The perversion of empire: Edmund burke and the nature of imperial responsibility

Abstract

Professions by British politicians of their nation's responsibility or obligation to provide “just” rule for foreign peoples have long been characterized by critics of the British Empire as being little more than hypocritical ploys intended to obfuscate the “true” economic and racist motivations for nineteenth‐century imperialism. But such criticisms, while undoubtedly accurate in many cases, do not account for the British public's acceptance of the ideal of imperial responsibility as a political necessity. This essay proposes an alternative interpretation of imperial responsibility founded upon Edmund Burke's rhetorical denunciation of the East India Company in 1783. By ironically foregrounding the classical justification for empire in order to indict the Company's policies in India, Burke essentially constructed a new understanding of imperial responsibility in which the need to protect foreign peoples from unscrupulous Britons was stressed instead of any sense of racial superiority or paternalism. This understanding continued to influence British conceptions of imperial responsibility throughout the nineteenth century.