Ethical Empire?
India Reformism and the Critique of Colonial Misgovernment

Explores how British and Indian reformers in the Victorian period agitated against the abuses of power undergirding colonial rule.

Zak Leonard (Author)

9781009321068, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 October 2023

314 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.59 kg

'In Ethical Empire, Zak Leonard masterfully excavates the ethics of empire as framed and understood by its reformist critics during British India's nineteenth- century heyday. With both empathy and sophistication, Leonard examines reformers on their own terms, in their own times. What emerges is a richly woven tapestry of debate upon which the promises and shortcomings of the British Empire in India - as well as at home - were imagined and litigated. This is a must- read for any serious student of empire and the ethical conundrums its opponents contended with.' Ben Hopkins, Professor of History and International Affairs, The George Washington University

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]