This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

These people, called badagàs, though of the same colour and quality as the other peoples of India, are more valiant and powerful in war; because, as I have said, they are a wealthy people, and of great chivalry, and behave with greater dignity than the others, and they have all their cities and towns sheltered and encircled all around with walls of mud or of stone, with their bulwarks, rather like our fortresses, in which too they differ from the other peoples of India, who in general do not live together and encircled in this manner.

Was the Madras Army professional in the 1830s? The answer depends largely upon the definition of professionalism. Professional standards in society at large and in military forces have changed over the past two hundred years. Major political decisions with enormous social and economic consequences are made by governments today based upon their understanding of military professionalism. This understanding should incorporate the historical record including nineteenth-century developments outside of Europe.

Colonial regimes have frequently shown a preference for sharing the burdens of defence with certain ethnic groups of the countries under their control. The advantages of a policy of this type—the essence of the divide and rule system—were many and varied. Binding natives to the service of colonial defence solved the functional problems of manpower in situations where no adequate corps of white regulars was readily available. The practice was cheaper to maintain and found to be an effective instrument of control. Its employment also drew off warlike elements that might have made trouble.

Resource cartels face a fundamental organizational problem. While production control can secure higher prices, these are enjoyed by all producers, regardless of whether they are members of the cartel or not. Those who take the benefits without making a contribution to its costs are freeriders, and they can destroy the conditions under which effective collective action is possible. If resource cartels are to make an important contribution to improving the terms under which peripheral nations participate in the world economy, it is important for them to find ways of resolving the freerider issue.

This paper explores the goals, nature and results of government interventions into the rice and palm oil markets of Malyasia since independence. Its purpose is to compare the relatively successful way in which the government has promoted the palm oil industry with the failure of interventions in the rice market. The historical comparison of public efforts in these two industries points up the importance of setting consistent goals, of encouraging crops which match the natural resource endowment of the country, of having a private sector which is capable of responding to production incentives, and of letting supply and demand determine prices when designing a strategy of market intervention. Above all, it is important to distinguish programs of intervention based primarily on efficiency criteria from those which seek to perform social welfare (e.g. income support) and political (e.g. food security) functions as well.

Is there a positive symbiosis between the liberal economy and the liberal polity? From the time the question became meaningful, mainstream Western social theory and doctrine has tended to give a positive answer. It has generally been possible convincingly to argue an intrinsic causal connection between the dispersal of economic (and thus political) power inherent in the competitive market economy and the pluralism which is central to all definitions of the liberal polity. At a ‘broad-brush’ level the historical evidence is supportive. There is a strong empirical association between liberal democracy and (successful) capitalist market systems. While there are a number of quite plausible arguments indicating some potential deep and long-term causal connections between capitalism/the market economy and political unfreedom, the balance of long term historical evidence appears to support orthodoxy.