Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's the History of British India and Orientalism

This book re-examines British attitudes to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It places the emergence of utilitarianism in the context of these attitudes by focussing on James Mill's The History of British India (1817), and the work of Sir William Jones, Robert Southey, and Thomas Moore. In particular the study shows how the standard view of Mill's History does not do justice to the complexity of this text; Majeed argues that aesthetics played an important role in the f…