Montesquieu's Anti-Despotism: The Spirit Of Law

Considering an extraordinary influential work arguing about despotism gives the answer for the first question. This was originally not written in English, but in French. L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws) , written in 1748 and translated into English by a travel writer Thomas Nugent in 1750, gives us two clues in elaborating “anti-despotism”.
First, he reclassified the form of government and divided it into three categories, namely, despotism, monarchy, and aristocracy. The traditional argument deriving from Aristotle divided it into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Accordingly, one of Montesquieu’s aims is to make an emphasis on the sharp distinction between monarchy and despotism, contrary to the traditional argument. They are different, according to him, in that despotism is “one alone, without law and without rule, draws everything along by his will and his caprices” ,

Rather, members of parliament struggled to understand correctly the situation of colonies－this is the first feature of their anti-despotism. Of course, some politicians had the fixed idea that there was not any law in India, and the Britain had to codify it, as can be seen in the following quotation. Lawrence Sullivan―a rival to Lord Clive－contended that “every Indian native may come to the pure fountain of English justice”. When he told this in the House of Commons, however, a lot of objections occurred with the remark that they should try to fully understand the respectfulness of Indian laws as the understanding about East India becomes better. Some political figures, such as Edmund Burke, thought that a law which was not appropriate for native people should not be regarded as a law. In this respect, India was for them no longer a despotic government and the Company conversely could be