The Changing Moral Justification of Empire: From the Right to Colonise to the Obligation to Civilise

Abstract

This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius assumed an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. The idea of terra nullius has a central place in the political thought of thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. Although terra nullius, consolidated in European colonial thought in the early modern period, differed conceptually from the doctrine of trusteeship as the colonial legitimation for Africa, both instituted a moral justification for the appropriation of native land, and of empire itself.

The contention is that the trajectory from the one doctrine to the other was aligned with the change in the underlying moral framework of the rights and duties of Europeans and non-Europeans. In the early days of colonisation, there was a certain permissiveness on the part of the colonisers to appropriate the land of American Indians. By the late nineteenth century this seemed to change into a moral requirement for civilising the native Africans. Edmund Burke's conceptualisation of trusteeship illustrates the way in which traditionally conceived natural rights were transformed into fundamental social rights, and central to this idea was the expansion of European ‘civilised’ moral communities on which rights now depended.

Keywords:

• terra nullius
• trusteeship
• colonial political thought
• Edmund Burke
• British Idealism

1. Introduction

Judgements on the capabilities of non-Europeans and the moral obligations of ‘civilised’ peoples towards the ‘uncivilised’ has been a firm feature of history since Columbus planted the flag in the New World. Here, attitudes were most famously associated with sixteenth-century Spanish theological and juridical debates on the rationality of the Indians, which culminated in what became known as the Great Valladolid Controversy in 1550. In these juridical controversies the property rights of the Indians was of particular importance; and questions of how entitlement to land could be claimed, generated theories of its appropriation. The concept of terra nullius, meaning empty land, was central to such theories of justification. It was closely allied to the right of husbandry but what became more fundamental was its conceptual facilitation of the moral justification for appropriating ‘waste’ and under-cultivated land. This was the genius of John Locke. Indicative to terra nullius was also the justification of war as dictated by the universal laws of nature and nations if the indigenous people denied such appropriation.

This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius took an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. Trusteeship was the idea that Europeans had the responsibility and duty to hold the land in trust for the indigenous peoples, until they had reached a stage of civilisation at which self-determination was appropriate, and it required a continuous effort on the part of the colonial powers to make judgements on the capabilities of the native peoples and their potential for being civilised. In his insightful study, William Bain, a leading scholar on the political theory of trusteeship, has explored this idea, contrasting it with liberty both of individuals and communities while contending that the contemporary international administration of troubled states, whether Bosnia, East Timor or Kosovo, has seen the return to the principle of trusteeship, ultimately arguing that what lies between anarchy and society is this idea. Bain contends that it was during the Age of Discovery that the space between anarchy and society first opened up, noting the intelligibility of ideas of trusteeship that accompanied the extension of European rule to distant places of the globe. Bain, however, remains vague on the transition from terra nullius in early modern colonial justification to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' idea of trusteeship. The same is partly true of Anthony Pagden's excellent study.1 This paper seeks to fill this gap, by juxtaposing these two ideas with the aim of clarifying and identifying the shift in the teleological, hierarchical worldview of Europeans in their dealings with non-Europeans. As such, my claim is that the trajectory of trusteeship as one of the moral foundations of colonialism deserves further attention, to highlight the change in how empires were morally justified. That such a change occurred in how we think about empire and the duties we have towards people outside Western civilisation is evident but often obscured by the commonplace belief that the moral structures we build for ourselves, through which we make sense of a changing world, are believed to be immemorial. Exploring the moral arguments of terra nullius and trusteeship will help exemplify such change. This is pertinent for at least one main reason: it is important to assert that the moral foundations upon which the European dealings with the world changed—although, as I will point out, the implications appeared to have been the same.

This paper does this by demonstrating how terra nullius and trusteeship, while serving similar legitimating functions, conceptually differed from each other, and how by the nineteenth century the former was by and large conceptually abandoned in favour of the latter. What is significant about these two ideas is that they both instituted a moral justification for the appropriation of native land. I will show that the logic of the two doctrines is intimately related but their articulation differs as the underlying moral framework changed. There is a subtle argument to be noticed here. As Pagden shows, as the rights of man became increasingly more ‘political’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, such rights could only be held within specific political regimes (or within society as the British Idealists argued).2 This, I will contend is exemplified by Edmund Burke (and later the British Idealists), who holds a transitional position, making rights explicitly dependent upon communities, paving the way for the transformation of traditional natural rights to fundamental social rights from which a notion of trusteeship derived.

To underline the limits of my investigations, the focus here is on the moral basis of the arguments and their overall development within a theory of rights framework; thus, the historical practice of terra nullius and trusteeship, well represented in the existing literature, is of less concern, although I will conclude by indicating that in practice their effects were of a piece.3

2. The Idea of Terra Nullius

This section partly reviews the familiar narrative of the idea of terra nullius conceptualised in the writings of its principal early modern investigators.4 The colonisers’ rights to settle on foreign lands were subject to conjecture in this period. Natives were rights holders too, under the universal natural law, but fell short in some way in exercising these rights. For Locke, especially, a conceptual gap opened for the moral legitimacy of European colonial expansion. Theories of property were fundamental to this effect and illustrate how colonialism was justified by extending the European community as universal. Here, however, I intend to break new ground by suggesting that Grotius and Locke, in considering terra nullius as a principle of the law of nature and the conditions for how such rights were to be exercised, surmised a notion of the progressive stages of civilisation. Outlining this natural purpose for mankind begot a diverging path for the moral justification of empire later formulated as the idea of trusteeship. In reality, this meant that for the uplift of the Native races they would have to make progress along specific manual and industrial lines.

The discovery of the Americas gave rise to three centuries of juridical debates on international ethics, where jurisprudential considerations such as the doctrine of terra nullius and theories of ownership and property rights were direct consequences of this normative and legal framing. It was debates such as these that determined the boundaries for the duties of mankind. American Indians, for instance, were claimed to be firmly within the normative and legal jurisdiction of the law of nature and of nations, as were their African counterparts centuries later. As the seventeenth-century jurist Johann Textor wrote using the example of both the American Indians and the Africans of the Cape of the Good Hope, ‘if there be a people so wild and inhumane as to live without Law, the Law of Nations, which Reason dictates and Usage affirms, is not on that account any the less the Law of Nations’.5 Edmund Burke professed the same vein of thought in noting that ‘in Asia as well as in Europe the same law of nations prevails […] and, however disobeyed, no man suffers from the breach of them who does not know how and where to complain of that breach’.6 Early modern European natural law thinkers, later revered as liberals, formulated their political theories with reference to the colonial. They were forced to address the problem of deep cultural differences relating to their meeting with a new world as they had been within their own communities following the wars of religion.7 These intellectual responses to the Discovery of the New World are in many ways supreme examples of how political events interplay with political thinking.

Terra nullius refers to the Latin expression of Roman Law, of ‘land belonging to no one’ or unoccupied, describing a territory not subject to sovereignty or ownership by any state. Indigenous peoples did not constitute political societies and for this reason did not possess the necessary sovereignty for exercising property rights. Carole Pateman argues that the way in which Europeans planted themselves in the new world by appropriating land designated as terra nullius constituted an original contract, the settler contract as she calls it, by replacing the state of nature with civil societies. The legal and moral fiction of terra nullius was instrumental to that effect. As it were, the new settler contract was also a racial contract because the Native people were excluded from it, but their lives and lands were at the same time governed by it.8

The first question to ask is why was terra nullius important for European expansionism? The answer is that it provided the conceptual link between property rights and the moral obligation to prosper. The right of Europeans to appropriate land was a right derived from a duty; that is, the duty imposed by God to make the ground productive, thereby giving prominence to cultivation and the labour associated with it. This idea is best expressed in Locke. From this, the second line of enquiry deals with how terra nullius came to morally justify colonial settlements. The doctrine of appropriating unoccupied land was not only emblematic but also instrumental in furnishing the dichotomy of ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarous’ or ‘savage’ societies, which was central in shaping relations between European and non-European states. It was important because ‘unoccupied’ did not mean ‘uninhabited’. It came to mean underused or under-cultivated land, implying that in one way or another, the Natives had failed in their moral duty to flourish.9 Like the Europeans, they were accountable for what was prescribed for them by the universal laws of nature. The same was later true of the doctrine of trusteeship and the partition of Africa: the Natives had failed in progressing up the ladder of civilisation. As it were, prosperity through the means of civilisation was only attainable through the guidance and help of more civilised peoples, who had a moral duty to deliver this. There is an interesting analogy to be noted here. The transition from one mode of justification to the other, from terra nullius to trusteeship, is as much a transition from one duty to another—from the duty to make the earth bountiful and productive, to the duty to civilise.

Theorists before Locke had postulated similar notions of a moral right to uninhabited land. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) believed that everyone had a natural right to possess and inhabit uncultivated land. The condition was that due recognition was given to the appropriate political authority. This is of course not the case with Locke, where ownership rights to property do not depend on a system of law, whereas for Grotius it could only have validity within such a context. Grotius distinguished between property and jurisdiction, where the latter was something that was exercised over people rather than things but also extended it to all people entering within a given territory. As such, Grotius could deny the claim that the Portuguese had special rights to possess the East Indies from which he would later gain his fame.10 ‘The sea is by nature open to all’,11 and neither it nor land was by nature the property of anyone; however, ‘land through nature can become property, while the sea cannot’.12 For Grotius, the violation of rights is just ground for war against the perpetrators, and the law of nations prescribes a natural right for states to punish violations of the law of nature. If the Indian authorities refused settlers their right of settlement, this would be to violate the natural law and a just war could be waged against them.13 Although Grotius recognised the political authority of the Indians, he did not recognise their eminent domain, or the sovereignty they held over the land. By emphasising the collective ownership of the land by the Indians, Pufendorf's later theory severely restricted any colonial aspirations for the Europeans.14

Relating the idea of terra nullius to the principles of natural law, that is, of exercising one's right to settle and cultivate the land to fulfil God's plan in making the earth plentiful, was not a Grotian invention. Rather, he developed it from the neo-Scholastic tradition he inherited from the Spanish. It was the Dominican Francisco Vitoria (1480–1546) who had deemed the resort to war as just under the law of nations, if the Spanish were denied their natural right to seizure of ‘vacant land’ or gold found in that land. Ideas of property rights in the early modern period rested on the assumption that God had given the world in common to mankind and so land found to be unused or unoccupied was open for legitimate occupation.15 Vitoria was clear that the case of the Indians was one of natural law and natural rights, rather than being dependent upon the jurisdiction of the pope or emperor. Under the natural law all men had a right to everything, thereby denying the claim that the Indians were not in full possession of their land. If the Spanish were to claim that the Indians had no ownership rights as a way of justifying dominion, the Indians had to be sinners, infidels or idiots, and Vitoria could find no evidence to support such claims: the authority of a prince did not depend on God's grace but on God's law. Dominium must be independent thereof and instead derive from man as a rational being, made in God's image, which was a fundamental characteristic that could not be lost through sin. Vitoria was adamant that however irrational it might seem, no act could make you forfeit your natural right to property. Sins such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, sodomy and incest were not sufficient grounds to justify intervention to subjugate the Indians and deprive them of their property.16

The only way in which Spain could justify its jurisdiction in America was in relation to the jus gentium by what he called ‘right of society and natural communication’; seashores and natural harbours are absolutely necessary for man's survival; these have therefore, under God, been exempted from the original division of property.17 This contention gave the Spanish the right to travel into the lands of Indians. These were rights to trade and preach the Gospel without interference,18 and enforcing the violation of these natural rights was the only legitimate grounds for the Spanish presence in America, leaving the door wide open for colonisation.

Most of the early modern thinkers contended that people had an obligation (to God) to cultivate the land and that no persons had a right to stop others who were so inclined. For the jurist Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), occupation of ‘vacant land’ arose out of necessity, and was prompted by the Aristotelian tenet that nature abhors a vacuum. The obligation to acquire ‘waste lands’ was based on his notion of relating the law of nations to the universal community of mankind (societas gentium) instead of the later common practice of exclusively to nations. The implications were far reaching: Gentili used the idea of a world community that in essence served to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, the suggestion being that there was a right to occupy land by means of possession.19 For Gentili, the law of nations are rules and standards, which civilised nations use to regulate their relations. People with no religion are not offered the protection of the law as customary unanimity only fails to be recognised if races of men disagree on the existence of God.

Emmerich de Vattel (1714–1767) believed that unoccupied land could be colonised, as it was the property of no one: human society imposed obligations on nations to contribute to their own advancement and happiness as well as that of others, and such appropriations should be brought about peacefully, not through violence. Vattel took a clear stand against the sort of arguments that violations of the natural law such as the moral right to ‘vacant land’ gave a just cause for war, as posited by Grotius. The American Indians had been subjected to the avaricious rule of ambitious European states on the pretext of civilisation and instruction in the true religion, noting that ‘it is surprising to hear the learned and judicious Grotius tell us that a sovereign can justly take up arms to punish Nations, which are guilty of grievous crimes against the natural law’.20 For Vattel, then, appropriation of ‘uninhabited’ lands is permissive; intentions, however, must be grounded in just motivation of charity and morality.21 Appropriating ‘wasteland’ is to be done only as a means of sustaining life in accordance with the natural law and, unlike Locke, mere occupancy for Vattel is not enough.22 Vattel therefore was much more nuanced on the point of terra nullius than is usually recognised by scholars today. What his argument shows is the contingency of its use being invoked where it was evident that appropriation would be ‘low cost’—that is, in sparsely populated areas. Vattel, for instance, contrasted ‘the moderation of the English Puritans’ against the Spanish colonialists, and held William Penn and his Quaker colony as praiseworthy examples of how land which they wished to occupy was bought from the Indians.23

John Locke (1632–1704) was the genius who posited an account of a law of nature that prescribed a principle of preserving oneself through cultivation of the land: he correlated the right to husbandry with the duty of cultivation. Logically, the way in which humans can fulfil their duty to God of self-preservation is by exercising the corollary right to cultivate the earth for nourishment. Thus, terra nullius relates specifically to the right to husbandry being derived from the duty of self-preservation as commanded by God. The right to husbandry is universal but natives had a duty to give up land that was not being cultivated. What we see prescribed in Locke in relation to terra nullius is the application of a universal principle against which the natives are found wanting. It is a principle derived from the natural law of God's command to humanity of self-preservation, a duty which the savages and barbarians derelict by not making the earth productive and bountiful. The more cultivated and productive the land becomes by introducing new techniques of cultivation, the more man fulfils his duty to God. This also entails establishing civil societies and good government to provide protection for man's industriousness. This religious obligation makes several presumptions about recognisable modes of agriculture and what constitutes efficient exploitation of the land. One thing was certain: Indians as hunters/gatherers were deemed insufficient and were considered to be parasitic on the land. Uncultivated land came to be regarded as ‘waste land’. Private property in Locke does not require the context of civil society as it did for Pufendorf. If it did, it would go against God's intention. Private property existed in the state of nature derived from the premise that every person had property in himself. The principle of natural equality dictated further that no one could exercise dominion without consent. However, it is labour not consent that creates property in things: ‘The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them’.24 The ingenuity of Locke, as Boucher argues, was coming up with a universal theory of property without somehow conceding that the Indians owned their land by introducing a limited definition of labour and making it a moral obligation to engage in that particular type of labour. (This effectively meant setting the Natives up for failure in fulfilling their duty to God.) Locke's ideas of property rights are unusual: labour and ownership are fully restricted to the kind of pursuit that is related to cultivation.25 Whether consciously employing Locke or not, the industrial zeal for development amongst European settlers in America, Australia and Africa quickly led to this distinction between unproductive and productive land. Through cultivation they could claim entitlement to it. It was about exercising a right held in common with the Natives; a right which the Natives simply had not effectively used for themselves.26 Locke, and Grotius, however, also point us in the direction of the later colonial legitimation associated with trusteeship and the civilising mission.

3. Early Exemplars of the Idea of Trusteeship

Some scholars have seen a nascent justification of trusteeship in the writings of Vitoria; but as will be argued, such contentions fall far short of the later full-blown articulations.27

Invoking the fundamental Aristotelian principle Vitoria noted that ‘God and nature do not fail for a great part of a species in what is necessary. But the special quality in man is reason, and potency which is not actualized in vain’.28 Brian Tierney aptly argues that Anthony Pagden misunderstands this notion in Vitorian jurisprudence. This erroneous interpretation that the Indians’ rationality demonstrated potential, like that of children, leads Pagden to argue that the Castilian crown could claim the right to be the legal protectors of the Indians and their lands until they reached the age of reason under tutelage of the Spaniards. This could even be considered an act of charity, for which we would have a moral obligation. This is not at all what Vitoria meant: it is true that he rehearsed such an argument, but he rejects any early exemplar of trusteeship. The Indians were not a people whose intellect was merely potential; it was actual. For to claim such a view would ultimately imply that God and nature had somehow failed.29 As such, denying Vitoria's guardianship doctrine renders this narrow basis for the development of a full-blown doctrine of trusteeship questionable. That is not to say, however, that the Christian Church's civilising mission cannot be construed as an early exemplar of trusteeship—of assisting the Natives on the right path in the promise of eternal salvation.

Even so, in the classic natural law thinkers, we find subtle intimations of relating natural rights to the demands of the progressive stages of civilisation. When Locke wrote the famous words ‘In the beginning all the World was America’, he also remarked that ‘America […] is still a Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe’. What he opened up to was the idea that there were different stages of civilisation to which societies progressed over time. In Hobbes's Leviathan there was even further evidence to suggest that a way had opened up to think of America as some form of living model for the first stages of mankind.30 Grotius also alluded to this notion of the progressive stages of civilisations in his somewhat eccentric account De origine gentium americanarum as early as 1642.31 However, Locke had yet to link up obligations to this early account of progressive civilisation. A nascent idea of trusteeship cannot in this way be ascribed. It was not until the early nineteenth century that this idea of obligation became incumbent upon a theory of the natural progress of society. Such ideas, nevertheless found early expressions in Spanish political thought in the recognition of natives’ rights to land being dependent on a tenet of civilisation, informing the Europeans’ belief of their obligations towards the natives. Suárez certainly rehearsed the idea of civilising the Indians as a way of morally justifying Spanish rule in the New World, to provide an additional moral justification for appropriating land.32 He, however, remained vague as to this effect. No one imposed the Spanish humanitarian mission with more fervour than the Jesuit Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573).

The precept of Sepúlveda's humanitarianism was far reaching: the Indians were natural slaves, a contention he based on Aristotelian ethics, and if they resisted this natural order of dominion then they gave their superiors grounds for waging a just war against them. The justification he gave was that the Indians had to be saved from themselves and subjected to masters in order to guide them and bring them into the fold of Christianity to save their souls. His stipulation for just war was in maintaining that the Indians killed innocents among themselves, hailing their salvation as a just enterprise. To protect ‘innocent persons from such injurious acts’ would give the Spanish ‘the right, already granted by God and nature, to wage war against these barbarians to submit them to Spanish rule’.33

Providing barbarians with salvation through warfare was to be encouraged, the issue being that the Indians’ souls were in grave danger. ‘If anyone doubts’, Sepúlveda contended, ‘that all men who wander outside the Christian religion will perish in eternal death, he is not Christian. Therefore, the barbarians are rightfully compelled to justice for the sake of their salvation’.34 Sepúlveda asserted the common bond of humanity established by divine and the natural law to consider all men as our neighbours if ‘we can do so without disadvantage to ourselves’.35 God had given human beings commandments concerning his or her neighbour, and we have a duty to obey such divine laws. If we do not, then we commit heresy. What underlies Sepúlveda's just war theory is the notion that the Spanish had clear moral obligations to civilise and Christianise the Indians. It seemed obvious that the Indians were not reasonable enough to be left to their own devices. Although we, with Sepúlveda, get an early exemplar of trusteeship, insofar as the Spanish were required to civilise the Indians by Christianisation, he remains an aberration for this period of thought.

4. The Moral Reasoning of Trusteeship

The appropriation of, and claims of entitlement to Native land is noticeably recognisable in the conceptual application of terra nullius. This should not, however, obscure the fact that the idea of trusteeship resulted in the expropriation of land from indigenous inhabitants for the exploitation of resources. The moral, political and epistemic authority of trusteeship was instead based on the promise of self-determination for such inhabitants. In short, the doctrine of trusteeship betrayed a certain emancipatory potential of the granting of sovereign independence to people (and nations), thereby obfuscating the political and economic interests these entailed. Making the land as productive as possible remained a fixed feature in the colonial justificatory narrative, ensuring that a native workforce could fully exploit the resource potential of the land. The mid-nineteenth-century Victorian missions to Africa are partly an example of this.36

Why was the idea of trusteeship not actualised as justification for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' colonialism in Americas? From the outset of the Discovery of the New World, the Christian Church was engaged in the Christianisation of native peoples, as part of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises. Briefly stated, in one explanation we see that the eighteenth-century architects of empire were confronted with the legacies of the American and French Revolution in ways that the Spanish and Portuguese empires were not. The descent of the ideas of the rights of man in political thought disallowed all appeals to divine rights, Papal blessings, and right of conquest as justification of dominion in Africa and Asia. Justification of empire depended instead on the benefit it conferred on the governed, as was implicit in the American Declaration of Independence.37 This was the Lockean element of governmental accountability in the social contract. But what was more, such development had turned the universal rights obligation constellation on its head.

As Bain notes, the Enlightenment introduced the impulse of reform, and a change in thinking about the human condition. This was perhaps best expressed in Kant's principle of self-determination, which became the guiding principle for nineteenth-century liberalism as a standard of moral agency. However, reaching enlightenment required a move away from the abject condition of immaturity, and such condition, invariably, necessitated the guidance of another.38 It was with this form of enlightened, governed empire that John Stuart Mill aligned his faith but which he could never quite reconcile with actual colonial practices. Such were the deep tensions in Mill's theory, that he expounded a strong theoretical defence of the civilising potential of foreign races, while at the same time displaying deep reservations about British colonial conduct, especially in the West Indies. This came into full force during the criminal trials of Governor Eyre's management of the Jamaican uprising in 1865, which Mill pursued fervently, making an almost uncanny resemblance to Burke, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings some seventy years before that.39

The idea of trusteeship, in which the facilitation of civilising was constitutive, embodied the best traditions of enlightened empire in the professed and demonstrable humanitarian concern for the condition of the Native peoples but also the worst traditions of empire fuelled by theories of racial and neo-Darwinian supremacy.40 Moral justification for empire changed into the impetus for indigenous spiritual welfare and civilising progress. The change in natural law tradition and the emerging rights culture affected the moral duties that Europeans, as they saw it, had towards empire.

The terms of the Berlin Conference of 1884/5, which was called to regulate European colonisation and trade in Africa, give a sound representation of nineteenth-century attitudes towards trusteeship for the moral and material advancements of the natives. The primary justification put forward for trusteeship was to initiate the natives ‘in the industrious arts […] to raise them to the civilisation and bring about the extinction of barbarous customs, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice’.41 The notion of trusteeship charted at Berlin followed Lord Lugard's prominent claim that

Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane; that the benefit can be made reciprocal, and that it is the aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfil this dual mandate.42

Such prose resonated strongly with sixteenth-century Spanish colonial apologists and earlier Christians’ notions of oikoumene. This was the strongly-held belief, idealised by Vitoria, in the common, homogeneous origin of mankind and, in God's will for the perfection of man to be extended across the whole world. However, there was an essential difference in justification: except for what we see in Sepúlveda, the American Indians were under no obligation to receive the Gospel. There is a sense in which the common rights of man, as formulated by theorists of seventeenth-century natural law, were conceptually bankrupt by the late eighteenth century as a way to address the challenges of a global colonial world. Rights needed a specific context to be comprehensible. The distinction between nature and society, as Pagden notes, between the rights a person might hold as an individual and hold as a member of a given community, which both the Thomists and the early modern theorists of natural law had fought to keep separate, albeit with limited degrees of success, had now collapsed altogether. There were now certain obligations to do good and behave accordingly on the part of those who perceived themselves civilised towards backward and barbarian peoples. The implications lay in the context of which rights were now recognised; being dependant on the principle of civilisation meant that there was no law of nature, thus no body of rights to which the barbarian could appeal.43 The emerging idea of trusteeship illustrates this shift and if we are to attribute the origin of its conceptualisation to Edmund Burke, we have to look for its derivation in his nascent social rights theory, rather than to attribute its origin to the political thought of John Locke. This transition underlines the permissiveness of colonisation as exemplified in the doctrine of terra nullius to the requirement of the civilising mission for empire exemplified in the doctrine of trusteeship.

5. Trusteeship as Social Rights

It was in the writings on India that Edmund Burke (1729–1797) formulated his idea of trusteeship in the 1780s, and it is probably best summed up in his famous speech on Fox's East Indian Bill:

All political power which is set over men, and that all privilege claimed or exercised in exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and for so much a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit. If this is true with regard to every species of political dominion and every description of commercial privilege, none of which can be original, self-derived rights, or grants for the mere private benefit of the holders, then such rights, or privileges […] are all in the strictest sense a trust: and it is of the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable […].44

Burke positioned his theory of trusteeship as a response to what he conceived to be Hastings's arbitrary rule and misuse of power in India. His idea of trusteeship later resonated in his most famous work, Reflection on the Revolution in France, in justifying the Revolution of 1688 as a legitimate response to James II's breach of trust with the English people.45 Burke's involvement in Indian politics and his crusade against Hastings has seen him being placed as a critic of empire and a defender of cultural pluralism. This is certainly the case for his writings on India.46 His notion of trusteeship truly becomes intelligible only by examining it as part of his broader political thought as a critic of Rationalism and its adherence to abstract natural rights. This also calls his supposedly Lockean foundations into question.47

With roots in Locke's political philosophy, a trusteeship conception of government was commonly appreciated among eighteenth-century Whigs, like Burke. However, the philosophical analogy stops there. Trusteeship for Burke was Lockean only in the form that he emphasised accountability of the rulers over the ruled, dispensing any support for arbitrary political power within the British Empire. When Burke proclaimed that India was a trust, it was this familiar Whiggish notion of accountability he was emphasising. Frederick Whelan perceptively notes that unlike what we find in Locke, where governmental accountability prescribes a right of revolution as the ultimate recourse of the people, in Burke the insistence is put on the accountability of the governors, not the governed.48 Rather, Burke's idea of ‘trust’ conformed to a notion of necessary constraints on the way all power is to be exercised.49 Mankind for Burke did not follow up some ‘speculative principle, either of government or of freedom’ as we would find in Locke.50 Instead, Burke noted that all government and human benefit was founded upon compromise and barter; to balance inconveniences ‘we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others’ giving away natural liberty to enjoy civil advantages’, sacrificing ‘some civil liberties for the advantages to be derived from the communion and fellowship of a great empire’.51 Although Burke did sympathise with certain cases of Indian oppression against Hastings's rule, he left no room in his Indian writings for a right of revolution as we would find in Locke. Burke's Indian writings are first of all a critique of a ‘geographical morality’, the way in which Britons readily applied moral and legal precepts in their dealings with other cultures which were different to those of European ones, especially in India.52 He instead noted that

[I]n justification of ourselves […] the laws of morality are the same everywhere; and there is no action, which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and all the world over.53

His mission was not to fascinate, but rather to ‘familiarise the public’ with the actual relations of things, and ground the social and moral community for a provincial Britain.54 In admonishing on this topic, Burke was prepared, if only ironically as Jennifer Pitts argues, to call into question Britain's national self-image as civilised and cosmopolitan:

[H]itherto we have moved within the narrow circle of municipal justice. I am afraid, that, from the habits acquired by moving within a circumscribed sphere, we may be induced rather to endeavour at forcing Nature into that municipal circle than to enlarge the circle of national justice to the necessities of the empire we have obtained.55

The promotion of certain rights and liberties to the subjects of the Empire lay at the heart of his plea in extending British moral norms to the Indians. This was firstly to be done through mutually beneficial intercourse in trade, a duty the East India Company had not performed, in that such encounters had been undertaken with great harm to the indigenous Indian society. Burke argued that it was the ‘evident duty, and [their] clearest interest’ of the British to employ European arts and discipline and ‘the power that grew out of them [would] meliorate the condition of the subject and the dependant’.56 For Burke, it was the British failure to sympathise with their Indian subjects that constituted the real colonial injustice, in addition to the institutional failings of the East India Company's unaccountability. What logically presupposed the practice of ‘geographical morality’ was the characterisation of other societies as historically lawless and barbaric in order to exclude such societies from the standards of European rights and liberties. The response was Burke's insistence on Britain's obligations to apply the same moral standards in their dealings with India by upholding that Indian society was anything but lawless and despotic.57 Here Burke offered ‘The Law of Nature and of Nations’ as a riposte against Hastings's ‘geographical morality’. It is not my intention here to elaborate further on the foundational disposition of Burke's appeal to the law of nature. Suffice to say that any attempt to qualify Burke as a natural law theorist is ultimately unpersuasive: Burke's conception of the natural law is not to be viewed as a primary set of precepts underlying political and societal life but rather as setting the universal scope for moral norms, explaining his frequent appeals to it in his speeches regarding the impeachment of Hastings.58 It is in this context of Burke's political thought that his idea of trusteeship must make its entrance. Burke's notion of trusteeship formed a key element in his argument of just treatment of the Indians by arguing for the extension of British sympathies to that part of the Empire, just as he had previously insisted that Americans and Irish should be recognised as retaining the rights of Englishmen. Burke's concept of trusteeship implied certain rights as beneficiaries for the subject races of the British Empire, even though it remains a matter of controversy whether there were actual procedures in place to press for such rights.59 Speaking on Fox's East India, Burke laments:

the rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure […]. Indeed, this formal recognition, by the sovereign power, of an original right in the subject, can never be subverted.60

Fox's East India Bill became Burke's political manifesto in which to plea for the rescuing of ‘the greatest number of the human race that ever were so grievously oppressed, from the greatest tyranny that was every exercised’.61 But in this plight for the immediate reform of the East India Company's rule in India, Burke erred on the side of caution, reminding parliament that the power vested in the reformer was also a trust and that ‘it is the use we make of resumed power that must justify or condemn us in the resumption of it’. This new reform policy in India would be the ‘Magna Charta of Hindostan’.62

Thus, Burke's idea of trusteeship was a way of formally recognising the rights of the Indians, and provided a certain set of rights for the peoples living under British rule. Burke views on trusteeship conformed to his wider idea of thinking of rights as inherent in society's life and practices. By rejecting natural rights as metaphysical nonsense Burke carved a unique conception of social rights insofar as the justification of these rights depended on the contribution they made to the common good and the civility of the community in which they emerged. In Burke's view, deducing practical political policies from abstract principles was a precarious affair. ‘Government is not made in virtue of natural rights […] their abstract perfection’ is in fact ‘their practical defect’,63 and while abstractly-speaking such principles might be good, they are nowhere to be found.64 ‘Pretended rights’, Burke famously stated in Reflections, ‘are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false’.65 Burke does profess a certain usefulness to the idea of rights, but such rights are intelligible only in relation to civil society.

Unlike Grotius and Locke, Burke's emphasis on the idea of the civil social man is crucial. He expounded a common nature in man, which was substantially adapted by history, religion, manners, habits, institutions and customs. ‘The civil social man’ is both a product of our own making and of circumstances. The question of to what extent there is a universal nature, and in what it consists, is for Burke determined by this particular view of the civil social man and by the inherent similitude and manners they share. What underlies society's moral constraints are not divine sanction or consent arising from the social contract, but is instead the common sympathies we share. It is these sympathies that furnish us with the rights of civil society.66

Men are not tied together to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. […] They are obligations written in the heart. […] The secret, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse, holds them together, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to equivocate, scuffle, and fight about the terms of their written obligations.67

A century later, Lord Morley, Burke's famous biographer, summed up the way in which Burke's idea of empire, presented in his Indian writings, had given way to the Commonwealth:

That Hastings was acquitted was immaterial. The lesson of his impeachment had been taught with sufficiently impressive force – the great lessons that Asiatics have rights, and that Europeans have obligations; and that the authority of the English legislature is not more entirely a trust for the benefit of this country than the dominion of English in India is a trust for the benefit of the inhabitants of India.68

Whether directly influenced by Burke, Burke's idea of trusteeship understood as a way of giving content to the sort of social rights that non-European communities could claim within the British Empire, resonated in the rights theories of the British Idealists, coupled with their view on imperial responsibility.

In British Idealism, a system of rights was necessary for full self-realisation in the moral community. Although disagreeing to the extent of its actual achievement, the British Idealists promoted a wider international community, and their moral justification of empire was part of this, of reconciling the duties of men and citizens.69 The British Idealists were, like Burke, severe critics of the natural rights tradition. Nonetheless, they were willing to label rights that were fundamental to society ‘natural’, insofar as they contributed to the common good. For someone like T. H. Green, rights existed independently not of society per se, but of political society. Rights, according to Green, are powers that are necessary for the attainment of a good in which all share.70 Most of the British Idealists justified imperialism on the grounds that more civilised nations had a duty to assist raising lower nations to levels capable of self-government.71 For the late Victorians, thinking about empire invoked a notion of duty, which became a founding cornerstone of Victorian morality, despite often acknowledging past injustices.72 Speaking in 1900 about the British obligations to India, the Idealist philosopher J. H. Muirhead remarked that

to repudiate its responsibilities, to retire from tasks it [the Empire] has undertaken, however thoughtless at the time, is the poorest sort of corporate repentance. In the case of an empire like ours this would be a crime outweighing all we have committed in creating it.73

For Henry Jones, moral improvement was the destiny of the British nation and its Empire; and he, like J. H. Muirhead, stressed the moral foundations of empire as necessary in promoting the unity of sentiment, which was instrumental in binding the whole together. But unlike the natural law and natural rights thinkers, this whole—the higher ideals of humanity—was not a pre-existing realm outside the state, waiting to be achieved. Conceptualising the good life and the highest ideals of civilisation requires our participation in the moral community. It was a moral principle of maternalism which lay at the root of the British Idealist's humanitarianism of guiding ‘primitive’ people to the age of reason.74

There was recognition of the explicit ranking of different races according to their degree of civilisation. Furthermore, there were acknowledgements that different types of government suited different circumstances. At the core of the idea of trusteeship was the notion that it must always be for the people, even if it is not by the people. In this sense, Idealist imperialism resonated with Burke's articulation of trusteeship. The idea of the obligation of civilising people outside your moral community is a process in which there is recognition of the other as capable of apprehending, formulating and promoting the common good. Most of the British Idealists would argue that moral communities outside of the state (in their special meaning of the term) were not sufficiently developed and robust enough to sustain a fully functioning system of rights in which self-realisation is a priority. Imperialism is a way of assisting people lower down on the scale of civilisation to attain the sort of moral community necessary for full self-realisation. For Green, for instance, the sense of obligation comes from recognising those who we regard as our neighbours as capable of conceiving and sharing in a common good.75 This was in essence a sort of Burkean moral law of vicinage where, as Burke had stated, when there is no constituted judge ‘[…] the vicinage itself [was] the natural judge. It is, preventively, the assertor of its own rights; or remedially, their avenger. Neighbours are presumed to take cognisance of each other's acts’.76

For the British Idealists and for Burke too, there is a sense in which an idea of the obligation of trusteeship and the civilising mission becomes intelligible when understanding it as part of their social rights theories. From the natural rights theories of the seventeenth century, terra nullius became the epitome of the moral justification of colonialism, whereas from a theory of recognition of rights we get trusteeship. In effect, the doctrine of trusteeship, like that of terra nullius, also presupposed a conception of property rights. Holding the land in trust for the indigenous people implied moral and legal proprietary entitlement to native land. The difference was that in the former, obligation towards political and communal advancement was primarily placed on the natives, whereas in latter, obligation to civilise was placed on the colonisers themselves. Thus, there is a shift in legitimation from universal assimilation as exemplified by terra nullius and the natives’ duty to God to prosper, to the colonisers’ obligation to ensure a moral community that facilitated native prosperity by means of trusteeship.

6. Conclusion

By the later stages of imperialism, it was evident that the idea of trusteeship had become consolidated in political thought and was widely prescribed for dealing with non-European races, as the idea of terra nullius had been prescribed in appropriating the Indians’ lands in the New World.

Macmillan Press's widely read Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1916) included a chapter dealing with the issue of ‘Political Relations between Advanced and Backward Peoples’. So far, the solution to this perceived problem had been that European colonialism in Africa had rejected most political, economic, and cultural compromises with Africans based on convictions of European superiority and a belief in a divine mandate to rule and civilise Africa. The obligation to civilise lay in the mission to put an end to the ‘intolerable sufferings among a backward people’ by promoting the good government of civilisation, liberty and progress.77 The obligation was always perceived to be that ‘the superior race [was] bound to observe the highest current morality of the time in all its dealings with the subject race’.78 This very perception had manifested itself in the different moral arguments about colonialism and empire, as exemplified by terra nullius and trusteeship.

These two doctrines both illustrated the moral framework within which European colonisers dealt with non-European races. And while they both, directly or indirectly, justified the appropriation of native land, they also epitomised the universal rights and obligations of their times. Terra nullius epitomised the way in which early modern thinkers sought to make the rights of mankind truly universal by affording rights to the Native American Indians. The standards by which such rights were exercised were set high and non-Europeans, as a result, would inevitably fall short. For once, they fell short in establishing civil societies by neglecting their moral obligation to God to make the earth bountiful and productive. Making rights dependent on a specific mode of production or societal model paved the way for arguments about the moral duties of civilised peoples in relation to less civilised people. Pagden's contention that rights could only be conceived within civilised societies is important. However, it meant that the obligation to civilise was placed on the colonisers themselves, and at the same time this transition transformed traditional natural rights into fundamental social rights. Along with the British Idealists, Burke's notion of trusteeship exemplifies this shift. The moral justification of empire was refocused in the form of trusteeship that demanded the export of a moral community in which rights could be reified. Ultimately, the decline of colonial empires saw a shift away from Burkean and British Idealism thoughts about the moral efficacy of trusteeship, making way for a more Kantian individualistic model of ethics, representative of modern day human rights culture. Today, it would seem, such human rights culture has uncovered systematic forces of power and ideology equal to the colonial legitimating reasoning of trusteeship, in the West's continuing dealings with post-colonial countries.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Boucher for his research support in writing this article. In addition, this article also benefitted from comments provided by Thad Metz, Chris Allsobrook, and Sarah Gallimore.

Notes

¹See William Bain, Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (Oxford, 2003); Anthony Pagden, ‘Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Europe's Imperial Legacy’, Political Theory, 31 (2003), 171–99.

²See Anthony Pagden, ‘Human Rights, Natural Rights’.

³Shortly, they both illustrate the more practical implications of the European ideas of universal natural law, natural rights and the law of nations, and the consequences of those earlier encounters of ‘intervening’ to save souls, to civilise, or to ensure personal safety has entailed the establishment of sovereignty over foreign peoples. This has meant the permanent exclusion of certain indigenous peoples from the international sphere, making it ubiquitous in discussions about the legitimacy of European expansionism and the detrimental implications it has had on the indigenous peoples whose lands were deemed ‘empty’. (See for instance, David Boucher, The Limits of Ethics in International Relations: Natural Law, Natural Rights and Human Rights in Transition (Oxford, 2009); Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Carole Pateman, ‘The Settler Contract’, in Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, 2007)). Both doctrines were characterised by an uneven career and were contingently evoked whenever needed. For instance, Stuart Banner has questioned the status of terra nullius as the main legitimating factor for the colonisation of North America, noting that while terra nullius was such a basic and well-known fact of Australian history it is easy to forget how uncharacteristic it was in the broader context of British colonisation, underlying the myth that supposedly Indian property rights were never recognised. What seems to be the case is that there was no standard argument for appropriation of land. Captain Cook, for instance, used first sighting initially in respect of Australia. Various arguments were used in relation to Africa: initially, the Dutch did not regard the Cape terra nullius and treated the Khoikhoi as a sovereign people with whom to do trade with (see Özlem Ülgen, ‘Developing the Doctrine of Aboriginal Title in South Africa: Source and Content’, Journal of African Law, 46 (2002), 131–54 (137); and while the Boers two centuries later thought the centre of Africa terra nullius, arguments of trusteeship were being used elsewhere.

⁴See especially Boucher, Limits of Ethics; David Boucher, ‘The Law of Nations and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius’, in War, the State and International Law in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Olaf Asbach and Peter Schröder (Aldershot, 2010), 63–82.

⁵Cited in Boucher, ‘Law of Nations’, in War, the State and International Law, edited by Asbach and Schröder, 76.

⁶Edmund Burke, ‘Opening of Impeachment (16 February 1788)’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 12 vols (Boston, MA, 1901), IX, 485.

⁷David Armitage, ‘John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, Political Theory, 32 (2004), 602–27 (602–03).

⁸See Pateman, ‘Settler Contract’, in Pateman and Mills, Contract and Domination.

⁹Boucher, ‘Law of Nations’, in War, the State and International Law, edited by Asbach and Schröder, 69–70, 77.

¹⁰See Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, translated by Richard Hakluyt, edited by David Armitage (Indianapolis, IN, 2004, first published in 1604).

¹¹Grotius, The Free Sea, 91.

¹²Grotius, The Free Sea, 81.

¹³Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace [first published as The Rights of War and Peace, Three Books (1625)], translated by Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford, 1925), book II, chapter 20, section 40. See also his Prolegomena, section 25.

¹⁴Samuel von Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Eight Books, translated by C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather (Oxford, 1934, first published in 1672), book IV, chapter 6, section 4. See also David Boucher ‘Property and Propriety in International Relations: The Case of Locke’, in Classical Theory in International Relations, edited by Beate Jahn (Cambridge, 2006), 156–77.

¹⁵Boucher, ‘Law of Nations’, in War, the State and International Law, edited by Asbach and Schröder, 71.

¹⁶Francisco Vitoria, Political Writings, edited by Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge, 1991), 272–75.

¹⁷Vitoria, Political Writings, 280.

¹⁸Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513-1830 (New Haven, CT, 1990), 23–25.

¹⁹Alberico Gentili, Three Books on the Law of War, translated and edited by John C. Rolfe (Oxford, 1933, first published in 1612), book I, chapter 1, section 11.

²⁰Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations, or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns, translated by Charles G. Fenwick (Washington, DC, 1916, first published in 1758), chapter 1, section 7, 116. Grotius's mistake, Vattel argues, lay in his confusion that the freedom attributed to individuals and sovereign states somehow gives rise to a right to punish crimes when the law of nature is violated. For Vattel, a national's right to punish only exists against those who have injured it.

²¹Vattel, Law of Nations, book I, chapter 18, section 209, 85.

²²Vattel, Law of Nations, book I, chapter 18, section 208, 85.

²³Vattel, Law of Nations, book I, chapter 18, section 208, 85.

²⁴John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1988), sections 29–30, 289.

²⁵Boucher, Limits of Ethics, 127–29.

²⁶Boucher, ‘Law of Nations’, in War, the State and International Law, edited by Asbach and Schröder, 79.

²⁷See for instance James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and His Law of Nations (Washington, DC, 1932), 157–58; M. F. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law: Being a Treatise on the Law and Practice Relating to Colonial Expansion (London, 1926), 12. More recently, see Douglas Sanders, ‘The Re-emergence of Indigenous Questions in International Law’, Canadian Human Rights Yearbook, 3 (1983); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of the Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), 94.

²⁸Cited in Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150-1625 (Cambridge, 2000), 269–70.

²⁹Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 270.

³⁰Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), 17, 23.

³¹Hugo Grotius, On the Origin of the Native Races of America: A Dissertation by Hugo Grotius [first published as De origine gentium americanarum], translated by Edmund Goldsmith (Edinburgh, 1884).

³²See Francisco Suárez, Selections from Three Works, translated by Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown and John Waldron (Oxford, 1944), Disputation XIII, v.

³³Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians (Dekalb, IL, 1994), 86.

³⁴Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Apology for the Book on the Just Causes of War: Dedicated to the Most Learned and Distinguished President, Antonio Ramirez, Bishop of Segovia, translated by Lewis D. Epstein (Unpublished: Bowdoin College, 1973), 18.

³⁵Sepúlveda, Apology, 22.

³⁶For instance, as governor of the Cape Colony, part of George Grey's African ‘amalgamation’ scheme was that missionaries diversify the traditional classical curriculum to include agricultural and industrial training as part of the ‘civilising’ mission, to suit their perceived futures. For the conceptual development and dissemination of the idea of trusteeship in South Africa, from ‘Cape Liberalism’ to ‘Nationalist Segregationism’, see Chris Allsobrook and Camilla Boisen, ‘Perversities of Autonomy: the Devolution of a very British Reserve’, in Empire and Economics, edited by Lawrence Hamilton and Peter Vale (forthcoming).

³⁷William Bain, Between Anarchy and Society (Oxford, 2003) 16–17.

³⁸Bain, Between Anarchy and Society, 16–17.

³⁹See Margaret Kohn and Daniel I. O'Neill, ‘A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America’, Political Theory, 34 (2006), 192–228. In this excellent study, Kohn and O'Neill provide new evidence to support the claim that a close reading of the writings of Burke and Mill in relation to the West Indies gives new insight into their respective views on empire. In this context Burke re-emerges instead as a proponent of empire, and Mill as the critic.

⁴⁰Bain, Between Anarchy and Society, 17.

⁴¹ The Brussels Conference Act of 1890, Article II.

⁴²Lord Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, fifth edition (London, 1965, first published in 1922), 617.

⁴³Pagden, ‘Human Rights, Natural Rights’, 190–92.

⁴⁴Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Fox's East India Bill (1783)’, in Writings and Speeches, II, 439.

⁴⁵James Conniff, ‘Burke and India: The Failure of the Theory of Trusteeship’, Political Research Quarterly, 46 (1993), 291–309 (297).

⁴⁶See Kohn and O'Neill, ‘A Tale of Two Indias’.

⁴⁷See Bain, Between Anarchy and Society; Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA, 1996); Frederick A. Dreyer, Burke's Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy (Waterloo, ON, 1979), 45.

⁴⁸Whelan, Burke and India, 23–25.

⁴⁹Dreyer, Burke's Politics, 45.

⁵⁰Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America (1775)’, in Writings and Speeches, II, 168.

⁵¹Burke, ‘Moving Resolution for Conciliation’, in Writings and Speeches, II, 169.

⁵²Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 99.

⁵³Burke, ‘Opening of Impeachment’, in Writings and Speeches, IX, 448.

⁵⁴Gerald W. Chapman, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 249.

⁵⁵Cited in Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire 99.

⁵⁶Edmund Burke, An Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans in India, by the British Arms in Answer to a Pamphlet Entitled ‘Considerations on the Conquest of Tanjore’ (London, 1779), 119.

⁵⁷Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 88, 100–01. While Pitts perceptively argues that Burke's ‘speeches on India were intended not only to elicit empathy for Indians but also to make the British public aware of their own self-understanding as Britons and to develop a national consciousness that was less insular and exclusionary, and instead tailored to promote just actions abroad’, she seems to conspicuously leave Burke's notion of trusteeship out; see Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 123.

⁵⁸See Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 345 note 81. For criticisms of Burke as a natural law theorist see for instance Paul Lucas, ‘On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; Or, an Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers’, The Historical Journal, 11 (1968), 35–63; Frank O'Gorman, Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London, 2004); Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics and Aesthetics (Oxford, 2002); David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations.

⁵⁹Conniff, ‘Burke and India’, 298.

⁶⁰Burke, ‘Fox's East India Bill’, in Writings and Speeches, II, 437.

⁶¹Cited in Chapman, Edmund Burke, 263.

⁶²Burke, ‘Fox's East India Bill’, in Writings and Speeches, II, 437. See also Chapman, Edmund Burke, 263.

⁶³Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)’, in Writings and Speeches, III, 310.

⁶⁴Burke, ‘Moving Resolutions for Conciliation’, in Writings and Speeches, II, 120.

⁶⁵Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in Writings and Speeches, III, 313.

⁶⁶Boucher, Limits of Ethics, 185–86.

⁶⁷Edmund Burke, ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace I (1796)’, in Writings and Speeches, V, 317–18.

⁶⁸John Morley, Edmund Burke: A Historical Study (London, 1867), 216–17.

⁶⁹Boucher, Limits of Ethics, 242.

⁷⁰Boucher, Limits of Ethics, 223, 226; Thomas Hill Green, Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by Richard L. Nettleship, 3 vols (London, 1886), II, 349–55.

⁷¹Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations, 395.

⁷²Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 281–98 (288).

⁷³J. H. Muirhead, ‘What Imperialism Means’, in The British Idealists, edited by David Boucher (Cambridge, 1997), 246.

⁷⁴Boucher, Limits of Ethics, 243.

⁷⁵Green, Works, II, 355.

⁷⁶Burke, ‘Regicide Peace I’, in Writings and Speeches, V, 322–23.

⁷⁷Cited in P. H. Kerr, ‘Political Relations between Advanced and Backward Peoples’, in An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, edited by A. J. Grant (New York, 1916), 151–52.

⁷⁸Morley, Edmund Burke, 201.