Most importantly, Mill launched an all-out assault on Hindu civilisation, criticising earlier observers, such as William Jones, for believing that it had a value equal to ancient Greece and Rome. Mill introduced a fundamentally modern perspective, arguing that societies could be graded along a spectrum of social progress. For Mill, there was no doubt that Hindustan languished in a state of utter barbarism. Its history was mere fable, its government despotic, its religion superstition and its caste system fundamentally degraded.
According to Mill, Hindus were ’the most enslaved portion of the human race’, with a ‘general disposition to deceit and perfidy’. In Mill’s progressive view of history, Hindu dominance had been replaced by a more advanced Muslim rule and then by modern British administration. Crucially, Mill argued that Hindu society was incapable of achieving social progress on its own, requiring the helping hand of imperial rule to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In an earlier review article for the Edinburgh Review published in 1810, Mill made his views crystal clear: ‘whatever may be our sense of the difficulties into which we have brought ourselves by the improvident assumption of such a dominion, we earnestly hope, for the sake of the natives, that it will not be found necessary to leave them to their own direction’.
Perhaps in an unconscious bid for employment, Mill’s views of early nineteenth-century Company were more favourable. ‘I know of no government,’ he wrote, ’either in past or present times, that can be placed equally high with that of the East India Company’, concluding that it deserved ’the highest applause. 30 In the crisis of the early 1830s, Mill amply repaid the trust that the Company’s directors had placed on him, appearing before Parliament on numerous occasions to fight its case.
Putting his free trade beliefs to one side, Mill argued that only the principle of caveat emptor (‘buyer beware’) should apply to the opium trade, urging the retention of the Company’s monopoly in Bengal as the financial burden fell primarily upon foreign - Chinese - consumers. And when he was questioned by MPs in the newly reformed Parliament about his views on whether some form of democracy should be applied to India as well, he responded firmly that this was ‘utterly out of the question’, not least because of the ’total absence of moral feeling’ in the country.
“An Empire of Scorn”, p155
