The English Utilitarian and India

The English Utilitarian and India

History Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 4500+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1,180 →

New Intellectual Currents in Britain

• Several new intellectual currents in Britain preached the idea of improvement, pushing forward the cause of reform both at home and in India.
• Since the end of Hastings’s tenure, there had been a gradual move towards cautious intervention in Indian social institutions. This shift was driven by several ideological influences in Britain — Evangelicalism, Utilitarianism, and free-trade thinking.

Evangelicalism

• Evangelists argued for the necessity of government intervention to liberate Indians from religions they viewed as steeped in superstition, idolatry, and priestly tyranny.
  • Evangelicalism launched its crusade against “Indian barbarism,” advocating the permanence of British rule with a mission to change the very “nature of Hindostan.”
  • In India, the movement’s spokespersons were the missionaries at Srirampur, near Calcutta; at home, its chief exponent was Charles Grant.
• Grant argued in 1792 that India’s principal problem lay in religious ideas that perpetuated the ignorance of its people — a condition that could be changed through the dissemination of Christian light, in which he saw the noble mission of British rule.
  • To convince his critics, Grant could also demonstrate a complementarity between the civilising process and material prosperity, without any accompanying danger of dissent or a desire for English liberty.
• Grant’s ideas were given wider publicity by William Wilberforce in Parliament, ahead of the passage of the Charter Act of 1813, which allowed Christian missionaries to enter India without restriction.

Utilitarianism and Free Trade

• Utilitarians began advocating appropriate social engineering and authoritarian reformism.
  • It was Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism together that brought about a fundamental change in the nature of the Company’s administration in India.
  • Both schools of thought held that the conquest of India had come about through acts of sin or crime; yet, instead of advocating the abolition of this “sinful” or “criminal” rule, they clamoured for its reform, so that Indians might benefit from good government in keeping with the “best ideas of their age.”
  • It was from these two intellectual traditions that “the conviction that England should remain in India permanently was finally to evolve.”
• Free-trade thinkers wanted government intervention to free the Indian economy from the shackles of tradition, ensuring a free flow of trade.
  • Pressure from the free-trade lobby at home worked towards the abolition of the Company’s monopoly over Indian trade.
  • They believed India would prove a good market for British goods and a supplier of raw materials, provided the Company shifted its focus from trader to ruler.
• There was, fundamentally, no major difference between the Evangelist and free-trade merchant positions on the policy of assimilation and Anglicisation. Indeed, it was the Evangelist Charles Grant who presided over the passage of the Charter Act of 1833, which stripped the Company of its monopoly rights over Indian trade.

What Is Utilitarianism?

• Utilitarianism is a theory in ethics holding that the moral action is the one that maximises utility.
  • Utility is defined variously — as pleasure, economic well-being, or the absence of suffering.
  • Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, implying that the consequences of an action are what matter morally.
• Classical utilitarianism’s two most influential contributors were the 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
  • Bentham, who took happiness as the measure of utility, held that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
• Utilitarianism attempts to answer the practical question, “What ought a man to do?” — its answer being that he ought to act so as to produce the best consequences possible.

Growth of Classical English Utilitarianism

• English Utilitarianism was an offshoot of Western liberal ideas.
  • In the history of English philosophy, Bishop Richard Cumberland, a 17th-century moral philosopher, was the first to hold a utilitarian outlook.
  • A generation later, Francis Hutcheson, a British theorist, held a more clearly defined utilitarian view, analysing the best action as one that “procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers” and proposing a form of “moral arithmetic” for calculating the best consequences.
• English Utilitarianism, however, owed its genesis chiefly to the ideas of Jeremy Bentham.
  • Bentham believed that an individual, in governing his own actions, would always seek to maximise his own pleasure and minimise his own pain.
  • For Bentham, the greatest happiness of the greatest number would play its primary role in the art of legislation, where the legislator sought to maximise the happiness of the entire community.
    • He argued that good laws and efficient administration were the most effective agents of change, and that the rule of law was a necessary precondition for improvement.
    • By laying down penalties for mischievous acts, the legislator would make it unprofitable for a man to harm his neighbour.
  • Bentham’s major philosophical work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), was designed as an introduction to a plan of a penal code.
• With Bentham, Utilitarianism became the ideological foundation of a reform movement that tested all institutions and policies against the principle of utility.
  • Bentham attracted a number of younger, early 19th-century disciples, including David Ricardo, who gave classical form to the science of economics; James Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father); and John Austin, a legal theorist.
  • James Mill argued for representative government and universal male suffrage on utilitarian grounds, and, along with other followers of Bentham, advocated parliamentary reform in early 19th-century England.
  • John Stuart Mill was a spokesman for women’s suffrage, state-supported education for all, and other proposals considered radical in their day.
    • He argued, on utilitarian grounds, for freedom of speech and expression, and for the non-interference of government or society in individual behaviour that harmed no one else.
    • Mill’s essay “Utilitarianism,” published in Fraser’s Magazine (1861), remains an elegant and influential defence of the general utilitarian doctrine, viewing it as an ethics for both ordinary individual behaviour and legislation.
• Freethinking utilitarians — followers of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill — were influential within the Company’s service, wishing to use India as a laboratory for their theories and believing Indian society could be transformed through legislation.

Effects of Utilitarianism

• The influence of Utilitarianism on law, politics, and economics is especially notable.
  • The utilitarian theory of the justification of punishment stands opposed to the “retributive theory,” under which punishment is meant to make the criminal pay for his crime.
    • For utilitarians, the rationale of punishment lies entirely in preventing further crime — either by reforming the criminal or protecting society from him — and in deterring others through fear of punishment.
  • In political philosophy, Utilitarianism bases the authority of government and the sanctity of individual rights upon their utility, offering an alternative to theories of natural law, natural rights, or social contract.
    • What kind of government is best thus becomes a question of what kind of government has the best consequences.
  • Generally, Utilitarians have supported democracy as a means of aligning government’s interest with the general interest.
    • They have argued for the greatest individual liberty compatible with equal liberty for others, on the ground that each individual is generally the best judge of his own welfare.
    • They have believed in the possibility and desirability of progressive social change through peaceful political processes.
  • With different factual assumptions, however, utilitarian arguments can lead to different conclusions — an inquirer who assumes that a strong government is needed to check man’s basically selfish interests, and that change may threaten political stability, may be led by utilitarian reasoning to an authoritarian or conservative position.
  • In economic policy, the early Utilitarians tended to oppose governmental interference in trade and industry, assuming the economy would regulate itself for the greatest welfare if left alone.
    • Later Utilitarians, however, lost confidence in the social efficiency of private enterprise and were willing to see governmental power used to correct its abuses.
• As a movement for the reform of social institutions, 19th-century Utilitarianism proved remarkably successful in the long run — most of its recommendations have since been implemented, and utilitarian arguments remain commonly employed to advocate institutional or policy change.

James Mill’s Utilitarianism and British Imperialism in India

• Throughout his involvement in the colonial administration of India from 1819 to 1835 at the East India Company, James Mill persistently held the conviction that India needed enlightenment and progress — applying his utilitarianism and theory of progress to justify British rule in India.
  • With Mill’s arrival at the Company’s London office, India policy came to be increasingly guided by such doctrines; Mill was responsible for transforming Utilitarianism into a “militant faith.”
  • Before taking up his post in 1819, Mill had written the History of British India in 1817, despite never having visited India.
• James Mill condemned Indian culture as irrational and inimical to human progress.
  • He exploded the myth of India’s economic and cultural riches, perpetuated, in his view, by the “susceptible imagination” of men like Sir William Jones.
  • Mill was the first to formulate a periodisation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods.
• He wrote that India would progress, and Indians would find greater happiness under British rule than under their native kings — thus, considering only the benefits Indians stood to gain, it was desirable for the British to rule them; whether the British should take total control of India, however, depended on whether this yielded an overall utility or disutility.
  • He argued that what India needed for its improvement was an effective “schoolmaster” — that is, a wise government promulgating good legislation.
  • It was largely due to Mill’s efforts that a Law Commission was appointed in 1833 under Lord Macaulay, which drew up the Indian Penal Code in 1835.
• Mill believed that, from a utilitarian perspective, there would be an overall utility if the British both retained British India — comprising Bengal, Bombay, and Madras — and extended their rule to the remaining parts of the subcontinent.
• English Utilitarianism in India took root within this paternalistic attitudinal context.
  • Utilitarians saw the Indian people held in bondage by despotic rulers, archaic economic relations, and a religion steeped in superstition, and set about reforming both the Indians and the colonial system.
  • The utilitarian philosophy justified colonisation by arguing that paternalistic colonial governance of indigenous peoples was necessary until they matured and acceded to rational thought and self-government — the pursuit of colonial peoples’ own welfare and happiness, defined in utilitarian terms, was thus invoked to justify colonisation.
  • Indian civilisation was branded by the British as “backward,” and Englishmen took upon themselves the task of guiding India towards modernity, teaching Indians the virtues of self-government.

The Enlightenment of Indian People

• Throughout his life, Mill’s ultimate concern was the happiness of humankind as a whole — global happiness — which he believed could only be achieved if all races and peoples of the globe were “civilised” in the utilitarian sense.
  • Mill was convinced that all non-European peoples would become “civilised” if European knowledge, arts, manners, and institutions were diffused among them, and was especially concerned with how to bring enlightenment to what he considered “half-civilised” peoples, such as those of India and other Asian nations.
• In Mill’s view, Sir William Jones had wrongly suggested that India had been quite advanced in many respects of civilisation.
  • Mill did acknowledge that, in ancient times, as India developed, its social structure and institutions progressed accordingly — for instance, the division of castes multiplied at some stage from four basic castes to as many as thirty-six, through the admission of “impure” offspring of mixed marriages.
  • Mill considered this stage of Indian progress impressive, calling it “an important era in the history of Hindu society” — but he contended that, “having reached this stage, it does not appear that India has made, or that it is capable of making, much further progress.”
• Given his concern with India even before joining the East India Company in 1819, Mill’s immediate objective was clearly to bring European enlightenment to India.
  • Holding firmly to a belief in the malleability of human nature, Mill thought Indians would inevitably receive substantial positive impact on their social progress from Europeans.
  • In his view, a widespread settlement of Englishmen in India would speed up this process of enlightenment, which would in turn conduce to the progressive development of other Asian peoples.

The Desirability of Foreign Rule in India

• The desirability of Indians being ruled by a more advanced civilisation was revealed in Mill’s assessment of Mughal rule in India.
  • For Mill, before Mughal rule, the individual and societal progress of Hindu Indians had been retarded by their superstitions in Hinduism; but under the Mughal sovereigns, Indians gained progress at both the individual and social levels.
  • Mill considered the Mughals superior to the Hindus in nearly every respect of civilisation — worldview, political arrangement, legal system, and other attainments — and held that Hindu Indians benefited under Mughal rule because they were thereby exposed to the more advanced Persian civilisation.
• The message Mill effectively conveyed was that it was justifiable for a people of an advanced civilisation to govern a people of retarded progress; he further believed that Western civilisation was surely a better candidate to rule the Indians than the Mughals had been.
  • Given the collapse and gradual disintegration of the Mughal Empire, Mill saw two alternatives available to the Indians: either a reversion to Hindu despotism, or the acceptance of European — specifically British — rule.
  • It thus seems plausible that, from Mill’s perspective, it was desirable for the British to subjugate the whole continent of India, since this would benefit the Indians; but the utility to Britain itself also had to be taken into account.

British India and the Extension of British Rule

Utility and the Emancipation of Colonies

• Mill drew a distinction between two kinds of colonies: on one hand, colonies such as those in America, which arose from widespread settlement by the English, French, Spanish, and other Europeans; and on the other, colonies such as British India, where native peoples constituted the majority of the population.
  • With regard to both kinds, the key question for Mill and Bentham was whether the European nations “ought to have them.”
  • From a utilitarian perspective, if keeping a colony produced an overall disutility, it would not be desirable for the mother nation to retain it; but if it produced an overall utility, retention was desirable, even if the mother nation suffered in the process.
• For Bentham and Mill, keeping colonies brought neither economic nor political advantage to the mother nations.
  • Even before publishing his History of India and joining the East India Company in 1819, Mill had repeatedly complained about the Company’s financial deficits.
  • As Mill argued in his Essay on Colony (1820), it was a matter of fact that colonies yielded no tribute to the mother country — he contended there was “a moral impossibility that a colony should ever benefit the mother country by yielding it a permanent tribute,” since even where tributes did arise, they would need to be retained for the colony’s own governance.
• On the political advantages and disadvantages, Bentham, in his Principles of International Law (as early as 1786–89), listed several reasons why it was in Britain’s political interest to give up British India:
  • saving the danger of war;
  • eliminating the means of corruption arising from civil and military patronage;
  • simplifying government; and
  • avoiding prosecutions that consumed parliamentary time and bred suspicions of injustice.
• Mill and Bentham believed colonies were, above all, a “grand source of wars.”
  • Having established the disadvantages of retaining colonies, the question turned to what utility colonies and humankind as a whole gained from either retention or independence.
  • Mill claimed the independence of the United States had proved commercially “far more profitable” to the British than its earlier subjection had been, viewing this as evidence that newly independent nations opened valuable opportunities for commercial connections and free trade, enhancing prosperity across all nations involved.
  • With regard to British India, however, given the Indians’ economic backwardness, Mill believed self-governance would not bring much enhancement of trade to other nations.
    • Given India’s strict adherence to traditional economic practices prescribed in the Hindu sacred texts, Mill considered it unlikely that a just and beneficent government capable of enhancing trade could be established there.
    • What was needed instead was the termination of the East India Company’s monopoly over Indian trade, so that competition and free trade could increase prosperity for all nations involved.
• On the political side, Bentham contended in his Principles of International Law that, for all the distant, well-established colonies in America, it would be impossible for European mother nations to govern them as well as the colonies could govern themselves, owing simply to distance — creating a great disutility in retaining such colonies.
  • In his “Emancipate Your Colonies!” (written around 1792), Bentham advised the French to grant independence to their West Indian colonies, since they were “ripe for self-government” — but not to return their Indian colonies to the Indians themselves.
    • In Bentham’s view, if left to their own native princes, Indians would inevitably be ruled by despots.
  • Mill similarly believed that, even though Britain suffered by keeping British India, it remained in the interest of the Indians for the British to govern them directly, rather than leave them to self-rule — since direct British rule would enlighten India, facilitate a rapid diffusion of European knowledge, arts, manners, and institutions to other Asian nations, and thereby enhance the happiness of humankind as a whole.
• Thus, it was, in Mill’s view, desirable for the British to keep their dominion in India — raising the further question of how far Mill was committed to extending British rule across the whole continent, and by what means such extension over independent and semi-independent native states could be considered legitimate.

Conquest, Consent, and the Extension of British Rule

• There were, in principle, two ways for the British Indian government to bring enlightenment to independent native states through the extension of British rule: through conquest, or by inducing voluntary subjection.
• Throughout his life, Mill never concealed his contempt for war, believing wars inevitably produced evils, and that war could never be justified except to prevent still greater evils.
• To see how Mill applied these principles to India, one may begin with the system of neutrality, first prescribed in Pitt’s India Act of 1784.
  • Since this Act, neutrality had remained official British policy in India, reaffirmed in the Act of 1793 — both prohibiting the Governors-General of British India from pursuing schemes of conquest and territorial expansion.
  • In compliance, the British Indian government was expected to “stand aloof from all connection with native princes,” forming no alliances, taking no part in their quarrels, and drawing the sword only in self-defence, when its own territory was actually invaded.
• Mill agreed that the British government should abstain from conquest in India and from waging any wars other than defensive ones, praising the fundamental rationale behind the policy of neutrality — the prevention of war.
  • He did not, however, agree with an unconditional submission to this policy, believing the system of neutrality was, on many occasions, impracticable in the Indian context.
  • Mill argued that departing from strict neutrality did not inevitably make wars more frequent, and that, in some cases, a “system of vigilant interference” — rather than neutrality — should be adopted, one that he considered defensive in spirit, even if not identical to neutrality in form.
• For nearly a decade before joining the East India Company in 1819, Mill had condemned the aggressive British policy and the violent conquest of native princes that followed from it.
  • He recognised that the “system of vigilant interference” was open to abuse in the hands of Governors-General, who might use the power to interfere in the affairs of Indian princes “not for the purpose of maintaining security, but for the gratification of private ambition, or private revenge.”
  • Mill persistently criticised the personal ambitions of various Governors-General, particularly Lord Wellesley (Governor-General from 1798 to 1805), whose alliance with the Peshwa ultimately gave rise to the Second Maratha War.
    • For Mill, what was objectionable was not the alliance itself, but Wellesley’s private ambitions, concealed behind an apparent intention of bringing benevolent rule to India.
• In Mill’s view, the only legitimate means of subjugating independent native princes, and thereby extending appropriate British institutions to their states, was to induce their consent.
  • The sovereignty of independent native princes ought to be respected; only when Indians attacked British India, or showed clear aggressive intent to do so, could the British justifiably wage war against them and subjugate them.

Impact of British Utilitarianism on India

• Several administrative and judicial reforms in India were driven by Utilitarianism.
  • Cornwallis had worked mainly with ideas and perceptions that predated Utilitarianism; Macaulay, by contrast, was a liberal shaped by both the missionary zeal of Evangelicalism and the emerging pragmatism of the 1830s and 1840s — hence his vigorous pursuit of legal codification, even though he did not share the Utilitarians’ broader goal of “reforming” India.
• Between the concerns of Cornwallis and Macaulay came the intellectual current of Utilitarianism, whose major exponents — James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill — took special interest in the Indian question, becoming largely responsible for the shape of the administration and judicial system that emerged in India.
  • The Utilitarians believed in the moral worth of education that served the good of society and promoted useful knowledge — instruction that had the added consequence of making Indians more suitable for the Company’s expanding bureaucracy. Many utilitarian ideas found expression in Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education (1835).
• Mill rejected the Indianisation of government structures — given their perceived character, Indians were seen as unfit for the task of their own “modernisation,” and Mill accordingly dismissed the idea of granting them any real power or responsibility. The Utilitarians instead prescribed a modern machine of government, run by the British.
  • With their well-defined structure of ideas, a body of committed followers, keen interest in India, and readily applicable concerns — over taxation, forms of government, and the administration of justice — the Utilitarians proved the most outspoken and effective among contemporary thinkers. When James Mill was admitted to the executive government of the East India Company in 1819, it became far easier for utilitarian ideas to be put into practice in India.
• Lord William Bentinck, Governor-General of India from 1828 to 1835, combined efficient financial management with modernising projects that included a policy of Westernisation, influenced directly by the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill.
  • Reforming the court system, he made English, rather than Persian, the language of the higher courts, and encouraged Western-style education for Indians to supply more educated recruits for the British bureaucracy.
  • Bentinck also tried to suppress the practice of sati — the prescribed death of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre — along with other customs offensive to Western sensibilities, often with the assistance of Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
    • The Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829 (Regulation XVII) was a legal act promulgated by Bentinck, making the practice of sati illegal across all jurisdictions of British India and subject to prosecution.
• At the heart of the ryotwari system lay a particular theory of economic rent — based on David Ricardo’s Law of Rent — promoted by the utilitarian James Mill, who formulated Indian revenue policy between 1819 and 1830.
  • Mill believed the government was the ultimate lord of the soil and should not renounce its right to “rent” — the profit left over on richer soil once wages and other working expenses had been settled. He held that taxing land rent would promote efficient agriculture while simultaneously preventing the emergence of a “parasitic landlord class.”
  • Mill accordingly advocated ryotwari settlements, involving government measurement and assessment of each plot — valid for 20 or 30 years — with subsequent taxation dependent on the fertility of the soil.