Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. By Karuna Mantena

Veldman, Meredith

doi:10.1080/10848770.2012.716204

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…With the rise of Liberal imperialism, from the 1890s onward there was a marked attempt within the party to contest the Conservative monopoly over imperial fervor. 68 The Clive Memorial Fund had numerous Liberal members on its committee, including Lord Morley and Lord Rosebery. Although it was Curzon who took the lead as a Conservative and ultra-imperial politician, as Nicholas B. Dirks has argued, colonial events, arguments, and theories, crucial for "securing the nation-state itself," rebounded upon the metropole, and the Clive Memorial Fund was an example of this.…”

Section: Contested Statuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contested Statues: The Clive Memorial Fund, Imperial Heroes, and the Reimaginings of Indian History

Watts

2024

J. Br. Stud.

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This article considers the Clive Memorial Fund and the campaigns surrounding proposed statues to Robert Clive in London and Calcutta between 1907 and 1912. The author argues that this campaign was an attempt to glorify Clive's actions, focused on the battle of Plassey and its aftermath, as foundation stones for the Indian Empire. The statues were an anxious attempt to situate Britain as a natural part of Indian history, but the campaign instead provoked a developing Indian counternarrative around resistance to colonial rule, particularly from newspapers in Bengal. Although the fund garnered support in Britain, it was greeted in India with official irritation and widespread Indian opposition, highlighting the importance of considering imperial statues in their imperial frame. This reaction, demonizing Clive's treachery and praising his opponent, Siraj-ud-Daula, the nawab of Bengal, was indicative of the place of history in both Bengali nationalism and imperial self-identity. Using newspapers in Britain and Bengal and the correspondence of the Clive Memorial Committee, the author examines the competing narratives of history that emerged in the campaigns around the fund.

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Section: Contested Statuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contested Statues: The Clive Memorial Fund, Imperial Heroes, and the Reimaginings of Indian History

Watts

2024

J. Br. Stud.

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“…He conceived of indirect rule as part of a developmental project of capitalist integration, rather than as an epiphenomenal construct, serving to protect the "traditional" society of irredeemably "backwards" colonized subjects against modernity. The latter view of indirect rule was a powerful line of imperial apologetics, articulated by Henry Maine (1822-88) and reasserted in the twentieth century by Frederick Lugard and other imperial administrators (Mantena 2010). Hobson's own argument echoed those of British humanitarian activists, who sometimes defended indirect rule as a means to emancipate and transform the colonized native into what John Holt (1841-1915), a Liverpool merchant and advocate of indirect rule, described as "a free agent to dispose of his produce to whoever he chooses" (quoted in Porter 2008, 257).…”

Section: Race and Unequal Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hobson on White Parasitism and Its Solutions

Tan

2023

Political Theory

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Since the publication of J. A. Hobson’s (1858–1940) Imperialism: A Study in 1902, the text has been studied—even celebrated—as a liberal or proto-Marxist critique of modern empires. This reputation stands in some tension with the text itself, which defends various forms of imperial domination. While scholars have addressed this tension, they remain divided over how best to understand Hobson’s imperial commitments. Offering a new response to this debate, I argue that a key dimension of Imperialism has been overlooked—namely, Hobson’s conception of humanity as stratified into a hierarchy of racial “souls.” This deeply committed view of human difference undergirded Hobson’s arguments about the moral and practical limits of Western imperial power. This article shows how Hobson articulated imperialism as the “parasitic” rule of whites over the nonwhite world—the solution to which was not the rejection of empire but the reform of white imperial power in accordance with his normative vision of global racial hierarchy. This recovery reveals the redemptive critique at the core of Imperialism and enables us to more readily grasp the text as a form of imperial apologetics. The article concludes with the suggestion that Hobson is better understood not as a liberal- or socialist-imperialist but as a proponent of racial capitalism on a global scale.

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“…In the long shadow of Darwinian evolution, white Anglophone liberals framed progress as dependent primarily upon the hereditary and civilisational improvement of the 'Anglo-Saxon' or 'Teutonic race' (Koditschek, 2011;Steinberg, 2019). The mission to 'civilise' the 'lower races', long called upon by Victorian thinkers to justify imperial commitments as consistent with liberal universalism, was not just impracticable, but also unnecessary for the overall advance of civilisation (Hall, 2002;Mantena, 2010). We thus see liberal thinkers at the turn of the century propose novel forms of racially exclusive political organisationfor instance, American federationas means to secure world peace and human progress (Bell, 2020;Vucetic, 2011).…”

Section: Liberal Hypocrisy and Illiberal Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

Dissolving the colour line: L. T. Hobhouse on race and liberal empire

Tan

2022

European Journal of Political Theory

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L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) is most familiar today as a leading theorist of British new liberalism. This article recovers and examines his overlooked commentary on the concept and rhetoric of race, which constituted part of his better-known project of advancing an authoritative account of liberal doctrine. His writings during and after the South African War, I argue, represent a prominent effort to cast liberalism as compatible with both imperial rule and what he called ‘the idea of racial equality’. A properly liberal empire, he asserted, would dissolve the colour line. This article traces the arguments Hobhouse advanced to make this claim, and explores his motivations for doing so. I contend that Hobhouse drew on the idiom of race as a form of exclusionary rhetoric, to delegitimise rival accounts of liberal empire and to cast his own as properly cosmopolitan. This recovery, I suggest, offers payoffs for our understanding of both Hobhouse's political thought and, more broadly, the uses of ‘race’ in twentieth-century liberalism.

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Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. By Karuna Mantena

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Contested Statues: The Clive Memorial Fund, Imperial Heroes, and the Reimaginings of Indian History

Contested Statues: The Clive Memorial Fund, Imperial Heroes, and the Reimaginings of Indian History

Hobson on White Parasitism and Its Solutions

Dissolving the colour line: L. T. Hobhouse on race and liberal empire

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