If the early 20th-century racial theorists of white supremacy were still alive, they would be mortified that the “tides of colour” had truly “risen”. One might also expect the Left, if it weren’t for Sunak’s conservatism, to make much of this racial inversion. But scratch below the surface, and the true story here transcends reductive categories of race — if anything, it is a reflection of both premodern and globalised realities of class and caste. Consider Sunak, who once admitted that he did not have working-class friends as a young man, and who, like Varadkar, has a parent who is a physician, placing both of their proximate origins firmly in the professional upper-middle class. Yousaf’s father, meanwhile, was an accountant, perhaps more modest in origins than his peers to the south and east, but nevertheless still solidly middle-class.

Despite today’s focus on race, class and status have always formed the bulwark of India’s elite ideology. As David Cannadine observed in Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, this explains Queen Victoria’s repeated habit of adopting and fostering children of African and Asian royals, inculcating them with Christianity. Separated from her white subjects by a chasm of class and origin, this practice was aimed at forming a ruling elite informed by 19th-century Victorian sensibilities of race, but also transcending them, harkening back to an older ideology where the rulers were a fundamentally different species from the peasants and shopkeepers they ruled.

This class element in imperial life is clear even from the perspective of Indians; it was as much a British as an Indian ideology. Mohandas K. Gandhi’s initial activism in South Africa was motivated by his offence, as an upper-caste Indian, at being categorised with black Africans. Gandhi dressed like an Indian holy man later in life, a return to indigeneity, but in South Africa he initially exhibited the sartorial affect of an English-trained barrister. A vegetarian Hindu who had married a woman from his own caste at a young age, Gandhi was still in his early years one of Macaulay’s men: “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Two hundred years later, the rise of Sunak and Yousaf illustrates how such class dynamics still hold the British nation in thrall. Both are ethnic Punjabis, but of a variety very distinct from the dominant element in British life, the Mirpuris. The Mirpuris, who hail from Pakistani Kashmir and its environs, form about 70% of the Pakistani population in Britain. These rural villagers eventually went to work in the mills of the English north, and have created their own Pakistani but essentially British working-class culture. Sunak and Yousaf’s family are ethnically related to the Mirpuris, but are more conventional Punjabis from further south: Sunak’s paternal lineage is rooted in modern Pakistani Punjab, as were Yousaf’s ancestors. But more salient than their Punjabi ethnicity is that Sunak and Yousaf both have connections to Africa. The mother and father of Britain’s Prime Minister were born in British Tanganyika and Kenya, respectively. Yousaf’s mother, though ethnically Punjabi, was born and raised in British Kenya.

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Subcontinental people of East African provenance have been prominent in British life for decades: in 2011, more than 10% of those of Indian ethnicity in the UK were born in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania (this does not include those born of African Indians in Britain). And Sunak is hardly the only prominent African Indian in Conservative politics. Both the current and former home secretary, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, have African connections: Braverman’s father being Indian Kenyan and mother Mauritian, while Patel’s family are part of the Ugandan Indian diaspora. The Ugandan Indians, expelled in the Seventies from Idi Amin’s regime with £55 on their person, have re-established themselves as entrepreneurs and professionals in the UK, part of the reason that Indian Britons are a relatively affluent minority.

These Indians, then, are a global people for a global nation. A simple racial calculus sees in Sunak a brown-skinned Indian, but the vast majority of subcontinental people do not have connections to Africa or the influential slice of South Asians who catalysed trade and travel along the shores of the Indian Ocean. This elite diaspora was always made up of enterprising individuals from commercial castes; self-selected for the personalities and peoples who ventured across the kala pani (“black water”). Sunak’s devout Hinduism and orthodox vegetarianism reflect his indubitably Indian cultural background. But the fact that he married not only outside of his caste but his ethnicity, with his wife being a South Indian heiress of one of India’s largest fortunes, simply confirms his membership of the global elite. Sunak may be of a nation, but he is truly not of any nation. After all, he filed US tax returns while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Like Yousaf in Scotland, Varadkar in Ireland, and even Ramaswamy in the USA, Sunak is therefore hardly a representative son of the subcontinent. More than one billion South Asians live just as their ancestors have for thousands of years, tilling the land, speaking the tongues of their forefathers and venerating the landscapes of their ancestor gods and saints. But amid this population are an enterprising sliver whose skills, aptitudes and inclinations have injected them into the bloodstream of the quasi-post-national global world. These are children born to globalisation, cultures within the subcontinent who have operated inter-regionally and even internationally for centuries. Globalisation is part of their tradition, etched into their bones. Rishi Sunak was born in England, his father in Kenya, and his grandfather in Indian Punjab. But they were always of the world, their opportunities painted upon a canvas without a border.

Like 58-year-old Kamala Devi Harris, America’s Vice President, Ramaswamy and Haley are in the 1% of the US population that is Indian American. Despite their shared heritage, all three grew up in different Americas — though in each, Indians were rare, exotic and little understood. Harris, born at the end of 1964, was among the first members of Generation X, while Haley is solidly in the middle of that cohort. Ramaswamy, as a geriatric millennial, is firmly a child of the Eighties and Nineties.

For Harris’s generation, the dominant image of India in the American imagination centred around gurus such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose association with The Beatles brought them to public prominence. In its most benign manifestation, India meant mysticism and spirituality, though sometimes this would transmute into cult-like communities around charismatic and exploitative figures who drugged their followers and inspired anxious newspaper headlines.

Seven years later, during Haley’s childhood, India had become a byword for overpopulation and global environmental catastrophe. The Western view was summed up in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1969), in which he described a night in Delhi that “seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging… People, people, people, people”. By the late Eighties and Nineties, however, when Ramaswamy was growing up, this view of India and Indians had become less hostile: the most prominent Indian American was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons.

Largely as a result of their different childhoods, these three politicians responded to being outsiders, aliens despite being born in America, in disparate ways. Harris, the product of Sixties liberal idealism, has never denied her Tamil Brahmin mother’s identity; she was, after all, raised by an Indian woman after her parents’ divorce. But Harris’s attendance at the historically black Howard University and her Baptist religion points to the fact that she has chosen to align more closely with her African-American roots. Though she is both a black American and an Asian American, it is widely accepted that Joe Biden selected her because of her identity as the former.

Meanwhile, Haley, who grew up in the recently desegregated South, has talked about her lack of a place in a biracial world; as a young girl, she was disqualified from a beauty pageant because she was neither black nor white. Raised a Sikh by Punjabi Indian parents, Haley has never publicly distanced herself from her Indian heritage, but her conversion to Methodist Christianity, her decision to assume her husband’s Anglicised surname, and her somewhat racially ambiguous appearance have all furthered the perception that she is a model of smooth assimilation.

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Ramaswamy, by contrast, cuts a different profile. The self-styled “skinny guy with a funny last name” is entirely candid that his Hindu religion is unfamiliar to most Americans. Married to another Indian-American professional, Ramaswamy is an exemplar of an emerging group that is often termed the “new Jews” in the media. They are American, but distinctive, notable and stand out.

Look around today and Indian Americans hold prominent roles in all walks of public life. In tech, the CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are both Indian American. In politics, they are particularly dominant in the ruling party. Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna are prominent progressive voices in the Democratic Party, and among five Indian Americans in the House of Representatives, while former engineer Saikat Chakrabarti served as chief of staff for Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. Towards the party’s centre, Neera Tanden, director of Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, has been a consigliere of Democratic leaders since advising Bill Clinton in 1992. And in more technical domains, the Surgeon General of the United States is Vivek Murthy, while the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is Arati Prabhakar.

This boomlet in prominent Indian Americans is a function of two complementary dynamics. First, and perhaps most obviously, America is truly a land of opportunity, a nation where immigrants can ascend to positions of power and accrue great wealth through dint of hard work and application of human capital. Yes, racism may exist, but it is no bar to advancement.

Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, it seems that South Asians, at least in politics, have talents and cultural dispositions that make that flourishing easier. Like other highly skilled Asian immigrants, Indian Americans are wealthier and more likely to be married and well-educated than the average native-born citizen — and yet, there does not seem to be a similar rise to cultural prominence in politics among East Asians as South Asians. A common explanation for this is that, as English-speaking and highly verbal elites from a society where disputation and competition are taken for granted, South Asian personalities and cultural orientations are better suited to the rough and tumble world of America’s ruling class, where self-promotion is no sin and assertion is taken as a given.

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Vivek Ramaswamy is perhaps the end result of this dynamic. With an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, he perfectly captures the balance between technical and verbal fluency that is the marker of many South Asian elites. His brash, assertive and pugilistic debating style would not be out of place at an Indian American social gathering. And, crucially, he has accrued a vast fortune, a symbol of an opportunism that is entirely all-American, where getting rich is seen as glorious and a sign that one has “made it”. As a result, unlike earlier generations of Indian Americans, who aimed to blend in, the millennial Ramaswamy brings his distinctive South Asian personality to the fore, synthesising it with American assertiveness and claiming Donald Trump’s Maga mantle without embarrassment.

But should we be surprised? This is, after all, how it has always been. From Irish politicians to Jewish intellectuals, immigrants have transformed this country and reshaped it in their own image, all the while maintaining the cultural DNA that goes back to the intrepid British settlers who set out for a frontier for both the sake of God and gold. Ramaswamy and the current crop of Indian American public figures are simply what is old made new.

Their significance is highlighted in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America and Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America. Fischer shows how the factions and coalitions in colonial America played out in the early Republic, sowing the seeds of the the Civil War, while continuing to haunt American politics to this day. Phillips, meanwhile, flags up the differences between the English settlers of North America and the English of the metropole.

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Fischer’s early America is framed around four dominant folkways. There are the New England Yankees in the northeast; gentry planters in the lowland South along with their retainers; inhabitants of the upland South, originally from Ulster and the Scottish-English border; and the diverse business-oriented groups in the Mid-Atlantic, from Dutch burghers to Quakers. For both authors, the Yankees and the Southern planters have direct genealogical connections to the Roundhead Whigs and the Royalist Tories. The Borderers and the more mercantile folk of the Mid-Atlantic play a less prominent role in Phillip’s narrative, but  eventually amalgamated into the broader Northern and Southern cultural and political alliances.

These groupings would eventually struggle against each other in the American Civil War. When House member Preston Brooks nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate in 1856 — a foreshadowing of the conflict to come — it reflected the anxious, daggers-drawn national mood. But it was also the culmination of centuries of tumultuous history between those disparate strands in British culture which had put down deep roots into North America.

Brooks was a scion of the South Carolina upcountry and exemplar of a nascent fused Southern identity, a vociferous defender of slavery as a right and proper institution. In contrast, Sumner was a New England Yankee through and through. Brooks’s focus on family honour (he believed Sumner had insulted his cousin) reflects both the values of the English gentry and of the Scots-Irish Borderers. Sumner espoused the anti-slavery cause at a time when compromise between South and North was seen as prudent politics. This reflected a Yankee’s commitment to humanitarian justice, descended from the utopianism that gripped the Roundhead forebears of his New England ancestors.

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Where the ultimate basis of this American factionalism (Puritan New England Yankee against Southern planter Cavalier) can be found in England (Roundhead East Anglia against the Royalist glens of Devonshire), The Cousin’s Wars observes that the migration to North America of dissenters simultaneously enabled the creation of Britain as a cohesive 19th-century power. After the false dawn of the English Republic in the 1650s, Puritan-minded Protestantism only flourished as the dominant force in New England. The existence of North America as a release valve for radical Protestantism stabilised the middle path that the Anglican Church occupied. Meanwhile, the Irish potato famine and the mass migration to the US of Roman Catholic peasants meant that the Protestant proportion of the United Kingdom was far higher in 1900 than in 1800. There are victors in The Cousin’s Wars — just different ones in different places.

The Englishmen, Scots or Welshmen who migrated to America were not “normal” Britons. Perhaps they sought more freedom of worship outside the established Church or more economic opportunities outside of the class system, or perhaps they were fleeing debt and the hand of the law. The “cowboy” is a cliché, but these cowboys came from somewhere, many even genealogically descended from herders on the Scottish border that engaged in as much theft as productive labor. The inverse of the American cowboy were the English who were left behind: the aristocrats, peasants and gentry who came together to create a British Empire with a much more united cultural identity in the 19th century than it had in the 17th century.

Albion’s Seed and The Cousins’ Wars have as much to do with the present and future as the past. Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 saw the emergence of a belt of “Red” Republican counties dominated by Borderers, attracted to the aggressive pugilistic style of their candidate. Though Barack Obama was perceived by America and the world as the first black president, he was raised by a mother whose paternal grandfather was named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, a nod to her ancestral Yankee lineage. Obama presented a moralistic, even utopian, vision for America in keeping with this ancestry.

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In contrast, Trump, the German-Scottish son of New York’s outer boroughs, reflects a persona that is in tension with the dominant Yankee tradition of the North. It is not well remembered, but during the Civil War, New York City was a hotbed of pro-Southern sentiment, and the mayor, Fernando Wood, even proposed the city’s secession from the Union. To the west, much of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were pro-Confederate during the conflict because the local population were “butternuts”, descended from settlers who had moved north in the first half of the 19th century, like Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln. The Great Emancipator was, though, a direct descendent of Samuel Lincoln of Norfolk, East Anglia, who was to settle in Massachusetts in 1638.

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Though the old ethnicities are in decline today, their shadow still haunts the present as the US fractures along cultural and regional lines again. The progressive cultural Left has rekindled the flame of enthusiastic abolitionism, attempting to attain cosmic justice in their utopia. “MAGA America”, in contrast, channels the irascible and pessimistic vision of the Borders, and their tribune is a fighter focused more on winning than policy. In the 19th century, the switch of the populace of the lower North, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to an alliance with New England Yankees signalled the rise of a new Republican ascendancy that would persist down to FDR’s day. Now we are witnessing Americans of Latin American heritage frustrated with the moralism and cultural politics of the progressive Left, eyeing perhaps a realignment with the Borderers with whom they might share a cultural ethos, if not history.

Once you read Fischer and Phillips’s narrative, the past becomes illuminated. You can see shadows of the future already being cast.

The reality is that the true Vikings were far stranger to modern sensibilities than we wish to acknowledge, a fact reflected in our aversion to the highly realistic but alien world on display in The Northman — which enjoyed less-than-stellar box office returns. By contrast, Vikings did brilliantly, despite taking many dramatic liberties with both history and anthropology in service of today’s culture war. It’s clear that nobody is interested in watching a visual dissertation on Scandinavian Iron Age culture.

The pagan raiders in Vikings reflect the passions and priorities of the modern world. This perhaps explains their attraction: Vikings can be reshaped to our sensibilities in a way the more concrete Christian European civilisation that they ravaged could never be. We know the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the heart of the troubadours, while the God of the medieval world still reigns supreme even today. But the Vikings are comparative ciphers, mostly perceived through the mute witness of archaeology and the propaganda put down by their Christian enemies.

The sequel to Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla, highlights and extends the series’ malleable vision of reality. It is firmly grounded in rich historical detail and actual figures from the late Viking Age, but it rearranges and transmogrifies them to a large extent. The series revolves around the interlocking relationships and entanglements between three characters, Lief Erickson, Harald Hardrada and Freydís Eiríksdóttir. Yet the execution is not of true Viking history, but a fictional drama set in a Viking-themed universe of our imagination. Erick the Red’s children were born 45 years before Hardrada, and we know Lief died when the future Norwegian king was five years old. Vikings: Valhalla glosses over these details, as Lief becomes Harald’s younger protégé and Freydís Harald’s enthusiastic but troubled lover.

But these are not the only liberties taken in the show. Freydís becomes a shield-maiden, one of the ubiquitous female warriors from the original series. Though there are descriptions of female warriors in the sagas, the extant historical and archaeological evidence does not reflect a surfeit of women bearing arms in the Viking world. Fighting was generally the affair of men in the Viking Age, and raiding, in particular, was the province of adolescents who had to establish their bonafides and make their way in the world.

The presence of shield-maidens in the two Vikings series is due to 21st-century Western penchant for “butt-kicking babes” in film, often inexplicably depicted by svelte model-actresses like Frida Gustavsson, who plays Freydís. Gustavsson as an archer is a striking image, but standing 185cm high and weighing 61kg, her fighting prowess against large powerful men is totally implausible. At least Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth in the genuine fantasy series Game of Thrones, seems a creditable warrior, weighing 25kg more than Gustavsson.

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If the sexually liberated shield-maidens channel 21st-century liberal feminism, then the character of Jarl Estrid Haakon, who rules the fictional multicultural trading city of Kattegat, reflects 21st-century Western racial progressivism. Estrid Haakon is played by Caroline Henderson, an actress of mixed Swedish and black American heritage. Setting aside the fact that there is no evidence of women rulers during the Viking Age, the controversial aspect of Jarl Haakon’s character is her racial identity, especially considering that elements of her biography seem drawn from the life of Haakon Sigurdsson, a 10th-century ruler of Norway. The stereotypical Viking is blonde and fair, the epitome of the Nordic ideal. Jarl Haakon in Vikings: Valhalla is none of those things, while her mercantile city reflects her own racial cosmopolitanism.

Though Kattegat is fictional, the idea that there might be a Viking trading entrepôt with racial and ethnic diversity is not entirely constructed out of thin air. Nearly 1,000 years ago a woman who was likely Indian was buried in a cemetery in Zealand, the island on which modern Copenhagen is situated. Additionally, vast caches of Middle Eastern and Central Asian coins are found across Baltic ports, the consequence of a rich Eurasian trading network extending as far west as northern Scotland with ties to the Islamic Caliphates to the south.

But the past is a different country. Today when we think of global trade we couple it with mass migration and multiculturalism, as the three are necessarily connected. This was not the case 1,000 years ago when Vikings roamed the world as raiders and traders. Though L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the most famous Norse site in North America, it seems likely that these western Vikings ranged into the Arctic, with artefacts found on Baffin Island. And in 913 AD, 500 Rus ships ventured down the Volga and into the Caspian, raiding the Persian city of Gorgan, on the border of modern Iran and Uzbekistan. There is a distance of nearly 10,000km between Newfoundland and Iran, 25% of the earth’s circumference.

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And yet the Norse from the Atlantic to the Caspian were united by a common culture, a set of folkways, language and religion that likely had its roots as far back as the Scandinavian Bronze Age 4,000 years ago. In The Northman there is a scene where a woman is sacrificed on a burning ship with a horse to honour the passing of a nobleman, in line with the Arab Muslim Ibn Fadlan’s account of a ship burial in 10th-century Tartarstan, in the Volga basin. But aspects of these death rites are far older, with the killing of the horse in particular a cultural remembrance of a primal Indo-European ritual. In another scene, The Northman depicts an Indo-European warband induction, with howling young men wearing wolf and bear skins around a fire, reminiscent of the Vedic Ekāstakā mid-winter ceremony, when 16-year-old boys were initiated as roaming “dog warriors”.

The deep roots of Viking culture should not be surprising: genetics make it clear most of the ancestry that we today associate with Scandinavians arrived in the wake of the original Indo-European expansions out of modern Ukraine 5,000 years ago. After 500 AD, DNA evidence points to subtle differences between the peoples who we would later term Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. (The term Viking points to an action rather than an ethnicity, as tribes like Danes, Geats and Swedes would go on Viking voyages to distant shores to hawk their wares and plunder booty.) And yet despite the ethnic and genetic distinctions that arose, the world of The Northman is unified in being an organic outgrowth of the Nordic Bronze Age, itself one of the innumerable children of the Indo-European expansions.

This Viking world was not the antithesis of Latin Christendom, as depicted in Vikings: Valhalla, where the sexually liberated pagan religion of the Norsemen (stand-ins for tolerant modern pluralistic Westerners) is set against the intolerance and brutality of the new Christian faith. Rather, it was a parallel universe of primal Indo-European religion and culture untempered by the sophistication of Mediterranean Europe. It was as if Hindu India was stripped away of the philosophical sophistication of the Puranas, the religious revolution of Buddhism and the introspection of the Bhagavad Gita.

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In this the Norse were unique in western and northern Europe. Even the Irish and the Germans were influenced by Romanitas at a remove: the former adopting the Roman religion without threat of conquest, the latter turning the famous Roman limes into a porous and profitable border that stimulated cultural synthesis. Before Hermann led his Germans against Augustus Caesar’s armies, he was Arminius, who learned Latin, received Roman citizenship and served in the Roman army.

The Vikings did not have any truck which such hybridity. They swarmed out of their dim peninsula covered in tattoos, worshipping gods that would not have been out of place in the Iliad or the Vedas, and honoured them with sacrifices of horses. Whereas the men and women in Vikings distill sensibilities of the New Age tempered with helpful dollops of choreographed mass violence, the true Vikings, as depicted in The Northman, were creatures of an old age, a prehistoric world that somehow persisted down to the edge of history, witnessed with horror and incomprehension by the believers in the God of Abraham.

And even if in our age God is dead, the old instincts are strong, and we cannot bear to confront the strangeness of the pagan past head on. Today, the Vikings remain an enigma: we see them only in shadows and glimmers, turned into didactic instruments in the service of culture wars they would not have comprehended.

It all makes for a rather disconcerting narrative. The only problem is that it’s almost certainly wrong. Yes, the Cisco lawsuit is newsworthy, but individual lawsuits do not establish generalised truths.

If you look at the fingerprints on many of these stories, much of the concern over America’s alleged caste system stems from a California-based non-profit called Equality Labs. Its Executive Director, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, is a Berkeley-educated daughter of a physician, who began her Dalit (the lowest caste) activism as a university student. Her 2018 report, and its horrifying findings, remain extensively quoted: for example, 25% of Dalit respondents said they had faced verbal or physical assault based on their caste; 50% of Dalits live in fear of their caste being outed; 67% reported being treated unfairly at their workplace. (The report also talks of “Caste apartheid”.)

The total sample size was 1,500, which is not a small number, and far superior to anecdotes. But the issue with the report has more to do with representativeness. The authors state that it was a “web-based, self-reported, self-administered questionnaire”, and that it was distributed “through direct contacts, community listservs, community organisations, immigrant organisations, South Asian religious, cultural, and linguistic networks, and social media”. The survey was written by “South Asian academics, anti-Caste activists, community members, and policy advocates”, and was endorsed by the Dalit American Coalition, the International Campaign for Dalit Humans Rights, and the Dalit American Women’s Association, among others. It also used “snowball sampling”, where respondents referred other respondents, resulting in a strong skew in demographics and views.

In short, this survey was likely completed by individuals already conscious of and concerned with prejudice and discrimination against Dalits in America. This does not invalidate the report, but it does suggest that its results may not be a good representation of Indian American experiences and views.

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Several years after the Equality Labs survey, the Carnegie Foundation and YouGov collaborated on a report using a representative sample and came to different conclusions. While the Equality Labs sample was 24% Dalit, the Carnegie report found that 1% of Hindu Indian Americans who identified themselves with a caste were Dalit. This is in line with other private surveys I have seen, as well as the unrepresentative caste demographics of Indian Americans when compared to the subcontinent. While 22% of Hindus in India are “upper caste”, 80% of Hindus in America who identify with a caste — roughly half of all Indian Americans — are upper caste. Moreover, a quick perusal of a The New York Times wedding pages for a common Indian surname like Patel suggests that while 95% of Indian Hindu marriages are intra-caste, closer to 30% of US-born Indian marriages are intra-caste, and the true value is probably lower. In America, the melting pot is still operational.

The issue of endogamy is critical because the genetic data indicates that Indian castes, and in particular, subcastes or jati, have been strongly endogamous for 1,500 years in the subcontinent. While in the US racial differences between blacks and whites are organised around physical appearance, despite some average differences in looks between Indian castes even within a region, they are not striking enough to organise the communities.

Rather, castes operate genealogically as lineage and kinship networks that regulate marriage, uphold collective honour and distribute and control power and resources. There are Indian political parties whose vote banks are specific castes, and though there are some rarefied urban professional milieus where caste is marginal to their experience, it pervades the occupational, social and personal lives of the rural majority. Upper-caste groups tend to control disproportionate wealth and power, while lower-caste groups must make do with affirmative programs that reserve government jobs for their communities.

These inequalities in the subcontinent explain the demographics of Indian Americans, who are the most well-educated and wealthiest ethnic group in the US. Overwhelmingly still an immigrant community, Indian Americans have been able to migrate primarily due to their educational and professional qualifications, which means they will be drawn from the upper-caste elites of the subcontinent. Though fewer than 5% of Indians are Brahmin, private surveys indicate that 25% of Indian Americans are Brahmin. Dalits are 15% of India’s population, but they are no more than 1% of Indian Americans.

There are three different dynamics to consider when evaluating all these facts. First, it is possible and perhaps even likely that the small number of Dalits in the US experience some level of prejudice and discrimination. Second, Indian Americans belong to an overwhelmingly privileged caste in the subcontinent, but are still a racial minority in the US. They are 1.4% of the American population, of whom only 50% are Hindu. Dalits are 0.014% of the American population (1 out of 7,200).

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Third, whereas in India it is possible that one’s friendship network could be limited to one’s subcaste, the Carnegie report finds that only 43% of immigrant Indian Americans even have mostly or all Indian friends, with the figure being 25% for those born in the US. 28% of US-born Indian Americans have almost no Indian friends, while 17% of foreign-born Indian Americans are in this category. Of those Indian Americans who are Hindu, 50% have almost no friends from the same caste as themselves. The fact that they can make this assessment indicates that caste is salient to them (most are immigrants), but their revealed preferences in friendship networks indicate that they do not self-segregate by caste.

America, then, is not India, and, contrary to some paranoid conspiracy theories, upper-caste Hindus do not call the shots in the US (no, Kamala Harris, whose mother is a Tamil Brahmin, is not very influential). Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are both upper-caste South Indians, but the workforce of Google and Microsoft are 50% non-Hispanic white. Though there are exceptions in Silicon Valley and at a few family-owned businesses (those glamorous motels!), Indian Americans’ workplaces are mostly dominated by non-Hispanic whites or are multiracial.

Since more than half of Indian Americans arrived after the turn of the millennium, they have brought many aspects of their culture to the US, some of which likely do include unpleasant attitudes around caste and jati that were nurtured on the subcontinent. But the social context of the US is entirely different to India; the reality is that the Indian communal dynamics do not and cannot apply.

Does this mean that Dalit Americans experience no discrimination or prejudice? Of course not. But there is a huge difference between India and the US in the pervasiveness of caste-based discrimination. America undoubtedly has many social ills relating to class and ethnicity, but this isn’t because India is importing its own problems to the US. The vast majority of Indians come to the US for a simple reason: to get rich, not to maintain caste hierarchy.

Now, in Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Pinker synthesises both aspects of his oeuvre. On the one hand, Rationality briskly introduces you to essential concepts like Bayesian reasoning and technical terms like modus ponens. But the technical, learned aspects of the book are accompanied by a polemical drive. Rationality matters — every day, everywhere. Especially at present, in a world that many think has gone mad, whipsawed irrationally by social media mobs and online conspiracy theories. Pinker argues that methods of rationality represent not an esoteric corner of cognitive science or philosophy, but an essential set of tools for individual human flourishing, maintaining our sanity and perpetuating civilisation as a collective whole. To reason and think clearly is to be modern, and even requisite in order to be moral.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the rational actor and “homo economicus” seemed to have failed us. Nature abhors a vacuum, so there was a vogue for the field of behavioural economics, a discipline that operates in the gray zone of economic frictions and psychological irrationalities powered by faulty intuition. A crop of authors harvested these ideas: Dan Ariely, Rom Brafman, Ori Brafman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler among them. More broadly, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s heuristics and biases research program, to which all these authors owe a debt, entered the mainstream — Kahneman also contributed a bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. Barack Obama’s administration tried to ‘nudge’ America through policy. David Cameron’s government, and the British civil service, embraced nudging too.

Rationality is part of a tacit backlash against these authors, their books, and the atmosphere they generated in public policy circles in the 2010s.

Today, Dan Ariely faces accusations of fraud at worst and scientific malpractice at best. More broadly, behavioural economics has been hit by the replication crisis. Humans respond to incentives, and for scientists, sexy and vivid results are rewarded, while negative findings can stall a career. The scientific culture of the aughts was defined at its peril by “publish or perish,” as well as sloppy experimental practices, a mechanically unthinking application of statistics, and cognitive biases in the very fields dedicated to understanding how rationality fails us. Kahneman himself began having doubts in 2012, justifiably, about some of the results reported in his 2011 book.

Pinker’s good news in Rationality is that with deliberate effort, humans can think clearly and move beyond their biases. Where much of cognitive psychology focuses on illusions and mental misfires, Rationality instead argues that our faculties are up to the task, and that this is all a natural consequence of our evolution. Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on the idea that humans are only equipped with “stone-age minds” in a technologically advanced present. Pinker seems a bit chagrined at this angle being so overplayed, and in Rationality he attempts to redress the balance, making the case that humans are naturally equipped to reason and that reason is not a dark art or the province of philosophers and mathematicians alone.

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If you are a consumer of anthropology and ethnography or even have simply watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, you are aware of the preternatural skills of the San hunters of the Kalahari desert. Pinker shows this is not due to inborn traits, but the ability of the San to take in the information around them, the time of the year, the season, the species of antelope, and make inferences in alignment with their overall goals. The San, like all humans, engage in a rough and ready form of syllogistic reasoning. They start with axioms, premises informed by their experiences, and deduce logical consequences from their assumptions. Things don’t just “happen” in the Kalahari, there is a rhythm and rhyme the hunters exploit, a pattern and sense of the world that allows them to survive and flourish. Steenbok antelope are hunted during the rainy season while eland are stalked during the dry season. You might think this is due to custom and tradition, but the San are aware that steenbok has stiff joints during the rainy season while eland hooves are ill-equipped to navigate sandy soil. They hunt animals in the season that loads the dice for a success hunt. The alternative, simply, is a higher risk of starvation. The San have goals, and they naturally use the tools of rationality to achieve them.

But what if the San did not rationally know the reasons for their actions?

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One of the essential points in Rationality is that reasoning and understanding the world are collective enterprises. We know that socially-generated knowledge and rationality can be embedded enduringly through rules and taboos. Yes, those executing a cultural script may not be aware of the ultimate reasons, but a deeper investigation by anthropologists can reveal that mindless traditions actually serve functional purposes.

Joe Henrich in 2015’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter reports how traditional societies across the world have a system of preparing cassava that prevents them from getting cyanide poisoning. Those following the methods do not know what cyanide is, nor do they even know that consuming unprepared cassava will lead to death, but their culture comes preloaded with the fruits of adaptive learning that are highly rational.

The deepest insight then is that our ability to reason through complex problems depends on our willingness to stand on the shoulders of giants. Though we can all reason, Pinker does not shy away from conventional pitfalls of human analysis such as the Monty Hall problem, the gambler’s fallacy and the base rate fallacy. He recounts that Paul Erdos, author of 1,500 mathematical papers, was as mystified by the Monty Hall problem as most people who encounter it. He refused to believe he was wrong, relying on his native intuitions, despite his prodigious ability to work through formal mathematics.

The point is that the most brilliant individual mind can fail at reasoning unless it approaches the enterprise with humility and the willingness to update beliefs and understanding. The scholarship reviewed in Rationality, from Aristotle to machine learning, is not just the product of singularly brilliant minds, but the collective efforts of whole scientific traditions. The replication crisis shows that groups of scholars can blunder into traps and dead ends en masse. But advances in fields like statistical decision theory would be impossible without the collective efforts of disparate research groups across numerous domains. Pinker’s treatment of deep learning neural networks also makes it clear that some of these tools for rationality are approaching the dark edge of Arthur C. Clarke’s formulation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And, like magic, they often fail without the guiding hand of human reasoning faculties.

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Rationality, Pinker says, was partly in response to students at Harvard finding the world puzzling, especially with much of psychology focused on how human rationality fails. If Pinker makes the case for thinking clearly, with the most powerful tools we have, whether it be 21st-century computational methods in machine learning or sharper formal analysis that draws upon mid-20th-century economic game theory, he still remains fully aware that he lives in an empirical world of irrationality.

Pinker was not one of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. But he is, and long has been, a fellow traveller of the group (he is also personally close to Dawkins). In the early 2000’s he took equal-opportunity aim at the Right’s attachment to traditional religion in The Blank Slate while taking the Left to task for its denial of human nature. Twenty years later, he made an extended call for a revival of the cult of rationality in Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s enthusiasm for applying rationality and empiricism to the world reflects the intellectual culture of the mid-2000’s when Dawkins was riding high with his critiques of evangelical Christianity and public intellectuals were gathering to celebrate the Enlightenment in conferences like Beyond Belief. The familiar flame of this hopeful past burns bright throughout Rationality.

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But ours today is a world of cancel culture and QAnon. Ideological polarisation that has turned the pandemic into the object of a culture war in the United States. Pinker does address the reality that the world today is not the world he might have imagined it would be a generation ago, as irrationalities and superstitions spread like ideological pandemics on social media.

The vision of the aughts was one of a reason-ruled future, but Rationality was written in the wake of Donald Trump, whose rise and popularity as an emotive demagogue triggered a reactionary flare-up of identity politics on the cultural Left. This is the world where David Hume observed that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. To a great extent, the project of making Bayesian reasoning, game theory and machine learning accessible and palatable to the public seems born of the disappointments of the past generation. If you are a deep reader of Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex, Rationality may not offer you much new food for thought. But if you are terrified by the insanities of the present, and wish to replenish your intellectual armoury in the fight for progress and reason in the 21st century, then Rationality is what you will want to bring to the battlefield.

Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.

It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”

Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.

Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.

Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.

But the world has turned sideways in a single generation. By 2020, the US had a $3-trillion-dollar budget deficit, and our share of the global economy had decreased to 25%, in large part due to the rise of China. Nearly 7,000 Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than double the number killed on 9/11. In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, and on 6 January this year the US Capitol was stormed by an enraged mob. To the broader world, the American colossus was looking a lot more like an American basket case.

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The results of American hubris have been mixed at best for Iraq and Afghanistan. A conservative estimate is that more than 200,000 Iraqis and 250,000 Afghans have died since 2001 as a result of the invasions. Iraq’s democracy is shaky, having undergone an existential fright with the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s. Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule, just as it was in 2001. America came to liberate, but in the wake of imperial conquest, the natives suffered through corruption, factionalism and civil war. Due to our all-volunteer army and reflexive recourse to deficit spending, most Americans did not experience the wars in a visceral or indirect manner. All the while, viscera were being splattered across the streets of Baghdad and Kabul as young men blew themselves up, inspired by a religious fanaticism in turn aggravated by American occupation.

Notably, while the consequences for the Iraqis and Afghans have been tragic, our social, intellectual and political elite have suffered no professional repercussions for their incompetence. On 2 November, 2001 Friedman asked us to “give war a chance”. Twenty years later, he continues to opine for The New York Times, pulling down a salary of $350,000 per year at a time when journalism as a profession is collapsing.

Goldberg, whose New Yorker piece burnished the humanitarian need for the overthrow of Hussein, was appointed editor of The Atlantic in 2016. Packer wrote a book, Assassin’s Gate, where he chronicles his disillusionment with the war. This was sufficient to maintain a sinecure at The New Yorker until 2018, when he moved to The Atlantic to work under his former colleague Goldberg. Frum has had a more chequered career, but that had little to do with his position on the War on Terror, and everything to do with his scepticism of the Republican stance on healthcare reform in 2010, illustrating the true red-lines in American politics.

Frum is now more often speaking to a centre-left rather than a centre-right audience (though still identifying as a conservative), but he is still comfortably ensconced in the American establishment. Similarly, Kristol has converted into a “Never Trump” “Biden Republican,” and is a member of good standing of the “Resistance”. His publication, The Bulwark, receives funding from centre-left foundations. Even George W. Bush, who was once a hate-figure for the Left, is now being rehabilitated. The man who unleashed two disastrous wars and whose decisions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands is now celebrated for his paintings of immigrants.

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Bush’s one-time viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also taken up painting and become a ski instructor in his leisured semi-retirement. Meanwhile, his hawkish lieutenant Dick Cheney is now well regarded for his support of gay marriage, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz, is garnering respect and accolades from Democrats for her anti-Trump views following the 2020 election. Condeleezza Rice, also an anti-Trump Republican, returned to academia, but has also become a pop culture phenomenon, and has now been tapped to make guest appearances on The View.

The soft-glow Cheney rehabilitation is emblematic of the primacy of domestic political concerns in today’s American cultural landscape. Just a decade ago, he was being pilloried for his frank defence of torture. Today his anti-Trump stance gets more weight when determining whether he’s one of the “good ones” or “bad ones”. Despite how much foreign policy dominated American politics in the early 2000’s, the rest of the world has faded from view over the past decade. The 2016 and 2020 Democrat presidential candidates were both supporters of the Iraq invasion and hailed from the party’s more hawkish wing, Hillary Clinton being a major proponent of American intervention in Libya.

Under Trump, many conventional narratives surrounding national security and foreign policy flipped. Liberals and the intelligentsia came to love the CIA and FBI, and cast a sceptical eye on foreign powers like Russia. Kristol, the architect of the neoconservative intellectual project in the 2000s, has now become an icon of the anti-Trump faction, even lauded by mainstream liberals. Establishment intellectuals even now see Bush as a bulwark of American democracy, a contrast to Trump’s strongman tendencies.

It turns out that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Despite a decade of international adventurism in the 2000s that extended at lower wattage into the 2010s, the US remained a nation apart, focused on its own concerns. The pundits and politicians whose blunders in the early 2000s had grave consequences for nations far away suffered few ill consequences for their disastrous prognostications, short-sighted decisions and uninformed arguments.

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Bush is now allowed to be the pro-immigrant painter ex-president, not the executive who authorised extraordinary rendition and whose decisions pulverised two nations for a generation. Kristol’s legacy may not be as organiser of Bush’s imperial braintrust, but as the rebel against the Trump regime. Friedman remains one of the best-paid journalists in the country, while Goldberg is now editor of one of the nation’s most venerable magazines. Frum and Cheney have not changed their fundamental politics, but are now embraced by the liberal establishment thanks to their strident anti-Trump position.

Never mind that Cheney’s objection to Trumpism is rooted in the latter’s deviation from the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s. The period in the middle of that decade when foreign policy loomed large as a polarising issue in partisan politics was the exception and not the rule, and the collateral damage abroad of American adventurism is out of sight and out of mind. The current President supported the Iraq War, while Kristol is now a Biden-defender against even the gentlest conservative criticisms.

Twenty years down the line, the American elite is somewhat chagrined to be reminded of the arrogance and ignorance they showed in the wake of 9/11. But they are the same elite that they always were, because their sinecures are ultimately yoked to the whims of domestic politics, not the horrors that American enthusiasms unleashed abroad. Once obtained, a position in the pundit and political elite is rarely subject to the vicissitudes of meritocracy. America is ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error in 2021, just as it was in 2001 on the eve of the 9/11 terror attack. In that sense, it was a day that changed nothing.

Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is therefore likely to be many readers’ first introduction to a new field of inquiry that synthesises the age-old insights of behaviour genetics and the new technology of genomics. Harden is a scientist who ventures where few academics dare to tread. Indeed, the book was written because so many people remain ignorant of behaviour genetics, and suspicious of any attempt to introduce biologically based variables into sociological matters.

By this measure, The Genetic Lottery is a success. Harden concisely reduces a century of research into a digestible and comprehensible form. Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.

To a large extent, I expected this, as I know the author personally. We both live in Austin, where she is a professor at the University of Texas. I became acquainted with Harden in 2016 following a massive social media conflagration triggered by her sensible contention that liberals needed to acknowledge the insights of behaviour genetics, and that the field was not necessarily racist.

A committed band of online “social justice warriors” have continued to hound her; a population geneticist told me several years ago that another scientist at a seminar dismissed Harden as “Charles Murray in a skirt”. This was somewhat ironic given that she once wrote a piece titled “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ”. Harden’s disagreements with conservatives also elicit outrage from the online Right, but that is of little impact. As an academic, the only serious reputational risk comes from the baying of her own ideological tribe.

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It’s unfortunate, then, that though Harden provides a potted history of eugenics, much of her historical interpretation is tendentious, and seems geared to reassuring the intended audience that they are on the right side of history. She observes, for instance, that the statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson “argued that progressive-era social reforms, like the expansion of education, were useless”. What the reader may fail to glean from this is that Pearson was a committed socialist and freethinker, who was also engaged with feminism and suffrage.

Where the narrative shines is when Harden explores fields that have long been taboo. For example, the notion that genetics can cause patterns in social phenomena is ignored by whole fields of scholarship, but it’s no coincidence that adopted individuals are much more likely to engage in crime as adults if their biological parents were convicted of offences.

Harden further illustrates this with her own research on abstinence from sex. The State of Texas promotes abstinence policies because it believes there is a strong correlation between early sexual activity and negative life outcomes such as crime. To test this assumption, Harden’s team tracked down identical twins, who share both genes and environment, and first had sex at different stages in life. They found that there was no difference in life outcomes.

The Genetic Lottery comes alive whenever Harden writes about her own research. At one point, she reports that “executive function” — your cognitive behaviour, ranging from memory to self-control — is nearly 100% heritable in children, meaning that all the variation in the population can be attributed to variation in genes. The correlation in executive function between identical twins is 1.0, while between full siblings it is 0.5. Since twins share 100% of their genes and full-siblings just 50%, this is exactly the pattern you would expect in a fully heritable characteristic, whether executive function or eye-colour. This research has no straightforward immediate political implications, so the exposition is freed from a need to gauge the impact on the audience.

But statistical correlations remain unconvincing to many. A specific criticism of twin-studies centres on the likelihood that parents treat twins more similarly than full-siblings. That’s partly why the late population geneticist Richard Lewontin thought behaviour genetics was a useless field with deep methodological problems. His views are not unusual for geneticists who work in molecular or evolutionary (rather than behavioural) fields today.

It is at this point that Harden illustrates why her book could only be written in 2021. Whereas past geneticists had to assume that full-siblings were exactly 50% related, today genomics allows a precise quantification of the level of relatedness. I know, for instance, that I share 52.49% of my DNA with one brother, 50.26% with another, and 4.57% with my first-cousin once-removed (the expectation in the last case is 6.25%).

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In 2006, geneticists applied the new technology to the study of heritability, generating relatedness scores from genomics for thousands of sibling pairs. They discovered that very heritable traits did indeed show more similarity in those siblings who were genomically more related. Heritability was more than a statistical construct, it was a biophysical reality.

One of the most striking figures in The Genetic Lottery shows that “polygenic risk scores”, a statistic used to predict your position along a distribution of values, such as from shortest to tallest, are already as powerful as parental income at predicting the rate of college completion. Those students in the bottom 25% of parental income have a 15% chance of completing college. Those in the bottom 25% of the polygenic risk score also have a 15% chance of doing so.

This task in explaining the state of behaviour genetics today is helped by bodies such as the UK Biobank, which offers researchers 500,000 individuals with 820,000 genetic markers per individual. It has resulted in papers which are generated in an almost turnkey fashion. Consider “Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain”, which concludes that “Alleles associated with educational attainment (EA) showed the most clustering, with EA-decreasing alleles clustering in lower SES areas such as coal mining areas”. In plainer English, smarter people migrated south, leaving those remaining in the north of England on average less intelligent due to their genes. Needless to say, this was a controversial result.

Harden spends a great deal of time exploring population structure because of its relevance to possible variation in human psychology and behaviour. She reports on survey data that liberals in particular are suspicious of — results which indicate variation in intelligence due to genes — and she argues that this is due to its connection with the history of racism and classism in the United States. Harden asserts that intelligence is heritable within a group, but does not necessarily imply that it explains differences between groups in outcome.

The targeted readership for The Genetic Lottery will almost certainly dismiss the case for behaviour genetics if that requires them to connect it to potentially racist implications. Yet Harden’s book is actually rooted in social justice, and her belief that “people’s moral commitments to racial equality are on shaky ground if they depend on exact genetic sameness across human populations”. Nevertheless, much of the narrative gets bogged down in race and particularities of American politics.

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Harden is a white liberal who is deeply committed to the cause of racial justice in the historical context of black and white Americans. Presumably her audience is as well. But her ultimate goal is to talk more about John Rawls than Ibram X. Kendi. For The Genetic Lottery is a theory of justice informed by unearned genetic advantages and undeserved genetic disadvantages.

Harden personalises this by contrasting herself with her brother. Though siblings are 50% similar, she explains, they are also 50% different. Raised in the same household, she asks who was dealt the better hand — she did better at standardised tests but also has ADHD — between the two siblings. Do these differences speak at all to the moral value of the siblings? Of course not. We know this intuitively. It is self-evident.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls introduced the “difference principle”. This argues that inequality in outcomes is permissible if those inequalities benefit the least-advantaged members of society. Similarly, towards the end of her book, Harden considers three scenarios conditioned on Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”, where you don’t know what endowments you’ll randomly be allotted. First, a society where the “biologically superior are entitled to greater freedoms and resources”. Second, a society “structured as if everyone is exactly the same in their biology”. Finally, a society “structured to work to the advantage of people who were least advantaged in the genetic lottery”.

Science does not tell you which choice to select. Harden points out that in the US, both conservatives and liberals often behave as if we live in the second scenario. But what if we consider the reality that outcomes are to some extent caused by varying genes? Though these facts do not necessarily change one’s values, they do change the prescription for how one can achieve the just outcomes we might have in mind.

Of course, biology is not everything, but The Genetic Lottery reminds us that it is a factor we ignore at our own peril when we craft social policy. In 2021, we now have the technology to plumb the depths of our human nature. The results may not always be to our liking, but the facts are ultimately unchangeable.

Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India puts the kibosh on these assertions. In it, Roderick Matthews argues that there was no fixed plan, either in the inception of British India or the hasty exit; the vaunted connection between the British and Indian economies was marginal at best; and though the rise of racial supremacism was a feature of the cultural landscape of Victorian England, the colour hierarchy in India had roots prior to the 19th century, and was caught up in a roiling vortex of broader currents in the Western world.

Matthews, who has written extensively on British India, contends that while the jewel in the crown was a glittering signal to the world of British power, it did not make that power. And yet he presents little coherent explanation for these centuries when the decisions made by the British gave us the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan. Peace, Poverty and Betrayal would have us think that these were incidental, but even without a plan, the decisions made by India’s colonial overlords have shaped the lives of 25% of the world’s population.

In the realm of British-Indian historiography, the centuries between 1600 and 1947 are divided into three neat subunits. The East India Company’s (EIC) era of assimilationist age of “White Mughals”, to use William Dalrymple’s phrase, is followed by an evangelical Christian one, with the British Raj closing out a three-act tragedy. To Matthews, the overarching themes applied to justify these three eras can be forced and misleading, overly reductive. I take his point.

He kicks off the narrative conventionally enough in 1600, when the East Indian Company (EIC) was founded, and ends it in 1947, when the British Raj transferred power to the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. In Peace, Poverty and Betrayal, the EIC never transcends its 17th-century origins, when it was a tool of the British monarchy battling the Portuguese and Dutch on the high seas, skulking around the margins of the Mughal Empire to obtain minor trading concessions. Despite the later pomp and circumstance, Matthews argues persuasively that the EIC remained an institutionally weak organisation from its beginning to its very end.

The nature of the EIC for most of its history can be illustrated by the Child’s War of the 1680’s, when it first confronted the Great Mughal directly. The conflict did not go well for the EIC, and eventually a surrender was negotiated where the company’s envoys prostrated themselves before Emperor Aurangzeb and paid a substantial indemnity. It is easy to forget that for generations, British merchants and soldiers were almost beneath the notice of the rulers of India.

How, then, did the British become masters of the subcontinent by 1800? Well, Robert Clive conquered Bengal for the EIC at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. But again, this was not part of any plan. Clive looted what would today be billions of pounds, and was put on trial by Parliament for his actions. Clive’s protégé, Warren Hastings, was impeached by Parliament for extortion, embezzlement and committing judicial murder against a personal enemy. The fall of India to the EIC was a conspiracy of individual greed rather than a coordination of imperial power.

Clive and Hastings’s ignoble careers illustrate the institutional capture of the EIC, where they burdened the company with quasi-imperial responsibilities and risks, while personally hoarding the gains. No surprise that in 1772 the British taxpayers bailed out the EIC, extending a loan to stave off bankruptcy.

But British hegemony in India was born of more than the private interests of rapacious aspiring nabobs. The total chaos of the mid-18th-century Mughal collapse was such that India fell into their laps. In the war of all against all that defined India in the 18th century, Clive and Hastings were only exceptional in that they were British. By the second half of the century, India was divided between warring Mughal vassals bickering over who could manage to hold the emperor hostage.

Across the vast centre of the subcontinent, an array of warlords allied to create the Maratha Confederacy, which persisted as a power across the whole of the 18th century. Though lionised by modern Hindus for defeating Muslim invaders, at the time the Maratha playbook of raids geared toward looting and destruction left only fear and loathing in its wake. The Maratha invasion of Bengal in the 1750s resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Yet while men such as Clive and Hastings clearly operated purely on the basis of selfishness, a widely agreed fact, their leadership of the EIC arguably brought relative peace to the Indian subcontinent. Matthews notes that during the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the cities of Bengal stayed loyal to the EIC and the British, as did most of the native princes. Both factions preferred the peace of British India to the potential chaos — something akin to China under the warlords — that might have been unleashed by a rebel victory.

Nevertheless, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal chronicles the gradual disillusionment of India’s forward-looking urban elite with British rule, contrasted with the complacent satisfaction of the innumerable maharajas. By the time of the Indian Rebellion, a modernising native professional and capitalist class had emerged. When EIC governor-general William Bentinck banned sati, the ritualised burning of widows, in 1839, Indian objections were minimal. In fact, Ram Mohan Roy, a prominent Bengali cultural reformer and wealthy financier, had campaigned for banning the practice.

This cultural liberalisation within India in the 19th and 20th centuries was not just a tone-deaf top-down imposition from the Anglo-Indian elites, but a process that occurred in concert with native professionals. Much of the urban elite of India was educated in the British system, realising Thomas Babington Macaulay’s vision of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first leaders of India and Pakistan, both trained as lawyers in London.

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The leadership of the Raj did remain the exclusive preserve of British aristocrats— though the EIC officers routinely mixed with and assimilated into the conservative Indian ruling class, while some Indian women became the ancestors of prominent British notables. Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool and Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827, likely had an Indian great-great-grandmother. In the 1820s, EIC major-general David Ochterlony took his 13 Indian wives on a promenade atop 13 elephants around the Red Fort of Delhi.

Ochterlony, however, was the last of his kind, as officials and officers started to reflect 19th-century British cultural triumphalism and a more sober Christian outlook. The sharp turn away from synthesis and assimilation was even felt in the homes of company officials; the standard curries of the early 19th century gave way to vegetarian Indian cooks attempting to master the art of the roast.

But Matthews rejects standard histories which chronicle a transition from an EIC infinitely accommodating of local custom and tradition to one dominated by evangelical zeal and utilitarian calculation. The EIC still understood that active attempts to convert Hindus and Muslims would only result in hostility from the population they ruled. The business of the East India Company was business. Excessive evangelistic enthusiasm was tamped down. In 1847, those who served in the company were forbidden to engage in missionary work in any official capacity.

The toxicity of mixing religion and rule in India was illustrated by the infamous trigger for the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Rumours swirled that the Enfield rifle cartridges distributed among the sepoys were greased with cow or pig fat. Soldiers needed to prise out the cartridges with their lips or teeth before use, a gross violation of the religious taboos of both Muslims and Hindus. Later investigations proved that the grease was indeed from pigs and cows, but the reason was self-interested cost-cutting by obtuse contractors. In other words, a rebellion was sparked by capitalist avarice, not insensitivity of zealous Christians bent on trampling the beliefs of Hindus and Muslims. The British blundered into conquest and rule, and they blundered into a rebellion. Venality was far more common than malevolence.

The subsequent betrayal of India’s political and cultural elites after 1857 was due to short-sightedness. The British crown developed a much closer relationship to the conservative Indian princes, who were very positively disposed toward undemocratic rule on the subcontinent. The EIC conquest brought peace in the early 19th century, but the transfer to the British Raj in 1858 and the crowning of Queen Victoria as the Empress of India in 1877 consolidated and ossified an imperial system which remained fixed in the past, shutting out the rising Indian middle class from political power.

In addition to its political conservatism, the British Raj did little to alleviate poverty, inspired by the same economic theories which led to the calamitous Irish potato famine. India was subject to 24 major famines between 1850 and 1899 and millions died of starvation. Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argues that these tragedies were caused by a lack of accountability in an undemocratic regime, rather than the vicissitudes of the monsoons.

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And so by the early 20th century, the Indian National Congress, precursor of modern India’s Congress Party, was agitating for full independence and national self-determination, while Mahatma Gandhi led campaigns of civil disobedience against the British colonial administration. The children and grandchildren of the prosperous burghers who had remained loyal in 1857 were no longer satisfied with just peace and order; they wished to govern themselves.

In the decades up to 1947, the Anglo-Indian ruling elite understood the looming future in the abstract, but refused to acknowledge the necessity of concrete steps. The tragedy of a hasty partition, and the death of millions, can be attributed to these attitudes and policies. Britain unwound its Indian responsibilities in haste, rather than in an ordered fashion. Matthews’s heterodoxy in treating the 18th and 19th centuries swerves back to expected orthodoxies in the 20th. Anyone familiar with the late stages of the British Raj will not be surprised by the depictions of the regime’s bumbling and missteps, but this unplanned improvisation was foundational to British rule in India, rather than a new development.

The reality of permanent chaos in decision-making leads us to the conclusion that the great prosecutions of British misrule in India are off-base. India as a part of the British Empire was a matter of prestige and pride for the ruling gentry, but its economic connections to the metropole have been greatly exaggerated. India’s poverty in the 20th century had more to do with the fact that its economic basis, subsistence agriculture, did not change much from the 18th century.

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In contrast, Britain was at the forefront of  industrialisation before the conquest of India. Nationalist Indian observers such as Shashi Tharoor in his polemical Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India argue for a zero-sum world of wealth redistribution, but European nations without extensive colonies also underwent rapid development in the 19th century. The EIC itself was marginally profitable, and made many of its largest windfalls in the China trade. Taxation and goods remitted to Britain were always minimal.

The true impact of the British relationship with India was not economic, but cultural and social. It is an undeniable fact that the political and legal systems which constitute the machinery of the modern Indian state to this day are inherited from the British. The economic “great divergence” between the West and the rest of the world was a universal feature of the 19th and 20th centuries, not something special and peculiar to the relationship between India and Britain.

There was no need for transfer of wealth from India to Britain, because Western economies were all shifting toward higher value manufactured goods that ushered in a middle-class society well before the apex of the Raj. Nineteenth-century English historian John Robert Seeley observed that the British “seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” But despite the lack of forethought, India inherited a salubrious set of institutions and norms from the Raj in terms of maintaining and keeping a liberal democratic republic. The modern Republic of India is a testament to this fact.

This is the nearly 400-page case Marie Favereau lays out in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World — and it’s a convincing one. A professor of history at Paris Nanterre University, Favereau’s previous published work focused on the wide-ranging geopolitical connections the Mongols made, and subtle cultural revolution that transformed them from an alien, conquering elite to deeply-rooted imperial administrators who shaped the societies they ruled. Though Favereau occasionally fixates excessively on the internecine dramas of Genghis Khan’s family, on the whole The Horde is both brisk and dense with facts and analysis about a period and people that remain unknown to most Westerners.

The Golden Horde emerged during the Pax Mongolica, when the various divisions of the Mongol Empire — Khanates —were ruled separately by the descendants of Genghis Khan, but united by treaties based on Mongol tradition. Marco Polo traversed the length of Eurasia, from Europe to China, and back, when the Mongol Empire was at its peak in the late 13th century. But the Golden Horde was the most geographically expansive of the Khanates. It stretched from modern Bulgaria and Romania in the west, to the vast Eurasian steppe north of the Black Sea, and yet further eastward still to the western edge of Mongolia. Beyond it lay the Great Yuan, who ruled most of the landmass of China and Mongolia, while the modern Middle East and southern Central Asia were under the two smaller Khanates.

The high noon of the Golden Horde’s power came between 1250 and 1400 AD, when it had unquestioned hegemony over all of the Russian principalities, northern Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus (Moscow remained a nominal vassal of the Horde until 1480 AD). This was an empire at enormous scale, with a vast reach — like Augustan Rome, or Spain during el Siglo de Oro, or Victorian Britain. For centuries, the Golden Horde stood athwart the trade routes of Eurasia. It was colossal.

But before there was the Horde, there were the four sons of Genghis Khan: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei and Tolui. It was from Jochi that the Horde would come. The eldest, he had a checkered relationship with his father, and with good reason. His mother, Börte, had been kidnapped by an enemy of Genghis Khan eight months before his birth. Although a shadow was cast over Jochi’s paternity, Genghis claimed him anyway. (Favereau straightforwardly accepts that Jochi was likely not Genghis Khan’s biological son.) After a great conference of Mongol leaders in Central Asia was held to determine the succession, and passed over Jochi, he marched his forces west, pitching his tents on the far fringe of the Mongol Empire north of the Caspian Sea.

Jochi’s self-exile set in motion a long train of consequences, and the real narrative of The Horde begins with Jochi’s sons, Orda, Batu, and Berke. Their lives illustrate three principles that reoccur again and again in The Horde. First, there is the principle of consensus and coexistence. Batu ruled the western half of the Golden Horde, while Orda ruled the east. These were the Blue and White Hordes, due to the association of these colours with the west and the east, and for over a century they respected each other’s territory. Second, the ascension of the younger Batu over Orda as Khan reversed expectation and reflected pragmatism.

Rather than slavishly following rules and customs, the Golden Horde embraced flexibility in its culture and political organisation. Finally, after the death of Batu, the youngest brother, Berke, became the Khan. Berke was the son of a Muslim woman, and he eventually converted to Islam, anticipating the later wholesale conversion of the Horde’s Mongol elite. Berke’s religious choice was also reflected in his geopolitical decision-making: he had no compunction about aligning with fellow Muslims against other Mongols. But Berke was also a pragmatist, not a fanatic, and he valued Mongol legal precedent and accepted the importance of religious toleration within his empire. The Golden Horde eventually became Muslim, but the empire it dominated was never Islamic.

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One of the major themes of The Horde is that the wealth of the ruling class of the Golden Horde was uniquely fuelled by trade, and this drove much of its diplomacy and war-making. Unlike China, Europe or the Near East, the territories of the Horde were sparsely populated. The Khans of the Golden Horde could not tax vast numbers of peasants to sustain their wealth. Rather, their economic activity was geared toward exploiting natural resources, as with furs shipped to Europe via the Hanseatic League, and customs collected on overland trade passing between Europe and China, as well as exports of slaves south to Egypt via Constantinople.

Some actions of the Khans that seem ideological on their surface turn out to have straightforward material explanations. Berke’s conversion to Islam cemented an alliance with the Mamluk regime in Egypt against the Mongol Il-Khanate. The Golden Horde supplied the Egyptians with slave soldiers to battle their Il-Khanate cousins, resulting in the first major defeat of the Mongols, which stopped their military advance. But those slave soldiers were also a major economic commodity that powered the financial health of the Golden Horde. The conflict with the Il-Khanate was not just ideological or geopolitical, but driven by the reality that the Golden Horde’s trade routes were constantly threatened by enemies — in this case, other Khanates. Berke and the Khans who succeeded him were engaging in literal trade wars.

Similarly, the amity between the two major divisions with the Horde, the Blue and the White, was not just a matter of sentimental familial bonds between the descendents of the brothers Batu and Orda. It reflected business savvy. The Golden Horde invested heavily in a Silk Road route that began at ports on the Black Sea, like the Genoese colony of Kaffa. The route continued eastward, grazing the southern fringe of Siberia, and moving onward all the way to the rich lands of the Great Yuan (Mongol-ruled China).

Cooperation between the Blue and White Hordes was necessary, not simply preferred, for this Silk Road to function. Additionally, propagandists in the service of the Horde whispered in the ears of merchant houses in Europe that the southern route that snaked through the rugged lands of the Il-Khanate was more dangerous and expensive. The ruling class of the Golden Horde wanted the world to know they were “open for business,” and offered a favourable tax regime for merchants willing to traverse their peaceful and well-ordered territories.

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But trade-fuelled prosperity is subject to the vicissitudes of globalisation. The collapse of the Il-Khanate in the 1330s resulted in the northern route achieving even greater prominence, as the southern Silk Road fractured between numerous hostile states. This monopoly was short-lived. In 1368, the great engine of west-east trade was turned off; the Mongols were expelled from China, and the ascendent Ming Dynasty shut the door to the rest of the world. If agriculturally-based empires were vulnerable to weakening in times of famine, merchant prince fortunes soared at the pleasure and caprice of foreign potentates.

Additionally, the 14th century saw the lucrative global trade in furs across the lands of the Horde facilitate the spread of the Black Death to Europe and the Near East from the eastern steppe. As we keenly feel today, one downside of globalisation is that a much larger human population can be a potential host for a pandemic. More than 30% of Europe and the Near East died from the bubonic plague, and the impact was significant on the Horde itself, as some of its leaders succumbed to the disease. The paradoxes and discontents that emerge from globalisation are long-standing.

Favereau’s narrative makes much of the reality that the Golden Horde was religiously pluralistic, a phenomenon immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. This was a legacy of Genghis Khan himself, who exempted clerics from taxation and left all houses of worship intact. He believed that the sky god, Tengri, had given him the world. Genghis and his descendants looked favourably upon all religions as the expression of the same divine principle.  Most earlier Khans were not Muslim, but devotees of Tengri. Nevertheless, they patronised Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity to cultivate relationships with subject people, most of whom were Christian or Muslim, and encourage the migration of other Mongols, many of whom were Buddhist. However, 1313, the Khan of the Golden Horde declared Islam the religion of the Mongols in the Blue and White Hordes.

Even after the Khan of the Golden Horde demanded that Mongols in his domain convert to Islam, he continued to encourage Christians to practise their religion (in contrast, Buddhist Mongols were expelled and their temples torn down). The Golden Horde exempted Russian Orthodox Church lands from taxation and encouraged European Roman Catholics in the trading cities to build their own houses of worship. Even when the Mongol ruling class became thoroughly Islamicised, they accepted religious diversity for both principle and profit.

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Though the global commercial orientation and religious tolerance of the Mongols are nothing to sneeze at, perhaps the biggest direct impact of the Golden Horde was upon the nascent identities of their subjects. Almost as an aside, Favereau notes that the Mongols liberated Wallachia from its nomadic overlords, laying down the foundation for modern Romania in the 13th century. But this is nothing, compared to how the Golden Horde played inadvertent midwife to the rise of the modern Russian state. Traditional accounts date the origin of Russia to the Christianisation of Kievan Rus’ under Vladimir the Great at the end of the 10th century. Though 1,000 years later this culture and society may seem exotic to us, Kievan Rus’ was oriented to the west and Europe, which explains how Anne of Kiev became queen of France in 1051. The deep separation between Russian culture and that of Western Europe only emerged during the period under the Golden Horde, as the ruling elite shifted its focus from Kiev in the west to Moscow in the east.

By the time the Mongols arrived, the Rus were ruled by a patchwork of more than a dozen principalities. Their main southern trading partner, the Byzantine Empire, was in sharp decline, and the Northern Crusades by German knights were impinging upon the prosperity of the Baltic-facing trading cities. The Mongol invasion was even more traumatic. In 1246, an envoy of the Pope traveled through Kiev and observed that “it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses.” The only major city to avoid being sacked by the Horde was Novgorod in the far north, which survived through preemptive surrender.

Modern Russia was built upon the ashes of cities the Mongols burned. The imperial Russian state of Ivan of the Terrible that rose to unprecedented power in the 16th century was not shaped by Kievan Rus. It did not face the European kingdoms to the west, but the Golden Horde to the east. Instead the rulers of Moscow were positioned between the core territories of the Rus to the west and the lands of their steppe rulers to the southeast. A perfect location to be cultural and geopolitical go-betweens.

Just as Batu had been promoted over Orda, so the Khans of the Golden Horde strategically promoted Moscow’s junior princely lineage, the Danilovich, above the others. The House of Moscow did not have the pedigree, but they got the job done, collecting revenue and suppressing revolts. In the process, Moscow accrued enormous power and influence, eventually overthrowing the “Tatar Yoke” to impose its own domination on what became imperial Russia. While 11th-century France obtained a queen from Kiev, 18th-century French asserted that if you “scratch a Russian… you find a Tartar.”

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Favereau’s contention that you cannot understand the Russian imperial order without considering the formative impact of the Golden Horde is just one aspect of her argument. A broader thesis explicit in The Horde is that the empires that arose in the last 500 years mimicked and adapted many of the features of the steppe polities they dismembered. Russian historiography speaks of the period of subordination to the Golden Horde, but the centuries of disgrace were erased only with the conquest of the lands of their erstwhile oppressors: Siberia and Central Asia.

The Russian Empire also assimilated the Horde’s ruling class. Much of the Mongol military elite became Christian and part of the Russian nobility, while Jochid princesses married into the Russian ruling houses. A tradition of autocratic rule arose that was different from the more decentralised model that had characterised Kievan Rus. Ivan the Terrible took the title Tsar only in 1547. Before that he had simply been a prince, a reflection of the Kievan legacy. His assertion that he was a Tsar reflected an imperial ambition more in keeping with the traditions of the steppe than the nation-states emerging in Western Europe.

Though there are occasions in Favereau’s narrative where fixation on the political and social intrigues of the Jochid lineage overshadow the broader lessons, The Horde is most deeply understood as a cultural and social history. Like many histories which centre the steppe, it attempts to roll back the erasure of nomadic empires from the genealogy of modern states and societies. This process is clearest in the case of Russia, but applies pervasively across Eurasian history.

Historians of the steppe observe that the kingdoms of Europe and the emirates of the Near East may have built vast stone cities which withstand the test of time, but the religious tolerance and the global mercantile orientation of the Mongols are much more in keeping with the values of modern cultures. Like the Horde, modern developed societies are not fundamentally agricultural.

Also like the Horde, modern developed societies tolerate a wide variety of religions, often with the unspoken understanding that this will be socially useful. And, like the Horde, modern nation-states tend to exhibit a centralising and expansive tendency, with an explicit hierarchy of administrators and decision-makers. The Horde argues that multicultural global empires have much more relevant lessons for modern nation-states than the agrarian societies which the Mongols ruled. Without recognising it, we all still travel on a path the Mongols carved out for us centuries ago.

The last of the post-partition generations are passing on, to be replaced by an indigenous leadership class more parochial and rooted in the subcontinent. The modern Indian culture war is a reflection of the decline of a once-secure, outward-looking cosmopolitan Western elite in the face of a rising Hindu nationalist movement, one that is relatively insular and inward looking. India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.

In 1835 Thomas Macaulay had argued in his famous essay Minute on Education that “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” 

Macaulay was arguing that British Government should spend money on educating those it found under its rule. So it came to be as Britain ruled over the most heavily-populated and most valued part of its empire for another century.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister who led India to independence from Britain, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Inner Temple, and was closely connected to the Fabian Society. Nehru’s rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, studied law at the Lincoln’s Inn, and was strongly influenced by English utilitarianism and French positivism. Nehru was an agnostic who requested a secular burial (this was denied him), while Jinnah was a gin-drinker whose religious attachments were more a matter of identity than belief.

Nehru and Jinnah led India and Pakistan to independence as the brown-skinned Westerners Thomas Macaulay had envisioned a century earlier. South Asian in appearance and pedigree, the leaders of these two nations nevertheless personified a fundamental truth about the Western orientation of the new Asian states. Pakistan was aligned with the United States, while socialist India was nominally non-aligned but clearly tilted toward the Soviet bloc. Though the populace of these nations were mostly illiterate, poor and detached from the cosmopolitan currents of the world, their elites were integrated among the English-speaking peoples. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, attended Somerville College, Oxford. His great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, whose mother is Italian, studied at Harvard and Trinity College.

India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in contrast, sports a third class degree from the University of Delhi. While Rahul Gandhi boasts of his Brahmin ancestry, Modi is from a lower caste. Though he had an arranged child marriage, Modi never consumated it, and devoted his energies to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). A Right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation, the RSS was Modi’s true university, where he made his deepest early connections. He was Chief Minister of Gujarat during the 2002 communal riots when over 1,000 died. Despite a period of international censure and ostracism, Modi made a political comeback on his populist appeal to the Indian voter, winning the election in 2014, and again in 2019.

How was it that Modi could withstand being shunned by Western governments, including the United States? The answer is that Modi, and Hindu nationalists, do not rely on the West in the way their predecessors did. There are 1.4 billion Indians, of whom 80% are Hindu. Though over 100 million Indians speak English, 90% do not. The overwhelming majority obtain arranged marriages and marry within their jati, or endogamous community. The Oxbridge-educated milieu of Nehru, and the gin-drinking inclinations of Jinnah were in the subcontinent, but not truly of it. The English-speaking intelligentsia of India, which produces novelists such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, is the face of elite India most prominent to the rest of the world, but this is not the only India. And it is no longer the dominant India.

At the time of Indian independence, less than 20% of the population was literate; only four years earlier, millions had died in a famine. Like many recently independent countries, it had the external simulacra of being a Westphalian nation-state, but while the post-colonial leadership took their seats at the United Nations, and traveled abroad, their populace at home was nothing like the active citizenry of Western republics, or even the mobilised proletariat of the Eastern bloc.

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The citizens of India in 1947 were focused on survival, and were grateful that Nehru and his colleagues in the Congress Party had shepherded the country to independence. For generations Indians voted for the Congress Party because of this old loyalty, not because they agreed with its Fabian socialism or international connections. But those generations are now passing away, and the India of 2021 is not the India of 1947. The people no longer want to be led by elites who are quite so different from them.

Today 700 million Indians are on the internet, talking, arguing and debating. Though it is still a poor nation, there are now pockets of development, and a prosperous indigenous middle class has rooted itself.

But contrary to Macaulay’s expectations these are not simply brown-skinned Westerners. They are often Hindus of a very traditionalist bent, untouched by Nehru’s theosophical inclinations and cosmopolitan experiences. Just as Salafism and Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity and development, so Hindu nationalism is less an atavism than a new movement that emerges from a synthesis of traditional Indian religion with the modern world and its demands. As the old village life recedes and collapses, so the Hinduism habituated to that mode of production also recedes. In its place has emerged something more muscular, universal and monochrome.

While Hinduism is a religion, Hindutva is an identity. Though the origins of Hindutva are diverse, its foremost early expositer and formulater, Vinayak Sarvakar, was an atheist. So while the vast majority of Hindutva adherents are religious Hindus, being a religious Hindu is not a necessary precondition.

Rather, Hindutva may best be thought of as an personal identity with India and Indian culture, and a mass movement attempting to unite the diverse strands of native Indian identity into one. Like many 21st century ideologies, including Islamic and Protestant fundamentalism, Hindutva’s origins date back to the rise of European colonial hegemony in the 19th century.

While Nehru and Jinnah were inspired in their anti-colonial politics by the very traditions of liberty and self-determination pregnant within Western nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Chinese and Japanese nationalism, and Hindutva, all fuse deep-rooted indigenous identities with the modern yearning toward self-determination. Hindutva cannot be understood except in the context of its reaction to the West, and to Islam, but it asserts its deep continuity with the native traditions of the subcontinent.

It is in its attitude toward Islam that contemporary Hindu nationalists are most striking in their dissent from the orthodoxies of the post-colonial Indian secular elites. Though Nehru and his successors all averred a civilisational Hindu identity, they also asserted that in contradiction to Pakistan their project was not confessional, but religiously pluralistic. They argued that Indian nationalism by necessity and choice was a multi-religious project, and that Pakistan’s establishment was predicated on a misunderstanding of the nature of the relationship between Muslims and Hindus, which had been defined by a certain level of amity before the British. Nehruvian socialists and India’s secular English-speaking elite aimed to establish in India a society and culture which rebuked Pakistan’s descent into religious sectarianism.

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This project was fundamentally post-colonial, attempting to paper over divisions which had ripened during the British Raj, ultimately fracturing the subcontinent into two states. The early Hindu nationalists had a different vision, one where India’s Hindu identity became central to its self-conception, in the same manner that Pakistan’s Islamic identity was etched into its founding DNA. Rather than Hindu-Muslim unity fractured by the British, the historiography favored by Hindu nationalists argues for two colonialisms, first by Muslims, then by the British. Proponents of Hindutva see in India a wounded civilisation which must be healed, revived, and allowed to take its place vigorously in the congress of nations.

Whatever legitimacy Hindu nationalists had at the founding of India was obliterated by the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, an activist in the RSS. It took them generations to rehabilitate themselves. This let independent India’s 20th century political and cultural elite have a free hand in shaping Western perceptions. Though the vast majority of Indians were conservative Hindus, Hindu nationalism was long a stillborn political movement hamstrung by its connection to the killing of the beloved Gandhi.

The election and popularity of Modi, and the reorientation of much of Indian popular culture toward Hindutva, means that the 20th century cultural monopoly of the secular Left is now firmly in the rearview mirror. The new reality can be illustrated by the complex dance of Priyanka Chopra, an internationally-renowned Bollywood actress married to a white American pop singer, who nonetheless has good relations with Hindutva cultural elites. Chopra has attempted to depict herself as a progressive, supporting Black Lives Matter. Whatever her personal beliefs, Chopra is clearly attempting to navigate the reality that to be acceptable in the Indian market she cannot be seen as oppositional to the dominant political and cultural ethos, while in the American context she cannot be seen to be reactionary

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Yet more broadly the global Left is not positively inclined toward Modi and his Hindutva government, despite the reality that it has not enacted the neoliberal reform they oppose. The Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy, who is fundamentally a global Leftist activist, is deeply opposed to Hindu nationalism. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the former American adult film actress Mia Khalifa tweeting in support of farmers in Punjab only makes sense in light of the fact that they are protesting in opposition to the Modi government. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists have been courting allies against their Leftist antagonists, which sometimes results in strange connections to Western white nationalists. Whatever its economics, Hindutva’s plainly anti-Islamic stance falls afoul of the de facto global Left popular front, and wins strange admirers in Europe.

As we proceed in the 21st century India and the world will confront two simultaneous dynamics: modernisation of the nation-state and the rise of indigenous non-Western cultural and political movements, and further international global connections and coalitions. Instead of a homogeneous world dominated by Western “Davos Man,” what we will see is a world with difficult to define texture and protean affinities which might seem ideologically nonsensical.

The rise of Hindu nationalism and its political dominance in India seems here to stay. This will result in a native cultural ascendancy, and will lead to a negative response from the global Left, which has a substantial presence in the English-speaking middle and upper-class of the subcontinent. None of this speaks to the substance of what Hindu nationalism is. It simply speaks to the natural reaction of those with power who no longer have it.

Instead of the great mass of the population being Westernised by the brown-skinned Englishmen, the great mass have thrown up their own leadership class, which has marginalised the Macaulay men. And the responding rage of the secular class has been heard round the world.

Due to the gradual nature of transformation, the pagan lore of Ireland was recorded by monks who saw their work as a way to preserve and continue the legacy of their own native culture. J. R. R. Tolkien famously created the world of the Lord of the Rings so that the Anglo-Saxons could have their own mythos. The Irish have no need of such creative endeavours, since the tales of Cú Chulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill have wrapped within them the pathos of Túrin Turambar and Achilles. The Lebor Gabála Érenn, “Book of Invasions,” more than matches The Silmarillion.

These are enduring myths that have been preserved in Irish culture — but what if I told you that the legend and myth are rooted in reality? That the Irish oral tales preserved by monks in the 8th century AD are echoes of events from thousands of years in the past? Far afield from folklore and oral history, the new science of ancient DNA is putting concrete flesh and bones upon the veiled prehistory in which Irish myth is rooted.

The story goes back to the last Ice Age when Ireland was mostly covered in ice and, like Britain, uninhabited. As the ice sheets retreated 10,000 years ago, the island began to be recolonised by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers arriving from the continent, venturing into an empty landscape. These people had migrated out of southern Europe, following the fauna and flora north as the continent warmed up, and were related to people then found in Britain, France and Spain.

They looked strikingly different from today’s Europeans. Genetic analysis indicates that their skin was dark, as was their hair — but their eyes were likely blue. The genetic difference between these people and later Europeans is similar to that between modern Europeans and Chinese. This world of hunter-gatherers persisted for thousands of years, as small bands clung to the western edge of Europe, practising a lifestyle with roots in the deepest Palaeolithic, eating a protein-rich diet of horses, bison, aurochs and red deer.

All this ended with the arrival of farming. A generation ago there were roiling debates among archaeologists as to whether agriculture came to northern Europe through cultural diffusion or migration, a debate similar to that which had raged about whether the Anglo-Saxons had conquered Britain in large numbers. Ancient DNA has now definitively answered this question, and we know that the first farmers in Europe descended from Anatolian migrants who swept in from the Near East. They spread across the continent rapidly around five millennia before Christ, mixing only minimally with the native hunter-gatherers, who were thin on the ground and could offer little resistance; although hunter-gatherer peoples had healthier diets and probably lived longer, farming societies could feed vastly more people and so overwhelmed their neighbours.

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These newcomers arrived in Ireland around 4500 BC, many thousands of years after they had established themselves in southern Europe. They brought with them their grains, sheep and cattle, but many of the elements of Irish agricultural life were already in place and had been for over 1,500 years, conditioned by the local ecology and climatic regime. Though the new people mixed with the native hunter-gatherers, their own language and culture came to dominate, while ancient DNA indicates that the hunter-gatherers were very small in number. There were simply many more of the newcomers.

What few Mesolithic hunter-gatherers there were retreated and were absorbed in the advancing human wave of farmers. For many generations the two groups would probably have been easy to distinguish: the newcomers were light-skinned and dark-eyed, while the hunter-gatherers were dark-skinned and light-eyed. Ancient DNA suggests dark-skinned people persisted long after the arrival of farmers in pockets and corners of the island, in more remote and mountainous regions of the country. Who knows if some of the Irish legends of different people and races did not emerge from these contacts?

Curiously, the closest modern people genetically to the Neolithic farmers of Ireland are the Sardinians. But this is not surprising considering that most of the ancestry of the first Irish farmers seems to have derived from the Cardial Culture of Spain (itself the product of a rapid expansion of farmers from the eastern Mediterranean). While the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were dark-skinned but light-eyed, the farmers likely resembled many modern southern Europeans, with dark hair and eyes, and lighter skin. The contact between two such distinct groups, almost certainly speaking unintelligible languages, physically so different and practising contrasting lifestyles, almost certainly fed into later legends and myths.

The arrival of farmers in Ireland led to a transformation of the material culture. These Neolithic people were responsible for the construction of great stone megaliths, a practice that arose and spread along Europe’s Atlantic shores, seen with Stonehenge in Britain and the Carnac Stones of Brittany. They also built monuments such as the Newgrange passage tomb, one of the most ornate and beautiful pieces of prehistoric stonework in the world. These various stoneworks and tombs that litter the landscape of Ireland have shaped the Irish sense of their past, and loom large in legends of faeries and ancient peoples long lost and faded into the mists of time.

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But the time of the Stone Age farmers ended in due course, and in 2500 BC the first of many waves of migrants swept west onto the island. Called the “Beaker Culture“, they were descendants of people who had left modern Germany, and earlier still had their origins on the Eurasian steppe. Genetically, the Beaker People resemble the modern-day inhabitants of the island and physically, too, these newcomers appeared rather like the fair-skinned and often fair-haired modern Irish. Though many of the traits now associated with the Irish, such as lactose tolerance, were not present in full, the roots of the genetic character of the modern people date to this period.

One hypothesis holds that it was the Beaker People who brought the Celtic languages, establishing the cultural patterns that persisted down to the Iron Age and contact with the Romans. If this is true, then the myths that were recorded by the Irish monks in the 7th and 8th centuries AD may date to the period of contact and conflict between the Neolithic tribes and the Beaker Culture. Could it be that the Tuatha De Danann, a mythologic race of supernatural beings mentioned in Irish legend, and vanquished by the ancestors of the Gaels, were actually the builders of the megaliths?

Recently, a group of Irish scientists has cataloged genetic remains from a host of locations across Neolithic Ireland. They discovered that a high-status man buried at Newgrange 5,000 years ago appeared to have been part of an important prehistoric dynasty, and was also the product of incest. The researchers point out that it is often a feature of highly-stratified Neolithic societies that royal families will practise incest, yet it is intriguing that the early historical Irish had legends of incest at the site of Newgrange, a story that must have survived thousands of years until Christianisation and literacy.

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The local people in fact called the mound the “Hill of Sin”, and there were legends of incestuous activities between a ruler who built monuments and his sister in order to maintain the cycle of the sun. And so the existence of an individual who is quite inbred, and clearly of elite status, buried 3,000 years before these stories were written down is quite extraordinary.

Is it possible that Irish folklore was able to record an essentially truthful story over so many generations? The mythic legends of Ireland date to the time of Christ, over 2,000 years after the arrival of the Beaker Culture, and their likely conflict with the last of the Stone Age farmers who built the monuments they inherited. Preservation of such ancient motifs seems implausible. But note that Indian mythology preserves elements that are resonant with Greek myth, such as the divine twins — this, despite the two cultures being separated by thousands of years since their last common ancestor, suggesting a story that had been maintained for generation upon generation.

Davies, among other historians, highlights the Irish preservation of their mythic cycle as a matter of curiosity, and perhaps an edifying fact. But the detail and fidelity of the Irish in setting down their oral history may actually benefit future generations, as ancient DNA is telling us in exquisite detail the demographic processes by which the Irish people came to be the way they are. The true book of invasions is being written by unraveling DNA, and the existence of an oral record of the deep past may be essential for future scholars in understanding life in the islands before the Romans brought it into the light of history.

She is very good at what she does. But, then, making money runs in Rao’s family — as it does with many Indian activists in the United States, who have become leaders in the battle against ‘white supremacy’.

Though it is true that in many ways Rao is atypical, and almost a caricature of the sort of activist found on social media, she reflects important visible strands of the Indian-American experience. The daughter of upper-caste southern Indian immigrants to the United States, her parents were doctors, which is not exceptional since nearly one out of every 20 doctors in the United States is of Indian origin, and somewhere in the region of one in 20 Indian Americans has a medical degree.

Not surprisingly, the median Indian-American household income is nearly twice that of white Americans, and as well as medicine many others are in prestigious, highly-paid industry — including Sara Rao’s husband, who works in finance and private equity.

Across the English-speaking world, and in particular the United States, people of Indian origin, and South Asians more broadly, are becoming more culturally influential. This is quite a turnaround; in the 1980s the most prominent person of South Asian origin depicted in American pop culture was Ben Jabituya in the Short Circuit sequel, played by Fisher Stevens, a white actor. Today, in contrast, there is an embarrassment of riches: comedians such as Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling; politicians such as Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley; television doctors such as Sanjay Gupta.

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Though there are many examples of Indian Americans on the political Right, namely Haley, Ajit Pai or Seema Verma in the Trump administration, most of the public figures today are Democrats. Pramila Jayapal is a hard-left member of the Democratic Party representing a district in Washington state; though her colleague Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley, and began his career as a member of the pro-business faction of the party, he also co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s recent campaign for President; Sanders’s campaign manager was Faiz Shakir, a Pakistani-American. Indian-American adjacent, as it were.

The Center for American Progress, the major Democrat-leaning think-tank in Washington, D.C., is led by an Indian-American, Neera Tanden, while Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s long-time influential chief of staff was Saikat Chakrabarti, who left to head Left-wing pressure groups in the party.

This lopsided representation among political elites is reflected in voting patterns: in 2016 just 16% of Indian-Americans voted for Donald Trump, even though they are on average economically advanced and have high educational attainment. In the private sector, and unlike East Asians, people of South Asian origin are not underrepresented in managerial positions.

There is a reason that many are wont to call Indians the “new Jews,” a culturally prominent ethnic group overrepresented in academia, media and business, and who tend to be socially liberal and Democrat-voting.

This liberalism extends to attitudes on race. Bracketed as “Asians,” Indian-Americans are subject to the same discrimination in selective higher education as other Asians, but on the whole have not led opposition to the practice — which is largely the result of attempts to increase African-American representation on campus.

Black Americans have a very distinctive identity on the US landscape, as do Native Americans. Though the Latino/Hispanic category was only created in 1970, it alludes to a sharply delimited group of people with origins in Central and South America. But as brown-skinned people who are Asian-Americans, Indians occupy a grey zone in America’s racial taxonomy, categorised in the same bracket as Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. This has often led to some perverse scenarios within the country’s complex racial politics and its hierarchy of oppression.

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Saira Rao grew up in wealthy Richmond, Virginia, and went to the elite University of Virginia, then New York University law school, and even wrote a novel published in 2007 while she was clerking for a judge. By all rights, she is the child of modest privilege, with little to distinguish her from her upper-middle-class peers.

But Rao, like many Indian-Americans, is also a scion of centuries of privilege in India. Private survey research indicates that 25% of Indian-Americans are Brahmin, the highest caste in Hindu society — who comprise less than 5% of people back at home. Virtually no Indian-Americans are Dalits, who in India are 15% of the population, and today receive affirmative action due to centuries of oppression.

Compared to class differences in western countries, caste barriers in India are enormous and ingrained, and genetic studies indicate that they go back 1,500 years. To the Indian-American upper-middle-class privilege is bestowed as a family heirloom, far older and more ingrained than the white variety.

But in 21st-century America we do not talk much about class. We talk about race. When “black and brown” is used as an incantation it is not surprising that many young Indians are attracted to the idea that they, too, are among the wretched of the earth.

So you see young people of a bronze shade with names such as Iyer, Mukherjee and Tripathi, claiming for themselves the centuries of oppression and trauma of others, American history adopted and co-opted. They decry white supremacy which confirmed upon their ancestors’ their ancient ritual purity during the colonial period — for the forefathers of these Iyers, Mukherjees and Tripathis were the rural landowners of British India; they were the Indians who manned the colonial civil service. But before that, their privileges went back centuries, long before the United States existed and indeed even before England or France emerged.

American history is unique, and its own “caste system” is racially inflected into a bipolar framework: black or white. Only in the past few decades have terms such as “people of colour” allowed for the assimilation of other minorities, whether it be Latino, Native American or Asian. But while black Americans have a particular history, other minorities are diverse in their experiences. What does an Asian-American child of Hmong refugees have in common with the Asian-American child of Indian doctors? And yet both grow up in a world defined by slavery, the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

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Young Indian-Americans can easily identify themselves as people of colour, because in the American social landscape what matters is their brown complexion, not thousands of years of hereditary caste privilege. And while America has a rich textured vocabulary to talk about race, it has little in the way of discussion on the matter of class. Indian-American professionals can neglect their own privilege while highlighting their racial disadvantage because that is how the American cultural system is set up.

It is a system that benefits them on many levels, since as well-prepared meritocrats they are equipped and conditioned to optimise any advantages and arbitrage away inefficiencies. It is natural that the language of systemic racism designed for the black American experience can easily be leveraged by verbally-gifted members of the professional-managerial class who happen to have brown skin.

Saira Rao is a lawyer; her stock and trade are words. Though among Indian-Americans it is widely debated whether she is sincere or an opportunist, the fact is that an American system emphasising racial identity in a Manichaean conflict between whites and people of colour will naturally create strong incentives for some to exploit it.

Upper-caste Indian-Americans who descend from centuries of privilege, and grow up in American suburban comfort, do not need to face up to the consideration of class, because American culture as a whole does not engage economic inequality forthrightly and directly. As long as it focuses only on social ills with a racial origin, and sees the world in such black and white terms, then people with hundreds of years of privilege behind them will continue to lead the wretched of the earth.

This ethno-religious transformation of the island occurred under the shadow of semi-history, allowing for the development of an imaginative romantic tradition exemplified by the Arthurian Cycle. But this Dark Age also became a bone of contention between the English who saw themselves as deeply rooted in the land, and those who declared that they were a German folk who had won their new home through conquest and blood. The dominant view at any given time reflected social and political events of the 20th century more than facts. The propaganda value of myth meant more than the conjectures of scholars.

While in the early 20th century the dominant position was that the English were a people akin to German Saxons, a race apart from the Welsh, by the early 21st century serious scholars assumed that the spread of Anglo-Saxon culture occurred through imitation rather than replacement.

Today we can say with some confidence that neither stark view is correct, and that the middle path between is far more interesting and complex. Large numbers of Saxons, Angles and Jutes did in fact cross the North Sea — but the preponderance of England’s heritage still draws from the Celtic-speaking peoples. It is not coincidence that the earliest rulers in Alfred the Great’s lineage bear Celtic names, not German ones.

Those who argued for the erasure of the Celtic people did not do so without any basis. St. Gildas, a 6th century British Celt, recounted in On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain the defeat and destruction of his people at the hands of the Saxons. More recently, 19th century philologists observed that the number of Brythonic Celtic loan words in English is extremely small; in fact, there may be more Celtic loan words from Gaulish, due to the later Norman French influence. Finally, the collapse of institutions like the Roman Christian Church and the total decay of urban life indicates incredible disruption of the social hierarchy which characterised post-Roman Britain.

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A contrast here exists with Gaul, which absorbed a German-speaking elite but retained Roman language and religion. Some of the nobility of southern and western France even traced their descent from Romans, not Germans. On a more demotic level, British archaeologists have also observed that the arrival of the Saxons seems to have been associated with a transformation of the layout of rural farmsteads. In most societies, farmers have customs and traditions which they hew to, and they are often quite stubborn and set in their ways. Such a change indicates new people, not just practices.

But by the late 20th century such views of cultural and demographic disruption were in bad odour. The dominant ethos is that people did not move, their customs and traditions did. Hengist and Horsa may have existed, but rather than a folk migration the Anglo-Saxon conquest was one of a small number of German mercenaries who were engaged in elite capture of the post-Roman peasantry.

The Welsh historian Norman Davies observed in his 1999 book The Isles that “blood price” in 8th century Wessex differed between whether one was Saxon or British, the implication here being that there were many Celtic Britons living in the Anglo-Saxon lands, even if our documentary evidence is from the Saxon elite; this would tally with the 6th century ancestors of Alfred the Great having names such as Ceawlin, Cynegils and Cerdic, all of which have a distinctive Welsh flavor.

Genetics has untangled the Gordian knot of this semi-historical mystery, although illumination has not come at once, and only in fits and starts. One of the primary reasons is that the genetic difference between “Celtic” and “German” peoples is very small. Most Northern Europeans separated from each other very recently. Ancient DNA from between three and eight thousand years ago shows that Northern Europe underwent several mass migrations which transformed the genetic landscape.

First, the blue-eyed dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who descend from Ice Age Europeans disappeared and were absorbed by brown-eyed pale-skinned farmers who moved north out of the Near East. Then, these agriculturists were themselves overwhelmed by a people who migrated out of the Eurasian steppe into Europe 5,000 years ago. These pastoralist people probably brought Indo-European languages, and 4,500 years ago they arrived in Britain as the Bell Beaker culture. Within a few generations there was 90% genetic turnover, as the farmers who first erected Stonehenge disappeared, and were replaced by people who seem to have arrived from what is today northern Germany, possibly prefiguring the later Anglo-Saxon migration.

The problem from the perspective of genetics in understanding the proportion of Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the modern English goes back to the reality that Germans and Celts themselves had only been separated for 3,000 years, at most. These are genetically very close populations, and the technology of the early 21st century could not resolve the questions being asked.

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UCL geneticist Steve Jones did attempt such a thing in his 2003 book Y: The Descent of Men. Jones observed that the distribution of two Y chromosomal lineages exhibits a sharp break at Offa’s Dyke. A far higher proportion of Welsh men are R1b, which is very common across the Atlantic facade of Europe, while more English men carry R1a, which is found in higher frequencies in Germany and Norway. In contrast, Professor Jones observed that there was no difference in the maternal heritage of the Welsh and English, suggesting that the ethnic change was due to the impact of men. Jones’s UCL colleague Mark Thomas later developed an “apartheid model” to explain why the genetic difference between the English and Welsh was so striking.

But the true understanding of the situation could only be obtained by looking across the whole genome, not simply the paternal and maternal lineages. This was done by the Peopling of the British Isles Project, which published a paper in 2015 that drew from analysis on hundreds of thousands of genetic markers from 2,000 British individuals who were sampled from all across the United Kingdom.

They estimated that 10-40% of the ancestry in central and southern England was Anglo-Saxon — that is, DNA segments more similar to the Germans than the Welsh. Another paper from 2016, utilising ancient as well as contemporary DNA, estimated that 38% of the ancestry in the “East English” — people from East Anglia and the East Midlands — is derived from the Anglo-Saxons. These researchers actually found DNA from Dark Age-era graves identified as Anglo-Saxon, and some of these individuals were far more like the Germans in their DNA than the modern English; they differed from earlier Iron Age samples, proving beyond a doubt that a significant number of Germans did cross the North Sea in the 6th century.

Where does this leave us in relation to the question of whether the transformation of Dark Age Britain to early medieval England was one of genes or memes? The clear answer seems to be both. The emergence of a new style of farming, pottery and the collapse of urban Roman civilization and Christianity in eastern Britain was not simply due to the prestige and power of a small number of German warlords. Whole villages must have transplanted themselves across the North Sea, creating the nucleus of a new people, and absorbed the remaining British Celts. The lack of Celtic loanwords and the adoption of Saxon peasant culture may indicate the self-confidence of the newcomers. If St. Gildas is correct, the British elites moved to the west of the island, leaving the common people to their own devices.

But though the southern and eastern fringe of England has a substantial Anglo-Saxon demographic imprint, that fades out as one moves to the west, including to the lands that once comprised the kingdom of Wessex. There is far less German genetic influence in Hampshire, Berkshire or Wiltshire, let alone Devon. We know from early medieval records that Celtic language speakers did exist as late as the 8th century in these domains (and much later in Devon) but by then Old English, which is for all purposes a purely Germanic language, was dominant.

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The genealogy of the House of Wessex may offer a clue as to what occurred in broad swaths of western England. In the 6th century Celtic names imply that this elite lineage was identified with British culture, and looked west, but by the 7th German names became common, and the kings were pagan. Though the Saxons may have imposed their way of life through sheer numbers in the east, explaining the light impact of British Celtic culture upon their folkways and language, their expansion beyond the Saxon Shore seems to have been due to the adoption of the German identity by native British. The killing of a Celtic-speaking individual under the Saxon system of blood price was far cheaper than for a German speaker, serving as a clear inducement to assimilate.

What science makes clear then is that both extreme scenarios presented in the 19th and 20th centuries were wrong. The English are not a race apart from the Welsh. The modern English are genetically closest to the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, but the modern English are not simply Celts who speak a German language. A large number of Germans migrated to Britain in the 6th century, and there are parts of England where nearly half the ancestry is Germanic.

These folk served as the focus of a cultural revolution that transformed the British Isles. It was not a passive affair: the cities, churches, and hamlets of the previous inhabitants were blotted out, and what had been one of the provinces of the Roman Empire became a backwater pagan land. Though the original Romano-British elites had some knowledge of Latin, and patronised the Christian Church, the patina of civilization was clearly thin upon them, and the loosely Christian Celtic warlords of Dark Age western Britain transformed seamlessly into the pagan kings of Anglo-Saxon England.

The initial founding of the Saxon Shore was surely based on a level of brutality that Christian priests, if any had lived to tell the tale, would have recorded with foreboding. But the transformation of vast swaths of western Britain into the core of what had become England by the Viking Age occurred consensually, so seductive had the Saxon society become to the Celts, highborn and low.

The lesson that history and genetics teach us that cultural change is a complex phenomenon, and a single factor does not explain the whole story. Today we live in an age of migration, and native peoples fear being replaced, while immigrant communities fear being assimilated. Numbers matter, but the Saxons tell us that numbers are not everything.