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engineers, and military officers, while the Country yielded raw materials, cheap labor, and an endless supply of foot soldiers. Each colonial power had a somewhat different idea of its “civilizing mission.” British and Dutch interests were largely commercial, while the French were convinced that the whole world would benefit from French civilization, which they held to be universal. Perhaps because America, like France, was born from a revolution, Americans have been rather more like the French in their missionary zeal than like the Dutch or the British. But these differences aside, all empire builders saw themselves as agents of civilization, as opposed to the backward, superstitious, “semi-barbarian” priests of local culture.
    Opposition to this view came early on. Romantic thinkers in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany resisted the imperial designs of France in the cultural sphere, even as Prussian troops fought Napoleon’s army. France, to German Romantics, represented the aggressive, expanding City, driven by its false, rationalist, metropolitan ways. Germany was the countryside of poets, artisans, and peasants. The work of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 -1803), for example, shows this juxtaposition clearly. Herder was a keen folklorist who believed that nations were organic communities, which had evolved like trees, rooted in native soil. Languages and cultures contained a spirit, unique to each community. Embedded in these communities, their languages, and the Volksgeist that gave them life were ancient wisdoms and warm human virtues. Unfortunately, however, “the cold European world” was frozen by “philosophy,” meaning French philosophy with its claims to universal reason.
    Coupled to this cold philosophy, like a malignant twin, was the ruthless European trading system, which brought death and destruction to warm cultures on three continents. Herder was a typical “Orientalist,” as defined by modern anticolonial critics, in that he projected an exclusive, unchanging view onto the world outside Europe. Not for him the virtues of “hybridity” or “multiculturalism.” He saw most people in the tropical zones as “nature’s children,” who were still blessed with simple, childlike reverence for god-kings and despotic wise men. But he did not say these things to promote the white man’s duty to educate the benighted natives. On the contrary, he was violently opposed to imperialism or indeed any claim to universal wisdom. Compared with cold rational Europe, nature’s children were better off, purer, more authentic. It was an arrogant mistake to think all men should be free, since our supposed freedoms led only to inhumanity and sterile materialism.
    In truth, however, European ideas about politics were inevitably transmitted to the colonial subjects, along with science, religion, economics, and literature. The transmission did not always work perfectly. Many distortions crept in, but from Cairo to Tokyo Western ideas about capitalism and democracy transformed the way societies were run. The few non-Western nations to have avoided Western rule, such as Japan and, to some extent, China, still had to borrow European ideas to keep the West at bay. The question is: Which European ideas? Too often they tended to be variations of either brutal universalism or its most lethal antidotes, ethnic nationalism and religious purity.
    China is a good example of both. It was there, under Mao Zedong, that the war between City and Country was at its most murderous. Chinese imperial rule was justified by a cosmic order. China was in the center of the world, and the dragon throne occupied the spiritual and political center of the Chinese empire. The scientific challenge to this cosmic order, imported from the West, was a political challenge as well. And so, of course, were liberalism, individualism, and Christianity. The rejection of these Western influences, more often than not, was a defense of a