Abstract

This book re-examines British attitudes to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It places the emergence of utilitarianism in the context of these attitudes by focussing on James Mill's The History of British India (1817), and the work of Sir William Jones, Robert Southey, and Thomas Moore. In particular the study shows how the standard view of Mill's History does not do justice to the complexity of this text; Majeed argues that aesthetics played an important role in the formulation of Mill's utilitarian views, when he used British India as part of a much larger critique of British society itself. Mill's attempt to place thinking on these issues on a different footing illumines other scholars and poets whose writing on the Orient was an important part of the defining of their religious, social, and political views. Ungoverned Imaginings demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.