Mill and Sidgwick, Imperialism and Racism

This essay is in effect something of a self-review of my bookHenry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe(2004) and of the volume, co-edited with Georgios Varouxakis,Utilitarianism and Empire(2005). My chief concern here is to go beyond those earlier works in underscoring the arbitrariness of the dominant contextualist and reconstructive historical accounts of J. S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick on the subjects of race and racism. The forms of racism are many, and simple historical accuracy suggests that both Mill and Sidgwick could be described as ‘racist’ on some plausible understandings of that term.