LIBERALISM AS A GLOBAL TRADITION

There are, broadly speaking, two main ways that political theorists have tended to understand the globalization of liberalism. In one perspective, the circulation of liberalism is closely associated with the circulation of electoral democracy. Representative democracy was given a central place in Albert Hourani’s seminal reconstruction of Arabic thought of the “liberal age,” especially in discussions of early Egyptian nationalism (Reference Hourani1962, 193–221). In Rise and Growth of Indian Liberalism (Reference Buch1938), one of the first English-language academic studies of a non-European liberal tradition and a work self-consciously modeled on Harold Laski’s The Rise of European Liberalism (Reference Laski1936), the political scientist Maganlal Amritlal Buch identified “the principle of democracy” as one of the three pillars of Indian liberal thought, alongside economic nationalism and a broad program of civil rights (249–55).Footnote ¹ Around the same time, Bimanbehari Majumdar’s History of Political Thought: From Rammohun to Dayananda (Reference Majumdar1934) described the “liberal school of political thought” which emerged in British India in the late nineteenth century as a fundamentally “democratic” movement (233). And for Alfred Cobban (Reference Cobban1945), the extension of liberalism beyond Western Europe and the Atlantic world meant the extension of rights-based democracy, a counterpoint to statist authoritarianism. Within this framework of interpretation, the appeal of liberalism for global thinkers lay in precisely those norms of equality, autonomy, and consent which, generally, are taken to provide the scaffolding for modern democracy as a regime (Brettschneider Reference Brettschneider2007). These narratives echo John Rawls’s well-known formulation (Reference Rawls1999) that the diffusion of liberal principles across societies necessarily entails the diffusion of constitutional democracy.

A second, more recent paradigm has emphasized liberalism’s role in the rise of shared ideas about social, economic, and racial equality around the world. A wave of scholarship has come to explore how liberal concepts were—and, more prescriptively, can be—deployed to challenge various international and domestic socioeconomic hierarchies. The focus here has been on liberalism’s capacity to recognize deep cultural and social diversity (Ivison Reference Ivison2002), to affirm the equal standing of peoples in international society (Manela Reference Manela2007; Pitts Reference Pitts2009), to support arguments for racial equality (Mills Reference Mills2017, 201–15; Holley Reference Holley2024), to justify discourses of rights (Banai Reference Banai2021; Bayly Reference Bayly2011), and to lend credence to redistributionist economic measures (Bajpai Reference Bajpai, Jackson and Stears2012; see also Panikkar Reference Panikkar1962, 14–20). One particularly interesting line of inquiry has underlined the egalitarian possibilities opened up by vernacular adoptions of Lockean notions of property, natural rights, and ownership of the products of free labor (Sartori Reference Sartori2014). This new turn has reconstructed liberalism as a capacious, polyvocal philosophy. It has helpfully dislodged some older understandings of liberal thought as a constellation of ideas thoroughly imbricated in dispossession and colonial expansion (Losurdo Reference Losurdo2011, 219–40; McCarthy Reference McCarthy2009, 166–91; Mehta Reference Mehta1999; Parekh Reference Parekh and Shtromas1994). Yet the view of liberalism’s globalization now current in contemporary political theory, stressing a conceptual connection to rights and egalitarianism, has also had the effect of eliding the specific problem of representative government. In this, recent commentary parallels trends in the historiography of European liberalism itself, wherein questions of political representation have increasingly become subordinated to questions of social and ethical relations (Selinger and Conti Reference Selinger and Conti2020; see Rosenblatt Reference Rosenblatt2018).

The goal of this article is to recover a third aspect of liberalism’s global career: its transformation into a theory of elite leadership. A doctrine neither inherently wedded to popular self-government nor lacking a theory of political representation, liberalism, I contend, was reworked to argue for popular political unfitness under conditions of colonial dependence and to advocate for an electoral system that vested legislative power within a vanguard intellectual class, presented as uniquely capable of modern political judgment. The reservations many nineteenth-century Western European liberals had regarding mass politics are well documented (Englert Reference Englert2024; Kahan Reference Kahan2003). Yet there is a striking lack of attention to the ways that a principled rejection of mass democracy animated the uptake of liberal thought beyond Europe and the United States, especially in colonial contexts. In the case of British India, for instance, the tensions between democracy and liberalism have rarely been considered intellectually generative, making possible dismissive interpretations of early liberal politics as little more than a mask for the class interest of an emerging bourgeoisie (McLane Reference McLane1977; Seal Reference Seal1968). I show here that skepticism of popular political capacity assumed a particular ideological shape as liberalism took hold in South Asia through the middle of the nineteenth century. An analysis of imperial political economy’s effects on the character of the poor located the possibility of full popular government within an unspecified future and generated a concomitant argument regarding the need for elite tutelage. A discourse of hierarchical political leadership, I argue, needs to be considered as significant an aspect of liberalism’s travels as any commitments to inclusive popular rule or equality.

To make the argument, I turn to the work of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), one of the first figures in Indian political thought to clearly locate himself as a participant in a transnational, imperial liberal project. Over an almost 40-year period from the late 1860s to around 1910, Naoroji produced a voluminous amount of writing on the nature of representative government—its history, its meaning, its relationship to political liberalism, and its function in the context of empire. These reflections have received little more than cursory glances from historians of Indian political thought. For Dinyar Patel (Reference Patel2020), Naoroji’s primary import lies in his role as one of the earliest and most vocal critics of the nexus between industrial capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century, a critique that had far-reaching consequences for the development of later anti-colonial thought (263). While Vikram Visana (Reference Visana2022) briefly notes Naoroji’s lack of interest in universal suffrage (148), he presents Naoroji as a theorist of “labor republicanism,” attentive to the unequal circulation of capital among constituent populations of the British Empire. Others have examined Naoroji’s Macaulayite invocations of Britain’s civilizing mission (Koditschek Reference Koditschek2011, 293–7), his meticulous statistical documentation of colonial poverty (Bayly Reference Bayly2011, 194–8), or his protectionist measures to stanch the outward flow of capital from the Indian subcontinent and create a “spatially delimited national economy” (Goswami Reference Goswami2004, 225). Readings of Naoroji as an advocate of state-led protectionism especially accentuate long-standing views of him as above all a forerunner of mid-twentieth-century economic nationalism (Chandra Reference Chandra1966; Ganguli Reference Ganguli1965). Finally, Naoroji’s successful candidacy for the British parliament on a Liberal Party ticket in 1892 has meant that he occupies an important place in attempts to understand the empire’s complex, evolving relationship with India, Ireland, working-class activism, and racial difference during the final two decades of the Victorian era (Banerjee Reference Banerjee2010, 36–74; Burton Reference Burton2000; Stubbings Reference Stubbings2016). To my knowledge, there is not yet any work focused on Naoroji’s political theory of representation. We continue to have an incomplete picture of a key modern political thinker, a writer and activist who was a central figure of pre-Gandhian Indian politics and, just as importantly, a major conduit for the movement of liberal ideas outside of Britain’s imperial center. This article addresses the oversight.

I reconstruct Dadabhai Naoroji’s thinking on representative government by locating it within the world that formed him: the crisscrossing intellectual networks of nineteenth-century colonial Bombay. As a whole, Indian political thought of the late nineteenth century was deeply imbued with historicist language about popular backwardness and incapacity, finding itself unable to claim the people as a source of authorization (Sultan Reference Sultan2024, 67–96). I show how, in the specific regional context of the Bombay Presidency (maritime western India), ideas about mass backwardness derived from political economy analyses of imperial policy and led to assertions about the need for leadership by a vanguard class. I trace the emergence of an economically oriented reformist discourse in Bombay in the 1840s and 1850s. Contextualizing Naoroji as a participant in this reformist milieu, I show how it led him to formulate a particular narrative about mass-elite relations in India. In the second part of the article, I use previously unexplored primary sources to examine Naoroji’s later analysis of the nature of electoral politics, relating his assessments to the broad notions of leadership outlined in part one and elaborating on the connections he drew between political representation, the capacity for rational thought, and economic exploitation. The subsequent section analyzes Naoroji’s last major effort to institutionalize representative government through an imperial federation. I emphasize continuities between the turn to federation and nineteenth-century discussions of representation. Finally, in the concluding section, I reflect on the place of Naoroji’s theory of elite representation in the global history of liberal political thought.

YOUNG BOMBAY AND “LIBERAL SENTIMENTS”

Dadabhai Naoroji’s discussion of political representation was grounded in an understanding of nineteenth-century Indian social and economic dynamics which he began to articulate between the mid-1840s and the mid-1860s. In May 1840, the 15-year-old Naoroji first enrolled at the Elphinstone Native Education Institution (later Elphinstone College), established in 1827 by the erstwhile Governor of Bombay, Montstuart Elphinstone, with financial support from the port city’s local business interests. Elphinstone College provided the context for Naoroji’s initial intellectual formation. His time at Elphinstone, first as a student and then as a lecturer in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy from 1849, coincided with the college becoming the center of an important intellectual movement, referred to colloquially, then and now, as “Young Bombay.” By the early 1850s, the English-language Bombay Times was making repeated references to the rise of a “Young Bombay Party” based at Elphinstone (Anonymous 1852).Footnote ²

Reflecting on the reality of British suzerainty over western India after 1820, the demise of the Maratha Confederacy and its attendant structures of rule and authority, the escalation of Protestant missionary polemics against Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and local folk belief, and the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment introduced by the Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen-trained teachers at Elphinstone (for instance by John Harkness, who had studied moral philosophy under Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh), a group of students and instructors began to insist that India was in the midst of an enormous generational shift. Bombay’s insertion into a maritime world market centered on the rapidly industrializing commercial core of England had created a new intellectual division in Indian society: a division between those acquainted with European modernity, and those outside of it. As Rosalind O’Hanlon (Reference O’Hanlon1985, 88–102) has observed, the small but highly vocal group of “student radicals” at Elphinstone in the 1840s considered themselves to belong to the first camp, endowed with the faculty of “practical reason” and standing apart from a “traditional” society mired in irrationality, hierarchy, and superstition and facing inevitable crisis in its encounter with Britain. The student radicals of Young Bombay saw themselves as belated conscripts of the Scottish Enlightenment, privy to a rationalistic mode of inquiry absent from society at large. Interestingly, their straightforward association of modernity with practical reason and rational judgment differentiated them to a significant extent from philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Smith, Hume, and Hutcheson, all of whom considered affect and passion to be as much a motor of sociability as reason (Berry Reference Berry1997; Forman-Barzilai Reference Forman-Barzilai2010; Sebastiani Reference Sebastiani2011). Nonetheless, despite this important difference, the role of the Scottish Enlightenment in the emergence of the Young Bombay movement at Elphinstone was considerable. It was not a coincidence that the Dumbarton-born Monstuart Elphinstone was himself a product of the intellectual ferment of late eighteenth-century Scotland, justifying his educational initiatives in Bombay with reference to the proposals for state-supported public instruction given in Volume II of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ([1776] Reference Smith1982) (Zastoupil Reference Zastoupil and Hanifi2019).

It was in his interactions with the Young Bombay circle and its engagement with rationalistic philosophy that Naoroji first encountered the trope of mid-nineteenth-century Indian society as split into opposing camps. While there were a number of interlocutors and influences present at Elphinstone—Gopal Hari Deshmukh, Dadoba Pandurang, Bhau Daji, Navrozji Fardunji, and others—a key inspiration for Naoroji was the dynamic young geographer Bal Shastri Jambhekar (1812–46), who had been recruited by Harkness to teach at Elphinstone during the institution’s early days in 1834. The first bilingual educator and journalist in Bombay, Jambhekar was the central node of the Young Bombay movement, committed to a lifelong mission to train a cadre of university graduates from Elphinstone, well-versed in modern European philosophy, who might undertake large-scale social reform projects across Bombay Presidency. In the June 26, 1840, issue of his Anglo-Marathi weekly Bombay Darpan (Bombay Mirror), Jambhekar ([1840] Reference Jambhekar and Jambekhar1950, 66–7) stated that the goal of his pedagogical movement was to “spread liberal sentiments in matters of religion and politics” among a “Hindoo community” in urgent need of “improvement.” The English term “improvement” and the equivalent Marathi term sudhar were ubiquitous in the articles published in the Bombay Darpan through the 1830s and in the pages of Jambhekar’s subsequent periodical, Dig Durshun (Revelation of the Path), through the early 1840s. The preoccupation with sudhar again carried the imprint of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the tradition’s belief in the improvement (and progressive development) of mankind (Berry Reference Berry1997, 70).

Jambhekar’s efforts were perceived at the time as a sign of an emerging new class in Bombay, separated from the society around it and seeking to transform the latter. The English travel writer Marianne Postans (Reference Postans1839), following a tour of Elphinstone College, took “the modest and highly gifted individual … Bal-Shastree” (47) to be symptomatic of the ways “the native gentry” was “elevating itself by means of newly acquired intelligence,” foreshadowing a day of “mutual appreciation, between European and native talent” (45). The Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court, Thomas Erskine Perry, wrote a short memorial note for Jambhekar in The Bombay Courier lauding him as the novel product of an embryonic “enlightened morality resulting from an excellent European education” with “an anxiety and a zeal for Native improvement” (Perry Reference Perry1846). And the Oriental Christian Spectator, an American missionary publication, remarked in March 1833 that Jambhekar’s writings seemed to be wholly “fitted to inform, expand, and correct the native mind” (Anonymous 1833, 127–8). Naoroji came to view Jambhekar as something of a mentor during his student years. Reflecting back on his time at Elphinstone, he credited the geographer with being the crucial “teacher” of his youth, especially regarding matters related to “Native Improvement” (Naoroji Reference Naoroji and Jambhekar1950, 332–3). He used Jambhekar’s Hindustanatil englishanchya rajyacha itihas (History of British India) ([1845] Reference Jambhekar1854), an account of the intellectual impacts of the East India Company’s ascendance, as a textbook for his own students years later, while working as a lecturer at University College London (UCL 1857, 6). Naoroji appears to have been especially taken with the core thesis of Jambhekar’s History, that the true import of the British Empire lay not in political conquest but in its introduction of rational thought to India (Inamdar Reference Inamdar1960, 323–5).

That Naoroji imbibed Jambhekar and the Young Bombay circle’s reformist zeal over a 10-year period between 1840 and the early 1850s was evident in the projects he undertook at Elphinstone, from editing the periodical Rast Goftar (Truth-Teller) to organizing the Dynan Prasarak Mandali (Society for the Spreading of Knowledge) to spearheading projects for women’s education (see Patel Reference Patel2020, 30–45). These initiatives set Naoroji and his Elphinstone colleagues at odds with traditionalist authorities such as the elders of the Parsi panchayat (community council) and orthodox Brahmins, as well as with a new, broad social category which, the Elphinstonian Dinshaw Edulji Wacha later recounted, members of the Young Bombay movement increasingly began to refer to as “the mass of the population” mired in “ignorance” and “darkness” (Wacha Reference Wacha1920, 632–4). As Dinshaw Wacha described it, as the efforts of “Mr. Dadabhoy Nowrojee and his friends … those pioneers of social reform” (183) got under way, a view quickly emerged among them of the “masses” of Bombay city and the surrounding countryside as hopelessly suspended in “a low state of vitality” (471). In the eyes of Thomas Erskine Perry, who became the chief supporter of Naoroji’s efforts to continue Jambhekar’s legacy, a mere minuscule proportion of India’s population had been able to “emancipate the human mind” enough “to govern themselves,” while “the mass of society” remained bound “in inextricable straits” (Reference Perry1855, 96). At its first recorded appearance within Anglophone public writing in western India in the 1840s and 1850s, the English word “mass” was immediately deployed to signify stasis, in stark juxtaposition to the dynamic new conceptual universe of liberal reformers.

The accounts of mass stagnation and incapacity which began to occupy a central place in Young Bombay discourse through the 1840s were rooted in a diagnosis of the evolving imperial political economy of the first half of the nineteenth-century. As early as July 1841, Bhaskar Tarkhadkar, a student of Jambhekar’s at Elphinstone, adopted the pseudonym A Hindoo and wrote in impassioned tones in The Bombay Gazette that the primary economic effect of two decades of East India Company rule in Bombay had been of “draining India of its wealth and reducing it to poverty” (A Hindoo 1841, 103). Imperial conquest and occupation were not novel phenomena. But, for Tarkhadkar, what distinguished the British in India from earlier empires such as the Romans in North Africa was the imposition of a “predatory” trading system which destroyed domestic manufacturing capacity and thereby depressed wages and limited the amount of capital available to producers (103).Footnote ³ Tarkhadkar’s letter connected the “poverty” resulting from imperial trading policy to the character of the Indian masses, insisting that “dread” about “the effects of the approaching poverty” was the cause of a general “anxiety of mind and fear” and prevented the subject populace from appreciating the “humanity” underpinning the colonial government’s liberal reforms (103). Erskine Perry himself, in similar tones, singled out the observation that “poverty” was the chief “characteristic of the land” as an explanation for the “improvident habits” of the Indian people (Perry Reference Perry1855, 96–7). Poverty was equated with a kind of mental debilitation, a barrier to gaining familiarity with a new mode of rational, rights-based politics. Ongoing, large-scale deprivation of the bulk of the population was identified as a source of moral and political exclusion from modernity and a primary reason for the intellectually fractured nature of nineteenth-century society.

Through his involvement with Young Bombay, Naoroji became intimately familiar with such political economy analyses of colonial social dynamics (Naik Reference Naik2001, 4432). The depth of Naoroji’s engagement with the economic language of Young Bombay became clear in the years following his departure for England in 1855, when he shifted his base to Liverpool and then London to found the trading firm Cama and Company. On March 27, 1866, Naoroji delivered a much-publicized riposte to John Crawfurd, President of the London Ethnological Society and former Resident of Singapore, who in mid-February of that year had published an essay titled “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man,” asserting the inherent civilizational backwardness of Asian society. Naoroji and Crawfurd’s public exchange was published together in the same volume of the Transactions of the Royal Ethnological Society in 1867. Crawfurd’s February paper was adamant about the fundamental, unavoidable inclination toward “misrule,” “apathy,” and “dislike of innovation” within “the nations of Asia” (Crawfurd Reference Crawfurd1867, 73).Footnote ⁴ While Naoroji rejected the most virulent strands of Crawfurd’s racist essentialism, he proceeded to add a caveat of his own. Within a nation like India, recently incorporated into the expanding British Empire, there were important differences between those able to be “reinvigorated by modern western civilization,” former rulers “now displaced or still remaining” who were hostile to the entire project of British governance, and, at the bottom, the vast “mass” of the subcontinent, whose “improvement” remained “confined within small limits” (Naoroji Reference Naoroji1867a, 144–5). India as a whole lagged behind the “free institutions,” “high moral culture,” and even the “mental development” attained by Victorian England, but, in India itself, the capacity to operate successfully within the constraints of “modern civilization” was distributed unequally among social groups (144).

Naoroji traced the nature of mass deficiency to the structures of imperial rule. Citing the testimony of an unnamed “Parsee gentleman” who regularly traveled between India and England (141), he argued that the empire drew “millions every year from India” in commodities, revenue, and taxation, but cared “not so much for it as for a rotten English borough” (142). A simultaneous drain of resources and a lack of reinvestment in industrial and educational infrastructure created conditions for deepening poverty. Denied the “advancement in material prosperity and mode of life” achieved in industrial England, the Indian poor remained “ground down and depressed” in matters of “development” and the cultivation of “public spirit” (144). The result was a deep fracturing of the “character of the people” along economic lines (145). Naoroji’s critique of a racialized hierarchy of global civilizations was perfectly compatible with his insistence on a recently arisen, economically determined hierarchy of capacity. In breaking apart Crawfurd’s crude racial categories, Naoroji treated familiarity with modern rationality both as a product of the inequities of empire and as a metric for classifying populations.

The account of Indian society that Naoroji sketched for his London audience in 1867, simultaneously ethnographic, historical, and economic, was framed squarely by a Bombay-based liberal tradition that positioned a relatively small group of elites as possessors of rational faculties amidst a mass population trapped in poverty and, consequently, irrational and unformed by processes of modernity. The first generation of liberal thinkers in Bombay city converged around a shared narrative about the emergence of new divisions in India as a result of South Asia’s integration into an imperial industrial economy. Mapping conceptions of rationality and irrationality onto assessments of material well-being enabled these thinkers to posit a novel understanding of the colonial encounter as one beset by opposition and conflict between modern and premodern camps. They unequivocally viewed modern subjectivity as the precondition for India to attain rational progress and consequently sought to reserve the power of popular leadership for those groups considered to be sufficiently socialized into liberal principles. The Young Bombay movement thereby came to formulate an understanding of the need for a vanguard class. It was this paradigm, connecting economic conditions to the faculty for rational thought, which Naoroji began to convey publicly from the 1860s. It was also the paradigm which laid the foundation for his politics.

“THE FEW EARNEST AND TALENTED”

In early May 1867, Dadabhai Naoroji gave one of his first avowedly political speeches to inaugurate the East India Association, an early London civil society group set up in 1866 to discuss the condition of India after the disbanding of the Company and the establishment of Crown Rule. Naoroji emphasized the transformation wrought by the onset of the British Empire in language that hearkened back quite directly to Jambhekar’s commentary in History of British India. “The political condition of India before the consolidation of the British rule,” Naoroji declared, was “the usual Oriental despotism” marked by “want of law,” “disorder,” and “general ignorance” (Naoroji [1867b] Reference Naoroji and Parekh1887, 26). The British Empire had brought about an “enlightenment” of the country, where the concept of “enlightenment” for Naoroji was defined above all in terms of facility with “the new political life” of liberalism (27). Naoroji’s speech was replete with references to “enlightenment” as a process of intellectual upliftment. The appreciation of “rational” principles like freedom of speech, popular government, and legal equality marked both the demise of long-standing Oriental despotism and the revolutionary transformation of a stagnant, hierarchical society.

Yet the enlightenment of India was a project marked by unevenness. It had made no inroads into the “mass”—that enormous, amorphous, and beleaguered multitude of the urban and rural poor. As Naoroji put it:

Naoroji presented the Indian masses as outliers to the modernity of the empire. Though nominally British subjects, they inhabited a conceptual world outside of—or even prior to—that of Victorian Britain. The mass understanding of politics itself, as a domain of collective human action, was deeply simplistic. It showed no cognizance of the nature of constitutional equality or popular government. It evaluated imperial politics with the “simple criterion” of the state’s noninterference in private life, with no further conceptions of rights or participation.

While the origins of mass incapacity lay in the inherited legacy of Oriental despotism, Naoroji held that the problem had been deepened by the empire’s fiscal policy. Taxation, high-interest loans, and “home charges” levied to offset the costs of European civil and military presence (29) meant that any revenue generated by Indian producers was taken “clean out of the country” (30) and “added to the resources of England” (30) without the prospect of a commensurate “commercial return” (29), so that the country was being “continually bled” (31). The large-scale sapping of local capital this entailed led to a rapid decline in the “vitality and vigor” of the working population, rendering them further incapable of understanding liberal theories of government (31). Material destitution distorted the Indian poor’s encounter with the modern world. Whether or not the “hitherto apathetic and ignorant mass” would one day become capable of learning modernity’s “new political lessons,” Naoroji concluded, was contingent on their ability to break from the poverty imposed by imperial terms of trade (28).

Insofar as there had been an enlightenment in colonial India, it was the provenance of a numerically minor but intellectually significant demographic of businesspersons and university graduates in the three Presidency towns of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. Citing the example of his own Young Bombay circle around the journal Rast Goftar, Naoroji argued that these classes were committed to individual rationality as an organizing principle of social, economic, and political life and, importantly, aligned themselves with the founding values of imperial liberalism. Their adherence to the political principles of the empire was not in doubt. As enlightened rationalists, they had also come to embrace their historic role as “natural leaders” of “the mass of the people” (37). They were social, economic, and intellectual products of the British Empire and needed to be seen as agents extending the enlightenment project beyond Western Europe.

Naoroji broached the topic of political representation once he had drawn a line between “leaders” and “masses” as distinct classes. Participation in the governance of empire necessitated familiarity with the rationalistic ideals upon which Naoroji perceived liberal imperialism to be premised. Since the Indian masses could not evince any such familiarity, the introduction of popular government in South Asia was unthinkable. Naoroji was adamant that “the lower classes of the population” did not “understand” and “much less cared” for the modern notion of “representative government” (42). Their conception of politics did not allow for election to be considered a normative value. India as a whole lacked the “necessary elements and qualifications for the introduction in its integrity of the representative system” (42). Yet, Naoroji continued, representative government might be safely conceded for the enlightened class that had now emerged within the Presidency towns. The new class of “leaders” was sufficiently wedded to a rationalistic liberalism as to be able to elect lawmakers from among itself for local legislative assemblies and even for the imperial parliament in Westminster (43). The task of elected Indian lawmakers would be to continue the empire’s pedagogical process of reform and “improvement”—a word Naoroji used as frequently in his speech as Jambhekar had in his Anglo-Marathi journalism of the 1830s—using legislation to rationally order an irrational population. A contrast between the forms of judgment exercised by an evolved colonial elite and an inert, impoverished mass became key to drawing a legal boundary around those perceived as able—and ready—to be accepted into the category of imperial citizen, and those still on the outside.

Naoroji’s speech to the East India Association, published under the title “England’s Duties to India,” marked his first proper discussion of representative government. Indeed, it was one of the first discussions of imperial legislative representation within modern Indian political thought as such. As C.A. Bayly (Reference Bayly2011, 61–72) has shown, representation in the first half of the nineteenth century in British India generally referred to local participation in juries. There were occasional calls for more robust republican self-government in the 1840s and early 1850s, spurred on by the global impact of the pan-European 1848 revolutions, but these were scattered, inchoate demands, few and far between (Bayly Reference Bayly2011, 111). Certainly, in the particular regional context of Bombay, no public figure drew great attention to political representation through the first three decades of Elphinstone reformism. Representative government as such did not become a coherent aspiration within Indian political theory until the second half of the 1860s. And Naoroji’s 1867 London address may be considered a crucial moment marking the wider intellectual turn toward electoral representation.

It is all the more striking, then, given the speech’s pivotal historical role, that the entry of representative government into Indian liberal discourse through Dadabhai Naoroji coincided with a deep sense of unease about unequal capacities for rational thought among the Indian people. As Naoroji made clear, imperial representation could not be predicated upon principles of popular sovereignty or the rule of an enfranchised demos. It had to be oriented toward empowering an enlightened elite to enact its modernizing agenda. Suffrage and the right of office-holding were curtailed with reference to the attainment of modern subjectivity. The function of representation was to allow a particular class to lead the backward society around it.

Naoroji continued to make similar points regarding the centrality of electoral representation to a reformed imperialism over the next two decades. His opening address to the first meeting of the Indian National Congress (INC) at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay in December 1885 reflected a curious amalgamation of imperial fealty with a now fully-formed theory about the importance of representation to the empire’s diffusion of enlightenment. As Sanjay Seth (Reference Seth1999) points out, despite the name, it is misleading and anachronistic to consider the INC under Naoroji as “nationalist” in any sense, since the organization conceived of itself as thoroughly imbricated in the imperial civilizing mission. Naoroji suggested that elected legislative councils with powers to set budgets, oversee taxation, and interpellate the imperial executive were required in Indian provinces so that those who had “sufficiently advanced” in their familiarity with the principles of modern “good government” might act for the “improvement of the Natives” (Naoroji [1885a] Reference Naoroji and Parekh1887, 321–3). Representative councils might then expand and aid the empire’s reordering of native society. Underlying such arguments was a clearly epistocratic justification for colonial class rule. The sophisticated knowledge needed for modern governance was limited to certain groups. Naoroji’s repeated call to admit Indian elites into the colonial administrative service through the 1870s and 1880s—a central demand of the early INC—was likewise premised upon the need to institutionalize governance by a demographic which had demonstrated familiarity with both liberal values and with the needs of the suffering poor.

An important though now-forgotten episode in the maturation of Naoroji’s theory of representation occurred in March 1886, 3 months after the founding of the INC, when he was invited by the cotton trader Jamsetjee Jeejabhoy (whose family firm had earlier employed Bhaskar Tarkhadkar) to lecture to the Ripon Club, a largely Parsi social institution in Bombay. Naoroji began his lecture by addressing the objection that an elite could never be considered fully representative within an electoral system, since it did not share the opinions and mores of the masses. Naoroji suggested that this critique was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of political representation. Representation was not a mechanism to allow a population to have its views reflected in government, but rather a system to select and allow those persons who were trained in an “advanced civilization” to act in accordance with their particular judgments of the social good. Naoroji argued:

It followed that representative government, correctly understood, was nothing if not a device for elite rule. Under a properly designed representative system, “the few earnest and talented” would “lead the van of all progress and civilization” and be maintained as “the leaders of mankind” (361). Incidentally, this sentence contained Naoroji’s first use of a variation on the “vanguard” metaphor to describe a class of representatives.

Having rejected critiques of elite representation, Naoroji’s lecture then proceeded to develop a correlative account of legislation. Like representation, law was not a reflection of popular will. The substance of lawmaking was not created collectively by an assembled people, like the Rousseauvian general will, but needed to be independently ascertained by representatives relying upon reason. “To legislate for a people, whose weal or woe depends upon such legislation” was an “onerous responsibility” demanding the creative use of logic (361). The representative was guided by his own reason and not by the articulated will of a constituency or a mass public, insofar as such a thing could even exist. Naoroji’s depiction of the Indian poor as “the dumb millions” captured their perceived inability to formulate any political judgment at all. Modern legislation presupposed the faculty for complex rational thought, which, Naoroji emphasized, was not inherent or universal in humanity, but was itself the outcome of successful modernization.

From one angle, the defense of elite government that Naoroji articulated in the Ripon Club lecture was typical of the Victorian intellectual milieu he inhabited in London and Liverpool. We might think, for instance, of John Stuart Mill’s defense of plural voting for “competent,” educated constituencies in Chapter Eight of Considerations on Representative Government ([1861] Reference Mill2011, 162–87).Footnote ⁵ A more direct connection was William Gladstone himself; commentators of the time regularly depicted Naoroji as a mirror-image of the Liberal Party leader. Even as a vocal proponent of franchise extension, Gladstone harbored apprehensions about the capacity for full self-government on the part of the English working class in the absence of any clear social or wage qualifications. Such fears ensured that the debate on voting rights in 1870s and 1880s Britain remained limited to male householder suffrage, rather than anything approximating full universal adult franchise. In introducing the Third Reform Bill which eventually became the Representation of the People Act of 1884, Gladstone repeatedly stressed enfranchising only those segments of the urban and rural working population who could be determined to be “capable citizens of the State” (House of Commons 1884, 106–83). As Eugenio Biagini (Reference Biagini1992, 310–2) has shown, skepticism about the development of workers’ political consciousness informed even staunchly reformist aspects of Gladstonian legislation.Footnote ⁶ Deep anxieties about political capacity, structured along lines of class and gender, remained foundational to dominant strands of Western European liberal reformism through the late nineteenth-century (Zerilli Reference Zerilli1994, 95–137).

But while there were resonances between Naoroji’s notions of mass irrationality and unfitness and the broader landscape of nineteenth-century thinking on class politics, the divergence between them was more pronounced. Naoroji folded the problem of popular incapacity into a larger structural issue of the hierarchical global economic order put in place by the British Empire by the mid-nineteenth century—a heuristic that was simply never present in the writings and speeches of Mill and Gladstone. For the Bombay liberal, the absence of constitutional knowledge among the Indian masses could not be entirely attributed to unjust local allocations of property and political rights, as might be the case for the poor of England. The condition of the Indian masses instead needed to be understood as the result of a radically new form of material vulnerability, created by the sustained depletion of capital in a deindustrialized economy for the growth of an industrial metropole. The novelty of Naoroji’s account of unfitness, in the context of Victorian political thought, was his recharacterization of the problem as one of an extractive economic relation and, consequently, of a people’s incomplete socialization into modern life within and through empire.

Indeed, over the next 15 years Naoroji began to outline his vision of representation in terms of a clear differentiation between British and Indian social conditions. Naoroji secured a historic victory in the British general election of July 1892 as the Liberal Party candidate from Finsbury Central, becoming the first colonial subject to sit in the House of Commons. His quite unprecedented election, by the genuinely remarkable margin of five votes, was buoyed by constituencies in Clerkenwell who had either been recently enfranchised or were seeking enfranchisement: the suffragette movement, Irish supporters of Home Rule, and, most crucially, those members of the working-class who were recognized as new voters under Gladstone’s 1884 Representation Act. Naoroji was keenly aware of the importance of class-based support to his victory and became an enthusiastic champion of workers’ voting rights and self-representation. The London correspondent for The Bombay Gazette observed in mid-July 1892 that “Mr. Dadabhai ever since his appearance into the political arena” had “paid assiduous court to the horny-handed sons of toil” and that there was “hardly a working men’s Radical Club in the Metropolis at which he has not lectured during the past five or six years” (1892a, 13–4). The same journal later commented that “Mr. Dadabhai is, in regard to labor questions, very advanced; in fact he is almost a socialist” (1892b, 116). Naoroji’s public pronouncements during the 1890s echoed the working class reinvention of liberalism that Richard Ashcraft (Reference Ashcraft1993) has identified as a feature of late Victorian intellectual life.

Crucially, though, on the campaign trail and as an MP, Naoroji throughout maintained a separation between his new working-class supporters and the Indian “lower orders.” He was not ready to concede to the masses of India the same political rights that he presented as being fundamental constitutional entitlements for British laborers. Though subjects of the same imperial sovereign, the two laboring populations were placed differently in relation to the intellectual requirements for modern politics. Naoroji drew the distinction bluntly when he briefly returned to Bombay in December 1893. Addressing the city’s municipal corporation on January 11, 1894, he stated:

The English working class, while politically excluded and economically dominated by domestic owners of capital, was a product of the same modern conditions that had produced representative government. Familiarity with the value of representation was woven into the “atmosphere” of nineteenth-century British political life, regardless of class. Voting and office-holding could be extended to British workers, but not yet to colonial subjects who had only lately, and only in spurts and small fragments, awoken to a “new life.” Both the nature and the effects of destitution in India were distinctive. Shaped by imperial political economy’s simultaneous denial of capital (“wealth”) and knowledge of governance and administration (“morality”) to the space of the colony, the Indian poor were situated outside of the sphere of constitutional modernity much more acutely than recently mobilized metropolitan workers.

Taken as a whole, then, Naoroji’s account of imperial representation derived from comparing the differential experience of modernity in India and Victorian Britain and from a view of representation itself as an exercise in rational judgment. The theory of elite governance that these two premises generated was a theme reproduced across late nineteenth-century Young Bombay liberalism as the tradition turned to political matters from the 1870s. Naoroji’s embeddedness within the larger western Indian intellectual context becomes clear once we read him alongside two of his Elphinstone College colleagues who also became founders of the INC: Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), the key figure in the second generation of Bombay liberal thinkers, and the barrister Pherozeshah Mehta (1845–1915). Naoroji corresponded with Ranade frequently regarding electoral reform; in a letter dated September 26, 1885, he conveyed apprehensions to the younger Ranade about the demanding knowledge, expectations, and “experience” required to be a political representative in India (Naoroji Reference Naoroji, Mehrotra and Patel2016, 505).

Ranade’s own views on representation were contained in an essay titled “Local Government in England and India,” originally published in the July 1882 issue of the Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha edited by S.H. Chiplonkar. Ostensibly presented as a discussion of colonial voting rights, the essay was in reality a wide-ranging comparative historical sociology of political representation modeled on François Guizot’s History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe (1851), a text Ranade cited at considerable length (Ranade Reference Ranade1882, 3–5).Footnote ⁷ Ranade affirmed that the condition of India was different from that of the “self-governed Countries” examined by Guizot, long accustomed to liberal and republican governments (21). Despite the differences between imperial India, postrevolutionary France, and Britain since 1688, he proposed that “election by popular suffrage” might be extended to some Indian provinces to allow for representatives in elected councils, checked by “educational and property qualifications,” to more fully act as “Natural leaders” of the masses (21–2). The result of introducing election would be to create lawmakers able to legislatively restructure and reorient Indian society, leading to “the political education of the people” as well as “the growth of that self-reliant energy” and spirit of individual reason among Indian subjects which was “the highest justification of coercive rule” (22). The task of the legislator was equated with—and collapsed into—the transformative task of the British Empire.

An analogous interpretation of electoral politics was put forward by Pherozeshah Mehta, the Elphinstone College graduate most preoccupied with introducing election into Bombay’s municipal government. In his short but arresting pamphlet The Bombay Municipal Reform Question (Reference Mehta1871), Mehta addressed whether Indian society was prepared for representative government at all, a dilemma he traced back to James Mill’s public testimony to the House of Commons Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company in February 1832. Mehta’s pamphlet was to a large extent a rejoinder to the elder Mill and what he saw as the lingering influence of the utilitarian philosopher’s ideas on colonial administrators.Footnote ⁸ Mehta accepted Mill’s broad dictum that representative government could not be granted to a people “to whose genius they are alleged to be so radically foreign and inappropriate” (Mehta Reference Mehta1871, 22). Representative government was not an abstract, universal value free of civilizational, social, and economic determinants. Its existence was rather predicated upon, and presupposed, the prior existence of a set of “positive qualifications” in society, namely a people’s “readiness and ability to preserve and work the institutions that may be conferred upon them” (29). That a constituency needed to meet a threshold of qualifications in order to be granted rights of suffrage and representation was an argument Mill had made with direct reference to India in his House of Commons testimony, but had also outlined, in a more general sense, in his earlier 1819 Essay on Government ([1819] Reference Mill and Ball1992, 26–35). For Mehta, the “masses of the people” in India remained trapped in the state of political incapacity detailed by James Mill, to the extent that India as a whole could not be given “the full-blown representative institutions of the Western world” (22). In the four decades since the 1830s, there had however emerged in commercial centers like Bombay a new class acquainted with the “higher civilization” of constitutional liberalism (30). This class satisfied Mill’s stringent criteria for democratic rights and could be entrusted with electoral politics.Footnote ⁹

The Young Bombay circle around Ranade, Mehta, and others had therefore developed a coherent, shared doctrine of legislative government by 1890. While concentrating on the importance of representation, the liberal thinkers of Young Bombay insisted that only a modernized economic class could possess full political rights and, concurrently, that the overwhelming majority of the Indian population did not yet have the propensity for judgment needed to participate in constitutional government. Certainly, Bombay liberals were not unique in their attachment to elite representation in the broader universe of Indian political thought during the first two decades of the INC’s existence. A product of the University of Calcutta, the Congress leader Surendranath Banerjea similarly sought to limit the right of office-holding in legislative councils to the “educated classes” of colonial subjects through the 1890s (Banerjea [1895] Reference Banerjea1917, 11–99). But what was particularly salient in the Bombay liberal tradition was the way its proponents reconfigured older ideas circulating in western India in the 1840s and 1850s regarding the need for leadership by a rationalist vanguard and the entrenched premodernity of the impoverished masses. The Bombay thinkers’ attentiveness to the material preconditions for judgment and political participation might even be seen as a prefiguration of later accounts, in moral philosophy and welfare economics, of poverty as “capability deprivation,” a form of disadvantage that prevents persons from accessing shared goods of social and political life (Sen Reference Sen1999, 87–110).

As in relation to his British interlocutors of the time, the distinctiveness of Naoroji’s thought with respect to Indian political argument lay in his constant attention to the global circulation of capital. By the 1890s, thinkers in Bombay began to differ among each other in their understandings of the colonial economy. Despite the trope of a “drain” having been so salient in Young Bombay liberalism of the 1840s, it was no longer uncontroversial by the end of the century. Ranade especially was quite critical of Naoroji’s singular and continued focus on the drain of wealth. In an address to the Pune Industrial Conference of 1890, Ranade disagreed with Naoroji that imperial rule rendered colonies incapable of possessing sufficient capital for industrial growth (Ranade [1890] Reference Ranade and Chandra2018, 274–5). Ranade offered an alternative account wherein the sources of poverty lay in the maldistribution of existing stores of credit and property, along with the absence of a codified system of land tenure in rural regions (271–9). He sought to shift the object of nationalist economic analysis from imperial terms of exchange to regional patterns of resource ownership (see Vora Reference Vora, Pantham and Deutsch1986; Karak Reference Karak2021, 89–97). Ranade’s own formula for limited electoral representation was not framed as an effect of the underlying revenue system of the late Victorian empire, as it was for Naoroji, but was instead presented as a necessary consequence of distorted local state infrastructure and the persistence of economic forms that disincentivized private enterprise.

SWARAJ AND IMPERIAL FEDERATION

The most significant extension of Dadabhai Naoroji’s political thought occurred in the opening years of the twentieth century, a period which also marked the culmination of his decades-long career. The publication of Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (Reference Naoroji1901a) in London cemented his reputation as a key Anglophone theorist of colonial political economy. The text became an important point of reference in a nascent English debate on the link between the growth of monopolistic domestic financial firms and coercive, militaristic expansionism abroad, a thesis defended most famously the following year in John Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (Reference Hobson1902; see Claeys Reference Claeys2010, 235–81).Footnote ¹⁰ Naoroji was chosen as President of the INC for the third time in 1906 and was invited to address the organization at its annual gathering in Calcutta in December of that year. His selection occurred against the backdrop of an imperial community that had changed significantly since the first Congress meeting in 1886. In 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia became a federated state of the British Empire, with its own parliament able to hold inaugural elections in March. New Zealand became a Dominion Colony shortly thereafter. In May 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging ended the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and extended British control over southern Africa while granting self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The first 5 years of the Edwardian era saw the British Empire becoming a more federated political community, with greater constitutional autonomy for Britain’s satellite settler colonies than in previous decades as well as a concomitant move away in Westminster from unionist understandings of imperial governance (Bell Reference Bell2007, 264–6).

Naoroji closely followed the federal reorganization of the late Victorian and early Edwardian empire. Australia attracted his particular attention. Four weeks after the formal establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia in Sydney on January 1, 1901, Naoroji delivered a public lecture at Toynbee Hall in east London arguing that Australia and India stood at two opposite ends of the spectrum of the British Empire. He used Australia to illustrate how “Commonwealth” status—that is, federated imperial status—could allow a colony to “increase in prosperity by leaps and bounds” (Naoroji [1901b] Reference Naoroji1917, 230).Footnote ¹¹ Electoral politics combined with an expansive devolution of legislative powers over budgeting and taxation made it possible for capital to be circulated and redistributed by colonial assemblies in ways consonant with local needs, rather than allowing it to be drained toward Britain. In the 1906 Calcutta address, Naoroji used these earlier observations regarding the transformative power of legislative self-governance in Australasia to render imperial federation into the INC’s new key constitutional demand. His orientation shifted from reform of provincial legislative assemblies in British India toward an internal arrangement of “self-government” similar to “that of the United Kingdom or the colonies” (Naoroji [1906] Reference Naoroji1917, 73). The goal was now the creation of an elected parliament in India on the Australian model. The “self-governing colony” became an object of nationalist activism. It was this federalist parliamentary project that Naoroji described with the Sanskritic neologism Swaraj (“self-rule”).

Swaraj as an imperial federation was equated with representation. At no point in his INC Presidential Address did Naoroji ever define Swaraj with the English word “democracy,” preferring to gloss the term as either “self-government” or as “representative government.” The omission immediately signaled how Swaraj connoted a politics of delegated rule, rather than mass control over (or popular participation in) the process of legislation. Naoroji acknowledged that much of the Indian populace was unprepared for modern politics. The absence of a mass uptake of the language of liberalism signified India’s continued difference from England, where popular “agitation” for rights and liberties was “the life and soul” of the polity (88). Such disparity again marked the difference between the English working class, whether in London, Manchester, or Sydney, and the Indian masses. It also provided a justification for continuing to limit the franchise in a future self-governing Dominion of India, since the Indian people had not “petitioned or agitated enough” in their demands and, as a result, had not demonstrated their facility with the regnant forms of modern popular politics, or what Naoroji referred to as the ability to think and “act constitutionally” (90). Naoroji did not foreground the role of racial identification in shaping the positionality of the English working class vis-à-vis colonial populations—as was done in, say, Du Bois’s contemporaneous analysis of the international dimensions of class politics (Du Bois [1917] Reference Du Bois, Getachew and Pitts2022)—but remained focused on the constitutive material realities of different parts of the empire.

Mass unfitness for political modernity in India was not in itself a bar to the formation of a representative system of government, however. It would be “futile,” Naoroji suggested, to indefinitely “wait till all the people are ready” (79). He observed that parliamentary government in England had emerged in the seventeenth-century long before universal adult suffrage was a thinkable proposition. The political awakening of India had also continued unabated through the late nineteenth-century, an argument that echoed Mehta’s Reference Mehta1871 pamphlet on municipal reform. There now existed “a body of able men” who might vote and function as elected office-holders, forming simultaneously an electorate and a pool of electoral candidates (87). The task of such office-holders would be to use legislation to train the Indian masses in the correct forms of political life and thereby aid in “preparing our Indian people for the right of self-government” (86). Though the concept of a people being “prepared” to undertake self-government marked representation by “able men” as a temporary measure, Naoroji never detailed how the full maturation of popular judgment might be discerned. Such rhetorical open-endedness created a profound ambiguity for the temporality of Swaraj.

In a revealing moment near the end of his speech, Naoroji described the role of political leaders as akin to a “band of political missionaries,” outlining for the people a set of instructions and regulations regarding the substance, form, and practice of political rights:

When such elite instruction was combined with a reworking of economic links between colony and metropole on the new model provided by Australia, the premodernity of the mass population could conceivably be overcome, and their politics reordered in a rational manner. The scheme of political representation contained within the Swaraj speech turned to a class trained in constitutional principles to modernize a class which could not yet act appropriately on its own. Naoroji concluded by stressing the educative mission of representative government—namely a people’s collective socialization into the norms of “progress” and modernity—as central to “the duty of Liberalism” (97). Through a circular logic, the culture of liberalism was equated with representative government, and the purpose of representative government was, in turn, to create a culture of liberalism.

Naoroji’s Swaraj speech can be considered an important text within the body of twentieth-century anticolonial federalist thought reconstructed by Frederick Cooper, Gary Wilder, and others (Cooper Reference Cooper2014; Pagden Reference Pagden2024, 134–8; Wilder Reference Wilder2005; also see Fejzula Reference Fejzula2021). Much like the political thinkers examined by Cooper in the French West African context, Naoroji in 1906 did not yet work within the structural constraints of the twentieth-century nation-state. He similarly sought to reconfigure empire into a community of citizenship and legislative authority for colonial subjects. Yet the theory of political representation which undergirded Naoroji’s project of imperial federation was the product of regional intellectual currents in western India. Even as the scope of electoral government in the Swaraj plan went considerably further than early Congress proposals, since the aim was now an elected national parliament, Naoroji insisted on strictly circumscribing rights of office-holding, legislative participation, and voting according to perceptions of constitutional capacity. Elite representation was maintained as the only viable form of self-rule. Rather than marking a definitive rupture, the final, most “radical” iteration of Naoroji’s thought was largely continuous with nineteenth-century Bombay liberalism, at least in its understanding of the normative purpose of representative government.

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND ELITE RULE

Naoroji did not envisage integrating the Indian poor into an electoral system as actors with any tangible agency. Although he came to interact with stridently revolutionary forms of activism in the final 15 years of his life, going so far as to attend the 1904 International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam alongside Rosa Luxemburg, his theory of representation was always resolutely elitist. The duration of elite tutelage stayed unresolved in his last writings and speeches, paradoxically converting a putatively provisional system of representation into a hierarchical regime which limited political action to the few who could demonstrably meet the intellectual burdens of modern democratic norms. The degree of popular political power that was possible or permissible within the anticolonial movement remained a source of contention in Indian political thought following Naoroji’s death on June 30, 1917, and through the early interwar period, even after the INC came to support universal adult franchise 11 years later in 1928 (Parasher Reference Parasher2023, 89–90).

Among those who continued to affirm Naoroji’s account of leadership after June 1917, the specifically economic analysis of mass irrationality he had inherited from the Young Bombay circle began to be displaced by a more generalized, abstract notion of popular unfitness, bundling together education, social practices, and the absence of political experience. At the INC session of December 1918, Annie Besant voiced support for restricted suffrage, but did not specify the grounds for excluding the overwhelming majority of the population from governance beyond a somewhat vague reference to their lack of preparedness (Indian National Congress [1918] 1919, 108). In The Political Future of India (Reference Rai1919), Lajpat Rai promoted a representative system to empower “the educated and the propertied classes” as elected rulers, arguing that the people of India could be justly ruled by an “oligarchy of their own countrymen” (55). Yet Rai also held that a system of electoral oligarchy did not rest upon an assumption that the fact of poverty barred the poor from ever gaining political knowledge. “Acceptance of the argument of poverty as sufficient to deprive people of political right,” he noted, was incommensurable with “the political ethics of the twentieth century” (48). Rai’s reference to the emergent “ethics” of his time highlighted a sense of temporal and intellectual novelty and suggested the need for a new way of linking the domains of the economic and the political. He sketched out a possibility that “the ryot [cultivator] and working man” might indeed one day assume their “rightful place in the body politic” once the “political consciousness” of the poor had been duly “raised” under the tutelage of their representatives (54). Such defenses of elite representation in the late 1910s no longer singled out material deprivation as an indelible signifier of political unreadiness.

With this shift, inegalitarian theories of electoral politics moved away from being justified with reference to the economic condition of the Indian people. Prior to the developments of the WWI years, I have argued that there existed a discernible language of materially-determined political capacity in colonial India between the 1860s and the early 1900s, of which Dadabhai Naoroji was the most systematic exponent. A focus on differential faculties for political judgment originated from a mid-nineteenth-century view of colonial society as fractured between a new class of rationalist thinkers and an atrophied mass being pushed deeper into economic vulnerability through its forced integration into an unequal system of production and exchange. For figures like Bal Shastri Jambhekar, the project of enlightenment necessitated vesting leadership in the hands of the rationalist elite, who increasingly came to be portrayed as comprising a new vanguard class. From the 1860s, representative government became a constitutional tool to enable this vanguard to lead, through legislation, a mass society whose poverty rendered it fundamentally incapable of accessing modernity. Naoroji’s thought was a product of this trajectory of Bombay liberalism, even as he went further than his peers in subsuming the problem of political capacity under the larger problem of how capital was distributed and accumulated within the British Empire. The connective link between Naoroji’s early works, such as his “Observations” on John Crawfurd’s essay in 1866, and his later works, such as the 1906 Swaraj speech, was his rooting of rationality itself within the material environment of social groups. His approach to representation emerged out of an understanding of mass-elite dynamics as a product of the political economy of empire.

The archives of Dadabhai Naoroji and the Young Bombay movement thus starkly illustrate how new theories of political hierarchy developed with the growth of liberalism from a narrowly Western European and trans-Atlantic doctrine into a cosmopolitan, globe-spanning idiom of political order. Within the philosophical tradition shared by Ranade, Naoroji, and others, representative government was identified as a defining element of political liberalism—an “absolute necessity” of the liberal creed, to use Naoroji’s own terminology ([1906] Reference Naoroji1917, 97)—but was never made synonymous with either popular rule or equality. Representation began its life as, and throughout remained, a means of facilitating a government of the few. It was a response to an economic condition perceived as a site of uneven modernization. To read this theory of elitist political thinking on its own terms requires us to separate out the global intellectual history of liberalism from the twin global intellectual histories of democracy and equality. It is not simply that these three concepts had divergent careers in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Rather, at an originary moment for anti-colonial thought, they were theorized as being in direct opposition to one another. When a political philosophy of liberalism first arose in the colonial world, it only did so through a disavowal of democratic egalitarianism.