On being called a racist

My ‘literary spat’ with the London Review of Books

Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings. It is indeed astonishing that, from the beginning of the 16th century until the third quarter of the 20th century, the West (Europe and its settler colonies) did much better than the rest of the world and came to rule over it. But that’s what happened.

By the 1970s the average American was roughly 20 times richer than the average Chinese. The average Briton was at least 12 times richer than the average Indian. In the first half of the 20th century, westerners had life expectancy nearly twice that of non-westerners. Europeans and North Americans even grew taller than Asians.

Moreover, a dozen western empires were able literally to rule most of the world. At their zenith, these empires encompassed three fifths of the earth’s land surface and population and controlled three quarters of economic output. Fewer than 1,000 British civil servants governed the entire Indian subcontinent.

Explaining why this extraordinary divergence came about is the principal task I set myself in writing Civilization: The West and the Rest. The book argues that we cannot do so in terms of geography, the weather, culture — and least of all in terms of race. I write: ‘The idea that the success of the United States was contingent on racial segregation was nonsense.’ I call racism a ‘pseudo-science that ranks alongside the ideology of communism as the most lethal of all Western civilization’s exports’.

Imagine, then, my amazement to see myself accused, by the Indian journalist and travel writer Pankaj Mishra, of being a racist. In his review of my book in the London Review of Books, Mishra spent more than a page insinuating a resemblance between me and the American racial theorist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) and a notorious Nazi sympathiser.