Alston Dialogues in Imperialism

51

CHAPTER 3

DIALOGUES IN IMPERIALISM: ROME, BRITAIN, AND INDIA

RICHARD ALSTON Introduction

Mid- to late-twentieth-century models of Empire have tended to operate in simple dichotomous forms. Such models postulated a division between the ‘imperial’ culture, the culture of the ‘metropolis’, and the culture of the native, the subaltern, the colonised, or the barbarian. The cultural conflict between these homogeneous forces is resolved in the imperial struggle, a struggle in which hegemony is achieved through conquest, but victory achieved in acculturation or cultural survival. In Roman imperial history, notions such as Romanization preserve this great divide, perpetuating a myth of cultural units in conflict and centring the debate on the historical period from c. 30 BC to c. AD 400 on issues of cultural hegemony, acculturation, cultural resistance and preservation of local traditions. Debates become politicised not so much around the nature of these cultural entities (probably universally regarded as highly artificial constructs) but on the extent to which subaltern cultures preserved their cultural, and ethnic identities. The debates around Romanization parallel debates on other more modern imperialisms, and these simple dichotomous models live on in the writings of the New Right, such as Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003) and Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (London, Sydney, 1996), and Boris Johnson, The Dream of Rome (London, 2006) in which imperial cultures act upon accepting or resisting provincial cultures and the ‘task’ of Empire comes to be the integration of these local cultures into the imperial culture. Although ancient historians may wish to escape from this historiographic tradition, the debate, sometimes refashioned into one on ‘Globalism’, continuously reasserts itself. The success and persistence of these models of imperial interaction rests in part on their attractive simplicity, a simplicity that allows polemic from Left and Right. But in greater part, this narrative form is attractive because it is fundamental to the hegemonic ideologies of Modernity: it makes sense to us because it is central to those ideologies by which we understand our own world. In various slightly different ways, Mill, Marx, Hegel and Weber all held to the view of a type of Kulturgeschichte, an understanding of cultural entities spread through set temporal and topographical zones, ‘civilizations’ as we might call them. It is by these civilizations that we order differential histories and geographies, explaining inequalities and establishing the geo-cultural-political differences that make our world. That nineteenth-century world view also gave rise to the organisation of

52 INDIA, GREECE, AND ROME, 1757 TO 2007

knowledge that dominates contemporary academic and cultural life, creating the discip-lines of geography, sociology, and anthropology, defining different historical periods, walling off Classics from Modernity, dividing and mapping the world into geographical specialisms. To unpick that discourse is to set about the unpicking a whole world of knowledge fundamental to the institutions on which many of us, including this author, depend for their subsistence. In what follows, I aim to bring together two strands of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century political analysis, India and Rome. The two subjects have tended to be considered in isolation, and often by different parts of the academy. Classicism dominated political philosophy up until the early nineteenth century and retained its influence both through the intellectual tradition and the educational system. It may safely be assumed that all nineteenth-century intellectuals had a stock of Classical knowledge and referents with which they were comfortable. The encounter with India was also a major formative influence on Western political thought. Although James Mill never visited the land on whose history he confidently expounded, his understanding of India and Indian difference was central to his development of Utilitarianism and to his son’s influential Liberalism. Similarly, as I shall argue below, Marx’s understanding of the imperial ‘encounter’ was crucial to his development of a theory of history. India added another layer of associations, of paradigms, and of political and social histories to the stock of Classical knowledge that could be called upon as comparanda for Western Modernity. Further, although Classical history could be subsumed within a particular narrative of political and social development that gave rise to the contemporary West, India showed, or could be made to show, that this historical trajectory was not universal, and thus provided a historical exemplum which was, and to some extent continued to be outside history. These two strands of comparative knowledge were interlocking narratives, reflecting and reinforcing views of imperialism in this period. As such, they acted as ‘discursive zones’ in which ideas of identity and culture, civilization, history and empire could be explored and debated. Studying this process of interlocking raises problems of method. Reading nineteenth-century historiography, one regularly comes across Classical allusions in texts on India, and allusions to India in texts on Roman history. One could simply collate these. The importance of these references is not, however, obvious. Henry Pelham, for instance, in an article on Arrian of 1896 in English Historical Review wrote that

In addition to his brief reports on the military stations along the coast, Arrian supplies information such as a modern Anglo-Indian ‘political’ would be expected to furnish as to the native chiefs and tribes inhabiting the native hill country1

Similarly, in a 1906 essay to the Royal Historical Society, Pelham compares the Germanic limes to the Indian Customs Hedge to support his contention that the fortifications in Germany were a barrier against smuggling rather than large scale Germanic invasions.2 From the ‘Indiography’, a correspondent to The Times in 1813 arguing for the maintaining of the East India Company’s monopoly signed off his or her letters, Civis. These references

1 Pelham (1911a), 226. 2 Pelham (1911c), 201–02.

RICHARD ALSTON: DIALOGUES IN IMPERIALISM 53

seem at first to have the force of similes, telling us little about the ‘structure of thought’ represented in the works. Further, these explicit comparisons are rather sparse. One can read vast tracts of Charles Merivale’s eight volume History of the Romans under the Empire (London, 1873 [2nd ed.]) or Thomas Arnold’s History of the Later Roman Commonwealth (London, 1845), or History of Rome (London, 1848 [5th ed.]), without discovering any obvious reference to India. Similarly, many of the treatments of India, say B. H. Baden-Powell, The Land-Systems of British India (Oxford, 1892) or A. C. Lyall’s Asiatic Studies (London, 1899), or the more obscure H. Clarke’s wonderfully entitled, Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (London, 1857) make no obvious reference to Rome. Similarly, E. Carpenter’s Empire: In India and Elsewhere (London, 1906 [1st ed. 1900]), which laments the damage caused by the British Empire and calls explicitly for an end of Empire, makes none of the obvious comparative references to Rome in support of the argument.3 It is well known that many of the imperial administrators were Classically educated, but in the literature of the period that Classical education was often worn lightly.4 This led Betts to conclude that

the allusion to imperial Rome was turned to British advantage and made to serve as a heuristic reinforcement, a magnificent historical reference in a historically-conscious age. Yet the allusion was not treated to very widespread or popular attention.5

The predominant academic traditions of the late nineteenth century were positivistic and hostile to comparative approaches. Although the Victorian (public) intellectual was a polymath, eager to try his hand at all manner of topics and lacking a reverence for academic expertise, India and Rome tended to be treated separately.6 J. R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England (London, 1895 [2nd ed.]), one of the most influential texts on late Victorian imperialism, is unusual in making frequent reference to Rome, but Rome is used more as simile than analytical comparandum. Some authors did write comparative histories, such as John Bryce, The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India: the Diffusion of Roman and English Law throughout the World: Two historical studies (Oxford, 1914) and Earl of Cromer’s Ancient and Modern Imperialism (London, 1910). But much of Bryce’s comparison is superficial and even Cromer’s Ancient and Modern Imperialism, which would seem to be an exception, emerges from a particular and unusual context. The book is an extended version of an address to the Classical Association, and one wonders what else the Earl could have told the assembled scholars: although famously abrupt, he was unlikely to have told his audience that Classics was dead. In his

3 Carpenter (1906). One would have imagined that the ‘fall of Rome’ would have provided anti-imperialists with a powerful set of comparative allusions and it is notable to contrast the rather better known Hobson (1938), which sparingly, but regularly, employs Classical parallels. 4 For education see Vasunia (2005b) and Larsson (1999). 5 Betts (1971). 6 This impression is contrary to the argument offered by Vasunia (2005a). Freeman (1997) argues, in my view implausibly, that the discussions of Roman imperialism in late-nineteenth-century Britain was scientific, owing nothing to current political concerns.


Modern Egypt (London, 1908), by contrast, he made virtually no reference to Rome or parallel with the Roman ‘mission’. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the history of imperial Rome was a ‘core narrative’ whose influences extended far beyond the explicit allusions in the writings of the time. Even when those writing about India were at their most positivistic, Rome was lurking as part of the intellectual scaffolding of the time. In a similar way, ancient historians writing on Empire were continuously aware of the Indian experience, though the references may be scarce. As Edward Said argued in Culture and Imperialism (London, 1997 [1st ed. London, 1993]), the Empire was always there, its explicit appearances in English literature but the tip of an iceberg of influence. As a central part of the intellectual infra-structure of the period, the historiography of Rome operated as more than just a convenient resource of historical anecdotes: it was a tool to think with and as such reinforced even as it was changed by the imperial ideologies of British India. In what follows I often claim a ghostly comparative presence even in the face of an absence of explicit allusions, and this is based on a confluence of concerns and issues that generated and informed the debates on Empire. In the face of the vast material available, I pick out three interlocked lines of debate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the moral effects of empire on the conquerors, imperialism as a Liberal, modernising ideal, and worries surrounding the affects of imperialism on India and Britain. Although there is a tendency in these debates to move in certain directions, towards a more confident, ideological imperialism for instance, many of the historians, political writers, and geographers that I consider displayed moments of ambivalence and responded often with doubt to elements of the debate which troubled them, and all elements of this debate remained live throughout the period.7 It is only when we set the discussions in the ancient historians in the context of these broader debates in Victorian and Edwardian society that we can understand how Roman history formed itself in response to wider political agendas. Yet, although we should not claim a unique status for the discourses around Roman history (many other intellectual endeavours, science, anthropology, philology, geography, etc., were transformed and transforming of the debates on imperialism), in establishing a historically normative parallel and in creating a view of history, and to a certain extent the individual, Roman history was a formative discourse that helped shape imperial ideologies in the nineteenth century. Further, the ideology of imperialism was historicising: nineteenth-century writers were concerned with placing Rome and Britain within a progressive historical framework and it was ‘history’ that underpinned imperial ventures. Edward Said argued that the emergence of the eighteenth-century novel was a precondition for imperialism, but we could add that a

7 This lack of uniformity in the responses to Rome and India complicate attempts to derive a coherent narrative from the diverse works. This is particularly the case in the study of India, in part because of the number of recorded responses and different engagements with the sub-continent, but also because of the diversity of cultures within India. British administration distinguished between different religious groups, the histories of India noted the ‘waves’ of invasions over the long span of history, and the consciousness of these divisions would eventually lead to partition. But in most of the texts cited in this article, only lip-service is paid to Indian diversity, and ‘Hindoo’ customs are seen as predominant.


particular understanding of Roman history, and of India, were requirements for the emergence of the imperial ideologies of the nineteenth century.

Degeneracy and Empire

Thomas Arnold’s History of Rome (5th ed, London 1948) advertised the analogies between Rome and Britain

it is not claiming too much to say, that the growth of the Roman commonwealth, the true character of its parties, the cause and tendency of its revolutions, and the spirit of its people and its laws, ought to be understood by none so well as those who have grown up under the laws, who are engaged in the parties, who are themselves citizens of our kingly commonwealth of England. 8

Arnold was establishing a fundamental parallelism between Rome and England, but one in which, in keeping with earlier historiography, the parallels were not with imperial Rome, the Rome of the monarchy, but with Rome of the Republican period; ‘commonwealth’ appears to have been the normal translation for ‘Res publica’. Arnold advertised his intention to pursue this multi-volume work down to the accession of Charlemagne (p. viii), for with Charlemagne there was a transition between a secular and religious state, a process that was, of course, reversed in the early modern period. In so doing, Arnold appears to be working within a Gibbonian scheme in which religion was the major dynamic of change in political cultures, and in which, therefore, the reinvention of the secular state was progressive, as well as Classicising. But this is overlain with other ideas.

The most striking point in the character of the Romans and that which so permanently influenced the condition of mankind, was their love of institutions and of order, their reverence for law, their habit of considering the individual as living only for that society of which he was a member. This character, the very opposite to that of the barbarian and the savage, belongs apparently to that race to which the Greeks and Romans both belong, by whatever name… we chose to distinguish it.9

Arnold goes on to claim that ‘Kelts’ and ‘Asiatics’ could not enjoy this character trait. Here we have an ‘Occidentalism’ that defines the West, and especially the English, as the heirs to Roman and Greek Classicism, as followers of order, against the disorder of the barbarian, and especially the Asiatic and the ‘Kelt’. That order was reflected in a sense of self-sacrifice for the community, a sublimation of the individual to the demands of citizenship that is the highest manifestation of political virtue. Within the Orientalism of the text, there is an incipient racism, which would seem to leave in doubt any possibility that this love of order could be inculcated in the Asiatic and Kelt. Indeed, Arnold is suspicious of Rome’s empire: in his History of the Later Roman Commonwealth (London, 1845), he doubts whether empire brought benefits to the conquered peoples. Not only did Empire work to their material disadvantage (II, 390); it also eroded the moral status of the conquered in withdrawing ‘all the advantages of independent government’ [so that] ‘their

8 Arnold (1948), I, vii. 9 Arnold (1948), I, 14.


nglish readers.

inhabitants were brought up to a condition of unavoidable helplessness’.10 But Empire was not just bad for the provincials; it also eroded the moral status of the Romans, reducing them from citizens to subjects and thus bringing about a period of decline. Empire thus threatened the end of the Roman character which so impressed contemporaries and differentiated Rome from the barbarian, and which was shared by the English. Although there is no explicit analogy here, the story of the degeneracy brought about by Empire operated as a warning from history for contemporary E In keeping with eighteenth-century political thought, monarchic systems of the type identified with Empire diminished the Republican individual in eroding the values of citizenship (virtue). The threat of Empire lay in the corruption of government, and it is this corruption which would lay the foundations of a transfer of authority from Republic to Empire. Capes in 1876 argued that the Antonine Age saw the end of the Roman Empire because of the influence of despotism on the character of the free.11 How and Leigh (1896), in their history of Republican Rome, are explicit about the dangers of Empire. They write that after the Hannibalic war

[Rome] had entered on a path from which there was no retreat: the consequences of her actions and the chain of events carried her half unwittingly on to fulfil her imperial mission – to pulverise and assimilate the civilised world. To that end, for lack of genius to create a new system adapted to her needs, she was to sacrifice her liberty and her constitution.12

For How and Leigh, Rome’s imperial mission after 202 BC turned on how successfully the Romans limited the damage that Empire was about to wreak on Republican society.

To stem the tide of scepticism and make a genuine culture of the fashionable Hellenism; to meet the relaxation born of reaction and the war; to breathe an imperial spirit into the ruling people – these were problems of a deeper order. To sharpen the distinction of governors and governed and close the burgers list; to sacrifice Italian culture and feeling; to plunder the provinces and share the spoils; to crush the relics of the yeomanry, block the paths to distinction, and bribe the populace with plunder; to govern at home in the interests of a class, abroad to accept the profits and refuse the responsibilities of empire; to live from hand to mouth with a policy of makeshift, would be to sacrifice the noblest fruits of victory, the gratitude of the conquered, and the homage of history.13

In case anyone had any doubts about the contemporary political relevance of the message, they concluded the section by arguing that ‘the growth of Roman dominion was the necessary and natural advance of a genuine governing nation in a world politically disordered, like the advance of the English in India’ (p. 235). How and Leigh represented

10 Arnold (1845), II 391. 11 Capes (1876). 12 How and Leigh (1896), 232. 13 How and Leigh (1896), 234.


Empire as a political challenge for the elite, a challenge to moral values, to Italian identity, which the Roman elite singularly failed to meet. These challenges were exacerbated by the slave systems of antiquity, which although moral problem in themselves also brought the Romans into contact with undesirable elements of Eastern culture.

The slave-system which depopulated the East… helped to import foreign ideas of a low type, to breakdown the old family life and strict morality. It filled Rome with intrigue, ruined the minds of the young, fostered despotism and vice, and menaced the state itself with dangerous insurrections.14

Empire and the East brought moral collapse, the end of family values, and despotism. These ideas were popular with the opponents of Empire. J. M. Robertson, Patriotism and Empire (London, 1900, 2nd ed.) argued that an overseas Empire was incompatible with domestic freedom. The lesson from antiquity was that Athens gave up imperial power in order to preserve domestic liberties, whereas Rome abandoned those liberties in order to secure Empire.15 Robertson railed against the imperialists who thought that Britain was proof against the dangers that afflicted Rome as a Christian, anti-slavery imperial power, but the comparative lesson of Empire was, for Robertson, that Empire resulted in a loss of liberty, and the fall of both the home country and the provinces. Similarly, J. A. Hobson Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902) argued that imperialism was bad for business, bad for the British state, bad for the provinces, but was supported by and supported a plutocratic elite, which we might call the military-industrial complex, that demonstrated a contempt for liberty and Liberalism. For Hobson, Empire favoured ‘forms of political tyranny and social authority which are the deadly enemies of liberty and equality’.16 The corrupting force of Empire was economic, in that it worked to the advantage of the Upper and Upper-Middle classes, and in reducing wage costs helped impoverish the working classes (p. 83), but also moral in that it corrupted domestic politics both through the operation of this plutocracy, and through a connection with the traditions of despotism in the East (pp. 150-52). Even the great moral successes of British imperialism in ending slavery was scorned in the face of the practice of indentured labour, used extensively to replace slave labour in Southern India and South Africa, which was slavery by another name (pp. 268-78). Given that slavery was closely related in contemporary discourses to the moral decline of Rome, Hobson seemed to be systematically eroding differences between Rome and the British Empire. Unsurprisingly, he concluded by drawing a close parallel with Rome in the parasitism of Empire and predicting degeneration and fall (pp. 363-68). In a similar fashion, in 1840, W. C. Taylor had argued that Empire eroded the liberties of the citizen.

It was not when the Roman name was highest and the Roman empire most extensive, that the Roman people was most happy. From the moment that the

14 How and Leigh (1896), 316. 15 Robertson (1900), 146-51. 16 Hobson (1938), 152.


Romans resolved to carry their arms beyond the limits of Italy and to become a nation of conquerors, the social state of the citizen began to decline.17

This ambivalent rhetoric about Empire surfaces in surprising ways. G. Thornton’s India, its state and prospects (London, 1835) is something of a propagandistic work in favour of the East India Company. Although it makes no mention of Roman parallels, Thornton claimed that measures aimed to regularise the situation in India by establishing direct rule threatened both India and England and that the ‘House of Lords… rescued the crown and country by rejecting a measure which would have enslaved both’.18 This enslavement would come from the concentration of power in the hands of the ministers. Thornton much preferred that patronage be held by the Company than by ministers, who would have used that power to subvert the government of the state.19 Twenty years later, when the Company faced a far more severe crisis, J. S. Mill was to deploy a very similar argument in a petition against what was probably an inevitable winding up of the Company’s interests. Mill argued on behalf of his employers that not only had the East India Company excelled in a very difficult task, but that passing control of India to the crown would inevitably mean the end of meritocratic government in India and an era of corruption.20 The Roman root of this argument actually emerged twenty years before Thornton wrote, in the letters of Civis, first published in The Times. Civis revealed his doubts about Empire in a claim that the wealth and patronage of India would corrupt the state of which he is a citizen. One would assume that we are meant to draw a parallel to Rome, all the more powerful in being implicit, in that Empire was also commonly seen as causing the decline of citizenship. Civis also defended the monopoly of the East India Company on the grounds that the Company was best positioned to protect India from the potential ravages of free trade.21 Yet it was Thornton who took the logical step that Mill avoided: he argued that the lack of citizenship values in India, the Indian population’s mendacity and spiritual poverty, their lack of entrepreneurial spirit, the ‘three-fold curse of indolence, superstition, and anarchy’ (p. 66), the absence of family feeling, hospitality, trust, kindness to animals (pp. 130-35), all stemmed from the Indians being reduced to slavery. It was the Company that not only stood firm against the possible overthrow of the state by corrupt forces, but also against the subsequent enslavement that would have reduced the proud English to the same status as the Indians. Yet, these relatively straightforward analogies are uncommon. More often writers draw allusions which both compare and distinguish British and Roman imperialism. Lyall, for example, compared British protectorates in India with those of Rome, but argued that British dominion was mercantile in contrast to the military dominion of Rome.22 Thornton also drew the same distinction, suggesting that the East India Company represented

17 Taylor (1840), II, 125. 18 Thornton (1835), 43. 19 Thornton (1835), 40-44. 20 In Mill (1990a), 77-93. 21 Civis (1813). 22 Lyall (1910), 352-53.


government by merchants, and thus separating its history from that of imperial states.23 An early Life of Clive by C. Carraccioli claimed that after his victories in Oudh, the East India Company became ‘the most formidable commercial republic … known in the world since the demolition of Carthage’.24 Merivale, by contrast, distinguishes between two phases of imperialism, a good early phase and a corrupting later endeavour.25

The colonization of the [Iberian] peninsular… and the admission of natives to the Roman franchise had been more liberal there than in most of the provinces… Thus it was that at the opening of the civil wars the spirit of the Iberian provinces was more thoroughly Roman than any other; the political feelings and interests of the people, no less than their social habits, had become nearly identified with those of the dominant race… Spain was rather a healthy offshoot from the parent state than a conquered dependency.26

Merivale saw Spain as a supporter of the Republic, a defender of libertas, a role in which, oddly enough, Gaul was to assume under Caesar’s tutelage (p. 159). But the East was a different proposition.

But in the eastern half of the Roman empire the values of the dominant people had received no such development… The Greek population… submitted to the conqueror with an apathy from which nothing could rouse them… beyond the Grecian provinces no attempt was made to infuse the political ideas of the republic into the dependent or tributary kingdoms on the frontier. The races of Asia acquiesced in their own immemorial despotisms… To them the names of Liberty and Equality… were unintelligible… The sympathies of the Orientals centred always in men, and never in government.27

Merivale wheeled out the tropes of Orientalism, and I shall return to this in the next section, but these tropes were used to maintain a distinction between a successful acculturating imperialism in the West, and a dangerous imperialism in the East. That danger was embodied and sexualised in Cleopatra, upon whom Merivale lavishes several breathless pages. For Merivale, ‘the East was the grave of many a Roman virtue’.28 For others, however, the course of Roman imperialism was not to be feared, but accepted. J. A. Froude, an influential figure on the late Victorian intellectual and political scene, argued that

23 Thornton (1835), 40-44. 24 C. Carraccioli, Life of Lord Clive, Baron Plassey (London, 1775) I, 106 [non vidi], quoted in Thompson and Garratt (1934), 104. 25 On Merivale, see also James Thorne’s chapter in this volume. 26 Merivale (1873), II 158. 27 Merivale (1873), II 159-60. 28 Merivale (1873), II 333-35, on Cleopatra, III 47, on the East.


The conversion of the Roman Republic into a military empire commands a peculiar interest. Notwithstanding many differences, the English and the Romans essentially resemble one another… In virtue of their own freedom, they became the most powerful nation in the known world; their liberties perished only when Rome became the mistress of conquered races, to whom she was unable or unwilling to extend her privileges… If there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations cannot govern subject provinces.29

What follows is a narrative history of the Republic that devolves into a paean of praise for Caesar, whose brutalities are excused, whose conquest of Gaul rescues the Gauls from ‘a state of chaos and decomposition’ and an economic and religious system that resembled feudalism.30 Froude concludes that Caesar ‘fought his battles to establish some tolerable degree of justice in the government of this world; and he succeeded, though he was murdered for doing it’. Such an unlikely construction of the motives of the assassins recalls Froude’s introductory thoughts: Caesar rationalised the empire, developing a Liberal imperial regime, but one which could only be achieved within a monarchic structure. Imperialism required monarchy, and, in Froude’s view, monarchy was the price of liberty.31 Such Caesarism has a long and shameful history. T. M. Taylor, A Constitutional and Political History of Rome from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Domitian (London, 1899) offers a similarly robust defence of Caesar

There is little doubt that Caesar had long intended to make himself master of Rome, to supersede the effete Republic by a form of government that could adapt itself to the needs of a world-wide empire… It was as well for Rome that he did not hesitate. For many years Rome had been drifting towards Militarism and Imperialism.32

Much praise of Caesar’s reforms follows in which Caesar is made the representative of a new form of imperialism.

[The Caesarian] revolution … was undertaken not by a party politician for party reasons, but by the master of the Roman Empire determined to use his power for the good of the Empire as a whole. Caesar’s rule was the triumph of order… Caesar was the first man to take an imperial view of the Empire; he saw the necessity of welding into one complete whole the numberless communities and distant provinces of which the Empire was composed.33

29 Froude (1894), 1. 30 Froude (1894), 221 (for decomposition), 222 (for medievalism), 296 (for brutality). 31 This is very much in keeping with Froude’s Nietzschean view of history. In ‘The Science of History’, a lecture delivered on February 5th, 1864, Froude argued that environment was always important as a historical factor, but never determining: there was always room for the great man. See Froude (1868), 5-8. 32 Taylor (1899), 355. 33 Taylor (1899), 374


This new model imperialism is differentiated from the old, which is in turn associated with the East. Pompey, for example, is dismissed as ‘burlesque’, a character trait that supposedly earned him the title ‘Great Mogul and the Pasha’, and whereas the pre-Caesarian governor was a ‘provincial satrap’, his Caesarian successor devoted ‘to foster[ing] the prosperity of provincials’.34 For Tenney Frank, Caesar was the required and ‘logical result of conquest’, though Frank retained a far greater ambivalence about the loss of liberty that empire entailed.35 These themes in the treatment of Caesar were brought together in Warde-Fowler’s extremely popular summary history of Rome (1912).

I say without hesitation that Caesar was the one man of his time really gifted with scientific intelligence – with the power of seeing the facts before him and adjusting his action to them. This intelligence, combined with great strength of will, made him master of the Roman Empire… He seems to have used his mastership, not like a capricious Oriental despot, but with a real sense of responsibility… [he] surely deserves to be thought of as one altogether out of the common’.36

Dictatorship was, then, the scientific response to the problems of Empire, though that ‘mastery’, and the unusual nature of the vocabulary here is surely meant to be elusive, is to be differentiated from Oriental models of monarchy. Significantly, the major critic of Empire, Tacitus, who is the source of first resort for those who saw monarchy as enervating and corrupting, is dismissed as ‘lurid’.37 Order and Empire

These texts differentiated between an Oriental model of Empire, which entailed a loss of liberty, and a Western or Caesarian model of Empire in which the virtues and efficiencies of Rome preserved order and freedom. This makes very little sense in terms of the ancient historiography, and the moral development (good empire degenerating into bad empire) is notably reversed between Merivale and Taylor. Yet, this strand of analysis would seem to reflect a new confidence in Empire, and a perception both that the British Empire would escape the fate of Rome and that Empire was in itself not corrupting. Instead Empire emerges as a technocratic resolution of political problems, an almost morally neutral polity, in which Caesarism was the means of bringing good government to the empire when more representative systems had failed. The scientific model necessitated a re-evaluation of the Roman legacy, which established a distance between Britain and Rome, but also a parallelism. Further, it strengthened the conceptual boundaries between

34 Taylor (1899), 361 (Pompey), 370 (satraps). 35 Frank (1914). 36 Warde Fowler (1967), 79. 37 Warde Fowler (1967), 102.


metropolis and colony and brought together strange fellow travellers, jingo-imperialists and Liberal ‘improvers’.38 We have already seen that Merivale portrayed the best of imperialism as establishing ‘liberty and equality’, to be contrasted with Oriental imperialism. The linking of these words obviously recalls revolutionary slogans and establishes a parallelism between the polity of the Roman Empire and post-revolutionary modern European states. Although both terms were derived from Classical political thought, the application of ‘libertas’ to the Roman imperial state was contentious, requiring a rather naïve reading of Tacitus, Agricola and Pliny, Panegyricus. Although equality under the law was a Roman and Greek democratic principle, seeing equality as a political characteristic of an imperial system required an extraordinary level of special pleading. Yet, Merivale was not alone in this view. F. Fiddes, in the introduction to Arnold’s Studies of Roman Imperialism described the Roman Empire as

the first great Imperial experiment … Rome made a genuine effort to unite Liberty and Empire … In particular the English historian is irresistibly reminded of the British Empire, and especially of its great Indian dependency.39

Dill asserted that

The greatest glory of the imperial administration for nearly two centuries was the skilful and politic tolerance with which it reconciled a central despotism with a remarkable range of local liberty. It did not attempt to impose a uniform organisation or a bureaucratic control on the vast mass of races and peoples whom the fortunes of Rome had brought under her sway. Rather for ages its guiding principle was, as far as possible, to leave ancient landmarks undisturbed and to give as much free play to local liberties as was compatible with the safety and efficiency of the imperial guardian of order and peace.40

Rome’s role as the guarantor of freedom was transmuted into Rome as the source of civil rights. Cromer, for instance, argued that human rights originated in the teachings of stoicism and Christianity.41 That theoretical commitment to the rights of the individual

38 I identify a constellation of political ideas as Liberal, notwithstanding the non-party political nature of these ideas and the broad ideological alliance that was nineteenth-century Liberalism. These ideas include free trade, a desire for a strong distinction between state and individual and a state that respects as much as possible the private sphere, and a commitment to cultural and economic ‘improvement’, which extended to empire. Since the private sphere was the social location of freedom and the state was the sphere of social constraint, a ‘free’ state was oxymoronic and instead one should wish for an efficient state which would enhance human happiness and not impinge on private matters. Liberalism is associated with the development of capitalist individualism as opposed to more communitarian or nationalistic visions. 39 Arnold (1906), 5. Arnold spent most of his career in Manchester working as a journalist on the notoriously Liberal Manchester Guardian. The connection here between Liberty and Empire establishes Arnold as a theorist of Liberal imperialism. 40 Dill (1925), 203. 41 Cromer (1910), 45.


was transmuted into a ‘humanitarianism’ ‘to be found in the records of Roman Imperialism. The cruelties of druidical worship, which were left untouched by Julius Caesar, were suppressed by Claudius…’ and Augustus, Agricola and the Antonines were made representatives of policies ‘mild and conciliatory’.42 Parallels to the suppression of Indian barbarities, which justified British imperial activities, seem implied. Arnold also found parallels between English and Roman humanitarianism

Augustus contented himself with abolishing certain practices, like that of human sacrifice – just as the English government in India, though in a general way its attitude towards the native religions has been one of impartial tolerance, has abolished Suttee and Juggernaut – and with setting up a rival religion which was as distinctively Roman as its predecessor had been Gaulish.43

Perhaps inevitably, Rome also came to be seen as a propagator of that other great Liberal tradition, free trade. Capes argued in 1876 for Trajan as free-marketeer and for the Roman Empire as securing civilization through a road-building campaign which furthered the interests of trade. Rome’s Empire was undermined by governmental interference in trade and over-taxation.44 It was a position that Capes maintained in his book of 1887 in which, if anything, free trade was given a more central role in the development of Roman culture, and was also seen as the root of a moral excellence that characterised (perversely) the early empire.45 Capes is perhaps somewhat unusual in this strongly Liberal association between patterns of trade and moral and imperial status, though it was also picked up by de Burgh.46 More common is the reference to scientific government. Fowler made the very Utilitarian argument that Rome’s policy of urbanization made the provincials ‘more happy and contented’.47 Dill’s praise for Roman imperial government concludes ‘[a]nd the worse of emperors share with the best in the universal gratitude of the provinces for the blessings of the “Roman Peace”.’48 For Taylor, Caesar’s was the efficient organisation of the ‘department of the Roman system’ dealing with the provinces: ‘On no one did the new monarchy confer greater blessings than on the distant subjects of Rome’.49 Stobart’s immensely influential study also depicted a Rome which had ‘a natural capacity for affairs’ that was allow her to spread civilization, a mission that could only be accomplished once the imperial monarchy had brought stable government.50 And Pelham in his popular Outlines of Roman History wrote of the Augustan empire that

42 Cromer (1910), 49. 43 Arnold (1906), 92-93. 44 Capes (1876), 15-24. 45 Capes (1887), 193. 46 de Burgh (1912), 8. 47 Warde Fowler (1967), 95. 48 Dill (1925), 204. 49 Taylor (1899), 433 50 Stobart (1912), 221. See also de Burgh (1912), 7.


The establishment of a civilised government among a barbarous or half-civilised people produced, naturally enough, friction and disturbance. But against these isolated instances must be set the abundant evidence which exists of widespread prosperity.51

Pelham’s analysis set a loss of national freedom against a Utilitarian claim for empire as increasing the sum of human happiness. This claim for empire’s popularity (British and Roman) also appears in Cromer, who rejects the manifestation of opposition to Empire in 1857 as a ‘mutiny’ and thus not a rebellion.52 Arnold similarly argues that the Gauls at least rushed to embrace Roman practices.53 Whereas for Froude and others Caesar was the great man of the age, Pelham found his heroic imperialist in Hadrian. In 1896 Pelham, writing of Arrian in English Historical Review, turned his attention to Hadrian

Hadrian aimed above all things at the consolidation of the empire. He was consequently opposed not only to ambitious schemes for its expansion, but to the old-established view of the empire as a federation of allied communities under the leadership of Rome. The differences of race and political status which the federal theory helped to keep alive, Hadrian did his best to sink in a sense of common citizenship. It was a policy which has often been called cosmopolitan, but which might more properly be called imperialist.54

The article depicted Arrian as Hadrian’s representative on the frontiers, and explicitly compared Arrian to the ‘politicals’ who provided the Indian government with its information. Two years later, in a brief note on Hadrian, Pelham was again extolling his favoured emperor as an ideological imperialist.

Viewed as a statesman, as a ruler of a great empire, Hadrian stands higher than either Trajan or Marcus [Aurelius]. He is the true representative of his time, and he left a deeper mark upon it. Above all, it was he and not they who shaped the policy of the empire … It was directed by one dominant idea … the master idea was … the imperial idea – the conception of the empire, as a single well-compacted state, internally homogeneous and standing out in clear relief against surrounding barbarism.55

Yet, Hadrian was not alone. In 1895, Pelham extolled the virtues of Claudius

The speech in which Claudius combated the continuance of the liberal policy which had made Rome great was, as a matter of course, convincing … The credit

51 Pelham (1926), 466. 52 Cromer (1910), 38. 53 Arnold (1906), 93. 54 Pelham (1911a), 216-17. 55 Pelham (1911b). This note was first published in 1898.


for initiating the policy of freely admitting provincials to the senate, and of investing the senate with a truly imperial character, must be given to Claudius.56

And in his Outlines of Roman History credit was shared between Augustus, the Flavians and the Antonines.

To the emperors who… consolidated the authority of Caesar belongs naturally enough the credit of attempting to weld the empire into a single state under his supreme rule, and of abandoning the old theory which regarded it as a federation of allied communities under the hegemony of the Roman commonwealth. This task was no doubt made easier by the gradual disappearance of distinctions of language and manners, by the assimilating influence of commercial and social intercourse, and by the extinction of national jealousies and aspirations.57

The Republicanism of the commonwealth gave way to a monarchic imperialism into which the provincials were rapidly assimilated and which provided good government, prosperity, and an increase in happiness. What is more, this development is seen in Pelham as willed, a deliberate policy of a beneficent Roman state governed by a wise and representative senate and emperor. In Pelham’s hands, Imperialism has become an ideology of a state beyond Republics and nations, beyond the conventions of language and manners, a supra-national state of governmental efficiency and Liberal intent, and in this we see a close connection between ancient history and the political debates of the day. Moneypenny, writing of ‘The Imperial Ideal’ in 1905, echoes many of Pelham’s concerns. For Moneypenny, Empire was beyond nation, imperialism supplanting nationalism in the political lexicon. That evolution led to a shift in political values, away from the old fixation with liberty and towards a new evaluation of authority. Rome provided a model for emulation since

[b]ound together not only by a common ruler, but by a highly organized and uniform though elastic system of administration, and as time went on by a common system of law and a common citizenship, it became the most powerful engine of assimilation that the world has ever seen. In the first instance, indeed, Roman imperialism was little more than an Imperialism of conquest; but it was a conquest that ultimately justified itself as a furtherance to civilization.58

Moneypenny claimed that was not just a new or revived political ideological which surpassed old-established models of political power but that it was the telos of history, a culmination of 500 years of political and military development.59 J. A. Cramb, who was Professor of Modern History at Queen’s College London, similarly extolled imperialism as an ultimate political ideal, an ideal which Rome had held, but in imperfect form. That ideal appears to have been latent in Rome, never fully

56 Pelham (1911d), 156. 57 Pelham (1926), 484-85. 58 Moneypenny (1905), 5-28; see 5 for political language, and 7 for common citizenship. 59 Moneypenny (1905), 5-28


developed, and Cramb lapses into a pseudo-Freudianism to explain why that imperial consciousness remained unspoken and unrealised before 1900.

In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a state, or an individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire, purpose, or ideal passes into the consciousness.60

This enigmatic sentiment is explained many pages later

The spirit of imperial Britain has grown up through a history stretching back to antiquity which has moulded the character of Britain, but has now moved from “Unconscious” to ‘Conscious” awareness.61

The Romans felt this ideal but it could only by manifested through art and not turned into a central ideal of the Roman imperial state.

The common traits… in the hero of the Aeneid and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but rise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right of the ancient State.62

Rome was thus the precursor of Britain, in a less developed form, laying the ground for a developed or conscious imperialism of the Modern era. Not only is that imperialism an end of history, to which the world had been shifting for many centuries (thus naturalising imperialism), but that imperialism existed beyond the petty confines of the state and, in an extraordinary shift, is seen by Cramb as being anti-state, aiming

to rescue individual life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by the larger freedom, the highest justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain through Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find.63

The British Empire, it seems, was entirely devoted to the ideal freedom, whereas the Romans had a separation between the spheres of state and individual, encapsulated in “render unto Caesar” which marked a contrast between imperial subjugation and personal freedom (p. 21). The underlying Liberalism becomes obvious here, a Liberalism which is embedded not in political form, but in the shared national psyche of the English. It is for this Liberal ideal that the dead of the British Empire are to be honoured (p. 24) and which the British soldiers of Spion Kop apparently died extolling (p. 105). This Empire beyond nation (p. 91), but led by a spirit of Englishness, is to be identified with secular Liberal modernity, a modernity that is seen in the educative mission of the British Empire in spreading the learning of the West in the East. In this sense Cramb is a direct heir of Mill

60 Cramb (1915), 6. 61 Cramb (1915), 54. 62 Cramb (1915), 15. 63 Cramb (1915), 15. The obvious Latinity of the English here surely marks Cramb’s ambitious prose, but expresses strongly Liberal sentiments.


and Macaulay in their sponsorship of Western education in India and in seeing modernisation as the great mission of Western imperialism.64 This Liberal faith in an Imperial spirit echoes Seeley’s influential discussion of empire in The Expansion of England (1st ed. Oxford, 1883). Seeley’s argument was for an extension of representative government within the empire to draw in the provinces. He argues that

our Empire is not an Empire at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not consist of a congeries of nations held together by force, but in the main of one nation, as much as if it were no Empire but an ordinary state.65

Seeley’s vision was of a world-wide Anglo-Saxon state, but a state that also moved beyond nation, for the historical task of empire was modernisation, and that modernisation faced its greatest challenges in India. For Seeley the controversial decision to introduce Anglophone education into India

remains the greatest landmark in the history of our Empire, considered as an institute of civilization. It marks the moment when we deliberately recognised that a function had devolved on us similar to that which Rome fulfilled in Europe, the greatest function which any government can ever be called upon to discharge.66

Seeley dreamt of an Anglicization of India, which would allow the development of a truly world-wide citizenship. It is in this context that we can understand Pelham’s representation of the imperialism of Claudius and Hadrian: the great Imperial dream was a citizenship beyond nation, and a citizenship that would encompass all the provinces, including, in the British case, India. Yet, notably, Seeley maintained that this process by which citizenship values were to be communicated was one-way.

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our way of thinking.67

Seeley reflected a sense of an imperial mission to civilize, and in so doing saw in imperialism an action accomplished by the imperial power of which the natives were passive receivers. There is no sense of the possible corruption, no sense of doubt, but a confident assertion of the superiority of English culture. In this Seeley is the heir of Mill and the Liberal imperial tradition, a tradition that we see reflected and rewritten in the Roman history of the period.

64 Cramb (1915), 78-79, though Cramb choses the college in Khartoum as his example of beneficial imperial education rather than the Indian universities. Unlike Mill, Cramb did leave some space for Eastern learning. 65 Seeley (1895), 60. 66 Seeley (1895), 293. 67 Seeley (1895), 10; cf. 286 for an explicit denial of influence from India on England.


Village India: Asiaticism, citizenship, and doubt in the reception of India

Liberal thought was founded in large part in conjunction with an emerging understanding of India. The discussion of Indian society comes to focus on Village India, and although there is little explicit mention of Rome in many of these texts, the ghost of Rome profoundly operates as the comparator in relation to whom much of the debate is constructed. Mill’s influential The History of British India (1st ed. 1817, with editions in 1820, 1820, 1826, 1840, 1848, and 1858) is possibly the most notorious history of India ever produced. In part its reputation depends on an attack on the culture of India that extended through law, society, religion, and traditions, and takes up most of Volume II. Mill commences his assault with a discussion of Indian historical traditions. He cites various fantastical numbers and concludes

Rude nations seem to derive a peculiar gratification from pretensions to remote antiquity. As a boastful and turgid vanity distinguishes remarkably the oriental nations, they have in most instances carried their claims extravagantly high.68

Native Indian history is regarded as a tissue of myth and extravagant claims. In desperation Mill turns to Classical authorities.

From the scattered hints contained in the writings of the Greeks, the conclusion has been drawn that the Hindus, at the time of Alexander’s invasions, were in a state of manners, society and knowledge, exactly the same with that in which they were discovered by the nations of modern Europe; nor is there any reason for differing widely from this opinion.69

Later in the volume, in writing of property rights, Mill argued that Solon and the Twelve Tables introduced testamentary rights into Greek and Roman culture (and his audience would surely have known that this dated the legal innovation to the very foundation of the city-states), but that Hindu culture was not sufficiently advanced to have such rights.70 On Hindu religion, Mill complained about a lack of philosophical sophistication, a theology comparable to that of pharaonic Egypt, which Mill held in contempt, a lack of moral teaching and, most important, the absence of a spirit of improvement.71 The picture of Hindu culture is consistent. The absence of a reliable historical account for the period before the English conquest is rendered unimportant by the parallel absence of any cultural or political development in Indian society. India is thus a society without history, because it is a society without change, and thus it remains mired in the ancient primitivism of its religion and culture. In contrast to those Orientalists who had tried to derive a Classical tradition from Indian legal and religious texts, Mill saw India as a tabula rasa, a land empty of history and tradition.72 An important part of that primitivism was an

68 Mill (1858), II, 107. 69 Mill (1858), II, 118. 70 Mill (1858), II, 173. 71 Mill (1858), II, 228-302. 72 See Majeed (2005).


absence of private property-holding as it was understood in Western traditions. Instead, ultimate ownership of property was seen as being vested in the state, to be granted to important figures or distributed among the population.73 Mill established and popularised an Asiatic economic and political model in which an absolutist state controlled all aspects of economic life, and in so doing Asiatic societies were frozen in time, incapable of development and renewal. This understanding was reinforced by surveys and studies of Indian village communities, and powerfully influenced Marx’s understanding of India, to which I will turn below. But the nineteenth-century authority on the village was Sir H. Sumner Maine, whose 1871 Village Communities in the East and West was already in its fifth edition by 1887. Maine argued that Indian villages had a structure that corresponded in broad terms to that of the medieval Manor or to German mark villages. This association was built upon a perceived Indo-European tradition of village organisation which spread through much of Northern Europe and India. That tradition was represented in purer form in India, which could be seen as a living museum in which medievalists could experience the original forms of village community, which makes explicit Maine’s claim for the value of comparative history. In a typical nineteenth-century shift, Maine linked the conservatism of the village to the influence of the extended patriarchal family, and the role of that family both in the distribution of landed property and as a source of law. In contrast to many Orientalists who had tried to resurrect a Classical Indian law from the ‘Code of Menu’ (i.e. Manu), Sumner Maine thought that law was essentially local, a function of local agencies.74 J. S. Mill presented the same view of Indian villages to Parliament in defence of the East India Company in 1858. Mill’s petition included a ‘Memorandum of the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years’, in which he argued that property in land in the Indian villages resided in the village communities and that the village proprietors formed a municipal government which ‘was the only institution, properly so called, which the Hindoos possessed’.75 Mill went on to argue that the imposition of scientific taxation and land survey, the development of roads, canals, modernisation of legal forms, the introduction of cash crops and the building of railways led to an enormous increase in prosperity, as reflected in a reduction in the debts afflicting the labouring classes and an increase in taxation revenue. The linkage between village organisation and improvement becomes clearer when we compare Mill’s account to the contribution of Lieutenant General John Briggs of the Madras army. Briggs was arguing for an extension of British control. It was not

consistent with our duty or humanity, to withhold and discourage among the Native Principalities … those advantages of education and advancement which will

73 Mill (1858), II, 212-19. 74 Maine (1887), esp. 3-18. 75 Mill (1990b), 93-106, esp. 99.


eventually take place when their subjects form a portion of that Universal Empire in India to which at present it seems our destiny to attain.76

Briggs also commences his account of the vast improvements wrought by the Company in India with some thoughts on Indian villages

The remains of [municipal institutions] are everywhere to be found in Europe, though the tendency to centralization in monarchies tends to destroy them. They have been best preserved by the Swiss nation … and exist in greater perfection under the constitutional sovereignty of England than under any other monarchy. In India, they are, in spite of the despotic rule of ages, found to be universal, but most perfect where they have escaped Mahomedan dominion.77

Briggs acknowledged that this understanding of Indian villages was relatively recent, dating to 1808, when the Republican nature of these municipalities was recognised (p. 5), before which the Company had been interested in establishing its rights to tax as inheritor of the prerogatives of the monarchies, and legal ownership according to Western perceptions. Briggs explicitly denies that India had cities, describing the large population centres as ‘congeries of townships or parishes’, and thus extended the ‘village model’ to all settled communities.78 It is this understanding of India as a community of villages which is picked up by Marx. Marx wrote most explicitly on India in his journalism and India plays very little obvious role in his general theories of history. In The German Ideology, Marx offers a very simple and Western view of historical development: these are marked by stages of ownership systems: tribal, state/ancient-communal, the development of private property, feudal or estate property, and eventually the capitalist system. There is no obvious consideration of how India would fit into such a schema. But in the Grundrisse, which has its problems as a text, Marx has widened his approach so that Indian ownership systems were classed as state/ancient-communal, but as a special category within that schema, the Oriental or Asiatic mode. Writing in the New York Daily Tribune for June 25, 1853, Marx drew attention to Indian villages:

. . . we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.79

76 Briggs (1857), 249. Briggs’ book is an extended and considered work. I remain unsure whether it was written as a contribution to the political arguments after the war of 1857, to which I found no explicit reference, but the issues that concern Briggs are exactly those that drove political debate in the aftermath of the war. 77 Briggs (1857), 4. 78 Briggs (1857), 8. 79 Marx (1968a), 40. A similar point is made in Capital IV.14.4.


Marx saw India as a strange combination of Ireland and Italy, a voluptuous peasant culture of woe, and argues that in spite of the many transformations in regimes, the social organisation of India had never changed.80 Although Marx has a far more sophisticated view of the linkage between economic modes and cultural superstructure of religion and state organisation and was reversing Mill’s Hegelian reading from culture to economics, the Asiaticism of the account differs little from the predominant views of the time. Marx, however, broke with the imperial improvers by arguing that British imperialism was accidentally, through ignorance and brutality, dismantling the village system. It was not the soldiers or even the tax-gatherers who were leading the change, but the exposure of the Indian economic system to free trade and industrial competition, which depended on the integrative effects of the new communications networks. In a second article, from August 8th, 1853, Marx notes the accidental revolution in Indian property in the East India Company’s decision to award proprietarial rights to the zamindars, who had been tax farmers of a sort, describing the change as bringing in ‘the great desideratum of Asiatic society’.81 The collapse of the Indian textile industry, the dissolution of village communities, the ‘annihilation of… Asiatic society’ was causing ‘the greatest, and … the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’.82 The devastation wreaked by Capital and the integration of India into the world economic system paralleled the devastation wrought in Europe, but this was ultimately progressive, moving India from antiquity to modernity, starting India on a course of historical development. India was thus, incompetently and accidentally, being rushed from its antique, Asiatic mode into the Capitalistic age.83 The views of Indian villages progressively became more sophisticated, and by the end of the century, in part because of the detailed work of Baden-Powell on the land systems of British India, it became generally recognised that not all Indian villages were the same.84 The issue continued to be of general importance and in 1899 Baden-Powell produced a ‘popular’ summary account of his findings in The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India, a proposal one might have some difficulty selling in today’s book market. In contrast to Maine’s argument that there was a single type of original collective village, Baden-Powell argued that India had two main categories of villages, severalty villages and joint villages. Joint villages were again sub-divided into three types: an ancestral village which was created by a ‘Baronial’ grant of land to a military supporter by a Raja; tribal in which land is divided between households but retains collective responsibilities, collective holdings, and some rights of alienation; associate villages in which there is a co-operative collective. Severalty villages displayed developed property rights, but were also seen as a special form of ancestral villages, in

80 Marx (1968a), 35–37. 81 Marx (1968b), 82. 82 Marx (1968a), 40, and (1968b), 82. 83 Marx’s representation of imperialism as a progressive force has caused later Marxists considerable angst. See, among many others, Turner (1978), Brewer (1990), and Parekh (1997), 173-93. 84 Baden-Powell (1892).


which property originated with a female ancestor and was then divided and re-divided, with rights of alienation over generations. Although this complex typology of village societies developed Maine’s picture, Baden-Powell nevertheless maintained a primitivist theory of Indian village life. The ancestral village may have had medieval elements, and there may have been proto-capitalistic property rights in severalty villages, but Baden-Powell argues that nowhere in India do we find developed rights of individual property holding, such as we find in the Roman legal codes. The fundamental economic and institutional bases of the Roman and later Western cities were absent in India.85 In these representations of India, India is not only denied a progressive history, at least until the British conquest, but is left in a primitive state. The Medievalism within the texts, which surfaced also in discussion of state-level governance, both Indian and British (the latter especially in connection with eighteenth-century Company government) does not undermine this primitivism: Indian villages were seen as reflecting Germanic villages, a type untouched by Roman culture, and which could be traced back into very early Germanic history.86 Neither these Germanic or the Indian villages developed towards a property-owning, capitalistic system, and remained trapped in a pre-Classical state. Crucially, this meant that India could not develop cities, and cities were seen not only as the drivers of the modern economic system, but also as the root of the values of civilization. For without cities, there could be no citizenship.87 In the absence of these progressive forces, and of citizenship especially, imperial domination took on a different moral position. No longer could it be argued that Empires were instituting despotism, but instead they were advancing freedoms, civilization, and the very peoples over whom they were exerting control. Froude’s Julius Caesar, for instance, was engaged in rescuing the Gauls from ‘a state of change and decomposition’.88 Froude explains this as an incipient medievalism: ‘As the secular side of things has a rude resemblance to feudalism, so on the religious there was a similar anticipation of the mediaeval Catholic Church’.89 Sumner Maine drew a closer lesson. In a chapter of Village Communities entitled ‘The effects of observation of India on Modern European thought’, he argued that comparative method of historical analysis would bring significant benefits. In particular, he turns to Roman history, arguing that whereas the traditions of historical

85 Baden-Powell (1899), 17-19 for the basic typology, 64-93 for the typology of collective villages, and 128-39 for the absence of private property. 86 For state level medievalism see, for example, discussions of Hastings and Minto in Thompson and Garratt (1934), esp. 165-66 and 250. See also Edmund Burke’s speech of 1788 on the impeachment of Warren Hastings (conveniently available in Berriedale Keith (1922), 114-55). 87 Citizenship was a central issue to the debates around empire in the nineteenth century, and in particular how despotism led to an end of citizenship (see the discussion of Thornton above), and the rational citizen was a central tenet of Mill’s and later Liberal views of the political individual. See the collection of essays in Biagini (1996) and especially the article by Biagnini, ‘Liberalism and direct democracy: John Stuart Mill and the model of Ancient Athens’, 21-44. 88 Froude (1894), 221. 89 Froude (1894), 222. Similar descriptions of a society in chaos or decay were used to explain British success in India.


analysis tended to treat the Roman imperial administration as being morally bound up with the foibles of the emperors, as oppressive, and corrupt, the comparison with India would change moral and historical perspectives so that the European reader would come to identify with the Romans facing threats to order in Judaea and in the persecution of the Christians. The Romans, like the British, were rescuing provincials from primitive or medieval values.90 Roman historians identified the values of citizenship, the values of Classical culture, with the city, a trope so central to Classical scholarship that the nature and fate of the city continues to define the whole period of study. Although the sweeping away of antique villages may have pleased Marxists and Liberals, there was a question as to what type of community, and what type of city should replace the village. There were, of course, already cities long-established in India, but not such as to meet with the approval of the improvers. The drive to improve led to the development of the colonial city, a type of city that was often constructed using neo-Classical architectural forms.91 Such cities were systems of control, aiming to generate the citizen values of the Classical metropolis. Yet, there were doubts. H. Clarke’s Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (London 1857), a tract addressed to the Directors of the East India Company and produced after the uprising and in response to it, argued for the establishment of European colonies in India. In part, this was fuelled by a disappointment that everything that had been done for India had not produced the grateful citizen body that was expected, and Clarke argues that the only way forward was to plant Europeans in suitable climates both as a military reserve and as cultural capital, so that the values of European citizenship would seep into Indian society.92 Although there are no explicit references to Rome, it is difficult to imagine that the Roman model did not lie behind Clarke’s plan. But would it work? In 1905, W. T. Arnold was confident that the Gauls willingly and enthusiastically embraced urbanisation and Roman cultural values, but remained reticent with regard to others.93 Cromer concluded his address to the Classical Association by lamenting the failure of European imperialism to generate cultural change, which he attributed not to any failings on the part of the imperialists (racism for example), but to the manifest differences between Europeans, Easterners and Africans, fortified by religion.94 Warde Fowler was confident that urbanization would not work. In 1912, he wrote

To help us in realizing the urban character of Roman provincial life, we may compare it with that of the population of India in the present day … The economic

90 Maine (1857), 205-39. 91 This is, in itself, a topic with an enormous bibliography, which I have touched on elsewhere, but indicative of this sub-discipline of urban studies is King (1990). 92 Clarke (1857). 93 Arnold (1906), 96-97. 94 Cromer (1910), 73-91. This is very much in keeping with the Orientalism of his Modern Egypt (1908).


unit of India is the village and this simple fact is enough to explain why India has never been Anglicized.95

Eight years later, B. W. Henderson, in The Study of Roman History, which would appear to be an assertion of the utility of Classics, claimed that his book was about the method

by which the citizens and rulers of this city [Rome] maintained their government over races which, though at first alien, were presently in large measure incorporated into the city’s franchise; by which these men substituted a civilisation of their own in place of the Oriental or barbarous customs which they destroyed

before suggesting, in somewhat contradictory fashion, that the major difficulty facing the Roman empire was its inability to assimilate Greek culture, which was eventually to cause the fall of Rome, when Constantinople was founded.96 Yet, this crisis of confidence in the Liberal ideal of improvement was not just due to the rise of racism and its incorporation into Orientalism. There was also a loss of confidence in the Classical ideal itself. This was manifested in a turning away from cities, from secularism, and from modernity. For instance, whereas Marx and Mill had hoped for the sweeping away of villages, Matthai, Village Government in British India (London, 1915) saw the village as the way forward for India. Although differentiating Indian villages from Western political institutions, Matthai saw parallels between the Indian village and early Greek or German communities

When the load of indebtedness has been lifted off his shoulders and his mind awakened to the meaning of the things around him, we may hope that the Indian villager may develop a new desire to make his personality… enter in some positive way into the government of his little world… there is no higher call in India to the men of our generation than to see this process go forward.97

Citizenship was not to be hoped for in the cities, but to be located in villages. A. C. Lyall, in a fascinating piece of imaginative literature published in 1882, took on the persona of Vamadeo Shastri, a Brahman. Shastri attacked, in a rather genteel fashion, imperial modernity as an empty ideology.

Although your empire has given us a political settlement after the high Roman fashion, I do not yet see what aid it is likely to give us towards any kind of religious unity. It does not, indeed, profess to give any, for your government stands by religious neutrality, and attempts, as the Romans did at first, to treat the religious question with indifference.98

95 Warde Fowler (1912), 139. In the 1967 edition (at 67), the same sentiment is expressed with small modifications of tense. 96 Henderson (1920), quotation from 13, and problems of assimilation, 23-24. 97 Matthai (1915), 38; see 37 for analogies with Greece. 98 Lyall (1907), 97.


Shastri does not see the threat to empire as political, but cultural, based in a growing metaphysical fundamentalism that will prevent the values of the imperial nation being adopted. Dill turned his discussion of the decline of Empire in the Antonine period into an attack on materialism and spiritual poverty and hoped for a spiritual renewal akin to the Christian conversion to drive his contemporaries from their lethargy.99 In similar fashion, Warde Fowler concluded that Rome came to live in the past, and the energy and confidence of the imperial regime ebbed away.100 The Liberalism of the nineteenth century created an empire that was increasingly felt to be an empty vessel, full of sound, but devoid of meaning. Conclusions and Implications

By pulling at these threads in the discussions of imperialism, ancient and modern, and India, I hope to have shown the operation in inter-relationship of these ‘discursive zones’. These worlds of learning crossed over, reinforcing each other, establishing issues and questions, doubts and concerns, and formed a discourse of modernity, just as much as ‘the great European realistic novel’, as discussed by Said.101 Fundamental to that discourse was a theory of history constructed around a profoundly Classicising and Occidental narrative, which both saw the Capitalistic West as a telos and interpreted the history of the West as normative. The theory of history that developed in the nineteenth century was based on these interlocked historiographies of Rome and India. Yet that discourse depended on and enforced an essential separation of the ‘discursive zones’ of India and Rome. India was banished from History, located at a stage of primitivism, in large part because India did not experience the ‘progressive’ force of Rome, and as Rome and the West ‘left India behind’, so India was established as a counter-type to the ‘progressive’ West. Particular Indian social and intellectual forms were dismissed within this model as past, primitive, or without value. The engagement with India entailed a historiographical revolution. No longer was there just a single past from which Europe could draw its historical understanding, and this complicated the norms of historical analysis. The constitutionalism dominant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries now faced the more cultural history of Mill in which the fate of nations lay not just in the actions of great men, but in the institutions, values and ethics of the people. But in both models of history, India could be seen as a threat, a seductive primitivism that was a threat to the disciplines of the West. Intellectuals worried about the threat of degeneracy in the temptations of the Orient, In more conservative historiographical practice, the wealth of the Orient threatened to destabilise the English constitution and especially English Liberty, which was in large part the source of English cultural superiority, by creating an executive so powerful it could erode the liberties of the citizen, or citizens so powerful they could corrupt the workings of government. Both

99 Dill (1925), 220. 100 Warde Fowler (1967), 101. 101 Said (1993), 12.


understandings drew on Roman models, especially models related to the ‘Fall of the Republic’. Great intellectual movements are hardly mono-causal, but the response to India was clearly central to the early nineteenth-century political thinking that gave birth to Liberalism and Marxism. Mill’s Liberalism placed emphasis on rational government above all else. Rationalistic, technocratic government could be relied upon to make the right decisions and advance history. The notion of freedom came to be separated somewhat from constitutionalism. The liberties of the individual were not primarily political, but could be religious, cultural or economic, and located within a private sphere. This new, broader liberty was not necessarily best asserted or defended by a Republican government but could be maintained by a Liberal authoritarianism of the kind that Mill foresaw for India, while others saw an informed despotism (Caesarism) as the best defence against the pressures of Empire. Roman history was revised so that instead of being a story of liberty lost and state decline in the post-Augustan period, it could instead be read as a tale of liberties spread through an imperial autocracy. The superiority of the West rested not so much on constitutional freedoms, but on the individual freedoms that were supposedly inherited from the Classical tradition. The separation of state and liberty was taken to its logical extreme in ideals of empire beyond state, and beyond nation, that we see in the late nineteenth century, ideals that offer an almost mystical union in the imperial notion of history, but from which ideas of democracy and liberty, self-determination and national sovereignty were remote. Liberal historiography, of both Rome and India, became a means of excusing and justifying the imposition of structures of domination that were profoundly illiberal. The rethinking of history in the nineteenth century created an immense and almost unbridgeable gap between Indian primitivism and English (European) modernity. The polarities of that depiction made the imperial task of modernisation appear daunting and revolutionary, justifying the imposition of ‘strong’ government. The personalisation of that primitivism (making it rest in cultural attitudes that operated within the village, the family, and in religion) created an understanding of a ‘peasantry’ unsuited to governance, who needed educating in liberty before they could acquire basic civic rights. The identification of imperial governance as modernising and technocratic inevitably pushed opposition to Empire towards conservatism and primitivism. Yet, modernity was not without its critics in the metropolis itself and those critics perceived instinctive, though perhaps misunderstood, resonances within Indian culture and resistance.102 Such critiques of the modern (in which we see a fear of social dislocation, materialism, moral and ethical degeneracy, and spiritual impoverishment) also found acceptance in India (sometimes in the hyper-modernity of Marxist thought or in traditional, often religious modes). Empire was identified with modernity, with all its benefits and ills, while opposition to Empire inevitably played on those ills and sought to identify itself in opposition to Modernity.

102 See Sen (2005), 89-120, on Tagore, especially concerning his disagreements with Gandhi and his problematic and varied reception in the West.


Although I have not pursued the debate far into the twentieth century, the argument remains fervent, conducted on much the same lines as a century ago. Similar arguments continue to be used to justify the use of overwhelming force to free peoples who have supposedly known no freedom, to destroy societies, to justify atrocity, to make and remake the boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Even the spiritual aims of nineteenth-century imperialists, to save the world, to make it free, to generate universal peace, remain high on the political agenda. And bafflement at the rejection of those values continues, reinforcing a politics of identity that builds hard and fast distinctions between East and West. Yet, as Catherine Hall points out, drawing on Fanon, ‘identity is not only differentiation, it always exists within the context of identity relations’.103 For Fanon, negritude was the foundation of the Western self, but in this creation there was a transformation, a drawing in and a remaking in a different form.104 In this way, the presentation of Indian primitivism became internalised in Indian political discourses and continues to live on in debates about citizenship, cities, villages, the relationship of India to the modern, Hinduism and civilization.105 The simple polarities of ancient and modern encourage simplistic politics and dichotomous, powerful associations, and communal disaster. But the problems are not just Indian: these debates resonate and replicate in all discursive zones. In constructing India as an ‘other’, it became, like the ‘other’ that is the Classical past, always present, always touching and forming the ‘us’ of Western Liberalism. The crisis of faith in Liberal imperialism was a crisis in modernity that both responded to India and reacted to problems in the metropolitan culture. These discursive zones were ultimately never separate: this was the myth of the Liberal intelligentsia, that India did not affect the scientific European, when, so clearly, India was one of the locations that defined that European. As such, the historical reception of India and the current understanding of India, remains deeply embedded in Western cultural practices, and thus implicated in the on-going debates on Roman and contemporary imperialisms. To continuously and unselfconsciously replicate the histories of the nineteenth century risks the continuous replication of imperialism. The challenge of the post-colonial is that it refuses the categories of knowledge, the hard lines drawn between colony and metropole, the teleology of civilizations, the very narratives of classical, medieval, and modern that have shaped the world. To make a new world, we need new histories.

103 Hall (2002). 104 Fanon (1990) and (1991). 105 See the consideration of these issues in Chakrabarty (2002).

Documents

Alston Dialogues in Imperialism