Ethical Empire?

India Reformism and the Critique of Colonial Misgovernment

Zak Leonard

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009321037
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This study centers upon the abolitionists, Quakers, free-traders, disenchanted colonial agents, and Parsi intellectuals who participated in the British India Society, India Reform Society, and East India Association. Beginning in the 1830s, these agitators increasingly recognized that British dominion in India was exploitative and destabilizing; moreover, it had given rise to a series of prejudicial anomalies. Reformers therefore denounced the 'virtual' enslavement, infrastructural decay, violations of the law of nations, and economic impoverishment that had occurred under colonial rule, as well as the metropole's inattention to Indian affairs. By reconstructing the transregional networks that extended from Boston to Bengal and sustained these organizations, Zak Leonard analyzes India reformism from ideological and structural perspectives. In so doing, he historicizes the practice of anti-colonial critique and offers new insight into the frustrated development of a British imperial public consciousness.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Association Abbreviations and Key Membership
• Introduction
• 1 The Origins of Reform: Pressure-Group Rivalries and the Conservationist Turn
• 2 “A Blot on English Justice”: India Reformism and the Rhetoric of Virtual Slavery
• 3 Public Works, Publicity, and the Search for a New State-Idea
• 4 Reformist Collaboration and the Formation of an Imperial Civil Society
• 5 Anomalous Annexations: Debating the Law of Nations and Princely Sovereignty
• 6 Politicizing Decline: Reformist Remedies for Deindustrialization
• 7 Radical Reformism and the Challenge of Capitalist Complacency
• Epilogue: Integrating the Empire
• Bibliography
• Index