The History of British India - Summary

Summary

The History of British India purports to be a study of India in which James set out to attack the history, character, religion, literature, arts, and laws of India, also making claims about the influence of the Indian climate. He also aimed to locate the attacks on India within a wider theoretical framework.

The book begins with a preface in which Mill tries to make a virtue of having never visited India and of knowing none of its native languages. To him, these are guarantees of his objectivity, and he boldly claims –

A duly qualified man can obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.

However, Mill goes on in this preface to say that his work is a "critical, or judging history", encompassing singularly harsh attacks on Hindu customs and a "backward" culture which he claims to be notable only for superstition, ignorance, and the mistreatment of women.

From the historical perspective, Mill tells the story of the English and, later, British acquisition of wide territories in India, severely criticizing those involved in these conquests and in the later administration of the conquered territories, as well as illuminating the harmful effects of commercial monopolies such as that of the imperial East India Company. As a philosopher, Mill applies political theory to the description of the civilizations of India. His interest is in institutions, ideas, and historical processes, while his work is relatively lacking in human interest, in that he does not seek to paint memorable portraits of Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, and the other leading players in the history of British India, nor of its famous battles. Indeed, the History has been called "...a work of Benthamite 'philosophical history' from which the reader is supposed to draw lessons about human nature, reason and religion".

Despite the fact that Mill had never been to India, his work had a profound effect on the British imperial system of governing the country, as did his later official connection with India.

The Orientalist Horace Hayman Wilson edited later editions and extended the history to 1835 with a continuation entitled The History of British India from 1805 to 1835. He also added notes to Mill's work, based on his own knowledge of India and its languages. The History of British India is still in print.

In his introduction to Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism, Javed Majeed argues against "colonialist discourse" approaches to Mill's History, while in his forthcoming James Mill and the Despotism of Philosophy (2009), David McInerney considers how Mill's History of British India relates to Enlightenment historiography, and especially William Robertson's Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge the Ancients had of India. He argues that Mill first published his theory of government in The History of British India, and that in the work Mill's use of history is not rationalist but entails an empirical conception of how historical records relate to the improvement of government.