Visana, Vikram. "Vernacular Liberalism, Capitalism, and Anti-Imperialism in the Political Thought of Dadabhai Naoroji". The Historical Journal, Vol.59, No.3 (2016): 775-797.

Visana, Vikram. "Vernacular Liberalism, Capitalism, and Anti-Imperialism in the Political Thought of Dadabhai Naoroji". The Historical Journal, Vol.59, No.3 (2016): 775-797.

• The Western conceptual underpinnings of liberalism were applied different in India because they could not be transposed, as those same theorists held that India did not possess the self-governing individuals required in Liberal theory (776).
• Dadabhai Naoroji, a prominent Indian thinker of the mid to late 1800s and the first Indian member of British parliament, spent most of his life in England, with brief periods in Bombay. His thought was inline with contemporary British radicalism regarding labour conditions, but diverged in his much more universal critique of British imperialism (776-777).
• Whereas other radicals opposed imperialism as essentially contradictory with liberalism and responsible for feeding into a destructive jingoism at home, Mr. Naoroji focused on the refusal of Britain to install a liberal order in its colonies. He imagined that a liberal citizen could exist in the Empire, but that the British government was stifling it (777).
• Partha Chatterjee, a prominent subaltern scholar, argues that liberalism among Indian elites is simply the result of imbibing British education and the liberal values of the British elite. He contends that any 'truly Indian' ideology must exist in the private sphere, uncorrupted by Empire, although he does not clarify how this is the case (777).
• Another scholar, Andrew Sartori, makes a different case explaining why Indian liberalism resembles and engages with British liberalism, arguing that the colonial regime enforced a liberal capitalism ideological hegemony, meaning that ideas from both Indians and Brits needed to be expressed in certain terms appealing in liberal individualism (777-778).
• The author asserts that both scholars contribute useful ideas that explain the popularity of certain strands of thought among the Indian elite, but that neither should deny the possibility of Indian agency in politics and public life, as demonstrated by the works of Dadabhai Naoroji (778).
• Dadabhai Naoroji was born into the Parsi community of Bombay, which was undergoing a crisis as British culture and Christianity chipped away at the identity of the community, beginning in 1839 with the first widely-publicized conversion of two Parsis to Christianity (778).
• The threat the community believed was posed by Christianity prompted the Parsi to begin a reform movement within their community to demonstrate that they were a modern faith community deserving of respect. They created a range of civil society institutions designed to construct and enforce a new 'modern' Parsi identity (778-779).
• The civil society created in Bombay during this time served not only as a location to challenge British dominance, but also to construct identities separate from those of the Parsi elders and challenge internal orthodoxy (780).
• Victorian liberal society defined its ideal citizens in terms of upright moral character expressed in work and philanthropy. They were expected to garner wealth through industry and temperance, and then spend that money on charitable causes. Because virtue and success were mutually reinforcing, the poor were viewed as undeserving and their poverty seen as a result of bad character, thus the appropriate method of poverty relief was increasing the morals of the poor (781).
• An example of contemporary Indian thought on poverty was as follows:
• "It is clear that wherever there is industry, fairness, single-minded devotion and religion, Lakshmi (the Hindu goddess of wealth) will automatically be there [...]. As lethargy increases in a community, they are slowly  impoverished. And if one becomes poor, one should assume that one has many shortcomings" (785-786).
• The group of Indian Parsis who came into contact with literature making this point were also the most education elites, who naturally assumed that they constituted the self-regulating virtuous elite. Since they had been sculpted by education, they viewed education as the path for uplifting the rest of their community (781-782).
• The author argues that while education, and the resulting growth of civil society, was seen as the dominant project of the Parsi elite from the 1840s onward, a series of severe economic crises in the 1860s shook that belief and turned leaders of the movement, like Dadabhai Naoroji, towards anti-imperial politics (783).
• The outbreak of American Civil War led to a boom in Indian cotton prices and demands, which resulted in waves of investment and speculation in the Indian cotton market. When the Civil War ended in 1865, cotton prices lowered and hundreds of investments went bad. The wealth of Bombay Parsi was diminished and they were humiliated (783-784).
• The economic crises had severe economic and moral effects on the Parsi community. They no longer had enough money to fund philanthropic projects, and also saw their privileged commercial position lost to 'less enlightened' groups. This created a crisis of faith in their liberal project of self-improvement (784).
• In was during a study of the crisis that Dadabhai Naoroji began to think about capital flows in India. He observed that during the cotton boom, most of the surplus capital from cotton was either used for banking or exported to Britain to be used in speculation. He recommended that, instead, capital should be reinvested in productive industry (785).
• Dadabhai Naoroji developed the drain theory of imperialism, contesting that British firms were draining the wealth of India via extractive industries without investing any of the surplus wealth back into the Indian economy nor allowing Indians the opportunity to enrich themselves (786).
• Dadabhai Naoroji linked this unfair economic exploitation of India back to centrally liberal ideas of self-regulation and citizens, arguing that Indian political development had also been stalled by denying the Indian population the wealth they needed to become rational participants in the economy and society (787-788).
• He also conceptualized wealth in terms of pure land-labour productivity, seeing most forms of British investment as useless through this lens because they built infrastructure for export, but did not invest in increasing the productivity of agricultural land, which in Dadabhai Naoroji's mind, doomed Indian peasants to poverty (789).
• He maintained this Radical Ricardian viewpoint throughout his political life, asserting that labour was the sole determinate of wealth and that capital should get only the tiniest fraction of profit because it was not necessary to the production of wealth (789-790).
• Richard Congreve was a fellow anti-imperial politicians in Britain, although his arguments were fundamentally different than those of Dadabhai Naoroji. Mr. Congreve argued that civic unity and public virtue could only be safeguarded by a small state, which was endangered by the expanse of imperial administration controlled by selfish capitalists and imperialists. Although he advocated for the decolonization of India, he still conceived of it as a lost cause unable to be enlightened (790-791).
• John Hobson was another British anti-imperialist, with more similar views to Mr. Naoroji. He argued that imperialism was a symptom of the failure of British capitalism to include the poor in the marketplace, leading to a never-ending search for new markets. He argued that financiers were subverting democracy and driving empire, when what Britain really needed was effective integration of its urban poor. He, however, also believed that India could never achieve such integration (791-792).
• Dadabhai Naoroji differed from other anti-imperialist figures in that, rather than essentializing India as underdeveloped or incapable of rational governance, he blamed its poverty on British colonialism; further arguing that if it was incapable of rational self-control, then this was the fault of the extractive British state (792).
• He argued that the best solution to this problem was the expansion of opportunities for Indians to develop their character, namely through participation in local government and the civil service, which he demanded be entirely open to Indian participation (792).
• He also believed that participation in the British civil service would give Indians wages paid by the British state, allowing them to reinvest these wages into the Indian economy, instead of sending the money to Britain, as he assumed British civil servants in India did (793).
• His understanding of exploitation as driven by an unfair possession of the wealth of land productivity by capitalists and landlords, how played no role in actual wealth production, allowed it to be applied to all contexts, both Indian peasantry and the British proletariat (794).
• This leads Mr. Naoroji to propose a radical abolition of landlords, so that all productive wealth from land will belong the producers. He does allow for a tax on land wealth, but demands that this money should be used to fund free museums, concerts, and other events which raise public morality (795).
• "Dadabhai Naoroji’s political career calls into question a narrative of globalized liberalism in which subaltern thinkers ‘fulfilled’ the universal promises of a ‘truncated’ European ideology. On the contrary, Indian thinkers were conceptual innovators in their own right" (796).