Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this is a study of the emergence of Utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, Javed Majeed highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, Majeed demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.

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 formulation of Mill's utilitarian views, when he used British India as part of a much larger critique of British society itself. Mill's attempt to place thinking on these issues on a different footing illumines other scholars and poets whose writing on the Orient was an important part of the defining of their religious, social, and political views. Ungoverned Imaginings demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.

'a thought-provoking study of the importance of India for the development of James Mill's utilitarianism ... this is an important book ... It is well-argued, clearly written and deserves a wider readership than will be attracted by the somewhat restrictive title ... we are in Majeed's debt. This is a stimulating study which adds considerably to debates about Mill and depictions of the Orient by the west.' Penelope Carson, Denstone College, Utilitas