Thus, in closing, no matter how repugnant the idea, one has to conclude that Grant and Wilberforce were the logical conclusions of Hastings, Jones and Wellesley. As historian/ anthropologist Bernard Cohn sadly notes: "What had started with Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones as a search for the "ancient Indian constitution" ended up with what they had so much wanted to avoid - with English law as the law of India." [2] The failure for Jones and others to see that their actions could and did lead to blatantly racist policies being enacted has to be considered the ultimate tragedy, a tragedy that led to more than a century of the mentality of a "white man's burden," long before Rudyard Kipling immortalized that phrase. The world is still coping with the effects of this failure today.
Footnotes:
[1] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 122.
[2] Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 75.
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