Andrew Sartori's Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History examines the seemingly counterintuitive historical process by which property “became available” as a language for mounting specifically liberal, anticapitalist, and anticolonial critiques in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (3). He begins with a fine-grained reading of Locke on property that confounds both Marxist and sympathetic liberal analyses by exposing how the “anticapitalist trajectories” of Locke's thoughts were bound to the very practices of capitalist society (15). But whereas most political theorists would have left that startling insight to stand on its own, Sartori pursues its expression into the “vernacular,” as articulated through the relationship between landowners and tenants portrayed in nineteenth-century Bengali legal and political discourse and, ultimately, the discourse of twentieth-century Muslim nationalism in India (7, 128). Crucially, for Sartori, examining the circulation and transformation of liberal norms in this imperial context enables new critical insight into the epistemological assumptions and political and ethical impulses braided into the history of liberalism more broadly.
This is an important, groundbreaking book. It upends both mainstream approaches to the history of European liberalism as well as most scholarly inquiries into liberalism's historical entanglement with the material, social, and cultural politics of empire. For instance, Sartori's methodology expands considerably upon Uday Mehta's influential critique of the status of abstract individualism in liberal theory (Liberalism and Empire, 1999). For Mehta, a close reading of Locke and Mill reveals how these thinkers situated their ideas of universal personhood in complex cultural and social entailments that liberal theorists then endeavored to obscure, particularly in the context of empire. Sartori agrees with this conclusion but also insists that it does not go far enough toward explaining the “impulse to abstraction” in the first place or the political, cultural, and economic conditions that enabled it. (27). To do this, the book argues, we must burrow more deeply into the complex relationship between liberalism and political economy both in Britain and in India. Hence, the difference in titles between Mehta's and Sartori's books—Liberalism and Empire, Liberalism in Empire, respectively—perfectly captures the difference in their approaches. Not only does Sartori insist that the history of liberalism be read within the context of those political-economic relationships that developed between landowners and tenants on the ground in Bengal, but he also argues that this form of analysis disrupts the overly schematized relationship between abstraction and cultural/social object found in Mehta's account. In other words, Sartori urges us to understand the relationship between European liberalism and empire in, as Edward Said might call it, “contrapuntal” terms (see Said's 1993 Culture and Imperialism). Rather than approaching this relationship as unidirectional—moving from Britain to India where liberalism manifested itself in the same static political formations and expressions every time—Sartori interrogates the dynamism of its reception and transformation in situ as well as the impact of this transformation on the development of key liberal concepts (such as the role of custom) in the work of British thinkers.
Understanding the history of liberalism in empire in “fugal” terms (Sartori's word) also challenges the way most intellectual historians concentrate their scholarly pursuits on great European thinkers and texts (6). In contrast, for instance, with Anthony Pagden's newest book, The Burdens of Empire (2015), which focuses squarely on theories of empire evolving from the minds of Spanish, French, and British thinkers from 1539 to the present, Sartori engages the liberal thought of Locke, Smith, and Mill alongside the writings of English and Indian jurists in Bengal and the political expressions and texts of South Asian intellectuals and activists. Additionally, Sartori's archive consists of texts that neither most political theorists nor intellectual historians commonly consider legitimate objects of inquiry, such as legal decisions and political pamphlets. Sartori's method here is far more innovative, however, than that of the most prominent scholars associated with the “ideas in context” movement of the Cambridge School such as Quentin Skinner. While Skinner looks for insight into the work of canonical figures like Hobbes and Locke by mining the rhetorical and textual universe that surrounded them—digging into the pamphlets, broadsheets, and various writings and utterances of their interlocutors—he rarely takes these expressions of political contestation seriously as political theory, as constitutive of an emerging body of thought worthy of inquiry in its own right rather than merely ancillary to the formation of the canon. Sartori's approach challenges this narrowness by seeking out the transformation of nineteenth-century liberalism in the threads of a political fabric woven from multiple, overlapping perspectives, articulated by voices emerging from a variety of social and political locations, taking a number of different expressive forms. For Sartori, this complex corpus of thought and practice is liberalism.
Finally, and again from a perspective redolent of Said's call to engage history contrapuntally, by approaching agrarian politics in India through what he calls an “upward vector,” Sartori challenges an assumption common to subaltern studies literature: the idea that elites always co-opt subaltern energies, molding them to resemble “their own fundamentally alien projects” (143). Such a perspective assumes that the liberalism of Muslim nationalism, for instance, originated among elites like Muhammad Ali Jinnah who then drew upon subaltern activism for the purpose of actuating a liberal agenda that was epistemologically and politically divorced from agrarian experiences. Sartori's “upward vector” approaches the relationship between liberalism and Muslim nationalism in the twentieth century from the other direction by looking closely at the way liberal arguments about property that had already been embraced and radicalized by agrarian activists influenced and shaped elite politics. More generally, Sartori is absolutely clear that approaching liberal norms through this “upward vector” in no way vitiates the fact that liberalism came to Bengal from Britain, tied to a politics of coercion and extraction. But that historical fact does not mean, he insists, that Bengalis in these subaltern communities did not recognize in it an approach to property that resonated with their concerns. Critiquing liberalism in empire thus requires scholars to accept that liberal norms and judgments can no longer always be conceptualized “as extrinsically imposed by colonial institutions” (204). At the same time, Sartori is quick to clarify, the point of such a conclusion is not to emphasize the universal applicability of liberal norms, but rather to encourage a form of critique that engages the rhetorical capaciousness, tensions, and inadequacies of liberalism in its multiple contexts.
If there is a single drawback to this book it is precisely its conceptual and contextual multiplicity and the ambitious, almost daunting, number of methodological, historical, and philosophical assumptions it asks us to reconsider all at once. Having said that, however, the astounding conceptual breadth of Liberalism in Empire is also its greatest strength. Sartori forces to the surface new readings of property and custom in the history of liberal thought; a rethinking of Marx on smallholding and capitalism; a reorientation toward subaltern and elite discourse formation; a reevaluation of the relationship between rhetoric, law, and text in historical analyses; a rethinking of universal liberal norms in the context of their colonial transformation; and much more. The sheer force of this dizzying array of reconsiderations—articulated all at once—is arresting, and it forces readers to confront their own methodological limitations and imagine new avenues of inquiry into the history of liberalism and/in empire. In the final analysis, Sartori's book stands as testament to the fact that some of the most groundbreaking and methodologically expansive political theory today is being written by historians.
