Although Vincent Smith was not the most distinguished imperial historian of India, he was probably the most widely known in India because of the success of his textbooks on Indian history. In 1919, Smith published a rejoinder to the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional proposals seeking to placate nationalist demands by conceding a certain measure of “responsible government” to Indians. The proposals, Smith said, were based on two propositions: “(1) that a policy, assumed to have been successful in Western communities, can be applied to India; and (2) that such a policy ought to be applied to India, even at the request of an admittedly small body of Indians, because Englishmen believe it to be intrinsically the best. 5 His argument was that both propositions were false. The policy of responsible and democratic government, “supposed to be of universal application,” could not be applied to India because it went against “a deep stream of Indian tradition which has bee...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51