Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
-Domestic under consumption- hobson -Continuous capital accummulation and penetration into primitive societies (rosa
luxembourg)
-peaceful resolution by the capitalist class (kautsky)
-finance capital (rudolf hilferding)
-withering away of imperialism under progressive capitalism (Schumpeter)
-Monopolies of banks and corporations in advanced stage of capitalism (lenin)
-structural view of connectivities in centre and periphery (Galtung)
-monopoly and oligopoly of capital surplus (baran and sweezy)
Liberal Perspective
apparent “
the
which was sympathetic to the ideas of empire and colonialism. The fact that it
was a foreign rule colonial administration needed some kind of justification both
for the people they were ruling, the so called ‘natives’, and people back home
promoted this kind of history writing which was sympathetic to their mission in
needed some kind of external force to liberate themselves and make them
The idea of this "decayed system" however originated from a teleological construction of India's past. The early image of India in the
in the endeavours of scholars like Sir William Jones, who studied the
Indian languages to restore to the Indians their own forgotten culture and legal system-monopolised hitherto only by the learned
pundits and maulvis (Hindu and Islamic learned men). By establishing a linguistic connection between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin - aJl
supposedly belonging to the same lndo-European family of languages-Jones privileged India with an antiquity equal to that of
(1781 ), the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784) and the Sanskrit College
in Banaras (1794 ), all of which were meant to promote the study of
colonial state. Some scholars like Eugene lrschick have argued that
was a knowledge thrust from above through the power of the Europeans, it was produced through a process of dialogue in which the
colonial officials, Indian commentators and native informants participated in a collaborative intellectual exercise. One could point out
though that even when Indians participated in this exercise, they seldom had control over its final outcome. However, while emphasising
the importance of the Indian agency, Irschick does not deny the
Orientalism in practice in its early phase could be seen in the policies of the Company's government under Warren Hastings. The fun
itself in an Indian idiom". 7 It therefore needed to produce knowledge about Indian society, a process which Gauri Viswanathan
of the customs and laws of the land for the purposes of assimilating
was with this political vision that Fort WilJiam College at Calcutta
currency to the idea of kinship between the British and the Indians
dating back to the classical past, it was also morally binding the latter
These scholars not only highlighted the classical glory of Indiacrafted by the Aryans, the distant kin-brothers of the Europeansbut also
emphasised the subsequent degeneration of the once magnificent Aryan civilisation. This legitimated authoritarian rule, as
India needed to be rescued from the predicament of its own creation
Around 1800 the Industrial Revolution in Britain created the necessity to develop and integrate the
issue of reform both at home and in India. While the pressure of the
free trade lobby at home worked towards the abolition of the Company's monopoly over Indian trade, it was Evangelicalism and
Utilitarianism, which brought about a fundamental change in the nature
thought asserted that the conquest oflndia had been by acts of sin or
crime; but instead of advocating the abolition of this sinful or criminal rule, they clamoured for its reform, so that Indians could get the
evolve"
evangelicalism
home its chief exponent was Charles Grant The principal problem
and material prosperity, without any accompanying danger of dissent or desire for English liberty. His ideas were given greater publicity
by William Wilberforce in the Parliament before the passage of
believed that India would be a good market for British goods and a
difference between the Evangelist and the free-trade merchant positions as regards 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 took away the Company's monopoly rights over India trade.
Utilitarians
independence, and endowed with our learning and political institutions, Inclia will remain the proudest monument of British benevolence",
visualised C.E. Trevalyan, another liberal in 1838.is It was
guided by such doctrines. Mill, as it has been contended, was responsible for transforming Utilitarianism into a "militant faith". In The
logically and coherently formulated code, evolving from "disinterested philosophic intelligence"
(from metcalfe)
political view
Common features
oligarchic Whigs, or, subsequently, from Disraeli's Tory conservatives. Above all,
liberals conceived that human nature was intrinsically
Liberals had for the most part little sympathy with established institutions that were
sustained by simple antiquity alone. What shaped a
status.
laboratory for the creation of the liberal administrative state, and from
there its elements - whether a state sponsored education, the codification of law, or a
competitively chosen bureaucracy -
For the most part evangelicals, free traders, law reformers, educational
India
Informed with
could be measured with 'scientific' precision, Mill set himself the task
Hindus did not possess, and never had possessed, 'a high state of
civilization'.
James Mill proposed a remedy which was at once, as he saw it, simple
and obvious. All that was required was a code of laws that would
unrepresentative. For James Mill, as for his mentor Bentham, happiness and not
liberty was the end of government, and happiness was
and property.
John Stuart Mill inherited from his father both the mantle of liberal
for his On Liberty, in which he argued, against his father, that liberty
'ideally best polity', as he called it, was not suited to all peoples. Only
enjoy the benefits of representative government. For the rest, subjection to 'foreign
force', and a government 'in a considerable degree
Mill was adamant in his insistence that 'leading strings' were 'only
in India, was that it could, more rapidly than any but the most
They could be taught to pursue the public good, and to develop the
irresistible
Nor was John Stuart Mill alone in looking forward without hesitation to the eventual
end of British rule. 'Trained by us to happiness
and independence, and endowed with our learning and political institutions', as
Trevelyan put it, 'India will remain the proudest
\Most stirring perhaps was Macaulay's peroration in his speech on the 1833 renewal of
the Company's
Charter.
“It may be [he said], that the public mind of India may expand under our
system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may
educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having
demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know
not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be
there existed only 'civilization'. Hence the liberal set out, on the basis
assist the British in ruling India, but one 'English in taste, in opinions,
with India involved, then, nothing less than the complete transformation of India's
culture and society. Its outcome would be the
'imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our
laws'.
This liberal idealism was inevitably fraught with troubling implications. With neither
racial nor environmental theories to sustain it,
of its values, on the topmost rung. It was not some chance prejudice,
scorn the
'entire native literature of India and Arabia' as not worth 'a single shelf
we have seen, were private property, the rule of law, the liberty of the
notion of the
disciples, as Eric Stokes has pointed out, this ideal carried with it
radical implications.
In keeping with this ideal, during the settlements of the 1820s and
and zamindars were largely set aside, and ownership rights were
countryside were for the most part not transformed. Theory meant
from the 'secular'. They sought to confine the activities of the state to
whose monarch was also the head of that church. In India as well
from association with the institutions of religious faith. Raja and priest
always depended on, and sustained, each other. Yet the British in
left the government with the task of mediating disputes over succession and the
control of property held by temples and shrines. Despite
the colonial state's hostility to religions whose beliefs it did not share,
Rule of law
Yet the vision of the transforming power of the 'rule of law' was
regulations for the adjudication of disputes, and so did away with the
and justice were seen to be meted out - in place of what was imagined
as the despot's 'dark and solemn' justice executed in private, and often
the additional, great advantage that such codes could incorporate the
Hindu civil law. The legal system of colonial India thus accommodated both the
assimilative ideals of liberalism, which found a home in
'rule of law', conceived of as the use of standardized impartial procedures for the
settlement of disputes, was in their view essential. The
British could not give to India their own, English, law; that was
impractical. But they could give India codes of legal procedure. In this
fashion, even though they could not introduce into India the substance
of their law, the British could, or so they thought, bring its spirit. In so
mission.
(education)
meant that the government never founded more than a very few
schools, a further fundamental problem stood in the way of using
India, for its officials, even those who looked forward eagerly to the
(dalhousie’s reforms)
Dalhousie at once consolidated British dominion over the subcontinent by his policy
of annexation and set firmly in place the
(how these laws did not help much, increased notion of difference)
the body. The campaign against sati, or widow burning, for instance,
victims of religion, while lurid tales of the doings of the thags powerfully reinforced
the idea of Indians as treacherous and unreliable.
Stranglers in the service of the goddess Kali, thags were perceived as
travellers along the roads, luring them into their company and then
armed robbers, who were known more generally as dacoits. What gave
thagi its distinctive appeal was rather the way it enabled the British to
give voice to their own enduring fears and anxieties. Uneasily dependent upon native
intermediaries, whom they could not bring themselves
to trust, but without whose collaboration the Raj could not function,
the British saw deception and deceit everywhere in India. Thagi thus
projecting these fears outward onto thags, and then destroying this
they could not openly avow and hence reassure themselves of their
thagi, this successful campaign did not put an end to a fear of 'criminal
and dishonesty. On the contrary, the fascination with thagi, and with
it the idea that there existed 'deceivers' who lived at the heart of Indian
society, lived on, and found a place in novels, films, and the English
The origin of these colonial policies is seen in a lack of understanding, colour and
racial prejuice, the basically foreign character of the bureaucracy and the regime
itself.
This liberal critique led to the belief that once political or state power was taken away from the
foreign rulers and the full weight of the new power was thrown behind the indiogenous
economic effort, the colonial content of the economy would gradually disappear.the new
independent state would release the full forces of dev and modernisation that colonialism had
arrested.