On Liberalism’s Global Career: Dadabhai Naoroji and Representative Government

This article reconsiders the relationship between the globalization of political liberalism and the globalization of political equality. Departing from interpretations of liberal theories of rights and representation as egalitarian or democratic, the article reconstructs an elitist paradigm of liberal representative government from the colonial world. It does so by offering a new reading of the thought of Indian political leader Dadabhai Naoroji. It recovers Naoroji’s overlooked commentary on political representation and imperial reform. I show that Naoroji drew upon analyses made by the first generation of Indian liberal thinkers about imperial political economy and mass-elite relations and used these arguments to formulate a distinctive model of electoral politics as a form of hierarchical tutelage. The recovery of Naoroji’s theory illustrates the deep tensions between representation and mass politics that marked liberalism’s global circulation.