1 Introduction
In Civilization (1836) Mill distinguishes between two senses of ‘civilization’, both of which treat it as a scalar phenomenon, attainable by degree.Footnote 1 ‘Civilization’ in ‘the narrow sense of the term’ (narrow civilization) refers to ‘that kind of improvement only’ that is ‘the direct converse’ of a range of ‘elements’ (or ‘ingredients’) whose combination constitute a paradigmatically ‘savage’ form of ‘life’. In consequence, the greater the degree to which each of those elements is absent or overcome, the greater the degree of narrow civilization. Mill suggests that the greatest embodiments of narrow civilization in his day are ‘wealthy and powerful nation[s]’, as best exemplified by ‘modern Europe’, ‘especially […] Great Britain’. In contrast, ‘civilization’ in the broad sense (broad civilization) refers to ‘human improvement in general’, measured in terms of how far a people has ‘advanced’ on ‘the road to perfection; happier, nobler, wiser’. In consequence, the question of the relation between broad and narrow civilization becomes that of how the happiness, nobility, and wisdom of a people, on the one hand, is related to their level of wealth, power, and nationality, on the other.Footnote 2
Although Mill takes societies to embody wealth, power, and nationality to a matter of degree, he also uses narrow ‘civilization’ in a binary manner, which allows him to refer to peoples who have or have not crossed a certain threshold thereof as ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ respectively.Footnote 3 Moreover, within the category of the ‘uncivilized’, he deems it useful to posit a category of ‘semicivilized’ peoples who have transcended a certain degree of savagery without crossing the threshold into civilization.Footnote 4 In later writings, the ‘barbarous’ label is more or less reserved for such intermediaries, and ‘semi-barbarous’ for their most advanced representatives.Footnote 5 Thus, since broad civilization can also be conceived in binary terms, with broadly ‘civilized’ peoples conceived as having crossed a certain threshold of happiness, nobility, and wisdom, the question of the relationship between broad and narrow civilization can also be reframed in terms of whether a savage, (semi)barbarian, or narrowly civilized people is most likely to be happy, noble, and wise.
The concern that narrow-binary civilization is insufficient for broad-binary civilization, and that the former generates its own superable ‘impediments’ to the latter if improperly managed, animates many of Mill's writings, including On Liberty (1859).Footnote 6 Indeed, the Harm Principle defended in that text indicates his belief that a wide range of liberties is a necessary component of the optimal package of measures whose end is the broad civilization of a narrowly civilized society. However, although Mill posits broadly civilized individuals or sub-communities in narrowly uncivilized societies – some historical examples of which lead him to conclude that his own age is not ‘equally advanced’ – he takes the broad civilization of a people to require its narrow civilization, thereby opposing himself to the romanticization of savage or barbarian life.Footnote 7 In doing so, he raises the ethical question of the means through which a narrowly civilized people might be permitted, or even obligated, to promote the narrow civilization of savage or barbarian peoples, and whether these include the tools of imperialism and empire.
Duncan Bell has observed that there is ‘profound disagreement over whether the relationship’ between ‘liberal political theory’, on the one hand, and ‘imperialism’ and ‘empire’, on the other, ‘is rejectionist, necessary, or contingent’, where:
The rejection thesis posits that liberalism and imperialism are mutually exclusive, […] the necessity thesis asserts that imperialism is an integral feature of [liberalism…], [and] the contingency thesis argue[s] that liberal normative commitments do not necessarily [but may] entail support for empire.Footnote 8
Despite equating empire and imperialism in this passage, Bell also notes that in ‘the late nineteenth century […] it was common to distinguish between imperialism’, conceived as a ‘form of aggressive expansionism’, ‘and empire’, conceived as a ‘form of political order’.Footnote 9 Although Bell does not highlight this, the two claims indicate the need to distinguish between the rejection, necessity, and contingency theses as applied to empire and imperialism respectively, as the truth of one as applied to empire may not guarantee its truth as applied to imperialism. Indeed, this article will argue that, although the terminology is not Mill's own, as he tends to use ‘aggrandisement’ rather than ‘imperialism’, this conceptual distinction is needed to understand his liberalism.Footnote 10
Given Mill's defence of, and employment by, the East India Company (EIC),Footnote 11 most contemporary scholarship agrees that his liberalism: (a) allows for the possibility of a legitimate empire in which a civilized people rules over an uncivilized one in a genuinely paternalistic manner; but (b) rejects imperialism against uncivilized peoples for the good of the civilized.Footnote 12 However, this scholarship is often ambiguous regarding whether Mill deems it justifiable to establish such an empire through imperial aggression,Footnote 13 with only a minority affirming so explicitly (Section 3). In contrast, this article will argue that Mill rejects paternalistic imperialism too.
In what follows, Section 2 outlines what Mill conceives to be the most important elements of savage life, thereby establishing his key markers of barbarism and (narrow) civilization in the nineteenth-century world.Footnote 14 Section 3 links Mill's threshold for binary civilization to his Harm Principle, by showing that he also takes it to constitute the threshold at which members of a people are ethically immunized against justified paternalistic interference. Section 4 argues that, although Mill views the Mormons of Utah as civilized on balance, On Liberty's explanation of the wrongness of outsiders eliminating their ‘barbaric’ practice of polygamy by force implies that paternalistic aggression against uncivilized peoples is wrong as well. However, since it is somewhat unclear whether Mill treats the Mormon example as a case of the ethics of foreign intervention, Sections 5–8 integrate the preceding interpretation with Mill's A Few Words on Non-Intervention (1859). It is argued that passages in that text pertaining to Rome, Algeria, and India, which may be misconstrued as supporting paternalistic imperialism, actually support three distinct theses instead: (1) aggressive wars of conquest against uncivilized peoples can have positive paternalistic effects that mitigate their evil (Mitigation Thesis); (2) defence against aggression is more likely to necessitate the resort to war, and indeed conquest, when the aggressor is a barbarian power (Martial Thesis); and (3) civilized states are justified in engaging uncivilized peoples non-aggressively given the paternalistic benefits this can yield, even if this increases the risk of the latter responding with aggression that justifies their own conquest (Engagement Thesis). The upshot is that, although Mill's ethics of foreign intervention leads him to reject paternalistic imperialism, his belief that it can be justifiable to conquer and civilize aggressors leads him to posit a contingent relationship between his own liberalism and empire.
2 From the Elements of Savage Life to Narrow Civilization
For Mill, the first element of savage life is that it is predicated on small and transient tribal groups. In consequence, ceteris paribus, he takes civilization to increase with human settlement, population density, and collectivity, as manifested in the rise of villages, towns, and cities, on the one hand, and the incorporation of their inhabitants into polities with fixed territorial boundaries, on the other.Footnote 15 It also suggests that the paradigmatically barbarian middle-ground would involve settlements with few, if any, cities. In consequence, the fact that Mill deems nineteenth-century India to be ‘semi-barbarous’ rather than civilized on balance,Footnote 16 despite its cities and comparatively high population density, is indicative of his belief that a high level of scalar civilization with respect to one or another of the elements of savage life does not suffice for binary civilization as such.Footnote 17 A further, related corollary is that, although Mill makes clear that the presence or absence of one element of savage life is causally conducive to the presence or absence of the others,Footnote 18 the civilizational process admits of uneven development, in that a society may be more civilized relative to one of the elements of savage life compared to another element.Footnote 19
The second element of savage life is a people characterized by strong anti-social tendencies that incline them away from cooperation, and towards individual self-reliance. Here the exception that proves the rule is that limited intra-tribal cooperation may arise for the sake of the anti-social activity of inter-tribal warfare, or raids conducted against more civilized peoples. In consequence, ceteris paribus, Mill takes civilization to increase with cooperation and mutual dependence, where this will entail the extension of intra-societal cooperation beyond the activity of war-making, on the one hand, and potentially even render war-making obsolete through the emergence of inter-societal cooperation, on the other.Footnote 20 This suggests that a paradigmatically barbarian people would exhibit cooperation in activities other than war, albeit circumscribed by severe ongoing internal conflicts,Footnote 21 while retaining a fundamentally hostile or even aggressive attitude towards foreign peoples.
In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill also goes further by defining ‘nationality’ in terms of the sympathies that incline a people towards cooperation and mutual dependence within a shared territorial state.Footnote 22 In consequence, while remaining open-minded about the emergence of more cosmopolitan forms of cooperation in the future,Footnote 23 Mill takes the gradual transition towards a world of independent nation-states in his day as indicative of an increase in global civilization. This much suggests that the limitations of sympathy indicated by the severe internal conflicts of a paradigmatically barbarian people are also indicative of their lack of a fully-fledged nationality. Thus, Mill takes the conflicts between the independent Indian states that emerged during the decline of the Moghul Empire as a sign of the absence of a unified Indian nationality,Footnote 24 and the extreme oppression and conflict he posits within most of them to indicate that their populations tended not to have full nationality either.Footnote 25 However, the link Mill posits between sympathy and nationality also helps to show why he believes that a people that has crossed the threshold of binary civilization may still exhibit residual barbarian features. For example, in a discussion of the revolutions of 1848, Mill laments that the nationality-constituting mutual sympathies of the German people are attended by a widespread barbaric hostility to non-Germans.Footnote 26
Mill's third element of savage life, a lack of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, along with the poverty that attends their absence, is causally derivative from the first two elements.Footnote 27 After all, agricultural settlements tend to mark an end to transience, and an extension of cooperation beyond military activities. Moreover, in the absence of agricultural settlements, and the surpluses and consequent division of labour they make possible, cooperation could not be extended further into manufacturing, let alone trade with foreign peoples. In consequence, without ruling out greater socialistic forms of economic cooperation in the future,Footnote 28 Mill takes each of the preceding developments, and the increased wealth associated with them,Footnote 29 to constitute increases in civilization, and envisages an emerging global economic civilization of competitive free trade between states.Footnote 30
From this perspective, a paradigmatically barbarian society would have an agricultural economy characterized by severe class conflict, such as that exhibited by ancient slave societies.Footnote 31 Moreover, if able to advance enough to produce manufactures, it would be expected to continue to pose an obstacle to global economic civilization, through either maintaining an absolute opposition to commerce with outsiders, or a mercantilist-cum-protectionist approach thereto. Indeed, although Mill does not suggest that India is semi-barbarian in this respect, he treats Chinese economic protectionism as a kind of (semi)barbaric recalcitrance.Footnote 32
This dimension of Mill's conception of the civilizational process also explains why he describes early English colonists in North America as having lived in a ‘half-savage’ state, even though they brought aspects of binary civilization with them, such as relatively advanced acquirements of mind.Footnote 33 Despite being settled, Mill implies, the abundance of land available incentivized subsistence farming, the establishment of a less sophisticated division of labour than a paradigmatic barbarian society,Footnote 34 and hence an economic regress and labour shortage that lent slavery the illusory appearance of a civilizing solution.Footnote 35 Once again, that Mill allows an individual to be part of civilization at one time and semi-savagery in another – depending upon the ‘multifaceted sociological condition’ of the people in which (s)he is relationally embeddedFootnote 36 – limits the extent to which Mill's civilizational categorization of peoples implies praise or disparagement to any given member thereof.Footnote 37 By measuring civilizational advancement partly in terms of the universalization of certain characteristics, such as cooperativeness, Mill acknowledges that some individuals will develop these characteristics earlier than others, and hence that a people will probably have members whose characteristics do not conform to the societal norm. Thus, Mill can judge Akbar and Charlemagne more enlightened than the barbarian societies they governed,Footnote 38 while deeming some of Britain's ‘labouring class’ so impoverished materially and mentally that they are ‘barbarians in the midst of our civilization’.Footnote 39
Mill's fourth element of savage life, the absence of law, ‘administration of justice’, and security arrangements to protect tribal members from each other, also stems from the anti-social lack of cooperation and insistence on individual self-reliance characterizing savage life.Footnote 40 Since paradigmatically savage life leaves everyone without legal rights to personal security and private property, civilization increases along with them. Mill conceives the said expansion of legal protections as tending to proceed as unevenly as economic development, with some classes protected more than others. In the barbarian interim, this might involve a transition from savage individual self-reliance to a more cooperative form of communal self-reliance, in which groups protect their members from outsiders through the threat of vigilante violence.Footnote 41 Nevertheless, just as the overall trajectory of economic civilization is one of levelling-up to the point of the global elimination of poverty, that of juridical civilization is towards the elimination of domination through equality before the law.Footnote 42 When Mill extends this conception of juridical civilization to the international realm, he takes it to entail growing adherence by states to common rules designed to ensure peaceful, egalitarian cooperation, and the elimination of aggressive war.Footnote 43
Mill's next element of savage life, military weakness, is also a consequence of the prior elements. In the absence of the socially unifying sympathies needed for non-military cooperation and mutual protection from each other, paradigmatic savage military cooperation is conceived as undisciplined, poorly motivated, and hence vulnerable to strategies of divide and rule. Moreover, it is also implied that, even if a small, transient, poverty-stricken tribe lacking in (military) manufactures could remain a cohesive force, ceteris paribus, it would struggle to contend with the greater demographic, economic, and technological resources of a more civilized people. It is for this reason that Mill takes the converse of savage life to be manifested in his time by wealthy and powerful nations.Footnote 44 This analysis also suggests that paradigmatically barbarian peoples will tend to be weaker than fully-fledged nations, limited in their ability to form durable alliances, but nevertheless aggressive and capable enough to generate serious threats to civilized states.
Mill's final element of savage life to be considered here is that ‘powers and acquirements of mind’ are ‘confined to a few persons’, thus implying that civilization can be measured by the extent of their universalization.Footnote 45 As with property and wealth, Mill takes these mental powers and acquirements to spread highly unevenly at first. Moreover, despite denying any intrinsic link between wealth and intelligence as such, he thinks the opportunities that wealth affords for mental cultivation (including basic literacy) mean that there will be a strong tendency for the beneficiaries in one domain to significantly overlap with those of the other before the threshold for binary civilization is reached.Footnote 46 Since Mill takes the combination of wealth and cultivated intelligence to yield social power, on the one hand, and paradigmatic barbarism to be characterized by the most extreme inequalities of social power between groups, on the other, he thereby associates extreme inequalities of cultivated intelligence with barbarism's economics of class conflict and legal systems of domination.Footnote 47 Nevertheless, Mill takes the overall trajectory of civilization to entail a diffusion of social power resulting in ‘more and more’ societal questions being ‘decided by the movements of masses’.Footnote 48
In this way, Mill takes the cognitive and moral enhancements implicit in the possibility of nationality-constituting, sympathy-based mass cooperation, along with the political moderation encouraged by widespread property ownership and a substantial middle class,Footnote 49 to make a civilized people significantly more likely to be capable of sustaining and being improved by liberal democratic government.Footnote 50 Also pertinent is Mill's belief that the ethical essence of Christianity, which he finds in the example of Jesus in the Gospels, is more humane and intellectually defensible than that of its theological competitors, but that its metaphysical dogmas are gradually yielding to philosophical critique and scientific evidence.Footnote 51 This leads him to associate the later stages of intellectual civilization with secularization and adherence to science,Footnote 52 and to view non-Judaeo-Christian societies unreformed by the Enlightenment as mired in a kind of moral and intellectual barbarism.Footnote 53
3 The Harm Principle and its Civilization Clause
According to the Harm Principle that Mill defends in On Liberty, in the case of adults of sound mind:
the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.Footnote 54
This implies that if an agent, x, exercises power rightfully over an agent, y, despite this being against the latter's will, either: (1) x's purpose is to prevent y from harming x (the self-defence clause); (2) x's purpose is to prevent y from harming some third party, z, where y is doing so against z's will (the protection clause); or (3) y is not a member of a civilized community, and x's purpose is the paternalistic one of promoting y's own good on his or her behalf (the civilization clause). Thus, the Harm Principle's civilization clause invokes the binary distinction between civilized and uncivilized peoples,Footnote 55 and thereby posits the existence of cases of permissible paternalistic interference by members of the former in the lives of members of the latter.Footnote 56
Mill's claim that the satisfaction of one of the three clauses is necessary for interference to be warranted does not entail that it is sufficient to make it so.Footnote 57 In consequence, we can distinguish between an act of interference being compatible with the Harm Principle, in virtue of its satisfaction of at least one of the clauses, and its being warranted all things considered. However, it is not always clear that Mill takes compatibility to be insufficient for warrant when the former is achieved via the civilization clause. For example, while explaining why the civilization clause is needed, Mill maintains that ‘[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end’.Footnote 58 Although this implies that paternalistic intentions are insufficient to warrant an act of interference, as they do not guarantee any benefit to the person subjected to it,Footnote 59 it may seem to suggest that paternalistically intentioned interference that benefits the subject is automatically warranted. Moreover, while one might think that Mill is only speaking of native despotisms here, in the sense of acknowledging the permissibility of native leaders of barbarian peoples leading them in a despotic manner, he also affirms the potential permissibility of a colonial despotism in which a barbarian people is ruled by a more civilized foreign one. As he puts it in Considerations, this ‘mode of government is as legitimate as any other, if it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement’.Footnote 60
According to some scholars, when Mill affirms the potential legitimacy of such colonial rule, he implies that civilized states can be warranted in establishing it through unprovoked, and thus imperialist (qua aggressive), wars of conquest, provided that the purpose and outcome is genuinely paternalistic. For example, Will Kymlicka takes Considerations to imply ‘that liberal states were justified in colonizing [uncivilized] foreign countries in order to teach them liberal principles’.Footnote 61 By similar reasoning, Mill could be taken to justify other forms of aggressive interference falling short of outright conquest provided the same conditions apply. For example, Don Habibi seems to agree with Kymlicka when he claims that: ‘For the sake of stimulating progress, Mill could justify foreign intervention, cultural upheaval, despotism, and war’.Footnote 62
4 Mill on Mormon Utah and ‘Civilizades’
One reason to doubt Mill's willingness to support imperialistic wars against the uncivilized provided they are conducted paternalistically is On Liberty's discussion of the ‘remarkable phenomenon of Mormonism’.Footnote 63 Although the text was completed after the outbreak of the Utah War (1857–58),Footnote 64 between Mormon settlers in Utah Territory and the military of the United States, it is unclear whether that part of the text was a direct response to the conflict or predated it. Either way, Mill notes the widespread association of the Mormon practice of polygamy with barbarism – in 1856, the Republican party platform pledged to prohibit the ‘twin relics of barbarism’, polygamy and slaveryFootnote 65 – and agrees that it is ‘a retrograde step in civilization’ qua a step away from equality before the law.Footnote 66 However, Mill rejects the position of Thomas Taylor MeadowsFootnote 67 that the United States government should send a military expedition to ‘compel them [to abandon the practice] by force’.Footnote 68
Habibi denies that this shows that Mill opposes warfare against barbarian peoples for the sake of civilizing them because he ‘applied different moral standards to European and non-European cultures’.Footnote 69 If Habibi's point were simply that Mill takes the Mormon community of Utah to have crossed the threshold of binary civilization, along with the other peoples of ‘Christian Europe’,Footnote 70 and hence does not take the civilization clause to be salient to them, he would probably be right.Footnote 71 After all, while opposing the use of military force, Mill claims that ‘it must be remembered that this [polygamous marriage] relation is as much voluntary on the part of the women concerned in it, and who may be deemed the sufferers by it, as is the case with any other form of the marriage institution’.Footnote 72 By emphasizing the Mormon women's consent here, Mill seems to imply their immunity from paternalistic protection by third parties, and hence the irrelevance of the civilization clause to this case. Moreover, by hinting at his broader feminist view, that even the monogamous marriage institution of the most civilized peoples incorporates ‘relics of primitive barbarism’ by investing the husband with ‘odious powers’, Mill implies that the civilizational gap between the Mormons and their would-be conquerors is smaller than the latter would like to believe.Footnote 73
However, while opposing the coercive elimination of Mormon polygamy by outsiders, Mill also indicates that paternalistic wars of aggression are unwarranted in any circumstances. Having noted that some – namely, MeadowsFootnote 74 – now propose, ‘not a crusade, but a civilizade’, Mill does not insist that the problem is that the Mormons are too civilized to be the legitimate target of such a venture. Instead, he maintains that ‘I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized’.Footnote 75 Thus, although Habibi is correct to take the civilization clause to show that Mill has different ethical standards for interference in the lives of civilized and uncivilized peoples (Section 6), that does not explain Mill's opposition to military action in this case. Indeed, Mill charges Meadows with hypocrisy for embracing a dual standard, by tolerating polygamyFootnote 76 in the case of the supposedly barbarian ‘Mahomedans, and Hindoos, and Chinese’, while opposing it with ‘unquenchable animosity when practised by persons who speak English, and profess to be a kind of Christians’.Footnote 77 Moreover, Mill's point here is not that the civilized world should wage a war to end polygamy in the non-western world too, but that it would be an unsuitable ground for war in either case.Footnote 78
One potential response on Habibi's behalf is that, since Meadows notes that Utah Territory had been formally incorporated into the United States (in 1850),Footnote 79 when Mill opposes Meadows’ civilizade he is opposing intra-state coercive assimilation rather than imperial conquests as such.Footnote 80 Although this response may be called into question – for example, Meadows also notes that Utah had a quasi-colonial status, having been denied recognition as a state,Footnote 81 and Mill refers to the would-be interveners as ‘persons entirely unconnected’Footnote 82 to them – it can be refuted less speculatively with reference to Non-Intervention. There Mill deals with the ethics of foreign intervention more explicitly, and rejects imperialist civilizades thus:
To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect.
Although Mill adds the caveat that ‘there assuredly are cases in which it is allowable to go to war, without having been ourselves attacked, or threatened with attack’, this generates no contradiction.Footnote 83 After all, since the focus of the text is intervention to assist others who are subject to aggression or involuntary oppression, Mill is acknowledging that wars can be warranted via the protection clause as well as the self-defence clause.
However, there is no denying that Mill takes the civilization clause to have a role to play when considering whether certain conflicts, or the goals adopted therein, are warranted. As he puts it:
[there is] a great difference […] between the case in which the nations concerned are of the same, or something like the same, degree of civilization, and that in which one of the parties to the situation is of a high, and the other of a very low, grade of social improvement.
He is clear that one salient difference between these cases is that barbarous nations are not beyond ‘the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners’.Footnote 84 In consequence, the crucial question is how Mill reconciles these claims with his opposition to imperial civilizades.
5 The Mitigation Thesis
The answer can be gleaned from some other passages in Non-Intervention that may otherwise be misconstrued as support for (paternalistic) imperialism. One case is Mill's evaluation of the ancient Roman conquest of ‘Gaul and Spain, Numidia and Dacia’. Mill insists that, although the Romans were not ‘the most clean-handed of conquerors’, such conquests were not ‘a violation of the law of nations’ as ‘barbarians have no rights as a nation’. Moreover, he makes clear that in the longer term it was to their ‘benefit’ to be brought into the empire. However, Mill still seems to consider the conquests unjust as he also indicates that the Romans violated ‘great principles of morality’ or ‘the universal rules of morality between man and man’.Footnote 85 In consequence, rather than demonstrating Mill's support for imperialism, this passage seems to reveal his commitment to the claim that when one people benefits from being conquered aggressively by another of greater civilization, this can mitigate the immorality of the conquest without justifying it (Mitigation Thesis).
Of course, one possible response to the preceding is that Mill's criticism of the Roman conquests applies at the level of jus in bello rather than jus ad bellum. As such it would be consistent with the positive paternalistic effects of the aggression upon the conquered sufficing to provide the Romans with a just cause. However, On Liberty indicates that a paternalistic purpose is also a precondition for warrant (Section 3), and Mill attributes no such thing to the Romans in the passage at hand.Footnote 86 Indeed, as Mill puts it elsewhere, it is ‘a very common fact that good comes out of evil’, including ‘human crimes’, and yet ‘whatever incidental and unexpected benefits may result from crimes, they are crimes nevertheless’.Footnote 87
Reading Mill's discussion of Rome in terms of the Mitigation Thesis also aligns well with what Mill says elsewhere about ancient Athens, towards which he is far more sympathetic.Footnote 88 For example, despite judging that Athens’ ‘passion […] for conquest and dominion’ ‘was most beneficial to the world’, and ‘could not have been other than it was without crippling them in their vocation as the organs of progress’, Mill still describes it as ‘a blemish, when judged by the universal standard of right’.Footnote 89 Thus, although one might expect Mill to think of Athens as having a stronger claim to paternalistic purpose than Rome, he still indicates that its aggression lacked warrant.Footnote 90
Of course, in treating Athens’ domineering as a mere ‘blemish’ Mill can also be taken to downplay the significance of its wrongdoing.Footnote 91 However, since Mill's rationale for doing so is that there were extenuating circumstances, it aligns with the Mitigation Thesis. For example, on the one hand, he observes that a passion for domination and conquest was ‘universal in the ancient world’, and on the other, he claims that:
in a small but flourishing free community like Athens, ambition was the simple dictate of prudence. No such community could have had any safety for its own freedom, but by acquiring power. Instead of reprobating the Athenian maritime empire, the whole of mankind, beginning with the subject states themselves, had cause to lament that it was not much longer continued; for that the fate of Greek civilization was bound up with it, is proved by the whole course of the history.Footnote 92
Thus, Athens’ passion for domination is a mere blemish for two reasons. Firstly, given the historical context, the inner kernel of that passion, the more modest desire for power, could have been satisfied in a manner justifiable via the self-defence clause, as Athens needed power to ensure ‘safety for its own freedom’. That is, Athens’ search for power was warranted; its evil was to take it too far. Secondly, where transcension of the limits of morally justifiable conduct is universal, it makes no sense to ‘reprobate’ the powers that distinguish themselves by bringing great benefits to mankind through their wrongdoing. Such reprobation should be reserved for the real forces of reaction and regress.Footnote 93
6 The Martial Thesis
Returning to Non-Intervention, following the Roman example, Mill turns to a second kind of case in which the civilization clause does help to justify a war against a barbarian state. However, contrary to what one would expect if his goal were to defend imperial civilizades, he does not offer examples of civilized states engaging in unprovoked attacks on barbarian states that are warranted by their paternalistic purposes and effects. Instead, Mill provides cases designed to show that if a civilized state is engaged with a barbarian state, as opposed to some other kind of power, it is easier to justify the claim that the former will need to (1) resort to war for the sake of self-defence (or protection of others); and (2) escalate such wars into wars of conquest in order to achieve its defensive (or protective) aims (Martial Thesis).
To that end, Mill notes that, since ‘a civilized government cannot help having barbarous neighbours’, ‘it cannot always content itself with a defensive position’, in the sense of ‘mere resistance to aggression’. It may instead be ‘obliged to conquer them, or to assert so much authority over them’, as to ‘break their spirit’, and render them ‘no longer formidable to it’. Mill's key point here is that, to insist upon treating aggressive barbarian states in accordance with ‘the rules of ordinary international morality’ applicable between civilized states, such as the rule against conquest, is naïve because such rules imply reciprocity: ‘But barbarians will not reciprocate’, or ‘be depended on for observing any rules’.Footnote 94
At this point, it is worth remembering that Mill takes evidence of a tendency towards aggression as a pro tanto reason for categorizing a group as barbarian.Footnote 95 In consequence, he can only explain such a tendency in terms of barbarism if this means explaining it in terms of other paradigmatic features of barbarian life. Mill's analysis implies that, compared to savage peoples, barbarian peoples’ greater cooperation, communal solidarity, wealth, and military power will tend to make them more effective aggressors without reducing their hostility to outsiders. Likewise, the fact that their economies are based on slavery (or some variant thereof), along with other forms of violent exploitation or predation, will tend to give them a stronger interest in attacking alien groups for economic gain, while their greater acquirements of mind will tend to furnish them with a more inspiring religious or ideological rationale for doing so.Footnote 96 For such societies, Mill suggests, it will be hard to constrain the will to aggression even if it should be obvious to them that it will not serve their long-term interests.Footnote 97
One point of contrast here is the situation in which a civilized power encounters aggression from savage tribes. Mark Tunick maintains that, since Mill takes savage life to lack community, and his opposition to civilizades is framed in terms of opposition to one community forcibly civilizing another, the civilization clause still opens the door to civilizades against savage peoples.Footnote 98 However, there are two reasons to reject this claim. Firstly, Mill refers to the most primitive peoples as ‘savage communities’, and denies that we can know whether ‘there was ever a time when human beings lived in a state of entire isolation’.Footnote 99 Secondly, Mill's writings for the EIC on the ‘scourge’ of the raiding ‘hill tribes’ of India suggest that: (1) the EIC's primary motivations were defensive and protective; and (2) the Martial Thesis was less salient in their case because of their military weakness, and the ease with which they could be accommodated. For example, Mill describes some (supposedly) aggressive tribes being induced into agricultural settlements, and other forms of civilizing employment, through gifts of land and promises of protection against the ‘barbarian’ Indian states that would otherwise hunt them for enslavement or elimination. Likewise, even the more implacable ‘mountaineers of the Afghan and Beloochee frontier’ – whose aggression led the EIC to ‘attempt to retaliate […] in their hills’, resulting in ‘failures, sometimes almost disasters’ – are said to have ultimately accepted kindred ‘conciliatory measures’ upon acquiring ‘knowledge of our power’.Footnote 100 Thus, for Mill, even if military force was necessary for defence and protection against them, outright conquest was not.
The second point of contrast, only this time more implicit, is the scenario in which one civilized state is confronted by another with a vestigial barbarian tendency towards aggression. In that case, Mill's analysis suggests that the latter's non-barbarian characteristics – including its greater overall capacity for reciprocal cooperation, stronger commitment to relying on law rather than mere force, and lower hostility to alien peoples – will tend to make it easier to resolve the conflict through mere resistance and forbearance in conjunction with reasoned diplomacy. Moreover, even where this fails with a civilized power, as Mill takes it have failed in the case of Napoleonic France, he thinks the problem is more likely to stem from the role played by a particular despotic leader, whose removal will settle the issue without an outright conquest of the society as such.Footnote 101
When it comes to defensive conquests of barbarian peoples by civilized ones, Non-Intervention offers two concrete examples: ‘the French in Algeria’ and ‘the English in India’. Mill also suggests these examples are important because of the supposedly misguided criticisms they have generated.Footnote 102 In the Algerian case, Mill seems to be thinking of the way in which the gradual ascendancy of the western powers allowed them to end the centuries of piracy and slave-raiding that had been directed against them by the Islamic states of the Barbary Coast, a security threat far transcending any single leader.Footnote 103 As one historian whose summary Mill might well have found congenial puts it, following the Napoleonic Wars, during which the Barbary states had enjoyed a freer hand, ‘the United States imposed a treaty on Algiers in 1815’, and the ‘Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-French naval forces attacked Barbary ports in 1816 and 1819 respectively’. Finally, the ‘French seizure of Algiers in 1830 ended a process of cajoling, intimidating, or battering the Barbary states into freeing Christian slaves’.Footnote 104 Given the ineffectiveness of mere resistance to such long-standing aggression, Mill deems it naïve to deny that a conquest was justified on grounds of self-defence, even if France's treatment of Algiers can be criticized on alternative grounds.Footnote 105
We have seen that Mill's reference to violations of the ‘universal rules of morality between man and man’ (XXI: 119) should not be reduced to crimes committed in bello (Section 5).Footnote 106 However, such crimes – along with other post-bellum colonial abuses – provide the most obvious alternative grounds upon which an otherwise defensive conquest could become illegitimate.Footnote 107 Nevertheless. Mill also posits a distinct way in which such a conquest could go morally wrong. This pertains to the single exception to his claim that barbarians lack national rights, namely, ‘a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one [i.e. a civilized nation]’. For Mill, if a civilized state defeats a barbarian state militarily in self-defence, the power this gives the former over the latter can translate the said national right into a jus post bellum duty on the part of the civilized state to rule it in a paternalistic and civilizing manner. However, since some members of the barbarian state may continue to present a threat to others, either within their community or without, Mill conceives of the said duty as protective as well as paternalistic because the power that the civilized state wields over the barbarian people renders it ‘morally responsible for all evil it allows them to do’.Footnote 108 For example, although Mill does not highlight this himself, his point implies that when the French acquired the power to end Algiers’ slave trade in white Europeans, it was duty-bound to end Algiers’ slave trade in non-Muslim black Africans too.Footnote 109
7 The Case of British India
According to Mill, the EIC acquired its ‘Indian empire’ through ‘injustice and crime of many kinds’.Footnote 110 Given his claim that a state can acquire strong special protective duties through fighting justified wars of self-defence, the same would be true of wrongful wars of aggression. In consequence, one might conclude that he takes the EIC's civilizing duties in India to stem from a duty to compensate for historical injustice. After all, this would align with his view of British colonialism in Ireland, which he says was born of an illegitimate act of ‘usurpation and conquest’.Footnote 111 Given that historical crime, he claims, Britain's duty was not to withdraw but to compensate,Footnote 112 by providing a civilizing governance unless or until its failure to fulfil that duty produced an Irish national majority set upon creating free institutions of their own.Footnote 113 However, even if Mill takes the EIC to have duties to India stemming from historical injustice, this wouldn't explain why Non-Intervention offers the ‘English in India’ as a case of a just war. Nor would it explain why he takes his claim that ‘a civilized government cannot help having barbarous neighbours’ to be relevant to that case.Footnote 114 To solve these puzzles, we must examine why Mill thought the EIC had a right to make itself the neighbour of the ‘barbarian’ peoples of India in the first place.
In Mill's discussion of the transient ‘savage’ peoples of North America and Australasia, he never considers the possibility that they had a moral right to veto large-scale European settlement.Footnote 115 This seems to be because he views these peoples as having been scattered across vast ‘unoccupied’ territories in a quasi-anarchic condition,Footnote 116 thereby allowing the Europeans to settle unilaterally without automatically aggressing against them. This, in turn, allows him to focus his early evaluations of settler colonies on whether their economic management was optimal for the metropole, the colonists, and the cause of global economic cooperation more broadly.Footnote 117 In contrast, in the case of ‘barbarian’ India, with its dense settlements, centralized authorities, and legally defined borders, it seems unlikely that Mill thinks Europeans could have settled there unilaterally without thereby aggressing against the pre-existing inhabitants.
Nevertheless, this would not have precluded Mill from judging the EIC to have established its presence in India legitimately in the seventeenth century. After all, its first factories were established with the permission of the Moghul Emperor, to whom the EIC paid taxes in return for protection, and it soon received ‘a royal phirmaun for a general and perpetual trade’.Footnote 118 It is also significant that Mill's claim that the EIC went on to establish its empire in the eighteenth century through injustice and crime does not imply that the EIC was not itself subjected to the same by either its European competitors, the Moghul Empire itself, or the independent states that emerged as the latter fell into its quasi-anarchic decline.Footnote 119 After all, if Mill took the EIC to have established its presence in India legitimately, he could have taken his belief that barbarian peoples lack national rights to show that the EIC was not duty-bound to tolerate unjust predation and intimidation in the name of respecting barbarian sovereignty. From that perspective, the EIC's fortification of its factories or trading posts, and adoption of some of the other trappings of a territorial state, would also have seemed legitimate insofar as it was necessary for self-defence in a chaotic and predatory environment. Moreover, this would align Mill's condemnation of the EIC in that period with that of ancient Athens – which sought domination when entitled only to power (Section 5) – as the EIC's measures took it beyond the realm of self-defence into that of tyranny and aggression.Footnote 120
The preceding also lays an intelligible foundation for Mill's account of the EIC's supposedly just conquests in the nineteenth century in Non-Intervention, which begins with the observation that it ‘never was secure in its own Indian possessions until it had reduced the military power’ of the ‘native States of India’ to a ‘nullity’.Footnote 121 Here the immediate justification for military resistance is defensive, with the fact that the EIC was dealing with semi-barbarian powers indicating why mere resistance was insufficient, and an escalation to demilitarization was necessary. Although that falls short of a justification for conquest, Mill proceeds to explain how this kind of warrant for demilitarization – generated via both the self-defence and civilization clauses – can generate a subsequent warrant for conquest and empire via the protection clause.
According to Mill's account, the defensive demilitarization of the Indian state governments that threatened the EIC created several interacting moral problems. One unintended side-effect was to render these governments vulnerable to attacks by internal and external enemies, for which the EIC was thereby morally accountable. The obvious solution was to extend security guarantees to the governments thus weakened. However, he explains, this gave them a sense of impunity that reduced their incentive to rule responsibly, thus rendering the EIC responsible for the resulting harm done to the governments’ subjects. The next attempted solution was to make the EIC's security guarantees conditional upon minimal standards of good governance. However, as one would expect given Mill's account of the paradigmatic barbarian's refusal to be bound by rules, the governments often violated the treaties.Footnote 122
This leads to Mill's major criticism of the EIC during the period of his employment, namely, its failures to respond to treaty breaches with enforcement. For example, in the case of the King of Oude, with whom the EIC had signed a treaty in 1801, Mill says the EIC failed to respond to his misrule for more than ‘fifty years’ with anything more than ineffectual ‘remonstrances’ and ‘threats’, thus leaving it ‘morally accountable for a mixture of tyranny and anarchy’. In consequence, Mill explains, although many viewed the EIC's deposition of the king in 1856 as a ‘political crime’, it was really ‘a criminally tardy discharge of an imperative duty’.Footnote 123
The preceding suggests that Mill's defence of the demilitarization and conquest of the Indian states is far from a defence of imperial civilizades. Instead, it purports to show that acts of self-defence, legitimated in part by differences of civilizational attainment, can generate duties of protection through the shield of empire. Moreover, Mill's Oude example indicates that, once such protective duties are established, fulfilling them through acts of protective conquest need not require any additional paternalistic rationale. After all, in that case the EIC was allied with the discontented subset of the king's subjects whom Mill took to have a right to call for protective intervention. In consequence, Mill did not need to justify the imposition of EIC rule on the king's loyal subjects in paternalistic terms, as opposed to it being a necessary cost of preventing harm to others.Footnote 124
Nevertheless, Mill is clear that if a civilized state (or its commercial proxy) conquers a barbarian one in this way, it is duty-bound to fulfil the attendant protective and civilizing duties of empire better than the native despotisms it replaces.Footnote 125 Judging barbarian populations unprepared for liberal democratic government, but nevertheless considering that system a universal ideal, Mill takes these duties to include the use of despotic rule to prepare them for liberal democratic self-rule, and thus a life beyond despotism.Footnote 126 However, Mill emphatically denies that this involves coercively assimilating the conquered people into the language, culture, or religion of the conqueror, as if the EIC's duty was one of coercive Anglicization.Footnote 127 Although Mill endorses the coercive elimination of some Indian practices, he usually does so in the name of protection, such as when he endorses the EIC's prohibition of infanticide and slavery.Footnote 128 It is only when he takes intellectual barbarism to produce activities so self-harming as to be ‘abhorrent to humanity’ that he appeals to the civilization clause to justify their coercive elimination.Footnote 129 For example, Mill praises the EIC's prohibition and suppression of ‘voluntary’ suttee, for the good of the widow, along with other forms of ‘self-immolation’ (not requiring ‘harmful’ assistance from others), such as religiously motivated self-starvation.Footnote 130 However, Mill also emphasizes that such paternalistic coercion should be a last resort, undertaken only if persuasion and other indirect forms of discouragement fail.Footnote 131
8 The Engagement Thesis
The preceding discussion has shown that, while Mill rejects imperialism, there are at least two reasons for taking him to be a contingency theorist with respect to empire. Firstly, his position implies that if uncivilized peoples refrain from aggressing against their neighbours or some subset of themselves, there is no justification for civilized states to draw them into an empire against their will. Secondly, he takes a liberal empire dedicated to civilizing, and ultimately emancipating, once-conquered subjects to be committed to its own elimination. Nevertheless, we will now see why Mill still comes close to being a necessity theorist with respect to empire in his own time.
Given Mill's portrayal of the uncivilized as prone to violence, one might wonder why he thinks the civilized should seek to engage with them when they are not already geographical neighbours. After all, why not leave them in isolation, thereby reducing the risk of confrontation and even war? In the case of savage peoples, Mill's answer is that such engagement is the inevitable by-product of settler colonialism, which civilized peoples have a right to undertake in a non-aggressive manner. In contrast, in the case of engagement with settled barbarian peoples, he emphasizes the mutual benefits of the voluntary exchange of economic goods and ideas, the mutual self-awakening that can attend awareness of radically different cultures and ways of life, and the civilizing ripple-effects that can result.Footnote 132 Given that Mill also believes that if barbarians respond to peaceful engagement with aggression that necessitates their own conquest, they will benefit from the civilizing despotism that results, he takes such engagement to be justified despite the risk of confrontation it entails (Engagement Thesis).
However, Mill also reinforces the Engagement Thesis with two further considerations. Firstly, that non-engagement with one civilized state is less likely to result in an uncivilized people enjoying ‘splendid isolation’ than engagement with some other advanced power.Footnote 133 Secondly, where this makes such engagement a de facto inevitability, the optimal scenario is for the engagement process to be led by the most civilized state of all. In Non-Intervention, Mill suggests that Britain should play this role because its unique lack of ‘aggressive designs’, and disinclination to ‘quarrel for ascendancy with those who are as strong as itself’, means that:
If the aggressions of barbarians force it to a successful war, and its victorious arms put it in a position to command liberty of trade, whatever it demands for itself it demands for all mankind. The cost of the war is its own; the fruits it shares in fraternal equality with the whole human race.Footnote 134
From this perspective, the risk of war would not count as a reason for the British to refrain from engagement because the risk of aggressive war against uncivilized peoples would be higher if it were left to other powers to engage instead. Moreover, Mill takes British engagement to serve the global common good because it is compatible with other great powers engaging on similar terms, thus ensuring that the emerging world order bears the imprint of the values of its most civilized power.Footnote 135
This also helps to explain why Mill's growing awareness of British atrocities and abuses being conducted with public support in India, Jamaica, and New Zealand in the late 1850s and 1860s filled him with such pessimism.Footnote 136 After all, if Britain offered the best hope of a world order based on empire rather than imperialism and predation, its failure to completely suppress – and in some cases even condemnFootnote 137 – aggression and tyrannical lawlessness on the part of those tasked with engagementFootnote 138 indicated that the best feasible world order would retain a strong barbarian element for some time to come.Footnote 139
The problem, as Mill saw it, lay largely in the difficulty of ensuring that the most broadly civilized Britons maintained control of the nature of the engagement. After all, if Britain's narrowly civilized society remained broadly uncivilized, there would be no shortage of Britons totally unsuited to the task. In the case of India, he worried that the transition from EIC rule to Crown Rule, following the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, meant that what he saw as the EIC's relatively wise and noble ruling elite had been replaced by something inferior. A key concern was that government ministers would not simply lack the EIC's specialized knowledge, but that domestic political pressures would make them less able and willing to constrain the British contingent of the ‘rapacious Europeans’ whose goal was imperial plunder.Footnote 140 Given his negative assessment of the alternatives to British rule, Mill continued to view it as the least bad option for India.Footnote 141 However, this also reflected his judgement that the Indians could expel the British if enough of them wanted to, and that this generated a de facto constraint on the worst forms of imperial misgovernment.Footnote 142
In consequence, the apparent absence of such a constraint in the case of settler violence in New Zealand made it even more morally perplexing to him. On the one hand, Mill wanted Britain to protect the Maori against aggressive settler expansionism into their lands, but on the other, he worried that the settlers would respond by declaring independence, and effecting a Maori ‘extinction’ at a more rapid pace. However, despite conceding that he lacked a solution, Mill also held that if Britain could establish a peace-inducing power equilibrium by removing the ‘Queen's troops’ from the side of the settlers, it should do so.Footnote 143 Thus, in the absence of any worse civilized or barbarian power that could take Britain's place, Mill made clear both his opposition to imperialism and the contingency of his commitment to empire, by suggesting that the British Empire should withdraw if this would result in less imperialism overall.
Of course, the interpretative claim defended here, that Mill rejected imperialism in theory, does not rule out the criticism that he was guilty of supporting instances of it in practice. Indeed, this interpretation makes it easy to see how Mill could have slipped from categorizing peoples as barbaric because of their aggression, to presuming they were aggressive on the basis of other barbarian traits, to conflating aggression directed against them with robust acts of civilized self-defence.Footnote 144 However, even those who think Mill is guilty of that should concede one thing: that he cannot be charged with misapplying, or deliberately abusing, his theoretical defence of empire, until it has been properly understood – and that requires grasping its anti-imperialist character.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Susanne Beiweis and two anonymous Utilitas referees for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. They are also grateful to Wendy Donner, for responding to an enquiry about Mill and the Mormons, and Anne Manuel, for information about Mill's copy of Taylor's text, now held at the John Stuart Mill Library, Somerville College, University of Oxford.
