¹ There is, of course, ample tension between these two principles to begin with; but the fact remains that national sovereignty is the most basic principle of legitimate international action, while the democratic self-determination of peoples is, for all its persistent violations, the only widely accepted standard of domestic political legitimacy, and one to which nearly every regime at least pretends. Although they are far from requiring one another, they do belong together both for their common axiomatic status and because they together formed the core of both Wilsonian liberalism and anti-colonial independence movements, two of the defining ideological families of the last century.

2 I am deliberately omitting the question of whether there should be a category of state terrorism, and if so how it should be defined. I do so not because I consider it insignificant, but because it has not entered significantly into the prudential arguments in favor of liberal imperialism. Certain forms of what may be called state terrorism against a state's own subjects fall within another argument for liberal imperialism: the prevention of severe human rights abuses within a state. The important question of one state's actions against the citizens of another state does not enter into this essay.

3 A fine introduction to the views of the senior Mill is William Thomas's abridged version of The History of British India (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1975). In his discussion of “The Civilization of the Hindus,” for instance, Mill observes “the necessity of regarding the actual state of the Hindus as little removed from that of half-civilized nations” (p. 231); reckons that “despotism and priestcraft taken together, the Hindus, in mind and body, were the most enslaved portion of the human race” (p. 237); and quotes with approval Adam Smith's judgment that Asian “despotism is more destructive of leisure and security, and more adverse to the progress of the human mind, than anarchy itself” (pp. 249–50). John Stuart Mill, in his chapter, “Government of Dependencies,” in Considerations on Representative Government, wrote more systematically: “[Rule by a foreign power] is as legitimate as any other [mode of government] if it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people most facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement. There are … conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization.” Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government 1993 Rutland, Vt. Everyman p.415.

4 It is worth noting that the failure of many postcolonial regimes does not in itself mean that the preceding colonial rule was a good thing, whose passing was to be regretted. Nor, more pertinently, does such failure indicate that independence was inherently unviable for those countries. The bipolar manipulation of governments and anti-government insurrections during the Cold War was a disaster for many newly independent countries. While those countries faced severe disadvantages apart from the Cold War, we will never know whether some might have done much better free of the proxy battles of those decades.

5 Montaigne's view of these matters is expressed in two of his essays, “Of cannibals” and “Of coaches,” translated into supple English in Frame, Donald M.Complete Essays of Montaigne (StanfordStanford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Burke's extraordinary speeches on imperial policy are well represented in Bromwich, DavidBurke on Empire, Liberty, and Reform 2000 New HavenYale University PressGoogle Scholar). Particularly illuminating are the “Speech on Fox's East India Bill” and the “Speech in Opening the Impeachment of Warren Hastings,” although there is also much to learn in Burke's “Speech on Conciliation with America,” which treats imperial policy in a different context but with a remarkable unity of concern. Anyone who believes that racial attitudes are historically determined and excused might also read the letter to Miss Mary Palmer, in which Burke writes of his long defense of India, “I have no party in this business, Miss Palmer, but among a set of people who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces, but who are of the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not” (p. 374).