THE eND OF hISTORY IS A WASP CONSPIRACY:

It has long been evident to me that the most successful societies in the world are former British colonies - the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, and to a lesser extent India and South Africa. I have usually attributed this to the British embrace of capitalism, merit-based civil service, and widespread education.

As long as these nations followed that model they prospered, but when they went off the tracks and experimented with socialism (as India did for a while) or dictatorship (as Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, is still doing) they failed.

Now comes Robert Woodberry of the National University of Singapore to argue that I have missed the point. In 2012, The American Political Science Review published a breathtaking article by him, "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy." I say breathtaking because of the comprehensive statistical analysis underlying his argument. He doesn't just correlate missions with democracy, but he accounts for most other plausible explanations and he looks at conditions in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceana, and also considers regional differences within many of these countries.

What Woodberry finds is that wherever "conversionary Protestant" (CP) missionaries went, they laid the roots for modern democracy. Often, but not always, these were associated with British colonies. There were British colonies that had few missionaries and these areas were not especially well equipped for democracy, but when missionaries went to places untouched by the British, they had the same democratizing effects.

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