282 i STEP 5 Build Your Test-Taking Confidence
Section IIDOCUMENT-BASED QUESTION (DBQ)Suggested reading time—10 minutes
Suggested writing time—40 minutes- Using the documents and your knowledge of world history, analyze imperialism as a positive and negative
force in the nineteenth-century world.
Document 1Source: William Bentinck, head of the British East India Company, from a speech, 1829.
Whether the question be to continue or to discontinue the practice of sati, the decision is equally
surrounded by an awful responsibility. To consent to the consignment year after year of hundreds of
innocent victims to a cruel and untimely end, when the power exists of preventing it, is a predicament which
no conscience can contemplate without horror. But, on the other hand, if heretofore received opinions are
to be considered of any value, to put to hazard by a contrary course the very safety of the British Empire in
India, and to extinguish at once all hopes of those great improvements... is an alternative which even in
the light of humanity itself may be considered as a still greater evil.Document 2Source: Thomas Babington Macaulay, resident of Calcutta and member of the British “Supreme Council for
India,” “Minutes of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education.”All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of
this part of India, contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude
that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into
them.... What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it should be the
English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanskrit. The whole question seems to me to
be, which language is the best worth knowing?The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the
Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.