Uncivil Liberalism

Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by focusing on Naoroji's preoccupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. The story of Naoroji's political theory emerges from an in-depth contextualization of the Parsi minority in western India and Naoroji's engagement with the religious, social, political and economic debate that preoccupied the Parsi public sphere in nineteenth-century Bombay. Then, using Naoroji's detailed reflections on his career as a social reformer, entrepreneur and politician in India and Britain, the book reconstructs how his formative experiences in India's smallest minority produced some of South Asia's most globally significant political thought. As a contribution to theory, the book shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of cultural and ethnic fragmentation and communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsis' economic decline, which had rendered the minority less capableof funding the philanthropy that had maintained Bombay's cosmopolitan civil society. Naoroji responded by innovating his own liberal theory predicated on an economic republicanism that could guarantee the social contract between autonomous labourers liberated from the arbitrary mediation of financial capital and parasitic bureaucracy. Significantly, the author draws attention to how Naoroji seeded 'Western' thinkers with these ideas and influenced numerous ideologies in colonial and postcolonial India. In so doing, the book offers a compelling argument which reframes Indian 'nationalists' as global thinkers--