Evil Empire 81what it is. These nationalist histories had their own distortions, but they
got some basic things right. Look at the Chinese narrative about the
“hundred years of humiliation” or the Declaration of the Independence
of India (1929) and you see the same historical outline: how the forces
of industrialized production in nineteenth-century Europe and the
United States expanded through genocide and slavery, or, at the very
minimum, through military invasion, occupation, and dispossession.
The strange thing for me, when I first left India in my mid-
twenties and traveled to the West, is how differently people saw this
history. Structural and extensive violence had been carefully hidden
from its long-term beneficiaries. They saw themselves as the inheritors
of wonderfully inventive white people who had mapped the world and
created the political and economic possibility of individual freedom for
everyone. In truth, these were the paternalistic forms of a harsh theory
and practice of domination and supremacy, which presumed to bring
civilization to benighted natives.
Supremacy of all stripes—racial, ethnic, national—works in insidi-
ous ways, burrowing deep inside impeccably liberal minds. In retrospect
it seems a bit unfair of me to single out a figure such as Niall Ferguson
for peddling bogus histories of empire, free trade, and democracy: those
ideas have long informed much mainstream and respectable journalism.
So effective have those narratives been that even the long-term victims
of the history of violence have found it hard to build international
solidarities. In the latter half of the twentieth century, most Asian,
African, and African American thinkers and activists recognized that
decolonization and the civil rights movement were part of the same
battle—but that essential view has been mostly lost. Writers from
historically disadvantaged communities have become more parochial
and less internationalist in their thinking. In a recent review I pointed
out how even such a sensitive and brilliant writer as Ta-Nehisi Coates