The classical legacy: How the West used Greece and Rome to justify empire

When the western powers began their imperial expansion, they used their Graeco-Roman patrimony to justify their colonial actions, placing themselves as the defenders of civilisation against oriental barbarism.

The late Edward Said, whose work on Orientalism has been very influential. Photo by Ulf Andersen / Getty Images

Jerry Toner

Harvard University Press

Dh132

In late 1895, Abdur Rahman, the emir of Afghanistan, ordered the conquest of a number of remote valleys north-east of Kabul that bordered British India. Their capture was fairly straightforward. Scattered in mountainous villages, the locals struggled to put up a fight. The region – then known vaguely as Kafiristan, “land of the infidels” – was swallowed by the burgeoning Afghan state within months, emerging into the 20th century irrevocably as the province of Nuristan, “land of light”.

Curiously, the fiercest resistance to the emir’s conquest took place in the salons, conference halls and editorial pages of British civil society. Newspapers in both India and Britain published accounts of the emir’s abuses, decrying British complicity in the catastrophe. Members of parliament accused the colonial government in India of deplorable inaction. Groups such as the Aborigines’ Protection Society, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the International Arbitration and Peace Association wrote up memorials and lobbied the India Office to intervene.

What prompted this outpouring of British feeling on behalf of an obscure people in the wilds of the Hindu Kush? In some measure, the intensity of the protests could be attributed to dogged Islamophobia. The inhabitants of Kafiristan were known to be non-Muslims, maintaining an idiosyncratic pantheon of deities and festivals; their conquest by Abdur Rahman would invariably lead to wholesale conversion to Islam.

In larger part, however, European concern for the plight of the Kafirs was motivated by the peculiar and widespread notion that these rugged tribesmen were, in fact, Greeks. Throughout the 19th century, travellers and colonial officials spread word of the existence of a fair-skinned, blue-eyed people in the high passes of the Hindu Kush. Many believed that these mountain-dwellers were descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great, which had swept through the region more than two millennia before. In their refuges in the Hindu Kush, the Kafirs were thought to be maintaining the ways of their Greek ancestors. Kafir-sympathisers claimed that it would be a travesty to let such kindred people lose their ancient struggle against the surrounding Muslims and be subsumed by the rapacious emir. As one London newspaper argued, if the Greeks deserved British support in their rebellion against Ottoman Turkey, so too did the Kafirs in their resistance to Kabul. Since “the nucleus of the Kafirs is more truly ancient Greek than modern Greece … the Kafirs should not be allowed to perish by an educated world”.

What’s notable here is not the question of whether the inhabitants of Kafiristan were indeed descendants of Alexander’s Macedonian invaders (they were not), but rather the overweening hold of the Greco-Roman past on the British imagination. The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush were reduced to a bookish fantasy – a people seen as a window to the days of Alexander – that nevertheless had the power to shift political opinion. They mattered to the British public not for who they actually were, but for who they were imagined to be.

“For centuries,” Toner writes, “the classical past has helped … the English and the English-speaking world, throughout the many upheavals they have undergone, to find in their images of the East new values and identities to meet their immediate social and political needs.”

The residue of this mode of thought remains apparent today. Samuel Huntington, the controversial American scholar, rooted his theory of the “clash of civilisations” in the classical world. “The key cultural elements which define a civilisation,” he wrote, “were set forth in a classic form by the Athenians when they reassured the Spartans that they would not betray them to the Persians.”

The rise of the Ottoman empire as an influential player on the European stage made the task of comprehending Oriental peoples all the more urgent. Invariably, the classics were harnessed in the quest to demystify the Turk.

When 19th-century British colonists arrived in South Asia and the Middle East, they often saw themselves as agents of a new Rome. The Victorian writer T Roger Smith compared the experience of a Roman governor in the provinces to that of a British officer in the colonies. "The Roman governor of a province in Gaul or Britain continued to be as intensely Roman in his exile as the English collector [district officer] remains British to the backbone in the heart of India." If British imperial endeavours resembled Roman efforts, it was because the former were built on the achievements of the latter. The classical past was increasingly seen as the bedrock of British success.

Kanishk Tharoor is a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow at New York University.