Early Modern European Nations and Empire

Conclusion
Burke did not want to dismantle the British Empire in India, rather he believed it should and could exert a civilising influence by adapting the nature of its Empire to Indian laws, customs and institutions. One of many ironies in Burke’s campaign against the EIC is that the specially selected target for much of his invective, Warren Hastings, was himself an ‘orientalist’ who claimed to want, and in the opinion of some actually sought just such an accommodation (Moon 1947: 231, 282). Burke latched onto the implication of Hastings’ defence that the EIC’s arbitrary rule was necessary given India’s history and culture, and he used this as a powerful rhetorical weapon. According to Burke, there was no such thing as ‘oriental despotism’ in India. The view that the peoples of India were all ‘in a degraded, servile state… that they are… vile, miserable slaves, all prostrate…’ was a figment of European imagination (Burke 1991: 283). ‘In short’, Burke (1991: 265, 276) argued, Hastings’ defence rested on the fiction of ‘oriental despotism’ perpetrated by ‘Montesquieu [and the]… idle and inconsiderate Travellers…’ he relied upon, all of which was, Burke maintained, ‘absolutely false’. Burke (1991: 346) castigated what he called Hastings’ ‘geographical morality’,
…we think it necessary… to declare that the laws of morality are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over.
The idea that Asia knew no form of government other than ‘oriental despotism’ and that therefore the EIC were warranted in using this style of government in India implied a ‘geographical morality’ that consigned the people of India to a perpetual slavery to British government, and limited liberty, rights and representative government to Europe alone.

Here again, Burke’s attack rested on an idea of law, justice and government informed by universal principles of natural law that applied just as strongly in Britain and Europe as in India and Asia. ‘All Asia’ Burke (1991: 260) argued, would be ‘disfranchized at a stroke’ if Hastings’ defence were accepted. In Burke’s view, the tension between EIC government in India and the ideals of British political discourse was simply unsustainable. Although the impeachment trial ended with Hastings’ acquittal and the apparent triumph of his defence that British government in Asia required a ‘moral geography’ based on convictions of Indian difference, the next century would witness the sustained effort to create a British ‘empire of uniformity’ in India.

For Burke of course, the rejection of moral geography required a greater recognition of Indian differences, differences that made the universal political values to which he was committed more rather than less important. The final irony of Burke’s campaign was that in calling for a greater recognition of Indian difference, he helped to pave the way for the greater subjection of Indian customs, institutions and ways of life to European customs, institutions and ways of life (Davies 1935: 99; Marshall 2003: 90-91). One of the most aggressive spokespersons for this empire of uniformity in Asia, Lord Macauley (n.d.: 71), was to reflect that Burke’s campaign against Hastings showed the key problem of British rule in India had not been that it was insensitive to local custom and institutions, but that it had been too sensitive. Hastings’ failure was not his corruption, but his inability and unwillingness to introduce ‘into India’,
…the learning of the West. To make the young natives of Bengal familiar with Milton and Adam Smith, to substitute the geography, astronomy, and surgery of Europe for the dotages of the Brahminical superstition, or for the imperfect science of Ancient Greece transfused through Arabian expositions, this was a scheme reserved to crown the beneficent administration of a far more virtuous ruler.
Here as elsewhere, Macauley heralded a dramatic shift in British political thought away from the recognition of difference that both Burke and Hastings had sought in different ways (Marshall 1965: 181-3, 187; Bowen 2006: 203). Along with this shift came the consolidation of a new kind of moral geography in which Europe’s claim to superiority came to rest on its supposed monopoly over the universal values that called for uniform application by means of what came to be seen by its proponents as benevolent, civilising empire.
Bruce Buchan
School of Arts, Media and Culture
Griffith University

ABSTRACT:
Much has been written of late about the geographical contexts of Western political thought, particularly in reference to the problem of empire throughout the Enlightenment period (c.1650-1800). The Enlightenment has been identified as crucial to the development of Europe’s ‘Empire of Uniformity’ – a term that captures the claims that some Europeans made to the right to subject other peoples to European values and institutions. In this paper however, I will argue that European engagement with Asia in the Early-Modern and Enlightenment periods (c.1500-1800) was more powerfully shaped by perceptions of ‘difference’ than by aspirations to ‘uniformity’. European perceptions of Asian ‘difference’ in particular were intimately entwined with European self-perceptions. For both European travellers and political theorists, images of Asia were used to sustain increasingly assertive self-images of the ‘superiority’ of European civilisation. In this way, European geographical awareness of Asia served as a grounding for moral claims about the relative levels of civilisation that Asian nations were thought to exemplify, and were taken as sufficient justification for European pretensions to superiority and empire. Such claims illustrate how the development of European empires incorporated an awareness of the diversity of human communities alongside claims to a right to empire.

Introduction
European engagement with Asia in the Early-Modern and Enlightenment periods (c.1500-1800) was filtered through key assumptions in European political thought. Throughout this period, both European travellers to Asia and European political theorists sought to make sense of Asia as a place apart from Europe, different from it in history, customs, society, laws, and politics, but also as a place with which Europeans ought to be closely engaged through commerce and empire (Clarke 1997: 50-3; Gunn 2003: 167-8). European perceptions of Asian ‘difference’ were thus entwined with powerful domestic concerns, and above all with how Europeans wished to see themselves (Batchelor 2003: 79-92). In this paper, I will argue that European travellers and political theorists throughout the Early-Modern and Enlightenment periods used images of Asia to sustain increasingly assertive self-images of the ‘superiority’ of European civilisation. In using the term ‘moral geography’, I want to explore the process by which Europeans construed geographical entities – such as Asia and Europe – as a grounding for moral claims about the relative levels of civilisation that peoples and nations in those regions were thought to exemplify (Wolff 1994: 284-331). These claims were taken as sufficient justification for European pretensions to superiority and empire over peoples deemed less civilised.

The paper begins with a discussion (section 1) of the themes of ‘recognition’ and ‘difference’ in contemporary political thought and their application to the vexed issue of the relationship between empire and political theory. Recent research has been divided on whether European Enlightenment thought (c.1650-1800) was heavily implicated in the contemporaneous development of European empires. Some have argued for instance that those empires were upheld by an ‘Empire of Uniformity’ in Enlightenment thought, a term that captures the claims that some Europeans made to the right to subject other peoples to European values and institutions. Others however, have argued that Enlightenment thought was imbued with a strong anti-imperialist flavour and acknowledged the irreducible diversity of human communities. I will argue in Sections 2 and 3 however, that European commercial and imperial engagement with Asia in the Early-Modern and Enlightenment periods (c.1500-1800) was more powerfully shaped by perceptions of ‘difference’ than by aspirations to ‘uniformity’. These images and representations, I will argue, were deployed to buttress the self-image of Europe as the realm of civility, sophistication and good government. Even when conventional European views of Asia as mired in ‘oriental despotism’ were revised, as they were by Edmund Burke, the assumption of European superiority and the claim to empire was reinforced.

I have adapted the term ‘moral geography’ from Edmund Burke’s campaign (discussed in Section 4) to regulate the affairs of the British East India Company (EIC). The EIC, Burke (1991: 346) claimed, had put aside the universal rights and liberties due to all peoples – European and Asian – and resorted to what he called a ‘geographical morality’ in which, ‘…actions in Asia do not bear the same moral qualities as the same actions would bear in Europe’, and acted as if ‘the duties of men, in public and private situations’ were to be determined by ‘climates, degrees of longitude and latitude…’. The claim that Burke took such violent exception to was not that different peoples should be governed differently, for Burke was well aware of the need for political institutions to be adapted to the traditions and customs of different communities. Rather, he objected to the view that in governing Asian populations, Europeans could put aside what he saw as the universal principles embodied in the ‘law of nature and nations’ because these only applied in the relatively more civilised realm of Europe (Burke 1991: 109). At issue here is a key problem in the conceptualisation of how European empires in Asia (and elsewhere) actually operated. Also at issue is much contested implication of Western political thought in imperial projects.

1. Empires of Uniformity/ Empires of Difference
Political theorists (eg. Tully 1993; Pocock 1999) are now well engaged with questions of the relationship between Europe’s traditions of political thought, and European imperial expansion. Many political theorists (eg. Young 1990; Phillips 1993; Young 2000) have applied and adapted recent debates over the representation of difference in contemporary feminist critiques of liberal political thought to the analysis of the discursive strategies of imperial government throughout the early modern period. For some, a distinctive liberal indifference to difference emerged from the experience of empire. The ‘benign neglect’ of cultural diversity in Western liberalism, Will Kymlicka (1995: 54-5) argues, originated from,
…liberals who went to administer or study British colonies [and] found that the liberalism they learned in England simply did not address some of the issues of cultural diversity they faced.
Confronted by the imperial and governmental problems of cultural diversity, he claims, liberals simply stopped thinking about it and retreated to the comfortable territory of universalism. This account pays scant regard to the conceptual limitations within Western political thought that, as Pagden (1982; 10-14) argues, militated against any genuine ‘recognition of difference’ in the New World throughout the early-modern period.

James Tully (1995: 37) has argued further that Western political thought provided the resources for a sweeping denial of difference that he calls the ‘empire of uniformity’. Tully (1995: 15-16) contends that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European political thought focussed on establishing ‘the equality of independent, self-governing nation states and the equality of individual citizens’ in Europe (and later in white settler societies), while systematically denying recognition to the different cultural identities of Indigenous peoples throughout European empires. He contends that overcoming this legacy of denial of difference requires a genuine (and mutual) constitutional recognition of Indigenous cultural identities. The problem however, lies in what kind of recognition.

Conventionally, Western political thought offers what could be called ‘recognition as familiarity’ that Tully dismisses as part of an ‘imperial attitude’ in which the apparently different other is rendered familiar by translating it into the experience and language of the colonial observer. What Tully aims for is ‘recognition as acceptance’, in which the different other is accepted on their own terms, and is not evaluated and acknowledged in terms of their familiarity with the observer’s perspective. Tully’s (1995: 62-70) argument thus draws attention to the imperial structure of Western political thought which has endured long after the collapse of the political empires of European powers. This is what Tully means by speaking of the ‘empire of uniformity’, a rationalising attitude that subjects and evaluates non-European cultural identity to a single European standard of recognition.

Helliwell and Hindess (2002: 139-52) argue in contrast however, that presenting the problem in terms of the empire of uniformity masks the ways in which imperial administration often did ‘acknowledge cultural and other kinds of difference’. The problem as Helliwell and Hindess (2002: 140) see it, is not one of an imperial indifference to difference, but how cultural and other differences were treated in Western political thought. On the nature of this treatment, opinion remains divided. According to Bhikhu Parekh (1993: 20-33; Parekh 1995: 89) the ‘universalist’ pretensions of European thought did not prevent acknowledgment of cultural diversity, but ‘defined its nature and permissible range in narrow terms’. Uday Singh Mehta (1999: 33) goes much further in arguing that the Western ‘imperial gaze’ is ‘never really surprised by the stranger’ whose difference is ‘recognised as… familiar’ by being reduced to the category of the child or deviant. More recently, Sankar Muthu and Jennifer Pitts have each argued for a more benign interpretation of the relationship between empire and Western political thought. For Muthu (2003: 279), the European Enlightenment (c.1650-1800) was characterised by an acceptance of human cultural and political diversity. Pitts (2005: 26) similarly argues that great eighteenth century thinkers such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham, were all largely hostile to empire while ‘tolerant’ of and ‘broad-minded’ in their attitude toward non-European peoples.

In different ways, these thinkers have each drawn attention to the ways that Western political thought ‘recognised’ difference. The key point however, is not that differences were denied, but represented as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’ in contrast to European standards of progress, development or civilisation. My aim in the remainder of this paper is to show that throughout the Early-Modern and Enlightenment period, Europeans buttressed their claims for commercial and imperial engagement with Asia with images of Asian ‘difference’. I shall begin in the following section with a discussion of some themes in the Enlightenment European imagination of Asia.