Nineteenth-century liberal thinkers held racial-imperial views inseparable from their writings

Evidence

In the first place, nearly every nineteenth-century writer (and the same is true enough of writers in earlier periods) was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire: this is a subject not very well studied, but it will not take a modern Victorian specialist long to admit that liberal cultural heroes like John Stuart Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George Eliot, and even Dickens had definite views on race and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at work in their writing. So even a specialist must deal with the knowledge that Mill, for example, made it clear in On Liberty and Representative Government that his views there could not be applied to India (he was an India Office functionary for a good deal of his life, after all) because the Indians were civilizationally, if not racially, inferior. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 75

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how liberal universalism was never meant to extend to colonized peoples — Mill’s On Liberty/Representative Government contradiction is a recurring scaffold point. — connects to: British liberal thinkers racialized Indians through infantilization without using the word race
• SEED: The Mill paradox — universal liberty articulated while serving the India Office and excluding Indians — is an essay angle on liberalism’s colonial carve-out.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 75