Introduction: The History of British India as an Exercise in Futility

A deep ambivalence characterizes James Mill's The History of British India. Mill, the historian of India who never went to India, wrote ostensibly in the style of Scottish conjectural history, grafting this short-lived mode of historiography and onto a particularly rigid strand of utilitarian thinking. The result of this philosophical amalgam was a ponderous narrative now infamous for its disparaging comments about the ‘rude nations’ of the world, and a work of purportedly ‘standard’, ‘canonical’ or ‘hegemonic’ status, often being assigned the position as the single most important work in the historiography of South Asia. The ambivalence running through the History is a result of its ‘rude’ subject matter combined with the difficulty of aligning this rudeness with Mill's aim of providing the world with utilitarian knowledge, for it seems that Mill himself considered the work, along with its subject matter, regrettably inutile. The History was a book that need not have been written and a work of limited utility, for it could, in the eyes of its own author, only teach about the rude people of India. Mill offered the History as a ‘service’ to spare the utility of future generations, encompassing everything one could need to know about India ‘once and for all’. In carrying out this service, Mill established many of the ideological and textual underpinnings for the British civilizing mission, which was still inchoate when the History was first published in 1817.