On 26 December 1492 Columbus wrote in his diary that he hoped to find gold in such quantities that the Spanish kings will be able, within three years, to prepare for and undertake the conquest of the Holy Land' (Marc Ferro, Colonization, 1997, p. 5). Most significantly in his “Lettera Rarissima” in 1503 he cited Marco Polo's words: “the Emperor of Cathay some time since sent for wise men to teach him the religion of Christ”.

Columbus was influenced by radical Franciscans who believed that Francis of Assisi was the New Christ who had launched a new age of spirit in history. The American scholar John Leddy Phelan, in his The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans (1956), studied the millennialism of Columbus. According to Phelan, Columbus's chiliastic phantasy was in his mind since 1493, when he began to sign all his letters and documents Christoferens-"Christ-bearer." No less importantly, Spain's 'conquest' of the Americas and Portugal's 'conquest' of Asia were granted official sanction - and thus spiritual legitimacy - by Pope Alexander VI in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

European perceptions also made it impossible to conceive of the American Natives in their own right and rendered the Natives as a blank page or empty vessel that was waiting to be inscribed or filled, and thus utilised, by Western Christianity. However the first formulation  of the "Noble Savage"  did not start with John Dryden’s 1670 as Stephen Pinker pointed out in “The Blank Slate” (2002, p. 6) but should really be credited to ean de Ury's "Ricit dun voyage en la terre du Brasil," published in 1578.

The later degradation of the Africans was founded on a set of ad hoc ideas based on the Genesis story that Ham had seen his father Noah naked and drunk and had mocked him. For this God cursed not Ham but his son Canaan. Even though this came to be dubbed as the “Curse of Ham”, it seems that it was the medieval Arabs who initially shifted the curse from Canaan to Ham.

Benjamin Isaac in “The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity” recently investigated the potential roots of racial thought in for example Roman times, and what Isaac termed 'proto-racism'.

Ironically however, it was implicit racism, operating at a subliminal level, - that enabled many Europeans to sincerely believe that they were helping the East through imperialism.

Western man was privileged as fully rational in a mental and mature sense, whereas Eastern man had not reached the stage of full mental rational. Articulated by Carl Linnaeus in his book Systema Naturae (1735), he described four races of man within a hierar­chy: white, yellow, red and black (with the whites at the top). Then in 1758 he divided genus homo into two: the second group included the orang-outang and certain wild men who could not speak but none the less had emotions. Because the Blacks were placed one notch above the 'tail-less' orang-outang, and because the gradations between each member on the scale were small, it was concluded that the Negro was at the bottom of human civilisation standing only just above the orang-outang.

In this way, the Europeans delineated themselves as the progressive subject of world history both past and present, while the Eastern peoples were relegated to its passive object. The British (already before Theosophy of course, only in its split-off groups it still survives today as a Religious belief now), as in the example of South Asian countries, could this way also denigrate China's role in all of this. In fact no state in Europe was democratic or liberal before the twentieth century, yet the totalitarian portrait' of the Orient served Eurocentric thinkers to suddenly elevate Ancient Greece to the birthplace of European civilisation, given its alleged democratic institutions and scientific rationality. And its alleged role within the Renaissance (which supposedly created the 'European dynamic'). In contrast Greeks saw themselves firmly within what was known as the “Hellenic Occident”.

But to admit either that Ancient Greece was in part oriental, or that the Renaissance was shaped or informed by Eastern (often Islamic) ideas, or that Greece was not especially democratic, would have been extremely confronting. For it would have undermined the emergent claim that Europe has always been uniquely progressive and ingenious - it would have interrupted the linear line of European progress that Eurocentric scholars had now invented or imputed. Thus European intellectuals and thinkers sought to purge the orien­tal aspect of Greece and exaggerate its European properties as well as its scientific and democratic institutions. This was crucial given that Greek democracy was crude, to say the least, given that only Greek males participated in the political process - and that slavery was a fundamental institution in Ancient Greek society.

This also led to the invention of a rational West and an irrational East. In fact by asking the wrong questions to begin with it is to a degree even reflected in social science books today like the recent “Geography of Thought” by Richard E. Nisbett. Researching a “Geography of Thought” as interesting and important it can be, has to be approached by using better methods. The same problem is with “The Art of Global Thinking: Integrating Organizational Philosophies of East and West” by Donald Cyr. One of the more promising approaches however was indicated last year by “Thinking Musically” by Bonnie C. Wade.

In short, the West had been significantly dependent upon the superior Eastern technologies and ideas throughout the 500-1800 period. And it was rather  a product of colonialism that started to conflate the terms West and East with 'masculinity' and 'femininity' .And the phrase “colonial tutelage” was a signature of the doctrine, and this conception is encountered in most history and geography textbooks of the nineteenth century.

The East was simultaneously tainted with a Manichean divide between 'an image of evil' and a 'romantic image of innocence'. Though these appeared to be incommensurable, the ingeniousness of Eurocentric intellectuals was revealed by their ability to successfully graft these together into one coherent and seam­less imperial discourse. Representing the East as a despotic threat was as important for the discourse of imperialism as was the idea that the East was innocent, exotic and above all passive and helpless, since the latter idea was used to make imperialism appear as a 'moral voca­tion' (i.e. it was the Western prince's duty to emancipate his Eastern sleeping beauty). Nowhere was the link between the Peter Pan theory, the theory of oriental despotism and imperialism more clearly repre­sented than in Rudyard Kipling's famous 1899 poem, The White Man's Burden. For it was there that he described the Eastern peoples as 'halfdevil and half-child'. The burden constituted a moral duty to 'relieve the sickness' of Eastern depravity and deprivation. Nevertheless, it was also a burden, for the imperialists should expect no gratitude for their services to mankind.

Another aspect of Enlightenment thinking was the importance that was attached to the relationship between climate, temperament and civilisation. Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and William Falconer were particularly important here, though they were pre-empted by the likes of Michel Montaigne, Pierre Charron and Jean Bodin. Those living in the arid or tropical climates were deemed to be of a “low state of morality”, while those living in temperate climates were characterised by the “increased activity of the brain”. Indeed, it seemed entirely natural that the Europeans were hard working given that they live in a cold and wet climate, no less than that the Africans were phlegmatic or lazy owing to their extremely arid environment.

Confucius was suddenly replaced after 1780 with the image of a sinister Fu Manchu. The Black 'savage' was imagined as, in effect, “natural man in the state of nature” who was but one step removed from the ape. William Dampier, having arrived in Australia in the late seventeenth century, he was astonished at the “natural deformity” of the Natives, who had the “most unpleasant Looks and the worst features of any people that I ever saw, tho' I have seen a great variety of savages”. The condescension of Dampier was reproduced a century later when European scientists placed the Australian Aboriginal as but one step removed from the monkey.

This was a paradox of the revival of British Protestantism that while it forestalled the proper emergence of scientific racism on account of its preference for monogenesis over polygenesis. The reinvoking of the Genesis story of Noah's three sons was important not least because it justified the civilising mission. The Genesis story performed this role because it proclaimed - or so it was interpreted - that the duty of Japheth (i.e. Europe) was to absorb Shem (the Asians) and enslave and colonise Ham or Canaan (the Black Africans). According to Genesis ch. 9, verse 27: 'God shall enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant'. The Protestant revival infused Christian missionaries with the desire to go out into the world and spread the Word among all unbelievers.

This way British placed themselves at the very top of the hierarchy). Below them came the Germans (at the top of Division One). They then posited a ranking within Division One. The Catholic French were placed below the Germans, with the Catholic Portuguese teetering at the bottom of Division One facing relegation. As Palmerston put it, 'The plain truth is that the Portuguese are of all European nations the lowest in the moral scale'. It is also highly significant to note that the Catholic Irish were omitted from Division One, being consigned to Division Three.

British or English upper-class pronouncements on the Irish were replete with statements to the effect that they were a particularly “wild and savage Race” as Samuel Marsden claimed. And the English upper-class attitude of distrust and hate towards the Irish was one of the crucial factors in the policy of transporting them to the Australian colonies. They believed that in contrast to Catholicism, Protestantism represented civilisation. French Catholics were viewed as semi-slaves languishing under French despotism.

Thus from the conception of the British Israelism as God's Chosen People it was but a short step to view imperialism and the world as Britain's manifest destiny.

But the importation of Darwinism into social science theory was also important because it, 'seemed to accen­tuate the "scientific" validity of the division of races into advanced and backward, or European-Aryan versus Oriental-African.

Importantly, the racist discourse became imbricated within international law. James Lorrimer, for example, divided humanity into three zones: White civilized humanity, Yellow barbarous humanity and Black savage humanity. And John Westlake argued in his, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (1894), that the 'uncivilized regions of the earth ought to be annexed or occupied by advanced Western powers' In effect European international law enabled a mental 'deterritorialisation' of the Eastern peoples. And meant that full colonial take over was entirely appropriate. In contrast to the treatment of the Black savages and the conception of terra nullius, the “Yellows” of the Division Two countries were conceived of as the “fallen peoples” and their lands were imagined as 'borderless spaces.

However, as I will explain next, none of this is to say that material power or material factors are unimportant. The critical point of note is that great power is channelled in specific directions depending on the particular identity of the 'agent' in question.

Western identity was constructed in such a way that the East could not be tolerated for its imagined deviancy. Thus Europeans at the time came to view imperialism as a “civilising mission” whereby the 'moral duty' of Western man was to bequeath to the East the gift of civilisation. As Charles Dickens's Mr Podsnap famously remarked, other countries were but a “mistake”. And in their racist imagination it fell to the British to “correct this mistake”. The British saw nothing wrong in any of this, for what could be more noble than helping others enjoy the fruits of modernity and civilisa­tion that only the West had created and that only the British could deliver, even if the Eastern peoples were either too ignorant or too stubborn to recognise and appreciate the gracious imperial British hand…

The corresponding 'civilising strategy' would be selected according to the perceived level of civilisation that the West judged each Eastern state or people to be at. Thus the more uncivilised a state or people was judged to be, the harsher the disciplinary treatment would neces­sarily have to be in order to cure the deviant ailment. Those residing in the Division Three countries (the Black savage races), who were gauged as barely human, would be dealt with through colonialism and, at the extreme, through genocide and social apartheid. Those residing in Division Two countries (the Yellow barbarian races), who were assessed as more civilised than the Blacks but woefully inferior to the Europeans in Division One, would be dealt with through “informal empire”.

The British civilising mission was, however, based on a fundamental contradiction. First, the civilising mission would con­vert the East along Western lines so as eradicate the identity threat that the East posed in order to make the West feel superior. But in order to remain 'superior' it was also vital that the Eastern economies be contained so as to prevent them from challenging the economic hegemony of the West. Second, cultural conversion and containment both implied the repression of the East. Cultural conversion embodied the very essence of implicit racism in which the target group's identity and culture would be eradicated and replaced by the 'supe­rior' culture of the imperial country. Equivalent to one could call “ethnocide”, it meshed with the idea behind containment: that because the Eastern peoples were inferior at best or subhuman at worst, so they could 'naturally' be exploited, repressed and utilised to service the various needs of the “Mother Country”.

So the upshot of this discussion about the history of ideas is that had racism not existed and had the West viewed the Eastern peoples as equal human beings, imperialism might never have occurred.

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