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Liberalism's limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the negro

question”

David Theo Goldberg

To cite this article: David Theo Goldberg (2000) Liberalism's limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the negro
question”, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 22:2, 203-216, DOI: 10.1080/08905490008583508

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 Liberalism's Limits: Carlyle and
Mill on "The Negro Question"

DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University

n 1849Fraser'sMagazine, the popular London literary periodical,

Iunder
published an anonymous attack on the nature of black people
the title, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question." The
vicious essay turned out to be written by Thomas Carlyle. Outraged
by the incivility of its language, if not distressed by the intrans-
igence of the sentiment it expressed, literate liberals in Britain and
the northern States in the American Union openly objected to the
attack. Chief among the responses was a particularly impassioned
essay published again anonymously in the following issue of Fraser's
under the title, "The Negro Question." This time the author was
England's leading public intellectual of the day, John Stuart Mill.
Four years later, fueled no doubt by his increasingly acrimonious
feud with his former mate Mill, Carlyle published in pamphlet
form a revised and expanded version of the attack under the more
pointed title, "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question." And
there the matter was left to stand until 1971 when the two essays
were first brought together with an introductory commentary by
the editor Eugene August.1
It is curious that from their initial appearance to August's edi-
tion, and indeed since, no commentary exists on this exchange
which offers a particularly revealing window to the excesses and
limits of nineteenth century racialized discourse.2 This semi-
anonymous exchange, almost too sensitive to touch in their own
names, exemplifies the parameters of Victorian racialized sentiment,

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2000 O 2000 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.

Vol 22, pp. 203-216 Published by license under
Reprints available directly from the publisher the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,
Photocopying permitted by license only part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group.
Printed in Malaysia.
204 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

explicitly racist in one direction, seemingly egalitarian in the other,

as August hopefully has it. Indeed, while it exemplifies colonial
racialization and racist derogation—colonialism's vicious recourse
to neo-scientific racism, on one hand, and liberalism's polite racism,
on the other—the exchange reveals at once the long reach of colo-
nial discourse to elements of contemporary postcolonial racist
expression. Carlyle on race was to mid-nineteenth century Britain
what Dinesh D'Souza is to late twentieth century America, offering
a totalizing rationalization of the sorry state of black folk in the most
extreme, and thus eye-catching terms. By contrast, Mill's singular
contribution to "The Negro Question"—-just as his "On the Subjec-
tion of Women" was his seminal and remarkable contribution to
"The Woman Question"—nevertheless marks the implicit limits to
racialized egalitarianism for liberal Victorianism. This suggests at
once the challenge facing liberalism on the question of race more
generally.
The sociohistorical background to the exchange concerned the
fading prospects and conditions of the British plantation owners in
the West Indies, though the questions of race addressed have to be
understood in terms of the colonial condition more broadly. Eman-
cipation of slaves in the British empire in 1833 curtailed the supply
of desperately cheap labor and cut into the artificial profit margins
enjoyed by the West Indies sugar planters. In 1846 the British par-
liament ended plantation subsidies, thus forcing plantation owners
in the islands, those increasingly disaffected white British subjects,
to compete unprotected on the world market. Carlyle's voice was
that of the disenchanted colonial "aristocracy" abroad and (more
ambiguously) the distressed English working classes and Irish
peasants closer to hand, combined under the racialized aggrandize-
ment of whiteness; Mill's by contrast was that of "enlightened"
Victorian abolitionism. Here then are to be found the two pre-
vailing pillars of nineteenth century racial theory. Carlyle rep-
resented the bald claim to "the Negro's" inherent inferiority
articulated by racist science of the day; Mill on the other hand was
the principal spokesman for the European's historically developed
superiority, though (as Afrocentrists like Molefi Asante and their
critics like Mary Lefkowitz both should note) he temperately
acknowledged the influence of ancient Egyptians on the Hellenic
Greeks.
 LIBERALISM'S LIMITS 205

II

Carlyle's negrophobia is interesting intellectually only because its

vituperative language directed at black people was an expression of
more than just bald prejudice, though it was clearly that. Thus, his
objectionable language (revealing of equally objectionable pre-
sumptions) regarding people of African descent was expressed
against the background of, if not prompted by, a critique of the
conditions of the working classes in Britain. Carlyle's negrophobia
accordingly was tied up with a critique of laissez faire capitalist
political economy prevailing at the time. The failure of the potato
crop due to extended drought had devastated Irish peasants, and
the mid-century recession had caused massive unemployment
among the English working classes, represented in Carlyle's dis-
course in the forlorn figure of the "Distressed Needlewoman." Car-
lyle contrasted these desperately sad figures with the stereotype of
the lazy, "sho' good eatin'" Negro.3 Carlyle assumed that the capit-
alism of his day somehow causally tied the alienation of working
people in England and Ireland to the emancipation of shiftless and
workless Negroes in the colonies. He thus predicated in this essay
what might otherwise be deemed an insightful reading of unregu-
lated capitalism that he had developed, for example, in Past and
Present (1843) on a set of deeply racist premises. In the spirit of the
early Marx, Carlyle criticized laissez faire capitalism for reducing
human relationships (the paradigm for which he assumed to be
between whites) to the "cash contract"4 between employer and
employee. Capitalist "Lords of Rackrent" (or landlords) lost all
interest in the impoverished Irish peasant or English seamstress
once the latter were unable to afford the rent. The latters' freedom,
under laissez faire liberal capitalism, was reduced to the liberty to
die by starvation. Carlyle accordingly predicted that the importa-
tion of English workers into the West Indies in response to planters'
demands for workers who would work would render the Negro
inhabitants as free to starve as their British counterparts.
Carlyle attributed the underlying cause of this general condition
to the demise of paternalistic control by the British, superior on all
counts, over the inherently inferior natives of the islands. Those in
a situation of superiority had a paternalistic obligation to effect the
wellbeing of the inferior for whom the former were responsible.
206 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

Carlyle insisted that the feudal serf was (materially) better placed
than the Irish peasant, English needleworker, or "Negro" of his
day. He concludes that "the Negro Question" was to be answered
by turning "Negroes" into, a relationship of loyal serfdom to the
benevolent feudal-like lordship of their white masters. White men,
wisest by birth(right), were destined by nature and God to rule,
Negroes to serve; whites ought to try and convince Negroes to
assume their God-given role as servants, failing which masters
would be obliged to turn to "the beneficent whip."
Likely unaware first hand of any black people, Carlyle's "nigger"
of the "Nigger Question" was the stereotypical figure of "Quashee,"
a polygenic form of black lowlife—lazy, laughing, rhythmic,
musical, dance-loving, language defective (p. 12). "Horse-jawed
and beautifully muzzled" (p. 4), "Quashee" was the Carlylean equi-
valent of "Sambo," etymologically linked to squash and so to pump-
kin. Carlyle characterized "Quashee" as working only at eating
pumpkin—Carlyle's mean metaphor for any juicy tropical fruit like
watermelon, cantaloupe, mango, or papaya—and drinking rum.
Yet Carlyle insisted on finding "the Negro," "alone of wild-men,"
kind, affectionate, even lovable, and pointedly not the object of his
"hate" (p. 12). The abundance of tropical fruit in Carlyle's view
reduced the need on the part of West Indian natives to work. Car-
lyle's solution was to compel "the Negro" in the Islands to work by
restricting to the laborless the right to own fruit-producing land or
to enjoy its abundant products (p. 9).
In order to sustain this degraded image of the inherently
inferior "Nigger," Carlyle (like his counterpart D'Souza a century
and half later) was driven to reduce the debilitating effects of
slavery's experience for people of African descent. Carlyle accord-
ingly insisted that the debilitations of slavery were "much exagger-
ated" (p. 13). Slavery, and so mastery too, were considered "natural"
conditions; slaves, as Aristotle once put it, are slaves by nature.
Blacks are born to be servants (Carlyle's euphemistic bow to the
abolitionists, p. 22) of whites who "are born wiser...and lords"
over them (p. 32). Indeed, Carlyle insisted that there is a slavery far
worse than that of "Negroes" in the colonies, "the one, intolerable
sort of slavery" (as though enslavement of black people is not): this,
he remarked without a hint of irony, is the "slavery" throughout
Europe of "the strong to the weak; of the great and noble-minded
 LIBERALISM'S LIMITS 207

to the small and mean! The slavery of Wisdom to Folly." (p. 14)
Thus Carlyle diminished the horrible experience and effects of real
slavery historically by reducing them to less than the "platonic"
manifestations of a metaphorical servitude of the strong and wise to
the weak and ignorant. Of course, it says little for the strength and
wisdom of the European wealthy and wise that they should be so
constrained by the weak and witless, a point to which Carlyle in all
his critical power seems oblivious.
Carlyle emphasized that it was Europeans who developed the
colonies from their supposed prehistory of "pestilence... and putre-
faction, savagery... and swamp-malaria" (p. 28); through their cre-
ativity, ingenuity, and productivity; that it was the English (or "Saxon
British," p. 27) who supposedly made the West Indies flourish and
without whom the islands would reduce to "Black Irelands" (p. 33)
or "Haiti" with "black Peter exterminating black Paul" (p. 29). Yet
Carlyle repeatedly contrasted the conditions of "Negroes," those
"Demarara Niggers," with the conditions of English laborers, white
working women, and Irish peasants. Fat from the abundance of
land, the consumption of fruit, and lack of labor, the character of
the Negro was measured against, if not silently considered the
cause of, working peoples' plight in the mother country and the
colonies. Carlyle's discourse nevertheless reveal beneath the racial-
ized overlay of this contrast a class induced ambivalence. Thus he
identified also the Distressed Needlewomen, Irish peasants, and
English working classes through a nineteenth-century version of
the discourse of an underclass (or lumpen) poverty of culture with
"the Nigger" of the West Indies (pp. 20-1). Most of the 30,000 Dis-
tressed Needlewomen, he objected, were really "Mutinous Serving-
maids" unable "to sew a stitch," and defying their inherent need for
a master: "Without a master in certain cases, you become a Distressed
Needlewoman, and cannot so much as live" (p. 21). Indeed, Carlyle
further reduced this equation of posing seamstress and free "nigger"
to the infantilized condition of babies and the animalized conditions
of dogs and horses (pp. 23, 12), all of whom needed accordingly to
be cared for, looked after, mastered by "philanthropic Anglo-Saxon
men and women" (p. 23). Equal in quantity to an entire English
county, black West Indians "in worth (in quantity of intellect, fac-
ulty, docility, energy, and available human valor and value)"
amounted to a single street of London's working class East End.
208 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

In Carlyle's view, the working classes and particularly Negroes

were born to serve, to have masters. With little wit of their own,
they would flourish only in servitude, in being told what to do and
looked after. Carlyle concluded from this claim of inherent servility
that the "Black gentleman" be hired "not by the month, but by a
very much longer term. That he be 'hired for life'." That, in other
words, he be the slave he was to "Whites... born more wiser than
[he]" (pp. 21-2, 33, 34-5). Ironically, and against the naturalist
grain, such lifelong servitude was to be enforced through might
and fright (pp. 26-7, 29, 31), for if "the Saxon British" failed to
assert their dominance some other colonial power would (p. 35).
The colonial imperative was as much about relations of power,
domination, and "the education of desire"5 internal to Europe as it
was straightforwardly about imposing European will upon its Other.

Ill

It was Carlyle's call to reinstitute slavery to which Mill principally

objected in his response. This perhaps is predictable, given Mill's
longstanding and well-known commitment to abolition. Mill's crit-
ical concern with Carlyle's racist sentiment was only secondary and
much more understated. Moreover, not only did Mill not object to
colonial domination, he insisted upon it albeit in "benevolent"
form. After all, Mill worked for the better part of his working life
administering colonialism. Thus Mill opened his letter to the editor
ofFraser's by emphasizing that abolition was "the best and greatest
achievement yet performed by mankind" in "[t]he history of
human improvement" (pp. 38-9). Slavery was wrong for Mill on
utilitarian grounds in that it produced much more pain than would
liberty and equal opportunity, and it is for this reason that Mill con-
sidered slavery inherently inhumane (pp. 48-9), a view derided by
Carlyle under the mocking title of the "Universal Abolition of Pain
Association" (p. 2). In contrast to Carlyle's critique of laissez faire
capitalism, Mill offered a defense of laissez faire principles as
embodying economic freedom and underpinning a liberal social
order. Mill however qualified these laissez faire principles by insist-
ing that all people, black and white, enjoy equal opportunity:
"[Carlyle]... will make them work for certain whites, those whites
 LIBERALISM'S LIMITS 209

not working at all... Does he mean that all persons ought to earn
their living? But some earn their living by doing nothing, and some
by doing mischief..." (pp. 42-3). Mill continued:

[L]et the whole produce belong to those who do the work which produces it. We
would not have black labourers [in the West Indies] compelled to grow spices which
they do not want, and white proprietors who do not work at all exchanging the spices
for houses in Belgrave Square [an expensive neighborhood in London].... Let
them have exactly the same share in what they produce that they have in the work.
If they do not like this, let them remain as they are, so long as they... make the best
of supply and demand" (pp. 44-5, my emphases).

Mill's quiet qualification of class by race—black laborers, white

proprietors—was tied to his denial that every difference among
human beings is inherent, a "vulgar error" he rightly imputed to
Carlyle (p. 46). In objecting to Carlyle's racist hierarchical natural-
ism, however, Mill inscribed in its place, and in the name of laissez
faire and equal opportunity, an imputation of the historical inferi-
ority of blacks. Mill implied that this assumption of inferiority,
because historically produced and contingent, was not always the
case (Egyptians influenced Greeks) and might one day be over-
come. Yet Mill's superficial bow to what has become an Afrocentric
cornerstone barely hid beneath the surface the polite racism of his
Eurocentric history. Contingent racism is still a form of racism—not
so usual, not so bald, not so vituperative, and polite perhaps, but
condescending nevertheless even as it is committed to equal oppor-
tunity. Equal opportunity among those with the unfair, historically
produced inequities of the colonial condition will simply reproduce
those inequities, if not expand them.
The very title of his response to Carlyle—"The Negro Ques-
tion"—indicates Mill's presumption that (to use Du Bois's terms)
blacks are a problem, rather than that people of African descent in
the New World faced problems—least of all that those problems
were imposed by their masters—and that such problems might best
be resolved through the utility calculus. This interpretation is
borne out by placing Mill's response to Carlyle in the context of
Mill's views on development, modernization, and race. These were
views he developed most fully in terms of India and his experience
in the English East Indies Company but which he generalized to
Africa and the West Indies also. So to confirm that these premises
210 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

indeed underpin Mill's liberal egalitarianism it is necessary to turn

to his views on the colonies.
Mill worked as an examiner for the English East Indies Com-
pany from 1823 until 1856 and then, like his father, as chief exam-
iner until his retirement to politics in 1858. Thus he was central in
and ultimately responsible for all bureaucratic correspondence
between the British government and its colonial representation in
India. (Mill was involved in writing 1700 official letters to India
over this period.) It was in the context of India (and the Asiatic
countries more generally), then, that he worked out his views on
colonial intervention in those "underdeveloped" countries which
he considered stagnant and inhibiting of progress, and he general-
ized from this context to other areas.
In The Principles of Political Economy, Mill wrote that "Coloniza-
tion—is the best affair of business, in which the capital of an old and
wealthy country can engage."6 It would do so in order to establish:
[FJirst, a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes,
and freedom from arbitrary exaction under the name of taxes; a more permanent
and more advantageous tenure of land, securing to the cultivator as far as possible
the undivided benefits of industry, skill, and economy he may exert. Secondly,
improvement of the public intelligence: the decay of usages or superstitions which
interfere with the effective employment of industry; and the growth of mental activ-
ity, making the people alive to new objects of desire. Thirdly, the introduction of
foreign arts, which raise the returns derivable from additional capital, to a rate
corresponding to the low strength of the desire of accumulation: and the importa-
tion of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclus-
ively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves, while it
places before them a stimulating example, and by instilling new ideas and breaking
the chains of habit, if not by improving the actual condition of the population, tends
to create in them new wants, increased ambition, and greater thought for the
future.7

Mill picks out for application of these principles India, Russia,

Turkey, Spain, and Ireland. The West Indies and African countries
were not recognized as having the capacity for self-development
at all.8
The difference between a developed and undeveloped country,
between those more or less civilized, was defined by Mill in terms of
the country's capacity to enable and promote representative self-
government and individual self-development. In short, in terms of
its capacity for autonomy and good government. "Good govern-
 LIBERALISM'S LIMITS 211

ment" would enable a society, as Mill once said of himself "to effect
the greatest amount of good compatible with... opportunities"9
with the view to maximizing well-being and so happiness. Mill
attributed the success of such promotion fundamentally to eco-
nomic development which apparently would enable opportunities.
Civilized countries like Britain limited government intervention in
individuals' lives; those less civilized he thought should be ruled by
those more so with the view to promoting their capacity for self-
development. Liberal individualization was consonant with eco-
nomic, political, and cultural modernization. This would require
greater restriction in the ruled country on people's freedoms and
so more government regulation. Progress was considered a func-
tion of education and enlightened institutions but also of people of
"similar civilization to the ruling country," of Britain's "own blood
and language." The latter—Mill mentioned Australia and Canada—
were "capable of, and ripe for, representative government." India,
by contrast, was far from it, for India had stagnated for many cen-
turies under the sway of Oriental despotism.10 In India's case, and
even more perpetually in the case of the West Indies and African
colonies, "benevolent despotism"—a paternalistic "government of
guidance" imposed by more advanced Europeans—was the
rational order of the day.11
Thus, for Mill, the justification of colonization was to be meas-
ured according to its aid in the progress of the colonized, its educa-
tion of superstitious colonial subjects in the virtues of reason, and
the generation of new markets for capital accumulation through
the fashioning of desires. The purpose of education was to inform:
both to provide the informational basis to make rational decisions
and to structure the values framing practical reason in ways condu-
cive to the colonial ends Mill deemed desirable. Mill considered
progress to consist in being socialized in the values of liberal mod-
ernity, that is, in the sort of social, political, economic, cultural, and
legal commitments best represented by the British example. As a
colonized country exemplified such progress, the colonizing coun-
try progressively would give way to the colonized's self-governance.
So Mill's "benevolent despotism" amounts to a colonialism with a
human face. The world was to be directed by the most developed
and capable nations whose self-interests nevertheless would be
mitigated and mediated by the force of utilitarian reason.
212 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

Mill was blind to the internal tensions in his indices of progress.

The ideal conditions for the generation of new markets and the
fashioning of new desires for the sake of capital accumulation are
likely inconsistent with genuine self-determination, autonomy, and
self-governance. Colonization is straightforwardly consistent with
developing new markets and desires—it is after all a central part of
the historical raison d'etre for colonialism—in a way in which it is
historically, if not conceptually, at odds with self-determination.
Mill thought different socio-economic imperatives face the "advan-
ced" and "backward" nations: improved distribution of goods (not
wealth) for the "advanced," better conditions of production for the
"backward countries."12 So before worrying about distribution of
goods among the people of the "backward countries," improving
production was paramount, and in any case (re)distribution of
wealth was never an issue.
Mill's "benevolent despotism," relatively benign and masked by
humane application perhaps, nevertheless sought "to make pro-
vision in the constitution of the Government itself, for compel-
ling those who have the governing power, to listen to and take into
consideration the opinions of persons who, from their position
and their previous life, have made a study of Indian subjects, and
acquired experience in them."13 Thus Mill recognized the relation
between knowledge and power, specialized information and
administration, as the underlying imperative of colonial govern-
mentality. Knowledge of the Native was instrumental to establish-
ing the conditions for developing the colonies in a way that would
continue to serve the interests of the colonial power. It may seem
curious that Mill implied that the Natives themselves would not be
consulted in accumulating knowledge about local colonial condi-
tions, for he did insist that qualified Natives be appointed to all
administrative and governmental positions "for which they are fit,"
though without "appointing them to the regular service." Mill's
utilitarian reason for this restriction was that Natives were not to be
"considered for the highest service" for "if their promotion stopped
short while that of others went on, it would be more invidious than
keeping them out altogether." And as Europeans, rationally super-
ior, were to be the appeal of last resort, Natives'' ascension was
naturally delimited.14 James Mill seemed to project onto the Natives
of the colonies the same utilitarian paternalism with which he treated
 LIBERALISM'S LIMITS 213

his son, and John Stuart never managed to shake this paternal(istic)
framing.15
However, even in their administrative advance, the Natives
(here Indian) were to be "Indian in blood and colour, but English
in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."16 Blood may run
thicker than water, but it was to be diluted by a cultural solution.
Cultural colonialism mediates racial inferiority, culture replacing
biology as the touchstone of racial definition. Accordingly English
was to be the language of administration, the local vernacular to be
used only to convey rules and regulations to the local population. Far
from "creating the conditions for the withering away of their rule,"17
Mill (even if inadvertently) was instrumental in identifying and
administering the sort of conditions that would perpetuate indirect
rule, postcolonial control from afar without the attendant costs.

IV

Mill's argument for benevolent despotism failed to appreciate that

neither colonialism nor despotism is ever benevolent. Benevolence
here is the commitment to seek the happiness of others.18 But the
mission of colonialism is exploitation and domination of the col-
onized generally, and Europeanization at least of those among the
colonized whose class position makes it possible economically and
educationally.19 And the mandate of despotism, its conceptual logic,
is to assume absolute power to achieve the ruler's self-interested
ends. Thus colonial despotism could achieve happiness of colonized
Others only by imposing the measure of Europeanized marks of
happiness upon the Other, which is to say, to force the Other to be
less so. Mill's argument necessarily assumed superiority of the des-
potic, benevolent or not; it presupposed that the mark of progress
is (to be) defined by those taking themselves to be superior; and it
presumes that the ruled will want to be like the rulers even as the
former lack the cultural capital (ever?) quite to rise to the task. Mill's
ambivalence over inherent inferiority of "native Negroes" even as
he marked the transformation in the terms of racial definition his-
torically from the inescapable determinism of blood and brain size
to the marginally escapable reach of cultural determination has res-
onated to this day in liberal ambivalence regarding racial matters.
214 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

Liberalism's racially mediated meliorism and commitment to a

moral progressivism translates into an undying optimism that its
racist history will be progressively overcome, giving way ultimately
to a standard of nonracialism. Yet this standard nonracialism (sic)
is imposed upon the body politic at the cost of the self-defined
subjectivity of the traditionally dominated. Liberalism's response to
matters of race in the face of the fact that race matters amounts to
denying or ignoring race, paternalistically effacing a self-determined
social subjectivity from those who would define themselves thus
without imposing it on others. This erasure in the name of nonra-
cialism rubs out at once the history of racist invisibility, domination,
and exploitation, replacing the memory of an infantilized past with
the denial of responsibility for radically unequal and only super-
ficially deracialized presents. Divested of a historically located
responsibility, the relatively powerful in the society are readily able
to reinstate the invisibility of the subject positions of the presently
marginalized: savages become the permanently unemployable, the
uncivilized become crack heads, the lumpenproletariat the under-
class, Distressed Needlewomen become sweated labor, poor Irish
peasants turn into distressed defaulting family farmers and, well,
"niggers" become "negroes" or blacks scarcely disguised beneath
the seemingly benign nomenclature. For every Mill of yesteryear
today there is a William Bennett or a Gary Becker, and for every
Carlyle a Dinesh D'Souza.
Between Mill's "negro" and Carlyle's "nigger," then, lies the
common thread of racist presumption and projection, bald and
vicious, on the one hand, polite and effete, on the other, but both
nevertheless insidious and odious. Better in utilitarian terms to
have a Mill, perhaps, for at least one gets the sense that it is possible
to enlighten and thus transform such a person. With a Carlyle one
knows clearly and openly what resistance to racisms is up against,
what it has to confront and in some circumstances to avoid; with
a Mill, a promoter of abolition is at once a barrier to it. This
exchange between two leading English public intellectuals of their
day reveals in the final analysis then that structural and discursive
transformations necessary for resisting racisms are deeply related
to subjective expression. Ultimately it makes abundantly apparent
that a combined commitment to changing minds and to changing
conditions is crucial.
 LIBERALISM'S LIMITS 215

NOTES

1. E. August, ed., Carlyle, The Nigger Question and Mill, The Negro Question.
All parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition.
2. August includes in his little volume an editorial in a London newspaper
of the day, The Inquirer, protesting Carlyle's claims.
3. This is Fanon's cutting characterization in Black Skin White Masks, 79.
4. August, xvii.
5. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
6. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 971.
7. Mill, 189-90.
8. Gyozo Fukuhara, "John Stuart Mill and the Backward Countries," 67.
9. J. S. Mill, Autobiography, Harold Laski, ed., 72.
10. J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 563.
11. See Bearce, John Stuart Mill and India," 74-5; Pradhan, "Mill on India:
A Reappraisal," 16.
12. Mill, Principles, 749.
13. Mill, Parliamentary Papers, 30 (1852-3): 313-4.
14. Mill, 324-5.
15. Cf. Pradhan, 6.
16. Mill, quoted in H. Sharp, Selections from Educational Records, I, 1781-
1839 (Calcutta 1920): 116. See Abraham L. Harris, "John Stuart Mill:
Servant of the English East India Company," 195ff.
17. Harris, 201.
18. See Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 239.
19. See Frantz Fanon, 1 Dying Colonialism, 17.
216 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

WORKS CITED

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