The two books under review make extremely important contributions to a burgeoning literature on the relationship between various forms of liberalism and imperialism. This has been a fecund topic in recent political theory. The basic question at the heart of this research has been how liberal theory, which has as its foundational premise a notion of free and equal individuals, could nevertheless be used to justify the construction of modern systems of domination and oppression which systematically deny the “Other” both freedom and equality, oftentimes in the most brutal fashion imaginable.

In Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, Thomas McCarthy takes up this question from the standpoint of critical social theory. McCarthy describes his project as a Habermasian “critical history with a practical intent.” His “deconstructive” critique of the idea of human development unmasks its pernicious connections with racism and imperialism, and serves as a precursor to his “reconstructive” aim of defending a communicative approach to development. The transformation of the Kantian liberal notion of a “categorical imperative” into discourse-ethical terms requires, on McCarthy's account, “equal participation by those affected in establishing the normative structures that govern their life together” (pp. 13–14). Put differently, McCarthy ultimately supports a democratized idea of human development appropriately chastened by a keen awareness of liberalism's particularistic deployment of that concept for racist and imperialist ends.

One of the great virtues of McCarthy's book is its interdisciplinary approach. In Part One, McCarthy argues that abstract “ideal” normative theorizing in the Rawlsian vein is too far removed from empirical social reality to make it a suitable vehicle for theorizing racial injustice. Consequently, he turns to “nonideal” theory informed by fields as diverse as philosophy, history, critical race theory, anthropology, and biology to grapple with the problem. Using this approach, McCarthy convincingly challenges recent attempts to enlist the historical Kant into the anti-imperial cause. He shows that Kant's teleological philosophy of history led him to condemn imperialism and reject slavery from a purely moral point of view. However, Kant simultaneously accepted both of these phenomena from an empirical standpoint, as forms of theodicy contributing to the spread of superior European ideas and culture, and thereby aiding human development writ large. McCarthy also definitively establishes Kant as a founding father of scientific racism, and shows that his views on the subject were similar to those advanced by the neoclassical liberal theory of Social Darwinism, which was later used to justify imperial aggrandizement, especially by the United States. The effect of these arguments is to give added weight to his subsequent discussion of the “politics of memory” surrounding American slavery and subsequent “neoracism” (Chapter 4).

In Part Two of the book, McCarthy weaves together various strands of recent scholarship to demonstrate the extraordinary role that the idea of a linear, progressive notion of human development has played in justifying Western imperialism, as for example in the writings of John Stuart Mill, the most famous “modern” liberal and a lifelong defender of the British Empire in India and elsewhere. Mill, and others like him, advanced a paternalistic relationship between colonizer and colonized in which entire peoples were understood as underdeveloped and childlike “savages” and “barbarians” in need of tutelary rule from more “civilized” Europeans. Moreover, McCarthy makes clear the enduring links between the developmental logic that drove such “civilizing missions” and current policies of neoliberal globalization and neoconservative “messianism” (pp. 213–220), the latter a heady brew of divinely sanctioned American exceptionalism and unfettered hyper-capitalism. Such “neoimperialism” countenances massive global economic inequality, extreme poverty, and preventable death. Against it, McCarthy urges the adoption of a reflexive and inclusive approach to human development that does not abandon hope of ameliorating human suffering—even if it can never fully achieve Kantian “perpetual peace”—within the framework of a reworked universal history.

McCarthy's argument is a highly commendable form of philosophical praxis aimed at eliminating historical amnesia in order to rethink the problems of the present. As such, it represents a quantum advance over abstract analytical arguments about global justice. However, the book also suggests the possible limits of a critical theory underpinned by irreducible Kantian commitments. McCarthy argues that there are basic “facts,” or inescapable conditions of modernity, including the growth in “our scientific understanding of nature and our technical ability to manipulate it,” which mean that “certain premodern ethical views could be publicly justified only by appeal to beliefs that are no longer tenable” (pp. 155–157). Following Charles Taylor, McCarthy also holds “that some degree of convergence in economic, governmental, and legal institutions and practices is an unavoidable feature of a globalized modernity” (p. 159). Such “facts” mean “that the scope of deep divergence possible and desirable in today's world may be somewhat more constricted than many multiculturalists suppose” (p. 160). Specifically, McCarthy argues: “the issue confronting postcolonial societies is not whether to modernize at all but how best to do so” (p. 224). Perhaps this is true. Nevertheless, McCarthy's own earlier work on postpositivist philosophies of social science—and the way he deploys that work against the Rawlsian version of Kantian constructivism in this volume (at pp. 33–36)—accurately implies that there can be no straightforwardly unproblematic articulation of what the social “facts” of political modernity are, let alone what they logically and necessarily entail with respect to the tenability of particular arguments about the ethics of human development. Some postcolonial theorists, in particular, might argue that McCarthy begins by assuming too much about the parameters of a democratic discourse on development a priori.

Notwithstanding McCarthy's laudable contributions, however, it would be a fundamental mistake for scholars of modern empire to identify the idea of human development as the sole justificatory rationale for that endeavor, as Karuna Mantena makes abundantly clear in her book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. While Mantena focuses on Maine as the chief intellectual architect of late-nineteenth-century British imperialism, her book is enormously rich and branches out to discuss earlier models of liberal empire, the origins of modern social theory and anthropology, legal theory, nineteenth-century debates over the history of property and land tenure, and the colonial histories of Southeast Asia and Africa. Mantena's wide-ranging erudition amply bolsters her thesis that the logic of British imperialism in India and elsewhere underwent a fundamental shift in the aftermath of the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny.” In the early nineteenth century, Millian narratives of a linear, progressive, developmental history underpinned justifications of empire as an ethical “civilizing mission.” However, when the Mutiny made it abundantly clear that large segments of Indian society rejected the gift of Western “civilization,” the British fundamentally rethought the purposes of their empire.

Mantena shows that Maine and his followers embraced holistic models of culture and society and thereby reinterpreted the relationship between Britain and India as completely dichotomous. The former was a “modern society,” while the latter was a “traditional society” (Chapter 2). On the one hand, by recreating India in the mode of absolute difference, the British could explain why it proved so impervious and hostile to modernization. On the other hand, this was not treated by Maine as a reason to disengage from the project of empire, but the reverse: While the attempt to laminate “modern” British society onto “traditional” Indian society had been a massive error predicated on a basic misunderstanding of the subcontinent, Maine cast the results of walking away from empire as even worse for the Indians themselves. Contact between Britain and India could not be undone, and if the British left, the unmediated effects of that contact would lead to the rapid unraveling and complete dissolution of Indian society into inchoate individualism and chaos. Mantena argues that the creation of the idea of “a native society in crisis” traceable to Western imperial incursions “was Maine's most original innovation.” It was also, on her account, the theoretical linchpin to the late imperial ideological shift to a strategy of “indirect rule” (p. 151). The British intellectually retrofitted their goal away from one of civilizing people towards one of saving intact yet vulnerable traditional societies in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia through the use of indigenous surrogates. The power of this strategy is that it worked perfectly as an “alibi” not simply because it served as an ex post facto justification “for the fait accompli of empire” (p. 11), but precisely because it enabled the British to reframe the ravages of imperialism “as a practice of cultural tolerance and cosmopolitan pluralism” (p. 178). The resonances between these sorts of arguments and the ones we hear today about Iraq are stunning, and Mantena does not fail to alert us to them. She does not discuss Afghanistan, but her argument holds equally well there.

One wishes that Mantena had put her argument into more direct conversation with that of David Cannadine, whose book, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001), covers exactly the same chronological period and thematic issues she does. However, Cannadine argues that British indirect rule was actually governed by a logic of similarity, not difference. That is, the British imperial administrators saw in traditional societies mirror images of their own deeply Burkean class hierarchies, and came to defend them on that basis. For her part, Mantena points out that Maine and others believed that India “represented the ‘living past’ of Europe” (p. 75), which meant that there was a “commonality established between the contemporary East and the premodern West” (p. 82, emphasis in original). At least to the degree that agents of British imperialism saw themselves as aristocrats engaging their native counterparts in preserving an ideologically constructed brand of traditional hierarchical society whose European version they still desperately clung to, there seems to be room for a potential synthesis between Cannadine's and Mantena's respective positions.

This quibble aside, Mantena's main thesis serves as an invaluable corrective to flattened, univocal, and static accounts of the relationship between liberalism and imperialism. By suggesting that there is a dynamic logic to modern imperialism “sequentially structured by moral idealism, culturalist explanation, and retroactive alibis for imperial rule” (p. 180), Mantena has broken new intellectual ground in the study of empire. Hers is a bold and novel argument that should become required reading for anyone interested in modern imperialism. In this sense, whether subsequent scholarly treatments of the topic concur with Mantena's argument in all respects is immaterial. She has written an extraordinary book that cannot be ignored.