Josh White on the British in India, or the U.S. in South Asia

With things having built to a fever pitch on almost every professional front, I’ve fallen badly behind in my reading. Yesterday, I finally had a chance to start making it through my friend Josh White’s latest work, “The Shape of Frontier Rule: Governance and Transition, from the Raj to the Modern Pakistani Frontier.” White is a rising star at SAIS. Fluent in Urdu, he’s traveled all over Pakistan and South Asia, and spent a year living in the North West Frontier Province as a guest of the head of the Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (the coalition of Islamist parties). He writes here with stunning perspicacity on the British occupation of India:

This essentially romantic notion of governance more often than not came together with a conservative (critics might say, “unambitious”) political philosophy, characterized by a certain cultural relativism, a deep Burkean suspicion of social change, and a deference to native institutions. As such, it tended to envisage the British project as – in Lynn Zastoupil’s phrase – an “empire of opinion” in which perpetuation of British dominance was predicated on a recognition of the inherent limits of its own power, and a healthy respect for the role of local opinion.2

It is perhaps not immediately evident why, in the Indian context, a personalist or paternal style of governance would be so closely identified with this classically conservative view of culture and power. But in fact the two were functionally related, in that the institutionalization of Burkean restraint required above all that governance be carried out with a small footprint, and be characterized by the sort of adaptability of which ambitious systems of law are so often incapable. It was not that systems of legal governance were thought to be completely anathema to a culture of deference to local norms; the fear among this school of administrators, rather, was that an impersonal state apparatus would incline toward a form of administration that would, to the detriment of its own longevity, both overestimate its own powers and underestimate the capacities of its colonial subjects.

Over and against this personalist view of governance came a profoundly more ambitious, universalist, and structured ideology of the colonial state. This view was in large part the product of utilitarian thinking which drew on the liberal political philosophy of James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The utilitarian project as it pertained to India was ambitious in that it sought a re-creation of society according to a rational calculus (the most good for the most people); it was universalist in that it consciously and without irony placed the definition of that utility in the hands of those who exercised power (that is, the British); and it was structured in that such a project of social change required a systemic engagement with the social order, and had little patience for what it saw as the haphazard freelancing that characterized personalist and discretionary forms of governance, particularly on the empire’s frontiers.3

This passage puts an enormous amount of liberal political philosophy into perspective; John Stuart Mill, the consummate utilitarian, was the son of James Mill, who was most famous for his history of British India.

So perceptive is White’s take, and so keen in its observation that conservative thinking showed toward greater deference to native institutions, while liberalism tended more toward universalizing principles, that you can almost substitute “American” for “British” and have a critique of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

I’ve always envied people who can write these sorts of analyses; the timeless sorts that always read as though they’re about you. Like the best films, you can watch them now or 20 years from now, in a completely different historical context, and still feel as though you’re looking in a mirror.

Whenever people tell me our generation is dangerously clueless and illiterate, I’m tempted to throw things like this at them. I can’t wait until guys like Josh climb into the leadership.