About Ferguson's claim that Britain "made the modern world" by spreading democracy, free trade, capitalism, the rule of law, Protestantism and the English language, Wilson charged that Ferguson never explained precisely how this was done, arguing that the reason was the lack of interest in the history of the people ruled by the British on Ferguson's part, who therefore could not perceive that the interaction between the colonisers and the colonised in places like India, where the population embraced aspects of British culture and rule that were appealing to them while rejecting others that were unappealing. Wilson argues that this interaction between the rulers and the ruled is a more complex, and contradicts Ferguson's one-sided picture of the British "transforming" India that portrays the British as active and the Indians as passive. Wilson charged that Ferguson failed to look at the empire via non-British eyes because to do so would be to challenge his claim that Britain "made the modern world" by imposing its values on "the Other", and that the history of the empire was far more complicated than the simplistic version that Ferguson is trying to present.