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Science, race relations and resistance: Britain, 1870-1914

Online ISBN:
9781781705766
Print ISBN:
9780719033575
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Science, race relations and resistance: Britain, 1870-1914

Published online:
26 September 2013
Published in print:
31 July 2013
Online ISBN:
9781781705766
Print ISBN:
9780719033575
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

This study of the ‘colour question’, 1870-1914, offers a new account of the British Empire‘s most disturbing legacy. Following contradictions within the ideology of empire, the book provides a revisionist account of race in science, and an original narrative of the invention of the language of race relations, and of resistance to race-thinking. Constructions of race in both professional and popular science were rooted in the common culture, yet were presented as products of nature. Ironically, science only gained a larger public when imperialism, not nature, created a global pattern of racial subordination and conflict. Though often overlooked, the longer term legacy of Victorian racism grew out of the newly invented language of race relations. Originating in the abolitionist movement, this language applied to the management of the historically unprecedented multi-racial communities created by empire. A dissenting minority of abolitionists and persons of African and Asian descent championed racial egalitarianism and colonial nationalism in resistance to the dominant discourse. By 1910, they suffered a crushing defeat in contesting white power in South Africa. As a consequence, in the new twentieth century, visions of a colour-blind empire belonged to a sentimentalised, archaic abolitionist past. Under the guise of imperial trusteeship, a new lexicon of race relations gave legitimacy to the institutionalised inequalities of an empire bifurcated by race.

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