(^396) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
a docile people thousands of times more numerous. Except for the
Sepoy rebellion (1857-58), ruthlessly suppressed, and occasional reli
gious riots, neither Muslims nor Hindus would resist. The British also
came with decisive trade advantages. Like the Portuguese and Dutch
before them, they were the active partner in this union of West and
East. It was their ships that went and returned, their merchants who
sailed forth into Asian waters. (Contrast here the symmetrical pattern
of exchange and competition in the North Atlantic.) Old Asian com
mercial networks, for all their wealth and experience, yielded the juici
est transactions to foreign agency houses, and India's economic
development from the late eighteenth century came to be shaped more
by British imperial policy than by indigenous initiative.
British rule proved a school for scorn. The white sahibs and mem-
sahibs felt themselves infinitely more civilized—cleaner, smarter, hand
somer, better educated. The Indians returned the contempt in spades.
The English, the Bengali folk myth had it, were descended from the
union of a demon with a she-monkey. The more sophisticated Indians
eschewed such fanciful genealogies but noted that their ancestors wrote
poetry and knew about the zero when the British were still skulking
through the woods. Sir Henry Maine, British social anthropologist of
the late nineteenth century, deplored this self-indulgent nostalgia, on
either side: "The Natives of India have caught from us Europeans our
modern trick of constructing, by means of works of fiction, an imagi
nary Past out of the Present. ..." And again: "On the educated Na
tive of India, the Past presses with too awful and terrible a power for
it to be safe for him to play or palter with it."*
Today, of course, we all do that. We think it good, and we call it mul-
ticulturalism.
The empire of the Ottoman Turks proved more durable. That in it
self is a mystery, because after some two hundred fifty years of expan
sion (1300-1550), its downhill course should have brought about
fragmentation and liquidation in a matter of decades. By the nine
teenth century, Turkey was recognized as the "sick man of Europe,"
but the dying process had actually started three hundred years earlier.
- Quoted in N. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, pp. 674—76, who notes that much of this
counterpride was encouraged by romantic orientalists. But no such encouragement was
necessary: this was a not uncommon response where European arrogance encountered
older civilizations brought low by history. Cf. the lessons of Prince Tewfik, son of the
Egyptian Khedive Ismail, which taught him in the 1860s that everything in Western
science and technology—steam engine, railroad, etc.—came in the first place from
Islam and the Arabs—Landes, Bankers and Pashas, p. 325.