ABSTRACT
This chapter considers John Stuart Mill's rise to prominence due to the widely positive reception of History of British India. It traces how Mill’s reputation was overturned in just a decade—the focus progressively shifting from the History to the articles in the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, particularly the one on government. The tracing of the causal chain of events, decisions, and actions through a close examination of evidence and testimonies was but half of the task of philosophical historians; for their work to be complete, historians had to impress love of public virtue onto the mind of their readers. When the History appeared, Jeremy Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform was already making waves in the periodical press, but the 1818–1821 reviews of the History ran parallel to that discussion.
