26/11/2010

Race and the Victorians

1837-1901

Dr. Rachel Bright

1.What is race?

2. Why does the concept of Race exist?

3. Why was there a hardening of racial

attitudes in the Victorian era?

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„Race‟ Defined
Terms:
• Race – a social construct, not biological

• Racialism – classifying people based on assumptions of

racial difference

• Racism – ideology/policy based on assumptions of racial

difference – hierarchy of race

(Johnson, R. „Was the Empire racialist or racist?‟ in British Imperialism)

Why does the concept of Race exist?

Stereotypes

Sander Gilman:„Each society has a distinct “tradition”…

a rich web of signs and references for the idea of
difference arises out of a society‟s communal
sense of control over its world.‟

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Human Differentiation:
– Skin colour
– Nationality/geography
– Voice/accent
– Religion
– Gender
– Class
– „Attractiveness‟
– Cleanliness
– Education

Race: ‘a tribe, nation, or people,

regarded as of common stock’
Sir John Wynn’s The History of the Gwedir Family (1600)

***RACE CONFLICT***

(Kenan Malik, Race: the history of an idea)

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Greeks
• Barbers (Ethiopians) = BLACK = death, hell, bad spirits

Early Christians and Muslims

• „sons of Ham‟ or „curse of Canaan‟ (Genesis 9:20-27 )
• „Mark of Cain‟ (Genesis 4:2)
• Unbelievers=uncivilised savages

From 16th c.
• „Race‟ = geography
• Slave trade
• New worlds

Anti-Slavery and Evangelical movements

British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society:
‘Am I not a man and a brother’
„Noble savages‟
‘we have contaminated
them with our vices, and
with indignation behold
them perishing with
diseases communicated by
those who bear the
Christian name.’ Thomas Haweis,
co-founder of London Missionary Society
(1795)
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However…
‘The constant association of Africa with the inhuman
violence of the slave trade, of course, did much to
darken its landscape even during the Romantic
period.’ (Brantlinger)

‘Sati’(India) - R. Lewis, ‘white men saving brown

women from brown men’

‘the most deplorable state of heathen darkness’ William

Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians (1792) – founder
of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792)

The
Enlightenment

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (On the Natural
Variety of Mankind), (1795)

5 races - geography
Environmental
Search for Eden

Caucasian is beautiful 10

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Flexible until…

The Victorian Era

1837-1901
Queen Victoria: “They must of course feel that we
are masters, but it should be done kindly and not
offensively, which alas! Is so often the case.”

Science and technology

Machines as the Measure of Men (Adas)
– „Western technology giving working
control over the environment‟

• 1851 The Great Exhibition

• 1869 Suez Canal opened
• 1879 First telephone exchange set up
• 1884: Maxim Gun patented

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Technology:
1898: Battle of Omdurman - British forces lose 49 men,
10,800 Sudanese killed

Hilaire Belloch, ‘Whatever happens we have got,

the maxim gun and they have not’
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Defensive reaction to opposition

• 1830s-1850s Nine Xhosa Wars (Cape Colony)
• 1840s First Maori Wars
• 1848/9 European revolutions
• 1850 Taiping Rebellion (China)
• 1852 Second Burmese War
• 1850s Irish potato famine
• 1856 War in Persia
• 1857 Indian Mutiny
• 1860s Second Maori Wars
• 1860-64 US Civil War
• 1865 Morant Bay Revolt (Jamaica)
• 1870s famine in Bengal

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Morant Bay Rebellion (1865)

Governor Edward John Eyre

Against: John Bright, Charles Darwin, John Stuart
Mill, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, etc.
For: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, Charles
Dickens, and John Ruskin, etc.

„black people were born to be

mastered‟ (Catherine Hall)

Not brothers and sisters - children

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"The Black Baby," Punch, April 21, 1894

Rudyard Kipling (1898)

‘ …Take up the White

Man's burden--
The savage wars of
peace’

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Pseudo-science
– Martial Races
– Servile Races
– Polygenism (Knox)
– Aryanism (H. H. Risely)
– Craniometry

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„Scientific‟ Racism
• Victorian Anthropology (George Stocking Jr.)
– London Ethnographical Society (1843)
• Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species (1859)
Descent of Man (1871)
– „Survival of the fittest‟ – Herbert Spencer (1864)
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927)
– „father of eugenics‟: restrict or kill off competition

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History
Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain (1868)
James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)
– historical domination of English peoples
– Conclusions: The more of the world we
govern, the better for all

Exploration
Photography and travel writing

A picture into the past…

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Missionaries

After
„the sense of spiritual superiority, which a
Before missionary must often possess was in Africa
(and to a much lesser extent in India) easily
transformed into a feeling of racial
superiority‟ (C. Bolt) 21

Human Zoos
„Sarah Baartman‟
or the „Hottentot
Venus‟

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Silver table ornament by

Messrs. Gass of London

Exhibited at the 1851

Great Exhibition

ART
The Bible: The Secret of England's Greatness
Thomas Jones Barker 1863
© National Portrait Gallery, London 26

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Some Historiography
1. Nationalism defined by „otherness‟ (L. Colley)
2. Marxist viewpoint
– Propaganda for exploitation
3. Merely the justification of existing prejudices (Sander L.
Gilman)
4. Culturalists not racists (G. Fredrickson)
5. Not race but class: an extension of European
aristocratic, feudal, hierarchical social structures and
perceptions (David Cannadine)
6. Orientalism (Edward Said)
– assumption of difference
– Power dynamic: „the sense of Western power over
the Orient is taken for granted as having the status of
scientific truth.‟

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The Stanford Prison Experiment

(1971)
• Professor Philip Zimbardo
– experiment halted after six days

Conclusions: „About a third of the guards were hostile,

arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner
humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy
the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary
personality tests were able to predict this behaviour.‟

http://www.prisonexp.org/

The Lucifer Effect, How Good People Turn

Evil
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