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many of my fellow Indians are still smarting about that. What they often forget, however, is that before the British came the Indians were invaded and conquered by the Persians, by the Afghans, by Alexander the Great, by the Arabs, by the Mongols, and by the Turks. Depending on how you count, the British were the eighth or ninth colonial power to invade India. The English were merely the latest installment in a series of conquerors who forced their way onto Indian soil since ancient times. Indeed, ancient India was itself the product of the Aryan people who came from the north and subjugated the dark-skinned indigenous people.
    Those who identify colonialism and empire only with the West either have no sense of history or have forgotten about the Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Islamic empire, the
Mongol empire, the Chinese empire, and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. Shouldn’t the Arabs be paying reparations for their destruction of the Byzantine and Persian empires? Come to think of it, shouldn’t the Byzantine and Persian people also pay reparations to the descendants of the people they subjugated? And while we’re at it, shouldn’t the Muslims reimburse the Spaniards for their seven-hundred-year rule? As the example of Islamic Spain suggests, the people of the West have participated in the game of conquest not only as the perpetrator, but also as the victims. Ancient Greece, for example, was conquered by Rome, and the Roman Empire itself was destroyed by the invasions of Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and Visigoths from northern Europe. America, as we all know, was itself a colony of England before its war of independence; England, before that, was subjugated and ruled by the Norman kings from France. Those of us living today are taking on a large project if we are going to settle upon a rule of social justice based upon figuring out whose ancestors did what to whom.
    Perhaps it is not colonialism but slavery that is distinctively Western. Actually, no. Slavery has existed in all known civilizations. In his study Slavery and Social Death, the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, “Slavery has existed from the dawn of human history, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution.” 14 A brief survey of the nations of the world confirms this. The Sumerians and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was widespread in Greece and Rome, and also in sub-Saharan Africa.
American Indians practiced slavery long before Columbus set one foot on this continent.
    If slavery is not distinctively Western, what is? The movement to end slavery! Abolition is an exclusively Western institution. The historian J. M. Roberts writes, “No civilization once dependent on slavery has ever been able to eradicate it, except the Western.” 15 Of course, slaves in every society don’t want to be slaves. The history of slavery is full of incidents of runaways, slave revolts, and so on. But typically slaves were captured in warfare, and if they got away they were perfectly happy to take other people as slaves.
    Never in the history of the world, outside of the West, has a group of people eligible to be slave owners mobilized against the institution of slavery. This distinctive Western attitude is reflected by Abraham Lincoln: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” 16 Lincoln doesn’t want to be a slave—that’s not surprising—but he doesn’t want to be a master either. He and many other people were willing to expend considerable treasure, and ultimately blood, to get rid of slavery not for themselves, but for other people. The uniqueness of this Western approach is confirmed by the little-known fact that African chiefs, who profited from the slave trade, sent