Reimagining Empire in India: Professor Andrea Major on her new book

I’ve been working on this book – on and off! – for nearly a decade and the project has change quite a lot over that time. It started off as a study of the British anti-slavery movement’s relationship with colonialism in India, but when I read George Thompson’s letters, I knew I wanted to do something more biographical. He is an intriguing character, being both incredibly charismatic and frustratingly flawed. More importantly, his colourful career, varied travels, and extensive personal and professional networks provide a fascinating insight into debates about slavery, colonial exploitation, and empire in Britain, the U.S.A. and India in the 1830s and 1840s. 

How much I enjoyed writing biography. It wasn’t an approach I had used before, but I found it a really rewarding process. Thompson’s letters are very rich and the juxtaposition between his personal correspondence and his public persona was fascinating. The depth of feeling about what the East India Company (EIC) was doing in India was also surprising. It is often overshadowed by the better-known campaign against slavery, but there was real concern with the impact of EIC misgovernance on India’s rural economy. Prescriptions for reform based on the expansion of cash crop agriculture were also problematic, of course – Thompson and his friends were hardly anti-imperialist! – but the extent to which they were willing to hold the EIC to account does challenge the traditional view of the early nineteenth century as a period of growing British complacency about conditions in India.   

Until relatively recently, Thompson himself has been a bit player in more traditional histories of British abolitionism. As professional public speaker who was paid for his services as a lecturer he was often dismissed as a mercenary agitator or ‘hired gun’. This, combined with his relatively humble origins and confrontational ‘firebrand’ approach, meant that he was never seen as entirely respectable and was certainly a far cry from ‘gentleman philanthropists’ like Wilberforce or Buxton.  Yet he was an incredibly important figure in his day, being one of the most famous and recognisable anti-slavery orators, whose popularist style connected with the grass roots of the movement a way Parliamentary abolitionists could not. He was also a lynchpin of transatlantic anti-slavery cooperation and, as my book demonstrates, an important voice in other aspects of colonial reform. Fortunately, he has been taken more seriously in recent years and is now getting more sustained attention from scholars, for both his anti-slavery and colonial reform work

There has been a lot of heated discussion about empire in recent years, as histories of British imperialism are coopted into politicised ‘culture wars’ debates. One argument that is often put forward by those who seek to defend empire is that it was acceptable ‘by the standards of the time’ and that to critique it from a modern perspective is somehow ahistorical. Yet the activities and attitudes of reformers like Thompson and his friends show how controversial and contested many aspects of empire were even at the time. People in the nineteenth century were willing to loudly criticise both the government and the East India Company when they thought they were behaving badly. This may not have amounted to a rejection of empire in total, but it does complicate our understanding of how it functioned and was received in practice.