Colonizers, as we have known them in the last two centuries, came from complex societies with heterogeneous cultural and ethical traditions. As already noted, it is by underplaying some aspects of their culture and overplaying others that they built the legitimacy for colonialism. For instance, it is impossible to build a hard, this-worldly sense of mission on the tradition to which St Francis of Assisi belonged: one perforce has to go back to St Augustine and Ignatius Loyola to do so. It is not possible to find legitimacy for the colonial theory of progress in the tradition of Johannes Eckhart, John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, based as it is on the rejection of the ideas of an omnipotent high technology, of hyper-competitive, achievement-oriented, over-organized private enterprise, and of aggressively proselytizing religious creeds operating on the basis of what Erik Erikson calls pseudo-species. One must find that legitimacy in utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, in the socialist thinkers conceptualizing colonialism as a necessary step to progress and as a remedy for feudalism, and in those generally trying to fit the colonial experience within the mould of a doctrine of progress. (Childhood innocence serving as the prototype of primitive communism was one of Marx’s main contributions to the theory of progress, which he conceptualized as a movement from prehistory to history and from infantile or low-level communism to adult communism. India to him always remained a country of ‘small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities’, which ‘restricted the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition’ and where the peasants lived their ‘undignified, stagnant and vegetative life.’ ‘These little communities’, Marx argued, ‘… brought about the brutalizing worship of nature exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in the adoration of Kanuman [sic], monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.’ It followed, according to Marx, that ‘whatever may have been the crime of England she was the unconscious tool of history.’ [Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’ (1853), in Karl Marx and F. Engels, Articles on Britain, pp. 166-72; see especially pp. 171-2]. Such a view was bound to contribute handsomely – even if inadvertently – to the racist world view and ethnocentrism that underlay colonialism.