In this Ferguson is at least living up to the ethos of the colonial project, which primarily benefited the European imperialists in material, moral and intellectual terms. Imperialism elevated European notions of humanity to predominance in the world, posited the white male as the apotheosis of the ideal of the Enlightenment, and did so by fiat and military power. In the process imperial historians wrote the 'history' of their subject peoples in tendentious terms to explain and justify their own imperium.