In 1906 in India, a prominent Indian National Congress leader and theoretician, Dadabhai Naoroji published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, a book that was to be crucial to the nationalist understanding of the colonial state in India. As the first detailed theoretical and critical analysis of the economic and administrative policies of the British government in nineteenth-century India, it related widespread poverty in the subcontinent to the drain of wealth from the colonized country to the metropole and to the destruction of its indigenous industry.10 The primary purpose of this critique was to expose colonial governance in India as "un-British rule."
The deployment of the term "un-British" raises a critical question: under what historical and discursive conditions could one make a critique of British colonial government in India as being "un-British," since, by "un-British," Naoroji could clearly not have meant rule by a non-British people? How could the government be British and "un-British" at the same time? It is clear that by using the term "un-British," Naoroji was not referring to the people in charge of the government (who were British), but the actual mode of governance, and by extension the term "British" referred to the fundamental principle on which, he thought, it ought to have been based. In fact, he was precisely critiquing the tendency of the government to identify colonial rule in India with rule by the British people, thereby reducing the colony to the status of mere property in the hands of the latter. Naoroji's critique assumed a homology between the terms "un-British" and "unjust." British rule meant the rule of justice, and any deviation from the principle of justice would transform it into an "un-British" despotic rule.