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  • The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices, Civilisational Responsibilities, and the Contest for the Emerging World Order

    This is the second of a three-part prologue to a series on India’s strategic choices, civilisational responsibilities, and the contest for the emerging world order.

    Ideological Engine crafted with Religious Endorsement

    In my previous post, I traced the material foundations of the current world order — the knowledge borrowed from the Islamic world, the wealth extracted from the Americas, two-thirds of humanity colonised and enslaved. It was the extraction, the enslavement, and the colonial architecture that built Western dominance. But material power alone does not sustain five centuries of global domination. It requires an ideological engine — a moral framework that converts extraction into mission, conquest into duty, and atrocity into the necessary price of civilisation. That engine was exceptionalism. And it was powered by religion.

    The mechanism was constructed with precision. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, authorising the King of Portugal to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ” and “reduce their persons to perpetual servitude.” Three years later, Romanus Pontifex extended this authority to conquer the lands of infidels for “the salvation of all”. In 1493, following Columbus’s return from the Americas, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera — the foundational document of the Doctrine of Discovery — declaring that any land not under Christian rule could be seized, its peoples subjugated, and its resources claimed, in the service of Christianising the world.

    Columbus at the court of Barcelona. Christopher Columbus standing before the King and Queen of Spain, presenting Indians and treasures from the New World, 1493. (Newscom TagID: whphotos146159.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

    These were not peripheral theological documents. They were the legal and moral architecture of the colonial project, establishing in explicit terms sanctioned by the highest religious authority in the Western world that non-Christians were less than human, that killing them was not a sin, and that converting or enslaving them was a sacred duty. The Doctrine of Discovery was subsequently incorporated into the legal systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, and other settler-colonial states, where it shaped land law, property rights, and indigenous dispossession for centuries. The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery only in 2023 — more than five centuries after the damage was done.

    And here is what makes that repudiation hollow: the doctrine did not stay in the fifteenth century. It became the operating law of the settler-colonial states, and it remains so.

    In 1823, the United States Supreme Court, in Johnson v. McIntosh, formally incorporated the Doctrine of Discovery into American law. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples did not own their lands once those lands had been “discovered” by Christian colonists — that discovery itself conferred title on the discovering Christian nation, reducing the original inhabitants to mere occupants on their own soil. Marshall himself conceded the principle was “extravagant.” He made it law regardless. It has never been overturned. Two centuries later, it remains the foundation of all federal Indian law in the United States.

    Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place.

    The living force of this doctrine was demonstrated in 2023 — the very year of the Vatican’s repudiation. In Haaland v. Brackeen, the US Supreme Court affirmed the modern form of the doctrine: the “plenary power” of the federal government over Native peoples. The term is not incidental. Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century Popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place. The Vatican renounced the doctrine in March 2023. Three months later, in June, the highest court of the United States reaffirmed its modern expression as settled law. One institution let go of the fiction. The other continued to build on it.

    Terra Nullius and the Concepts of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny

    The pattern is not confined to the Americas. In Australia, the entire continent was claimed under the doctrine of terra nullius — the legal fiction that the land belonged to no one, that sixty thousand years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation and hundreds of distinct nations simply did not count as habitation. The Australian Constitution, when it came into force in 1901, contained Section 127, which declared that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” The original inhabitants of the continent were constitutionally excluded from the population of their own country. That exclusion was not removed until a referendum in 1967. The fiction of terra nullius itself was not overturned until the High Court’s Mabo judgment in 1992 — one hundred and ninety-two years after colonisation began.

    The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is the point that must be understood clearly. The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is not a distortion of Christianity. It is the documented institutional expression of a specific tradition within it: the doctrine that one’s own community occupies a uniquely chosen position in the divine order — that the Other is not merely different but lesser, and that this difference legitimates domination.

    The same logic operated, in different institutional forms, across other traditions. The conquering caliphates that used the concept of jihad to justify forced conversion were not the whole of Islamic tradition, which contains rich pluralist and humanistic streams. They were the weaponisation of religious exceptionalism by those who held political and military power. Political Zionism, in its most extreme contemporary expressions, follows the same pattern: the theological claim to exclusive divine right over territory and the dehumanisation of non-Jewish populations, ruthlessly visible from the Nakba in 1947-48 to the present conduct of the Gaza war, in full view of the world and with endorsement by the West. It follows the same pattern: religious exceptionalism converted into political licence for dispossession and violence.

    The pattern is not one religion. It is a specific logic — the claim to divine chosenness that exempts a community from the moral constraints that apply to others – that has been institutionalised, at different moments and in different traditions, wherever political power has found it useful.

    In Western civilisation, this logic found its most durable and consequential expression in American exceptionalism. In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, preparing to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called for the creation of a community that would be “as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” This was not yet a global claim.  It was a theological self-conception: a chosen people, on a divinely appointed errand, under special divine scrutiny. But the seed was planted. Two centuries later, in 1845, John L. O’Sullivan gave it political form: “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” God-given expansion across a continent — regardless of the peoples already living on it — was reframed as destiny, not conquest.

    The indigenous peoples of North America experienced what that destiny meant in practice. At Sand Creek in November 1864, a Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village whose chief, Black Kettle, was flying both an American flag and a white flag of truce. Roughly 150 people were killed, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly; the soldiers mutilated the dead and paraded body parts through the streets of Denver. Three separate investigations — two congressional, one military — condemned it as a massacre. Not one man was ever indicted. The campaigns that defined the conquest of the West — villages destroyed, food supplies burned, non-combatants killed as a matter of strategy — were not the excesses of rogue commanders. They were the method.

    And the men who carried them out were not disgraced but memorialised. George Armstrong Custer, who at dawn on the Washita River in 1868 attacked the village of that same Black Kettle, who had survived Sand Creek and was again seeking peace, killed him and his wife in the assault,  while his aggressive forces killed a large number of unarmed women and children. Custer was mythologised into a national hero, his death at the Little Bighorn recast as a noble sacrifice. This is exceptionalism completing its work: not merely committing the atrocity, but converting it, in the national memory, into valour. The conversion of conquest into heroism is not a distortion of the exceptionalist project. It is the project.

    It is worth pausing to see precisely how this engine is built, because it reveals something the comfortable version of history conceals. There are two broad models of colonialism, and they are not the same. Extractive colonialism — the Spanish in Peru, the British in India — needs the colonised population alive: to mine the silver, to work the plantations, to pay the taxes. It subjugates.

    But settler colonialism, of the kind practised in North America and Australia, does not primarily want the people. It wants the land. And a population that comes to stay on land already inhabited requires something darker than subjugation: it requires removal. The historian Patrick Wolfe named this the ‘logic of elimination’ — the observation that in the settler-colonial project, invasion is not an event but a structure, and the indigenous inhabitant is not a labour force to be exploited but an obstacle to be cleared. This is why the settler variant needed its ideological engine to run at maximum power. To subjugate a people, you need only believe they are lesser. To eliminate them, you must first erase them — conceptually, legally, theologically — before you erase them in fact. Terra nullius, the empty land; the savage without real title; the wilderness awaiting God’s chosen — these were not decorative rhetoric. They were the necessary vocabulary of replacement.

    A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    And here is the fact that removes every excuse: the conscience was present. It was not that no one knew, or that no one objected. Roger Williams argued in the 1630s that the Crown had no right to grant land it did not own, that it had to be purchased from its actual inhabitants — and he was banished for saying so. The Quaker John Woolman condemned the dispossession on moral grounds a century before it reached the Mississippi. When the Indian Removal Act came before the United States Congress in 1830, it passed by 102 votes to 97 — a bitter, closely fought debate, not a silent consensus. When the Cherokee took their case to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that they possessed sovereign rights the state was bound to respect. President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling and carried out the removal regardless; on the Trail of Tears that followed, thousands died. This is the point that must be held onto. A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    The same logic was exported globally. In 1898, the United States entered the Spanish-American War, having suggested to Filipino independence fighters that it was their ally against Spanish colonial rule. When Spain was defeated, the Philippines was not given its independence. It was purchased for twenty million dollars and then colonised. The Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 Filipino combatants and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians through violence, famine, and disease. McKinley called his policy “Benevolent Assimilation.” The Philippines did not receive full independence until 1946 — forty-eight years after the liberation that was promised.

    This is the pattern that repeats from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran: intervention justified as liberation, freedom invoked to mask extraction, and sovereignty violated in the name of the values that sovereignty was supposed to protect.

    The Civilisational Alternative 

    Now consider the contrast. India, China, and Persia are rooted in civilisational traditions that are fundamentally pluralist in their relationship to truth and the divine. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism do not claim exclusive possession of truth. They understand the search for ultimate reality as a path that admits multiple valid routes — that the divine is too vast and complex for any single tradition to comprehend fully. This epistemological humility produces a fundamentally different relationship to the Other: not as a lesser being to be converted or eliminated, but as a fellow traveller on a different path through the same reality — or, in the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image, rivers of many names flowing to a single shoreless ocean.

    A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    The distinction I am drawing must be stated carefully, because it is easy to misread as a claim that one civilisation is virtuous and another is wicked. That is not the claim, and it would be false. The impulse to dress conquest in sacred language is close to universal — it appears wherever power seeks to launder its crimes, and no civilisation, India’s included, is innocent of it. Ashoka built his empire by the sword before he turned to the dharma. India’s own caste hierarchy was given cosmic sanction, as I have argued elsewhere in examining the Manusmriti. The human capacity to summon the transcendent in defence of the indefensible is not the property of any one people. What differs is not the impulse to justify but what each tradition installs as its highest principle — and therefore what any justification of atrocity must first overcome. A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    One can still commit atrocity within such a tradition — humans always can — but one cannot easily make the tradition’s own highest principle bless it. A covenantal structure built on a chosen people, an exclusive truth, and a promised land contains that raw material at its theological core. It does not compel atrocity, and most who inherit it are decent people who read it toward mercy — the abolitionists and Roger Williams drew on it too. But the doctrine of chosenness is available to be weaponised in a way that Ekam Sat structurally is not. That is the civilisational difference that matters: not that one people is depraved and another pure, but that traditions differ in whether their deepest ideal resists the engine of exceptionalism or supplies its fuel.

    Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    This civilisational disposition is not merely philosophical. It expresses itself in conduct. In December 1971, India made the decision to intervene militarily in East Pakistan in response to one of the most egregious humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century — the Bangladesh genocide. The intervention was swift and decisive. Indian military forces liberated Bangladesh in thirteen days of formal war. Pakistani forces surrendered on December 16, 1971. The Indian military then withdrew completely. No occupation. No extraction. No installation of a client government. No strategic bases retained. Full sovereignty was transferred immediately to the people of Bangladesh. India returned over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war through the Simla Agreement. Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    These are not coincidental differences. They are civilisational ones. The world is now in contest over what the emerging order will be built upon. The declining Western order was built on exceptionalism — the claim to divine chosenness that converts domination into duty, secularised into legal doctrine but never abandoned. The Asian civilisational alternative — pluralist, non-exclusivist, epistemologically humble — offers a different foundation. India’s 1971 conduct is the most precise proof available that this alternative is not merely philosophical. It has been demonstrated operationally.

    The question is whether India — in Gaza, in Iran, in the institutions of the emerging world order — is willing to act consistently with the civilisational tradition it inherits.

    — This is the second in the series prologue.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that power without ethics is tyranny — and that India’s civilisational traditions offer the world something Western exceptionalism cannot.

     

    Further Reading:

    On the Doctrine of Discovery and the Papal Bulls

    Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452. Full Latin text and English translation: Doctrine of Discovery Project, doctrineofdiscovery.org.

    Pope Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455.

    Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, 4 May 1493.

    Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2010).

    Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008).

    On the Vatican’s 2023 repudiation

    Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, ‘Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery,’ Vatican, 30 March 2023.

    On the incorporation and persistence of the Doctrine of Discovery in US law

    Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).

    Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. 255 (2023).

    On the affirmation of ‘plenary power’ over Native peoples as the modern descendant of the Doctrine of Discovery, see the analysis by Peter d’Errico and the essays in the ‘200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh’ series, Canopy Forum, 2023.

    Robert J. Miller, ‘The Doctrine of Discovery in American Indian Law,’ Idaho Law Review, 42 (2005).

    Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (Oxford University Press, 2005).

    On Australia, terra nullius, and constitutional exclusion

    Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.

    Section 127, Constitution of Australia (repealed by referendum, 1967).

    Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Penguin, 1987).

    Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Allen & Unwin, 2003).

    On Section 127 and the 1967 referendum: National Museum of Australia, ‘Indigenous Referendum,’ and George Williams’ analysis of the ‘race power’ in Australia’s constitutional history.

    On American exceptionalism — Puritan origins and Manifest Destiny

    John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’ (1630).

    John L. O’Sullivan, ‘Annexation,’ The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), July–August 1845.

    Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (Hill and Wang, 1995).

    Hilde Eliassen Restad, American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Made a Nation and Remade the World (Routledge, 2014).

    On the Sand Creek Massacre and the conquest of the Plains

    U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians (38th Congress, 2nd Session, 1865).

    The contemporary Congressional investigation that condemned the massacre; the primary documentary record.

    Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

    On the Washita (1868), the killing of Black Kettle, and the pattern of village attacks; also on the mythologisation of George Armstrong Custer.

    Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Viking, 2010).

    On the Philippines, 1898–1946

    Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (Random House, 1989).

    Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

    On India’s 1971 Bangladesh liberation

    Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013).

    On Asian civilisational pluralism

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    The metaphor of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. See thiruarutpa.org.

     

  • The World Order we Inherited — and Why it must Change

    The World Order we Inherited — and Why it must Change

    This is the first in a series on India’s strategic choices, civilisational responsibilities, and the contest for the emerging world order.

    The Material Foundations of Western Power

     

    The world of strategists is familiar with the quote of Lord Palmerston, Britain’s nineteenth-century Prime Minister. He famously declared: “There are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.”

    Lord Palmerston

    As a description of statecraft, this is not wrong. Every civilisation that has endured has pursued its interests — including the ones this series will spend considerable space defending. Kautilya’s Rajamandala is, at its core, a theory of interest-based alignment. The Cholas sailed across the Bay of Bengal to protect Tamil trading interests. No serious tradition of statecraft has ever pretended that interest does not matter, and none should.

    The question worth asking is not whether interests are permanent. It is whether anything else is.

    Palmerston’s formulation, taken as a complete theory of how a state should conduct itself — not as one true observation among several, but as the only thing that needs ever to be consulted — becomes something different. It becomes a licence. If interest is permanent and nothing else is, then ethical limits on how interest is pursued are, by definition, temporary: honoured when convenient, discarded when not. That is not realism. That is realism with the safety catch removed.

    This is the civilisational fork in the road, and four hundred years of history show which branch the dominant powers took — and still take.

    The Islamic Golden Age — spanning roughly the 8th to the 14th century — was one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. Scholars at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom undertook a systematic, state-sponsored project of translation and synthesis: gathering the accumulated knowledge of Greece, Persia, India, and China, translating it into Arabic, and building upon it with original contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, optics, and chemistry. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine became a foundational text in European universities. Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle shaped medieval European philosophy.

    Exhibit in Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon – Photo by Author

    Europe in the early medieval period was not the centre of the world. It was its periphery — impoverished, fragmented, and in the grip of what its own historians call the Dark Ages. While Europe’s literacy rates collapsed and theological conformity suppressed inquiry, something extraordinary was unfolding in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Cairo. The Islamic Golden Age — spanning roughly the 8th to the 14th century — was one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. Scholars at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom undertook a systematic, state-sponsored project of translation and synthesis: gathering the accumulated knowledge of Greece, Persia, India, and China, translating it into Arabic, and building upon it with original contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, optics, and chemistry. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine became a foundational text in European universities. Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle shaped medieval European philosophy. The numeral system through which all modern mathematics operates — including the zero — came to Europe through the Arabic transmission of Indian mathematics. This was not borrowing. It was the rescue and synthesis of civilisational knowledge — and without it, the European Renaissance would have had no foundation on which to build.

    The numeral system through which all modern mathematics operates — including the zero — came to Europe through the Arabic transmission of Indian mathematics. This was not borrowing. It was the rescue and synthesis of civilisational knowledge — and without it, the European Renaissance would have had no foundation on which to build.

    Europe’s intellectual reawakening in the 14th and 15th centuries drew directly on this Islamic transmission. The Renaissance, together with the gunpowder revolution and the state system formalised at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, gave European civilisation (viewing it as a single civilisation may not be truly appropriate – disparate kingdoms, fused by the race for maritime trade dominance and military conquest – Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Russian, etc.) something it had never possessed before: military-technological superiority, organised state power, and the bureaucratic capacity to project both across the world.

    This wealth — extracted through conquest, forced indigenous labour, and the systematic destruction of existing civilisations — capitalised the European empires that would go on to colonise two-thirds of the world

    Columbus – Truth vs Myth

    The rise of the West that followed the maritime route discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama needs to be understood correctly, devoid of the myths built around them. The West celebrates them, but the truth is they were plunderers who unleashed the genocidal expansion of the West. This truth is now being brought out by brilliant and unbiased historians such as Howard Zinn and Utsa Patnaik. Howard Zinn writes – ” what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. They used the same tactics, and for the same reasons – the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay for the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism…These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.”

    What followed was not a story of civilisational achievement. It was a story of extraction on a scale without precedent in human history — extraction conducted on the understanding that, once interest was engaged, nothing else needed to be weighed. From the Americas alone, Spanish colonial mining operations extracted approximately 150,000 metric tonnes of silver between 1500 and 1800 — representing 80 to 90 per cent of global silver production over three centuries. By 1600, 25,000 tonnes of silver had crossed the Atlantic. This wealth — extracted through conquest, forced indigenous labour, and the systematic destruction of existing civilisations — capitalised the European empires that would go on to colonise two-thirds of the world. The Atlantic slave trade transported an estimated twelve to fifteen million Africans into forced labour over three centuries.

    The British were ruthless in pursuing their interests at the expense of the people and the geography of their colonial empire, particularly in India. The economy under the British Raj was not a system of governance or development – it was a system of systematic wealth extraction unprecedented in scale and duration. From 1765 (when Robert Clive obtained the Diwani Rights, that is, the right to collect taxes and revenue, from the Mughal emperor as a result of the Battle of Buxar) to 1947 – 182 years – Britain drained India’s wealth through every possible mechanism. The scale of this drain was staggering. Britain extracted the equivalent of about $45 trillion (in current dollar terms) from India during its colonial rule. This wasn’t accidental impoverishment or the natural result of economic evolution. This was deliberate policy, implemented systematically through revenue extraction, deindustrialisation, trade manipulation, and infrastructural control.

     

    500-year Commemoration of Vasco-da-Gama’s voyage to India -Lisbon – defining moments of colonialism. Photo by Author
    The Russian empire was equally consumed by Western Europe’s passion for colonies. Catherine the Great, Russian Empress and originally a German princess, was a ruthless expansionist of the Russian Empire. However, Russia differed significantly from Western colonialism. Catherine the Great’s Statue in St. Petersburg. Photo by Author.

    None of this was an aberration from Western values. It was the expression of them. Palmerston’s formulation was not a description of how all states behave. It was a justification for a specific civilisational approach: that power exists to be exercised without ethical constraint, that the strong may do what they will, and that the legitimating language of civilisation, Christianity, and later human rights, are instruments of justification rather than a genuine limits on conduct.

    Slavery was the most crucial contributor to the West’s development. This was a critical element of the transatlantic world. exhibit in the African American Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo by Author.

    The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 is its most clinical illustration. Otto von Bismarck convened the European powers to divide Africa between them. Not a single African leader was present. A request by the Sultan of Zanzibar to attend was dismissed. The Congo basin — a territory larger than Western Europe, home to millions of people with ancient civilisations, cultures, and governance systems — was assigned as the personal property of Belgian King Leopold II, one of the vilest European monarchs in human history. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Congolese were worked to death on rubber plantations. Those who failed their quotas had their hands amputated. Leopold accumulated one of the largest personal fortunes in history from the proceeds.

    This was not an exceptional act of cruelty. It was Palmerston’s formulation taken to its logical and undiluted conclusion.

    Whatever the merits claimed for each individually, taken together they represent the same formula: interest declared permanent, leading to the ruthless pursuit of national interests; ethical limits declared situational, that is, practically irrelevant.

    The pattern did not end with empire. It changed vocabulary. The wars launched and led by the United States since 2001 — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and beyond — were conducted in the language of security, liberation, and the defence of human rights. By the most careful independent estimates, their costs have run into the hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and their stated justifications have repeatedly diverged from their actual outcomes. Whatever the merits claimed for each individually, taken together they represent the same formula: interest declared permanent, leading to the ruthless pursuit of national interests; ethical limits declared situational, that is, practically irrelevant. The vocabulary had changed since 1884. The structure of the choice had not.

    The economic register tells the same story. The formal end of colonialism did not end the system. It adapted it. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank, established at Bretton Woods in 1944, became the institutional mechanisms through which the global south’s economic policies were directed from Washington. Structural adjustment programmes imposed fiscal austerity, market liberalisation, and debt dependency on nations that had barely emerged from colonial rule.

    Francophone West Africa became perhaps the most striking contemporary illustration of this persistence. Fourteen countries continued to use the CFA franc — a currency whose reserves were held in the French Treasury, whose exchange rate was set in Paris, and whose monetary sovereignty had never been genuinely transferred since formal independence. Long-term analysis tells the structural story: The Ivory Coast reached its peak in income per capita in 1978, in less than two decades after independence. It then stagnated over the next fifty years. Niger reached its highest level in 1965 — the year of independence. Seven decades of formal sovereignty. Not a single decade of genuine economic progress. France’s control was not only monetary. It was political and military. French intelligence maintained deep ties with governing elites. French military bases ensured that no elected government that moved too far from French interests would survive. The system corrupted the democratic process itself.

    When Thomas Sankara became President of Burkina Faso in 1983 and attempted to secure genuine sovereignty — nationalising land, refusing IMF debt, building schools and healthcare, and articulating a vision of African self-reliance — he was assassinated in 1987. French agents were present in the capital the following day. Blaise Compaoré, who replaced him, immediately reversed every policy of sovereignty and ruled for 27 years. When a popular uprising removed him in 2014, French troops exfiltrated him to the Ivory Coast. He was later convicted in absentia by a Burkinabe court and sentenced to life imprisonment for Sankara’s murder. The system did not merely extract wealth. It murdered the leaders who sought to end the extraction.

    “Anything that maintains us in slavery, we will break those bonds” – Captain Ibrahim Traore

    Then, between 2021 and 2023, something changed. A new generation of young, educated, patriotic military officers — shaped by Sankara’s tradition — moved. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States, expelled French and American military forces, and announced their intention to abandon the CFA franc entirely. Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traore declared: “Anything that maintains us in slavery, we will break those bonds.” These are not coups in the traditional sense. They are the consequence of a system that used democratic institutions as a mechanism of foreign control for seven decades. As I write this essay, Burkina Faso officially severed all diplomatic relations with France on June 26, 2026. The African nation’s Communications Minister announced the decision on national television, stating that the essential conditions for mutual respect, trust, and non-interference were absent. President Ibrahim Traore accused Paris of harbouring “neo-colonial ambitions,” backing terrorist groups, and acting against Burkinabe interests. African countries are rising against the strangulating control of the West and its neo-colonialism of the last seven decades.

    This is the order that India inhabits. This is the order India is being asked to join as a rising power. The contest for a new world order is not simply a geopolitical competition between states. It is a civilisational question —not the one Palmerston’s critics often imagine. The question is not whether a rising power will have permanent interests. Of course it will, and should. The question is whether it will articulate, with equal permanence and equal seriousness, the ethical limits within which those interests are pursued — limits that hold even when honouring them is costly.

    India has the history, the philosophy, and the standing to make that commitment. The question is whether it has the will.

    —

    Further Reading:

    On Palmerston’s statement and interest-based statecraft

    Lord Palmerston, Speech to the House of Commons, 1 March 1848. Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 97, cols. 66–123.

    Kautilya, Arthashastra, Books VI–VII (Mandala theory of interstate relations). Trans. R.P. Kangle, The Kautiliya Arthashastra, 3 vols. (University of Bombay, 1960–65).

    On the Islamic Golden Age and knowledge transmission to Europe

    George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007).

    Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation (Bloomsbury, 2009).

    Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (Routledge, 1998).

    Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers (Wiley, 2000). On the transmission of Hindu-Arabic numerals, including the zero.

    On colonial extraction — the Americas

    Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-18th Century,’ Journal of World History, 13(2), 2002.

    Source for the 150,000-tonne / 80–90% global silver production estimates, 1500–1800.

    Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Harvard University Press, 1934).

    Foundational source for the c. 25,000-tonne figure by 1600.

    On the Atlantic slave trade

    David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010).

    The Slave Voyages Database, Emory University. slavevoyages.org.

    Basis for the 12–15 million estimate.

    On the Berlin Conference and the Congo Free State

    Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

    S.E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885 (Longmans, 1942).

    Matthew Craven, ‘Between Law and History: The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,’ London Review of International Law, 3(1), 2015.

    On the Sultan of Zanzibar’s exclusion.

    On post-2001 conflicts and civilian costs

    Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. costsofwar.org.

    Cumulative estimates of direct and indirect deaths in post-9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen).

    Iraq Body Count project. iraqbodycount.org.

    Independent database of documented civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003.

    Gilbert Burnham et al., ‘Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,’ The Lancet, 368(9545), 2006.

    One of several widely-cited epidemiological estimates; cited to indicate the range of credible estimates rather than to adjudicate between methodologies.

    On Bretton Woods, the IMF/World Bank, and structural adjustment

    Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2014).

    Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers (Cornell University Press, 2006).

    On the CFA franc and Francophone West Africa

    Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story (Pluto Press, 2021).

    World Bank, World Development Indicators (databank.worldbank.org).

    Basis for the Ivory Coast (1978 peak) and Niger (1965 peak) GDP per capita figures.

    On Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré

    Ernest Harsch, Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary (Ohio University Press, 2014).

    On the French intelligence presence following the 1987 coup: reporting by Jeune Afrique and Radio France Internationale (RFI), 1987.

    On Compaoré’s 2014 exfiltration: Reuters and Agence France-Presse, October 2014.

    On Compaoré’s conviction: ‘Burkina Faso: Blaise Compaoré sentenced to life in prison over Thomas Sankara’s assassination.’ Reuters, 6 April 2022.

    On the Alliance of Sahel States (2021–2024)

    Formation of the Alliance of Sahel States, September 2023, and withdrawal from ECOWAS, January 2024: Reuters, Al Jazeera, and AfricaNews coverage, 2023–2024.

    Captain Ibrahim Traoré, ‘Anything that maintains us in slavery, we will break those bonds.’ Public addresses, widely reported across pan-African and international media, 2023–2024.

    On the closure of the US drone facility at Agadez, Niger: ‘Niger orders US military to leave the country.’ BBC News, 17 March 2024.

    —

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), an independent policy research think tank in Chennai, rooted in the conviction that governance must serve conscience and that the world order India helps shape must be grounded in ethics, not merely in interests.

  • Does Facial Recognition Tech in Ukraine’s War Bring Killer Robots Nearer?

    Does Facial Recognition Tech in Ukraine’s War Bring Killer Robots Nearer?

    Clearview AI is offering its controversial tech to Ukraine for identifying enemy soldiers – while autonomous killing machines are on the rise

    Technology that can recognise the faces of enemy fighters is the latest thing to be deployed to the war theatre of Ukraine. This military use of artificial intelligence has all the markings of a further dystopian turn to what is already a brutal conflict.

    The US company Clearview AI has offered the Ukrainian government free use of its controversial facial recognition technology. It offered to uncover infiltrators – including Russian military personnel – combat misinformation, identify the dead and reunite refugees with their families.

    To date, media reports and statements from Ukrainian government officials have claimed that the use of Clearview’s tools has been limited to identifying dead Russian soldiers in order to inform their families as a courtesy. The Ukrainian military is also reportedly using Clearview to identify its own casualties.

    This contribution to the Ukrainian war effort should also afford the company a baptism of fire for its most important product. Battlefield deployment will offer the company the ultimate stress test and yield valuable data, instantly turning Clearview AI into a defence contractor – potentially a major one – and the tool into military technology.

    If the technology can be used to identify live as well as dead enemy soldiers, it could also be incorporated into systems that use automated decision-making to direct lethal force. This is not a remote possibility. Last year, the UN reported that an autonomous drone had killed people in Libya in 2020, and there are unconfirmed reports of autonomous weapons already being used in the Ukrainian theatre.

    Our concern is that hope that Ukraine will emerge victorious from what is a murderous war of aggression may cloud vision and judgement concerning the dangerous precedent set by the battlefield testing and refinement of facial-recognition technology, which could in the near future be integrated into autonomous killing machines.

    To be clear, this use is outside the remit of Clearview’s current support for the Ukrainian military; and to our knowledge Clearview has never expressed any intention for its technology to be used in such a manner. Nonetheless, we think there is real reason for concern when it comes to military and civilian use of privately owned facial-recognition technologies.

    Clearview insists that its tool should complement and not replace human decision-making. A good sentiment but a quaint one

    The promise of facial recognition in law enforcement and on the battlefield is to increase precision, lifting the proverbial fog of war with automated precise targeting, improving the efficiency of lethal force while sparing the lives of the ‘innocent’.

    But these systems bring their own problems. Misrecognition is an obvious one, and it remains a serious concern, including when identifying dead or wounded soldiers. Just as serious, though, is that lifting one fog makes another roll in. We worry that for the sake of efficiency, battlefield decisions with lethal consequences are likely to be increasingly ‘blackboxed’ – taken by a machine whose working and decisions are opaque even to its operator. If autonomous weapons systems incorporated privately owned technologies and databases, these decisions would inevitably be made, in part, by proprietary algorithms owned by the company.

    Clearview rightly insists that its tool should complement and not replace human decision-making. The company’s CEO also said in a statement shared with openDemocracy that everyone who has access to its technology “is trained on how to use it safely and responsibly”. A good sentiment but a quaint one. Prudence and safeguards such as this are bound to be quickly abandoned in the heat of battle.

    Clearview’s systems are already used by police and private security operations – they are common in US police departments, for instance. Criticism of such use has largely focused on bias and possible misidentification of targets, as well as over-reliance on the algorithm to make identifications – but the risk also runs the other way.

    The more precise the tool actually is, the more likely it will be incorporated into autonomous weapons systems that can be turned not only on invading armies but also on political opponents, members of specific ethnic groups, and so on. If anything, improving the reliability of the technology makes it all the more sinister and dangerous. This doesn’t just apply to privately owned technology, but also to efforts by states such as China to develop facial recognition tools for security use.

    Outside combat, too, the use of facial recognition AI in the Ukrainian war carries significant risks. When facial recognition is used in the EU for border control and migration purposes – and it is, widely – it is public authorities that are collecting the sensitive biomarker data essential to facial recognition, the data subject knows that it is happening and EU law strictly regulates the process. Clearview, by contrast, has already repeatedly fallen foul of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and has been heavily sanctioned by data security agencies in Italy and France.

    If privately owned facial recognition technologies are used to identify Ukrainian citizens within the EU, or in border zones, to offer them some form of protective status, a grey area would be established between military and civilian use within the EU itself. Any such facial recognition system would have to be used on civilian populations within the EU. A company like Clearview could promise to keep its civil and military databases separate, but this would need further regulation – and even then would pose the question as to how a single company can be entrusted with civil data which it can easily repurpose for military use. That is in fact what Clearview is already offering the Ukrainian government: it is building its military frontline recognition operation on civil data harvested from Russian social media records.

    Then there is the question of state power. Once out of the box, facial recognition may prove simply too tempting for European security agencies to put back. This has already been reported in the US where the members of the New York Police Department are reported to have used Clearview’s tool to circumvent data protection and privacy rules within the department and to have installed Clearview’s app on private devices in violation of NYPD policy.

    This is a particular risk with relation to the roll-out and testing in Ukraine. If Ukrainian accession to the European Union is fast-tracked, as many are arguing it should be, it will carry into the EU the use of Clearview’s AI as an established practice for military and potentially civilian use, both initially conceived without malice or intention of misuse, but setting what we think is a worrying precedent.

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine is extraordinary in its magnitude and brutality. But throwing caution to the wind is not a legitimate doctrine for the laws of war or the rules of engagement; this is particularly so when it comes to potent new technology. The defence of Ukraine may well involve tools and methods that, if normalised, will ultimately undermine the peace and security of European citizens at home and on future fronts. EU politicians should be wary of this. The EU must use whatever tools are at its disposal to bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine and to Russian aggression, but it must do so ensuring the rule of law and the protection of citizens.

    This article was published earlier in openDemocracy, and is republished under Creative Commons Licence. 

    Feature Image Credit: www.businessinsider.in