A Very Short History of Liberty
1. The Greeks
‘The idea of liberty is and has always been peculiar to the West’, wrote the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, and ‘what separates East and West is first of all the fact that the peoples of the East never conceived the idea of liberty. The imperishable glory of the ancient Greeks was that they were the first to grasp the meaning and significance of institutions warranting liberty.’ Athens has long occupied a place in Western thought as the cradle of democracy and the love of liberty. This is in spite of the fact that the leading philosophers associated with this celebrated city-state were deeply suspicious of the ability of the demos (the people) to carry out the affairs of the polis with judiciousness. Plato’s critique of democracy, his disdain for the hoi-polloi, and his adulation of the philosopher-king may not have been shared entirely by his mentor, Socrates, but the great itinerant philosopher who wandered about the agora was no enthusiast of democracy, or rule by the people. Aristotle was scarcely thrilled that in democracies, rather absurdly, ‘the poor—they being in a majority, and the will of the majority being sovereign—are more sovereign than the rich’, and he was prone, as a close reading of his Politics shows, to complain that in a democracy ‘each man lives as he likes—or, as Euripides says, “For any end he chances to desire”’. Each man was free to do as he pleased—an outlook that, as Plato put it in the Republic, could have no outcome other than one in which women and slaves were as free as citizens, an abomination that was to be feared as much as deplored. How, then, did Athens acquire a reputation as the home of democracy in the ancient world, as the very fount of those freedoms—of speech, expression, assembly—that the West holds dear?
Before there were the Greek philosophers, there was Herodotus—a master storyteller born most likely between 490 and 480 BCE, a slightly older contemporary of Socrates and nearly 100 years older than Aristotle. Cicero dubbed him ‘the Father of History’, the designation by which he has been known ever since, and from his long and colorful narrative of the Persian Wars that consumed, indeed ravaged, the Greek world from around 500-450 BCE we derive a keen sense of how the Greeks birthed the narrative of their love of liberty. Sometime around 470 BCE, the Persian king, Darius, had sent messengers to Greek cities seeking signs of their willingness to submit to his overlordship. In Athens, Herodotus tells us, the barbarians—the word by which the Greeks designated all foreigners, whose language was incomprehensible and seemed to be but little more than a series of incomprehensible sounds (‘bar bar’)—were thrown into a pit and in Sparta they were ‘pushed into a well and told that if they wanted earth and water for the king, those were the places to get them.’ It would appear that the Greeks, having violated the universal tradition which guaranteed messengers and diplomats immunity from harm, had shown themselves to be the true barbarians—but let that pass. Around ten years later, Darius’ successor, Xerxes, similarly sent messengers, but this time without any ‘request for submission’.
In the meantime, the Spartans had been unable to ‘to obtain favourable signs from their sacrifices’, and some in Sparta thought that the city had gone through bad times as a punishment for the egregious offence committed against Darius’ emissaries. Two Spartans, Sperchias and Bulis, ‘both men of good family and great wealth’, decided to offer their lives ‘to Xerxes in atonement for Darius’ messengers who had been killed in Sparta.’ On their way to Susa, they stopped at the court of the Persian general Hydarnes, the governor of Ionia. The young Spartans were treated royally, and during their conversation the relations between the Greeks and the Persians came up as a subject of discussion. Hydarnes advised his guests to seek Xerxes’s friendship and offered himself as an example of a man who had gained immensely from his acceptance of subservience to the Persian king. ‘Both of you, if you would only submit,’ Hydarnes tells them, ‘might find yourselves in authority over lands in Greece which he would give you.’
The well-meaning Hydarnes had doubtless not bargained for a lecture by way of an answer, but he got one: you have spoken out of turn, not fully aware of the situation, Sperchias and Bulis tell him, and you only know half of the story: ‘You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too.’ Herodotus does not record Hydarnes’ response, but rather goes on to reinforce the message that he had so sharply delineated: the Greeks cherished their freedom and were not about to compromise or relinquish it for some other worldly gain and much less to appease an absolute ruler. When Sperchias and Bulis were brought into the presence of Xerxes, the king’s bodyguards sought to compel the Spartans to prostrate themselves before the king. The men refused to do so, or even to ‘push their heads down on to the floor’: it was not the custom in Sparta, they averred, ‘to worship a mere man like themselves’, but they let it be known that they had been sent by Sparta to make amends ‘for the murder of the Persian messengers in Sparta’. It was for Xerxes to do with them as he wished. The civilized Xerxes ‘with truly noble generosity’—these are Herodotus’s words— ‘replied that he would not behave like the Spartans’, and he spared their lives.
2. Oriental Despotism
Sperchias and Bulis returned home alive. Western commentators took home from this episode the lesson that, though the Persians were, as Aristotle was to say, ‘ruled and enslaved’, an Oriental king was a capricious character and could even be in a forgiving mood when least expected. Aristotle distinguishes, as nearly every other Greek did, the ‘free’ from the ‘unfree’ or ‘enslaved’. Some scholars may not unreasonably argue that the cult of Harmodius and Aristogeiton in ancient Greece suggests that the love for freedom among all Greeks but especially Athenians was intrinsic to them, scarcely requiring the enslaved Persians as the deprived other to make them aware of their unique blessings. The two lovers, whose story is recounted by Herodotus, Plutarch, and many other ancient writers but most remarkably in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, were possibly the first martyrs to the Greek love of freedom: their assassination of Hipparchus, the younger son of Peisistratus—the tyrant of Athens in 547-46 BCE, ‘tyrant’ here signifying someone who ruled outside the framework of constitutional law—and unsuccessful murder attempt on Hippias, the older brother of Hipparchus and the reigning tyrant of Athens in 528 BCE, earned them the epithet of ‘tyrannicides’ and the undying gratitude of the Greeks. Nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that, once we move into the period of the flowering of Athenian democracy, the Persians become indispensable as the foil against which the Greek love of freedom shines in splendid isolation.
Though Thucydides did not place the Persian Wars at the center of his narrative, focusing rather on war among the Greeks, it is remarkable that throughout his History he suggests, sometimes explicitly, that at least some of the Greeks were inclined to view the Athenians as the counterpart of the tyrannical Persians. The Spartans had fought the war, Thucydides tells us with evident sympathy, on the rallying cry of liberating the Greek world from the Athenians, and evidently some of the other Hellenes thought so too. The Thebans describe how, after the ‘barbarians’ (Persians) were pushed out and they recovered their constitution, ‘the Athenians attacked the rest of Hellas and endeavoured to subjugate our country’, but more forceful still is the scathing indictment offered by the Corinthians at the Spartan Congress of 432 BCE: an Athenian ‘conquest’, they say, can ‘have no other end than slavery pure and simple’. Their appeal, as they attempt to cajole the other Greeks to join them in a common cause of waging war against Athens, unmistakably summons ghosts from the past, placing Athens squarely in the position of how Persia was placed just some decades ago: ‘We must believe that the tyrant city that has been established in Hellas has been established against all alike, with a program of universal empire, part fulfilled, part in contemplation; let us then attack and reduce it, and win future security for ourselves and freedom for the Hellenes who are now enslaved.’
The celebrated classicist, Moses Finley, proposed that the history of ancient Greece be studied not in terms of the slave-free antinomy, but rather as an effort to understand a society caught ‘between slavery and freedom’. This seems like a considerable advance over the view that has only or largely glamorized Greece as the home of democracy, the fount of Western civilization, and effectively the reason for the West’s supposed incomparable superiority over the rest of the world, but the tendency to minimize the extent to which Greece was enveloped in slavery persists. The Spartan slaves known as helots outnumbered free men and in consequence the Spartans periodically allowed them to be killed with impunity. The condition of slaves in Athens and among other Greeks may have been better but nevertheless slaves were property. Western commentators down to the present day delight in quoting a passage from the second century Indian text Manusmriti, where a passage states that a woman shall never be independent, being subject to the authority of her father when young, her husband when married, and her eldest son when a widow or in old age, to suggest the servitude under which Indian women labored, but there is less evidence to support this view than the evidence which suggests that women in ancient Greek were always under the guardianship of their fathers or husbands and indeed lived their lives in virtual seclusion. Whatever the Greek conception of freedom, it was envisioned only for a tiny elite.
Still, even as these critiques of the storied idea of ‘Greek freedom’ are compelling, they obscure the more vital point that the Greek conception of freedom first birthed the idea of what in the period of European hegemony would be termed Oriental Despotism. The word despot is, not surprisingly, of Greek origin, and in Book III of Politics, Aristotle sought to distinguish despotism, the most debased form of monarchy, from tyranny. He saw despotism, which he associated with the Persians, not as unlawful because the people subjected to it did not object to it, viewing their relationship to the despot as analogous to the relationship of the slave to the master. The tyrant, on the other hand, usurps power, exercising it against the will of the people. Despotism, on Aristotle’s view, was incompatible with the character of the Greeks, and their natural inclination to freedom moved them to revolt against tyranny at the slightest opportunity.
The answer to what exactly is ‘despotism’ came in the seventeenth century as Europe started to push towards Asia in search of markets and in its quest for world domination. Under despotism, neither the life nor the property of any person is secure—barring that of the despotic ruler himself; or, as Kant was to explain, despotism is ‘the principle by which the state executes, on its own authority, laws that it has itself made. Under despotism, the public will is therefore treated by the monarch as his individual will.’ Kant, however, was merely echoing what other European philosophers had argued. For most of them, Francois Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire: AD 1656-1668 would have been the first sourcebook for their idea of the political history of the Orient, especially the Levant, Turkey, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent. Bernier introduces his principal idea early in the text, namely that ‘the land throughout the whole empire is considered the property of the sovereign,’ and thus there could not be the equivalent of ‘earldoms, marquisates or duchies.’ The Timurid Emperor, says Bernier, is the ‘proprietor of every acre of land in the kingdom, excepting, perhaps, some houses and garden which he sometimes permits his subjects to buy, sell, and otherwise dispose of, among themselves.’ In such a system, there could be ‘little encouragement to engage in commercial pursuits’, or to work the land and improve the crop, since the wealth thus accumulated could only have the effect of attracting the attention of the despot who had the power to deprive ‘any man of the fruits of his industry.’ But far more than the lack of private property was entailed by Oriental Despotism: as described by Bernier, ‘the Kings of Asia are constantly living in the indulgence of monstrous vices’. The Oriental Despot was just as cruel, capricious, and (often) corpulent as he was lazy, lecherous, and libidinous.
The idea of Oriental Despotism became deeply embedded in European political theory, traveling almost effortlessly across the continental divide from French thinkers such as Montesquieu to eighteenth-century English writers such as Alexander Dow and Robert Orme who gave shape to the dominant strands of the colonial historiography of India. It is not possible to discuss the nuances of the staggeringly large literature that has developed around the subject, or to delineate the finer distinctions between absolutism and despotism as suggested by Montesquieu’s writings: a European ruler, and Louis XIV comes to mind, could be an absolute ruler, but this did not preclude some in the kingdom from partaking in law and administration and of course from holding private property. Under despotism, there is but one individual, the despot; all others are slaves. John Logan was but one of thousands of the herd of Europeans who gave it as his opinion, at a lecture at Edinburgh University in 1780, that ‘One form of government hath prevailed in Asia from the earliest records of history to the present time. A despot, under the name of Great King, or King of Kings, possesses supreme or unlimited power . . . Sovereign and slave compose the only distinction or rank in the East.’ The annihilation of all other ranks of men, in order to ‘exalt the monarch’, was to the mind of his fellow Scotsman William Robertson the ‘distinguishing and odious characteristic of the Eastern despotism’.
There is, to take another instantiation of the features of the discourse on Oriental Despotism as developed by the Enlightenment thinkers, an unswerving fealty to the idea of climatic determinism, the notion that despotism was the natural form of government for the tropics. The idea is elaborated upon in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and Spirit of the Laws (1748), but we can see its flowering in India where the East India Company found itself in possession of vast tracts of land in the east before its military expansion enabled it to bring most of India under its rule. Robert Orme, historiographer to the East India Company, drew attention to the ‘effeminacy of the inhabitants of Indostan’, doubting not that ‘the general tendency’ of Indians was to ‘indolence’ and a sedentary life, but if the real import of this might not be altogether clear to the less than discerning reader, Alexander Dow, author of the highly influential The History of Hindostan (1770), was there to explain how the inclement weather of the country had made the people effeminate, unmanly, and thus indisposed towards liberty. Hindustan, Dow wrote in his disquisition ‘concerning the nature and origin of despotism’, had been ‘the seat of the greatest empires’ and ‘the nurse[ry] of the most abject slaves’. Hindus were ‘mild, humane, obedient, and industrious, [and] they are of all nations on earth the most easily conquered and governed.’ It was easy to be decisive in this matter: ‘The languor occasioned by the hot climate of India, inclines the native to indolence and ease; and he thinks the evil of despotism less severe than the labour of being free.’
As freedom is to the Greeks and slavery is to Persians in the ancient period, so Enlightenment and liberty are to Europe what despotism is to the Orient in the period of European colonization of the world. Writing on the Englishness of the English in the twentieth century, Orwell noted what is most distinctive about England, it being an eccentric nation of stamp-lovers, coupon-snippers, and dart-lovers, but what is most prominent is the air the Englishman breathes—an air that smells of freedom. ‘The liberty of the individual’, Orwell writes with abandon in the midst of World War II, ‘is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. . . . It is the liberty to have a home of our own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.’ Just how closely Orwell hews to the reasoning found in generations of British scholar-administrator types who governed India and Burma, where Orwell himself was a member of the colonial police force, is amply demonstrated by the writings of John Malcolm, Thomas Munro, and others of the Scottish school. Munro, the Governor of Madras Presidency, in his long 1824 ‘Minute on the State of the Country, and Condition of the People’ in Madras, opined that ‘a law might be a very good one in England, and useless here. This arises from the different characters of the people. In England the people resist oppression, and it their spirit which gives efficacy to the law. In India the people rarely resist oppression,’ and they only knew ‘implicit submission’ to the native princes. This was intended, in part, as a rebuke to James Mill, the father of John Stuart, who believed that good laws make a good government: a law is only as good, Munro is arguing, as the character of the people. Britain’s success in India, wrote the Governor of Bombay John Malcolm, could be attributed to the contrast that the native population were able to draw between the security and prosperity they now enjoyed and the ‘misrule and violence’ to which they had been subjected in the past. It all came down, as senior administrators across British possessions in India agreed, to something called ‘character’. But Malcolm was not without hope for the natives, considering the long period of ‘tyrannical rule’ through which they had survived: ‘Many of the moral defects of the Natives of India are to be referred to that misrule and oppression from which they are now in a great degree emancipated.’
3. The Haitian Revolution
It is, putting the matter mildly, altogether questionable whether the emancipation of ‘the colored races’ from oppression mattered at all to Europeans. If France and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard of what would become the United States were being swept by revolutionary fervour in the late eighteenth century, it is remarkable that the greatest expression of the aspiration for freedom should down to the present day remain largely unrecognized. On the night of 22-23 August 1791, thirteen years after Jefferson authored the American Declaration of Independence and two years after the onset of the French Revolution which introduced the dream embodied in the slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, a slave rebellion broke out in the parishes of Acul and Limbé in Saint-Domingue, a French colony in the Caribbean. The rebellion spread to the rest of the colony and paved the way for the creation of Haiti, the first free black republic in the world, in 1804. Unlike the much-celebrated American colonists, who were free men and women, and whom the French aided in their own quest for supremacy in North America, the black slaves were poor, hungry, poorly armed and hunted men who not only had to face the might of French arms but British troops who arrived in 1793 in an ignominious, wretched, and characteristically opportunistic attempt to attach the Caribbean’s wealthiest colony to their own empire.
By any measure, the accomplishment of the black slaves is incomparably greater than the achievement of the white American colonists who, having established a free republic for themselves, set about to entomb black slaves in a living death and continue their wholesale slaughter of the native Americans. Much ink has been squandered over the supposed ambivalence of the founding fathers and others of their ilk about the institution of slavery, and the difficulty of reconciling the great principles put forward by the Enlightenment about universal reason, the dignity of the individual, and the human aspiration for freedom to the bare and brutal fact of the ubiquity of slave-ownership among the colonists, but this attempt to project moral anguish on the part of the unrepentant should be summarily dismissed for the moral insincerity, intellectual dishonesty, and sleight of hand that it is. Yet, more than two hundred years after the Haitian Revolution and the death of its greatest figure, Toussaint Louverture, who died in a French prison in 1803 and did not live to see the proclamation of the sovereign state of Haiti by his deputy, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, on 1 January 1804, ‘neither Toussaint’s astounding career not the successful struggle for Haitian independence figures very prominently in standard history textbooks’. Such is the assessment of a recent biographer of Toussaint, but if anything he underestimates the extent to which the Haitian Revolution has been eviscerated in the popular imagination of the West and diminished if not wilfully ignored by professional historians. Napoleon was determined to obliterate Toussaint from living memory, and his biographer states ‘his body was interred in an unmarked grave’: ‘There was to be no martyrdom for Toussaint Louverture, and there would be no relics either.’ The intellectuals and historians of the established schools have, let us say, taken their cue from Napoleon: thus, in The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, a sweeping and yet finely detailed foray into the long nineteenth century by the late C. A. Bayly, a work described by Niall Ferguson as ‘a masterpiece’, the Haitian Revolution gets a mere two sentences, just another factotum among thousands.
The inimitable C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian writer whose account of the Haitian Revolution is racier than most novels, tells us just exactly what has been at the heart of the Western refusal to recognize the singular importance of a world-historical transformation that, in the words of Haitian-born anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, belonged to the realm of the ‘unthinkable’. ‘The slaves had revolted’, James wrote plainly in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, ‘because they wanted to be free. But no ruling class ever admits such things.’ The notion that black people, much as white people, may aspire for freedom was an utter novelty, an idea as incomprehensible as any to people in the West—even to the great Enlightenment philosophers. At that time, Saint-Domingue produced 3/4ths of the world’s sugar, and it exported 60 per cent of all the coffee produced in Europe; moreover, it accounted for a third of the Atlantic slave trade. The treatment meted out to the slaves need not be recounted in detail, and the lamentation of one slave who excoriated the slaveowners will suffice: ‘Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on plans, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with pikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss?’
No wonder, then, that in 1790, only months before the slaves rose in revolt, one French colonist wrote to his wife in France that ‘there is no movement among our Negroes.’ Life was tranquil, the slaves were ‘obedient’, and it was bliss to be alive: ‘We sleep with doors and windows wide open. Freedom for Negroes is a chimera.’ As if to shatter this great delusion, James writes, ‘the slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much’—and this was long before the revolution would take a far more violent turn. In the United States, a black person counted as 3/5ths of a person, and in Paris the Count of Mirabeau, objecting to the fact that the colonists had counted their slaves as persons with the sole object of increasing their representation in the National Assembly, begged to remind them that ‘we have taken into consideration neither the number of our horses nor that of our mules.’ The ontological order of the ‘modern’ West had no place for the black as a man: as Trouillot writes, sparsely but unsparingly, ‘in 1791, there is no public debate on the record, in France, in England, or in the United States on the right of black slaves to achieve self-determination, and the right to do so by way of armed resistance’ (italics in original).
4. John Stuart Mill
History, for all the sophisticated debates that are thought to have energized the discipline over the previous few decades, still revolves around the ‘event’. That is all the more true of popular history. The Haitian Revolution was, in the historiography of the West, a non-event; or, in the language of Trouillot, who calls to mind the inability of the greatest minds to comprehend that the lowly slaves desired freedom as much as they did, ‘The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened.’ The more enlightened among the European thinkers exulted in the French Revolution, at least before ‘The Terror’ creeped in and wrought havoc, as the apotheosis of the idea of the individual as a rights-bearing citizen and the enshrinement of the faculty of reason, but it required the Haitian Revolution to extend the gains of the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was just what it said: women were neither men nor citizens, indeed black men were not men either as they were incomplete as human beings. That was its most obvious limitation, and the Girondist, actress, and playwright Olympe de Gouges said as much in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Still, from the vantagepoint of today, one can be critical of this document for another monstrosity, namely its anthropocentric vision of the world and its conception of liberty gained at the expense of nature. ‘There is no document of civilization’, Walter Benjamin once opined, ‘which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’
The history of freedom in the West has been generally cast as a story of incremental progress, a story of the constant pushback against liberty and the heroic struggle to keep the torch of liberty burning amidst repression and tyranny. The democratic ideals of ancient Greece seemed to be reincarnated in the political aspirations and ideas of the Jacobins of post-revolutionary France—and C L R James, cognizant of this history, cleverly styled the Haitian revolutionaries ‘Black Jacobins’. However, the first French Republic was short-lived: following the Terror, Napoleon gained power and crowned himself Emperor. This betrayal is best conveyed in the story of Beethoven’s Eroica (‘Heroic’) Symphony, which the great composer had initially intended to dedicate to Napoleon. But when it became known that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor of France, Beethoven struck his name from the title page which originally bore the inscription: ‘Sinfonia grande intitolata Bonaparte del Sigr Louis van Beethoven’ (‘Grand Symphony titled Bonaparte by Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven’). ‘So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man’, Beethoven reportedly told a pupil, ‘Now he will trample on all human rights and indulge only his own ambition. He will place himself above everyone and become a tyrant.’ But when Waterloo did Napoleon in, the monarchists rather than democrats gained the upper hand. The Revolutions of 1848, not least of all in France, held out the promise of restoring republican ideals, but everywhere they were crushed and greatly disillusioned the liberals. The second French republic lasted but four years, 1848-52, as Louis-Napoleon engineered a coup and throned himself at the head of the Second French Empire.
The restoration of monarchy did not, however, entail the complete loss of democratic principles, and in France universal manhood suffrage was retained. It is around this time that, in Britain, John Stuart Mill published what is perhaps the most well-known exposition in Western political theory of the idea of liberty. However, even if it is conventional and altogether reasonable to read his essay, On Liberty (1859), as a carefully reasoned work on the unimpeachable claims of liberty and as a treatise on ‘the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’, it can with equal plausibility be viewed as yet another chapter in what I have described as the constant tussle between the adherents of liberty and the substantially greater number of intellectuals and writers who championed various forms of illiberalism and autocratic rule. By the early nineteenth century if not earlier, the industrial revolution had in Britain created ‘the poor’ and an urban proletariat who were sometimes viewed as only marginally less savage than colonized people. Though Mill may have been gravely concerned by encroaching state power and the constraints it placed upon people’s liberty, calls for state intervention to bring the hoi polloi and the rejects of society under the rubric of social order were common. It was well and good to speak of liberty, but in neighboring Ireland the English landlords, having forced Irish peasants onto small plots of land and made them wholly dependent on the potato, could doubtless be held responsible for genocide when the ‘Great Hunger’ stuck. Between 1845-48, at least a million Irish died, the victims as well of the economic doctrine of laissez-faire and the view that the poor, a blight on society, were deserving of death. Before the English colonized and brutalized India and parts of Africa, they colonized the Irish—and their various other alleged inferiors, including the poor and women. We shall return to this matter later, but for the moment it suffices to register the truth, unpalatable as it must be to John Bull, that English liberty was always parasitic on the misfortunes and oppression of others. The race question was not simply to persist throughout the nineteenth century, but rather got amplified as the European powers engaged in the scramble for Africa and each outdid the other in brutality and tyranny in an attempt not merely to extract profits but supposedly to civilize those who had tasted nothing of ‘freedom’. What is striking is that, whether one is speaking of the frightful encroachments upon the popish Irish or the Caliban Africans, it was not only the state but the force of society that allowed for a permissive oppression.
Where Mill differs from Enlightenment philosophers, as the preceding discussion may suggest, is that he recognized that the source of oppression is not only the state but the power of society. Most discussions of Mill swivel around the conception of ‘negative freedom’: the phrase is not his and is of course drawn from Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on ‘two concepts of liberty’. The external restraint that weighed down most heavily on the exercise of liberty, to Mill’s way of thinking, was the coercive force of moralism that was the most distinctive feature of Victorian society. He was equally critical of the pernicious force of custom as a hindrance to the exercise of liberty, and he attributed the subjection of women, against which he authored a critique with his wife Harriet Taylor, to custom and the force of intolerant public opinion. Neither society nor state was within its rights to censor public opinion or restrain individuals from the pursuit of their activities unless such activities were calculated to produce harm to certain persons or the public good. Given his views, then, which point to Mill as an enlightened figure with an admirably ecumenical conception of liberty, one might expect that he similarly envisioned an expansion of liberty for colonized people. On the other hand, if one keeps in mind the insights of recent scholarship which has to great effect demonstrated that liberalism could simultaneously entail the commitment to political rights and advocate for limited authority to the state as well as justify imperialism, it should come as no surprise that Mill’s broad-minded outlook of empire should appear to shrivel when it came to the question of empire.
Mill’s Considerations of Representative Government offers some insights into his thinking on whether, and to what extent, colonized subjects were fit for liberty. The title of chapter 4, ‘Under What Conditions Representative Government Is Inapplicable’, alone indicates the tenor of his thought. The book is liberally sprinkled with what can only be described as specious claims and shibboleths about the ‘Orient’. Some of his views may be put down to the temper of his times, among them his adherence to the openly racist idea of an evolutionary scale so that the state of a people, ‘in point of culture and development,’ can be witnessed as ranging ‘downwards to a condition very little above the highest of the beasts.’ Mill describes his aversion to slavery, describing it as ‘repugnant’ to the ‘government of law’ and says that he is unable to envision its adoption ‘under any circumstances whatever in modern society’ as that would be a relapse worse than barbarism, but also describes the circumstances under which despotism may be viewed as acceptable. Good despotism is distinguished from bad despotism, just as legal despotism is differentiated from illegal despotism. What is still more disturbing and barely recognized by most of his biographers, who have sidestepped his long (and only) professional career as an employee of the East India Company, where he toiled his entire adult life and rose to the rank of Examiner of Indian Correspondence in 1856 before writing a rather pathetic plea arguing against the abolition of the Company at the end of the Rebellion of 1857-58 which saw India being transferred to the Crown, is that Mill wrote one ‘dispatch’ after another justifying the annexation of native or princely state. Mill himself gave but one terse sentence in his autobiography to describe his life-long association with India: ‘In May, 1823, my processional occupation and status for the next thirty-five years of my life, were decided by my father’s obtaining for me an appointment from the East India Company. . . immediately under himself.’ Evidently, the place which provided Mill his livelihood mattered not a jot. How could it? The celebrated architect of the idea of liberty was, as his 1700 policy opinions on Indian native states demonstrably establish, a firm believer in ‘benevolent despotism’ and perhaps the most subtle defender of the British empire.
5. English Colonialism
13 April 1919 was a warm day, the first day of the spring harvest festival in north India. In the late afternoon, Reginald Dyer, an acting Brigadier-General in the Indian Army born in Murree, in what is now Pakistan, ordered fifty Gurkha and Balochi riflemen to commence firing without warning upon an unarmed crowd of 15,000-20,000 Indians gathered at an enclosure called the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, a stone’s throw from the Golden Temple. Public meetings had been prohibited in the wake of public disturbances, but many in the crowd, quite likely a majority, would have come in from the neighbouring villages and would not have heard of the order that had been passed. This is not to say that Dyer was under any circumstances justified in instituting firing; that he came determined to kill people is demonstrated by the fact that he brought two armoured cars, which he was prevented from using only because the sole passage into the enclosure was too narrow to accommodate them. The firing ended only when the troops ran out of ammunition; most of the 1650 rounds met their target, judging from the official tally of 379 dead and some 1,200 wounded. Some Indian estimates of how many people were killed ran to about 1,000. As the narrator Saleem in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children recalls, Dyer told his men: ‘Good shooting.’ The men had done their duty, order had apparently been restored: ‘We have done a jolly good thing.’
British censorship prevented the news of the massacre from being reported in India at all until weeks later. Not unreasonably, many Indians were enraged; moreover, unlike in the nineteenth century, they could scarcely be ignored. The British government in London sought to quell the uproar with their characteristic weapon, ‘the committee of inquiry’, hoping that the investigation would confirm what they believed to be true of themselves, namely their fidelity to the idea of ‘fair play’ and ‘the rule of law’. The English in India complained bitterly that the inquiry had been forced upon the British government in India and that the authority and knowledge of ‘the man on the spot’ had been impugned by arm-chair politicians in Whitehall. The story of all that transpired is too long to be told here, but the debate that took place in the House of Commons, where Indian affairs ordinarily excited no more than a yawn, is of exceptional interest. The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, while applauding Dyer for his long years of service to the Empire, argued that his desire to ‘teach a moral lesson to the whole of the Punjab’ had led him to embrace ‘a doctrine of terrorism.’ He then went on to charge Dyer for ‘indulging in frightfulness’. The grave import of this accusation would not have been lost on his fellow Parliamentarians: ‘frightfulness’ was the English rendering of schrecklichkeit, the word first used to describe the terrorism inflicted upon Belgian civilians by the German army in World War I. That an English army officer should stand accused of pursuing the policies of militaristic Germans was an intolerable idea, and some English thought that Montagu, a Jew, had his own ulterior motives for daring to equate the freedom-loving English with the hated Huns. However, Winston Churchill then arose to speak, and the patriotism of this scion of the establishment could scarcely be questioned. The ‘slaughter’ in Amritsar, Churchill thundered, was ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire.’ Dyer, Churchill argued, had intended to terrorize not just the whole crowd ‘but the whole district or the whole country’, and had in doing so shamed England. ‘Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia’ and the British empire scarcely required the ‘aid’ of ‘terrorism’. ‘Such ideas’ as Dyer had brought forward in committing mass slaughter were ‘absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.’
What had happened at Amritsar was ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.’ But was it all that exceptional? It has been a nearly unquestioned canon of scholarship, even if more critical voices are being heard these days, to argue that British colonialism was a relatively benign affair, certainly in comparison with, say, the genocide and brutalities unleashed upon black people in Leopold’s Congo or the wholesale atrocities against the Herero perpetrated by the Germans in present-day Namibia. Gandhi is thought to have succeeded against the British precisely because they were British, or, to put it rather more colloquially, jolly good fellows. One commentator after another in the West has argued, with a little more than smugness, that had Gandhi attempted mass non-violent resistance against the Nazis, he would have been effortlessly crushed and never heard from again. In the British public sphere, especially, the view most commonly encountered is the one espoused by former British Prime Minister David Cameron who on a visit to India in 2013 remarked, ‘I think there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did and was responsible for.’ He was only emulating one of his predecessors, Gordon Brown, who on a visit to East Africa in 2005 as Chancellor of the Exchequer candidly declared, ‘I’ve talked to many people on my visit to Africa and the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.’ These two gentlemen might be given a long leash since neither has any claim to being a scholar, but academics such as Niall Ferguson and other mighty stalwarts of the good old Empire are staunchly in the camp that believes that the British brought the ‘rule of law’ to their colonies. Such a view seems oblivious of the consideration that jurists, lawyers, and administrators have been known to acquiesce in, and then legitimize, the illegal and brutal seizure of power, as happened in Nazi Germany, and similarly it would be tiresome to list all the barbarities inflicted by the English upon the people they colonized across a wide swathe of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. To set an example to the country when a rebellion that threatened their rule in India broke out in 1857-58, the British tied captured rebels to canon and blew them into the sky, and the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya a century later was suppressed with mass killings and every strategy of torture that exists in the playbook.
It is to the credit of postcolonial theorists that they have shown how British barbarism was dressed up in the language of liberal reform and the supposedly principled struggle to enhance the sphere of freedom. It is also perhaps the case that the Anglophone empires have been far more diligent and successful in pressing the case that they have stood for ‘liberty’ and the ‘rule of law’ than other European colonial powers. Britain’s critically important place in the Atlantic slave trade has been occluded in most histories, and a recent critical assessment of Britain’s slave empire avers that ‘Britons were taught—and many still believe—that slavery had never been a foundation of their country’s commercial prosperity but was a millstone that needed to be removed so capitalism could truly flourish.’ Political philosophers and liberal commentators point to inconsistencies in the life and work of John Locke, who opened his Two Treatises of Civil Government with the famous proclamation that ‘slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man’ that it was inconceivable that ‘an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it’, but nevertheless played a principal role in authoring the constitutions of the Carolinas which guaranteed Englishmen ‘absolute power and authority’ over slaves in the colonies. Locke’s deep involvement in slavery, one scholar has argued, offers ‘an embarrassment of riches’, but it would be almost banal to suggest that hypocrisy is just as natural to the English as the bite is to the mosquito. The problem ran much deeper. The British empire transported nearly 3.5 million slaves to America between 1660-1807, more than all other slave-trading nations put together. The commerce in enslaved Africans was immensely lucrative and the empire that they helped build, while a prison for them, was a gateway to religious and political dissenters, the mediocre, the wannabees, criminals, and numerous others who could build a life for themselves and then sing hosannas to ‘British liberty’.
6. Mohandas Gandhi
The slave trade and likewise outright genocide apart, European colonial powers and particularly the British acted on the principle that people can be allowed to sink into a morass of poverty and depression and even die in many ways with little if any consequence for the colonizers. Before England colonized India and Africa, it colonized the Irish and brutalized its own working-class and women. It is now fashionable to speak of the ‘weaponization’ of this or that thing, and the present unprovoked war launched by the Russians in Ukraine has brought forth many commentaries on the weaponization of hunger by Putin as his army attempts to starve the recalcitrant Ukrainians into submission and the antecedents of this in the famine (the ‘Holodomor’) that Stalin brought upon Ukraine in 1932-33 which may have caused the death of as many as 3.5 million Ukrainians. But about the same proportion of people, and perhaps more as a percentage of the population, were killed in ‘The Great Hunger’ in Ireland when the potato crop failed in the mid-1840s over three successive years. Ireland lost at least a quarter of its population of 8 million: one million died and another million emigrated, largely to the United States. As the work of Amartya Sen and other scholars in his wake has decisively shown, famines are never caused entirely, and often not at all, by food shortages, and this was very much the case in Ireland. It is British policies that led to the macabre outcome: a succession of draconian Penal Laws forbids Irish Catholics from buying land, pushed them into increasingly smaller plots of land, and forced them to adopt the potato as the only crop that would give them sufficient calories and thereby permit their survival. When the crop failed, the dominant economic doctrine of laissez-faire was invoked to argue that there was no need to aid the millions who were afflicted. It is this sadism that doomed the Irish to annihilation. In India, it is not too much to say that British rule was bookended by mass starvation: after the initial conquest of Bengal, as many as ten million people are thought to have been killed in the famine that occurred in the midst of the anarchy introduced by the British, and the Bengal famine of 1943, which took a toll of around 2-3 million, was, it seems, their swan song as they prepared to exit India.
Though the anti-colonial critique would follow many trajectories, and many exemplary figures may be summoned as having contributed to the imperative task of decolonization, it remained to Mohandas Gandhi to launch a critique that both most creatively addressed the colossal shortcomings in the Western narrative of liberty and also offers the prospect for a far more radical, equitable, and ecumenical conception of freedom. Gandhi had at best an ambivalent intellectual relationship with the Western intellectual and political tradition. He was a relentless if discerning critic of industrial modernity, and, though this takes some by surprise, he did not chafe at describing Western civilization as ‘satanic’ when he thought it necessary. He is famously if apocryphally reported, on his last visit to Britain and the European continent in 1931, to have responded to the query about what he thought of Western civilization with the quip, ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’ However, if all that should be inferred as pointing to the corrosive influence of nationalism upon him, and, as some of his critics would like to argue, his intellectual philistinism, it must be noted that the Gandhi strove for a deep understanding of what he conceived to be dissenting spiritual and political traditions within the West. To add to the formulation I have earlier offered, of how the West colonized its own supposed inferiors—the Irish, Slavs, women, working class, among others—it may be argued that Gandhi was quite firm in his understanding that the West also rendered recessive and marginal its own dissenting intellectuals. Thus, Thoreau became the brunt of jokes as an eccentric who tried to pass himself off as a high-minded idealist when he was in reality, as the author of a recent polemic in The New Yorker avers, a miserable misogynist who was ‘narcissistic, fanatical about self-control’, ‘as parochial as he was egotistical’, indeed a humourless ‘adolescent’ suffering from ‘comprehensive arrogance’. Similarly, it was the later Tolstoy, who advocated for the religion of Jesus, which he viewed in The Kingdom of God Is Within You as a call for radical nonviolence and an anarchist repudiation of state authority, and which he distinguished sharply from the institutionalized religion of Christianity, whom Gandhi embraced. This Tolstoy, a far cry from the lionized novelist, was more likely to be seen as a madman.
Gandhi certainly had much in common with the renowned liberal theorists of liberty in the West. As the founding editor of several newspapers, and as someone who was convicted on charges of having incited disaffection against the British government in India by writing and publishing seditious material, Gandhi knew very well the value of free speech and expression and he upheld that ideal in hundreds of pieces over the course of five decades. Unlike many human rights activists the world over who seek more state intervention to secure rights, even when they understand that the state is often the most egregious violator of rights, Gandhi was profoundly apprehensive of the state and reposed greater confidence in the individual as the agent of social change. ‘Any man who subordinates his will to that of the State’, he wrote in 1910, ‘surrenders his liberty and thus become a slave.’ This could have easily come from the pen of Locke, Montesquieu, or Benjamin Constant. Upon being asked by the Austrian journalist Alice Schalek, who interviewed him at Sabarmati Ashram on 20 March 1928, ‘What do you mean by freedom?’, Gandhi replied: ‘I want the freedom to make mistakes, and freedom to unmake them, and freedom to grow to my full height and freedom to stumble also. I do not want crutches.’ Here one detects what appears to be the unmistakable voice of John Stuart Mill.
One might even think that Gandhi drew upon the natural law and natural rights tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. Sometimes he appears to be speaking in the voice of Jefferson and the American Founding Fathers, as is suggested by this passage from 1931: ‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin. If God Almighty has given the humblest of His creatures the freedom to err, it passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.’ But if there is nothing more to Gandhi than this, in what respect can he been seen as having withheld his approbation of the liberal view and similarly gone beyond the common anti-colonial denunciations of Western hypocrisy? Though Gandhi’s conception of liberty is deserving of a full-length study, it will be sufficient to hint briefly and in the broadest brushstrokes at some elements of his philosophical outlook. First, where Locke, Mill, and other classical theorists principally argued about freedom from restraint, Gandhi speaks of freedom through restraint. A passage from 1928, where he expounds on the ‘limits to freedom’, gives some hint of his thinking: ‘Freedom, both individual and religious, has always had and will always have many limits. Religion does not hanker after rights, it hungers for restraints and restrictions. Anyone who knows religion and practices it does not think in terms of his rights.’ Surprisingly, though Gandhi is celebrated as an advocate of human rights and was invited by the United Nations to issue a statement when the UN Declaration of Human Rights was being formulated, he rarely spoke in the language of rights; when he did so, it was invariably with an awareness that every right comes with a corresponding duty. Gandhi, while of course agreeing upon broader principles such as the unimpeachable fact that every human being has a right to his or her dignity, would very much have been at odds with those in the human rights community. The practitioner of a religion thinks not of rights but, remarkably, hungers for restraints: as the author of the second century CE Yoga Sutras, Patanjali, would have said, the real dimensions of freedom are revealed only in the act of discipline [restraint] which in turn is rendered superfluous by the reality that its practice discloses.
Why, then, had Indians become enslaved to the British? To this question that haunted every Indian nationalist, Gandhi had a reply that was even more unsettling. To be sure, the colonizers were animated by ambition, greed, the will for power, and much else, but Gandhi averred that the Indians were drawn to them by their own moral failures, their lack of discipline, and the fact that they were seduced by the glitter of the material civilization of the West. The self-righteous enforcers of political correctness or rather ideological puritans who are found everywhere these days will at once conclude that Gandhi is ‘blaming the victim’. There is no reply, at one level, to such a jejune rejoinder. But let us follow Gandhi, in summary. The argument first unfolds in Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, an extraordinary work and, I daresay, an unrivalled milestone in the human quest for freedom. True, Gandhi advocates for ‘home rule’ or self-determination, autonomy from colonial rule, but the word swaraj (swa=self; raj=rule) also signifies rule over oneself, or the rule over one’s meaner instincts. Before one can aspire to political freedom, much less demand it, one must contain one’s baser instincts. Gandhi was to explicate on this often: the language in which he did so might vary, but the intent was always clear: ‘The outward freedom therefore that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment.’ This was as true in India or Africa as it was in the US or Europe, and Gandhi did not therefore doubt, as he noted apropos of an exchange with an interlocutor in the United States, that ‘even in the land of so-called freedom, the real freedom has still to come.’
The argument has more nuances than is possible to convey here, but it is transparent that the colonizers themselves also have baser instincts—and they too need to be emancipated from their own worst tendencies. If anything, the colonizers are even more enslaved than the colonized: as Gandhi would have argued, the slave never views the slaveowner as less than fully human, but this is assuredly not the case with the slaveowner who does not confer upon his slaves the ontological dignity of a full human existence. ‘Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grand-children of slaves’, wrote Gandhi in response to a request from W. E. B. Du Bois for a message for African Americans, adding: ‘There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners.’ The anti-colonial movement that Gandhi spearheaded to secure India’s freedom was at the same time a principled endeavour to free Britain from its own base instincts; it was an invitation, and it is a testament to Gandhi’s magnificent ecumenism that some Britons accepted it as such, for Britain to enter into a more expansive world of freedom. It is striking that, at every stage of the struggle, commencing with Gandhi’s activities in South Africa, that he was never in want of support from Englishmen and women. They understood, as the world needs to understand, that freedom is indivisible.
7. Freedom’s Future
A more thoroughgoing exploration of Gandhi’s worldview and praxis yields further insights into the continuing struggle for freedom. The day before his assassination on 30 January 1948, he had prepared a draft constitution for the Indian National Congress, the principal nationalist organization that had been at the helm of the freedom struggle. It was in part informed by the views that he articulated in public on January 27, when he averred that ‘the Congress has won political freedom, but it has yet to win economic freedom, social and moral freedom. These freedoms are harder than the political, if only because they are constructive, less exciting and not spectacular.’ The message was, predictably, lost upon the leaders of the Congress who were already squabbling over power. Much the same can be said for what transpired in other countries where the anti-colonial struggle led to bitter ideological struggles, often violent, between warring factions. The struggle in India, however, was distinct in that Gandhi was the author of the wholly revolutionary idea of mass nonviolent resistance. That entailed another expansion in the meaning of freedom: there is no freedom unless one is willing to take the suffering of others upon oneself, unless one is willing to bear the cross. The leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and the farm workers movement among Mexican Americans, as well as the proponents of civil disobedience who have blockaded nuclear sites and installations in various countries are among the many activists who have acted on this principle.
The Western notion of freedom has for some time been principally tethered to the idea of the rights-bearing individual. The apotheosis of this idea seemed to have been achieved when the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the Soviet Union fragmented, and what Churchill called the ‘Iron Curtain’ was lifted. Commentators such as Francis Fukuyama were besides themselves with ecstasy and pronounced ‘the end of history’: the Western notion of freedom had clearly triumphed, the dignity of the individual everywhere—or at least in Europe, which was in reality sufficient—had been recognized, and the principles of the free market economy, which flow from the recognition that is given to the individual, had been validated as the only basis on which economic exchanges in and among societies can be contemplated. Apparently, on this view, the end of human existence is to be able to choose wisely between fifty varieties of toothpaste—or, as in the United States, between dozens of firearms at the local gun shop. In the aftermath of what is described as the creation of a unipolar world, the United States attempted to push democracy among benighted peoples clearly wanting in basic freedoms. Strangely, nearly every American enterprise over the course of nearly two centuries in the pursuit of ‘Manifest Destiny’, and to spread the blessings of liberty, has involved coups, the sponsorship of genocidal regimes, or outright war. It is not less ironical that democracy is now in considerable peril in its supposed citadel.
Though the language of ‘rights’ can be traced back to the eighteenth century, a rights-based discourse only started to achieve prominence in the aftermath of World War II and the creation of a new architecture of global governance which included covenants such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights. States may choose to deny or limit certain rights to individuals, but in principle they are, or may be held, accountable for abrogating rights that are deemed inviolable. The tendency over the last few decades has been to expand the field of rights, such that the right to one’s gender, to paid employment, to clean water and air, to what is called ‘organic’ food, to education in one’s own culture and history, to dress as one chooses (or indeed to barely dress at all), to drive fuel-guzzling vehicles, and many other rights have been added to what were once only the right to liberty, the right to freedom of speech and expression, the right of assembly, and the right (extended over time to constituencies once excluded) to suffrage. The field of rights is ever expanding. It may be argued that there is some contraction, too, though such contraction is only another affirmation of rights. Thus, as an instance, we may consider the case recently brought to my attention of a prominent white male university professor who is well versed in the history and culture of Africa, and who is conversant in at least two African languages, who was told unequivocally by an African American student that he has no right to teach African history. Though in contemporary jargon this is termed ‘cancel culture’, it may also be understood as the affirmation by the student of her right to be taught by a person of African descent.
It may be that, taken to its logical end, rights discourse may yet be productive in ways that we have not yet anticipated or fully comprehended. Courts in India and New Zealand have declared that rivers have rights. If rivers have the right not to be polluted, surely mountains must have the right not to be mined just as birds and animals must have the right not to be deprived of their natural habitats? If the end of this line of reasoning is to produce a far less anthropocentric conception of our existence, then it may be said that a rights discourse offers a richer conception of our planetary existence. Yet, some will view the expansion of the rights of non-humans as possible only by the contraction of the rights of humans, a zero-sum scenario that echoes the narrative of liberty as it has developed in the West. Must our concept of liberty necessarily be attached only to the conception of rights? Rights talk is now part of the global common sense, but is there any common sense that is not socially constructed? It appears that we are from comprehending that freedom, too, speaks in many languages. It is, for example, a general tenet of Western thought that classical Chinese has no word for liberty and that the idea of liberty remains a novelty for most Chinese. However, in reading Confucius’s Analects, one encounters a passage which suggests otherwise: ‘The Master said, The gentleman is not a utensil.’ A person, says Confucius, should not be treated merely as a utensil, that is as a means; or, as Kant put it, ‘So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.’ Humankind, and the modern West, will have to start thinking about liberty for those who do not speak the language of liberty.
Citations
Classical texts, whether Greek, Indian, or Chinese, are usually referenced not by page number but by book number, followed by paragraph or verse, or simply by line number. For Aristotle, Keith Barker’s ed. and trans. of The Politics has been used (New York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy Books, 1964), 1310, 1317b; for Herodotus, see The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), 7:133. I have used the translation in The Landmark
Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 6:56-59, 3:62, and 1:122-24. The quotation in the last paragraph is from Confucius’s Analects, trans. Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 2007), II.12. The quotation from Ludwig von Mises is drawn from chapter 21 of a collection of his essays, Money, Method, and the Market Process (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1990), while Moses Finley’s assessment is taken from his article, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 6, no. 3 (April 1964), 233-49; the quotation is from pp236-37.
There are many editions of Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire: AD 1656-1668. The 1891 edition revised and published by Archibald Constable, based on Irving Brock’s translation, is readable; quotations are from pages 5, 204, and 225. John Logan’s A Dissertation on the Governments, Manner and Spirits of Asia (London, 1787) and William Robertson’s The Progress of Society in Europe (1769) are discussed in Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Humankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1982). Robert Orme’s essay on the effeminacy of Indians (1761) is in Some Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (reprint ed., New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1974) while the passage from Alexander Dow is from Volume 3 of The History of Hindostan (1770, reprint ed., Delhi: Today & Tomorrow’s Printers & Publishers, 1973), vii-xxxv. Thomas Munro’s ‘Minute’ of 31 December 1824 is in Vol 28. of Parliamentary Papers (1830), while John Malcolm’s Notes of Instruction to Assistants and Officers acting under the order of Major-General Sir John Malcolm’ [1821] is reprinted in the author’s A Memoir of Central India, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Sagar Publications, 1970), 433-475 of Vol. 2; the quotation is at p436.
The passages cited from Madison Smartt Bell’s biography, Toussaint Louverture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007) appear on p3 and p284. See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p72-88, and C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1963; Vintage Books, 1989), p88-95. The passing reference to Toussaint in C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), is at p99. The testimony of the slave is cited by Jon Henley, ‘Haiti: A Long Descent to Hell’, The Guardian (14 January 2010), online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/14/haiti-history-earthquake-disaster
For the first of the two quotes from Immanuel Kant, see Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p76; the quote in the last paragraph is from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, of which there are many editions. Quotes from John Stuart Mill are taken from Considerations on Representative Government [1861], introduction by F. A. Hayek (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1962), p38; Autobiography, in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), p12; and the edition Of Liberty I have used is edited by Elizabeth Rapaport (Hackett Publishing Company, 1978). Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is anthologized in his The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998), 191-242. John Locke’s description of slavery as ‘so vile and miserable an estate’ is the opening line of The Two Treatises of Civil Government (1689) and his own involvement in the Carolinas is discussed in James Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate”: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought’, Political Theory 14, no. 2 (May 1986), the quote being from p265. Britain’s role in the slave trade is reviewed by Howard W. French, ‘Slavery, Memory, Empire’, The New York Review of Books (7 April 2022), 22-24. For Walter Benjamin’s famous aphorism, see Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p256.
On ‘frightfulness’, see Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, ‘Report of the [Bryce] Committee on Alleged German Outrages’, Cd 7894, in Parliamentary Papers, 1914-1916 [1915] Vol. 23; Churchill’s and Montagu’s remarks are from the debate in the House of Commons on 8 July 1920, 5 Hansard 131, columns 1707-28. David Cameron’s refusal to apologize for the Amritsar Massacre was reported in The Guardian on 20 February 2013, and Gordon Brown’s remarks are taken as reported in The Daily Mail on 15 January 2005.
Gandhi’s relationship to the Western intellectual tradition is explored by Vinay Lal, ‘Gandhi’s West, the West’s Gandhi’, New Literary History 40 (Spring 2009), 281-313, and from the same author there is an article on Gandhi’s position on rights: ‘Gandhi, citizenship and the idea of a good civil society, Mohan Singh Mehta Memorial Lecture April 2008 (Udaipur: Seva Mandir, 2008). Nearly everything that Gandhi wrote has been assembled in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols. (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India). But there are two different editions of this series with not merely different pagination but different content owing to the attempt by a previous Hindu nationalist government to tamper with the text. The pieces are best cited by date and title, where available. Some of the quotations are drawn from his essay on ‘Liberty’, Indian Opinion (8 January 1910); ‘Limits to Freedom’, Navajivan (31 May 1931); ‘Freedom to the Free’, Young India (1 November 1928); and ‘Congress Position’ (27 January 1948). The letter from Gandhi to Du Bois of 1 May 1929 can also be accessed online at http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b181-i615
For the polemic against Thoreau, see Kathryn Schulz, ‘The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau’, The New Yorker (19 October 2015). Orwell’s essay on ‘England Your England’ from 1941 is widely reprinted. Beethoven’s attitude towards Napoleon is discussed by Romain Rolland, Beethoven the Creator, trans. Ernest Newman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), p62-63.