagers to their fate.
Yet the use of such explanations inevitably called into question the
underlying assumptions of the liberal enterprise. If the Oudh villagers
did not, in the British view, pursue their own best interest, but
obstinately clung to their traditional ways, then the liberal presump-
tion that all men were inherently rational and educable fell to the
ground, and with it the expectation that India could be transformed on
an English model. In similar fashion, after the Mutiny, the conversion
of India to Christianity ceased to evoke much enthusiasm. For
evangelicals the Mutiny was a blow sent by God to humble Britain for
its remissness in Christianizing India; and the evangelical party in
Britain, together with a group of Punjab officials who saw God's
providence in the escape of their province from the uprising, urged
renewed efforts at conversion by such measures as Bible classes in the
government schools. But missionary zeal was fast waning in mid-
Victorian Britain. Lord Derby in December 1857 even spoke of 'what
I own seems to be the somewhat hopeless task of Christianizing India'.
In India, talk of conversion evoked a uniformly hostile response
among the senior offficals of the government. In a phrase expressive of
the growing British distaste for 'fanaticism' of all sorts Lord Canning
14
Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1979), chapter 7.

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dismissed the ardent Herbert Edwardes, commissioner of Peshawar,

as 'exactly what Mahomet would have been if born at Clapham instead
of Mecca'.
By the 1850s and 1860s Christianity was for most Englishmen
increasingly a mark of their own difference from, and superiority to,
their Indian Subjects. The government's expensive ecclesiastical estab-
lishment, with its English bishops and 'station' churches, had nothing
to do with conversion and meant little for the struggling community of
Indian Christians. Tellingly, perhaps, when the Society for the Propa-
gation of the Gospel in London proposed, as a memorial for the
Kanpur massacre of 1857, that a church be erected for the use of the
Indian residents of the city, with a missionary clergyman and prayers
'perpetually made for their conversion', the local English community
rebelled. 'Feeling is unanimous', wrote the commanding general of the
garrison, that the memorial should take the form of a church 'for the
use of the soldiers and residents of the cantonment', with tablets and
windows on which would be inscribed the names of all those who had
lost their lives in the tragedy. While acknowledging that Kanpur
required no additional church accommodation, the Government of
India still underwrote the construction costs for this 'Memorial'
church. Despite the presence of dedicated missionaries throughout
India, Christianity had become, as the Secretary of State Lord Stanley
put it in 1858, to the consternation of his evangelical countrymen, 'the
religion of Europe'.15
Although abandonment of the hoped-for conversion of India
undercut much of the logic that sustained liberal reform, still the new
policy had room for other enduring liberal ideals. One was religious
toleration, elevated after the Mutiny to a new place of pride. This was,
above all, the message of the Queen's Proclamation on the abolition of
the East India Company. Although the Queen added to the draft
proclamation drawn up by the Prime Minister Lord Derby the phrase
'firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity', the document
made no reference to conversion. Rather it repudiated any 'desire to
impose our convictions on any of our subjects', and enjoined absti-
nence from interference with the customs or beliefs of the Indian
people.
15
Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, pp. 92-97; for Kanpur Memorial Church, see NAI Home
Public Dept., 18 November 1859, No. 20-22; Home Ecclesiastical Dept., 4 December
1863, no. 1-4.

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In similar fashion the value of education remained unquestioned

despite the trauma of the Mutiny. In part, of course, this was because
the Western educated had remained loyal during the uprising. As the
young Indian official George Campbell had appreciated as early as
1853, 'The classes most advanced in English education, and who talk
like newspapers, are not yet those from whom we have anything to
fear; but on the contrary they are those who have gained everything by
our rule, and whom neither interest nor inclination leads to deeds of
daring involving any personal risk.' The challenge which the educated
would pose to the Raj still lay in the future.16
Yet the effort to preserve elements of an ongoing liberalism within a
conception of Indian 'difference' further accentuated the contra-
dictions which had marked the course of reform since the 1830s.
Although it was unthinkable to contemplate ending, or even curtail-
ing, government support for an ever wider network of schools, an
educational policy which embodied the Macaulayesque vision of an
India transformed on a Western model consorted awkwardly with the
vision of an India presided over by princely and aristocratic elites seen
as 'natural' leaders of the people. The British were likewise unwilling
to abandon altogether their perceived sense of responsibility for the
well-being of the tenants and subjects of these newly favoured inter-
mediaries. The result was the enactment of tenancy legislation,
especially in Bengal and Oudh, that endeavoured to succour the
peasantry, but without unduly antagonizing their landlord superiors.
Not surprisingly, such measures satisfied neither party, while making
ever more unlikely the capitalist transformation of India envisaged,
though only half-heartedly encouraged, since Cornwallis's time. The
British in similar fashion paired the award of sanads, or patents,
guaranteeing all India's princes the right to adopt heirs, and so save
their states from extinction, with a closer scrutiny of their succession,
education, and rule.
At the same time the Mutiny forced Britain to consider afresh the
way it represented itself as an imperial power. Although the East India
Company was not charged with responsibility for the uprising, the
British government nonetheless took advantage of the occasion,
twenty-five years after the Company had lost all commercial func-
tions, but only five years after its charter had last been renewed, to
bring this ancient corporation to an end. Even in its death throes, the
16
George Campbell, India as It May Be (London, 1853), p. 410.

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Company was not without supporters. John Stuart Mill, as examiner,

fought tenaciously on its behalf, and he subsequently devoted a
chapter of his Representative Government to arguing that a free people
could best rule a 'semi-barbarous' one by delegating their authority to
an 'intermediate' body composed of trained administrators devoted to
the land which formed their 'special trust'.
Even though the Company could in this fashion be incorporated
into the liberal scheme of empire, the continuing existence of this once
commercial body as the governing power in India, together with the
perpetuation of the Mughal emperor on his throne in Delhi, made it
difficult for the British effectively to mark out their sovereignty over
the subcontinent. Since Clive's treaty of 1765, when the British
secured the diwani [revenue management] of Bengal, the East India
Company had acknowledged a ritual subordination to the king in
Delhi. Its coins, for instance, continued to bear the Mughal emperor's
name until 1835, while the Company stopped the payment of an
annual nazr, visibly denoting its tributary status, only in 1843. As the
Mughal's vassal, lacking a clear-cut sovereignty of his own, the
governor-general could only with difficulty award honours or devise
rituals of hierarchy and subordination. Before 1858 there existed, as
Bernard Cohn, following F. W. Buckler, has argued, 'an incom-
pleteness and contradiction in the cultural-symbolic constitution of
India'. The abolition of the Company ended this ambiguity, for the
British Crown was now the uncontested centre of authority, ordering
into a single hierarchy all its subjects, Indian and British alike.17
Complementing the abolition of the East India Company was the
trial for treason of the king of Delhi, Bahadur Shah. Confined to his
palace, the king had long ceased to exercise any effective power, yet his
name kept alive the memory of the empire the British had pushed
aside. For half a century the British had themselves endeavoured to use
the power of that name to secure their own position, while in 1857 the
rebel soldiery, in turn, forced their way into his fort in order to
command that legitimate authority. Although the British could not
legally try the king for treason, inasmuch as he was the king and they
his vassals, nevertheless the trial, and Bahadur Shah's subsequent
17
Bernard Cohn, 'Representing Authority in Victorian India', in Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165-79; F.W.
Buckler, 'The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny' (1922), in M.N. Pearson (ed.),
Legitimacy and Symbols: The South Asian Writings of F.W. Buckler (Ann Arbor, Michi-
gan, 1985).

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banishment to Burma, enabled the British at last to represent them-

selves as the unquestioned rulers of India. A new order had begun.
With the end of the East India Company, Lord Canning adopted
the new title of viceroy, and toured India in the years after 1858 to
make manifest the new relationship proclaimed by the queen. In a
series of durbars, or assemblies, he distributed Indian titles, such as
those of Raja, Nawab, and Rai Bahadur, as well as lands and money, to
a number of loyal princes, notables, and officials. Yet uncertainty, and
even contradiction, remained. In addition to the award of Indian titles,
for instance, the government at the same time, in 1861, created a
special English order of knighthood. Called the Star of India, it was
restricted to the most influential princes and senior officials, and it at
once became the most coveted of all the distinctions at the disposal of
the viceroy. In similar fashion British building in India in the years
immediately following the Mutiny remained wedded to classical and
Gothic forms. From the early days of their rule the British had erected
neo-classical buildings across the face of India. These, above all the
imposing baroque Government Houses in Calcutta and Madras,
expressed not only contemporary British taste, but the ideals of
empire, for the 'ordered beauty' of classical architecture had long best
fitted the European conception of how a worldwide empire ought to
be represented in stone. As such, these buildings inevitably linked
Britain's empire not to India but to the world of ancient Greece and
Rome. As William Hodges had written of Madras as early as 1781, its
'long colonnades, with open porticoes and flat roofs' offered to the eye
'an appearance similar to that what we conceive of a Grecian city in the
age of Alexander'. Britain's celebratory construction of the early 1860s
- from the Mutiny Memorial Hall in Madras to the Lawrence and
Montgomery halls in Lahore — similarly evoked the conquests of
Alexander and of Caesar, not those of Akbar.
Such architecture, furthermore, by setting Europe's building styles
on Indian soil, at the same time held out to the Indian people the image
of a modern world they might themselves aspire to join. A building
such as Pachaiyappa's Hall in Madras, modelled on the Athenian
Temple of Theseus, announced, much as did the English style edu-
cation that took place within its walls, the transformation of India's
society on a European model. Hence, despite the coming of Crown
rule, the British had not yet by i860 decided how far, and in what
ways, their liberal ideals would accommodate the more forthright

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assertion of empire, and the vision of an India seen as enduringly
different, portended by the events of 18 5 7. The late Victorian ideology
of empire had still to be hammered out.

THE CRISIS OF LIBERALISM

Eight years after the Indian Mutiny, in 1865, on the opposite side of
the globe, at Morant Bay on the West Indian island of Jamaica, a group
of freed slaves, who had become peasant cultivators, rose in protest
against their desperate economic condition. Though the rebels were
few in number and possessed no armed force, the rising was ruthlessly
suppressed by the governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, who instituted
martial law, had hundreds of blacks killed, and executed a mulatto
leader who had challenged his authority in the assembly. To be sure,
the scale of these reprisals was far less than the indiscriminate murder
of Indians undertaken by the British troops as they marched on the
rebel strongholds during 1857 and 1858. But the justification too was
far less, for the rebellion posed but little threat to British rule in
Jamaica. Hence the outbreak, and the manner of its suppression,
provoked an immense outcry in Britain. In the ensuing debate,
although the enduring liberal ideals of Victorian Britain found cham-
pions, the breadth and intensity of support for Eyre portended a shift
in the conception of what empire meant, and how colonized peoples
were to be governed.
Among Governor Eyre's critics, perhaps the most outspoken and
influential was John Stuart Mill. Denouncing Eyre's actions as the
abandonment of the 'rule of law' for that of 'arbitrary power', Mill
insisted that no one could be allowed to stand above the law. In so
doing, Mill spoke for the enduring liberal tradition, in which the
procedural guarantees of the law alone secured the legitimacy of the
imperial enterprise. Mill was joined by a number of other mainly
middle-class professional men, from John Bright and T.H. Green to
Charles Lyell and T.H. Huxley, who together made up the Jamaica
Committee, and who sought to prosecute Eyre for murder. Eyre, by
contrast, argued that in a country occupied by a 'mere handful of
troops amidst a numerous and disaffected peasantry' prompt and
decisive measures alone could preserve order. Only the 'dread of
immediate and severe retribution', he insisted, prevented the rebellion
from extending itself throughout the island, and so vastly increasing

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the amount of suffering and misery. Such rhetoric, with its appeal to
colonial order, echoed throughout the empire as the British over the
years sought justification for exemplary acts of punishment.18
As the prosecution marshalled evidence against Eyre, British
opinion increasingly rallied not to Mill's, but to his opponent's side.
Some of Eyre's supporters, like Thomas Carlyle, had long distrusted
what they saw as a 'sentimental' liberalism driven by a desire to 'make
the niggers happy' even at the expense of Britain's imperial responsi-
bilities. For him Britain, and its empire, could only be saved by
fashioning 'heroes' left free to act on its behalf. In similar fashion
England's Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, harking back to 1857,
argued that, 'The outbreak of our Indian Mutiny remains as a warning
to all but mad men against want of vigour and swift decisiveness.' John
Ruskin and Charles Dickens too, less concerned about the fate of
Jamaican blacks than that of 'white slaves' in Britain's factories, added
their voices to the campaign on Eyre's behalf.
Common to all the arguments in support of Eyre was a sense of
disillusionment with the results of slave emancipation. Jamaica's black
population, in this view, had repaid trust with hostility, and so
deserved the treatment meted out to it by Governor Eyre. As The
Times explained it, though a 'fleabite compared with the Indian
mutiny', the Jamican uprising 'is more in the nature of a disappoint-
ment'. It had previously appeared, they said, 'to be proved in Jamaica
that the negro could become fit for self-government... Alas for grand
triumphs of humanity, and the improvement of races, and the removal
of primeval curses .. .'19 Carlyle, of course, since the writing of his
provocative Occasional Discourse Upon the Nigger Question in 1849,
had insisted that, without strong white supervision, blacks would
revert to indolence, if not to savagery. The Morant Bay rising, follow-
ing so closely after the 1857 revolt, appeared to vindicate Carlyle's
argument. Reform was pointless as well as dangerous. In the West as in
the East Indies, so it appeared, colonized peoples, perverse and
unreasoning, did not appreciate the benefits Britain chose to confer
upon them. Whether black or brown, they were of necessity funda-
mentally different from Europeans.
One immediate consequence of the 1865 uprising was the disso-
18
Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London, 1962), especially pp. 90-91,
102-18.
19
Cited in Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971), p. 71.

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lution of the white-dominated Jamaican Assembly, and the reversion

of the island to Crown Colony governance. Far from opposing this
action, the colony's planter elite, fearful of black majority rule, had
themselves initiated it. The result of this change was, however, to
sharpen the distinction, growing ever more visible during the 1860s,
between the constitutional position of colonies of predominantly
white, and those of non-white, populations. The process had begun in
the 1840s with the publication of the Durham Report, which awarded
responsible government to Britain's Canadian colonies. By 1867
Canada had been confederated and responsible government extended
to Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape. Such a process of encour-
agement to colonial self-government was of course implicit in the
liberal ideal. By mid-century, following such notions to their logical
conclusion, some had even begun to contemplate the eventual separa-
tion of these colonies from the imperial system altogether. For the
most part, however, rigorous 'Little Englandism' of this sort was rare
and confined to the radicals of the Manchester School. Most liberals,
while encouraging settlers to govern themselves, sought continued ties
of association with these colonies. The ideal was that of ancient Greek
colonization, defined by Gladstone as the creation of 'so many happy
Englands' united by bonds of 'perfect freedom and perfect self-
government'. The model for colonies of non-white settlement, by
contrast, whether in Jamaica or India, was the empire of Rome. In
these territories Britain, like its Roman predecessor, had imposed
upon it the 'duty and task and high privilege' of extending the rule of
law and 'the great and glorious fabric of truly civilized society' around
the globe.20
At home, while the Jamaica Committee was trying to rally support
for the prosecution of Eyre, working-class discontent erupted in the
famous Hyde Park riots of July 1866. Although hardly revolutionary
in its objectives, this demonstration exposed the vulnerability of
England's 'respectable' classes, and so, by extension, helped to
increase sympathy for Eyre as he too, as they saw it, had endeavoured
to control an unruly 'rabble'. Whether the English working classes,
Irish Fenians, or Jamaica's blacks, all such labouring classes were
inherently lazy, undisciplined, and potentially violent in their chal-
20
C.C. Eldridge, England's Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and
Disraeli, 1868—1880 (Chapel Hill, 1973), chapter 2; Gladstone speech cited in Paul
Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain's Imperial Policy (London, 1927), pp. 202-6, 224-26.

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lenge to established property relations; hence 'all rioting', as Matthew

Arnold put it, had to be 'put down with a strong hand, or [the state] is
sure to drift into troubles'.21
But in 1866 in England, unlike Jamaica, it was no longer practical
politics, as it had been even a quarter century before during the
Chartist agitation, vigorously to suppress working-class ambitions. To
the contrary, schemes of partial enfranchisement had been floated even
before the Hyde Park riots. In mid-1866, following the death of Lord
Palmerston, the Tory Party came into office under Lord Derby.
Disraeli, as leader in the Commons, resolved that the Tories should
themselves settle the franchise question by a comprehensive measure
of reform. The outcome, following a series of complex parliamentary
manoeuvres in which each party outbid the other, was the famed 'leap
in the dark' which extended the franchise to all urban working men.
This radical extension of the franchise carried with it the presump-
tion that the English working classes had become sufficiently disci-
plined and law abiding - had acquired, as it were, a sufficient stake in
the constitution - to be safely trusted to share in the working of the
country's institutions. But the inclusion of the English working classes
in the constitution inevitably altered the way the British perceived of
themselves in relation to the world outside. No longer was it possible,
as had been the case before, for Englishmen to conceive of the lower
classes at home as in some measure equivalent to colonized peoples
overseas: each subject to a state whose institutions ordered their lives,
but allowed them no place in its deliberations. After 1867, apart from
some feared 'dangerous' classes, isolated for the most part in such
places as the East End of London, all English men (though not
women) necessarily had to be considered as possessed of a 'sound
sense', as Derby said in justification of the reform; and hence as
participants together in the larger national enterprise. In so doing,
however, the extension of the franchise, like the award of responsible
government to the settlement colonies, further sharpened the distinc-
tion between white and non-white, between those who were deemed
fit for freedom and those who must remain subjects. The existence of
such a dichotomy in turn provided what might be called a 'common
sense' justification for the growing racial ideology of late Victorian
Britain. So long as there was no visible evidence of non-white inclu-
sion in a free political system, or of white exclusion (apart from the
21
Cited in Semmel, Govenor Eyre Controversy, p. 134.

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ambiguous case of Ireland, at once part of Britain and separate from

it), a racial theory of politics was at once logical and appropriate.
If the 1867 reform encouraged racial thinking, so too did this 'leap in
the dark' strengthen an explicitly authoritarian strand within liberal-
ism. The intellectual elite, especially, were fearful of the consequences
as Gladstone, the 'People's William', set out to reconstitute the Liberal
Party on the basis of a mass franchise. For such critics, of whom the
first was Robert Lowe, leader of the small band of liberal' Adullamites'
contesting the reform bill in parliament, nothing could be further from
true liberalism than the rule of an uneducated majority, manipulated
by wire-pullers and demagogues, and with no object in view apart
from the satisfaction of its baser instincts. As Lowe put it during the
debates:
Because I am a Liberal and know that by pure and clear intelligence alone can
the cause of true progress be promoted, I regard as one of the greatest dangers
with which this country can be threatened a proposal to subvert the existing
order of things, and to transfer power from the hands of property and
intelligence to the hands of men whose whole life is necessarily occupied in
daily struggles for existence.22
This opposition to franchise reform drew upon a set of principles
whose intellectual roots could be traced back to Hobbes and Bentham.
Its flowering, however, was a response to the crises of the critics' own
day as they perceived them - alike on the plains of northern India, the
shores of Morant Bay, and before the gates of Hyde Park. The result
was to call into question as never before the reformist ideology
associated with men like Macaulay and J.S. Mill. In its place was set a
darker and more pessimistic view of human nature, and with it differ-
ent ideals of governance. The empire provided at once cautionary
lessons, and hope for the future. Lowe had lived in Australia for some
eight years, and he saw its populist democracy as a political system to
be avoided, while the India of the Raj now stood forth as a model not
only for the empire but for Britain itself.
The most outspoken exponent of this authoritarian liberalism was
James Fitzjames Stephen, who on his return from his service as legal
member of the viceroy's Council published the manifesto of the new
school, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873). At the heart of Stephen's
22
Speech of 3 May 1865, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, cols. 1439-40; see also John
Roach, 'Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia', Cambridge Historical Journal, vol.
13 (i957)> PP- 5 8 - 8 1 -

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philosophy lay the Benthamite, and ultimately Hobbesian, conviction

that the aim of government was to secure, not liberty, as J. S. Mill
proclaimed, but the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Stephen
further insisted that most men cared only for their own immediate
interests; hence the state of nature was one of perpetual conflict and
warfare. The judicious application of force, wielded by a powerful
legislator, was thus in a fundamental sense its own justification. As
expressed in the coercive sanctions of law, force was not an evil,
Stephen maintained, but a necessary element in the creation of a
civilized social order. This insistence upon the civilizing power of law,
sustained by the coercive power of the state, Stephen shared of course
with liberal reformers from Bentham onward. Like them too he saw
the British as the representatives of a 'belligerent civilization', whose
rule over India found its justification in the 'superiority of the con-
quering race'. As he wrote, with an almost evangelical fervour, British
power in India was 'like a vast bridge' over which an enormous
multitude of human beings were passing from a 'dreary' land of 'cruel
wars, ghastly superstitions, wasting plague and famine', on their way
to a country 'orderly, peaceful, and industrious', and which might be
the cradle of changes comparable to those 'which have formed the
imperishable legacy to mankind of the Roman Empire'.
Where Stephen parted company with the liberal idealism of men
such as J. S. Mill was in his assertion that the propensity to seek one's
own selfish advantage was not curbed with the advance of civilization.
Human nature was such, he insisted, his Benthamite views reaffirmed
by the disillusioning experience of the crises of mid-century, that the
bulk of the people would forever remain under the sway of passion,
beyond the reach of rational discussion or improvement. Even in the
modern parliamentary state, where compulsion was mild and dis-
guised, the power of the sword still underlay the whole social fabric.
To base any society on the ideals of liberty, or the presumption that
men were other than 'fundamentally unequal', was a mirage. The
common people required not universal suffrage but the disinterested
rule of a gifted elite, able to command obedience and operate an
efficient economical government.
Never an apologist for the old social order, with its hereditary
aristocracy, Stephen found his ideal ruler in the trained bureaucrat of
the Indian civil service. The 'best corrective in existence to the funda-
mental fallacies of liberalism', the Indian government, in his view, was

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'the only government under English control still worth caring about'.
John Stuart Mill, as we have seen, had himself shrunk from a too ready
application of the principles of On Liberty outside the British Isles,
and had praised the East India Company's government. But an
imperial dominion, that for Mill was justified only by the larger
transformation that was inevitably to follow, Stephen exalted as one
the British need never be ashamed of. To the contrary, he urged the
British not to shrink from the 'open, uncompromising, straight-
forward assertion' of their own superiority over the people of India.
As Stephen's disciple John Strachey put it, 'the only hope for India'
was 'the long continuance of the benevolent but strong government of
Englishmen'.23
Stephen called Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 'little more than the
turning of an Indian lantern on European problems'. His enduring
objective was not to praise empire, but to remake England in the image
of the Raj. In this endeavour, as democracy took hold in Britain,
Stephen was bound to fail. Ever less comfortable in the Liberal Party,
Stephen and his disciples deserted the Liberal banner in the mid-18 80s
to protest Gladstone's attempt to extend the ideals of self-government
to Ireland. Nevertheless, allied with a revived Tory Party, these
Liberal Unionists, as they called themselves, secured for themselves an
influential place in late Victorian political life.
More importantly, through the rigour of his advocacy, Stephen
forced the British to confront the fundamental contradiction, long
evaded, that lay at the heart of the liberal conception of empire. As
early as September 1857, during the height of the revolt, the Economist
had told the British people that they had now to choose
whether in future India is to be governed as a Colony or as a Conquest;
whether we are to rule our Asiatic subjects with strict and generous justice,
wisely and beneficently, as their natural and indefeasible superiors, by virtue
of our higher civilization, our purer religion, our sterner energies ... or
whether we are to regard the Hindoos and Mahomedans as our equal fellow
citizens, fit to be entrusted with the functions of self-government, ripe (or to
be ripened) for British institutions, likely to appreciate the blessings of our
rule, and, therefore, to be gradually prepared, as our own working classes are
preparing, for a full participation in the privileges of representative assemblies,
trial by jury, and all the other palladia of English liberty.24

23
Stokes, Utilitarians, especially p p . 287-309; J o h n Strachey, India ( L o n d o n , 1888), p . 360.
24
The Economist, vol. 15 (26 September 1857), p . 1062.

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Increasingly, as the 1860s and 1870s went by, although it could not
secure much support at home, Stephen's authoritarian liberalism,
linked with parallel theories of scientific racism and historical juris-
prudence, powerfully reshaped Britain's imperial ideology. Under the
influence of these ideas, buffeted by the crises of mid-century, John
Stuart Mill's vision of an emergent 'similarity' of Indian and Briton
gave way to an insistence on India's enduring 'difference'.

CROWN AND EMPIRE: THE REVIVAL OF TORYISM

On 24 June 1872, speaking at the Crystal Palace, Benjamin Disraeli
challenged the English people to choose between a 'comfortable
England, modelled and moulded upon continental principles', and 'a
great country - an Imperial country', able to 'command the respect of
the world'. As he sought to find a place for the Conservative Party in
the new democratic era he had himself set in motion, Disraeli with this
speech brought the empire for the first time into the heart of British
politics. The invocation of empire was part of a larger redefinition of
tory principles. In the new tory strategy, empire was to be set
alongside the 'maintenance of the institutions of the country', which
for Disraeli included, above all, the monarchy, the established church,
and the House of Lords. Further, and central to Disraeli's scheme, the
Tory party would devote itself to the 'improvement of the condition'
of the working classes. With the support of the workers, who were,
Disraeli insisted, 'conservative - proud of belonging to an Imperial
country', the Tories could put an end to the fear of 'the caprice and
passion of multitudes' that so obsessed men like Stephen. By weaving
together this alliance of Crown, empire, and working classes, Disraeli
put not only the Conservative Party but the discourse on empire in
British politics on a new footing.
During his years in power, from 1874 to 1880, Disraeli did not
embark on any plan of imperial conquest, though he was prepared to
sanction campaigns in Afghanistan and South Africa; and these helped
precipitate his downfall. Disraeli's contribution to imperial ideology
was rather to shift the focus of attention from the settlement colonies
to India, from colonial self-government to the empire as a source of
national pride, from a Grecian, as one might say, to a Roman imperial
vision. In the process the ideals of mid-Victorian individualism, and of
the liberal industrial order, were challenged for almost the first time
since their inception.

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The shift toward the 'Eastern Empire' was first revealed in Disraeli's
1875 purchase of the Suez Canal shares belonging to the bankrupt
Egyptian Khedive. Altogether apart from any financial or commercial
advantage, the purchase was, Disraeli told the House of Commons,
'necessary to maintain the empire'. From the control of this waterway
it was but a short step, first to the annexation of the Mediterranean
island of Cyprus in 1878, and then, by an anguished Gladstone in
1882, to the occupation of Egypt itself. Disraeli's imperial vision
revealed itself most clearly, however, with the enactment in 1876 of the
Royal Titles Bill, which secured for Queen Victoria the title of
Empress of India.
Making the monarch 'Empress' can be seen to some degree as the
logical conclusion of the process, begun in 1858, of resolving India's
anomalous status within the empire. With the simultaneous abolition
of the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty at Delhi, the
British Crown had then become the country's unquestioned sover-
eign, so that the new title simply marked out visibly the new order.
Further, Queen Victoria was anxious to have this additional title for
herself; and Disraeli, ever anxious to please his sovereign, happily
acquiesced. Far more was at stake, however, than the whim of the
monarch, as the intense Liberal opposition to the bill soon made clear.
Liberals feared that the change of title implied a more active role for
the monarch in British politics - and the queen herself was not averse
to being styled 'Empress of Great Britain, Ireland, and India' - but
what roused the strongest hostility was the apparent identification of
the British Crown in this fashion with the hated imperialisms of
Napoleon III and the new German Empire. Though the British were
proud of their own empire, as Robert Lowe reminded the House of
Commons, 'sentiment clothes the title of emperor with bad associ-
ations'. The imperial ideal, in the liberal view, was that of the union of
Britain with its own kin, and their descendants around the globe; it
connoted loyalty and liberty, the 'happy Englands' of Britain's settler
colonies, not the despotisms of continental states.
For the Liberal opposition neither the empire of Rome nor that of
the Mughals offered attractive precedents for Britain's imperialism.
Both empires, Lowe pointed out, had frequently had as their sover-
eigns men at once raised to the throne by military violence and sunk in
debauchery. Lowe admitted, to be sure, that Britain had won India 'by
the sword', and intended to retain it. But with Gladstone he insisted

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that it would not be desirable to advertise the fact of conquest by

giving the queen an imperial title. 'Would it be wise or prudent in us',
he asked, 'to confound our wise and beneficent government with that
of the rulers who preceded us? Would it not be better for us to teach
the Natives of India that those men reigned for their own pleasure and
gratification . . . and that our object, on the contrary, is simply to do as
much good as possible?'25
As Disraeli sought to justify the new title, the larger implications of
the change came into view. One was a determination to assert Britain's
equivalence as a major power with her European rivals. 'Do not let
Europe', he said in closing the debate, 'suppose for a moment that
there are any in this House, who are not deeply conscious of the
importance of our Indian Empire.' The enforced restriction of the title
to India alone further enhanced the growing dichotomy, increasingly
conceived of in racial as well as cultural terms, between India and the
white settler colonies. Although Disraeli insisted that the 'amplifi-
cation of titles' was a universal way to 'touch and satisfy the imagin-
ation of nations', still, as the change applied only to India, it inevitably
furthered the notion that as 'Orientals', Indians were a different kind
of people, who attached 'enormous value to very slight distinctions'.
'What to us', as Stafford Northcote explained it to the Commons,
'may appear exceedingly trumpery and trivial distinctions, are in their
eyes of the greatest importance.' The titles act debate thus forced the
British to consider directly what it meant to be an imperial state and
helped bring about a reversal, from negative to positive, of the value
attached to the term 'imperialism'.
Furthermore, the new title made legitimate, and so reinforced, the
idea of India as a land 'of many nations', and of 'various and varying
races', as Disraeli described its peoples. It was a land also of princes
and of an unchanging past. Many of India's princes, Disraeli
announced with hyperbole, 'occupy thrones which were filled by their
ancestors when England was a Roman Province'. These varied 'princes
and nations', he assured his countrymen, would welcome a great
imperial sovereign who could properly regulate their position as
feudatories in a hierarchic order. In addition, Disraeli and the Con-
servatives sought to exonerate both the Roman and the Mughal
empires from charges of debauchery. The 'happiness of mankind',
25
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 17 February 1876, cols. 413-18, and 3 September 1876,
cols. 1719-37.

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Disraeli insisted, was never so completely assured as in the age of the
Antonines, while the retired Sir George Campbell rose to the defence
of the Mughal Empire. It was, he said, though not perfect, still 'very
great and glorious, and in many respects an excellent and good
Empire'. Praise of the Mughal Empire was essential for the success of
the new title, for its supporters imagined Victoria as empress assuming
'in name as in effect, the position hitherto occupied by the Great
Mogul in India', and so standing in a direct line of descent from these
predecessors. As Disraeli's Viceroy Lord Lytton exulted in writing to
the Queen, the new title would 'place her authority upon the ancient
throne of the Moguls, with which the imagination and tradition of
[our] Indian subjects associate the splendour of supreme power'. The
larger implications of the endeavour to define the Raj as 'Mughal',
India's princes as 'feudal' rulers, and its society as 'medieval', will be
examined in subsequent chapters.
In England too the change of title marked out a new vision of the
monarch. It is perhaps not wholly a coincidence that Victoria, for the
first time since the death some fifteen years before of her husband
Prince Albert, opened parliament in person to announce the change in
the royal title. In the early years of her reign Victoria, like monarchs
before her, had actively intervened in British politics, and reaped the
hostility such partisanship carried with it. Her lengthy seclusion,
combined with her piety and the probity of her personal life, made
possible the transformation of the monarchy that took place from the
1870s onwards. In an arena dominated by mass politics and rival
parties, the monarch could in any case no longer exercise effective
political power. But the upheavals of the era at the same time made
ever more urgent the creation of a symbolic figure at the head of the
nation as a whole. Indeed, in such an age, the 'preservation of anachro-
nism', as David Cannadine has argued, the deliberate, ceremonial
presentation of an impotent but venerated monarch as a unifying
symbol of permanence and unity became both possible and essential.
Such a transformation gained legitimacy at the time from the writings
of Walter Bagehot, who described the monarch as the 'dignified'
element of a government whose 'efficient' elements lay elsewhere,
with the Prime Minister and parliament. Once available to represent
the nation, the monarch could by extension easily be conceived of as
the embodiment of empire as well. From 1877 onward, every great
royal occasion, culminating in the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, was also

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an imperial occasion. In this fashion, by associating it with a cherished

monarchy, the novelty of the new 'imperialism' could be to some
degree concealed, and the empire given a place, as never before, at the
heart of the national consensus.26
Formally of course the rehabilitation of the monarch as a ceremonial
figurehead transcended party. Nevertheless, it is not surprising that
Disraeli inaugurated the new regime, for the Conservatives stood to
benefit the most from the 'invention' of a tradition that emphasized
consensus, continuity, and deference. The ideology of the new conser-
vatism further tapped a growing distaste in the later Victorian era for
the liberal industrial order, its individualism and spirit of competition,
with the ugliness of design that it was seen as having spawned. In its
place there sprang up a powerful nostalgia for a pre-industrial arcadia.
A vision of India as a land of abiding traditions and enduring artisanal
crafts at once sustained, and itself gained strength from, this conserva-
tive revival.
Disraeli's final contribution to the creation of a new 'imperialism'
was to inform British foreign policy with its spirit. In 1877, as Russo-
Turkish animosity flared into war in the Balkans, Disraeli devised a
new strategy for the defence of Britain's interests in the eastern
Mediterranean. For decades Britain had sought to deter Russia by
alliance with Ottoman Turkey, even to the extent of going to war in
the Crimea. Now, however, with Turkey discredited among large
sections of British opinion for its massacre of Bulgarian Christians,
Disraeli sought to justify continued support of Turkey by a direct
appeal to Britain's own 'imperial interests'. The British Empire, he
argued, formed by the 'enterprise and energy of our ancestors', had
given millions 'justice and order'. As the defence of 'provinces in every
zone' had been entrusted to Great Britain, so the foreign policy 'of
these islands' had of necessity to be imperial in character; hence Britain
had to be ready itself to counter such threats to the lifeline of empire as
Russian expansion into the Mediterranean. To make visible this new
determination Disraeli in 1878 dispatched 7,000 Indian troops to
Malta and occupied Cyprus.
Though the crisis of 1877-78 was ultimately resolved peaceably at
the Congress of Berlin, by linking England's honour and its interests
26
David Cannadine, 'The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British
Monarchy and the "Invention of Tradition", c. 1820-1977', i n Hobsbawm and Ranger,
Invention of Tradition, pp. 108-32.

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with the defence of the empire, Disraeli further enhanced the political
importance of the empire and of India. To be sure, the new imperial-
ism aroused intense hostility. In his famous Midlothian campaign
Gladstone passionately condemned an empire based on force and
splendour, and his moral ardour helped bring about the Conservative
defeat of 1880. Nevertheless, British patriotism was now inextricably
bound up with the empire. By itself, one might argue, imperialism as
an ideology never commanded more than limited support among the
British populace. Those committed to the idea of 'empire' comprised
powerful voices, including much of the intellectual elite, above all the
Liberal Unionists, who thought of themselves as a 'great governing
race'. But beyond this narrow class it was not easy, as one student of
British conservatism has written, 'to wean people away from the
specifically English patriotism of landscape and culture'. Still, as the
British from Disraeli's time onward defined their national interests
ever more explicitly in imperial terms, the values of 'patriotism' came
to encompass those of imperialism. Imagining in retrospect the words
and associations that 'marched in a grand chain, hand to hand' through
the heads of those attending George V's 1910 coronation, Vita
Sackville-West listed: 'England, Shakespeare, Elizabeth, London;
Westminster, the docks, India, the Cutty Sark, England; England,
Gloucestershire, John of Gaunt; Magna Carta, Cromwell, England.'
The Raj, and the overseas trade that secured such dominion, had
clearly found a secure place in England's vision of itself.27
'Jingoism' also emerged from the upheavals of the Balkan crisis. A
song sung in the music halls during 1878 celebrated British truculence
with the chorus: 'We don't want to fight/Yet by jingo if we do/We've
got the ships/We've got the men/And got the money too.' During the
subsequent decades of British imperial expansion, the term 'jingoism'
was used to denote a blustering chauvinism which gloried in conquest.
Jingoism did not imply any particular stance towards the empire, nor
did it ever command a universal assent. At its core it was patriotic, not
imperial, in its content, expressive of an exuberant sense of nation-
alism. Nevertheless, by placing that patriotism at the service of empire,
jingoism, like the more sedate patriotism of such events as the royal
coronation, deepened the hold of empire over the British people.
British patriotism, then, especially as it was mediated through the
27
Hugh Cunningham, 'The Conservative Party and Patriotism', in Robert Colls and Philip
Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920 (London, 1986), pp. 292-301.

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Crown, provided a reservoir of sentiment that undergirded what A. P.

Thornton has called the 'imperial idea'. The content of that imperial
patriotism could of course be contested; it was not at the disposal of
the Conservatives, or anyone else, to do with what they pleased, as the
intense struggles at the end of the century over the Boer War and
Chamberlain's imperial preference scheme visibly revealed. It is not by
chance, however, that the era of greatest imperial enthusiasm, from
1885 to 1905, was also a period of Conservative predominance in
British politics. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a new
imperialism sustained a new vision of India. No longer a land to be
remade in Britain's image, it was now the cherished 'jewel in the
crown' of the queen-empress.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008