The Sun Never Sets on Roger Kimball's Inanity

Old hat for regular G.p readers, but the Sepia Mutiny recounts and redresses Roger Kimball's recent reformulation of the white man's burden vis-à-vis Indian history preceding Partition. Ghandi's "rabble" and all that. Says Kimball, if you'll recall:

. . . this third-world feminist of color should get down on her knees and thank Siva that her country was the beneficiary of British colonialism. Without it, she would never have heard of feminism or even of the third world, since the very concept depends upon the freedom, education, and language that the West brought to savages [sic] countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. India is such an economic powerhouse today because of the legacy bequeathed by her former colonial rulers . . . everywhere that Britain went—I cannot think of a single exception—it left better off.

A correlation/causation fallcy falling somewhere between a counterfactual and sampling on the dependent variable (e.g., Kieran Healey's "Why are so many of the closets I open full of my clothes?"), Kimball's proposition is that progress necessarily follows from British subjugation. Taking his hypothesis to one natural conclusion, one might suggest that the British immediately be persuaded to conquer the entire world, given all the benefits that subjugation to the queen confers; applying his thesis along another axis, one might suggest world domination by both the Nazis and Soviets as well, since many if not all the countries formerly conquered by these Empires are doing very well today (I cannot think of a single exception, or bother to define my metric), a trend only explained by the wise guidance of Fascism and Communism. Following the time variable backward, in fact, it's hard to come up with a single historical instance of brute imperialism that hasn't made the world a better place!

Posted by Kriston at May 26, 2005 12:44 PM