The supply of horses . . . has been a preoccupation of the rulers of India, from, nearly, one end of its recorded history to the other. . . . It has … - Thomas Trautmann

The racial theory of Indian civilization was formed in a period after the ending of slavery in Europe and the United States, in the aftermath of which there grew up a racialized division of labour, combined with social segregation on the basis of race. The system of indentured labour, involving large numbers of Indian workers being shipped to distant colonies of the British Empire after the abolition of slavery to work for very low wages, contributed to the racialization and globalization of the division of labour.

For what profoundly separated Jones and Mill, and the Oriental renaissance from British Indophobia, was the power of the idea of ancient wisdom in the one, and of progress or future wisdom in the other. The Oriental renaissance depended upon the conviction that a numinous truth was captured in the Veda, that this wisdom was mankind's original religion and the source of civilization. As opposed to that, it was the formation of an idea of progress unqualified by the idea of ancient wisdom that sustained Mill and gave him the theoretical grounding for an aggressive policy of modernization. With the idea that the primitive condition of humankind was rude, ignorant, and barbarous, Mill quashed the ancient wisdom idea and forced new, harsh readings of India's past upon the scholarly product of Orientalism.

As Trautmann notes: "This tree paradigm remains very much the foundation of historical linguistics to this day, although a kind of willful collective amnesia has tended to suppress its biblical origins. . . . In the self-conception of linguistics there came to be a strong tendency to imagine that its central conceptual structure comes from comparative anatomy and to forget that it comes from the Bible" (1997, 57).