On Reparations, Richard Cobden and the Nature of Nineteenth Century Liberalism.

This week I have been reading Uday Singh Mehta’s (1999) Liberalism and empire: A study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (University of Chicago Press). A very highly cited work. As a contrastive study between Burke (who is the hero of the story) and father Mill, James (the villain), and his son J.S. Mill (it’s complicated) it’s really quite insightful. It’s especially useful to have Burke’s best instincts be explored in a sensitive and insightful fashion—that’s actually quite rare in the academy.

Even so, I have very mixed feelings about Mehta’s book. First, Bentham’s attitude toward empire is really misrepresented. (For this see a work I very much admire, Jennifer Pitts (2005) Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. (Princeton), especially chapter 4.) Second, what Mehta (who is an important Locke scholar) claims about Locke is super interesting, but it is really odd to treat Locke and J.S. Mill as belonging to a continuous liberal tradition. Even if you don’t agree with me on the fact that Locke was no liberal at all, neither of the Mills treats Locke’s political thought as an antecedent to his own thinking. (As Duncan Bell has noted (pp. 695-96) in his famous essay, “What is Liberalism?” this absence was true of Victorian liberals more generally.)

Third — and this is the main point of today’s Digression — as a study of nineteenth century liberal thought on Empire it is seriously attenuated. There is no interest at all in the stance of ‘Manchester’/ ‘Corn League’ liberalism toward empire. Richard Cobden and John Bright are wholly absent in Mehta’s book (this is also an important omission in Pitt’s work—but in her work it at least makes sense.)

The absence of Cobden and Bright is quite peculiar. They were the leading figures of nineteenth century British liberalism (alongside Gladstone, who also goes unmentioned by Mehta). They were massively popular in their own time drawing huge crowds. And this did not end even after they became mainstreamed as parliamentarians. Today they are usually only known as crusading free traders, and if that is all there was to their thought it makes complete sense to ignore them and to focus on the more systematic and more philosophical work of Mill (and the radical/utilitarian tradition). But Cobden and Bright were incredibly courageous in their anti-war and anti-militarist (cosmopolitan) stances, losing their seats in parliament for opposing the Crimean war. Both Cobden and Bright stood for peaceful, functional integration with other nations. And while Cobden was lukewarm about democracy, Bright was the true hero of expanding the nineteenth century British franchise. They were also known critics of slavery, empire, and imperialism. And Bright, in particular, played a key role in shifting public opinion in Britain toward the North against the secessionists during the American Civil War.

It’s hard, however, to be fond of Cobden (1804 – 1865), who is not an especially riveting author (unlike Bright, whose speeches are among the very best in the English language). But it doesn’t mean he is not worth reading. Take, for example, his (1853) pamphlet How Wars are got up in India: The Origins of the Burmese War. It was prompted by outrage over the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852-53) and the incredibly flimsy British justifications offered for it.

Much of the pamphlet is devoted to recounting the events that purportedly justified the war. But the real core of the argument is that the way the British government have set up government in India and the incentives for mischief by colonial administrators and naval officers makes it nearly impossible to prevent entanglement in relatively cheap foreign wars that lead to costly and degrading permanent territorial expansions.* (One sub-text of Cobden’s argument is that imperialism is a drain on public finance, but that argument is less important in this pamphlet.)

The pamphlet closes with a striking set of paragraphs that I quote in full:

Public opinion in this country has not hitherto been opposed to an extension of our dominion in the East. On the contrary, it is believed to be profitable to the nation, and all classes are ready to hail with approbation every fresh acquisition of territory, and to reward those conquerors who bring us home title-deeds, no matter I fear, how obtained, to new Colonial possessions. So long as they are believed to be profitable, this spirit will prevail.

But it is not consistent with the supremacy of that moral law, which mysteriously sways the fate of empires, as well as of individuals, that deeds of violence, fraud and injustice, should be committed with permanent profit and advantage. If wrongs are perpetrated in the name, and by the authority of this great country, by its proconsuls or naval commanders in distant quarters of the globe, it is not by throwing the flimsy veil of a "double government" over such transactions, that we shall ultimately escape the penalty attaching to deeds for which we are really responsible. How, or when, the retribution will react upon us, I presume not to say. The rapine in Mexico and Peru was retaliated upon Spain, in the ruin of her finances. In France, the razzias of Algeria were repaid by her own troops, in the massacres of the Boulevards, and the savage combats in the streets of Paris. Let us hope that the national conscience, which has before averted from England, by timely atonement and reparation, the punishment due for imperial crimes, will be roused ere it be too late from its lethargy, and put an end to the deeds of violence and injustice which have marked every step of our progress in India.

So not unlike his contemporary, Lincon, Cobden quite clearly believes in a providential order in which history is inscribed. This order keeps track of national political sin. And he prophecies retribution for the British.

Not unlike a Biblical prophet, Cobden refuses to flatter his democratic audience; for public opinion is fully implicated in cheering on imperial expansion. This echoes a sardonic passage in Wealth of Nations:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.

As I argued recently, Hobson connects the dots and treats the political economy of the media as a feature of the imperial party. (Hobson is then also led into the temptation to treat ordinary people as basically good and also victims of empire.)

Be that as it may, Cobden also offers a way out from divine punishment. And this is quite striking: “atonement and reparation.” And, of course, the argument for both is not rooted in fear of divine retribution, but the nature of justice and common humanity. As Smith teaches, atonement is a possible means not just of expiating harms, but also a means to re-establish common humanity among victim and perpetrator.

Let me telescope out. There is a recurring tendency to treat Manchester liberalism as heartless, calculating utilitarians. So much so that even major works that treat of nineteenth century liberalism are unable to devote any attention to them. This strikes me as a mistake because they are the first liberals who figured out how to be a mass political movement and arguably (despite their many defeats and genuine and non-trivial limitations) the most successful of all time. In Bright, especially, one is never far removed from the Quacker religiosity of his childhood.

Because of the centrality of J.S. Mill in the imagination of nineteenth century liberalism and because of the forward-looking structure of Rawls’ political theory, there is a growing common sense that reparations for historical wrongs are somehow incompatible to liberalism. But this is only very partially true. I always point out that the one country that engaged in reparations for historical sins on a very large scale, the German Federal republic, initiated this while ordo-liberals and ordo-liberal ideology were reigning there. But it’s important to see that this is not an idiosyncratic case. The most ‘classical’ of the classical liberals, Cobden, grasped the true nature of British empire, and came to the conclusion that its victims were owed reparations.

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*Wikipedia correctly notes that “In the work he theorized why similar disputes with the United States never culminated in war. According to Cobden, the reason was "that America is powerful and Burma weak... Britain would not have acted in this manner towards a power capable of defending itself.”" This is not wrong, but doesn’t get at the heart of the argument.