In the late pamphlet titled “England and Ireland” (1868), J. S. Mill perceptively noted the tenuous grounds underlying even the most confident presumptions of liberal imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain. Written during a period of intense Fenian activity in Britain and Ireland – when popular perceptions of Irish political resistance were less than sympathetic – the pamphlet contained pointed reflections on the root causes of the deteriorating political situation in Ireland as well as Mill's most searching analysis of the fraught dynamics of imperial power and ideology. Of English attitudes towards its civilizing project in Ireland, he wrote,

In marking the ways in which the project of imperial liberal reform when faced with resistance or disappointment shifted the burden of responsibility for this failure onto colonized societies themselves, Mill's critical portrait exposed a fragility at the heart of the liberal imperial project. In its disavowal, in locating responsibility solely with “Ireland or the nature of things,” liberal imperialism revealed at once the limits to its own discourse of ethical rule and its persistent blindness to these limits.