I have not yet read Uday Mehta "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion". In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in A Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Stoler and Frederic Cooper.
Mehta writes: Mill's "The Govt of Dependencies by a Free State" is a 'revealing document on the increasing relevance of cultural, civilizational, linguistic, and racial categories in defining the constituency of Mill's liberalism.' p. 75
Seems something worth following up on in the exploration of liberalism. I once took a seminar on Mill's political and social writings and the Indian question never came up *once*; however, there are a few books specifically John Stuart Mill's writings on India.
Oh yes Mill's urging workers to back down in 1865, which had the consequence that universal adult male franchise would not be introduced for twenty more years, was also not even mentioned. Or as Mill himself bragged: "And I do not believe it could have been done, at that particular juncture, by any one else. No other person, I believe, had at that that moment the necessary influence for restraining the working class." From JS Mill's autobiography, quoted in Guy Routh The Origin of Economic Ideas, p. 181.
Well at least we did discuss his essay with Harriet Taylor on women's emancipation.
best, rakesh