This study centers upon the abolitionists, Quakers, free-traders, disenchanted colonial agents, and Parsi intellectuals who participated in the British India Society, India Reform Society, and East India Association. Beginning in the 1830s, these agitators increasingly recognized that British dominion in India was exploitative and destabilizing; moreover, it had given rise to a series of prejudicial anomalies. Reformers therefore denounced the 'virtual' enslavement, infrastructural decay, violations of the law of nations, and economic impoverishment that had occurred under colonial rule, as well as the metropole's inattention to Indian affairs. By reconstructing the transregional networks that extended from Boston to Bengal and sustained these organizations, Zak Leonard analyzes India reformism from ideological and structural perspectives. In so doing, he historicizes the practice of anti-colonial critique and offers new insight into the frustrated development of a British imperial public consciousness.

‘In this fascinating and original account, Leonard shows how Indian and British reformers alike sought to hold the Raj to account. Ever attentive to the personalities, connections and failings of an inter-racial and trans-national reforming nexus, Leonard’s book is a key contribution to our understanding of Indian and imperial modernity.’

Alan Lester - University of Sussex and La Trobe University

‘Leonard's insightful study highlights the prolonged nineteenth-century struggle to conciliate liberal norms with the anomalies of British imperial rule, suggesting that the failure of that project played an important role in shaping the subsequent trajectories of British and Indian political thought.’

Andrew Sartori - New York University

‘In Ethical Empire, Zak Leonard masterfully excavates the ethics of empire as framed and understood by its reformist critics during British India’s nineteenth- century heyday. With both empathy and sophistication, Leonard examines reformers on their own terms, in their own times. What emerges is a richly woven tapestry of debate upon which the promises and shortcomings of the British Empire in India - as well as at home - were imagined and litigated. This is a must- read for any serious student of empire and the ethical conundrums its opponents contended with.’

Ben Hopkins - Professor of History and International Affairs, The George Washington University