Through his History and his career at East India House, Mill profoundly shaped British views towards India. His intellectual assertion of the superiority of Western modernity was a perfect match for the arrogance of power that the Company increasingly displayed in India. In a warning full of foresight, one of the Company’s leading executives, Thomas Munro, protested in 1817 against the Company’s refusal to employ Indians in all but the most menial positions, arguing that ’there is perhaps no example of any country in which the natives have been so completely excluded from all share of the government of their country as in British India’. For Munro, ’the consequence of the conquest of India by British arms would be, in place of raising, to debase the whole people’. But like Burke’s views before him, Munro’s concerns were cast aside by those who asserted that Anglo-Saxon values and institutions should prevail. Certainly, there were many aspects of Indian society that needed to be changed, as home-grown reformers such as Ram Mohun Roy would argue, not least the caste system and practices such as sati (widow-burning).
“An Empire of Scorn”, p155-156
