Edmund Burke’s speeches and writings during the trial of Warren Hastings—from 1788 to 1795—remain one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of colonial trade and territorial expansion on Britain’s nationalist self. A rhetorical reading of his prosecution speeches reveals how they affected the public response to the trial by evoking the sublime and framing terror as the basic feature of Britain’s mercantile imperialist agenda in the colonies. Moreover, by associating Hastings’s governance of Bengal with sublime terror, Burke altered (...) the interpretations of virtue and corruption, thus distancing both Britain and India from the rampant profiteering of the East India Company. Burke’s critique of the degenerative influences of commercial imperialism along with the reformulation of his ideas in subsequent colonial historiography is crucial for assessing how the aesthetics of the sublime conferred greater moral force to the sporadic and fragmented reports about the Company’s abuses of power in India. (shrink)

Unfortunately, Adam Smith’s undeserved legacy as a proponent of laissez-faire and liberal institutions at the international scope inhibits profiting from his refined analysis of international affairs. I argue that the Wealth of Nations’ chapter on colonies contains Smith’s discussion of the sovereign’s adaptation to ignorance in global politics. I examine the sense in which the sovereign is ignorant according to Smith and how sovereigns adapt to ignorance with varying success. His comparative analysis suggests that reduction of one’s share in ignorance (...) is not always desirable, and a priori rejection of ignorance is impractical because it deprives of a potentially advantageous resource. A careful reading of his work enables learning from his approach to global politics, without filtering it through his ideas on the free market. (shrink)