Description
Book SynopsisDiscusses arguments made against empire and colonialism in the eighteenth century through works by Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke. Explores the limits and failures of their arguments by emphasizing what they wrote on the two indies, especially India and Haiti.
Trade Review"Hating Empire Properly will be praised by political philosophers as well as literary critics for its brilliant 'solution' of the Edmund Burke 'problem': how could a 'liberal' on America and India also be a'conservative' on France? How can we grasp Denis Diderot's defense of colonial commerce alongside his denunciations of empire? Neither apologia nor jeremiad,Agnani's compelling study of the Enlightenment shows subtle consistencies where previous critics could only see contradiction." -- -Srinivas Aravamudan author of Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel "Agnani argues convincingly that Enlightenment historiography is imperial historiography; that is, it derives the terms of its understanding of historical transitions and epochal events (in Europe as elsewhere) from the history of empires, past and present. Agnani focuses on Diderot and Burke, but his carefully-crafted analyses of the energy and limits of their anti-colonialist writing illuminate the wider field of colonial discourse studies." -- -Suvir Kaul University of Pennsylvania "What should it mean to hate empire,properly? What modes of conceptual critique, what ethos of engagement, what attitude to the modern, should we adopt? In this learned and deftly argued book, Sunil Agnani offers us a revised picture of the conceits of Europe's self-consciousness of empire by holding up the internal anticolonial mirror of Diderot and Burke. If Enlightenment is neither single nor seamless, neither a choice nor a prison, what Agnani's reading underscores is the truth of the dictum that, for its conscripts anyway, the only way out is through." -- -David Scott Columbia University "Agnani offers wonderfully nuanced readings of two profound and vexing 18th-century thinkers-Diderot and Burke.Agnani refuses, just as Diderot and Burke did, to be defined and constrained by shallow distinctions that have so often marked our view of the Enlightenment, its critics and their relationship to European imperialism. This is a work of sustained subtlety and intelligence." -- -Uday S. Mehta City University of New York ". . he [Agnani] offers a fresh textual analysis of a selection of colonial writings by Diderot and Burke." -Anita Rupprecht, University of Brighton
Table of ContentsPrologue: Enlightenment, Colonialism, Modernity Introduction: Companies, Colonies and their Critics Part I Denis Diderot: The Two Indies of the French Enlightenment Chapter 1: Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Consensual Colonialism in Diderot's Thought Chapter 2: On the Use and Abuse of Anger for Life: Ressentiment and Revenge in the Histoire des deux Indes Part II Edmund Burke: Political Analogy and Enlightenment Critique Chapter 3: Between France and India in 1790: Custom and Arithmetic Reason in a Country of Conquest Chapter 4: Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament Chapter 5: Atlantic Revolutions and their Indian Echoes: The Place of America in Burke's Asia Writings (a) Reflections on the Revolution in Saint Domingue/Haiti (b) Compensation in the East, or, from Virginia to Hindostan Epilogue Hating Empire Properly: European Anticolonialism at its Limit
