Swadeshi was more than a boycott.

The Bengal Presidency was, by the early twentieth century, an administrative unit of enormous size — and the centre of Indian political organisation. Under Viceroy Lord Curzon, the government resolved to divide it. The partition took effect on 16 October 1905.

The official case was administrative: the province was too large to govern efficiently. Bengali opinion read a different intention. Dividing Bengal along a line that separated its eastern, Muslim-majority districts from its western ones would split the political class that had made Calcutta the most troublesome city in British India, and would set two populations against each other in the process.

Pal, speaking at Madras in May 1907, made an argument about the partition that is worth quoting because it is not the argument usually attributed to the movement. He said the significance of the measure had been exaggerated outside Bengal — and, he conceded, by part of the Bengali press as well. The partition was an evil measure. But he did not think a line on a map could do what its authors intended.

What the partition actually did, in his reading, was destroy the credibility of petitioning. Bengal had cried, prayed, petitioned and protested, and the administration had proceeded anyway. If argument addressed to the government produced nothing, then political effort had to be redirected — away from the state and toward the society. That redirection is Swadeshi.

Pal devoted the fourth of his 1907 Madras lectures entirely to boycott. What is striking, reading it now, is how little of it is about anger.

He begins by defining passive resistance: asserting the will of the nation against the wrong that the domination of one people over another inflicts — economically, politically, morally and spiritually — while keeping strictly within the law. The strategic instruction is explicit: keep ourselves in the right, and place those opposed to us in the wrong at every step.

He then makes the economic case. The regulation of consumption, he argues, is the economic principle underlying the boycott movement, and he is prepared to defend it as economic theory rather than protest. Boycott is protection: the imposition of protective tariffs upon the people themselves, and indirectly upon foreign imports. If protection is of economic value — and, he notes drily, no economist outside Manchester has ever declared protection to be wrong — then boycott is too.

He is also honest about its limits. He distinguishes between goods where the boycott was effectively absolute — enamelled articles, foreign cloth, salt, sugar — and goods where it was partial. He calls the work uphill. He notes that a movement without a state behind it has to do by voluntary organisation what a government would do by legislation.

And he had a precedent in mind. He tells his Madras audience about a consumers' league meeting he attended in New York, whose members boycotted the products of firms that mistreated their workers. Pal's boycott is placed, deliberately, in the company of international consumer politics rather than of religious injunction.