Legitimizing Imperial Authority: Greater Britain and India in the Historical Vision of John R. Seeley

The celebrated lectures on Colonial and Indo-British history delivered by Seeley at Cambridge in 1881-1882 played a vital role in shaping the culture of liberal imperialism. His ability to employ the language of ‘scientific’ historiography in order to confer legitimacy to empire-building and colonial rule was an integral part of this achievement. Seeley shifted the focus of the Rankean paradigm onto the power-struggles between the Atlantic States, explaining the expansion of England in terms of globalization of the European international system. But he superimposed above this realist conceptual model a philosophy of history derived from the Protestant latitudinarian tradition, and described British colonization and encounters with non-Europeans as operational forms of an integrated process of unification of the world into a Westernized global polity, articulated in national «provinces of humanity». Grounded on these universalist metahistorical premises, Seeley’s historiographical account of the British domination in India provided the Raj with a justification which diverged from the most derogatory forms of stereotypization of the Other and proved capable of exerting an unsuspected appeal on early Indian nationalist opinion