Cultural history and imperialism
Keith Windschuttle
Lecture for The Historical Society at University of Illinois, Chicago, November 27, 2001

In the recent film of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, writer/director Patricia Rozema includes an early scene that is not in the book. As the heroine Fanny Price departs her family in Portsmouth to live in the grand household of her aunt and uncle, she hears some mournful singing from a ship off the coast. "Black cargo," explains the coachman. The ship is a slave transport and it is meant to remind the audience that around 1800, when this scene takes place, England was still a slave-trading nation. It is also a portent of what the heroine will eventually discover is the dark side of her new home. Many among Jane Austen's legions of readers will be upset at the film taking such licence with the novel because it imposes a controversial political issue onto the quintessentially domestic concerns of their favourite author. Those with a little historical and geographical knowledge will also find the scene outlandishly incongruent. Portsmouth is a harbour on the English Channel and, at the time, the transportation of slaves went by the "Middle Passage", that is, directly across the Atlantic Ocean from the Guinea Coast of Africa to the Americas. To be anywhere near the coast of England, a slave trader would have to be thousands of miles off course.

The scene is in the film because the literary critic Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993) persuaded many readers that Mansfield Park and its author are deeply implicated in the question of both slavery and imperialism in the islands of the Caribbean, the location of the sugar plantations that fund the lifestyle of some of England's grand estates, including that of the novel's title. Mansfield Park was published in 1814 and, according to Said, it was then the latest in a long line of literary products that had supported English imperial interests for the previous two hundred years, that is, since the Elizabethan era. "Even a quick inventory", Said claims, "reveals poets, philosophers, historians, dramatists, statesmen, novelists, travel writers, chroniclers, soldiers, and fabulists who prized, cared for, and traced these interests with continuing concern."

The British Empire effectively ended more than fifty years ago with the independence of India in 1947, an event that soon triggered a run of imitators. One might have thought that, at a distance of half a century, there would be little point in continuing the long and acrimonious argument between Left and Right over an empire that no longer exists, and even less point in seeking the high moral ground about its early accompaniments, such as the slave trade to the British West Indies that was ended by Act of Parliament nearly two hundred years ago. However, the target of Said and other "post-colonial" critics who want to continue this debate has shifted from England and its Empire to the wider focus of Western culture. Hence the interest in censuring and doctoring the work of Jane Austen and her peers who produced the canon of Western literature. The British Empire might be dead, but post-colonial critics claim its culture of exploitation persists in the minds of those who have inherited it, especially in the United States. The imperialist imperative purportedly lives on today in an expansionist American foreign and economic policy, where it is validated by Western culture.

In the recent prodigious reference work edited by Michael Bentley, Companion to Historiography, an entire chapter is devoted to the work of Edward Said. No other single author, historian or otherwise, receives such extensive treatment. The volume gives Said as much space as the entire corpus of ancient Greek history. This is a measure not only of his influence on the contemporary historiography of the relations between Western and Eastern cultures but also of the degree to which the discipline of history has been penetrated in recent decades by the methods and interests of literary critics. In fact, in this period, the field of cultural history has to a large extent been re-defined by literary critics, who have become its leading lights. Among other things, this has meant that the techniques of literary criticism, with its close scrutiny of the meaning of works of fiction, have become part of the methodology of history. One outcome is that the assessments made by literary critics are today frequently used as historical evidence per se. Much of this is due to the example set by Said in his celebrated 1978 book Orientalism, in which he argued that the academic discipline of Oriental Studies had acted as the handmaiden of Western imperialism in its conquest of the East in the modern era. Since then, Said has gone on to influence subsequent generations of scholars, especially in the field of cultural history known as 'post-colonialism'. It is now almost impossible to study the relations between Western and other cultures in the imperial era without paying at least some attention to Said and post-colonialism.

Said claims the flowering of European literature since the sixteenth century either directly endorsed or provided a supportive environment for the expansion of Europe in the same period. Said draws on the thesis of the French historical theorist, Michel Foucault, that all knowledge serves the ends of power and that all intellectual fields are politically motivated.

Said argues that political culpability has been especially true of the novel, an art form born and reared in the period when European expansionism knew no boundaries. In Culture and Imperialism he claims that, of all modern literary forms, it is the novel that has been most responsible for reproducing and advocating the power relations of empire. His critique encompasses not only novels that are overtly about imperial affairs, such as those of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, but even the work of such apparently domestic writers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. One of Jane Austen's characters in Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram, owns a sugar plantation in the Caribbean, so this implicates her in support of slavery, Said claims. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens despatches one of his characters to Australia and another to Egypt, so this makes him an imperialist author, too.

Said extends his critique to opera, which he describes as an art form "that belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination". Because Giuseppe Verdi's Aida is set in ancient Egypt, Said claims it fosters military aggression towards the Orient. It contains "imperialist structures of attitude and reference" that acts as an "anaesthetic" on European audiences, leading them to ignore the brutality that accompanied their conquest of other countries.

Equally culpable are European paintings of the Islamic world, even those of the Orientalist school of Delacroix, Ingres and Deutsch, which critics once thought portrayed the region in romantic, admiring and even over-indulgent terms. Instead, art critics who follow Said, such as Linda Nochlin, now use them as examples of subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture. They purportedly exhibit the aggressiveness necessitated by the colonial expansion of the European powers. These paintings are primarily a reflection of European arrogance and Western prejudices: "the idea of Oriental decay, the subjection of women, an unaccountable legal system -- pictorial rhetoric that served a subtle imperialist agenda".

The ambitions of this critique are not confined to the high culture of the last five hundred years. They extend right across the whole of the last two and a half millennia, all the way back to Homer and the Iliad. From its classical origins, this critique claims, Western culture had been defined not by its own internal development, but by its long history of antagonism to "the Other", that is, to non-Western cultures. From ancient Greece to the present, the desire to rule distant peoples has had a "privileged status" in the West. There has been "something systematic" about its imperial culture that was not evident in other empires. In particular, Said argues that Western oriental scholarship led Europeans to see Islamic culture as static in both time and place, as "eternal, uniform and incapable of defining itself". This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. It consequently saw itself as a dynamic, innovative, expanding culture and rationalised its imperial ambition not as a form of conquest but as the redemption of a degenerate world.

Said has spawned a school of followers from a variety of intellectual disciplines.One of them is Richard Waswo, who, in his 1997 book, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization, traces the story of the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome by the Trojan survivors to show how it has been represented in Western literature ever since. He calls the story a "legend of perpetual colonisation" that "became the rationale for imperialist attitudes from ancient Rome to Vietnam". He examines the legend from its first expression in The Aeneid , to the Faerie Queene, to the fiction of Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, and to its manifestations in the films of John Ford, in the defoliation of Vietnam and in the current policies of the World Bank.

Waswo is not an historian but is Professor of English at the University of Geneva. This has not, however, prevented him from receiving the endorsement of some of America's most celebrated academic historians such as Hayden White, who praises him for having written "a counter-history to the official version, a complete re-reading of the Western canon", and "an indictment of the whole of Western civilization". This last phrase really tells us what is at stake here. We are looking not at a partial but a total critique, a total indictment, of Western culture. Radical critiques of the West, even one as far-reaching as Marxism, were once primarily internal affairs, intent on fulfilling what they imagined to be the destiny of the West, taking its history to what it thought would be a higher level.

The critique I am discussing here, however, explains Western history not in terms of its internal dynamics but by its external behaviour, especially its rivalry and aggression towards other cultures. Western success has purportedly been at their expense. This critique thus constitutes an overwhelmingly negative critique of Western civilization itself.

One of the most prominent fields of study it has produced is that of postcolonialism. This is an intellectual movement focussed primarily on the study of history and literature, although it is usually conducted at such an arcane level of theory that former students of either history or literature would find their subjects unrecognisable. Postcolonial social theorists and critics have gained a major foothold in academic life in the United States.

One of the leading tendencies within postcolonialism is the Subaltern group of Indian historians or, more accurately, Indian theorists about history. In 1994, the American Historical Review, the journal of the leading professional association, devoted an issue to them. The Subalterns took their name from a phrase coined by the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci. Their Indian origins lay in the 1960s middle class Marxist movement, the Naxalites, whose leading theoreticians sought to emulate the Red Guards of Mao-tse-tung's China by assassinating landlords and police in Bihar province and West Bengal. A number of the movement's members subsequently moved to America and Australia where they gained academic positions teaching history.

Although they address historical topics, the Subalterns offer a radical critique of the discipline, which they see not as a methodology that can be applied to any society but as an ethnocentric product of European culture. History, they assert, is an artefact of the Western nation state. Contesting the imperialism of the West involves contesting its version of history as well. India, of course, gained its independence fifty years ago so one might have thought there has since been plenty of opportunity for its historians to go their own way. The Subalterns insist, however, that they still need to struggle to liberate themselves from European modes of thought, especially English historiography, with its scepticism about theory, its inductive logic and its document-based research methodology.

Rather than arguing the point at home in India, these theorists choose to do it in the Western education system. Indeed, one reason why there are now so many Indian academics employed in the humanities departments of American universities is because of the network of influence provided by the postcolonial movement.

The aim of their project is to use postmodernist and poststructuralist literary analysis to deconstruct historical documents to recover the voice of the colonial oppressed who, because they were illiterate, left no documents of their own. They want to recover the authentic voice of Indian peasants, bandits and others of low caste and to rewrite them into history. While English historians have generally regarded Mahatma Ghandi and the Congress Party as the leaders of the nationalist struggle against British imperialism, postcolonial historians want to argue that it was actually the work of the Indian lower orders.

In using postmodernism and poststructuralism, the postcolonialists are adopting theoretical tools used by other currently fashionable political movements. The journal Postcolonial Studies describes their political alliances and connections:

Postcolonialism has much in common with other related critical endeavours ? such as women's studies and gay/lesbian studies ? classified under the rubric of the "new humanities". Marked by an underlying scepticism, these closely aligned projects find their shared intellectual vocation in a determined opposition to coercive knowledge systems and, concomitantly, in a committed pursuit and recovery of those ways of knowing which have been occluded -- or, in Foucault's terminology "subjugated" -- by the epistemic accidents of history. Given its particular inheritance, postcolonialism has directed its own critical antagonism toward the universalising knowledge claims of "western civilization".

In other words, although it claims to eschew Western culture, the methodology of the postcolonial critique derives from one radical stream of the West itself. The members of this movement want to reject the West, but all they are doing is rejecting one aspect of its intellectual culture, English historiography, while accepting another, European poststructuralist theory.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, a Subaltern historian recently appointed to a personal chair at the University of Chicago, has written a book called Provincialising Europe (2000), whose title neatly summarises the intellectual ambitions of the movement. Chakrabarty says "provincialising" means to "re-read the European philosophers of modernity in order to show up the parochialism of their imagination".

Chakrabarty and his colleagues want to subvert the logic of history as a field that produces knowledge. In general, if a category or concept is used by Western historians, this identifies it as part of Western or Enlightenment discourse and so the Subalterns insist on rejecting it. But this makes it very difficult to write an Indian-oriented history because there are many elementary concepts about Indian society, such as "Hinduism" and "caste" for example, which the British adopted because they found them being used first by Indians themselves. Moreover, the Subaltern group has recently drawn fire from the old Left in India for its abandonment of Marxist terminology such as "class" and "capital" in favour of concepts such as "community", "hierarchy" and "authority". Their Marxist critics have observed that colonial discourse theorists prefer such traditional concepts because most of them come from upper-status groups who were privileged by colonialism. More recently, their journal Subaltern Studies has allowed topics such as the oppression of the peasantry to disappear from its pages, to be replaced by essays on the angst of the Calcutta intelligentsia.

Chakrabarty also wants to transcend the limits of the methodological assumptions of European forms of investigation. For instance, he wants to incorporate the magical beliefs of traditional India into its history, not as categories to be observed sceptically but as living historical presences. However, he is too committed to the modern intellect to believe in magic himself so the best he can do is revert to the language of the German Nietzschean philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and recommend his hermeneutic analysis of "particular ways of being-in-the-world". In short, Chakrabarty would rather withdraw into arcane and largely irrelevant German theoretical speculation than adopt the contaminated tools of English historiography.

Despite the substantial academic and publishing resources now being invested in it, and despite its claim to be showing both Indians and other oppressed peoples how to recover their own epistemological independence, postcolonialism is a profoundly backward intellectual movement. There is nothing about it that is innovatively non-Western or, indeed, original in any way. To use a favourite term of one of its other gurus, the former Chicago, now Harvard literary theorist Homi Bhabha, it is yet another example of colonial "mimicry" of the West. Only, in this case, it shuns the most positive aspects of the Western intellectual tradition in order to mimic the worst.

The same can be said of the entire corpus of Edward Said's contribution to history as well. Let me start with his claim that Western culture has always defined itself in opposition to others. This is an assumption that usually goes unquestioned in academic debate today. There is, however, very little to recommend it. Although they have long distinguished themselves from the Barbarians of the world, Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage. Europeans identify themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece, Rome and Christianity, tempered by the fluxes of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions. In other words, Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years.

There is a similar flaw at the core of Said's book Orientalism where he makes two major points. The first is that Western scholarship about the Orient has been seriously mistaken because it has been distorted by racial prejudice and has been "essentialist", that is, it has imagined it could characterise modern Islamic countries in terms of the founding principles of their religion. His second claim is that, because knowledge always operates in the service of power, Oriental Studies have been complicit in imperialism by providing the information on which European conquest of the Orient was based. However, these two claims are totally incompatible. If Orientalism's picture of the Orient is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Oriental essentialism is not knowledge but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgements, bad estimates and mistaken policies. Hence they were unlikely to have had a positive effect in augmenting the power of Western imperialism over the colonised.

The historical evidence on which Said's literary criticism is based has a similar degree of credibility. In Culture and Imperialism, Said argues that Dickens and other British authors use sites in the British Empire as part of their stories because the fact of imperialism readily allows them to encompass other countries within their imagination. "References to these places are made because they can be." So in Great Expectations, when Charles Dickens sends his character Herbert Pocket off to Egypt to start a business, and then finally sends the hero Pip off to join him, even though both events happens off-stage and none of the novel is actually set in Egypt, Dickens becomes an imperialist writer, according to Said, because he uses Britain's overseas territories as part of his plot. However, Dickens wrote Great Expectations in 1860-61, when Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire and well before it was occupied by Britain in 1882. When the novel was being written, British firms had substantial interests in trade and investment in Egypt, it is true. But Egypt was not then governed by the British, nor was it part of their Empire. To start a trading company in Cairo, an Englishman like Herbert Pocket would still have needed to apply for permission to the viceroy of the Ottoman Sultan. For Said to call Egypt a British "overseas territory" at the time Great Expectations was written is to mislead his readers about the historical setting of the novel.

Similar points could be made about several other attempts by Said to use European novels to substantiate his thesis. He writes that "many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society and culture, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium." As evidence of this, he cites Thomas Mann's novel, Death in Venice:

In Mann's great fable of the alliance between creativity and disease -- Death in Venice -- the plague that infects Europe is Asiatic in origin; the combination of dread and promise, of degeneration and desire, so effectively rendered by Aschenbach's psychology is Mann's way of suggesting, I believe, that Europe, its art, mind, monuments, is no longer invulnerable, no longer able to ignore its ties to its overseas domains.

So, the plague that infects Europe is Asiatic in origin. Therefore the novel is a response to the pressures imperialism is forcing onto European culture. This is Said's entire argument about this book. It would be hard to find a less substantial connection made within a literary analysis. The obvious reason for Mann's choice of direction was that the disease of his story, the pandemic of bubonic plague that swept Europe and the rest of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, had actually originated in south-western China. It would have been odd -- and maybe then of some significance -- if he had said it came from anywhere but Asia. Said's attempt to score a political point out of this unexceptional issue tells us little about the imperialist assumptions of the novelist and far more about the anxieties of the critic scraping to find evidence for his thesis.

Similarly, Said's claim that Verdi's opera, Aida, 'anaesthetised' its European audiences to imperial conquest should not be taken seriously. Verdi also wrote operas about revenge, regicide and prostitution but it would be absurd to argue that these works inured his audiences to these forms of behaviour. To demonstrate that any work of art has had historical consequences, the critic is obliged to offer empirical evidence that this actually occurred. It is methodologically inept to simply deduce it from the plot.

Most revealingly, there is the now famous question about slavery in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which, since Said's intervention, has become virtually a compulsory talking point in any discussion of the novel. In Chapter Twenty One, the heroine, Fanny Price, recounts a conversation she had with her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram: "Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?' she asks her cousin Edmund, and then adds: '-- but there was such dead silence!" The silence not only afflicted Sir Thomas but also his other children who sat by in the room "without speaking a word". This is the only mention of slavery in the book and different critics have offered differing interpretations of it. Brian Southam says that by broaching this hitherto sensitive and unmentionable subject in the Bertram household, Fanny is revealed unmistakably as a "friend of the abolition" and an opponent of the plantocracy. Moreover, since we know from the biographical details of Jane Austen's life that she and her brothers were strongly opposed to slavery, and since in Emma she has her heroine use the abolitionists' term "the traffic in human flesh", Southam argues that her original readers would have applauded both Fanny Price and her author for their stand. On the other hand, the critic Kathryn Sutherland has argued that the "dead silence" does not necessarily mean that the family felt guilty about the question. It may have simply reflected the bored uninterest of the other young people, who would have clammed up if faced with a discussion about politics of any kind. Either of these interpretations is possible, although the inference that the issue was too embarrassing rather than too boring to discuss is the more plausible.

Said, however, has a different explanation. He thinks the "dead silence" is meant "to suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both". In other words, those for and those against slavery had no common terminology or means of talking to one another about the issue. This interpretation is, to say the least, strange. The novel is set shortly after the abolitionist campaign had succeeded in passing its legislation through Parliament in 1807, when the debate over slavery was still fresh in the minds of anyone who took an interest in politics. Rather than each side of this debate being confined to its own linguistic cocoon for the want of a common language, the opposite was true. Both sides had argued their respective cases for decades from pulpits, newspapers, the quarterly reviews and political meetings, and had long practised dissecting and countering the claims of their opponents. West Indian slave owners like Sir Thomas Bertram had defended their interests in the House of Commons where they put their position vigorously, using all these tactics. There might have been little moral agreement between the two sides and, in the context of the Bertram household, this makes Fanny naïve for raising the issue, but Said's claim that Jane Austen is suggesting there was some impassable linguistic divide that prevented debate is simply not credible, either within the milieu of the novel itself or the times in which it was written.
I have written a long analysis of Said's Culture and Imperialism for the latest edition of the Journal of the Historical Society where examples of misinterpretations of this kind are multiplied, but I think those provided here are quite enough to show that Said lacks the ability to match his literary critique with the historical evidence. Nonetheless, let me add a couple more, this time from his book Orientalism.

Said claims that by the end of the Seventeenth Century, Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean, whereas in reality the Levant was still controlled for the next one hundred years by the Ottomans, and British and French merchants could only land with the permission of the Sultan. Said describes Egypt as a 'colony' of Britain, whereas the legal status of British occupation of Egypt was never more than that of a protectorate. This is not merely a semantic difference because a real colony, like Australia or Algeria, was a place where large numbers of Europeans settled, which never happened in Egypt. Even on Islamic history, Said is unreliable. He claims that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before they took over North Africa. The facts are that the Arabs invaded North Africa in the seventh century, but what is now Turkey remained part of the Eastern Roman Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the Seljuk Turks late in the eleventh century. The fact that these howlers have been preserved in the 1995 edition of Orientalism suggests that Said lacks friends or admirers with any expertise in history, who might have sent him a list of corrections.

While the postcolonial critique has been waged over the past two decades, traditional empirical historians of imperialism have not been sitting on their hands. A revisionist movement has emerged to question a great many of its claims. The recently published five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire has attracted a number of them as authors. Thanks to their efforts, a number of the old debating points about the politics and the morality of Britain's imperial adventure have now been resolved, at least at the level of historical scholarship if not yet among literary critics and literary theorists.

One of the longest running of these debates has been over slavery, especially its abolition and its contribution to the wealth of England, which, as the recent film of Mansfield Park shows, is still a live issue in the popular media. In the eighteenth century, English merchant ships were the principal transporters of slaves from Africa to the New World and slave labour on English sugar plantations in the West Indies made fortunes for their absentee owners at home. Yet Parliament put an end to this business by banning the transportation of slaves in 1807 and outlawing the ownership of slaves in 1833. Until the 1940s, the consensus among historians was that slavery was ended because of the strength of religious feeling and humanitarianism, expressed through the abolition movement of William Wilberforce and his Evangelical Christian followers.

However, in a widely celebrated counter-thesis, the Marxist historian Eric Williams attacked this moral explanation and substituted an economic rationale. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944) Williams argued that slavery was only abolished because, after more than a century of cropping, the monoculture of sugar cane had exhausted the soil of the West Indian islands and the estates had become unprofitable. Prohibiting the transport of slaves would prevent French expansion on other islands in the region while the British transferred their plantations to Asia. Moreover, while attacking the traditional explanation for abolition, Williams constructed an even more audacious moral case of his own about the place of slavery in the English economy. The profits from the transport and sale of slaves, he argued, made a substantial contribution to financing the industrial revolution in Britain. Hence, all those subsequent generations of Europeans who have enjoyed the standards of living provided by industrialism have done so from capital accumulated on the backs of black slave labour. Edward Said endorses and relies upon both these arguments in Culture and Imperialism.

There are two chapters in the Oxford History of the British Empire that examine Williams's thesis and come to quite different conclusions. In Volume II, J. R. Ward reviews the literature on abolition and concludes that Williams was mistaken about the economic decline of the West Indian plantations. In fact, they had only recently introduced higher yielding cane varieties, more efficient crushing and refining technologies and a more abundant supply of fertiliser. The Caribbean was still of considerable economic importance, employing half of England's long-distance shipping and providing one eighth of Exchequer revenue. "When abolition was finally enacted," Ward writes, "British West Indian trade stood at record levels." In other words, the abolitionists' success was at the expense of the British economy.

In the same volume, David Richardson analyses the contribution of the slave trade to the industrial revolution in Britain and finds Williams's claims are exaggerated. Profits from slaving voyages contributed less than one per cent of total domestic investment in Britain at the time. In other words, slavery was irrelevant to the industrial revolution.

So was the exploitation of gold and silver from the New World. That old Marxist, Andre Gunder Frank, has recently written a long thesis to deny European exceptionalism as the cause of its rise to world dominance in the modern era. (ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age) "Europeans did not do anything -- let alone modernise -- by themselves," Frank argues. Instead, they exploited the gold and silver of their American conquests and traded this specie on very favourable terms with China in order to give themselves an entirely fortuitous lift in their economic fortunes.

Frank now defines himself as a world historian but it would have been better if he had paid more attention to local issues. For it has been well-established by a number of historians of Spanish imperialism, the latest of whom is Anthony Pagden (Lords of All the World, 1995) that Spain eventually became an economic victim of its American conquests. The American mines that initially poured so much gold and silver into the Spanish treasury blinded its rulers to the fact that long-term prosperity could only come from agriculture and trade. Ultimately, the cost of defending their American possessions impoverished the country. The founder of the Bank of England, William Paterson, observed: "The Indies, properly speaking, may be said to have conquered the Spaniards, rather than having been conquered by them." In contrast, the British Empire found the formula for success of both the mother country and her colonies: investment, commerce and migration, which enriched both sides of the Atlantic.

The truth is that the profits from British investments in its empire can no longer be accurately described by the term "exploitation". Historians such as P. J. Marshall, P. G. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have shown British investment benefited India, Africa and South America considerably. It provided the infrastructure of ports, roads, railways and communications that allowed them access to the modern world. From the vantage point of hindsight we can now see that the principal artefact Britain exported to its empire was not "civilisation", as many thought at the time, but modernisation. In terms of economics, this meant the systems of finance, transportation and manufacturing that Britain had developed at home. In terms of politics, it meant replacing Oriental despotism with the concepts of liberalism and democracy. Rather than a form of plunder that depleted the economies that came under its influence, British imperialism injected many of the institutions of modernisation into the territories it controlled. On balance, and despite the many mistakes made and the over-weening arrogance it sometimes produced, the British imperial adventure was a force for good in the world.

I hasten to add that this is not merely my own opinion. After editing five volumes and the work of 150 scholarly contributors, this is the conclusion that the editor of the new Oxford History, William Roger Louis, reached as well. It is a formidable finding, which, in the coming years, will be increasingly accepted by genuine scholars. The ideologues who have dominated so much of the recent debate will, in the future, find themselves increasingly isolated.

Let me conclude with some comments about the alleged great villain of this whole critique, the traditional, empirical methodology of Western investigation. Postcolonial historians and literary critics claim that Western empirical methods were among the forces that subjugated the Orient, so they regard empiricism and its quest for objective knowledge as a form of imperialism. This is why they are so enamoured of the subjective hermeneutics, or literary interpretations, that prevail in postmodernism and cultural studies. Objectivity, they claim, equals domination whereas subjectivism equals intercultural equality and respect.

If taken seriously, this would mean that empirical methods can no longer be relied upon for discovering universal truths. It would mean that any reasonably coherent doctrine or body of beliefs can produce "truths" of its own. Now, it is hard to imagine a doctrine that could do more damage to a non-Western culture than this one. The truth is that the empirical methods developed by the West in both science and historiography are universal methods and their success is sufficient to refute any theory about the relativism of truth. Western science makes genuine discoveries. Western history records truths about the past.

Western knowledge works, and none of the others do with remotely the same effectiveness. To say this, however, is not to be ethnocentric. Western empirical methodology has nothing whatever to do with racism, or the elevation of one segment of humanity over another. It endorses a style of knowledge and its implementation, not any particular race of people or ethnic group. This style of knowledge did, of course, have to emerge somewhere and at some time, and to this extent it certainly has links with the Western intellectual tradition. It emerged in this social context, but it is clearly accessible to people of any background. Far from being bound by Western culture, it belongs to the whole of humanity.

The attempt by postmodernists and postcolonialists to eliminate traditional historical methodology would deprive all of humanity, no matter what culture its members inhabit, of genuine knowledge of our past. This attempt is not only a theoretical delusion but is politically inept. Though used most often these days to assert the esteem of Third World and indigenous cultures, postcolonialism will never serve the real interests of these people if it denies them access to the truth about their past. Just as Western science is open to everyone, Western historical method is available to the people of any culture to understand their past and their relations with other peoples. It is only by facing the truth of both our separate and our common histories that we can best learn to live with one another.