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marily interested in stimulating or clarifying the minds of our stu–
dents and not in stirring them into some sort of political action .
These general considerations apply to the study of imperialism,
too, of whose many evils students should be well aware. But is, or
was, imperialism an absolute evil at all times and in every respect?
Did the culture and economy of the imperial power in addition to its
cruelties ever make a positive contribution to the health, standard of
living, and public order of the region it ruthlessly exploited? There
are several schools of thought here . But one school of thought, whose
most notable representative is Lord Peter Bauer, is never discussed .
The works of Bauer and his school are never listed in the bibliog–
raphy of courses in Black Studies, Chicano Studies, or in any of the
tracks of the old course in Western Culture or the new course in CIV
in which reference to colonialism is made. Nor are the writings of
other foremost scholars of imperialism like Stanford's Lewis Gann or
Peter Duignan ever listed, although occasionally they are orally de–
nounced . Members of this school are not apologists of imperialism:
some of them even believe that colonialism was sometimes a bad
economic investment. But they argue that not all the present-day
economic evils of decolonized states are due to colonialism, that
some of the worst economic problems today are found in states that
were never colonized.
Right or wrong, it is a view that merits discussion. For the view
that colonialism had some progressive features was held, among
others, by none other that Karl Marx who wrote some years after he
published the
Communist Manifesto
that India owed its only social
revolution in 1,500 years to British imperialism. I suspect that many
at Stanford and elsewhere who regard themselves as Marxists will
suspect the authenticity of my quotation (as did Jawaharlal Nehru)
although it follows strictly from Marx's own theory of history and
economics. The passage I refer to reflects the stigmata of racism with
which Marx himself unfortunately was personally affiicted, and En–
gels even more. But it does not affect the point he is making.
To be sure, Marx is unsparing in his criticism of the needless
cruelties of the British subjection ofIndia . But he is just as unsparing
in his eloquent account of the still greater infamies to which the
British put an end . He mentions the "small semi-barbarian, semi–
civilized communities" that were destroyed by "the greatest, and to
speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia," and
then goes on:
