Race,Empire and Education: Teaching Racism

1 See, e.g., Dorothea Matlitzki , The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1977); David C. Linberg (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 1978).

2 Peter Fryer , Staying Power (London, Pluto Press 1984), pp. 2–5; on Luce Morgan, see, e.g., Hugh Clavert, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Devon, Merlin Books, 1987).

3 For example, the Earl of Leicester apparently paid his Black servant/s handsomely (Simon Adams, ‘At home and away: the Earl of Leicester’, History Today (May 1996), pp. 22–28, and subsequent correspondence with the author). There are six ‘negroes’ or ‘blackamores’ listed in the Assessment of Strangers in the London borough of Barking’s All Hallow parish for the years 1598–1599: they are noted, for example, as ‘a negra at Olyver Skinnar’s’. Status is not recorded. (Notes & Queries (April 1961), p. 138.)

4 Published in 1586, the poem reads: ‘Leave off with pain, the blackamoor to scour/With washing oft, and wiping more than due/For thou shalt find, that Nature of power/Do what thou canst, to keep his former hue.’

5 Winthrop D Jordan , White over Black (New York W. W. Norton 1968), p. 15-15.

6 D. Hammond and A. Jablow , The Africa That Never Was (New York, Twayne 1970), p. 20-20.

7 See, for example, Katherine George , ‘The civilized West looks at primitive Africa: 1400–1800, Isis (1958), pp. 49-49, 62–72. Parish records from the late sixteenth century use ‘black’, ‘negro’, ‘nigra’, and ‘blackamore’ as descriptive terms for people of various origins.

8 I have been unable to discover whether Lok entered the ‘nefarious trade’.

9 Paul Hair , ‘Attitudes to Africans in English primary sources on Guinea up to 1650’, History in Africa (No. 26, 1999).

10 Another example is Muly Mahomet, the evil hero in Thomas Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, c.1588.

11 Quoted in Ruth Cowling , ‘Blacks in English renaissance drama’, in David Dabydeen (ed.), The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1985), p. 4-4. See also Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen (Oxford, OUP, 1965); Ania Loomba, Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989); Anthony G. Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

12 The most recent and comprehensive book on slave traders is Hugh Thomas ,The Slave Trade (London, Picador 1997). For the pre-Atlantic slave trade, see W. D. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985).

13 Folarin Shyllon , Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (London, OUP 1977), pp. 17–19.

14 See Hugh A. MacDougall , Racial Myth in English History (Montreal, Harvest House 1982). On how Europe has invented and re-invented itself, see the farranging The Distorted Past: a re-interpretation of Europe, by Joseph Fontana (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995).

15 Henry Morley (ed.), The Earlier Life and the Chief Earliest Works of Daniel Defoe (London, George Routledge 1889), pp. 189–190. While not specifically naming Africans, could one argue that Defoe was aware of Africans among the Roman auxiliaries stationed in Britain?

16 A most informative book on how earlier improvements helped Europeans’ ventures is Carlo M. Cipolla , Guns, Sails and Empires: technological innovation 1400–1700, (London, Minerva Press 1965).

17 Daniel Defoe , Robinson Crusoe (1719) (London, J. M. Dent 1945), p. 147–147. There were three editions of the book in the year it was published; it is still read today.

18 Donald Leinster-Mackay , The Rise of the English Prep School (Lewes, Falmer Press 1984), p. 16–16.

19 David Hume, in an essay entitled ‘Of national character’ (1753), quoted in Fryer, op. cit., n. 2, p. 152.

20 James Foster , Discourses on all the Principal Branches of Natural Religion and Social Virtues (London, 1752) and J. Philmore, Two Dialogues of the Man-Trade (London, 1760), quoted in Julia M. Reed, ‘The origins of English attitudes towards the Black Africans 1554–1807’, MA Thesis, University of Hull, 1975, pp. 172 et seq.

21 Reed, ibid.

22 Defoe’s In Madagascar (1729), quoted in Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980), p. 362–362.

23 Postlethwayt (1707?–1767) was elected as fellow of the Society of Arts in 1734; a prolific author, his publications include a number on the African slave trade, which broadly repeat the above argument and advocate that the East India Company, whatever its faults, should take over and expand trade with Africa. Quotations from volume 2, pp. 215 and 268–9.

24 Fryer, op. cit., n. 2, p. 153.

25 Ibid., pp. 159–60. Long, the son of a plantation owner, had also been private secretary to the lieutenant governor of Jamaica, Sir Henry Moore. He married the sole heiress of Thomas Beckford, Jamaican planter/merchant.

26 Despite the Duke’s patronage, Williams was refused government employment on his return to Jamaica. On Williams and other ‘middle-class’ Africans in Britain, see Fryer, op. cit., n. 2; Shyllon, op. cit., n. 13; E. Scobie, Black Britannia (Chicago, IL, Johnson Publishing, 1972); James Walvin, Black and White (London, Allen Lane, 1973).

27 Diallo was the enslaved son of a Fula priest. On learning of the slave’s scholarship (he wrote fluent Arabic), the Royal African Society purchased his freedom and brought him to London where he was elected member of a very prestigious antiquarian society. After helping Sir Hans Sloane with some Arabic translations, the much-feted young man was shipped home to Africa. See Douglas Grant , The Fortunate Slave (London, OUP 1968).

28 Recognised as a child prodigy, Bridgetower became the Prince of Wales’s first violinist and performed in many British and European cities.

29 Another Montague protege, Ignatius Sancho became a Mayfair grocer and composer who moved in London’s artistic circles; his Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho was published in 1782. See also Reyahn King et al (eds), Ignatius Sancho: an African man of Letters (London, National Portrait Gallery 1997) and P. Edwards and P. Rewt, The Letters of Ignatius Sancho (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1994).

30 Julius Soubise of St Kitts was educated as a gentleman by the Duchess of Queens-berry; handsome, polished, a violinist, orator, swordsman and equestrian, he apparently moved freely in aristocratic salons.

31 Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved Ibo who had purchased his own freedom, became a government employee for a while in England, and was part of the abolitionist movement, lecturing around Britain and Ireland. His book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789, went through nine British editions in his lifetime; it was also published in New York and was translated into Dutch, German and Russian. The most recent edition of Equiano’s work, edited by Vincent Carretta, was published by Penguin in 1995. See also James Walvin , An African’s Life: the life and times of Olaudah Equiano 1745–1797 (London, Cassell 1998).

32 See Black & Asian Studies Association Newsletter (No. 27, April 2000).

33 Granville Sharp and the indefatigable Thomas Clarkson were the two pre-eminent workers for abolition in Britain. There is no modern biography of Sharp, but see Prince Hoare , Memoirs of Granville Sharp (London, 1828). On Clarkson, see Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: a biography (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1989).

34 See Marika Sherwood , ‘Blacks in the Gordon Riots’, History Today (December 1997), pp. 24–28.

35 Reid, op. cit., n. 20, p. 142. Cobbett did not approve, describing intermarriage as ‘foul, unnatural and detestable’. (Weekly Political Review (16 June 1804), pp. 935–7.) James Tobin in 1785 had written that ‘the strange partiality shewn for [blacks] by the lower order of women, the rapid increase of a dark and contaminated breed, are evils’. (James Tobin, Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr Ramsey’s Essay, London, 1785, quoted in Shyllon, op. cit., n. 13, p. 104.)

36 One of the latest books on abolition is Robin Blackburn , The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, Verso 1988). There were many ways of contravening the laws; see Marika Sherwood, ‘Perfidious Albion: Britain, the USA, and slavery in the 1840s and 1860s’, Contributions to Black Studies (Nos 13/14, 1998/1999) and ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave: Britain, the slave trade and slavery 1808–1840’, African Labour (No. 1, 2000).

37 There is some ongoing discussion regarding deliberate attempts at ‘slave-breeding’ in Barbuda and Tobago. See Stanley Engerman and B. W. Higman , ‘The demographic structure of Caribbean slave society in the 18th and 19th centuries’, in Franklin W. Knight (ed.), General History of the Caribbean, volume 3 (UNESCO, 1997). Debate on the reasons for abolition and emancipation, begun by Eric Williams’s Slavery and Capitalism (1944) (London, Andre Deutsch, 1965), continues to this day. The freed men, women and children received no compensation but their ex-owners were paid £20m in compensation for their loss of free labour. Much of this was invested in Britain. (Anthony Wood, Nineteenth Century Britain (New York, David Mackay, 1962), p. 206.) For an interesting aspect of the abolitionist movement, see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery (London, Routledge, 1992).

38 On the British relationship with Africa, see, e.g., R. Robinson and J. Gallagher , Africa and the Victorians (New York, St Martin’s Press 1961); H. L. Wesseling, Divide and Rule (Westport, CT, Praeger, 1996).

39 On these early explorations and settlements, see, e.g., Christopher Lloyd , The Search for the Niger (Newton Abbott, Readers’ Union 1973); Howard J. Pedraza, Borrioboola-Gha (London, OUP, 1960) and Obaro Ikeme, The Fall of Nigeria (London, Heinemann, 1977).

40 The Cape Colony began to be settled in 1815; King Cetewayo of the Zulus was defeated in 1879; soon after Uganda was made a British Protectorate, as was ‘Rhodesia’ and the Sudan was conquered. To prevent further fights with each other for territory, the European powers divided up Africa between themselves at the Berlin Conference of 1885. At the turn of the century, the defeat of the Boers led to their territories being added to British South Africa; in 1902, the Ashanti were conquered. In the East, Hong Kong had been ceded to Britain in 1840 and Kowloon had been leased from China in 1860. For the view from ‘the other side’, see A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). An interesting exposition on expansion, rivalry and conquest can be found in Giles Merton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (London, Hodder, 1999).

41 India’s neighbours were conquered by the British-officered Indian armies; both the British officers and the army were paid out of Indian revenues. On this expansion, see the interestingly titled chapter, ‘Imperial defence 1870–1897’, Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge, CUP, 1959).

42 The historian J. R. Seeley, in a fit of his own absent-mindedness, wrote in his Expansion of England (1883) that ‘we seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. Quoted in L. C. B. Seaman , Victorian England, (London, Methuen 1973), p. 332–332. For another view on the acquisition of empire, see Sven Lindquist, ‘Exterminate the Brutes’ (London, Granta, 1992). I must thank my friend and colleague Martin Spafford for bringing this book to my attention.

43 The population increased from 26.7 million in 1841 to 41.5 million in 1901.

44 There were Blacks in the Chartist movement, even in leadership positions; thus, in mid-century there still could not have been pervasive racial antagonism, at least within the politicised working class.

45 See W. A. Carrothers , Emigration from the British Isles (1929) (London, Frank Cass 1965), pp. 305–306. Some of these migrants were assisted by private (‘philanthropic’) emigration societies, others received assistance from the state. For example, some 630,000 were helped to emigrate to Australia between 1832 and 1900. (Ibid., p. 317.) See also, e.g., C. F. Plant, Overseas Settlement (London, OUP, 1951); Alex G. Scholes, Education for Empire Settlement (London, Longmans Green, 1932). Children and women were sometimes forcibly made to emigrate. See, e.g., Joan Foster, ‘Children from Newcastle’, Local History Magazine (No. 59, 1997), pp. 14–17; Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982); P. Bean and J. Melville, Lost Children of the Empire (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989). The only working-class emigration society appears to have been the Potters’ Joint Stock Emigration Society and Savings Fund, formed in 1844, which bought land in the US on which 384 families settled. (J. Ginswick, Labour and the Poor in England and Wales 1849–1851: volume II (London, Frank Cass, 1983), p. 129.)

46 Lord Rosebery, a Privy Councillor, speaking in 1900, quoted in H. John Field , Toward a Programme of Imperial Life (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press 1982), p. 91–91.

47 See, e.g., Stuart Anderson , Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American relations 1895–1904 (Rutherford, Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press 1981) and Louis L. Snyder, The Idea of Racialism (Princeton, D. van Nostrand, 1962).

48 Did Gladstone believe that the indoctrination over empire had, by 1878, been successful when he declared that ‘the sentiment of empire may be called innate in every Briton’? (Seaman, op. cit., n. 42, p. 331.)

49 There were – and are – no agencies which systematically counter these ideologies. For an interesting compilation of quotations, see Philip D. Curtin (ed.), Imperialism (New York, Harper & Row 1971).

50 Rhodes quoted in Green, op. cit., n. 22, p. 399, n. 17.

51 Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies (and the father of the future Secretary of State for India, Austen) quoted in H. A. Will , Constitutional Change in the British West Indies (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1970), p. 232–232. On Chamberlain, see, e.g., W. L. Strauss, Joseph Chamberlain and the Theory of Imperialism (New York, Fertig, 1971).

52 Foreign Secretary Grey, quoted in Field, op. cit., n. 46, p. 84.

53 V. E. Chancellor , History for Their Masters (Bath, Adams & Dart 1970), p. 115–115.

54 C. Headlam (ed.), The Milner Papers: volume II (London, Cassell 1933), p. 307–307.

55 Lord Milner , The Nation and the Empire (London, Constable 1913), p. 490–490.

56 Sir Harry Johnston , The Backward Peoples and our Relations with them (Oxford, OUP 1920), pp. 23–23, 26–26, 7–7, 9–9. Johnston, explorer and empire builder, served as, e.g., British Commissioner for South Central Africa 1891–6 and Special Commissioner, Uganda, 1899–1901.

57 Martin Green , Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980), p. 283–283. Kipling was a close friend of Cecil Rhodes.

58 Quoted in Rupert Lewis , Marcus Garvey: anti-colonial champion (London, Karia Press 1987), p. 234–234.

59 See, e.g., Brian Simon , The Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780–1870 (London, Lawrence & Wishart 1974); Henry E. Cowper, British Education, Public and Private, and the British Empire 1880–1930, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1979. General education in much of mainland Europe was superior to that in Britain at this time.

60 It was almost always ‘English’ and not ‘British’; quite often it was explicitly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ superiority that was inculcated.

61 The importance and use of athleticism to governing empire is mentioned by many analysts of the Victorian public school. See, e.g., Jonathan Rutherford , Forever England: reflections on masculinity and empire (London, Lawrence & Wishart 1997). Perhaps the first book on the uses of sport in the colonies is C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963), recently reissued by Penguin.

62 G. Best , ‘Militarism and the Victorian public school’, in B. Simon and I. Bradley (eds), The Victorian Public School (Dublin, Gill & Macmillan 1975), p. 144–144. If the ‘commerce’ was lucrative enough, such susceptibilities were ignored. For example, sixty-four public school graduates worked for the East India Company in the period 1809–1850. (Bernard Cohn, ‘Recruitment and training of British civil servants in India’, in R. Braibanti, Asiatic Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1966), chapter 3.

63 Robert Roberts , Classic Slum (London, 1973), p. 142–142.

64 Chancellor, op. cit., n. 53, p. 118. At first this ‘typical Englishman’ was only from the upper class; as exigencies changed, the model was imposed on all classes.

65 K. Castle , Britannia’s Children (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1996), pp. 7–8. See also A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and its Enemies (London, Macmillan, 1966), pp. 89–92.

66 On geography texts, see Teresa Ploszajska , Geographical Education, Empire and Citizenship (Liverpool, Hope University College 1999).

67 Racial imagery was also abundant in the ‘readers’ used to teach literacy. The advertisement for E. W. Kemple’s A Coon Alphabet (New Age, 1898) quoted a review in the St James Gazette: ‘a clever and amusing illustrated book for the child, which will also please their elders. Its nigger antics and humour are original as well as diverting.’

68 Chancellor, op. cit., n. 53, p. 22; Castle, op. cit., n. 65, pp. 14, 22, 25. See also C. H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon: part II (London, OUP, 1996), especially chapters 17, 25, 27 and 28.

69 Quoted by Frances Lawrence , ‘Textbooks’ in William Lamont, The Realities of Teaching History: beginnings (London, Chatto & Windus for Sussex University Press 1972) pp. 121–122. Sir Charles Oman was Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.

70 Professor Meiklejohn’s series: Outlines of the History of England and Great Britain (London, A. M. Holder 1895), pp. 75–76.

71 Farrar in Michael D. Biddiss , Images of Race (Leicester, Leicester University Press 1979), pp. 143–143, 147–148.

72 J.A. Mangan , ‘“The grit of our forefathers’’: invented traditions, propaganda and imperialism’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1986), pp.120–121. On the effects of such education on those who went out to rule empire, see, e.g., C. Allen (ed.) Tales from the Dark Continent (London, Andre Deutsch, 1979).

73 On the racial views of other academics and some eminent Victorians, see K. K. Aziz , The British in India (New Delhi, Indian Institute of Applied Political Research 1988), chapter 3 and Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1978).

74 G. Wheatcroft , The Randlords (New York, Touchstone Books 1985), p. 139–139. Ruskin’s pro-working-class, philanthropic but racist philosophy is echoed today by left-wing historians whose books on the British working class usually omit all mention of Black peoples.

75 By ‘barbaric’, one presumes that Sir John meant the North African (‘Moorish’) conquerors who ruled for 700 years.

76 Sir J. R. Seeley , The Expansion of England (London, Macmillan 1894), pp. 138–138, 185–185. This book sold 80,000 copies in its first two years of publication. (H. John Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 41). See Peter Burroughs, ‘John Robert Seeley and British Imperial History’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, (Vol. 1, 1973), pp. 191–211. Burroughs does not mention Seeley’s racism but does quote from contemporary reviews, e.g., of Expansion in Macmillan’s Magazine (February 1884), p. 242: ‘It has helped and will further help, to well a sentiment that is already slowly rising to full flood.’ In his Oceanea (1886), Seeley wrote that the Maoris lived in ‘animal sloth and indulgence... It is the with wild races of human beings as with wild animals... those only will survive who can domesticate themselves into servants of the modern forms of social development.’ (pp. 257–8)

77 J. A. Froude , The English in the West Indies (London, Longmans, Green & Co. 1888), pp. 105–105, 252–252, 319–319 and English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, (London, 1896) (lectures delivered in Oxford 1893–4). Froude was a friend of Joseph Chamberlain’s.

78 The most comprehensive book on this subject is John M. MacKenzie , Propaganda and Empire: the manipulation of British public opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1984).

79 While Darwin appeared to hold no racist views in 1859, by 1871 in the Descent of Man he said he would prefer to be related to baboons than a ‘savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency and is haunted by the grossest superstitions’. ( Patrick Brantlinger , Rule of Darkness: British literature and imperialism (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press 1988), p. 187–187.

80 See, e.g., C. H. Lyons , To Wash an Aethiop White: British ideas about Black African educability 1530–1960, (New York, 1975).

81 Richard Drayton , Nature’s Government (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 2000). See also Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London, Macmillan, 1982).

82 Trevor R. Reese , The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society 1868–1968 (London, OUP 1968), p. 16–16.

83 On Hunt and others, see Christine Bolt , Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1971).

84 Paul Crook , ‘Social Darwinism and British ‘‘New Imperialism’’: second thoughts’, The European Legacy (Vol. 3, no. 1, 1998).

85 See, e.g.. Richard Price , ‘Social status and jingoism’, in G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London, Croom Helm 1977), pp. 89–112; J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London, 1901).

86 Meath, ex-Eton and the Foreign Office, belonged to numbers of imperialist bodies and was an active proselytiser for empire in the public schools.

87 Mary Debenham , Empire Day: a dialogue for children (London, nd). See also H. Drake, The British Empire and What it Stands For (London, Royal Empire Society, nd). For a wonderful description of similar celebrations in Barbados in the 1930s, see George Lamming, In the Castle of my Skin (London, Michael Joseph, 1953), pp. 36et seq.

88 Robert MacDonald , Sons of Empire (Toronto, Toronto University Press 1993).

89 John Springall , Youth, Empire and Society (London, Croom Helm 1977), p. 14–14.

90 See Brian Stanley , The Bible and the Flag: Protestant missions and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, (Apollos, 1990); Andrew Porter, ‘Cultural imperialism and the Protestant missionary enterprise 1780–1914’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History (Vol. 25, no. 3, 1997), pp. 367–91.

91 Brantlinger, op. cit., n. 79, pp. 180–1.

92 M. A. S. Barber , Missionary Tales for Little Listeners (London, Nisbet & Co 1840). There appears to be no research on missionaries’ sermons in Britain.

93 Halevy, quoted in David Thomson , England in the Nineteenth Century (1950), (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1971), p. 204–204. According to Dunae (n. 95 below), Henty was a shareholder in the Transvaal Gold Mines.

94 W. H. Fitchett , Deeds That Won the Empire (London, Smith, Elder & Co 1910), pp. v–vi. This was the twenty-sixth edition.

95 See Louis James , ‘Tom Brown’s imperialist sons’, Victorian Studies (Vol. 17, no. 1, 1973), pp. 89–99; Patrick A Dunae, ‘Boys’ literature and the idea of empire 1870–1914’, Victorian Studies (Vol. 24, no. 1, 1980), pp. 105–21.

96 Quotation from Daniel Bivong , Desire and Contradiction: imperial visions and domestic debates in Victorian literature (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1990); see also B. V. Street, The Savage in Literature (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). There are now many books investigating the connections between imperialism/racism and literature; for a Europe-wide perspective, see Hugh Ridley, Images of Imperial Rule (London, Croom Helm, 1983). See also Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (London, Pandora, 1986).

97 Dudley Kidd , The Essential Kaffir (London, A. C. Black 1925), pp. 395–407.

98 On Thackeray, who was also anti-semitic, see John Sutherland , ‘Thackeray as Victorian racialist’, Essays in Criticism (Vol. 20, no. 4, 1970), pp. 441–450.

99 Denis Judd , Empire (London, HarperCollins 1996), p. 67–67. On press reactions to the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, see Bolt, op. cit., n. 83, chapter 3.

100 The Daily Mail was the first newspaper intended for mass circulation. Its stated aim was to be ‘the embodiment and mouthpiece of the Imperial idea... the articulate voice of British progress and domination... We know that the advance of the Union Jack means protection for weaker races, justice for the oppressed, liberty for the downtrodden... It is for the power, the greatness, the supremacy of the Empire that we have stood.’ (Daily Mail, fourth anniversary issue, 1900, quoted in J. Harvey and K. Hood , The British State (New York, International Publishers 1959), p. 262–262). Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express from 1913 adopted the Mail’s techniques and purpose.

101 On music halls, see Penny Summerfield, ‘Patriotism and empire’, in MacKenzie, 1986, op. cit., n. 72; on art and artists, see ‘‘‘Up Guards and at them’’: British imperialism in popular art’, ibid.; on the stage, Ben Shephard, ‘Showbiz imperialism’, ibid.

102 Five and a half million attended the 1886 ‘Colonial and Indian’ exhibition and twenty-seven million the 1924/1925 Empire Exhibition. (MacKenzie, 1984, op. cit., n. 78, p. 100).

103 MacKenzie, ibid., p. 113.

104 See Paul S. Landau and D. Kaspin (eds), Images and Empires: visuality in colonial and post-colonial Africa (forthcoming); Brian Street, ‘British popular anthropology: exhibiting and photographing the Other’, in E. Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography 1860–1921 (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 122–131 (the quotation is from p. 122). James R. Ryan noted in his Picturing Empire (London, Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 219, that ‘it would be wrong to exaggerate the coherence and effectiveness of photography as a vehicle of imperial repression’.

105 Cowper, op. cit., n. 59, p. 238.

106 Quoted in Henry Pelling , Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (1968) (London, Macmillan 1979), p. 85–85.

107 We can catch a glimpse of the indoctrination used by the army from the recruitment handbooks used in India. These often differentiated between the light-skinned Aryans and the ‘darker skinned lower types’. The ‘martial races’ were usually described as being of Aryan descent and recruitment was to be, as far as possible, from ‘racially pure’ Aryans. (David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj (London, Macmillan, 1994), p. 32.) George Orwell, recalling his days as a police officer in Burma in the 1920s, wrote of the British soldiers in Burma who ‘develop an attitude towards the ‘‘nigger’’ which is far more brutal than that of the officials or businessmen’. (Bernard Crick, George Orwell: a life (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982), p. 149.) See John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992). Lionel Caplan, in ‘‘‘Bravest of the brave’’: representations of the ‘‘Gurkha’’ in British military writing’, Modern Asian Studies (Vol. 25, no. 3, 1991), pp. 571–97) presents a very interesting analysis, following Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, 1978. See also Said’s Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto & Windus, 1993). On the barbarities of the conquest – that is, the ‘civilising mission’, see, e.g., Lawrence James,‘‘‘The White Man’s Burden’’: Imperial wars in the 1890s’, History Today (August 1992). See also the pro-imperialist Victoria’s Enemies, by Donald Featherstone, published in 1989.

108 Richard T. Lapiere , ‘Race prejudice’, Social Forces (Vol. 7, 1928), pp. 102–109.

109 G. Green , ‘Racial prejudice among school children’, Geography (Vol. 16, 1931), pp. 50–51. Curiously, Iona and Peter Opie record no racist chants in their Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (London, OUP, 1959). Yet, when I asked just one Black person whether she remembered any, Josephine Florent (now aged 89) recalled the following from her days at Netly Street Primary School, north London: ‘Blackie, blackie weasel/Stick her on a needle/If she hollers let her go/Blackie, blackie weasel’. This was chanted while the children circled around her. ‘I was terrified’, Josephine recalls. (Interview, London, 6 June 1999.)

110 See Marika Sherwood , ‘Lynching in Britain’ History Today (March 1999) and ‘Engendering racism: history and history teachers in English schools’, Research in African Literatures (Vol. 30, no. 1, Spring 1999), pp. 184–203.

111 Most ‘coloured’ seamen were in fact British; see Marika Sherwood , ‘Race, nationality and employment among Lascar seamen 1660–1945’, New Community (Vol. 17, no. 3, 1991), pp. 229–244.

112 S. G. Searle , ‘Eugenics and politics in Britain in the 1930s’, Annals of Science (Vol. 36, 1979), pp. 159–169. See also Eleazar Barkan, The retreat of scientific racism (Cambridge, CUP, 1992). Julian Huxley was knighted in 1958 and had been the first director-general of UNESCO. This great populariser of science, scion of a most eminent family, after a visit to West Africa, described Kano in northern Nigeria as a ‘barbaric mud-walled city’ which was divided not into streets, but ‘burrows’. All Africans were ‘inherently cheerful’. (Julian Huxley, ‘How West Africa is governed’, Picture Post (18 August 1945), pp. 20–3).

113 Rachel Fleming , ‘Human Hybrids’, Eugenics Review (Vol. 21, 1929–30), pp. 257–263.

114 M. E. Fletcher , Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and other Ports (Liverpool, Association for the Welfare of Half-caste Children 1930), p. 28–28; R. M. Fleming, ‘Anthropological studies of children’, Eugenics Review (Vol. 18, 1926/27), pp. 294–301.

115 Quoted in Joanna Bourke , Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960 (London, Routledge 1994). The series was called ‘The Colour Question’.

116 J. L. Keith, quoted in Sherwood, 1999, op. cit., n. 110, p. 193.

117 H. B. Gray , The Public Schools and the Empire (London, Williams & Norgate 1913), p. 198–198.

118 Daily Telegraph (28 January 1927), quoted in Cowper, op. cit., n. 59, p. 265. The national curriculum for schools in 1999 reflects the same policy.

119 Sherwood, 1999, op. cit., n. 110.

120 Published by Pilot Press, London; the quotations are from p. 20.

121 On the present state of textbooks, see Marika Sherwood , ‘Sins of omission and commission’, Multicultural Teaching (Spring 1999), pp. 14–22.