Conclusion: British India before 1857 and the Writings of Sir John Malcolm

Sir John Malcolm’s significance as an ideologue lay in the fact that his works gave a historical consciousness and a rhetoric to the empire-building militarism of the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Out of the imperial crises of the 1780s, the Company had become the paramount power in India, and as a consequence the related questions of how India as a whole should be governed and how the improvement of society could be achieved increased in significance. At home, the long friction between the Company’s commercial roots and its role as the manager of a territorial empire, which animated the Sketch of the Political History of India, had ended with the loss of its monopoly on Indian trade in 1813. Many major authors in the history of British India, from Sir William Jones to James and John Stuart Mill, who advocated democracy at home and authoritarianism for British India, have added weight to the idea that the imperial project sat paradoxically with the development of liberal democracy in Britain. As a thinker and a policy maker, Sir John Malcolm articulated an ideology of empire that was anything but paradoxical. No other writer in this period elaborated a historical vision of empire that so completely expressed the impact of the British conservative reaction to the French Revolution on late Enlightenment thought.