This chapter examines the sociopolitical history of the ‘euharmonic organ’, built by Henry Liston in 1817 for St Andrew’s, the first Presbyterian Church in India. Liston’s unique organ was adapted for performance of church music and common-practice repertory in a ‘natural tuning’, optimizing perfect consonance over practicality. Drawing on the arguments of political historian Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this unusual design feature was intended to afford sensations of musical space and time as organized in accordance with the topological and chronological propositions of colonial modernity. The first section investigates how the instrument’s purchase, contrary to the church’s prior rejection of organ music, altered how it construed the relation between reason and sensation, and why those changes were tolerated as necessary for establishing the Anglo-Indian Presbytery as equally progressive and modern to the Anglican Church of India. The second section draws on Liston’s musical historiography in addressing how the instrument was also envisioned as consistent with the church’s programs for ‘native education’. In an afterword, I reflect on the instability of the church’s musicological claims, by showing how Indian theorists successfully inverted what natural tuning represented in order to support claims that musical modernity originated in Hindustan, not Europe.

I begin the Conclusion by considering the widely felt crisis of parliamentarism that unfolded at the turn of the twentieth century as the rise of electoral democracy led to the rise of a plebiscitary executive, upending previous presumptions about the centrality of parliament to political life. But despite these transformations, the classical liberal theory of parliamentarism persisted, most notably in the writings of Max Weber, who defended a constitutional ideal that was strikingly similar to that of Benjamin Constant. In the decades since Weber, political institutions have evolved even further away from the liberal parliamentary model. Yet the values and concepts of liberal parliamentarism continued to persist in twentieth-century democratic theory. Recent political crises reveal that the liberal constitutional structures put in place during the second half of the twentieth century have by no means overcome the enduring problems of modern representative government, which an earlier tradition of liberal theorists sought to answer through parliamentarism.