Soldiers, Scholars, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Militarism in Early Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract

an article recently published in this journal, Martha McLaren makes a compelling case for the reintroduction of ideas into the debate over who and what drove the British conquests in early nineteenth-century India and the subsequent drive for consolidation.1 By linking the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Scotland with the administrative circles of early nineteenth-century India, she shows that ideas did matter to officials such as Thomas Munro, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and John Malcolm - Scotsmen all - whose views of India, and of Britain's authority and obligations there, were remarkably similar. McLaren attributes the similarity to their grounding in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular the works of David Hume, William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson. She draws parallels, for example, between Hume's and Robertson's 'philosophical history' and Malcolm's and Elphinstone's didactic histories of Asian states. A didactic purpose in writing was not the only Scottish baggage they carried to India; they also brought ideas about political processes, originally developed to account for early modern Europe, which they applied to Mogul and post-Mogul India. The emphasis on the Scottish Enlightenment and its emergence in a Scottish school of imperial administration makes two important contributions to imperial and Indian historiography. Intellectual history and human agency are given their due after years of playing second fiddle to structuralism and post-structuralism. And McLaren shows that in mapping colonial mentalities, greater attention should be paid to the metropolitan world. Here she adds an important caveat to the fashionable preoccupation with 'orientalism'. The presupposition that 'orientalism' was simply a calculated reading of non- Western societies i Martha McLaren, 'From Analysis to Prescription: Scottish Concepts of Asian Despotism in