FOUNDATIONS: Reason & Imperialism 5; Cohn’s Unintended Echoes of Imperialism

In Season 2 - our FOUNDATIONS series - we’ll examine European philosophers from the 17th through the 19th centuries, to see how their views have shaped and defined our own… whether we realize it or not.

Today, we’ll finish our look at Bernard Cohn’s COLONIALISM AND ITS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE: THE BRITISH IN INDIA Cohn uses the critical style of Michel Foucault to examine how the English expressions of power in India often produced outcomes they did not anticipate - even, or especially, when their intentions were “good”.

We’ll begin with Cohn on the English effort to “clarify” law and legal codes in India. While they intended to do so in a way that “arrived at the truth” of Indian law, what they did was to make Indian law fundamentally English; fundamentally European. Thus, regardless of the English intentions, their activities cause another major change in Indian Civil Society, which, in turn, set the stage for ongoing changes to individual Indian minds.

From there we’ll look at some of Cohn’s contentions that are both not quite so well proven in the text (IMHO), and which, as with Foucault, it will be somewhat harder to know what to “do” with. But which are important and likely profoundly important questions, nonetheless.

All of which results in what will simply have to pass for a “rant” – a rhetorical rant, at that - by the bookish and retiring standards of AFOI, in which we explore what it means that, in the centuries since Elizabeth the First, many of us in the “western” (ahem) world have gone from being subjects living under a government, to data sets that factor (more or less) in the operations of government.

Don’t miss it!