ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sajid Mohamed is a practising lawyer and the founder of a law firm in India, with extensive experience of law as an instrument embedded in wider institutional and social frameworks. This perspective, attentive to how legal principles operate in the real world and affect real people, informs the analytical approach of this book. He examines the racial framework of the world order through its intellectual origins, colonial application, legal codification and contemporary persistence.
He writes with the conviction that the view from a formerly colonised society can be more illuminating than the view from the centre. He imagines a world in which Immanuel Kant had not taken sides.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Chromatic World Order argues that race, far from being a relic of the colonial past, remains a foundational principle of the modern global order. It contends that the ideology of white superiority has shaped European imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and neoliberalism over the past five centuries, and continues to influence international politics, institutions and systems of knowledge despite post-Second World War claims of racial equality. Through a critical engagement with Western political thought and historical narratives, the book challenges conventional understandings of global history and examines how racial hierarchies have been embedded in ideas of civilisation, development and international relations.
Drawing on vivid historical episodes, from Columbus’s voyage aboard the Santa Maria and the transatlantic slave ship Brookes to the 2023 Adriana migrant tragedy, the book traces the enduring legacy of racial colonialism and its contemporary manifestations, including the War on Terror and conflicts in Gaza and Iran. It argues that race does more than facilitate exploitation: it dehumanises, sustains unequal global power structures and intersects with class and gender. Written in an accessible style and supported by extensive historical evidence, the book calls for a fundamental rethinking of modern history and anti-racist struggles. It presents a compelling case for confronting and dismantling racial hierarchies and broader systems of human domination.
A timely book that explores some of the most pressing debates surrounding race, colonialism, geopolitics, inequality and international relations, The Chromatic World Order: The Fiction That Rules Our World examines how racial hierarchies have shaped the modern world and continue to influence global politics and society.
EXCERPTS
The Consolidation (page 151 to 154)
During the period of European expansion, as large parts of the world were being reorganized through colonization, the intellectual developments associated with the Enlightenment were reshaping Europe’s philosophical and political foundations. These developments then had a lasting influence on global historical trajectories. In conjunction with imperial expansion, the ideas developed during the Enlightenment helped to articulate the intellectual justification for colonial domination. A particular tension between universalist claims and the selective and exclusionary applications is central to the present inquiry. Given the Enlightenment’s canonical status in Western intellectual history, it is necessary to examine its limits and contradictions, particularly in relation to race.
Through the Enlightenment lens, the European, implicitly White, man – and not woman – became the universal benchmark for reason, morality, and civilization. Those outside this category – the non-White, colonized – were cast, correspondingly, as irrational, immoral, and uncivilized. Kant declared that ‘[humanity] achieves its greatest perfection in the race of the whites’. Similarly, David Hume, one of the most influential philosophers of the period and a foundational figure in empiricism, dismissed non-European civilizations as inherently inferior, asserting that no non-White society had contributed anything significant to the arts or sciences. Such ideas helped to construct an intellectual architecture that rationalized the empire. The notion of a ‘civilizing mission’, later articulated as the ‘White Man’s Burden’, born out of this racialized epistemology, provided the moral justification for the subjugation that accompanied colonialism. The Enlightenment gave a theoretical scaffolding and moral facelift to the brutality of the empire, under which, the most egregious forms of imperial violence could be cast as acts of benevolence. This logic was prevalent even amongst supposed progressives, like John Stuart Mill, who could say that despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.5 Here, Enlightenment liberalism transforms into a tool of domination. Indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions, cosmologies, and governance structures were dismissed as unscientific or superstitious while only Western knowledge – validated through the Enlightenment’s rationality, empiricism, and formal logic – was deemed legitimate.
In all, the Enlightenment gave Europe and, later, the West an extraordinary superlative ability, an intellectual licence, and an authority to colonize, create hierarchies, oppress, and own and brutalize those deemed savages or coloured Others. It allowed them to destroy the Others’ memories and history and write it afresh; define afresh the Others’ cultural texts and contexts; frame for them what was good and evil; decide what was punishable and what was not; define fines for wrongs and rewards for good; draw and re-draw their geography; justify their decimation; civilize them; and create the framework of their epistemology, ontology, and standards to assess their metaphysics and to lead their lives in. The conceptual violence ran parallel to the material violence. In both realms, the Enlightenment provided tools for legitimating European superiority and the subordination of the non-European. Thus, a movement that claimed universality played a central role in constructing a deeply unequal world order of which race was the constitutive logic, not a peripheral concern.
James Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) wrote the history of the world’s most prosperous region without ever visiting or speaking any of its languages. The acceptance of that work as the legitimate history of that land is a testimony and example of that ability. Empowered by that ability, Thomas Babington Macaulay claimed that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the entirety of native literature from India and Arabia. Without possessing any knowledge of an Indian language or Arabic,6 he could claim that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.7
James Mill’s The History of British India (1817) contains a teleological framework starting from a ‘backward and barbaric’ Hindu period riddled with ‘caste divisions, superstition, and ritualism, static and incapable of progress’ ‘no other race of men are perhaps so little friendly, and beneficent to one another as the Hindus’, passing through the Muslim period ruled by ‘despotic, oppressive, and alien’ dynasties, and culminating in the benevolent British rule bringing about ‘Enlightenment, modernity and progress’. Under the force of the Enlightened colonial masters, India internalized this religious reductionism. Even after two centuries, the simplistic framework of the three epochs of Indian history created by the gora sahib dictates independent India’s social present and continues to fuel an irresolvable chasm based on those supposed epochs that are intractably fixed in the Indian psyche particularly those, who claim to have an Indian psyche. One notices that digging deeper into history’s imagined and not-so-relevant events to consolidate this framing of Indian history in religious epochs by the gora sahib has been a successful electoral doctrine of modern India. Despite the best efforts of native historians to distil the concocted accounts into ones based on the Enlightenment’s highlights of empiricism and scientific methodology – even though the proto ideas of such ideals are sufficiently available in their own history – India has been unable to overcome the ability, look for her own history, and take it to their masses. To add a satirical paradox of what the ability has produced, the self-assumed nationalist forces in India have subsumed their account of history under James Mill’s three-epoch framework and used it to play a game sufficiently enjoyed by the gora sahib’s regime. In fact, they dig deeper to concoct a stronger fictional history founded on the gora sahib’s accounts, conveniently forgetting that Mill’s principal employer8 was the British East India Company that those very Indians consider tyrannical. Such is the ability.
