Jennifer Pitts's book is a major contribution to what is now becoming an ever-growing literature on political thought on empire and imperialism and indeed should be credited with having inspired much of the subsequent literature. Even when they come to qualify her claims or to disagree with her on some points, later works have clearly been influenced (and some, arguably, conceived) as a result of the perusal of Pitts's work. Pitts studied the attitudes towards empire of some major political thinkers in late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain and France and compared them with the attitudes of two iconic mid-nineteenth-century liberal thinkers in the two countries, J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Many significant differences between thinkers within each of these two groups notwithstanding, Pitts identifies a ‘turn to empire’ in British and French liberalism by the mid-nineteenth century. While the earlier thinkers she discusses (Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Benjamin Constant) all displayed varying degrees of mistrust of imperialism and remarkable degrees of open-mindedness and respect for different cultures, their liberal successors had, according to Pitts, made a volte-face and embraced empire and imperialism in ways that were unknown among the earlier group of thinkers.
Pitts insists that, unlike some earlier scholarship on liberalism and empire (notably Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire (1999)), her work does not claim that the drift towards imperialism was inherent in liberalism or inevitable; rather, that at the particular time (the mid-nineteenth century), the particular thinkers who emerged as iconic figures of liberalism such as Mill and Tocqueville embraced empire and imperialism for their different complex reasons.
Adam Smith is praised by Pitts for showing respect for cultural difference and is credited with a refusal to dismiss different or less advanced societies as irrational but rather explaining their ways of living and customs as rational reactions to their material circumstances, thus offering functional explanations of their customs and ways, rather than attributing these and their potential defects to the mental state or condition of the peoples concerned. Pitts praises Smith's moral philosophy for proposing ‘that we make moral judgments by comparing our own initial and necessarily partial views about actions or characters with the judgments of other spectators, and thus seek the perspective of a truly impartial spectator’ (p. 244). Edmund Burke receives praise, among other things, for showing genuine concern about the British failure to show empathy with ‘the other’ or the peoples the British ruled be they Indians, Catholic Irish, or St Eustatius Jews. Coming to the utilitarians, Pitts claims that ‘The curious evolution of utilitarian theory in Britain on the subject of empire can perhaps best be observed in the writings of Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the philosophically richest thinkers in the tradition’ (p. 104). Henry Sidgwick's admirers may take issue with this last statement. Pitts also considers in a long section of Chapter 5 the writings of James Mill, whom she sees as having ‘played a crucial intermediary role in the transformation of the utilitarian tradition’ (p. 104). Pitts criticizes James Mill for his prejudiced treatment of Indian civilization and for his abandonment of some of his Scottish predecessors’ (primarily Adam Smith's) tolerant sociological explanations of observed differences, replacing them with his simplistic binary distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ societies and attributing the failures of ‘barbarian’ peoples to their mental states. On the other hand, Jeremy Bentham is praised for his open-mindedness, and for his refusal to accept James Mill's binary distinction and scale of civilizations. Pitts takes issue with earlier scholarship on Bentham on colonies, notably by Donald Winch and Lea Campos Boralevi, who pointed to the inconsistencies and shifts in Bentham's position on colonization and empire. Instead, she presents Bentham as having possessed a more consistent antagonism to empire than previous commentary would have one believe.
John Stuart Mill comes in for the harshest criticism of all after his father. According to Pitts, his acceptance of the binary distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ and its reductions led to a particularly distorted picture of the whole ‘East’ lumped together as a society of barbarians whose minds are still in their infancy and need guidance. One could point to a number of statements by J. S. Mill urging the importance of seeing things from different perspectives and using the differently coloured glasses of other nations for that purpose, statements that sound as if he copied them from Adam Smith's exhortations that Pitts praises as highly commendable in her chapter on Smith. But Pitts would probably (rightly) reply that, while the younger Mill may have aspired to being culturally open-minded (and while he may have displayed a considerable degree of such open-mindedness and aversion to ethnocentrism as far as other European societies were concerned), he showed himself uninterested in cultural diversity in the non-European world and in non-European cultures.
In the two chapters on France, Pitts discusses several thinkers and offers a brief historical sketch of the development of French thinking on empire, but the main focus is on the differences between Constant's castigation of the spirit of conquest and Tocqueville's embrace of imperialism. Pitts is convincing in arguing that ‘Tocqueville's anxieties about the difficulty of maintaining political engagement in France in an age of democratization led him to approve of the exercise of French power in Algeria and elsewhere (India, if possible) and largely to ignore the claims of those France sought to dominate’ (p. 207). I find her main explanation convincing. Given how judicious and conscientious Pitts strives to be throughout, the picture is never black-and-white. Thus, on the one hand, she censors Tocqueville for essentially sacrificing the interests of the colonized peoples to the paramount needs of offering the French people a great object of ambition for exercising national pride and undertaking a grand national unifying project. On the other hand, Pitts has ample praise for Tocqueville's perspicacity in seeing through what he saw as the hypocrisy (or at best self-delusion) of the British about the benign character of their own empire and its benefits for the colonized peoples.
It is probably inevitable that, in a book of the length and breadth of coverage of this one, some oversights may arise. The title of Guizot's Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe is slightly modified. And James Mill did not die in 1838 (p. 123) but rather in 1836. But these are small details in a long book that masters an impressive range of primary texts and scholarship in English and French. But more importantly, how conclusively has Pitts proved that there was a ‘turn to empire’ in mid-nineteenth-century British and French liberalism? Recent and ongoing work on British thought on empire and imperialism has drawn attention to some vociferous liberal critics of empire in the period in question as well as later. To put it another way, how representative were Mill and Tocqueville of ‘liberalism’? But even her partial critics acknowledge Pitts's contribution as major and some of the most fruitful avenues currently pursued by historians of political thought on empire and imperialism have been initiated in A Turn to Empire.
