Political Theory

H02(a) - Decolonization #2: Reflections on Colonialism and Post-Colonialism in the Developing World

Date: Jun 12 | Time: 10:15am to 11:45am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : William Barclay (Carleton University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Janice Feng (Trent University)

From Revenue Systems to Mass Death: Racial Bureaucracy in British India?: Chris Barker (The American University in Cairo)
Abstract: The British official in charge of Bengal during the disastrous 1866 famine refused to take any responsibility - a key concept of liberal political theory. Theorizing in the Malthusian spirit, one might conclude that “gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear,” bringing population back into lockstep with the land’s carrying capacity. However, as Amartya Sen has argued, democracies do not experience famines because they face public criticism and maintain their legitimacy and power through elections. Authoritarian governments lack these constraints. Famines - and famine relief efforts - illustrate the misapplication of liberal political economy and liberal imperial theory, the false promises of bureaucratism, and the flaws of racial bureaucratism, as I argue in this paper. Lieutenant Governor of Bengal Cecil Beadon’s own exculpatory statement on the causes of the famine and the relief effort paraphrase a passage of JS Mill’s Principles of Political Economy sent to him by John Strachey, architect of British famine policy. For Mill, in times of famine government should counsel general moderation of consumption, because subsidies do not reduce prices and enrich the middle-men. As his August 15, 1867 letter to Thomas Plummer shows, Mill was aware of the Orissa famine, but he did not speak or write on it. In the course of the parliamentary debate about Orissa, Viscount Cranborne, Secretary of State for India, noted that Mill’s liberal doctrine was systematically misused in doctrinaire fashion to starve “some 750,000 persons.” Mill’s silence was broken by a shouted cry of support, “Hear, hear!” and yet Mill did not speak in parliament on the famine, the misuse of liberal theory, or even the shocking claim that his own textbook on political economy shaped the British policy that provided too little famine relief, too late. Famine relief policy was illiberal, but famines were induced in the first place by a system of imperial land tenure and revenue systems that were wealth-extractive in intent. In the paper, I step back to address the efficiency and impartiality of British revenue collection in India. I bring failures in these areas back around to the original purpose of the Company, which was to transfer wealth from India to Britain. The path-dependency of the for-profit corporation (the East India Company) charged with the impartial administration of a large territory comprised of distant and different subjects is a part of global liberalism’s story that is too often overlooked. This paper therefore recenters theorists’ focus on revenue systems, taxation, and unintended consequences (famines) as systematic failures that cannot easily be addressed within the liberal frame of intervention vs. non-intervention. In the words of Stafford Northcote, Secretary of India during the Orissa Famine and past co-author of the famous Northcote-Trevelyan report, the cause of the 1866 Orissa Famine was “an official lack of courage” of the officers of the Raj. The “bureaucratic demon” that silenced the local revenue collector, who was charged with making reports about local conditions, and who retracted his report under pressure from his superiors, form an episode in the exercise of power-knowledge and non-parrhesia that shows the limits of bureaucratic administration. Finally, the racial component of these failures were noted by Northcote: “the conduct of Englishmen towards Asiatics and other races is very often such as to make me blush.” The 1866 famine was by no means the first or the most mortal famine in British India. Attention to the failures of the British administration and its consequence - mass-death in famines – helps to clarify the scope of imperial power, clarify the form of administrative power that was exercised over so-called dependencies, and recenter studies of Metropolitan liberalism on how practices of administrative control over territories and populations were created on the periphery.

The Role and Function of Recognition for Fanon's Conception of Freedom: William Gregson (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Frantz Fanon is often seen as both a proponent and radical critic of the politics of recognition. This article seeks to reconcile Fanon’s project of freedom as both being foundationally concerned with establishing the conditions for recognitive reciprocity and providing an alternative to the recognition paradigm. While it is argued that misrecognition poses a threat to freedom insofar as it consists in the objectification of an otherwise free and self-conscious subject, Fanon nonetheless identifies three freedom-disabling forms of recognition: i) recognition-seeking as a form of bad faith, ii) essentialist recognition of group identity, and iii) recognition as falsely equated with freedom itself. Ultimately, Fanon avoids these obstacles by articulating freedom as self-constitution, for which recognition is a necessary but insufficient condition.

China in Herder's Political Thought: a Reassessment: Simon Kow (University of King's College)
Abstract: Johann Gottfried Herder’s robust approach to cultural diversity in his historical and political thought has been seen by sympathetic commentators as an important shift away from the more egregious aspects of Enlightenment universalism. They champion Herder’s insistence that different world cultures, past and present, cannot be judged by the values of eighteenth-century Europe, and that each culture contains its own internal standards of happiness and virtue. This would suggest that Herder would be more cognizant of cultural particularity and difference than other eighteenth-century thinkers, and thus avoid the trap of either idealizing or denigrating China based on European models of Enlightened absolutism or Oriental despotism. On the contrary, as I argue, Herder’s presentation of China is even more caricatured and dismissive than that of such Enlightenment critics of China as Montesquieu or Diderot. I will consider Herder’s remarks on despotism and race before turning to his stress on the Mongolian origins and genetic character (genetischen Charakter) of the Chinese, and his assessments of the Chinese moral and political order. Despite Herder’s robust appreciation of cultural difference in many respects, his account of China is influenced by Enlightenment critiques of Chinese despotism and goes beyond them with his emphasis on China’s ‘genetic character’ as a deformed Mongolian culture. Herder’s hostile account of China is not an aberration in his thought, but rather an integral part of his philosophy of history and thus an extension of later Enlightenment critiques of China.