William Dalrymple’s fashionable assessment of U.S. foreign policy since 1990 does not inspire confidence in his skills at comparative historical analysis:
Why did the relatively easy interracial and inter-religious relationships so evident during the time of Ochterlony give way to the hatred and racism of the 19th-century Raj? How did the close clasp of two civilisations turn into a bitter clash?
Two things put paid to the easy coexistence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated not only the French, but all their other Indian rivals; and, in a manner not unlike the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to undisguised imperial arrogance.
The other factor was the ascendancy of evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about.
While I don’t know much about eighteenth or nineteenth century India, the charge of America’s “undisguised imperial arrogance” strikes me as utter hooey. Our war against Saddam after he invaded Kuwait had a great deal of international support (as does, despite protestations to the contrary, the current action in Iraq), and the no-fly zone we enforced against Saddam in the 1990s was sanctioned by U.N. resolution. American involvement in Somalia did not lead to the “Blackhawk Down” incident until after the U.S. accepted U.N. police duties, and our attacks on Serbia in response to Serbian ethnic cleansing of its various neighbor peoples were carried out in conjunction with the U.K. and, ultimately, NATO.
I also don’t know what role evangelical Christianity played in the British Raj of the nineteenth century. Other than, perhaps, an insistence that Hindus and Muslims should have clean water, adequate food, and as much modern medical assistance as possible – I suspect those were definite opinions of British Christians of the Victorian era. If Mr. Dalrymple is simply claiming though, as he seems to be, that evangelical Christianity by its nature aggravates jihad, he is both right and ridiculous. Jihadis do hate – and punish by death when possible – attempts to convert Muslims to any other religion. But it is both foolish and cowardly to declare that one group’s homicidal hatred for something means that someone else is therefore to blame when that hatred periodically rages out of control and erupts into mass-murder.
