Violence and Epistemology: J. S. Mill's Indians after the "Mutiny"

Although some of his most important writings date to the period immediately after the Indian Revolt of 1857, J. S. Mill seemed unable to recognize that British violence might substantively contradict British people's "civilized" character. Likewise, he could not view Indian actions, including recent insurgent violence, as political but rather only as expressions of "barbarian" character, nor could he consider the occasional reforming native leader effective in producing lasting political change. What enabled Mill to ignore evidence that contradicted his firm generalizations about essentially "barbarian" Indians and "civilized" Britons? Arguing that Mill wrote during an important shift in the order of European knowledge, this article explores two epistemological devices by which Mill consistently reconciled apparent outliers from a class to the rest of the class in question-his characterization of human differences as either "essential" or "accidental" and his reliance on a concept of the "norm" that is ambiguous between normative (ideal) and normal (typical) human character. Analyzing how Mill diminished both violence by the civilized and capacity for political change by barbarians as merely accidental, we can understand how epistemic and physical violence are linked and, more generally, how essentialism functions in the characterization of complex political phenomena.