Science, race relations and resistance

Britain, 1870–1914

Douglas A. Lorimer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526102676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

This book offers a new account of the British Empire's greatest failure and its most disturbing legacy. Using a wide range of published and archival sources, this study of racial discourse from 1870 to 1914 argues that race, then as now, was a contested territory within the metropolitan culture.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Rethinking Victorian racism

Our received narrative of the ideology of race needs to be reconsidered. It misconstrues the relationships between nineteenth-century science, race and culture, it overlooks the Victorian language of race relations which constitutes the most substantial legacy of the nineteenth century for the racism of the present, and it has no place for the dissenting voices of resistance among persons of colour in the United Kingdom and among a few British radicals and philanthropists. In addition to these distortions and omissions, in accounting for racism and anti-racism in the more recent past, our received narrative relies upon significant discontinuities. Between 1850 and 1950, racism, often attributed to the influence of science, attained a dominant place in the constructions of the world’s peoples. Following the Second World War, scientists and the international community engaged in a retreat from scientific racism, and the achievements of the civil rights and colonial nationalist movements in the next two decades marked a substantial rejection of the racism of the past. Nonetheless, racial inequalities and conflicts persisted, and since the 1970s, a reinvention of racism has occurred under the ‘new imperialism’ and neo-liberalism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.¹

This historical synopsis is obviously over-simplified. Part of the problem stems from the origin of the term ‘racism’ itself, which was coined in the 1930s by critics of Nazi doctrines of racial supremacy.² This originating context gave racism its most common yet most historically restrictive definition as a belief that human beings could be categorised into distinct, unequal racial types whose attributes and status were biologically determined. In the nineteenth century, scientists – even Charles Darwin and his generation – had confused ideas about biological as distinct from environmental explanations for inheritance. The legacy of nineteenth-century science for the scientific racism of the 1920s and 1930s may not be as straightforward as our narrative suggests. The scientists shared the confused notions of race and culture commonplace in the nineteenth century. Our scholarly quest for the historical roots of a biologically determined racism, as Peter Mandler has argued, may well have overlooked the role and utility of ideas about culture and civilisation in constructing national character and world inequality.³ The scientists’ discourse was unavoidably informed by colonial conquest, the clash of cultures, and the construction of unequal relations between peoples of diverse origins living within colonial jurisdictions including former slave societies.⁴ In fact, cultures, according to the thinking of the time, defined distinct essences of peoples, and the scientists through comparative anatomy and other methods searched for a biological explanation for those presumed cultural essences. The retreat of scientific racism in the 1930s first involved the rejection of Jews and European ethnicities as races. Whether such an analysis applied to British subjects of colour still was a contentious issue among the scientists.⁵

Other elements in the presumed discontinuity in the mid-twentieth century (c. 1950–1970) also need to be addressed. Colonial nationalism and the civil rights movement have roots in the nineteenth century. Their pioneering advocates participated in the racial discourse of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. As historical actors, they do not belong solely in the pages of black or colonial nationalist history, for they engaged in an intellectual and political struggle within the imperial metropole against the hegemonic racism of the time.⁶ Equally important and yet missing altogether from our histories of the ideology of race is the rich nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature on race relations. Conventional wisdom attributes the birth of the sociology of race relations to Robert Park and the Chicago School in the early 1920s, whereas our language of race relations was largely a Victorian invention. Its authors included discerning colonial administrators, abolitionists and humanitarians assessing the outcome of emancipation and the impact of the new imperialism on colonised peoples, and Africans and persons of African descent who faced directly the growing intensity of racial prejudice and discrimination. The United States of America was the pioneer among modern states with a past of race slavery, an industrialising economy and a democratic polity in institutionalising racial subordination and segregation. Developments there were watched with intense interest from across the Atlantic. The term ‘race relations’ came into use around 1910, probably originating in the United States, but having particular resonance for the British Empire. For a decade, British politicians, journalists and humanitarian lobbyists had discussed the post-war settlement in South Africa. In the end, white South Africans – British settlers and Boers – were victorious, for in 1909 the Imperial Parliament approved a race-based constitution for the new union. There were now two templates for modern multiracial states: the United States and South Africa, and developments in these two countries would have profound influence on the discourse race relations in the twentieth century.⁷ As Laura Tibili has eloquently pointed out, ‘race is a relationship and not a thing’. It is the overlooked ‘language of race relations’ which provided the longer-term legacy of the nineteenth century for the ideology of race post-1950.⁸

While post-colonial studies and the linguistic turn more generally have fuelled a virtual explosion in studies of Victorian race and culture, I have nagging concern that some of these studies are as much a celebration of the present as an effort to understand the past. Our new methods with their sensitivity to the manifold bipolar constructions of racial identities, while exposing the Victorians to reveal something about ourselves, may also be engaged in colonising the Victorians. By constructing the Victorians as archetypical ‘racists’, we implicitly celebrate our own freedom from racism.⁹ This book is written from the point of view that racism is alive and well in the twenty-first century. In a different historical context, our racism may well be differently constituted from that of the past, but to understand that difference we need a better representation of the complexity, diversity and sophistication of the nineteenth-century discourse on race. The richest studies address the aftermath of the abolition of slavery and how by the 1860s the tide seemed to have turned against earlier abolitionist commitments. Strangely enough, apart from the literature on African and Asian history, until recently, far less attention has been given to changes in racial discourse in the metropolitan culture under the new imperialism, 1870–1914.¹⁰

Beyond the possibility that we might be colonising the Victorians, our new methods may encourage us to focus on individual texts or authors and extrapolate a larger significance from them without a full appreciation of the historical context. In some ways, this approach is similar to the older history of ideas once common in the history of science. It is an invitation to practice what W. L. Burn called ‘selective Victorianism’. I am always uncomfortable dealing with a solitary author or source (though at times by necessity I have had to do so), and more comfortable in dealing with a variety of sources from the same historical context, yet expressing differing views. The task then is to establish the meaning of the sources, to assess their differences and weigh their historical significance.¹¹ It may be that I am ‘splitter’ rather than a ‘lumper’ when it comes to historical analysis. I must admit I am extremely sceptical about any claim that a single author is representative of larger body of opinion on questions of race. I hope the book will demonstrate that, just as it is for us, from 1870 to 1914, race was contested territory.

While not a believer in any way in the adage that history repeats itself, there is an eerie parallel between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between the 1830 and the 1860s, an international anti-slavery movement, led by abolitionists in Britain and the United States, including the resistance of slaves themselves and the leadership of black abolitionists, overthrew colonial slavery, and, through civil war, slavery in the American republic. While a notable historic achievement in the record of liberation from racial oppression, it was an incomplete emancipation. Worse still, as the nineteenth century advanced into the twentieth, the supposed failure of the mighty experiment of abolition justified new coercive practices, the so-called ‘new slaveries’ in Africa, and in the most modern of multi-racial societies instituted racial segregation and subordination in the law and in everyday life.¹²

Following the Second World War, the long-term economic boom and the creation of the welfare state eventually produced a significant improvement in living standards in the West. It also led to migration of peoples of colour from the colonies to supply the labour needs of the metropole. The exposure of the contradictions in American democracy opened space for successful protests by African-Americans. The success of the civil rights movement had not just an American but an international impact, setting new standards for racial equality under the law. A parallel but not unrelated development occurred in the old colonial empires. The Second World War had stimulated rapid urbanisation in some colonies, and rising expectations among those soldiers and civilians who had contributed to the war effort. When those expectations could not be fulfilled, the tinder existed for colonial nationalist movements to confront colonial rule. The old colonial empires facing the costs of post-war reconstruction, a new cold war, and the claims of the colonised for political and social justice, decided it was better to withdraw.¹³ The gains made by civil rights movement in America and elsewhere and the process of decolonisation, like the emancipation moment of the nineteenth century, were unfinished or incomplete liberations. It is no longer possible to construct a narrative of liberation into the twenty-first century. The celebrated victories of the colonial nationalists have not lived up to expectations. The gains in legal equality achieved by the civil rights movement did not necessarily translate into social and economic gains. In Britain, governments continued to wrestle with immigration, race relations and the redefinitions of citizenship never managing to embrace fully the multi-racial legacy of an imperial past. More recently, the dominant neo-liberal agendas of governments dismantle the power to the state to intervene, and tax and economic policies widen the gap between rich and poor. Among the latter class racialised minorities are over-represented, and yet the successors to the civil rights movement have not managed to develop a political strategy to protect the erosion of gains made almost fifty years ago.¹⁴

This recent manifestation of racism exists apparently without its pre-1945 ideological buttress. It is measured by the consequences of policies and culturally informed practices that reward white privilege and disadvantage persons of colour. As a concept, ‘race’ has no meaning in biological science, and ‘race’, ‘racial identities’ and ‘race relations’ persist as historically informed, social and cultural constructions subject to change over time. This racism without ideology has received various labels including ‘structural’, or ‘institutional’, or ‘pragmatic’ racism. Some authors are more willing to see discriminatory outcomes not as unintended but as deliberate consequences of white power and privilege. This more recent form of racism has been variously termed simply ‘new racism’, or ‘racism without race’, or ‘hegemonic racism’, or ‘born again racism’.¹⁵ Racism’s revival should at least make us wary of the arrogance of the present as we approach those Victorians and Edwardians contending with the erosion of their own principles of racial justice. In 1906, P. E. Cheal wrote to H. R. Fox Bourne of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) complaining of the failure of the New Zealand Government to recognise the ‘natural and political rights’ of 40,000 Maoris as ‘natural born British Subjects’. Appealing to the past precedent of the Native Rights Act of 1865, Cheal observed, ‘often the greatest condemnation of the present state of affairs is found in the record of the past’.¹⁶ A more comprehensive view of racism a century ago, when the old certainties of human equality were under attack, might be instructive about how tried certainties wither under concerted assault.

The problem then is to provide a more comprehensive study of racial discourse between 1870 and 1914 which will come to terms with the contested territory of this discourse, i.e., deal with sources in conflict rather than in agreement. I have followed a strategy of Georges Duby, a French annaliste, who suggested that to study changes in an ideology over time one should trace the working out of its contradictions.¹⁷ To address the problem of selective Victorianism, I have relied on bibliographies compiled in the 1920s and 1930s. Essential to this task were the bibliographies of Evans Lewin, the librarian of the Royal Empire Society. He produced in pamphlet form a bibliography ‘illustrating relations between Europeans and Coloured Races’ in 1926, and it was incorporated with...