Nineteenth Century Progress and Arrested Civilizations

Abstract

The evident ambivalence towards the China Case expressed in the writings of both Smith and Malthus failed to concern a later generation of British political economists. Imbued with a normative faith that society could and should be transformed by the application of a felicific calculus, British economic liberals saw nothing intrinsically valuable in the habits, manners and customs of traditional civilizations. James Mill in his seminal History of India (1858) particularly found the economic arrangements of both India and China autarchic and, therefore, contrary to utility. Although he thought the Chinese in many respects a ‘civilized people’, Mill considered their future progress encumbered by the lack of an authentic morality and ‘the cumbrous contrivance of the Chinese symbols’ which impeded ‘the advancement of knowledge’. Significantly, Mill viewed ‘Hindu’ and Chinese society and institutions broadly similar. (Mill vol. 1: 109) Indeed, throughout his History of India, Mill treated China merely as a footnote that supported Indian socioeconomic practice, rendering generalizations about a common Asiatic model of production plausible. For Crawfurd whose fieldwork in Java, Burma and China gave added credence to Mill’s hypothesis, the economic foundation of despotism throughout Asia, consisted in the competition ‘not of cultivators for the land, but of land for cultivators’ (vol. 3: 5, 52).

The truth is that these old empires endure, not because the cohesive bond is strong, but because though it is weak, the disuniting elements are still weaker. But if you destroy the bond, or much weaken it, these agencies will win and that will be the total dissolution of all authority.

Bagehot Physics and Politics 1872