7. The rise of English racism

Race prejudice and racism

Did race prejudice cause slavery? Or was it the other way round? Winthrop D. Jordan, in his monumental study of white American attitudes to black people from 1550 to 1812, argues that prejudice and slavery may well have been equally cause and effect, ‘dynamically joining hands to hustle the Negro down the road to complete degradation’.1 But we must go deeper than that, if we are to understand the rise of English racism as an ideology, the various roles it has played in the past, and the role it is playing today. And first we must distinguish between race prejudice and racism.²

Sudden or limited contact between different nations or ethnic groups gives rise, as a rule, to all kinds of popular beliefs. Such beliefs spring from ignorance, fear, and the need to find a plausible explanation for perplexing physical and cultural differences. Specific false beliefs about other nations or other human varieties tend to be corrected, sooner or later, by observation and experience. But race prejudice in general is no less persistent than other oral traditions containing a substantial irrational element. It is specially persistent in communities that are ethnically homogeneous, geographically isolated, technologically backward, or socially conservative, with knowledge and political power concentrated in the hands of an elite. Such communities feel threatened by national or racial differences, and their prejudices serve to reassure them, to minimize their sense of insecurity, to enhance group cohesion. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a classic instance of such a community – though its geographical isolation was rapidly being overcome and its technology was about to leap forward. We have already seen how ancient myths about Africa and Africans were widely believed here, and we shall shortly examine further evidence of English race prejudice in that period.

But to assert that their race prejudice, which was considerable, led Englishmen to enter the slave trade – even if we immediately add that slave-trading and slavery perpetuated race prejudice – is to make it harder, not easier, to understand Britain’s rise to the position of foremost slave-trading nation in the world. It was their drive for profit that led English merchant capitalists to traffic in Africans. There was big money in it. The theory came later. Once the English slave trade, English sugar-producing plantation slavery, and English manufacturing industry had begun to operate as a trebly profitable interlocking system, the economic basis had been laid for all those ancient scraps of myth and prejudice to be woven into a more or less coherent racist ideology: a mythology of race. Racism is to race prejudice as dogma is to superstition. Race prejudice is relatively scrappy and self-contradictory. It is transmitted largely by word of mouth. Racism is relatively systematic and internally consistent. In time it acquires a pseudo-scientific veneer that glosses over its irrationalities and enables it to claim intellectual respectability. And it is transmitted largely through the printed word.

These distinctions are important, but there is another even more so. The primary functions of race prejudice are cultural and psychological. The primary functions of racism are economic and political. Racism emerged in the oral tradition in Barbados in the seventeenth century, and crystallized in print in Britain in the eighteenth, as the ideology of the plantocracy, the class of sugar-planters and slave-merchants that dominated England’s Caribbean colonies. It emerged, above all, as a largely defensive ideology – the weapon of a class whose wealth, way of life, and power were under mounting attack.

Most notorious and influential of eighteenth-century racist writers in Britain was in fact an absentee planter from Jamaica. Edward Long had spent 12 years on that island, where he was judge as well as planter, before he wrote his History of Jamaica (1774), a book highly respected both in his own day and long after his death.3 He justified the degradation of blacks by insisting that in every mental and moral way they were inferior to whites. He summed up the plantocratic ideology of race for consumption in the home country. And his book’s pretensions to scientific rigour gave English racism a respectable cover, a spurious authenticity, just as the slave trade and slavery were beginning to trouble public opinion and arouse opposition. As we shall see, the timing of Long’s book is significant for British imperial history; it came out just as the British government was taking responsibility for direct rule over a ‘native’ people, in Bengal. But the really interesting thing about Long’s exposition of racism is how essentially unoriginal it was. He relied heavily on previous, deservedly obscure, writings. He copied two key passages practically word for word from his predecessors without troubling to acknowledge those borrowings. Long’s particular contribution was to link the assertion of black inferiority with the defence of slavery more boldly and blatantly and ‘scientifically’ than anyone had done before. And so, before discussing Long himself, we must examine the components of his attack on black people.

The demonology of race

The very words ‘black’ and ‘white’ were heavily charged with meaning long before the English met people whose skins were black. Blackness, in England, traditionally stood for death, mourning, baseness, evil, sin, and danger. It was the colour of bad magic, melancholy, and the nethermost pit of hell. People spoke of black arts, blackmail, and the Black Death. The devil himself was black. So were poison, mourning, sorrow, and forsaken love. When bad people were ostracized, they were blacklisted; when they were punished, their names were entered in a black book; when they were executed, a black flag was hoisted. And the black sheep of the family was, in all probability, a blackguard. White, on the other hand, was the colour of purity, virginity, innocence, good magic, flags of truce, harmless lies, and perfect human beauty.1

Spaniards and Portuguese had been invaded and subjected by people at once darker-skinned and more highly civilized than they were. The insular English, whose historical experience had been more limited, found sudden contact with black Africans deeply disturbing. It was a severe cultural shock for them: ‘one of the fairest-skinned nations suddenly came face to face with one of the darkest people on earth’. Not merely did the Wolofs and Mandings of Senegambia fail to fit the English ideal; they ‘seemed the very picture of perverse negation’.²

We all know how much easier it is to slot a new phenomenon into a pre-existing conceptual pigeon-hole than to do the hard work of rethinking one’s concepts. And the English happened to have a very old and very convenient pigeon-hole for black Africans. If their skin was black, what else could they be but devils? The Ethiopian as devil can be found in La Chanson de Roland, an early version of which is supposed to have been sung by Taillefer at the battle of Hastings. But the idea was much older. The so-called Epistle of Barnabas, composed in the second century AD, termed the devil ‘The Black One’, and in the fourth century St Jerome said: ‘Born of the Devil, we are black.’3 By the early seventeenth century this equation was a commonplace of English literature. One dramatist, John Day, wrote of bad dreams which

hale me from my sleepe like forked Deuils,

    Midnight, thou Æthiope, Empresse of black soules.⁴

Another, Thomas Heywood, referred to

a Moor,

    Of all that beares mans shape, likest a devill.⁵

And indeed, those unfortunate people who happened to be visited by the devil often reported that he took the shape of a black man. That had been the distressing experience of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland, in the eleventh century⁶ and of St Bridget of Sweden in the fourteenth,⁷ and it was still happening in Shakespeare’s day. ‘A damned soule may and dooth take the shape of a blacke moore’, wrote Reginald Scot in his authoritative Discouerie of witchcraft (1584).⁸ Samuel Harsnet, later to be archbishop of York, told in 1603 of a woman who had seen ‘a blacke man standing at the doore, and beckning at her to come away’; demons in the shape of black men later tempted her to break her neck down the stairs and to cut her throat with a knife.⁹ Beliefs such as Harsnet’s – whose book Shakespeare raided for the names of the diabolical spirits in King Lear – were summed up sardonically by Samuel Butler:

    Some with the Dev’l himself in league grow,

    By’s Representative a Negro.¹⁰

So the ground was well tilled for a travel writer like Sir Thomas Herbert, who after visiting parts of Africa in 1627-9 described the inhabitants of that continent as ‘fearfull blacke . . . Deuillish Sauages’ and ‘divels incarnate’.¹¹ That fitted in splendidly with what many people already knew for a fact; if archbishops and eyewitnesses agreed about it, who could deny it? Small wonder that in Angola, so Herbert assured his readers, there were people so devilish that they actually worshipped the devil – ‘in forme of a bloudie Dragon’.¹²

An alternative view, current throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, was that Africans were not devils but monsters. They often appeared in lists of freaks or undesirables: the ‘Amozins’, ‘Nagars’, ‘ollive cullord moores’, ‘Canniballs’, ‘Hermophrodites’, and ‘Pigmies’ of the lost play Tamar Cam,13 for instance, and the ‘beggars/Gipseys, and Iewes, and Black-moores’ with whom Ben Jonson’s Volpone has coupled to produce his Dwarf, Fool, and Eunuch.¹⁴ And it so happened that the English, hitherto unfamiliar with tailless apes that walked about like human beings, were introduced to the anthropoid apes and to black people at the same time and in the same place, and ‘the startlingly human appearance and movements of the “ape” . . . aroused some curious speculations’.¹⁵ These speculations were encouraged by ancient traditions about anthropomorphous monsters. European folklore was full of apemen and werwolves. When Edward Topsell, later vicar of East Grinstead, published his Historie of foure-footed beastes (1607), he included pictures of a baboon and two of those legendary humanlike monsters, a ‘Satyre’ (‘a most rare and seldome seene beast’) and an ‘Ægopithecus’ (‘an Ape like a Goate’). Each of the three displayed a prominent, and erect, ‘genitall member’. Topsell told his readers that apes lusted after women, and insisted that ‘Men that haue low and flat Nostrils are Libidinous as Apes that attempt women, and hauing thicke lippes the vpper hanging ouer the neather, they are deemed fooles’.¹⁶ Of course, apes and devils were already linked in the popular imagination, as for instance James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England, linked them in his Daemonologie (1597).¹⁷ Now Topsell clinched matters by explaining that, very likely, ‘Deuils take not any dænomination or shape from Satyres, but rather the Apes themselues from Deuils whome they resemble, for there are many things common to the Satyre-apes and deuilish Satyres’.¹⁸

These traditions were bound to affect the way in which English people perceived black Africans. As they assimilated new information about Africa and tried to fit it into the steamy mass of ancient folklore, they were predisposed to see a similarity between the human-like beasts of the ‘dark’ continent and that continent’s supposedly beast-like human beings. Richard Jobson retailed this comparison in 1623, attributing it to an unidentified Spaniard.¹⁹ Sir Thomas Herbert was altogether coarser. In 1634 he wrote of Africans: ‘Comparing their imitations, speech and visages, I doubt many of them haue no better Predecessors than Monkeys.’²⁰ He later elaborated this comparison, suggesting that Africans not only resembled apes but copulated with them:

Their language is rather apishly than articulately founded, with whom ’tis thought they have unnatural mixture . . . Having a voice ’twixt humane and beast, makes that supposition to be of more credit, that they have a beastly copulation or conjuncture. So as considering the resemblance they bear with Baboons, which I could observe kept frequent company with the Women, their speech . . . rather agreeing with beasts than men . . . these may be said to be the descent of Satyrs, if any such ever were.21

Apes themselves, it was supposed, were the offspring of Africans and some unknown quadruped.²²

Such bizarre but piquant ideas were not exactly brand-new in Europe. The French lawyer Jean Bodin had asserted in 1566 that ‘promiscuous coition of men and animals took place, wherefore the regions of Africa produce for us so many monsters’.²³ But now, supported by the testimony of people who had actually been to Africa, these notions became widespread and extremely persistent in England, and were subscribed to by otherwise intelligent and rational people. Captain Thomas Phillips, though opposed to colour prejudice, repeated a story he had heard that baboons often raped African women;²⁴ Morgan Godwyn, one of the few who came forward in the seventeenth century to challenge the assertion that Africans were sub-human, nevertheless accepted the story that some Africans had ‘too frequent unnatural conjunctions’ with apes and baboons (‘tho not’, he added hastily, ‘so as to Unpeople that great Continent’);²⁵ the naval surgeon John Atkins reported that at some places ‘the Negroes have been suspected of Bestiality’ with apes and monkeys.²⁶ Even the famous eighteenth-century French naturalist Buffon, who at least tried to be scientific, wrote of ‘an ape as tall and strong as a man, and as eager for women as for its own females’ and referred to ‘the violent lust [appetit véhément] of male apes for women’ and ‘the forced or voluntary intermixture of Negresses with apes, the produce of which has entered both species’.²⁷

Quite the oddest expression of this idea was to come from the fertile pen of the eighteenth-century Scottish judge Lord Monboddo. In his effort to prove the close relation between human beings and speechless animals, Monboddo was specially fascinated by what he took to be two missing links. He firmly believed that there were humans in the Nicobar Islands who had tails which they waved like cats; and he claimed he could produce legal evidence that there had been a mathematics teacher at Inverness with a tail about six inches long, discovered after his death.²⁸ When the explorer James Bruce returned to Scotland from Ethiopia and went into Monboddo’s courtroom the learned judge sent him a note asking to be immediately informed if, in his travels, he had come across any men with tails.29 So much for one of Monboddo’s missing links. The other was the ‘Ourang Outang’, by which he meant the gorilla, chimpanzee, and probably also baboon, of Africa rather than the orang-utan of Borneo and Sumatra. According to Monboddo, Ourang Outangs were rational human beings that happened to live in a primitive state of nature. They could do everything but talk.³⁰ The Ourang Outang was ‘an animal of the human form, inside as well as outside’ – ‘a barbarous nation, which has not yet learned the use of speech’. It carried off boys and girls as slaves and kept them for years without harming them. It buried its dead. It played very well on pipes, harps, and other instruments.³¹ And an Ourang Outang once served as a cabin-boy.³² Amid this rigmarole, culled from travellers’ tales, the allegation that Ourang Outangs ‘carry away young negroe girls and keep them for their pleasure’, and almost certainly fathered offspring in that way, was a mere drop in the bucket.³³ Monboddo’s aim was to elevate the Ourang Outang, not degrade black people; but it so happened that his evidence for alleged human–simian copulation was travellers’ tales from Africa.³⁴

Reports of unusual sexual behaviour of any kind have always found an eager and credulous readership, and English people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were only too happy to swallow stories which confirmed their immemorial view of dark-skinned people as lustful beasts. When Shakespeare had Roderigo call Othello’s embraces ‘the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor’³⁵ he was drawing on a centuries-old belief. A widely read translation of John Leo Africanus – who was born in Spain and really was a Moor – assured English readers in 1600 that there was ‘no nation vnder heauen more prone to venerie’ than ‘the Negros’, who ‘haue great swarmes of harlots among them; whereupon a man may easily coniecture their manner of liuing’.³⁶ And this was ‘the most authoritative work on the history of the interior [of Africa] that was to appear in England for more than two centuries’!³⁷ Bodin too had insisted that heat and lust went hand in hand, that ‘in Ethiopia . . . the race of men is very keen and lustful’; his authority for this bold generalization was Ptolemy, who lived in the second century AD and who ‘reported that on account of southern sensuality Venus chiefly is worshiped in Africa and that the constellation of Scorpion, which pertains to the pudenda, dominates that continent’.³⁸ Elizabethan literature abounded with lecherous and degenerate black men: ‘in Elizabethan drama before Othello there are no Moor figures who are not either foolish or wicked’. Muly Hamet, the ‘Negro Moore’ in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (c. 1588), probably the earliest Moor–villain, in the first full-length treatment of a black character in English drama; Aaron, the ‘barbarous Moore’ in Titus Andronicus (1589-90); Eleazer in Lust’s Dominion (1599): these characters ‘supply the norm of dramatic expectation – of a man whose colour reveals his villainy as (quite literally) of the deepest dye’.39 And that of course was what gave Othello (acted in 1604) its exceptional power, for Shakespeare relied on his audience’s knowledge and acceptance of the stereotype in order the more effectively to shatter it.

Outside the theatre, the stereotype remained unshattered, so that Francis Bacon could refer to ‘an holy Hermit. . . that desired to see the Spirit of Fornication, and there appeared to him, a little foule vgly Aethiope’.⁴⁰ Seventeenth-century travellers’ tales strengthened the stereotype by adding spicy details. Andrew Battell of Leigh found the Angolans ‘beastly in their liuing, for they haue men in womens apparell, whom they keepe among their wiues’.⁴¹ In Guinea, said another account, the people were ‘very lecherous . . . and much addicted to vncleannesse: one man hath as many wiues as hee is able to keepe and maintaine’.⁴² Perhaps most piquant of all – though they can’t have done much to allay Englishmen’s sexual anxieties – were reports that male Africans were all equipped with enormous sex organs. According to Jobson, Manding men were ‘furnisht with such members as are after a sort burthensome vnto them’;⁴³ the anonymous author of The Golden Coast (1665), remarking on the ‘extraordinary greatness’ of their ‘Members’, described African men as ‘very lustful and impudent [i.e. shameless] . . . and therefore much troubled with the Pox’;⁴⁴ while John Ogilby, adapting the writings of the Dutch traveller Olfert Dapper, told his readers that ‘most of the Blacks upon the Guinee Coast’ had ‘large Propagators’.⁴⁵ Nor were African women less sexually aggressive than African men. This was the sort of thing that went on in Guinea:

If they meet with a Man they immediately strip his lower Parts, and throw themselves upon him, protesting that if he will not gratify their Desires, they will accuse him to their Husbands . . . If they can come to the Place the Man sleeps in, they lay themselves softly down by him, soon wake him, and use all their little Arts to move the darling Passion.⁴⁶

But what else could you expect of savages, of people who lived like animals? This was precisely how West Africans were described in 1555: ‘a people of beastly lyvynge, without a God, lawe, religion, or common welth’.47 How could such people be trusted? According to Sir Thomas Herbert, in 1634, ‘black-faced Africans, are much addicted to rapine and theeuery’.⁴⁸ According to Ogilby, in 1670, it was an ‘innate quality’ of the inhabitants of ‘Negroe-land’ to steal anything they could lay their hands on, especially from foreigners.⁴⁹ To the Dutchman Willem Bosman a third of a century later – his book was translated into English within a year – black people were ‘without exception, Crafty, Villanous and Fraudulent, and very seldom to be trusted . . . they indeed seem to be born and bred Villains’.⁵⁰ To John Oldmixon, reporting on Barbados in the same period, ‘the Negroes are generally false and treacherous . . . for the most part they are faithless, and Dissemblers’.⁵¹ To Hugh Jones, in 1724, black people were ‘naturally of a barbarous and cruel Temper, yet are they kept under by severe Discipline upon Occasion’.⁵² To Dr James Houstoun, in 1725, ‘their natural Temper is barbarously cruel, selfish, and deceitful’, while ‘as for their Customs, they exactly resemble their Fellow Creatures and Natives, the Monkeys’.⁵³ Richard Ligon’s was almost a lone voice of dissent. ‘I beleive,’ he wrote in 1657, ‘and I have strong motives to cause me to bee of that perswasion, that there are as honest, faithfull, and conscionable people amongst them, as amongst those of Europe, or any other part of the world.’⁵⁴ This wholly exceptional statement speaks volumes about the prevailing view.

Some accounts even claimed that hungry Africans were no more to be trusted by their friends than by foreigners. From Sir Thomas Herbert came a picturesque description of how they rather liked having their friends for dinner – and how some even enjoyed being eaten themselves:

Not satisfied with natures treasures . . . the destruction of men and women neighbouring them, better contenting them, whose dead carkasses they devoure with a vultures appetite; whom if they misse, they serve their friends (so they mis-call them) such scurvy sauce, butchering them, thinking they excuse all in a complement, that they know no rarer way to express true love than in making (not two soules) two bodies one in an inseparable union: yea, some (worne by age, or worme-eaten by the pox) proffer themselves to the shambles, and accordingly are joynted and set to sell upon the stalls.⁵⁵

Africans were not merely devilish, monstrous, ape-like, lustful, treacherous, and given to cannibalism. They were also inherently lazy: ‘generally idle and ignorant’ (King Charles II’s hydrographer);56 ‘Nothing but the utmost Necessity can force them to Labour: They are besides . . . incredibly careless and stupid’ (Bosman);⁵⁷ ‘lazy, careless’ (Oldmixon).⁵⁸ But this stereotype – which is how slave-owners have seen their slaves throughout history – was hard to sustain when huge numbers of Africans were being worked to death producing sugar for European planters. So it was balanced by, and co-existed quite harmoniously with, a diametrically opposite stereotype: ‘They are by Nature cut out for hard Labour and Fatigue’ (Hugh Jones).⁵⁹

Black people were also generally described as ugly – though here again there were exceptions, such as the travellers who confessed to finding the young women they saw in Africa aesthetically pleasing and implied that they found them sexually attractive. Richard Ligon was enchanted by the breasts of young African women he saw in Barbados.⁶⁰ But William Towerson described the breasts of African women as ‘very foule and long, hanging downe low like the vdder of a goate’.⁶¹ A French traveller, in a book translated into English in 1696, said Africans were ‘dreadful to look upon’ (haves à voir): ‘It might be properly said, that these Men came out of Hell.’⁶² Comparing American ‘Indians’ with Africans in 1612, colonist William Strachey said the former had ‘great bigge Lippes, and wyde mouthes, (yet nothing so vnsightly as the Moores,)’.⁶³ When Hugh Jones made the same comparison a century later, his perceptions were clearly coloured by the rise of plantation slavery in the intervening years. Blacks, he wrote, ‘have uglier Faces and Bodies, and are of a more servile Carriage, and slavish Temper’.⁶⁴

These manifold disabilities of black people became much easier to understand when viewed from a religious point of view, as resulting from God’s curse on Ham for looking on his father’s nakedness as the old man lay drunk in his tent.⁶⁵ In particular, that was how blacks were supposed to have come by their blackness. However strange it may seem to us in the twentieth century to turn to Jewish mythology for an explanation of differences in human pigmentation, the Old Testament was by far the most authoritative place to look, 400 or 500 years ago, for guidance on such problems. Gilbert Génébrard, sixteenth-century Benedictine monk and archbishop of Aix, is often said to have been the first to hold that the ancestor of all Africans, a character by the name of Chus, was made black by the curse on his father, Ham.⁶⁶ But Génébrard merely copied this notion from a visionary called Guillaume Postel;⁶⁷ and it is safe to say that even Postel was probably not the originator of the ‘God’s curse’ as opposed to the ‘scorched by the tropical sun’ explanation of Africans’ blackness. There were of course some tricky aspects to the Postel–Génébrard theory, and a later scholar–monk called Agostino Tornielli did his best to clarify matters. He pointed out that Chus begat Nimrod, who was white, as well as black children. So Ham’s wife must have had her mind on something black at the time she conceived Chus or, alternatively, was afflicted with a longing for something black during his gestation. Chus’s wife, too, was white and bore both black and white sons to her husband, who very considerately assigned to his dark offspring the hotter and therefore, for them, more comfortable regions of the earth.68

The classical English statement of the ‘curse of Ham’ theory came from the pen of a sea-captain called George Best, who sailed with Martin Frobisher in 1577 in search of the north-west passage. When he came back Best published a book about the expedition in which he explained how, to punish Ham for disobedience, God had willed that

a sonne shuld be borne, whose name was Chus, who not only it selfe, but all his posteritie after him, should be so blacke & lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the Worlde. And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa . . .

    Thus you see, y^t the cause of y^e Ethiopians blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud.⁶⁹

In 1704 the Englishman Peter Heylyn, historian, theologian, and friend of Archbishop Laud, was being cited as an authority for the theory that Ham’s impiety had turned him or his descendants black.⁷⁰ But Heylyn was both a late and a half-hearted convert. All he said in the earliest version of his almost unreadable book Microcosmus (1621), which grew like a snowball as it rolled through successive editions down the seventeenth century, was that blacks ‘doe almost want the vse of reason’, were unintelligent, had no arts or sciences, were prone to lust, ‘and are for the greater part Idolators’.⁷¹ Six years later he was calling the ‘curse of Ham’ theory a ‘foolish tale’.⁷² But after pondering the matter for another 30-odd years, Heylyn was at last persuaded to concede that ‘possibly enough the Curse of God on Cham and on his posterity . . . hath an influence on it’.⁷³

One final, contrasting strand in the tangled skein of prejudice must be identified: the notion of polygenesis, or separate creation of different human varieties. This notion, whose adherents are known as polygenists, brings us to the threshold of pseudo-scientific racism. Polygenists thought, and taught, that black people were in some way intermediate between white people and apes. The theory of polygenesis was canvassed in Isaac La Peyrère’s Præadamitæ (1655), an English translation of which was soon out as Men before Adam (1656),74 and it turned up in the Journal des sçavans in 1684, when François Bernier divided humanity into four ‘species’, largely on the basis of skin colour, two of these ‘species’ being Africans – and Lapps, whom he called ‘wretched animals’.⁷⁵ In 1699 Dr Edward Tyson, physician and authority on the scent-bags of polecats, published the results of his dissection of a chimpanzee (which he called an ‘orang-outang’). Tyson not only proved that there were anatomical similarities between human beings and apes. He also explained that ‘Man is part a Brute, part an Angel; and is that Link in the Creation, that joyns them both together’.⁷⁶ Like the German surgeon Johann Meckel’s claim in 1757 that black people’s blood was black – so black, indeed, that it blackened bandages instead of reddening them⁷⁷ – Tyson’s work was seized on by writers who held that Africans were a separate species, a link between humans and animals in the ‘Great Chain of Being’. (This idea, whereby all inanimate matter, living beings, and supernatural powers were arranged in a hierarchy, with humanity smack in the middle – midway between angels and animals – dates back at least to the ancient Greeks.)⁷⁸ After scratching his head in perplexity over what he called ‘the distempered skin of Africans’, which he found ‘extremely difficult to account for’, the naval surgeon John Atkins concluded in 1734 ‘that White and Black must have descended of different Protoplasts [i.e. first human beings]; and that there is no other Way of accounting for it’.⁷⁹ A year later he reaffirmed that ‘the black and white Race [sic] . . . have sprung from different-coloured first Parents’ – though he was forced to admit that, from a religious point of view, such a doctrine might be ‘a little Heterodox’.⁸⁰

Three notions that have figured in this section were to be specially prominent in racist ideology: the idea that Africans were, in one way or another, closely connected with apes; the idea that people with differently coloured skins had different origins; and the idea that human beings could be graded hierarchically on the basis of skin colour.

It should not be supposed that all English people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were prejudiced against black people. There were ethnocentric stereotypes other than hostile ones. But they were stereotypes all the same. Immensely popular, for instance, was the idea of the ‘noble savage’, foreshadowed in the legend of Yarico and Inkle. When that legend made its first appearance in print, in 1657, the lovely Yarico – who saved a christian’s life only to be made pregnant and betrayed by him – was not yet an African virgin but a Carib woman in Barbados.81 Appropriated by anti-slavery writers in the eighteenth century, with the heroine’s race suitably changed, this touching tale inspired at least 40 separate works – poems, essays, plays, ballets, and an opera – and was translated into eight languages. The African as ‘noble savage’ was first portrayed in Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (c.1678), which, adapted by Thomas Southerne, was to be performed on the stage nearly every season for 100 years. In some ways Mrs Behn’s ‘noble savage’ looked more like a European than an African:

His Face was not of that brown, rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett. His Eyes were the most awful [i.e. impressive] that cou’d be seen, and very piercing; the white of ’em being like Snow, as were his Teeth. His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African, and flat. His Mouth, the finest shap’d that could be seen; far from those great turn’d Lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes.⁸²

The ‘noble savage’ crops up in the writings of numerous English and Scottish romantics: Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Cowper, Southey, Wordsworth, and many minor poets and ‘forgotten scribblers’.⁸³ In the hands of lesser writers the ‘noble savage’ became a stock figure of literary fashion, no less artificially sentimental than the pining slaves that crowd the pages of late eighteenth-century novels, plays, and poems. And just like those grateful Negroes, captive Negroes, dying Negroes, Negroes fettered, Negro’s incantations, Negro’s prayers, Negro’s imprecations, and Negro-mothers’ cradle-songs, the stereotype tells us ‘more about the white men’ – and women – ‘who did the writing than about the negroes who did the suffering’.⁸⁴

After all these stereotypes, coarsely hostile or cloyingly sentimental, we badly need a breath of fresh air. It blew rarely. But here is the bluff, common-sense opinion of an English sea-captain, reporting in 1694 on a voyage to Africa and Barbados. Captain Thomas Phillips could not imagine why black people should be despised for their colour, ‘being what they cannot help’. And he added: ‘I can’t think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think so because we are so, and are prone to judge favourably in our own case.’85

Plantocracy racism

The oral tradition

‘Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel does not make the least difference in civil property’, said Thomas Sherlock when speaking about the slave trade in 1727.1 Sherlock was in turn bishop of Bangor, Salisbury, and London, and he was stating the Church of England’s official view. The planters in the West Indies shared the widespread belief that if they let their black slaves be converted to christianity and baptized this would mean setting them free. The Church did its best to reassure the planters on that score; on the issue of slavery it was otherwise totally passive. Dissenting christians were also, with few exceptions, less troubled by the institution of slavery as such than by the planters’ opposition to the conversion and baptism of their slaves. In the controversy that developed, the planters argued that black people were not human beings but animals without souls to save. ‘What, such as they?’ they cried. ‘What, those black Dogs be made Christians? What, shall they be like us?’² And they demanded to know whether ministers of religion would start baptizing horses.³ Here was the very dawn of English racism, and we find it reflected or reported in 300-year-old religious tracts. These tracts make curious reading today, for most of their authors argue that Africans are human without objecting in the slightest degree to their being slaves.

The earliest tracts of this kind suggest that even before the middle of the seventeenth century race prejudice was crystallizing into an orally transmitted racism that was already leading in practice to cold-blooded killings by members of the dominant race. In 1642 a popular preacher called Thomas Fuller, who served as chaplain to various titled families, published a book called The Holy State. His chapter on ‘The good Sea-Captain’ said that when the latter seized a ship as a prize

he most prizeth the mens lives whom he takes; though some of them may chance to be Negroes or Savages. ’Tis the custome of some to cast them overbord, and there’s an end of them: for the dumbe fishes will tell no tales . . . What, is a brother by the half bloud no kinne? a Savage hath God to his father by creation, though not the Church to his mother, and God will revenge his innocent bloud. But our Captain counts the image of God neverthelesse his image cut in ebony as if done in ivory, and in the blackest Moores he sees the representation of the King of heaven.4

Visiting Barbados in 1671, George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, was accused of trying to stir up the black slaves by telling them that Christ had died for them, too – though in fact he also ‘exhorted them to Justice, Sobriety, Temperance, Chastity and Piety, and to be subject to their Masters and Governours’. What he told the island’s Quaker slave-owners suggests their prevalent opinion:

Do not slight them, to wit, the Ethyopians, the Blacks now, neither any Man or Woman upon the Face of the Earth, in that Christ dyed for all, both Turks, Barbarians, Tartarians and Ethyopians; he dyed for the Tawnes and for the Blacks, as well as for you that are called Whites . . . You should preach Christ to your Ethyopians that are in your Families [sic] . . . and be tender of and to them.⁵

The Presbyterian Richard Baxter came still closer to the heart of the matter when he told the planters a few home truths in 1673. To begin with, ‘those . . . that keep their Negro’s and slaves from hearing Gods word, and from becoming Christians . . . declare that their worldly profit is their treasure and their God’. Moreover it was time the planters learnt the difference between human beings and animals. Black slaves, wrote Baxter,

are reasonable Creatures, as well as you . . . Remember that they have immortal souls, and are equally capable of salvation with your selves . . . How cursed a crime is it to equal Men and Beasts? Is not this your practice? Do you not buy them and use them meerly to the same end, as you do your horses? . . . as if they were baser than you, and made to serve you?⁶

Emergent racism is also reflected in a pamphlet called Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684), by the vegetarian and mystic Thomas Tryon. This contained a complaint against slavery put into the mouths of black slaves: ‘The Negro’s Complaint of their Hard Servitude, and the Cruelties Practised upon them By divers of their Masters professing Christianity in the West-Indian Plantations’. The overseers’ racist insults to their helpless victims are quoted. Blacks were ‘sold . . . like Beasts to the Merchant’ and ‘the inconsiderate and unmerciful Overseers make nothing to Whip and Beat us, and the best words they can afford us, are, Damn’d Doggs, Black ugly Devils, idle Sons of Ethiopean Whores, and the like’.7

But it was Morgan Godwyn who in 1680 put his finger unerringly on the economic basis and role of plantocracy racism. Grandson of a bishop and son of a canon, Godwyn went out to Virginia, then to Barbados, as a minister of religion. He didn’t care for the progress the Quakers had been making in Barbados, and inter-denominational rivalry may have sharpened his attack on the plantocracy. In any case, he showed very clearly that slave-owners and slave-merchants were denying the humanity of black slaves from economic motives. And he said this publicly, giving chapter and verse, in the teeth of the West India lobby’s threats to silence him by slander. ‘The very worst they can vomit forth’, he retorted, ‘will never in the least prejudice me in the opinion and esteem of Good Men.’ Echoing Baxter, he declared that the ‘public Agents’ for the West Indies ‘know no other God but Money, nor Religion but Profit’.⁸ He was quite prepared ‘to undergo . . . the utmost Effects of the Rage and Malice of those incensed MAMMONISTS from abroad’.⁹

The object of Godwyn’s book The Negro’s & Indians Advocate (1680) was, in his own words, ‘to prove the Negro’s Humanity, and to shew that neither their Complexion nor Bondage, Descent nor Country, can be any impediment thereto’. He was the first to analyse racism as a class ideology, and even after 300 years neither his analysis nor his language has lost its cutting edge. While in Barbados, he had been told that to teach christianity to blacks and baptize them were unnecessary and destructive to the planters’ interest. One person told him ‘with no small Passion and Vehemency . . . that I might as well Baptize a Puppy’; another, that baptism would do no more good to her black slave ‘than to her black Bitch’. Baptism of blacks, said the planters, tended ‘to no less Mischief than the overthrow of their Estates, and the ruine of their Lives, threatning even the utter Subversion of the Island’. Even as his book was in the press a Barbadian in London told him ‘That Negro’s were Beasts, and had no more Souls than Beasts, and that Religion did not concern them. Adding that they went not to those parts to save Souls, or propagate Religion, but to get Money’ – and Godwyn’s printer managed to squeeze in this extra piece of evidence as a let-in note. The heart of the book is the following passage:

[A] disingenuous and unmanly Position hath been formed; and privately (and as it were in the dark) handed to and again [i.e. to and fro], which is this, That the Negro’s, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances to Manhood, yet are indeed no Men . . . If Atheism and Irreligion were the true Parents who gave it Life, surely Sloth and Avarice have been no unhandy Instruments and Assistants to midwife it into the World, and to Foster and Nurse it up. Under whose Protection getting abroad, it hath acquired sufficient strength and reputation to support it self; being now able not only to maintain its ground, but to bid defiance to all its Opposers; who in truth are found to be but very few, and those scarcely considerable. The issue whereof is, That as in the Negroe’s all pretence to Religion is cut off, so their Owners are hereby set at Liberty, and freed from those importunate Scruples, which Conscience and better Advice might at any time happen to inject into their unsteadie Minds.10

This key passage deserves close study. It tells us five important things about this very early stage of English racism. First of all, racist ideology was created by the planters and slave-merchants out of ‘avarice’. Second, it was spread at first in whispers, furtively. Third, by 1680 it had become respectable enough – had gained enough ‘strength and reputation’ – for its propagators in England to have come into the open (though not yet in print). Fourth, opponents of racism were as yet few and uninfluential. And lastly, one of racism’s functions was to justify the planters and merchants in their own eyes as well as in the eyes of the rest of society; Godwyn says it stopped them feeling guilty about what they were doing to their slaves. If this sounds a shade far-fetched, we must bear in mind that in Godwyn’s day a lot of people – even sugar-planters – believed that if they sinned they might very well end up frying in hell.

Godwyn’s analysis did not end there. He accused the planters and their spokesmen of being prepared to say anything that would safeguard their profits. What they did say wasn’t hard to refute. They argued that blacks were not human beings on the slender basis of skin colour:

Their Complexion, . . . being most obvious to the sight, . . . is apt to make no slight impressions upon rude [i.e. ignorant] Minds, already prepared to admit of any thing for Truth which shall make for Interest . . . And therefore it may not be so improbable . . . that from so poor a Medium, our Negro’s Brutality should be inferred, by such whose affection to so gainful a Doctrine, cannot but make the Way smooth and easie to their Conviction.

Even if black skin were a mark of God’s curse on Ham, black people were human beings and nothing else. ‘The consideration of the shape and figure of our Negro’s Bodies, their Limbs and Members; their Voice and Countenance, in all things according with other Mens; together with their Risibility [i.e. faculty of laughter] and Discourse (Man’s peculiar Faculties) should be a sufficient Conviction.’11 Godwyn contemptuously dismissed the further argument that the enslavement of blacks had confirmed that they were not human beings: ‘If Slavery had that force or power so as to unsoul Men, it must needs follow, that every great Conqueror might at his pleasure, make and unmake Souls.’¹² Yet another racist argument was the alleged stupidity of the blacks – but in fact, Godwyn pointed out, many blacks were ‘confessed by their Owners, to be extraordinary Ingenious, and even to exceed many of the English’.¹³ And Godwyn concluded that the planter class supported ‘that filthy Principle . . . That whatever conduceth to the getting of Mony, and carrying on of Trade, must certainly be lawful’.¹⁴

A few years later the ‘Hellish Principles’ of plantocracy racism were summed up by another of these rather eccentric divines. His name was Francis Brokesby and he was one of those clergymen who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary in 1690 and was deprived of his benefice. Planters, Brokesby wrote, were teaching ‘That Negroes are Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and Treated accordingly (as generally they are) and whom Religion (apt only to make Subjects Mutinous) doth no way Concern’. The ‘sorry weak Arguments’ used by the Barbados planters were, Brokesby added, ‘a clear Indication that their Cause was bad’.¹⁵

The eighteenth century

So far we have been examining plantocracy racism as expressed orally and represented in the writings of christians – mostly supporters of slavery – who objected to racism on religious grounds and some of whom were shrewd enough to detect its economic roots and function, honest and brave enough to attack it publicly. Racists did not themselves get into print until the middle of the eighteenth century. And by then the ground had been prepared for them by three eminent thinkers who, each in his own way, helped to make respectable the notion that Africans were intellectually inferior to Europeans.

As early as 1677 Sir William Petty, founder of modern political economy and one of the founders of the Royal Society, in an essay entitled ‘The Scale of Creatures’, expressed the belief that Europeans differed from Africans not only in colour, hair, shape of nose, lips and cheek-bones, outline of face, and mould of skull: ‘They differ also in their Naturall Manners, & in the internall Qualities of their Minds.’16

Petty’s contemporary John Locke, who happened to have £600 invested in the Royal African Company, not only managed to reconcile a belief in the inalienable rights of man with the view that black slavery was a justifiable institution, but also made a considerable if (as some have it) inadvertent contribution to the view that Africans were in some respects innately inferior to Europeans. Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), whatever its philosophical merits as the primary classic of systematic empiricism, made it possible to argue that Africans might be human but even so had a level of reason comparable to that of animals.¹⁷ Challenging the Augustinian view that there is something supernatural about human intellectual faculties, Locke emphasized the blank mind’s reception of ‘sensations’ from the outside world, and conceived mental faculties as mechanisms for manipulating sensations. Locke’s theory of knowledge paved the way for a mechanistic classification of faculties which, ‘by rendering the concept of mental ability less amorphous than previously . . . helped channel much of the debate on the Negro towards the gratifyingly specific question of whether or not he was the mental equal of the white man’.¹⁸ And so the founder of English empiricism and first systematic exponent of liberalism in political theory helped, quite innocently no doubt, to build a plausible foundation for the racist theory of intellectual gradation. Not that Locke was free from race prejudice. ‘The Child certainly knows,’ he wrote, ‘that the Nurse that feeds it, is neither the Cat it plays with, nor the Blackmoor it is afraid of.’ And again:

A Child having framed the Idea of a Man, it is probable, that his Idea is just like that Picture, which the Painter makes of the visible Appearances joyned together; and such a Complication of Ideas together in his Understanding, makes up the single complex Idea which he calls Man, whereof White or Flesh-colour in England being one, the Child can demonstrate to you, that a Negro is not a Man, because White-colour was one of the constant simple Ideas of the complex Idea he calls Man: And therefore he can demonstrate by the Principle, It is impossible for the same Thing to be, and not to be, that a Negro is not a Man.¹⁹

‘Whatever may be the early thoughts of an English child,’ dryly comments Léon Poliakov, ‘those of Locke betray an unconscious prejudice.’20

However embarrassing all this may be for historians of western philosophy, there is worse. Locke’s successor, the great empiricist David Hume, came out openly as a racist. White people, he claimed, were naturally superior to all other races. He said this in a footnote added to the 1753 reprint of his essay ‘Of National Characters’, first published in 1748. Ignoring the mass of evidence that contradicted his prejudices, Hume wrote:

I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacture amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the white, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without ingenuity, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.²¹

This passage by the great Scottish philosopher Hume, with its slighting reference to the classical scholar Francis Williams (see p. 421 below), was not the first appearance of racism in print. That honour belongs to the writer of a letter published in the London Magazine in 1750. Purporting to summarize Buffon, the author – who chose not to sign his name – described ‘the people called Negroes’ as ‘the most remarkably distinct from the rest of the human species’. After some remarks on the differences between ‘Hotentots’ and ‘Caffers’, including differences in the external female genitalia, this writer added his distinctive contribution to the debate by asserting that ‘a great difference between Negroes and all other Blacks, both in Africa and the East-Indies, lies in this, that the former smell most abominably when they sweat, whereas the latter have no bad smell even when they are sweating’.22

The floodgates were now open, and a lot of muck oozed its way into print over the next few decades. A typical example, worth quoting at length since it is one of Edward Long’s two prime sources, is to be found in the Universal History (1736-65). Two of this immense compilation’s 23 folio volumes contained page after page of lofty abuse of Africans, who ‘are now every-where degenerated into a brutish, ignorant, idle, treacherous, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people’. Various Greek and Roman authorities were cited for the view that Africans were

proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot, and addicted to all kinds of lusts, and most ready to promote them in others, as pimps, panders, incestuous, brutish, and savage, cruel and revengeful, devourers of human flesh, and quaffers of human blood, inconstant, base, treacherous, and cowardly; fond of and addicted to all sorts of superstition and witchcraft; and, in a word, to every vice that came in their way, or within their reach . . . It is hardly possible to find in any African any quality but what is of the bad kind: they are inhuman, drunkards, deceitful, extremely covetous, and perfidious to the highest degree. We need not add to these their impurities and blasphemies, because in these they outdo all other nations, Africa being known to have been ever burning with innumerable impurities; insomuch that one would rather take it for a volcano of the most impure flames, than for a habitation of human creatures . . . St. Austin, who was a native of that country, scruples not to confess, that it is as impossible to be an African and not lascivious, as it is to be born in Africa and not be an African . . .

    THUS much shall suffice for the general character of the native Africans . . . it is so far from being either unjust or exaggerated, with regard to the far greater part of them, that, in many instances, they deserve, if possible, a much more odious one; they being in many parts so utterly void of all humanity, and even natural affection, that parents will sell their wives and children, and vice versâ, for slaves into the American colonies . . . even for so small a matter as a gallon or two of brandy . . .

    IF we . . . take a cursory view of their manufactures and mechanic arts . . . we shall find the spirit of indolence running through them all, even the most necessary of them . . .

    IF we look into those few manufactures and handicrafts that are amongst them, we shall find them carried on with the same rude [i.e. ignorant] and tedious stupidity.23

Even where the Universal History abandoned generalizations in favour of a detailed account of a specific African country, the same invincible prejudice stamped its judgments. Thus the section on Benin insisted that ‘IN general the negroes of this country are libidinous, and much addicted to venery’.²⁴

One of the earliest openly racist pamphleteers in Britain was William Knox, who had been provost-marshal of the British colony of Georgia from 1757 to 1761. On returning to Britain he was appointed agent for Georgia and east Florida. About the year 1768 he was approached by the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker, and invited to write, for the edification of the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Three Tracts respecting the Conversion and Instruction of the Free Indians, and Negroe Slaves in the Colonies. How completely Knox had soaked up the plantocratic ideology during his years in Georgia is shown by his praise of whipping (‘It is no wonder that they are treated like brute beasts . . . If they are incapable of feelling mentally, they will the more frequently be made to feel in their flesh’) no less than by his observations on ‘the dull stupidity of the Negroe’, which ‘leaves him without any desire for instruction’. Knox was sure that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, but not sure why:

Whether the creator originally formed these black people a little lower than other men, or that they have lost their intellectual powers through disuse . . . I will not assume the province of determining; but certain it is, that a new Negroe, (as those lately imported from Africa are called,) is a complete definition of indolent stupidity.

The planters’ objection to their black slaves’ being taught was simply that ‘instruction renders them less fit or less willing to labour’ – and, Knox declared, ‘experience justifies their opinion’. If black slaves were taught to read they would read literature exhorting them to rebel. And then there would be ‘a general insurrection of the Negroes, and the massacre of their owners’.²⁵ As we shall see, Knox was not the only plantocracy spokesman who openly expressed fear of the slaves’ revolutionary potential.

As might be expected, emergent racism was soon being used to buttress the demand that no more blacks be admitted to Britain and that those already here be expelled. The grounds advanced ranged from concern about unemployment to concern about racial intermarriage.

A writer signing himself ‘Anglicanus’, in the London Chronicle of 1764, characterized the importation of black servants as a ‘folly which is becoming too fashionable’ and added:

As they fill the places of so many of our own people, we are by this means depriving so many of them of the means of getting their bread, and thereby decreasing our native population in favour of a race, whose mixture with us is disgraceful, and whose uses cannot be so various and essential as those of white people . . .

    To suppose them preferable in the point of service, can by no means be allowed, nor can their tempers recommend them to our superior regard; for it is their general character to be spiteful, sullen, and revengeful . . . They never can be considered as a part of the people, and therefore their introduction into the community can only serve to elbow as many out of it who are genuine subjects, and in every point preferable . . .

    It is . . . high time that some remedy be applied for the cure of so great an evil, which may be done by totally prohibiting the importation of any more of them, or by laying such a tax on the doing of it, as may prove an effectual discouragement.26

A similarly worded letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the same year complained that blacks would not do servile work more willingly than whites, ‘and if put to it, are generally sullen, spiteful, treacherous, and revengeful. It is therefore highly impolitic to introduce them as servants here, where that rigour and severity is impractical which is absolutely necessary to make them useful’.²⁷ Next year one ‘F.Freeman’ was bemoaning the abundance of ‘Negro and East-India servants’ in the kingdom. They were taking jobs from English people, and the ‘mixture of their breed with our own’ was ‘disgraceful’. His proposed remedy was a capitation tax, to be paid by owners and employers of black people. This ought to raise £60,000 a year – and after all, where black people were concerned, ‘there can be no just plea for their being put on an equal footing with natives, whose birth-right, as members of the community, entitle [sic] them to superior dues’.28 In 1773 a writer in the London Chronicle urged that black people be expelled from Britain and no more allowed in, so as to ‘remove the envy of our native servants, who have some reason to complain that the Negroes enjoy all the happiness of ease in domestic life, while many of those starve for want of places’. But two other things worried this writer even more. One was revolution; the other, mixed marriages. There was a danger that enthusiastic advocates of black freedom

may inspire our Colony Negroes with endeavours to steal away from thence, in order to come into this land of liberty, though it be to starve, in vain hopes of washing the Blackamoor white. If not that effect, they may instil such enthusiastic notions of liberty, as may occasion revolutions in our colonies.

The expulsion of black people and a bar on further entry would somehow diminish this revolutionary danger – and would ‘save the natural beauty of Britons from the Morisco tint’. This racist polemic was also published, over the signature ‘Britannicus’, as the preface to the 1773 edition of An Essay upon Plantership by Samuel Martin, agent for Antigua.²⁹

Stimulated by the outcome of the Somerset case, and by the unmistakable beginning of a swing of public opinion against the slave trade, these colonial agents were now working overtime. Samuel Estwick, assistant agent for Barbados, energetically pressed the demand for legislation to preserve racial purity by prohibiting the entry of black people into Britain. The son of a Barbados planter, Estwick married the daughter of a governor of Barbados, owned ‘very large possessions in the West India islands’,³⁰ became agent for Barbados and paymaster-general, and sat in the House of Commons for 16 years.³¹ In his attack on the Mansfield decision, Considerations on the Negroe Cause (1772), Estwick urged that a law to keep out black people would ‘preserve the race of Britons from stain and contamination’.³² And in the second edition, published the following year, he elaborated his racist views, contending that blacks were not human beings in the same sense as Englishmen. Among animals there were many kinds, ‘each kind having its proper species subordinate thereto’. It was hard to believe that humanity was not also differentiated in that way:

Does this not seem to break in upon and unlink that great chain of Heaven, which in due gradation joins and unites the whole with all its parts? May it not be more perfective of the system to say, that human nature is a class, comprehending an order of beings, of which man is the genus, divided into distinct and separate species of men?33

After quoting both Locke and Hume, and providing a thumbnail sketch of African barbarity and inherent moral depravity (‘Their barbarity to their children . . . Their cruelty to their aged parents’), Estwick concluded that black people were ‘filling up that space in life beyond the bounds of which they are not capable of passing; differing from other men, not in kind, but in species’.³⁴ In short, black people were irredeemably and permanently sub-human. And it followed that the plantocracy of which Estwick was a paid agent was fully entitled to deprive them of freedom and exploit them to the uttermost.

This pamphlet of Estwick’s was the second immediate source for Edward Long’s racist attack on black people. Born in Cornwall in 1734, Long was the son of a Jamaica planter whose family had been connected with the island since shortly after the English conquest in 1655. He himself went to Jamaica as a young man of 23, married a Beckford heiress, became a man of property, and was appointed justice of the Vice-Admiralty Court. He returned to Britain in 1769 and published his History of Jamaica five years later. First however came a sort of trial run for the History: a pamphlet called Candid Reflections Upon the Judgement lately awarded by the Court of King’s Bench . . . On what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause (1772). Candour is not, perhaps, the first term that would spring to mind nowadays for that eloquent passage in which, after describing black people in Britain as ‘a dissolute, idle, profligate crew’, Long unwittingly revealed his deepest preoccupations:

The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have a numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture, and from the chances, the ups and downs of life, this alloy may spread so extensively, as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of the people, till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and baseness of mind. This is a venomous and dangerous ulcer, that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide, until every family catches infection from it.35

Long makes plain his political, as well as his sexual and social, anxieties. He observes that if black people acquired the rights of Englishmen they might become MPs or landowners. Such developments would be neither politic, expedient, nor useful. Blacks were incapable of adding anything to the general support and improvement of the kingdom: ‘They are neither husbandmen, manufacturers, nor artificers. They have neither strength of constitution, inclination, or skill, to perform the common drudgeries of husbandry in this climate and country.’³⁶ And Long prefigured both the tone and the subject-matter of twentieth-century racism with his assertion that ‘the public good of this kingdom requires that some restraint should be laid on the unnatural increase of blacks imported into it’.³⁷

Two years later there appeared the three volumes of Long’s History of Jamaica. It’s a sprawling ragbag of a book, with observations of varying degrees of merit on meteorology, climatology, botany, zoology, medicine, history, geography, law, government, and commerce – and a spirited attack on colonial governors, whom Long seems to have hated almost as much as he hated blacks, accusing them of ‘artifice, duplicity, haughtiness, violence, rapine, avarice, meanness, rancour, and dishonesty’.³⁸ But what concerns us is the lengthy section which, containing Long’s doctrine of innate black inferiority, may be termed the classic exposition of English racism. We have already identified the two proximate sources which Long lays under contribution without a word of acknowledgment. It is quite clear that he had at his elbow, as he wrote, those volumes of the Universal History presenting Africa and Africans in the worst possible light and Estwick’s pamphlet, from which he copied virtually word for word the passage about the lowly place of Africans in ‘that great chain of Heaven’. We do not have to quote Long at excessive length to display both his venom and his unoriginality.

‘For my own part,’ he wrote, ‘I think there are extremely potent reasons for believing, that the White and the Negroe are two distinct species.’ Instead of hair, black people had ‘a covering of wool, like the bestial fleece’. Their bodies were infested with black lice. Their ‘bestial or fetid smell’ was so strong that ‘it continues in places where they have been near a quarter of an hour’. They had no plan or system of morality. They were barbarous to their children. Black men had no taste but for women, and eating and drinking to excess; no wish but to be idle. In Africa ‘their roads . . . are mere sheep-paths, twice as long as they need be, and almost impassible’. All authors said that blacks were ‘the vilest of the human kind’.

When we reflect on . . . their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude, that they are a different species of the same genus? . . . Nor do [orang-utans] seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negroe race; with some of whom, it is credible that they have the most intimate connexion and consanguinity. The amorous intercourse between them may be frequent . . . and it is certain, that both races agree perfectly well in lasciviousness of disposition.

In fact, Long went on, the orang-utan had in form a much nearer resemblance to blacks than the latter bore to whites. There was a continuous chain of intellectual gradation, too, from monkeys through varieties of blacks, ‘until we mark its utmost limit of perfection in the pure White’. Black people had brutish table-manners, ‘eating flesh almost raw by choice, though intolerably putrid and full of meggots’. They tore the meat with their ‘talons’ and ‘chuck it by handfulls down their throats with all the voracity of wild beasts’. They had no notion of shooting birds on the wing, ‘nor can they project a straight line, nor lay any substance square with another’. In sexual behaviour (to which enthralling topic Long was drawn back again and again) ‘they are libidinous and shameless as monkies, or baboons’, and ‘the equally hot temperament of their women has given probability to the charge of their admitting these animals frequently to their embrace’. Africa was, in short, the ‘parent of every thing that is monstrous in nature’.39

What is not plagiarism here is mere trivial prejudice, on the level of planters’ dinner-table gossip. And the plagiarism is from sources that, as we have seen, were themselves anything but original. Long’s peculiar talent lay in linking a ‘scientific’-sounding assertion of black inferiority – he was the first pseudo-scientific racist – with a defence of black slavery that comes across a good deal more plausibly than any previous statement of the slave-owners’ case. As a ‘scientist’, he is beneath contempt but was highly influential; as a pro-slavery propagandist he was rather less influential but, paradoxically, has to be taken rather more seriously. Here is the handy summary of Long’s views on black slavery provided by the editor of the 1970 reprint of the History of Jamaica; it shows admirably how the racist diatribe fits into, and serves the purpose of, the overall economic argument:

That the trade in slaves and in goods produced by slaves was immensely profitable, not only to the West Indies, but to Britain itself and that it greatly enriched Englishmen in all walks of life; that West Indian slavery was, on the whole, a mild and benevolent institution and that slaves were better off than the lowest classes in Britain; that negro slavery was inevitable and necessary in certain regions of the world; that the slave trade benefited and helped to civilise Africa; that virtually all the slaves were originally convicted criminals; that in every mental and moral way negroes were absolutely inferior to white men, and that the most constructive thing which could happen to them was to be compelled to work productively.40

It is interesting that Long, in his defence of black slavery, omits two of the pro-slavery arguments that were often heard in his day. There is nothing in his book about God’s curse on Ham. Long was no friend of orthodox religion, and that argument was evidently not available to him (though in 1789 it was to figure prominently in a pro-slavery pamphlet by the Tobago planter and West India Committee publicist Gilbert Francklyn).⁴¹ Omitted also, from Long’s History, is the argument that Britain could not give up the slave trade since other European powers would simply fill the gap and mop up the profit. Long had in fact written rhetorically in 1772 that ‘a total sacrifice of our African trade and American possessions’ to a ‘fantastic idea of English liberty’ would degrade Britain into ‘the tributary province of some potent neighbour’.⁴² But the abolitionist movement was only in its infancy in the early 1770s, and Long clearly thought the British about as likely to give up the slave trade and slavery as to give up roast beef and beer. So on this point the History is silent.

These omissions make the economic thrust of Long’s argument all the more significant. And of course, in one important aspect, he was stating the truth. The slave trade and slavery had indeed proved enormously profitable to Britain and to many rapidly expanding British industries. But what about Long’s assertion that slaves in the West Indies were better off than the lowest classes in Britain? That was also true – for the minority who performed household duties on well-run plantations. They lived under perpetual threat of demotion to field work as well as perpetual threat of the lash. But in terms of food, living accommodation, and working conditions their lot was preferable to that of the men, women, and children in small-scale and domestic industry or in the barrack-like factories with their harsh, cruel discipline.43 Here was the second grain of truth within the big lie. Yet Britain’s industrial workers, for all their long hours, drab conditions, miserable wages, and insanitary housing, were incomparably better off than the mass of plantation field slaves. Britain’s dark satanic mills were precisely that. But over here the overseers did not flog their workers, or chop arms, legs, hands, fingers, or ears off as a punishment.⁴⁴

‘We must not presume’, warns David Brion Davis in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), ‘. . . that Edward Long lacked a sympathetic audience, or was totally unrepresentative of his time.’⁴⁵ Far from it. He was influential and his opinions were shared by many. In the same year that his History of Jamaica appeared, no less a figure than Oliver Goldsmith, author of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), She Stoops to Conquer (1774), and other enduring contributions to English literature, described the physical ‘deformities’ and ‘insupportable’ smell of black people in terms strikingly similar to Long’s. ‘This gloomy race of mankind’, he wrote in his History of the Earth, ‘is found to blacken all the southern parts of Africa.’ Their minds were ‘incapable of strong exertions’. In general, the black race was ‘stupid, indolent, and mischievous’.⁴⁶ And, again in the same year, a British ‘lady of quality’ on a visit to Antigua, shocked by the ‘dreadful’ scars that floggings had left on the slaves’ backs, comforted herself with the reflection that ‘when one comes to be better acquainted with the nature of the Negroes, the horrour of it must wear off’. For the blacks were ‘brutes’ whose ‘Natures seem made to bear it, and whose sufferings are not attended with shame or pain beyond the present moment’.⁴⁷

It is clear that by the 1770s racism had more than a foothold in Britain. In particular, the spectre of racial intermarriage and ‘contamination’, incessantly invoked by the West Indians’ propagandists, was haunting England. The year after Long’s History came out, the novelist Charles Johnstone, best known for his scandalous chronicle Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760-5), declared in his book The Pilgrim that if English people mixed with Jews and blacks ‘their progeny will not much longer have reason to value themselves on their beauty, wit, or virtue’.⁴⁸ Ten years later James Tobin of Nevis was uttering his warning that ‘the great numbers of negroes at present in England, the strange partiality shewn for them by the lower orders of women, and the rapid increase of a dark and contaminated breed, are evils which have long been complained of and call every day more loudly for enquiry and redress’49 – a statement which, as we saw in chapter 5, was effectively challenged by Olaudah Equiano.⁵⁰

A racist still more virulent – though no more original – than Edward Long was Philip Thicknesse, who had spent some years in the English colony of Georgia and had then gone to Jamaica for a few years’ sporadic warfare against the black rebels in the mountains. This experience seems to have bred in him a hatred of black people more violent even than his notorious hatred of men-mid-wives. He inserted into the second edition (1778) of his book A Year’s Journey through France and Part of Spain an entire chapter on his pet hate. Black people were

in every respect, men of a lower order, and so made by the Creator of all things . . . Their face is scarce what we call human, their legs without any inner calf, and their broad, flat foot, and long toes (which they can use as well as we do our fingers) have much the resemblance of the Orang Outang, or Jocko [i.e. chimpanzee], and other quadrupeds of their own climates. As to their intellects, not one was ever born with solid sense; yet all have a degree of monkey cunning, and even monkey mischief, which often stands them in better stead than sense. They are in nature cruel, to the highest degree . . . The frequent marriages of these men here with white women, and the succession of black, brown, and whity brown people, produced by these very unnatural (for unnatural they are) alliances, have been better observed in France, than in this once country of greater liberty . . . I laugh when I hear . . . talk of the fidelity of those people. I never yet knew one who was not at bottom a villain . . . They are a bad, gloomy-minded, revengeful people, and in the course of a few centuries they will over-run this country with a race of men of the very worst sort under heaven . . . London abounds with an incredible number of these black men, who have clubs to support those who are out of place, and [in] every country town, nay in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys and infinitely more dangerous . . . A mixture of negro blood with the natives of this country is big with great and mighty mischief, and . . . if they are to live among us, they ought by some very severe law to be compelled to marry only among themselves, and to have no criminal intercourse whatever with people of other complexions. There is not on earth so mischievous and vicious an animal as a mule, nor in my humble opinion a worse race of men than the negroes of Africa.51

This ugly diatribe reads like a souped-up paraphrase of Long, whom Thicknesse had clearly read and who (as Shyllon has suggested) may have been the ‘Lover of Blacks’ that wrote with such heavy irony in the World newspaper three days before Wilberforce was due to move his first Commons motion against the slave trade. The letter contained a leering forecast of what would happen in Britain if the slaves in the West Indies were set free. Having taken over the plantations, they would be able to reside in Britain as ‘a new tribe of West-India Planters’ and marry the daughters of the nobility: ‘The breed of the inhabitants would be improved by the cross . . . The British Ladies’ noses . . . would get a truss up . . . It would save the expence of frizzing their hair, for their hair would friz of itself’ Blacks already in England had in some measure anticipated their future greatness: ‘Witness the great and tremendous tails they have affixed to their curly pashes [i.e. heads] . . . This degree of vanity . . . may be pardoned, considering the benefit that will arise from this ostensible method of shewing their parts; and how much sooner it will attract the notice of the Fair Sex, who are ever partial to parts and abilities.’ One advantage of the ‘blending of the two breeds’ would be ‘the graceful air that the young bucks, our grandchildren, of the mixed breed, will have, in walking in St. James’s and Bond-streets; – the cross will give them the appearance of a swivel in the backside, or a circuitous motion of the podex.’⁵²

All this, including the laboured sexual innuendo, is typical of the polemical tone of the period, as is the elegant way that ‘Civis’, in the Morning Chronicle, had of dismissing black literary achievement: ‘If I were to allow some share of merit to Gustavus Vasa, Ignatius Sancho, &c. it would not prove equality more, than a pig having been taught to fetch a cord, letters, &c. would shew it not to be a pig, but some other animal’.⁵³

By the 1790s the ‘taint’ of intermarriage had become an obsession with the propagandists of racism. Of course, as Equiano had pointed out, when white planters fathered children on their black slaves, nobody in Britain gave a damn. But when black men married white women a high degree of sexual and social anxiety was expressed. To the merchant John Scattergood, it was ‘madness’ to admit blacks to the privileges of Europeans ‘and treat them as our equals’. If slavery were abolished, ‘the Negroes from all parts of the world will flock hither, mix with the natives, spoil the breed of our common people, increase the number of crimes and criminals, and make Britain the sink of all the earth, for mongrels, vagrants, and vagabonds’. Britain would be wise, Scattergood added, to banish black people from her dominions ‘while it is yet in her power to hinder their migration hither’.54 Thomas Atwood, chief judge of Dominica and later of the Bahamas, was another who thought that ‘it is too common for the women to form connections with negro men’ – in Europe, that is, for such a thing, according to Atwood, was unheard of in the West Indies. No black person could become an artist or scientist:

There is . . . something so very unaccountable in the genius of all negros, so very different from that of white people in general, that there is not to be produced an instance in the West Indies, of any of them ever arriving to any degree of perfection in the liberal arts or sciences, notwithstanding the greatest pains taken with them.

Atwood claimed unctuously that the treatment the slaves received from their owners ‘is, as nearly as can be, that of a parent to his children’. A few pages later he dropped the cant and came out openly in defence of the whip:

Negros are in general much addicted to drunkenness, thievery, incontinency [i.e. unchastity], and idleness . . . Idleness is so very predominant in negros, and their dislike of labour is so great, that it is very difficult to make them work: it is sometimes absolutely necessary to have recourse to measures that appear cruel, in order to oblige them to labour.⁵⁵

Even Bryan Edwards, a West India merchant who founded a bank at Southampton, became an MP, and is often regarded as the most gentlemanly and civilized of the plantocrat writers, complained of the ‘strong and fetid odour’ of black people, their ‘cowardly, thievish, and sullen disposition’, and their ‘licentious and dissolute manners’.⁵⁶ If this was the gentlemanly and civilized end of the racist spectrum in the 1790s, what, it may be asked, lay at the other end?

The answer can be found in an anonymous pamphlet, Fugitive Thoughts on the African Slave Trade, published at Liverpool in 1792. ‘Africans being the most lascivious of all human beings,’ it said, ‘may it not be imagined, that the cries they let forth at being torn from their wives, proceed from the dread that they will never have the opportunity of indulging their passions in the country to which they are embarking?’57

Pseudo-scientific racism

By the 1770s racism was firmly established in Britain as ‘a principal handmaiden to the slave trade and slavery’.1 The British slave trade was ended in 1807; slavery, in 1833. Could racism now be dispensed with? By no means. It was too valuable. A new basis and new purpose for it had emerged. It was to become a principal handmaiden to empire. The culminating stage in the rise of English racism was the development of a strident pseudo-scientific mythology of race that would become the most important ingredient in British imperial theory.

This mythology arose in the 1770s, precisely when the British government first had to face the problem of ruling a territory with ‘natives’ in it. In 1773 the Regulation Act asserted parliamentary control over the East India Company for the first time; Warren Hastings was appointed first governor-general of Bengal and a supreme court was set up in Calcutta. In the following year Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, the pivotal book in the turn to pseudoscientific racism, was published. Pure coincidence, of course. But the timing turned out to be crucial for the subsequent history of the British Empire. From the 1770s onwards the empire and the pseudo-scientific racism that served it developed side by side.² Even the cosmetic version of the doctrine – the idea of ‘imperial trusteeship’ for the betterment of ‘backward peoples’ – took shape in the debates over the abolition of the slave trade in the years before 1807.³ From the 1840s to the 1940s, Britain’s ‘native policy’ was dominated by racism. The golden age of the British Empire was the golden age of British racism too.

Long’s book, furnishing ready-made arguments for the belief that black people were innately inferior to white people, was widely read, and widely accepted, by the scientists of his own time and for some 40 years after his death in 1813. These arguments crop up again and again in the writings of later polygenists of high scientific repute.⁴ But Long was not the sole source of pseudo-scientific racism. It was nourished also by a series of theories and ‘discoveries’ in the biological sciences of the eighteenth century: notably, the infant science of anthropology. This was the great century of classification, and it was the Swedish botanist Carl Linné, generally known as Linnaeus, who laid the basis for the modern classification of plants and animals. He was first to call us Homo sapiens, and he arranged us in a hierarchy largely based on skin colour, with whites at the top. In the 1758 edition of his Systema naturae he gave thumbnail sketches of, amongst others, European Man and African Man. Here is how these descriptions were translated into English in 1792:

H. Europaei. Of fair complexion, sanguine temperament, and brawny form . . . Of gentle manners, acute in judgment, of quick invention, and governed by fixed laws . . .

H. Afri. Of black complexion, phlegmatic temperament, and relaxed fibre . . . Of crafty, indolent, and careless disposition, and are governed in their actions by caprice. – Anoint the skin with grease.5

It was a pupil of Linnaeus who, relating an experiment by the French naturalist Réaumur, in which a rabbit allegedly fertilized a hen to produce chicks covered with fine hair instead of feathers, commented that ‘the most frightful conclusion could be drawn from this; . . . one would have reason to think that the Moors had a rather strange origin’.⁶ Clearly, all those travellers’ tales had become ‘thoroughly cemented into Western thought’.⁷ The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet wrote in 1764 of the ‘prodigious number of continued links’ between ‘the most perfect man’ and the ape, and left no doubt in his readers’ minds as to the identity of ‘the most perfect man’: ‘Let the flat-faced African, with his black complexion and woolly hair, give place to the European, whose regular features are set off by the whiteness of his complexion and beauty of his head of hair. To the filthiness [malpropreté] of a Hottentot, oppose the neatness of a Dutchman.’⁸ This brand of ‘scientific’ thought was reflected in the writings of the British MP and Board of Trade official Soame Jenyns, whose treatise ‘On the Chain of Universal Being’ also put ‘the brutal Hottentot’ at the bottom of the scale but preferred Newton at ‘the summit’ to any Dutchman, however neat.⁹

A major but not always deliberate contribution to pseudo-scientific racism was made in the eighteenth century by pioneering students of the human skull. The ‘father of craniology’ was a German professor of medicine called Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Cofounder with Buffon of the science of physical anthropology, Blumenbach disliked the ‘Chain of Being’, divided humanity first into four and then into five varieties, denied that any of these varieties was inferior to others, and denied that Africans could not acquire learning.10 A friend of Ignatius Sancho by correspondence, he collected a library of books by black authors.¹¹ But he also collected human skulls from all over the world, and it was one of these skulls, from the Caucasus in Russia, that led him to suppose that Europeans came from that region, to coin the word ‘Caucasian’ to describe the white variety of humans, and to prefer this ‘most beautiful form of the skull’ to the two extremes furthest from it, skulls which he called ‘Mongolian’ and ‘Ethiopian’.¹² Blumenbach’s method of studying skulls was to stick them between his feet and examine them from above to see what shape they were. Here he followed Buffon’s colleague Louis Daubenton, who had used geometrical projection to measure the position of the head on top of the spinal column and had correlated the angle thus obtained with the amount of will-power in different races.¹³

Blumenbach’s method did not satisfy the Dutch comparative anatomist Pieter Camper, whose ‘facial angle’ – an expression he himself does not seem to have used – was, in a sense, the springboard of modern craniology. Camper was surgeon, obstetrician, authority on medical jurisprudence, artist, and sculptor. His ‘facial angle’ measured the extent to which the jaw juts out from the rest of the skull. A wide angle was thought to indicate a higher forehead, a bigger brain, more intelligence, and a more beautiful appearance. According to Camper, the angle grew wider as one went from Africans, through Indians, to Europeans. And it was ‘amusing’, he wrote, to contemplate an arrangement of skulls on a shelf in his cabinet, placed ‘in a regular succession’ from apes, through Africans, to Europeans. Camper found ‘a striking resemblance between the race of Monkies and of Blacks’.¹⁴ (As Jordan points out, if amount of hair had been chosen as the criterion of ranking, Africans would have come out on top, Indians in the middle, and Europeans at the bottom, next to apes: ‘When Europeans set about to rank the varieties of men, their decision that the Negro was at the bottom and the white man at the top was not dictated . . . by the facts of human biology.’)¹⁵ A similar arrangement of skulls was made by the English physician John Hunter,¹⁶ and the German anatomist Thomas Soemmerring, pupil and friend of Camper, Blumenbach, and Goethe, also tried to prove that Africans’ skulls were intermediate between those of Europeans and those of monkeys, and that the African’s brain was ‘smaller than that of the European’.17

Meanwhile the Scottish lawyer, polymath, and ‘common sense’ polygenist Lord Kames, rival of Lord Monboddo, was pioneering a racist interpretation of society by claiming that ever since the Tower of Babel humanity had been divided into different species, each adapted to a different climate. ‘The black colour of negroes, thick lips, flat nose, crisped woolly hair, and rank smell, distinguish them from every other race of men’, he wrote – and by ‘race’, as he made clear, he meant ‘species’.¹⁸

The scene was now set for the influential Manchester physician Charles White to lecture to the Literary and Philosophical Society of that city in 1795, quoting United States President Thomas Jefferson’s ‘suspicion’ that blacks were inferior to whites;¹⁹ quoting lengthy extracts from Soemmerring; quoting Long on black lice; declaring that ‘in whatever respect the African differs from the European, the particularity brings him nearer to the ape’ and that ‘the lowest degree of the human race’ resided in Africa; insisting that black people were a different species from whites; stressing that all the same they had souls and that nothing he said was to be taken as a defence of slavery (there is here a sharp break with plantocracy racism); and concluding with this ringing, not to say passionate, declaration of white superiority:

The white European . . . being most removed from the brute creation, may, on that account, be considered as the most beautiful of the human race. No one will doubt his superiority in intellectual powers; and I believe it will be found that his capacity is naturally superior also to that of every other man. Where shall we find, unless in the European, that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain . . .? . . . Where that variety of features, and fulness of expression; those long, flowing graceful ringlets; that majestic beard, those rosy cheeks and coral lips? Where that erect posture of the body and noble gait? In what other quarter of the globe shall we find the blush that overspreads the soft features of the beautiful women of Europe, that emblem of modesty, of delicate feelings, and of sense? Where that nice expression of the amiable and softer passions in the countenance; and that general elegance of features and complexion? Where, except on the bosom of the European woman, two such plump and snowy white hemispheres, tipt with vermillion?²⁰

With Charles White’s lecture, published in 1799 as Account of the regular gradation in man, English racism may be said to have come of age. Its later development, throughout the nineteenth century, presents a picture of remarkable diversity and complexity, which there is room here only to summarize. Three facts will help to guide us through this maze of theories.

First, racism was not confined to a handful of cranks. Virtually every scientist and intellectual in nineteenth-century Britain took it for granted that only people with white skin were capable of thinking and governing. Even the distinguished ethnologist James Cowles Prichard, humanitarian and monogenist though he was, insisted on a relation between the ‘physical character’ of West Africans and their ‘moral condition’. The Igbos, ‘in the greatest degree remarkable for deformed countenances, projecting jaws, flat foreheads, and for other Negro peculiarities’, were ‘savage and morally degraded’; the ‘most civilized races’, on the other hand, like the Mandings, ‘have, as far as form is concerned, nearly European countenances and a corresponding configuration of the head’.21 Scientific thought accepted race superiority and inferiority until well into the twentieth century. Only in the past 30 or 40 years has racism lost intellectual respectability.

Second, amid all the ramifications of contending schools of racist thought, there was total agreement on one essential point:

Whether the ‘inferior races’ were to be coddled and protected, exterminated, forced to labor for their ‘betters’, or made into permanent wards, they were undoubtedly outsiders – a kind of racial proletariat. They were forever barred both individually and collectively from high office in church and state, from important technical posts in law and medicine, and from any important voice in their own affairs . . . They were racially unfitted for ‘advanced’ British institutions such as representative democracy.²²

And third, there was an organic connection in nineteenth-century Britain between the attitude the ruling class took to the ‘natives’ in its colonies and the attitude it took to the poor at home. Though the Chartist movement evaporated after 1848, by the 1860s working people in Britain were once more challenging the political and economic power of those who ruled and employed them. Faced with this challenge, ‘the proponents of social inequality slipped all the more readily into racial rhetoric’.²³ ‘Lesser breeds’ and ‘lower orders’ had much in common, not least in the threat they presented to law and order:

The English governing classes in the 1860’s regarded the Irish and the non-European ‘native’ peoples just as they had, quite openly, regarded their own labouring classes for many centuries: as thoroughly undisciplined, with a tendency to revert to bestial behaviour, consequently requiring to be kept in order by force, and by occasional but severe flashes of violence; vicious and sly, incapable of telling the truth, naturally lazy and unwilling to work unless under compulsion.24

As V.G. Kiernan puts it, ‘discontented native in the colonies, labour agitator in the mills, were the same serpent in alternate disguises. Much of the talk about the barbarism or darkness of the outer world, which it was Europe’s mission to rout, was a transmuted fear of the masses at home’.²⁵

Bearing these three facts in mind, we can summarize nineteenth-century English racism under the broad headings of phrenology, teleology, evolutionism, anthropology, social darwinism, Anglo-Saxonism, trusteeship, and vulgar racism.²⁶

By their bumps ye shall know them

The pseudo-science of phrenology, which told people’s characters from the contours of their skulls, served from the start as a prop to racism. Most of the leading phrenologists had large collections of human skulls from all over the world and firmly believed there was a correlation between the shape of the head in different human varieties and their degree of civilization. In 1819 the distinguished surgeon Sir William Lawrence was using phrenology to show that race and culture were connected. ‘The Negro structure’, he wrote, ‘approximates unequivocally to that of the monkey.’ Black people

indulge, almost universally, in disgusting debauchery and sensuality, and display gross selfishness, indifference to the pains and pleasures of others, insensibility to beauty of form, order, and harmony, and an almost entire want of . . . elevated sentiments, manly virtues, and moral feeling . . . The inferiority of the dark to the white races is much more general and strongly marked in the powers of knowledge and reflection, the intellectual faculties . . . than in moral feelings and dispositions . . . I deem the moral and intellectual character of the Negro inferior, and decidedly so, to that of the European.27

Lawrence’s book Lectures on physiology, zoology, and the Natural History of Man was denounced – not for its racism, but for views on heredity which anticipated Darwin and were held to endanger society – and he was forced to suppress it.²⁸

The Edinburgh lawyer George Combe, chief popularizer of phrenology in Britain, firmly believed it could be applied to the study of race. Africans’ skulls, he said, were inferior to those of Europeans. Although they showed a high development of Philoprogenitiveness, Concentrativeness, Veneration, and Hope, they lacked Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, Ideality, and Reflection. Blacks were not unfit for free labour – some as operative mechanics, others as clerks, others as ‘mere labourers’.²⁹

By the 1820s phrenology was in vogue, and this gave added force to the views of W.F. Edwards, an English anthropologist who lived in France and wrote in French. For Edwards, the form and proportion of the head and face provided the crucial distinction between races.³⁰ Edwards’s racial interpretation of European history ‘marked the beginning of a new flowering for pseudo-scientific racism’, since, ‘if racial interpretations of European history could be made to look “scientific”, racial explanations of African culture seemed all the more plausible’.³¹

Phrenology justified empire-building. It told the British that they were ruling over races which, unlike themselves, lacked force of character. According to Combe, before Europeans took civilization to Africa that continent exhibited ‘one unbroken scene of moral and intellectual desolation’.³² The rich phrenologist and physician Robert Verity, an admirer of Lord Kames, predicted that ‘the inferior and weaker’ races would in due course become extinct and that within 100 years Britain, its wealth, population, and intelligence, would overshadow the whole world and British civilization and language would likewise be dominant. Of all the modern nations, the English had ‘a greater and more proportionate admixture of the best races’: ‘Eminently superior in their cerebral type, and their physical conformation, they join to these advantages the very best combination of temperament.’³³ Here, no doubt, lay the main secret of phrenology’s success. The British were already convinced of their high destiny. Phrenology told them why they were lucky and how to remain so.³⁴

Blacks as beasts of burden

‘The strongest moral force in the literature of his time.’ That is how The Cambridge History of English Literature describes Thomas Carlyle, author of Sartor Resartus (1836) and The French Revolution (1837). He ‘affirmed without fear’, it adds, ‘ . . . the eternal need for righteousness in the dealings of man with man’.35 One of Carlyle’s less famous works is an Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1853), first published under a less insulting title in Fraser’s Magazine in 1849. From this it emerged that when white men had dealings with black men righteousness gave place to hierarchy. As Carlyle saw it, Africans had been created inferior in order to serve their European masters. Whites were born wiser than blacks, and blacks must obey them: ‘That, you may depend on it, my obscure Black friends, is and was always the Law of the World, for you and for all men: To be servants, the more foolish of us to the more wise.’ Carlyle trounced humanitarians ‘sunk in deep froth-oceans of “Benevolence”, “Fraternity”, “Emancipation-principle”, “Christian Philanthropy”, and other most amiable-looking, but most baseless . . . jargon’ and thereby blinded to black people’s innate stupidity and laziness.³⁶ Though the radical philosopher John Stuart Mill publicly attacked Carlyle for this article, it circulated widely in pamphlet form; after all, ‘it matched exactly the opinion of the Colonial Office’.³⁷ In 1867, Carlyle reaffirmed his position:

One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments, – with a turn for Nigger Melodies, and the like: – he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant.³⁸

As for the English, Carlyle saw them as a chosen people, whose special glorious mission was to throw open the world’s waste lands – ‘Sugar Islands, Spice Islands, Indias, Canadas, – these, by the real decree of Heaven, were ours’. And he was the original discoverer of that idol of later romantic fiction, the Strong Silent Man, his ideal type of Englishman.³⁹

Though Carlyle was the most prominent representative of the teleological view of race, he was by no means the only one. Another leading English writer of the period, the novelist Anthony Trollope, thought black people idle, sensuous, and incapable of much sustained intellectual effort. They could ‘observe . . . but . . . seldom reason’. On the other hand, they were capable of the hardest physical work, ‘and that probably with less bodily pain than men of any other race’.40 The Spectator, quoting the essayist William Rathbone Greg in 1865, put the teleological view in a nutshell: ‘The negroes are made on pupose to serve the whites, just as the black ants are made on purpose to serve the red.’⁴¹

A variant of the teleological view, favoured by the medical profession, held that blacks were capable, whites incapable, of working in the tropics. Since the resources of the tropics had been put there for the whole of humanity to enjoy, they must be exploited by the labour, forced, if need be, of those capable of working there.⁴² Extreme supporters of this view went so far as to suggest that emancipation had failed and slavery should be brought back in the West Indies; Disraeli proposed this obliquely in a Commons speech in 1846.⁴³

One British colonial administrator who supported the teleological view was the explorer Sir Harry Johnston, who served as commissioner for South Central Africa from 1891 to 1896 and special commissioner for Uganda from 1899 to 1901. He wrote in 1899 that Africans, with few exceptions, were the natural servants of other races: ‘The negro in general is a born slave’, possessing great physical strength, docility, cheerfulness, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, gratitude for kindness, and ability to ‘toil hard under the hot sun and in the unhealthy climates of the torrid zone’; ‘provided he is well fed, he is easily made happy’.⁴⁴ The same mythology was expressed in the same period by the respected classical scholar and humanitarian Gilbert Murray, who wrote in 1900:

There is in the world a hierarchy of races . . . those nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others, and the lower work of the world will tend in the long-run to be done by the lower breeds of men. This much we of the ruling colour will no doubt accept as obvious.⁴⁵

The road to extinction

Some white Americans argued in the eighteenth century that the extinction of American ‘Indians’ was nature’s way of making room for a higher race. This evolutionary racism was imported into Britain in the 1830s and was soon dominating discussions about the proper ‘native policy’ for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. In 1841 Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, advanced a racial interpretation of European history. He thought the final stage of history had been reached; races unable to absorb European culture would dwindle away and, in the end, become extinct.46

But suppose – just suppose – the dark-skinned races fought back? The outcome of the race struggle might not, after all, be a foregone conclusion. This chilling prospect was a central preoccupation of the Scottish anatomist Dr Robert Knox, ‘one of the key figures in the general Western movement towards a dogmatic pseudoscientific racism’.⁴⁷ Knox’s career as surgeon had been ruined by his connection with the sordid Burke and Hare body-snatching scandal. He was mobbed and burnt in effigy. He then turned to the ‘science’ of ‘transcendental anatomy’, and his popular lectures on this subject were published in 1850 as The Races of Men. Here is the key passage, blending racism, belligerence, and dreams of empire in equal measure:

Look at the Negro, so well known to you, and say, need I describe him? Is he shaped like any white person? Is the anatomy of his frame, of his muscles, or organs like ours? Does he walk like us, think like us, act like us? Not in the least. What an innate hatred the Saxon has for him, and how I have laughed at the mock philanthropy of England! . . . it is a painful topic; and yet this despised race drove the warlike French from St. Domingo [i.e. Haiti], and the issue of a struggle with them in Jamaica might be doubtful. But come it will, and then the courage of the Negro will be tried against England . . . With one thousand white men all the blacks of St. Domingo could be defeated in a single action. This is my opinion of the dark races.

    Can the black races become civilized? I should say not . . .

    By ascending the Senegal cautiously and rapidly . . . a thousand brave men on horseback might seize and hold Central Africa to the north of the tropic; the Celtic race, will, no doubt, attempt this some day. On the other hand, accident has prepared the way for a speedy occupation of Africa to the south of the equator by the Saxon race, the Anglo-Saxon.

This bold armchair strategist sought to prove that ‘race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization, depends on it’. A generation after Auschwitz, it is hard not to shudder when one reads his gloating vision of the outcome of racial conflict: ‘What signify these dark races to us? Who cares particularly for the Negro, or the Hottentot, or the Kaffir? These latter have proved a very troublesome race, and the sooner they are put out of the way the better.’ The dark races were simply animals: ‘Destined by the nature of their race, to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence, it matters little how their extinction is brought about.’48

Like Edward Long 80 years before, Dr Knox was anything but original. He mixed together scraps of various theories put forward in the first half of the nineteenth century and earlier, flavouring this hodge-podge with his own ‘wild irrational streak’. He was ‘a peculiar example of what a confused, and perhaps dangerous, mind could make of what had often been put forward as precise scholarship’.⁴⁹ To Dr Knox, black people were to be hated, feared, fought and, in the end, exterminated. Such a combination of racial arrogance, racial insecurity, and racial mysticism was not peculiar to him, though few matched his hysterical tone. His views were echoed in 1865 by a Lancet leader-writer who saw European colonizers as ‘military masters lording it over a sort of serf population, and under the continual fear of whose terrible vengeance we must always live’. This writer concluded that ‘all schemes of philanthropy and of brotherhood . . . which delude us and take us off our guard, should be at once deprecated’.⁵⁰ Dr Knox’s fearful doctrine was echoed again in 1876 by the traveller William Hepworth Dixon, who warned of the black threat in his extraordinary book White Conquest. The preservation of white values in a racially mixed society was essential, Dixon insisted. ‘The surface of the earth’, he wrote, ‘is passing into Anglo-Saxon hands. If we wish to see order and freedom, science and civilization preserved, we shall give our first thought to what improves the White man’s growth and increases the White man’s strength.’⁵¹

Killing blacks no murder

The phrenologists were not the only nineteenth-century ‘scientists’ fascinated by human skulls. But the Philadelphia physician and palaeontologist Samuel George Morton, who collected 837 of them – his collection, the world’s biggest, was called the ‘American Golgotha’ – was interested in their capacity, not their contours. He spent a lot of time in the 1840s filling his skulls with material that would pack closely – white pepper seeds or shot pellets – and then measuring how much he had poured into each one. All this was far from easy. It was hard to devise a uniform method of closing the openings in the skulls, and hard to decide just when to stop pouring. All the same, convinced that the larger the cranium the greater the intelligence of the skull’s former owner, Dr Morton persisted in his attempts to measure ‘cranial capacity’ and find a relationship between that and race. While confessing that there were probably errors of measurement in his tables, he found that the English skulls in his collection had an average cranial capacity of 96 cubic inches; white Americans and Germans averaged 90; Africans averaged 85, Chinese 82, and Indians 80.52 Since the skulls in the top three categories were nearly all from whites hanged as felons, ‘it would have been just as logical to conclude that a large head indicated criminal tendencies’.⁵³

It was ‘research’ of this calibre on which James Hunt, an expert in the treatment of stammers, based his theory of innate differences between black people and white people. Hunt founded the Anthropological Society of London in 1863, by which time home-grown anthropology, a favourite pursuit of gentlemanly amateurs, had already had much to say on the topic of race. Thomas Hope, expert on architecture, furniture, and interior decoration, had classified orang-utans as human and described West Africans (‘the natives of Old Calabar, residing not far from the coast of Guinea’) as having

foreheads and chins almost obliterated; cheeks or rather pouches projecting beyond the nose, wide prominent lipless mouths, armed with long sharp tusks or teeth standing out; eyes almost in contact with each other; bellies that hang down over their thighs; a chest very narrow, arms of prodigious length, thighs extremely short, spider legs void of calves, and splay feet as ill-fitted to stand firm on even ground as those of the neighbouring monkeys.⁵⁴

In 1841, a speaker had assured the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the African variety of man bore anatomically ‘a nearer resemblance to the higher Quadrumana [i.e. apes] than to the highest varieties of his own species’.⁵⁵

Hunt’s Anthropological Society of London was a breakaway group from the Ethnological Society, founded in 1843, which had offended Hunt and his followers by admitting ladies to its meetings.⁵⁶ Within two years the new society had 500 members, mostly medical men, lawyers, journalists, clergymen, and colonial administrators. Vice-president was Richard Burton, who was to be found at the society’s meetings ‘airing his distaste for negroes, and rejoicing in the rising value of phallic specimens among European collectors’.57 Rajah Sir James Brooke of Sarawak and Governor Edward Eyre of Jamaica were members, and so were the poet Swinburne and Frederic William Farrar, author of the edifying school story Eric, or Little by Little (1858) and afterwards dean of Canterbury.

Hunt’s doctrine, as set forth in his annual presidential addresses to the society, was much influenced by Dr Knox, to whose derivative teachings he himself added little that was new. Here is Hunt’s own helpful summary of his ‘general deductions’:

1. That there is as good reason for classifying the Negro as a distinct species from the European, as there is for making the ass a distinct species from the zebra: and if, in classification, we take intelligence into consideration, there is a far greater difference between the Negro and European than between the gorilla and chimpanzee. 2. That the analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and the ape, than between the European and the ape. 3. That the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European. 4. That the Negro becomes more humanised when in his natural subordination to the European than under any other circumstances. 5. That the Negro race can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans. 6. That European civilisation is not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character.⁵⁸

What is really important here is the political content, which Hunt was later to amplify. As long as Britain possessed an empire, he argued, it was essential to understand the practical importance of race distinctions, because of ‘the absolute impossibility of applying the civilisation and laws of one race to another race of man essentially distinct’.⁵⁹

The political role of the Anthropological Society of London, and of its president’s brand of racism, became quite clear in 1865 when one of its members, Governor Eyre of Jamaica, reacted to a rebellion of black farmers at Morant Bay with a degree of ruthlessness unusual even in the nineteenth century. He declared martial law and his troops went on a murderous 30-day rampage, killing 439 black people, flogging at least 600 others (some were flogged before being put to death, and some were flogged with a cat among whose lashes were interwoven lengths of piano-wire), dashing out children’s brains, ripping open the bellies of pregnant women, and burning over 1,000 homes of suspected rebels.⁶⁰ Public opinion in Britain was polarized, and bitter feelings were aroused on both sides. The Jamaica Committee, called by Thomas Carlyle ‘a small loud group . . . of Nigger-Philanthropists, barking furiously in the gutter’,61 was led by John Stuart Mill, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, and its supporters included Charles Darwin and Leslie Stephen. At first it sought merely a thorough investigation and Eyre’s recall, but after a whitewashing Royal Commission report⁶² it demanded the governor’s prosecution for murder; at one working-class meeting he was burnt in effigy.⁶³ On the other side, an Eyre Defence Committee was set up, supported by Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Charles Kingsley, who thought the governor ought to be given a seat in the House of Lords.⁶⁴ They saw him, indeed, as saviour of the West Indies and sought to raise £10,000 for his legal expenses. The Anthropological Society rallied behind its controversial member and drew some sharp political conclusions from the affair. Hunt told the 1866 annual meeting that

we anthropologists have looked on, with intense admiration, at the conduct of Governor Eyre as that of a man of whom England ought to be (and some day will be) justly proud. The merest novice in the study of race-characteristics ought to know that we English can only successfully rule either Jamaica, New Zealand, the Cape, China, or India, by such men as Governor Eyre.⁶⁵

As a public service, the society invited Commander Bedford Pim, a retired naval officer, to read a paper on ‘The Negro and Jamaica’. An audience of upper-class Englishmen heard Pim say that the black man in Africa and the New World was ‘little better than a brute, – in mental power a child, in ferocity a tiger, in moral degradation sunk to the lowest depths’. Slavery had rescued ‘a decidedly inferior race’ from a state of barbarism scarcely human. Pim supported the governor’s prompt action and concluded that only through the study of ‘anthropological science’ could statesmen learn the true art of governing alien races. Of special interest is Pim’s comparison between the discontented black people of Jamaica and the lower orders in Britain: ‘We do not admit of equality even amongst our own race, . . . and to suppose that two alien races can compose a political unity is simply ridiculous. One section must govern the other.’ Behind racism lurked the spectre of working-class rebellion in Britain.

Commander Pim’s address was greeted with loud cheers and a unanimous vote of thanks, after which speaker after speaker from the floor gave advice on the technique of governing alien races. One advocated killing ‘savages’ as a ‘philanthropic principle’: when trouble broke out there might be ‘mercy in a massacre’.66 After almost half a century, the spirit of Peterloo lived on.

Acquitted, as the Spectator put it, ‘because his error of judgment involves only negro blood’,⁶⁷ Governor Eyre was retired on a pension.

It is hardly necessary to add that Hunt and the Anthropological Society supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War. And after that war ended they reprinted American material calling for the return of slavery in the south as the only condition under which black people would do any productive work.⁶⁸

Survival of the fairest

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution proved that Europeans were related to Africans and that all human beings were related to apes. Thus it pulled the rug from under the polygenists’ feet and made the whole long debate between monogenists and polygenists irrelevant. At the same time darwinism furnished a new rationale for almost all the old beliefs about racial superiority and inferiority. Nineteenth-century sociologists assumed that when they were studying human society they were studying innate racial characteristics at the same time. White skin and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization were seen as the culmination of the evolutionary process. So the application of Darwin’s theories to human society ‘had a more pervasive influence in spreading racist assumptions than the comparative anatomy of the anthropologists’.⁶⁹

Social darwinism had been anticipated by Herbert Spencer, a philosopher much influenced by phrenology. It was Spencer, in fact, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.⁷⁰ He pointed out in 1851 that the ‘purifying process’ by which animals killed off the sick, deformed, and old was at work in human society too, thanks to ‘the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence’.⁷¹ And when Darwin published his Origin of Species eight years later it was Spencer who led the way in systematically applying Darwin’s ideas to sociology and ethics.

Spencer had plans to study human psychological development rather as Darwin had studied biological evolution. To understand the minds of ‘primitive’ races, ‘civilized’ races should look at the minds of their own children. The minds of ‘primitive’ races had similar limitations, but their childhood of intellect was permanent. Dominant races overran ‘inferior’ races because they had a greater ‘mental mass’, which showed itself in greater energy.72

In many ways, however, Spencer was not a typical social darwinian. Other believers in the natural law that the strong must devour the weak went much further in drawing racist conclusions from that law. The economist Walter Bagehot, who wrote The English Constitution (1867) and for whom deference to leaders was the essence of parliamentary government, argued that the strongest nations tended to conquer the weaker – ‘and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best’.⁷³ Social Evolution (1894) by Benjamin Kidd, a minor civil servant, made its author famous and sold 250,000 copies. It caught the popular imagination with its praise of the ‘vigorous and virile’ Anglo-Saxon race, in mere contrast with whom the weaker, ‘inferior’ races tended to die off. Nothing could stay this ‘destiny which works itself out irresistibly’.⁷⁴ The tropics’ rich resources could be developed only ‘under the influence of the white man’, Kidd added in a later book.⁷⁵ ‘Feeble races are being wiped off the earth’, wrote ‘A Biologist’ in the Saturday Review in 1896.⁷⁶ Winwood Reade, best known for The Martyrdom of Man (1872), was another who forecast the extermination of the black race. One day ‘the cockneys of Timbuctoo’ would have tea-gardens in Sahara oases; noblemen, ‘building seats in Central Africa, will have their elephant-parks and their hippopotami waters’; and ‘young ladies on camp-stools under palm-trees will read with tears “The Last of the Negroes”’.⁷⁷ Scarcely less bold was John Arthur Roebuck, MP for Sheffield (who made himself unpopular with working men by calling them spendthrifts and wife-beaters). In 1862 he told the Commons that in New Zealand ‘the Englishmen would destroy the Maori, and the sooner the Maori was destroyed the better’.⁷⁸

Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, founder of the ‘science’ of eugenics, believed that ‘the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own’. A ‘very large’ number of black people were ‘half-witted’. Other ‘inferior populations’, too, were congenitally defective; Galton took a specially low view of black Australians and Spaniards.⁷⁹ Michael Banton points out that ‘the acceptance by a man of Galton’s intellect and eminence of the thesis that different races could be distinguished and compared with one another, and his use of a mock statistical technique to this end, must have assisted considerably the propagation of racist theories’.⁸⁰ Galton’s pupil Karl Pearson, professor at London University and Fellow of the Royal Society, saw colonialism as a means of preparing ‘a reserve of brain and physique’ for times of national crisis: ‘Such a reserve can always be formed by filling up with men of our own kith and kin the waste lands of the earth, even at the expense of an inferior race of inhabitants.’ From a genetic standpoint, the black race was ‘poor stock’, and struggle against ‘inferior races’ was the way to keep a nation up to a high pitch of efficiency:

History shows . . . 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 . . .

    This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race . . . gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features.

Exterminated ‘inferior races’, Pearson added, were ‘the steppingstones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life of to-day’.81

Thus were Darwin’s theories distorted and adapted to provide an ideological prop for empire-building – a self-justification for a ‘great power’ that was expanding aggressively at the expense of ‘primitive’ and ‘inferior’ peoples. It should be borne in mind that racial extinction was not just a matter of theory. The black people of Tasmania did not long survive the invasion of their island by the dominant race. They were hunted down without mercy. The last of them died in 1869. And racist ideology justified genocide. Social darwinism taught white people that the Tasmanians were their brothers and sisters. It also taught them that the extermination of those brothers and sisters was an inevitable part of the struggle for existence, in which their own ‘superior’ race alone was destined to survive.⁸²

Britannia rule the world!

By the middle of the nineteenth century the belief in a special Anglo-Saxon tradition of freedom had been turned into a romantic mystique justifying the denial of freedom to other races. Ideas of Teutonic destiny developed by philologists and German nationalists mingled with ideas of inherent white superiority developed by phrenologists and anthropologists to swamp common sense in a flood of racial arrogance. ‘The English language, English law, and English institutions seemed ready to dominate the entire world.’⁸³ To Carlyle, the English had the grand task of conquering half the planet or more.84 Thomas Arnold, too, stressed the power and destiny of the English race and language, now overrunning the earth.⁸⁵ For Macaulay, the British had become the greatest and most highly civilized people that the world had ever seen and the acknowledged leaders of the human race.⁸⁶ Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, colonial secretary, told MPs in 1858 that their common interest was ‘to fulfil the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race, in spreading intelligence, freedom, and Christian faith wherever Providence gives us the dominion of the soil’.⁸⁷ The Liberal MP Charles Dilke, in his travel book Greater Britain (1868) – a title to be purloined by the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley in 1932 – painted a rosy picture of the future of the English, ‘marching westward to universal rule’, ‘ever pushing with burning energy towards the setting sun’, ‘more than a match for the remaining nations of the world, whom in the intelligence of their people and the extent and wealth of their dominions they already considerably surpass’. And Dilke noted complacently that ‘the Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth’.⁸⁸

Even these extravaganzas were surpassed by Charles Kingsley, grandson of a Barbados judge and author of Westward Ho! (1855) and The Water Babies (1863). For 25 years Kingsley extolled the virtues and historical mission of the English. God had fitted the great Teutonic race to rule the world; indeed, ‘the welfare of the Teutonic race is the welfare of the world’; and though the German tribes that swept over the Roman Empire had no supreme general on earth, they may have had ‘a general in Heaven’.⁸⁹ On the other hand, degenerate races, including the American ‘Indians’, were better dead: ‘One tribe exterminated, if need be, to save a whole continent. “Sacrifice of human life?” Prove that it is human life. It is beast-life.’ The Anglo-Saxons were extending God’s kingdom. ‘You Malays and Dyaks of Sarawak . . . are enemies to peace . . . you are beasts, all the more dangerous, because you have a semihuman cunning’.⁹⁰

Though he had been taught to box at Cambridge in 1836 by a black prize-fighter (Massa Sutton, for whom see p. 451 below), when Kingsley toured the West Indies in 1869-70 he expressed privately his dislike of black people – ‘specially the women’.⁹¹ And when he visited Sligo in 1860 he wrote: ‘I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country . . . To see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much.’⁹² Not only did he defend Governor Eyre, as we have seen; he went out of his way to flatter him as ‘so noble, brave and chivalric a man, so undaunted a servant of the Crown, so illustrious as . . . a saviour of society in the West Indies’.93

Appropriately enough, Kingsley was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria in 1859 and regius professor of modern history at Cambridge in the following year. His successor in the latter post, Sir John Seeley, was another convinced Anglo-Saxonist, who saw England’s expansion as decreed by ‘a Providence which is greater than all statesmanship’.⁹⁴

By the turn of the century English people took it for granted that Europeans were the top race. ‘No European can mix with non-Christian races without feeling his moral superiority over them’, wrote Sir Francis Younghusband, who was to lead the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-4.⁹⁵ And they took it for granted that, among Europeans, the inhabitants of the British Isles ‘had achieved the apogee of human existence and were uniquely endowed by the Creator with qualities and attributes lacking in other lesser human beings – be they European, African or Asian’.⁹⁶ In particular, the Englishman believed that he had

a sort of roving commission from above to carry the blessings of good government to all those races of the earth who are either too undeveloped or too effete to provide it for themselves; and that any interference with him in the execution of this commission may justly be resented and resisted by him . . . as a perverse attempt to obstruct the manifest designs of Providence.⁹⁷

That was how an irreverent writer summed it up in 1896. Colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain had put it even more simply in 1895:

I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing races the world has ever seen. (Cheers.) I say this not merely as an empty boast, but as proved and shown by the success which we have had in administering vast dominions . . . and I believe there are no limits accordingly to its future.⁹⁸

Much the same thought struck empire-builder Cecil Rhodes as he was wandering across the South African veld: ‘As I walked, I looked up at the sky and down at the earth and I said to myself this should be British. And it came to me in that fine, exhilarating air that the British were the best race to rule the world.’⁹⁹ As one of his admirers wrote soon after his death, Rhodes was ‘the first distinguished British statesman whose Imperialism was that of Race and not that of Empire . . . Mr. Rhodes saw in the English-speaking race the greatest instrument yet evolved for the progress and elevation of mankind.’100 Or, to quote again Rhodes’s own words: ‘We are the first race in the world, and . . . the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race . . . Every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.’¹⁰¹ Viscount Milner, who as British administrator in southern Africa was partly responsible for starting the Boer War, was another who saw the British Empire in terms of a mystical mission. ‘The British race’, he declared, ‘ . . . stands for something distinctive and priceless in the onward march of humanity.’ Deeper, stronger, and more primordial than material ties was ‘the bond of common blood’.¹⁰²

The white man’s burden

The idea of trusteeship has a long history in Europe, but it did not become central to British imperial policy until the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the second half of the nineteenth century. Three years after Columbus discovered the New World a Spanish professor of law had first argued that European conquerors should protect the rights of the ‘natives’ they conquered. Other Spanish jurists, and theologians, developed the idea.¹⁰³ In 1775 the British statesman Edmund Burke, in his speech on conciliation with the American colonies in revolt, used the word ‘trust’ in an ethical sense; and eight years later, in a speech on Fox’s East India Bill, he said that the rights or privileges of political dominion were a trust.¹⁰⁴ Moral obligation towards ‘backward’ races was much discussed during the impeachment and trial (1787-95) of Warren Hastings, and the so-called ‘civilizing’ of Africa was first discussed in the same period, during the debates on the abolition of the slave trade.¹⁰⁵ But trusteeship was still an ideal, not a guideline. In 1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who persuaded the East India Company to acquire Singapore, summed up the ethical view of Britain’s civilizing mission:

Let our minds and policy expand with our empire . . . While we raise those in the scale of civilization over whom . . . our empire is extended, we shall lay the foundations of our dominion on the firm basis of justice and mutual advantage, instead of the uncertain and unsubstantial tenure of force and intrigue.¹⁰⁶

In the 1837 report of the Commons Aborigines Committee this doctrine that power exercised over a ‘native’ race ought to be used ultimately for that race’s benefit was asserted with some vigour; the damage already done by treating ‘natives’ as if they were thieves, robbers, dogs, or kangaroos was deplored; and paternalistic suggestions were made for protecting them, notably by forbidding the sale of strong drink and encouraging christian missionaries.107 By mid-century, liberal-minded English people accepted Commerce, Colonization, Civilization, and Christianity – in other words, Conversion to western ways – as ‘the most effective recipe for the transformation of Africa’.¹⁰⁸

But in the second half of the century, and especially after 1885, as the European scramble for African territory got under way, the exact purpose of British rule in Africa had to be defined more rigorously. The idea of conversion, which implied merely informal influence, gave way to that of trusteeship, which implied annexation. Two factors in particular made such a strengthening of British imperial policy seem desirable. One was the rivalry of other European powers: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal. The other was the mounting conviction that Africans were inherently incapable of attaining western civilization:

If it were assumed that the Africans were racially inferior, and yet spiritually equal and capable of receiving the Christian message, the moral duty of the superior race was clear. It was to take up the ‘white man’s burden’ and exercise a trust over the spiritual and material welfare of people whose racial status was equivalent to that of minors.¹⁰⁹

The trusteeship plank in British imperial policy had two main components. Essentially it was a blend of the missionaries’ view that Africans ‘represented unregenerate mankind, sinful and unwashed’¹¹⁰ and the pseudo-scientific arguments for racial superiority. Britain marched across Africa with a clerical boot on one foot and a ‘scientific’ boot on the other. Since Africans were inferior, said the trusteeship theory, the British who ruled them owed them a special obligation, not unlike the obligation that decent Englishmen owed to women, children, and dumb animals. ‘An obligation rests on the controlling Power not only to safeguard the material rights of the natives, but to promote their moral and educational progress’: that was how the future Lord Lugard expressed it in his classic defence of British rule in Africa, published in 1922. To this outstandingly able administrator, who had spent some 30 years ruling over Ugandans and Nigerians, black Africans were essentially ‘attractive children’. The typical black African was

a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight, naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity . . . His thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from apprehension for the future, or grief for the past . . .

    The African negro is not naturally cruel, though his own insensibility to pain, and his disregard for life – whether his own or another’s – cause him to appear callous to suffering . . .

    He lacks power of organisation, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or of business . . . He is very prone to imitate anything new in dress or custom . . .

    In brief, the virtues and the defects of this race-type are those of attractive children . . .

    It is extremely difficult . . . to find educated African youths who are by character and temperament suited to posts in which they may rise to positions of high administrative responsibility.111

And indeed, for West Africans, the immediate practical result of the turn to trusteeship was the de-Africanization of the government service. The removal of Africans from office and their replacement by Britons confirmed that ‘the mass of the Africans were to be the carefully guarded wards of the Empire – . . . permanent wards who were racially incapable of receiving the full measure of Western civilization’.¹¹²

Another prominent exponent of trusteeship, Sir Charles Eliot, saw Africans as animals rather than as children. Commissioner for East Africa from 1901 to 1904, Sir Charles regarded the African’s mind as ‘far nearer to the animal world than . . . that of the European’ and as exhibiting ‘something of the animal’s placidity and want of desire to rise beyond the stage he has reached’. The African race would ‘greatly improve under a civilised and beneficent rule’, but had ‘great limitations’.¹¹³ (From Eliot came the interesting admission that ‘the average Englishman . . . tolerates a black man who admits his inferiority, and even those who show a good fight and give in; but he cannot tolerate dark colour combined with an intelligence in any way equal to his own’.)¹¹⁴

It would be an oversimplification to say that the trusteeship doctrine was merely a cloak for plunder. Even Lugard, however, thought it ‘absurd to deny that the initial motive for the penetration of Africa by Western civilisation was . . . the satisfaction of its material necessities’.115 By the turn of the century, the contrast between imperial policy and imperialist deeds was inescapable. When Joseph Chamberlain went to the Colonial Office in 1895 and opened a new era in British West Africa policy it became clear that Britain ‘was at last willing to pursue her interests in Africa to the utmost limits . . . Britain had emerged as the major European aggressor on the African continent’.¹¹⁶ Under British control before long were over 2,000,000 square miles of African territory with a population of over 40,000,000 black Africans – about a third of the continent’s black population. Addressing the British rulers of these ‘lesser breeds’ now no longer ‘without the Law’,¹¹⁷ Rudyard Kipling summed up, in the last year of the nineteenth century, the trusteeship brand of racism:

Take up the White Man’s burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait, in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.¹¹⁸

Englishmen, foreigners, and niggers

Hardly any British writers came out openly against racism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. One who did was the orientalist and philologist Robert Needham Cust. ‘The common form description of an African’, he wrote in 1883, ‘is that he is cruel, dirty, superstitious, selfish, a cannibal, and addicted to fetichism, human sacrifices, sorcery, and slave-dealing, besides being a drunkard, polygamist, a neglector of domestic ties, a liar and a cheat.’ And he added: ‘How different is the impression gained from an extensive consideration of the whole subject!’¹¹⁹

Few bothered to give the subject extensive consideration. And Cust’s catalogue reflects pretty faithfully the extent to which racist ideology had soaked into his unreflective countrymen’s minds. Not that all educated people were out-and-out rabid racists. But ‘the vast majority of the educated public appears to have accepted at least some aspect of the new racial doctrine, if only as a vague feeling that science supported the common xenophobic prejudice’.¹²⁰ Race prejudice was an acceptable subject for a humorous essay. The writer Charles Lamb, confessing himself to be a ‘bundle of prejudices’, wrote that while he had felt ‘yearnings of tenderness’ towards some black faces – ‘or rather masks’ – that had looked kindly on him in casual encounters in the streets, ‘I should not like to associate with them – to share my meals and my good-nights with them – because they are black’. Lamb had similar feelings about Jews, Scotsmen, and Quakers, and his account of these feelings was published as one of his Essays of Elia.121 Lamb was no racist. But pseudo-scientific racism both encouraged and fed off the kind of prejudice that afflicted him.

The flood-tide of racism never completely submerged the image of the black as ‘man and brother’. Though there is more than a trace of the ‘noble savage’ in some of the invocations of this image, it was kept alive by three distinct traditions: humanitarian abolitionism; radicalism; and working-class solidarity. Yet the strength of these traditions should not be exaggerated. ‘It would be hard to overemphasize the bias of British attitudes in the nineteenth century towards people with dark skins.’¹²² Only a minority of any social class, or at any level of education, would have raised strong objections to the ‘common form description’ as summarized by Cust. Nor would the majority have seriously challenged the more colourful – but totally characteristic – pen portrait drawn by Win-wood Reade:

The typical negro, unrestrained by moral laws, spends his days in sloth, his nights in debauchery. He smokes haschisch till he stupefies his senses, or falls into convulsions; he drinks palm-wine till he brings on a loathsome disease; he abuses children; stabs the poor brute of a woman whose hands keep him from starvation; and makes a trade of his own offspring. He swallows up his youth in premature vice; he lingers through a manhood of disease; and his tardy death is hastened by those who no longer care to find him food.

    Such are the ‘men and brothers’ for whom their friends claim not protection, but equality!

    They do not merit to be called our Brothers; but let us call them our Children.¹²³

Uneducated whites divided humanity into three ‘races’. There were white people born in England, Wales, and Scotland: ‘us’. There were white people born elsewhere: Irish people and foreigners. And there were non-Europeans: ‘niggers’. This word was applied, not only to persons of African birth or descent, but also to Indians, Maoris, and Polynesians – to anyone, in fact, whose complexion showed that he or she had not been born into the master race.124

Unlike the sophisticated varieties of racism, vulgar racism was largely the creation of the press, particularly that part of the press designed for the less educated section of the population. Children’s literature too was fairly saturated with racist stereotypes. In the schoolboy literature of E.Harcourt Burrage, for example, people with dark skins are referred to indiscriminately as ‘savages’. They are generally treacherous and cruel, and can be kicked, and killed, without compunction.¹²⁵ Boys of England, ‘A Magazine of Sport, Sensation, Fun, and Instruction’, started publication in 1866 with a serial story, ‘Alone in the Pirates’ Lair’. ‘Malay scums’, Chinese, Japanese, Javans, Papuans, Pintadoes, and Mestizoes, ‘most villainous-looking ruffians of every shade of colour’, are lumped together as ‘yon dingy devils’. A ‘gigantic negro’ threatens to burn out the eyes of the English hero, a young midshipman named Jack, with red-hot pincers. When Jack fires his pistol, ‘a yell, like the scream of a wounded baboon, proclaimed that the negro was hit’.¹²⁶ At a higher social level, public school magazines, ‘unremitting agents of seduction for an imperial dream of noble service and intoxicating adventure’, served as colonial travel brochures, army recruiting advertisements, and farming prospectuses, combining ethnocentrism and chauvinism in ‘a powerful instrument of indoctrination’ to persuade the sons of the rich to shoulder the white man’s burden.¹²⁷

Here, in conclusion, is a summary of how English boys were taught to regard black people, as put into the mouth of a character in one of G.A.Henty’s books. Henty was the best-known and most widely read writer of boys’ adventure stories in Britain before the First World War. Fifty years after his death in 1902 his books had sold over 25,000,000 copies and were still to be found on the shelves of school libraries. The reader of By Sheer Pluck: a tale of the Ashanti war (1884) is told that black people are

just like children . . . They are always either laughing or quarrelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.128

*      *      *

This chapter is central to this book, because the racism whose rise it outlines has been central to the experience of black people in Britain for the past 200 years. Long after the material conditions that originally gave rise to racist ideology had disappeared, these dead ideas went on gripping the minds of the living. They led to various kinds of racist behaviour on the part of many white people in Britain, including white people in authority. The chapters that follow show how since 1784 black people in Britain have asserted their humanity, dignity, and individuality in the teeth of racist beliefs and practices.