詹姆斯·穆勒

James Mill (born James Milne; 6 April 1773 – 23 June 1836) was a Scottish historian, economist, and political theorist, who was a founder of the Ricardian school of economics. He wrote the influential The History of British India (1817) which divided Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British.

Mill was the father of John Stuart Mill, the paradigmatic philosopher of liberalism.

Biography

James Milne, later known as James Mill, was born in Northwater Bridge, in the parish of Logie Pert, Angus, Scotland, the son of James Milne, a shoemaker and small farmer. His mother, Isabel Fenton, of a family that had suffered from connection with the Stuart rising, resolved that he should receive a first-rate education, and after the parish school they sent him on to the Montrose Academy, where he remained until the unusual age of seventeen and a half. He then entered the University of Edinburgh, where he distinguished himself as a Greek scholar.

In October 1789, he was ordained as a minister of the Church of Scotland, but met with little further success. According to John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, his father, though "educated in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism, had, by his own studies and reflections, been early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation, but the foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion." From 1790 to 1802, while supporting himself by various tutorships, he also pursued various historical and philosophical studies. With little prospect of a career in Scotland, in 1802, he went to London in company with Sir John Stuart of Fettercairn, then member of parliament for Kincardineshire, and devoted himself to his literary work.……

Intellectual legacy

The History of British India

Mill was a proponent of British imperialism, justifying it on utilitarian grounds. He considered it part of a civilising mission for Britain to impose its rule on India. Mill saw his own work for the East India Company as important for the improvement of Indian society. Mill portrayed Indian society as morally degraded and argued that Hindus had never possessed "a high state of civilisation".

Mill preferred to take a more theoretical approach to social subjects than the empirical one common at the time. His best known literary work is his History of British India, in which he describes the acquisition of the Indian Empire by England and later the United Kingdom. In the work, he characterises Indian society as barbaric and Indians as incapable of self-government. He also brings political theory to bear on the delineation of the Hindu civilization, and subjects the conduct of the actors in the successive stages of the conquest and administration of India to severe criticism. The work itself, and the author's official connection with India for the last seventeen years of his life, effected a complete change in the whole system of governance in the country. Mill never visited the Indian colony, relying solely on documentary material and archival records in compiling his work. This fact has led to severe criticism of Mill's History of India by notable economist Amartya Sen.

Major works

An essay of the impolicy of a bounty on the exportation of grain, 1804.

"Lord Lauderdale on Public Wealth", 1804, Literary Journal Vol. IV, No. 1

Commerce Defended, 1808.

"Thomas Smith on Money and Exchange", 1808, Edinburgh Review no. XXV, pp. 35–68

The History of British India, 3 vols., 1817 (and many later editions)

• "Government", 1820, Encyclopædia Britannica
• Elements of Political Economy, 1821
• "Liberty of the Press", 1825, Encyclopædia Britannica

Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press, Education, and Prisons and Prison Discipline, 1823.

Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols., 1829. Revised edn, 2 vols, 1869.

Essay on the Ballot and Fragment on Mackintosh , 1830.

"Whether Political Economy is Useful", 1836, London Review, vol. II, pp. 553–572.

The Principles of Toleration, 1837.