James Mill always attempted to write, he said, with “manly plainness,” and in that endeavor he certainly succeeded. The reader is never at a loss to know just what his views are or where his sympathies lie. Mill’s manly plainness is especially evident in his massive three-volume History of British India, which begins with a remarkable preface in which he asserts that his objectivity is guaranteed by the fact that he has never visited India. His is, he says, a “critical, or judging history,” and his judgments on Hindu customs and practices are particularly harsh (Mill 1818, I, x). He denounces their “rude” and “backward” culture for its cultivation of ignorance and its veneration of superstition, and leaves no doubt that he favors a strong dose of Utilitarian rationalism as an antidote. Although his History is in part a Utilitarian treatise and in part a defense of British intervention in Indian affairs, it is more than the sum of those two parts. Mill’s History shows, perhaps more clearly than any of his other works, the continuing influence of his Scottish education (Rendall, 1982). The criteria according to which Mill judges and criticizes Indian practices and customs derive from the view of historical progress that he had learned from Dugald Stewart and John Millar, amongst others. According to this view “man is a progressive being” and education is the chief engine of progress. And this in turn helps to explain not only Mill’s harsh judgments on the Hindus but his continually reiterated emphasis on education (Mill 1992, 139–84).