J. S. Mill’s protest at ‘vulgar’ uses of the past gave way in the 1830s to an eclectic science of history which drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Saint-Simonians, and Auguste Comte. Book VI of A System of Logic (1843) sketched a theoretical outline of progress whose scientific conversion came about when it was connected, indirectly, to the ultimate laws of psychology. The triumph of sociology reflected Mill’s settled view that society was increasingly a historical phenomenon, shaped less and less by the psychological laws from which Thomas Hobbes, Bentham, and the ‘geometric’ reasoners had deduced their political ideas. This realisation, Barrell argues, pulled in two directions. While it provided a logic and vocabulary of historical relativism, its theoretical sketch of progress was neither relative nor concretely historical because it encompassed the ‘whole previous history of humanity’ as a progressive chain of causes and effects. This double consciousness, I have argued, can be profitably situated within German historicism, French science sociale, and English utilitarianism, all of which acknowledged the logical dissonance between historical facts and their theoretical reconstruction.

The afterword brings the various questions raised through colonial law and literature into the contemporary era. In it, I reflect on the book’s overarching argument and attempt to orient its conclusions toward the present and future. It is difficult, for example, to read the recent ruling by the Supreme Court undoing the prohibition of homosexuality in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code as a predictable outcome of the structuring logic of colonial law. At the same time, it is equally unexpected as a consequence of contemporary Indian nationalism. Thinking about the unruly history of the “unnatural offence” that Section 377 seeks to prohibit helps reframe the legal narrative outside any teleological recourse to progress and tradition. In this vein, the afterword examines a range of flashpoints in contemporary Indian law in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the intersection of law and narrativity.