Skeptic's Notebook

This systemic ignorance marks a difference from the era of European empires, as opposed to the quasi-imperial ventures of today. Thus Edward Said was quite right in arguing that 19th century European ethnographic, historical and cultural studies of Asian peoples were closely related to the drive for European empire over the peoples concerned. However (in large part because of his concentration at bottom on specifically pro-Zionist studies) he missed two features of these studies which are of crucial importance compared to the present and which mean that these works in many cases remain the ultimate empirical foundations of all subsequent studies (like Robert Montagne’s study of the Berbers, for example).

The first is that it was scholars (or scholar-officials or scholar-soldiers) working in the field, among the peoples they were studying, who carried out the research for these works. This had at least some effect in modifying the fantasies that they could project onto their subjects. The second was that precisely because their research was meant to serve the cause of empire in a very practical way, and was carried out by servants of empire working in situ, it could not divorce itself wholly from facts.

If knowledge is to be effective power, knowledge has to be basically accurate. Ignorance of and indifference to the culture and views of colonised peoples led to mistakes and revolts like the 1857 rebellion which could and did cost colonial scholar-officials their professional reputations and often enough their lives. Niall Ferguson – to take the most famous example of a neo-imperial academic - runs absolutely no risk of either, no matter what he writes about places that he has never visited. His work, like that of the neo-conservatives, is very strictly imperialism as spectator sport.