Empires of Modernity

Modernity is many things. Urbanization, industrialization, technologization. At its simplest, it’s a project of supposed improvement, science, and progress. As a project, then, modernity seeks to expand itself. If improvements can be made, they should be made.

Exploration was at the heart of the modern expansionist drive that began in earnest in the 17th century. But why then? Why not before? What shifts in psychology led to this new attitude in Europe about an unexplored world?

We can sometimes see shifts in the most unexpected places.

In the early modern period, philosophers like Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith, began to reinterpret morality as the pursuit of pleasure, power, and profit. In 1747 Jean-Jacques Burlham wrote that ‘Now let man reflect but ever so little on himself, he will soon perceive that everything he does is with a view of happiness’. By 1776, Adam Smith could write that “It is not from the benevolence (kindness) of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Since, the scientific revolution it was beginning to be assumed that human nature was calculable, scientific, had simple principles, that people act in rational and predictable ways.

Happiness, pleasure, utility, whatever it was, was pursued, stored up, or, to use a word that the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham invented in 1817, maximized.

How did this have an effect on world history? On the mentalities and psychology of people in the West.

We explore the links between modern philosophy and British Imperial, particularly through William Dalrymple’s book on the rise of the East India Company and the decline of the Mughal Empire – the Anarchy.

The history looks at the life of the megalomaniacal Robert Clive, the idea of Gentlemanly Capitalism, theories of Imperialism, and, most horrifyingly, the Great Indian Bengal Famine of 1770, where a third of the population of Bengal died.

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Credits:

David Wooton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

Dipak Basu, Victorian Miroshnik, Imperialism and Capitalism

Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest State of Capitalism

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts

P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688-2015

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

Bernard Semmel, The Philosophic Radicals and Colonialism