Mill championed liberty at home while justifying imperial rule over Indians

Evidence

17 John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in the last chapter of Considerations on Representative Government (1861/2004) poses a critique of the colonial administration of the British empire. However, Mill’s criticism has to be seen in the context of his advocating “representative government” for the Americas and Australia for they are “composed of people of similar civilisation to the ruling country”, and “whose population”, he says, “is in a sufficiently advanced state”, compared to which “others, like India, are still at a great distance from that state”. Here, Mill argues, the coloniser must rule to introduce a higher form of civilisation. Ambedkar is alluding here to his contemporaries’ reverence for a complex figure who on the one hand championed the cause of individual freedom and liberty, and on the other, defended British imperialism by justifying the right of ‘civilised’ nations to rule over ‘barbarians’. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1044

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic ‘Mill the liberal imperialist’ tension, which connects to broader critiques of liberal universalism and to the reader’s interest in how caste-annihilation thinkers confronted their colonial-liberal interlocutors.