Friday, January 18, 2013

Niall Ferguson and India

If people want to learn about India from Niall Ferguson, perhaps criticisms like this one should be kept in mind as well. ("Niall Ferguson's ignorant defence of British rule in India : Oddly for a historian, Ferguson doesn't appear to have taken much notice of history", by Paul Cotterill, in the New Statesman, August 16, 2012.)

Or this. (The truth? Our empire killed millions. I've been told I should 'check my facts'. I have. Many times. And the truth is still there", by Johann Hari, The Independent, June 19, 2006.) The commentary on this latter piece by Eric Zuesse reads:
On 19 June 2006, a lengthy commentary by Johann Hari appeared in Britain's Independent, headlined "The Truth? Our Empire Killed Millions. A Reply to Niall Ferguson." Ferguson was at the time a Cambridge University educated professor teaching at (simultaneously) Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford, and the world's leading apologist for both the British and the American empires. Columnist Hari ripped his work to shreds, specifically citing Ferguson's benign portrayal of Britain's treatment of India during the 1800's. "When I criticised Ferguson for dedicating almost as much space in his revisionist history of Empire to the slaughter of 29 million people as he gives to a description of a statue of the Prince of Wales, ... he responded primarily with personal abuse."
Or this. (Warning: I greatly dislike Pankaj Mishra.) London Review of Books, Vol 33 No 21, November 3, 2011.  Per the NY Times,  Mishra's "blistering takedown of the historian Niall Ferguson in The London Review last November prompted extensive coverage in the British news media — and threats of a libel suit from Mr. Ferguson."
Posted by Arun at 7:00 PM

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CIP's avatar

CIP · 637 weeks ago

Ferguson is something of an apologist for empire, but he really doesn't gloss over many of the egregious abuses and he is very clear about the fact the empire was held together by military repression. His defense of empire goes more like this: yes it was bad, but, the conquered got A, B, C and D out of the deal. I think he does a pretty good job of telling a somewhat biased story. He certainly exposes many of the hypocrises of empire.
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Vishal · 637 weeks ago

I just finished reading 'Shameful flight - the last years of British Empire in India' by Stanley Wolpert. Gandhi/Nehru as well as rest of Congress leadership does not come off well there. As per the papers quoted/extracted there, British leadership of the time seemed quite enamored of Jinnah. Any takes on that book?
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CIP's avatar

CIP · 637 weeks ago

I'm no fan of Ferguson the Newsweek political hack, nor do I agree with much of his world view. Many of of your cites critique his Newsweek column (which I deplore) or other books that I haven't read. I haven't read the portion of Empire Hari apparently responds to, so I can't comment on that. The exchange between Mishra and Ferguson is entertaining but I'm inclined to give it to Ferguson on points. I find Ferguson to be a good writer and pretty forthright on Victorian hypocrisy.

Much of all our history has been shaped by conquerors: Aryan, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, and Arab and Mongol for the West, and Aryan, Persian, Mughal, and British for India, for example. Those conquests shaped our cultures and even our genomes. It impossible to pretend otherwise and idle to waste too much time on the evils of the past when those of the present are before us. It's fruitful to understand the past: perhaps we can avoid some it's evils and errors.
1 reply · active 636 weeks ago
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Arun · 636 weeks ago

To quote Balu: Let me repeat what I said in my earlier column: colonialism is not merely a process of occupying lands and extracting revenues. It is not a question of encouraging us to ape the western countries in trying to be like them. It is not even about colonising the imaginations of a people by making them dream that they too will become 'modern', developed and sophisticated. It goes deeper than any of these. It is about denying the colonised peoples and cultures their own experiences; of making them aliens to themselves; of actively preventing any description of their own experiences except in terms defined by the colonisers.

It is that last that is the problem.
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CIP's avatar

CIP · 636 weeks ago

What we know of the history of India suggests that Indian civilization has always been syncretic. It absorbs conquering civilizations and transforms them into something new and different from either its own original form or the newly imposed one. Like it or not, it almost certainly can't go back. The problem today is that that is very hard to do when the internet makes everything omnipresent everywhere.
1 reply · active 636 weeks ago
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Arun · 636 weeks ago

Let me put it this way - if most of the species of bird and mammal had been made extinct prior to Darwin, how much more hard would it have been for Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution? We are in a similar situation - the social sciences think they have arrived at universals, but that is rubbish. The dead cultures - ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt - cannot answer back. Globalization is making sure that only one frame of culture survives. How on earth are we going to arrive at a self-understanding with only one global culture? The clues to knowledge arise from diversity.

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