Ethical Empire? offers a richly detailed account of Indian reformism in the mid-nineteenth century. Focused on the ideas, networks, and intellectual lineages of “a global, multi-generational network of India reformers” (3) across several decades and at least three continents, it traces ongoing popular discomfort with first the East India Company and then Crown rule in India. The thinkers, activists, and colonial philanthropists at the heart of this study were members of institutions such as the British India Society (BIS), India Reform Society (IRS), and East India Association (EIA). They have been subject to growing interest in recent years in works such as Zoë Laidlaw's Protecting the Empire's Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870 (2021), Vikram Visana's Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji's Political Thought (2022), and my own Reimagining Empire in India: George Thompson, Anti-Slavery Activism, and the Global Networks of British Colonial Reform, 1831–1858 (2024). However, they are still less well-known than some of their more prominent contemporaries, for example, in the Aborigines Protection Society or the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. As Leonard amply demonstrates, however, they engaged in a sustained critique of colonial practices that often intersected with better-known campaigns as they attempted to hold governments to account over colonial conditions. By exploring this tradition of Indian reformism, Leonard argues, we can better historicize anti-colonialism as “a mutable assemblage of ideologies and practices” (14) that functioned across a range of interest groups and movements. The result is a thoughtful and lively account of reformist ideology and activism in a period that has too often been overlooked or written off simply as one of growing imperial self-confidence and complacency.

Ethical Empire? begins by challenging the notion that “Burke's fusillade against Hastings constituted a drawn-out, last gasp of imperial critique” (5), instead pointing to ongoing activism that connects the “India Question” of the 1780s to the emergence of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century, through an uneven but surprisingly sustained tradition of reformist activity in both Britain and India. Though more prominent at some moments than at others, critiques by activists ranging from George Thompson to Naoroji Dadabhai generated political debate about colonial reform and drew public attention to the inequities of empire. “In order to determine the level of reformist fervor at a particular moment,” Leonard declares, “we must investigate individuals’ personal circumstances, the fortunes of the societies to which they belonged, and the integrity of intra-imperial networks of intellectual exchange. We must also determine how reformers amassed information on Indian conditions, how they interpreted this data, and how they disseminated their findings” (10).

The resulting intellectual history of Indian reformism is grounded in the realities of organizing as well as the intricacies of ideas, drawing on pamphlet literature, associational minutes, lectures, and personal correspondence to plot the “informational circuits” (12) that connected reformers and traversed their various networks across the half-century between the 1830s and 1890s. It does not attempt this in a linear fashion (something which may occasionally be disorienting for readers unfamiliar with the wide range of personalities and organizations encompassed by the book), but rather through a thematic exploration of various anomalies of colonial rule: “Indians’ virtual enslavement, infrastructural decay, a stillborn imperial civil society, violations of the law of nations, and deindustrialization” (3). Thus, we have chapters on the early reformers’ modes of rhetoric and the scripts that allowed them to present both the impoverishment of India's famine-stricken peasantry and the disempowerment of its traditional ruling classes as forms of virtual slavery; on civil society in India and the role that Indians might play through inter-associational linkages in policymaking and within a shared colonial project; on the anomalous idea of paramountcy and the resulting territorial annexation of princely states; and on proposals to ameliorate India's poverty through cash crop production, tax reform, free trade, and reindustrialization. While many of the prescriptions for reform were problematic, exploring them in this fashion allows for informative intellectual connections to be located and explored.

The aims of Indian reformism were complex and sometimes contradictory. While aspects of their agenda would have appeared radical at the time, most of the reformers discussed here were not anti-imperialists. As Leonard notes, it may seem counterintuitive today that “reformers who campaigned for emancipation, free trade, global peace, the extension of the franchise, and aboriginal protection against settler violence did not endorse an immediate British withdrawal and the consequent formation of an independent Indian nation-state” (8). These limitations naturally complicate attempts to evaluate reformist attitudes that challenged specific colonial abuses but ultimately remained embedded in imperial structures and assumptions. While it might be tempting to dismiss them for not being anti-colonial enough, there is much to be gained by taking their activities and ideas seriously. Leonard presents a largely male-dominated cast of characters (a hazard of the material, but something that a greater focus on the organizational role of Elizabeth Pease and other female reformers might have helped redress) and arguably never quite resolves the tensions between principled reformism; professional, political, or pecuniary self-interest; and imperial complicity in some reformers’ attitudes to empire. He does, however, amply demonstrate the value of taking their “motivations, agitational strategies, fraught collisions with obstructionist regimes, and struggle to bring India into the metropole's frame of vision” (8) seriously. This is particularly relevant today, of course, as we face increasingly politically motivated attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of empire by claiming that it must be evaluated by the standards of the time. Ethical Empire? shows that the various structures, processes, and activities that constituted colonialism were controversial, contested, and much debated even as they were happening, offering a nuanced and multi-layered insight into how colonialism's various impacts were received and critiqued. As a result, this deeply researched and beautifully written book will be of considerable interest to anyone working in the interrelated fields of British Imperial and South Asian history, as well as those interested in the intellectual history of colonial philanthropy and reform.