The anti-colonialist.

THE history of South Asia and most other outposts of the British (or the Dutch or French) is replete with the struggles of the ancestors of contemporary populations against colonisers who occupied the subcontinent for over two centuries. The sum total of post-colonial history taught in most of the countries created as the sun set on the British Empire are, in fact, a compendium of the struggles of heroic fighters and thinkers who paved the way for independence.

Generations of people educated in these post-colonial nations have grown up with a consciousness of a once-glorious past that was interrupted by the machinations of colonial powers, who inveigled their way into South Asia or Africa or any of the many other places that were 'discovered' by white explorers in their quest to find resources to monopolise, people to subjugate, and lands to occupy.

The advent of the British East India Company or the Dutch East India Company saw the deployment of 'trade' interests that sought to amass raw material that the future colonisers set about gathering up. Everyone knows what happened next: trade gave way to administration, and doddering monarchies or tribal kingdoms were converted into colonies that were administered and then ruled by the white men who had first presented their presence and their intentions as benign.

The history of colonialism and the fact that it led to the looting of vast portions of the world for the benefit of white and Western home populations is thus well known by those who suffered under the yoke of colonial occupation. It is, however, markedly less well known by the populations of colonising nations. In the UK, many still insist that the British colonisers were 'benevolent' and brought only good things to the subcontinent, notwithstanding the compelling evidence of carnage or pillage of former colonies. There is still less awareness of the hobbling of long-existing systems of law, administration and cultural production that followed colonisation.

For all the good intentions of post-colonial historians, their efforts of the past half century have seemed mostly futile.

Academic departments in the UK and US have attempted to correct this incorrect recollection of the past. In the American context, post-colonial historians have focused on the lie behind the much-popularised premise that the explorer Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America as an example of how the presence of Native Americans has been erased in American...