Ungoverned Imaginings

James Mill's The history of British India and Orientalism

Bibliographic Data

ID20013091
AuthorsJaved Majeed (0000-0002-4639-1284, corresponding author)
Year1992
Pages225
Publication date1992-05-28
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueUngoverned imaginings (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117865.001.0001
OpenAlexW4237857927
Open LibraryOL1707491M
ISBN9780198117865
LanguageEN
Citations received96

Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. It focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of James Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, the book highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, the book demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonial period · Colonialism · Mill · Orientalism · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Utilitarianism · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Political Theory and Influence · Religion and Society Interactions · 1526-1765 · 1765-1947 · 18th century · 19th century · british occupation · British occupation, 1765-1947 · English literature · History and criticism · in literature · India · James Mill (1773-1836) · Orient