The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

Cecil Rhodes did not live to see the end of the war as he died in March of that year. He would leave most of his estate for the creation of the famous scholarship that now bears his name. The idea seems to have been to create an Anglo-Saxon elite, educated in Oxford, who would rule the British empire into perpetuity (there was also a hope that the United States would join the British in this grand enterprise). Rhodes lived during the high noon of British power and it would not have occurred to him that his beloved empire would cease to exist within half a century. It is somewhat ironic that I owe most of my education to Francis Xavier and Cecil Rhodes. I attended a high school named after the former and my years at Oxford were financed by a scholarship named after the latter. I am quite aware that in both cases I was not the intended beneficiary. This brings us to the tricky question of how to judge individuals from history—do we judge them by their intentions or by the consequences of their actions? Do we judge them only by the standards of their times or by some absolute yardstick? I do not claim to know the answer but these are questions that scholars of history constantly grapple with.