Victorian Attitudes to Race: Volume 26

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Dominant Victorian notions of racial and cultural superiority had a strong moral and religious content: Fundamentally, native Africans or Polynesians were regarded in much the same way as the French or the Germans; they lay some way back on the road to civilization but in time, like the British, they would get there. All the Britons went without any clothing, except the skins of wild beasts thrown carelessly over them; and they painted their bodies of a sky-blue colour, in rude forms of flowers, trees, and animals.

Instead of houses they had little mean huts; they tilled no ground, their food being game and fruits. Their arms were, a shield and a short spear to the lower end of the latter was fastened a bell of brass, in order to frighten their enemies, when they shook it. Thus textbooks in the early and mid-Victorian decades went out of their way to point out that backwardness in other cultures was a product not of lack of intelligence but of lack of progress and religion.

The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering told its readers in Underlying these views was the strong commitment to human equality embodied in the anti-slavery movement of the early part of the nineteenth century. Victorian Christianity held that all human beings were capable of salvation, and indeed held out the prospect of the ultimate conversion of the whole of humankind to Christianity. So missionaries were amongst the most celebrated and admired of Victorian heroes, foremost among them David Livingstone, who combined a passion for converting the heathen with a devotion to exploration, both equal sources of his fame back home.

By the end of the century it was estimated that there were 10, British missionaries living abroad, in every past of the globe. Their presence had in practice little direct to contribute to empire, and indeed in the early decades of the missionary enterprise they were regarded with suspicion by British colonial authorities. Justifications for imperialism were not only religious but also political and historical, especially from mid-century onwards.

The history of England had been one of the steady growth of freedom, in the dominant view of the day, and even towards the end of the Victorian era, intervention in other parts of the globe was justified in terms of liberation and progress.

Time and again, school textbooks told children that Britain had been forced to intervene against oppression: It was perhaps paradoxical to conquer part of the world in the name of freedom. This could even include the freedom of women, as Victorian writers waxed indignant about customs such as Chinese foot-binding and Hindu widow-burning. One widely used textbook from the s told its readers that during the Kanpur massacre: Shrieks were heard and low groans, and the sound of blows as the savages hewed to death the unresisting women and little children who filled the room.

Thrice a hacked and blunted sabre was passed out, and a sharper one received in exchange. Next morning the mutilated bodies were dragged forth and cast into a huge well. The savage British reprisals after the suppression of the rebellion, in which wholesale massacres of Indian civilians were accompanied by lining up Indian soldiers in front of cannon and blowing them to pieces, did not, of course, in the view of the British press, belong in the same category.

The Indian Mutiny indeed inaugurated a period of reorientation in Victorian concepts of race and empire, culminating in the active public and propagandistic promotion of Empire and Imperialism from the s onwards. This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century…Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists.

There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope, at present involved in that obscurity incident to novelty in such affairs. We used to have discussions in this House about the balance of power. Lord Palmerston, eminently a practical man, trimmed the ship of State and shaped its policy with a view to preserve equilibrium in Europe. Once he became Prime Minister, in , Disraeli did all he could to bolster the British Empire at home and abroad.

Post-Racial or Most-Racial?

In he secured for Britain a controlling interest in the French-build Suez Canal, vital for communications with India. By the time his Premiership came to an end in , he had mobilized British forces in Afghanistan and South Africa, and played a leading role in the Congress of Berlin, designed to settle the Russo-Turkish conflict of And imperialism was even better suited to win over the working classes, many of whom were enfranchised in the Reform Act; the demonstrations and disturbances in London in the mids, which included major riots in which shop windows in the West End were smashed by angry dockers, 21 underlined the need to substitute a new ideological cement for society in place of traditional habits of deference that clearly no longer had much influence.

If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists. Empire, Rhodes thought, would bring concrete economic benefits to Britain that would improve the lot of the masses.

But it was also an instrument of patriotic propaganda. Classrooms began to display the world map with the British Empire proudly coloured in red. As the owner of the Daily Express proclaimed in History textbooks were rewritten in the s and s to give more space to the Empire, and criticism of dubious enterprises such as the Chinese Opium Wars 25 or shady characters like the corrupt Indian administrator Warren Hastings now virtually disappeared.

The new attitude to Empire contained a strong element of racism and the denigration of other cultures and civilizations. Instead, as Bernard Porter has noted, they now emphasized racial difference and the alleged racial inferiority of subject peoples: The British, indeed, were, in the view of the imperialists of the s and s, destined not only to rule inferior races but also to lead the entire world into the future.

Belief in racial hierarchies based on descent had become more widespread once it had become possible to lend it scientific legitimacy. This was not least a product of the growing influence of Darwinism in the second half of the century. The prime example of course was his own family and its various connections, in which brilliance and scientific ability occurred in successive generations with notable regularity; Galton, wavering between designating himself as scientifically able or generally brilliant, opted in the end for the latter.

Conversely, Galton thought that the inferior were threatening the future of the race by producing too many sub-standard children. The reductio ad absurdum of this view could be found in H.

Race and Politics in the Obama Era

Such means may render the individual members of a stock passable if not strong members of society, but the same process will have to be gone through again and again with their offspring, and this in ever-widening circles, if the stock, owing to the conditions in which society has placed it, is able to increase its numbers. While this might be possible within British society, the same principles were much less encouraging when applied to the world as a whole. Here Pearson was influenced by the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, whose ideas were first developed in his treatise On the Inequality of the Human Races Contemplating the British Empire and its history, Pearson declared: History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.

If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended. In this pessimistic view, education and improvement were futile when applied to inferior races.

But these views did not go unchallenged. Racism and eugenics were stronger in other countries, for example in Germany, before the First World War than they were in Britain; laws banning racial intermarriage were for example introduced in German South-West Africa, now Namibia, and served as a model for the later Nuremberg Laws introduced in Nazi Germany in the s.

The genocidal suppression of the Herero uprising in South-West Africa 39 had no parallel in the British administration of the Empire, and when cruelties and atrocities did occur, they ran into heavy criticism at home. In the administration of the Empire, race could often take second place to the need to reward the native elites whose collaboration was essential to the maintenance of imperial control, and British royal honours, knighthoods and orders were doled out liberally to maharajahs and sultans across the colonies; here for example is His Highness Maharaja Thakore Shri Sir Dr.

In addition, Critics of Empire like J. Hobson emerged to excoriate the economic exploitation they thought underpinned the colonial enterprise. Britain may have enjoyed its imperial High Noon in the decades leading up to the First World War, but it was not unclouded, and in some quarters there was a consciousness too that the Empire, like others in previous ages, might not last: It was not only Kipling who realized that empires rose and fell. How and why this happens, or at least, how and why it happened in the modern era, when empire became a central aspect not just of Victorian but also of European consciousness and experience, will be the subject of my third and final series of Gresham Lectures, beginning in September.

Device is incompatible to play the video. Monday, 11 April , 6: His series of lectures were as follows: Word Transcript Powerpoint Presentation.

This is part of the series: Culture and Experience in Britain, Europe and the World Colonial history Victorian history History. Transcript 11 April The Victorians: Monday 11 April The Victorians: A World More Concrete N. When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making.

More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics. One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Obama as Most-Racial Chapter 1.

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The Spillover of Racialization Hypothesis Chapter 3. Desmond King, University of Oxford. Statistically rigorous, theoretically nuanced, and politically important, this is a major work of original scholarship. Kinder, University of Michigan.

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