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• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Writings On India
• Trade With India 1828
• Minute On the Black Act 1836
• Penal Code For India 1838
• The East India Company’s Charter 1852
• The Petition of the East-india Company 1858
• Memorandum of the Improvements In the Administration of India During the Last Thirty Years 1858
• Report to the General Court of Proprietors, Drawing Attention to the Two Bills Now Before Parliament Relating to the Government of India 1858
• A Constitutional View of the India Question 1858
• Observations On the Proposed Council of India 1858
• Practical Observations On the First Two of the Proposed Resolutions On the Government of India 1858
• The Moral of the India Debate 1858
• A President In Council the Best Government For India 1858
• Letter From the East India Company to the President of the Board of Control 1858
• Maine On Village Communities 1871
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Check List of Mill’s Indian Despatches (1823%u201358)
• Appendix B: List of Published Extracts From Mill’s Indian Despatches
• Appendix C: Editorial Emendations
• Appendix D: Index of Persons, and Works Cited, With Variants and Notes

Textual Introduction

JOHN M. ROBSON

of mill’s fourteen published writings on India, eight appeared in anonymous pamphlet form, all in connection with the legislation of 1858 that transferred to the Crown all the affairs of the East India Company. These exist only in the one printed version, except for “The Petition of the East India Company,” which also appeared in Parliamentary Debates. Two other items, “John Stuart Mill, Esq., Is Called in and Examined” (1852), and “Letter from the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Honourable East India Company to the President of the Board of Control” (in connection with the legislation of 1858), were published in Parliamentary Papers; the latter also appeared in Supplement to Votes, which is the copy-text because a copy of it, corrected by Mill in punctuation, is in his library, Somerville College, Oxford. Three articles appeared in periodicals: “Foreign Dependencies—Trade with India,” in the Parliamentary History and Review (1828); “Penal Code for India,” in the Westminster Review (1838); and “Mr. Maine on Village Communities,” in the Fortnightly Review (1871). The last of these is partly extant in manuscript (Library of Congress) and was republished in the posthumous fourth volume of Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions (1875). There is one manuscript, the “Minute on the Black Act” (1836) in the British Library, deriving (like the pamphlets) from Mill’s employment in the Examiner’s Office of the East India Company.

Editors’ notes to each item identify the copy-text (and other versions when they exist), indicate whence such titles as are not original have been derived, and supply other specific explanatory material, such as the description of the item in Mill’s own list of his published writings, and any corrections found in his own copy. Editorial footnotes (signalled by numeric series within each item) give personal identifications, bibliographic details, and such limited historical comment as seems necessary for comprehension. Notes in the originals are signalled by the series *, ^†, ^‡, etc.; occasionally references within the text have been moved to footnotes for consistency, and some have been corrected.

In the few cases where more than one version of a text is extant, full collations have been made, and substantive variants recorded in footnotes that indicate the origin and nature of the different readings. Obvious typographical errors in versions other than the copy-text are ignored. Sometimes a variant reading is accepted into the text, as at 81.4, where “changes” is preferred to the copy-text’s “change” because it is found in two other versions and makes sense. An example of deletion is seen at 83.19, where the text reads “respectfully ⁱand deferentiallyⁱ”; the variant note reads “-D”, indicating that “and deferentially” does not appear in D (Debates in the East India Company).

The only editorial interventions in printed texts are made for consistency; special instances are given in Appendix C with, as necessary, explanations for the changes. Usually these are evident in context, though a few trouble the conscience: at 49.34, e.g., the alteration from “provided for it within” to “provided within” is made in the interest of sense (“it” has no evident antecedent; if “good government” is intended, the sense is unaltered). In general, the titles are from the originals; added titles and abbreviations of the originals are evident from the editors’ notes. Headings have been restyled. Other general practices include: “2dly” and similar forms are given as “2ndly”; ordinals attached to rulers’ names are given in the form “Charles I”; “&c.” is given as “etc.”; terms mentioned rather than used are given in italic. The titles of works published separately are given in italic and of parts of works in inverted commas. Foreign words and phrases are normalized in italic type. Long quotations have been set in smaller type, and the quotation marks deleted (in one case doing so involves placing a tag—“says Mr. Maine”—in square brackets; in another, an introductory colon has been added). Square brackets also appear when page references are added to the text to conform to Mill’s own practice in particular items. Volume and page references in the original have been standardized and corrected as necessary.¹

A few items call for particular changes in detail. In the text of “Penal Code for India,” “Code” is normalized to “code”. In “The East India Company’s Charter,” Mill’s parliamentary evidence, the numbers of the questions are not given in the text (the range is supplied in the editors’ note), and the questions are printed in italic type (in other volumes the names of the questioners are given, but in this case they do not appear in Parliamentary Papers); “connection” is regularized to “connexion”, the dominant form in this item. In “The Petition” and Observations, “minister” is regularized to “Minister” and “council” to “Council” (with the support of the alternate versions). In “The Petition,” “government” is altered in appropriate contexts (i.e., when specific) to “Government”, and “her” when applied to “Majesty’s Government” is changed to “Her”, which is in that item the normal form (as it is in “Letter to the Board of Control,” where no changes are needed); however, in Memorandum and Practical Observations, where the other form is dominant, “Her” is altered to “her”. In “Maine on Village Communities,” “shown” is altered to “shewn”, the dominant form. In the editors’ note to Report to the General Court of Proprietors (162), the reading in the manuscript list of Mill’s published writings—“New Bills Law”—has been corrected to “Two Bills Now”.

A location check list of Mill’s Indian Despatches makes up Appendix A; its headnote explains the system of reference, and the standarization of Indian names. We very much regret that the enormous extent of the despatches and the vast cost of transcribing and editing them precluded their inclusion in this edition. A selection was of course feasible, but no justifiable principle of exclusion presented itself. A companion list of the published extracts from Mill’s despatches comprises Appendix B; it is based on Mill’s manuscript list of his published writings. Appendix C lists textual emendations, and Appendix D is an Index of Persons and Works. The analytic Index has been prepared by Dr. Jean O’Grady.

[1 ]The corrections are:

217.8 61 [61-2]

219.19 85 [85-7]

220.26 88 [88-9]

221.7 88 [87-8]

227.12 149-51 [166-8]

227.39 68 [67-8]