7 - Radical Reformism and the Challenge of Capitalist Complacency

Summary

Chapter 7 delves into the reformers often-futile attempts to solicit potential non-official allies such as the Lancashire textile manufacturers and Anglo-Indian planters who sought access to raw cotton and land freeholds. While it initially seemed that the mobilization of the mill owners might deter arbitrary colonial governance, they failed to back the reformers’ radical efforts to alter India’s bureaucratic apparatus after the Uprising of 1857. Disappointed on a second front, reformers were also compelled to condemn the European planters whose exploitative tactics resulted in agrarian disturbances. As Manchester cotton lords in the 1870s continued to harp on the inequity of the colonial import duties levied on their textiles, reformers accused them of weaponizing free trade and stifling Indian competition. Recurrent famines also brought the efficacy of laissez-faire governance into question, which in turn led a faction within the East India Association to espouse a racialized variant of conservationism.