James Mill's 'The History of British India' and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3630693
AutoresJaved Majeed (0000-0002-4639-1284, University of Cambridge, autor de correspondencia)
Año1990
Volumen24
Número2
Páginas209-224
Fecha de publicación1990-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaModern Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026749x00010295
OpenAlexW2146381116
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas18
Referencias citadas17

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Conservatism · Economic history · Linguistics · Mill · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Rhetoric · Sociology · Utilitarianism · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Law · Legal and Social Philosophy · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence