Britain's other civilising mission

Abstract

This article reconsiders the policies applied by the colonial state with regard to European ‘loafers’ or vagrants in colonial India, thereby raising a number of questions about the relationship between the categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’ in colonial settings. It starts with a discussion of the intellectual roots of the class prejudices towards working–class Europeans dating back to the Company era, and offers a brief survey of the economic and demographic developments in mid–nineteenth century which brought the issue of ‘white poverty’ to the foreground. The article then focuses on the workhouse system introduced in the 1870s. The main argument brought forward here is that the ‘reclamation’ of European loafers can be regarded as an ‘internal’ civilising mission which shared many features with the ‘external’ mission civilisatrice directed at the Indian population. It is demonstrated that the colonial government's vagrancy policy was largely designed to protect the bluff of ‘colonial difference’ underlying the ‘external’ imperial civilising project. However, it also becomes clear that here, again, the colonial state could never fully realise its ‘civilising’ fantasies, both due to financial constraints and the white subalterns’ strong will to resist.