British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Lineages of Empire

Convened by Dr Duncan Kelly, University of Sheffield

Thursday 24 August 2006 to Friday 25 August 2006

ABSTRACT

'Great and Distant Crimes': Bentham on empire and international law
Jennifer Pitts (Princeton)

International politics, and especially colonial expansion, were among Jeremy Bentham’s most longstanding concerns, arousing his deep moral engagement and often outrage. Empire was among the topics on which Bentham was most misunderstood and misrepresented by the first generations to follow him, in part because of the enthusiasm with which later liberals and utilitarians embraced Britain’s imperial power. Bentham not only rejected the power-politics and trade arguments that were key justifications for colonies in the eighteenth century; he was also largely immune to the civilizing aspirations that became a dominant theme in the nineteenth century. Although moments of ambivalence marked Bentham’s assessment of Europe’s imperial expansion, in particular as he struggled with the question of whether colonization could provide an outlet for European overpopulation, he resisted the tendency of later nineteenth-century thinkers to draw a stark divide between Europe (and European settler colonies) and the rest of the world. Bentham’s views of non-European states and societies, such as his constitutional writings for Tripoli, warrant greater scholarly attention than they have yet received. Unlike most liberals of later generations, Bentham did not assume that European imperial rule was the only means by which non- Europeans might achieve constitutional government, nor that they were incapable of participating in their own governance. And in contrast to the standard portraits of the era of Islamic barbarity, Bentham largely approached Islam with respect and went to some lengths to understand the place of the religion in social and governmental organization. Bentham was not immune to the thought, widespread by the early nineteenth century, that European governments, for all their flaws, might be able to bring security and decent government for Arab and Asian countries that had long labored under despotism. But Bentham should be read, this paper argues, not as a participant in or even forerunner of the imperial liberalism of the nineteenth century, but rather as a counterpoint to it.

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