I will have to read Mehta's essay, as well as track down those two books on Mill and India, to determine whether new light can be cast on Mill's deeper philosophical positions by a closer examination of his writings on India. Mill's intervention in the Governor Eyre (jamaica) controversy also seems most interesting. I believe Bernard Semmel wrote a book about it.
I would also have to re-read the argument in ON Liberty to determine its philosophic consistency--that is, whether the spirited and inspiring defense of individuality is indeed based on or can be based on or ultimately circumscribed by utilitarianism in any of its many variants.
From another angle, reading Meikle's Aristotle's Economic Thought did illuminate why "utilitarianism unsuprisingly fits the requirements of economics...because it had been designed for this supported and subordinate role in the first place...There is only one end, pleasure or utility, and all actions are means to it. They are therefore to be judged only in their efficacy in promoting that end, so that only the consequences of actions are significant, not the actions themselves." p. 107
In his Cambridge Journal of Economics (21)review, Steve Fleetwood puts the pt very well indeed: "As capitalism establishes itself, not just just individuals, but society as a whole becomes organized via decision making centered upon the pursuit of exchange value. This real historic development has profound effects upon the conception of ethics and its relation to economics. Economics becomes the science of exchange value,its magnitudes, movements and the pursuit of its ends. Th epalce of use value shifts from end to means as usefulness becomes merely a means to meet the new end of exchange value. Real ethical questions about ends are expunged from economic theory onlyt to be replaced by utilitarianism...Utilitarianism collapses the twin ends of use and exchange value into the single end of utility, where there is no analytical space, as it were, to conceive the possibility of a contradiction or evaluate different forms of human action."
by the way, along with II Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (1927) and Bill Blake's Marxian Economic Theory and Its Criticism (1939), I think Meikle's book (1995) joins Robert Paul Wolff's Moneybags Must be So Lucky (1988) and Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination (1993) as crucial texts with which to think through the first chapters of Marx's Capital. I am learning that there are no few difficulties here.
best, rakesh