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Race and empire in British politics
621
Book Reviews is well-written and should be useful to students of the European particularly concerned about attitude change.
Community
and to those
Juliet Lodge European Community
Research Unit, University of Hull
Race and Empire in British Politics, Paul B. Rich (Cambridge 272 pp., E25.00.
University
Press, 1986)
Dr Rich gives usanexcellent survey of empire and race issues in Britain, between the high point of imperial expansion in the 1890s and the impact of coloured immigration in the early 1960s; from the time, in other words, when Afro-Asia was most acutely troubled with Britons, to the time when Afro-Asians became an acute problem to Britain. All through their long epoch of empire, the great majority of Englishmen were content to know very little about it, to experience it only as a hazy euphoria. But all the time, through a thousand channels, its influences were percolating into the body politic. History is always at work on us, whether we realise it or not. Rich has learned from his study of liberalism in South Africa, he tells us in his preface, to aim at ‘an increasingly historical focus’, corresponding to ‘the significance and potentiality of intellectual history’. Most of his attention is given to successive phases of what he calls ‘middle opinion’, which came to mean faith in slow reform and the spread of ‘scientific rationality’, though it was not free from ‘much of the earlier cultural provincialism (p. 5). Full weight is given to the individuals, writers and academics and politicians, who did most to guide opinion. In the first chapter, for instance, James Bryce is in the fore, with his view of British India as another Roman empire, and a strong faith in the British imperia1 mission until it was damped by the jingo frenzy of the Boer War. In the next chapter, on the rise of ‘cultural relativisim’ or pluralism, recognition of non-European cultures as having their own distinct value, Mary Kingsley occupies the limelight. She is one of the few women to earn a prominent place in the book; one of a small number of British women of the later 19th century who undertook remarkable travels-hers were in West Africa-exploring the world in one dimension as women at large were learning to explore it in many others. It was not a woman, but Genera1 Booth of the Salvation Army, who proposed to regenerate Africa by settling a hundred thousand pauper women there, to intermarry with Africans (30). Any thought of miscegenation was horrifying to generations of conservatives and eugenists; not until the late 1920s did belief in racial segregation fade into the background. After the Boer War, and still more after 1914-1918, the old imperia1 drum-beating was discredited, and the empire had to be given a new look. Rich shows how this was accomplished by talk of a new stage being reached, of empire disappearing and ‘Commonwealth’ taking its place. In the lead in this transformation, far more verbal than real, were the promoters of the ‘Round Table’ movement, men who had served under Milner in South Africa-Curtis, Amery, Dawson, etc.; their records inspire very little confidence in their bona fides. They could talk radically enough to disarm most criticism of the empire, as Rich says (pp. 55, 69); this must be regarded as their purpose. The youthful Labour party lent a willing ear, happy to be spared the trouble of working out an empire policy of its own. Its thinking was mostly loose and muddled; it was left to individuals like Leonard Barnes (to whom some appreciative pages are devoted) to try to clarify and strengthen it. Belated official adoption of programmes of colonial development represented in practice ‘the continuation of imperialism by other means’ (p. 144), or neo-colonialism. Race riots in Britain in 1919, and police reactions to them, revealed, as we are shown in
622
Book Reviews
Chapter 6, how deeply engrained racial prejudices and stereotypes had come to be. In the 1930s on the intellectual level, there was little effective countering of Nazi racialist propaganda; only after 1945 was there a ‘delayed response from within anthropology in Britain’ (pp. 117-8). All through the book sociology and social anthropology form the chief battlegrounds of ideas above all questions of race. Honourable mention is made of the short-lived but progressive ‘Edinburgh School’ of the 1950s headed by Kenneth Little and Michael Banton; and the various attempts at organizing useful discussion, leading up to the founding ofthe Institute of Race Relations in 1952, are described. Warnings that embittered coloured people might turn to communism (p. 176) had some effect. But there was much ‘bewilderment and confusion’ among liberals as the problems raised by immigration mounted, and ‘Victorian Social Darwinism was still alive’ (p. 189). No firm lead came from the Labour party before 1958, and by the 1960s faith in the Commonwealth was dwindling. It is a sombre enough picture that the reader of this study is left with. V.G. Kiernan
Stow, Galashiels. U.K.
Studies in British Imperial History. Essays in Honour of A.P. Thornton, ed. Gordon (St. Martins’s Press: New York, 1986), 231 pp., $25.00.
Martel
This collection opens with a tribute to Professor A.P. Thornton by NicholasMansergh, and closes with a list of his many writings. Its six contributions, commentaries on aspects of the empire by non-Marxist but not uncritical scholars, are all in diverse ways interesting; two in particular, Ged Martin’s on Canadian Federation, and D. Schreuder’s on the South African historian Theal. Martin’s essay is long, closely reasoned, and based on research in depth; it is besides well written, with neat turns of phrase worthy of a former president of the Cambridge Union. British approval, growing steadily between 1837 and 1867, was a ‘vital element’ in the success of the federal idea (p. 50). One motive in the earlier years was the wish to tie French Canada into a bundle it could not slip out of; though Martin shows that this fell into the background as unrest in Quebec quietened down. .4nother calculation was that it would be easier to keep control of Canada through a central government there than through a scattering of petty states pulling in different directions. But the most insistent reason for wanting to pull the country together was to prevent it from being sucked piecemeal into the American maw. Martin quotes Gladstone’s friend J.R. Godley as warning in 1854, prophetically enough in a way, that ‘the great peril which overshadows the future of the civilized world lies in the vast power and progress of the United States’, and their ‘inordinate ambition’(p. 76). Civil war and mass mobilization in the USA was what finally turned the scales in favour of federal union, as a safeguard against intervention. An unlucky printing error has turned ‘Colonial Nationalist’ at the head of each page of Schreuder’s essay into ‘Colonial Naturalist’, but it is a fact as he observes that the writing of colonial history by colonists has not been given its proper share of attention. G.M. Thea1 (1837-1919) grew up in New Brunswick before casting anchor, after some wanderings, in South Africa. He was at the outset a liberal, not unsympathetic in his early writings to African culture and feeling. A change came over him in the 1880s after he was put in charge of the Cape Colony archives, and began to publish a massive series of documents and a many-volume history based on them. He was coming tosee the Boers as heroic pioneers, and writing in terms of ‘a unique, emerging “new society”‘, a new white civilization (p. 95). His work is an object-lesson in how history can be falsified by historians, as well as by politicians. It was pervaded by racial prejudice posing as scientific
Book Reviews is well-written and should be useful to students of the European particularly concerned about attitude change.
Community
and to those
Juliet Lodge European Community
Research Unit, University of Hull
Race and Empire in British Politics, Paul B. Rich (Cambridge 272 pp., E25.00.
University
Press, 1986)
Dr Rich gives usanexcellent survey of empire and race issues in Britain, between the high point of imperial expansion in the 1890s and the impact of coloured immigration in the early 1960s; from the time, in other words, when Afro-Asia was most acutely troubled with Britons, to the time when Afro-Asians became an acute problem to Britain. All through their long epoch of empire, the great majority of Englishmen were content to know very little about it, to experience it only as a hazy euphoria. But all the time, through a thousand channels, its influences were percolating into the body politic. History is always at work on us, whether we realise it or not. Rich has learned from his study of liberalism in South Africa, he tells us in his preface, to aim at ‘an increasingly historical focus’, corresponding to ‘the significance and potentiality of intellectual history’. Most of his attention is given to successive phases of what he calls ‘middle opinion’, which came to mean faith in slow reform and the spread of ‘scientific rationality’, though it was not free from ‘much of the earlier cultural provincialism (p. 5). Full weight is given to the individuals, writers and academics and politicians, who did most to guide opinion. In the first chapter, for instance, James Bryce is in the fore, with his view of British India as another Roman empire, and a strong faith in the British imperia1 mission until it was damped by the jingo frenzy of the Boer War. In the next chapter, on the rise of ‘cultural relativisim’ or pluralism, recognition of non-European cultures as having their own distinct value, Mary Kingsley occupies the limelight. She is one of the few women to earn a prominent place in the book; one of a small number of British women of the later 19th century who undertook remarkable travels-hers were in West Africa-exploring the world in one dimension as women at large were learning to explore it in many others. It was not a woman, but Genera1 Booth of the Salvation Army, who proposed to regenerate Africa by settling a hundred thousand pauper women there, to intermarry with Africans (30). Any thought of miscegenation was horrifying to generations of conservatives and eugenists; not until the late 1920s did belief in racial segregation fade into the background. After the Boer War, and still more after 1914-1918, the old imperia1 drum-beating was discredited, and the empire had to be given a new look. Rich shows how this was accomplished by talk of a new stage being reached, of empire disappearing and ‘Commonwealth’ taking its place. In the lead in this transformation, far more verbal than real, were the promoters of the ‘Round Table’ movement, men who had served under Milner in South Africa-Curtis, Amery, Dawson, etc.; their records inspire very little confidence in their bona fides. They could talk radically enough to disarm most criticism of the empire, as Rich says (pp. 55, 69); this must be regarded as their purpose. The youthful Labour party lent a willing ear, happy to be spared the trouble of working out an empire policy of its own. Its thinking was mostly loose and muddled; it was left to individuals like Leonard Barnes (to whom some appreciative pages are devoted) to try to clarify and strengthen it. Belated official adoption of programmes of colonial development represented in practice ‘the continuation of imperialism by other means’ (p. 144), or neo-colonialism. Race riots in Britain in 1919, and police reactions to them, revealed, as we are shown in
622
Book Reviews
Chapter 6, how deeply engrained racial prejudices and stereotypes had come to be. In the 1930s on the intellectual level, there was little effective countering of Nazi racialist propaganda; only after 1945 was there a ‘delayed response from within anthropology in Britain’ (pp. 117-8). All through the book sociology and social anthropology form the chief battlegrounds of ideas above all questions of race. Honourable mention is made of the short-lived but progressive ‘Edinburgh School’ of the 1950s headed by Kenneth Little and Michael Banton; and the various attempts at organizing useful discussion, leading up to the founding ofthe Institute of Race Relations in 1952, are described. Warnings that embittered coloured people might turn to communism (p. 176) had some effect. But there was much ‘bewilderment and confusion’ among liberals as the problems raised by immigration mounted, and ‘Victorian Social Darwinism was still alive’ (p. 189). No firm lead came from the Labour party before 1958, and by the 1960s faith in the Commonwealth was dwindling. It is a sombre enough picture that the reader of this study is left with. V.G. Kiernan
Stow, Galashiels. U.K.
Studies in British Imperial History. Essays in Honour of A.P. Thornton, ed. Gordon (St. Martins’s Press: New York, 1986), 231 pp., $25.00.
Martel
This collection opens with a tribute to Professor A.P. Thornton by NicholasMansergh, and closes with a list of his many writings. Its six contributions, commentaries on aspects of the empire by non-Marxist but not uncritical scholars, are all in diverse ways interesting; two in particular, Ged Martin’s on Canadian Federation, and D. Schreuder’s on the South African historian Theal. Martin’s essay is long, closely reasoned, and based on research in depth; it is besides well written, with neat turns of phrase worthy of a former president of the Cambridge Union. British approval, growing steadily between 1837 and 1867, was a ‘vital element’ in the success of the federal idea (p. 50). One motive in the earlier years was the wish to tie French Canada into a bundle it could not slip out of; though Martin shows that this fell into the background as unrest in Quebec quietened down. .4nother calculation was that it would be easier to keep control of Canada through a central government there than through a scattering of petty states pulling in different directions. But the most insistent reason for wanting to pull the country together was to prevent it from being sucked piecemeal into the American maw. Martin quotes Gladstone’s friend J.R. Godley as warning in 1854, prophetically enough in a way, that ‘the great peril which overshadows the future of the civilized world lies in the vast power and progress of the United States’, and their ‘inordinate ambition’(p. 76). Civil war and mass mobilization in the USA was what finally turned the scales in favour of federal union, as a safeguard against intervention. An unlucky printing error has turned ‘Colonial Nationalist’ at the head of each page of Schreuder’s essay into ‘Colonial Naturalist’, but it is a fact as he observes that the writing of colonial history by colonists has not been given its proper share of attention. G.M. Thea1 (1837-1919) grew up in New Brunswick before casting anchor, after some wanderings, in South Africa. He was at the outset a liberal, not unsympathetic in his early writings to African culture and feeling. A change came over him in the 1880s after he was put in charge of the Cape Colony archives, and began to publish a massive series of documents and a many-volume history based on them. He was coming tosee the Boers as heroic pioneers, and writing in terms of ‘a unique, emerging “new society”‘, a new white civilization (p. 95). His work is an object-lesson in how history can be falsified by historians, as well as by politicians. It was pervaded by racial prejudice posing as scientific