#14 Understanding Colonialism: The Age of Nationalism and Racism

Two blogs now follow on the complex issue of ‘race’. In many ways, this could not be more relevant for today’s big news, the results of the US election, where the issues of race in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and the growth of White Supremacy vie for dominance. Race and nationalism have always been closely tied together, never more than today.

What is Race and Racism?

Race is complex, primarily as the word is in common use. Yet it is near impossible to define the concept. We know from natural science there are no such things as ‘races of people’, there is just one human race with multitudes of diverse languages, physical types, skin colours, cultures etc. We are though all one, as human beings. Yet for literally hundreds of years, the common sense among the middle classes of the dominant Western colonial powers considered that they themselves were the superior master race.

Racism was the ideology of European, then the US and Japanese Colonisation; the framework of ideas that justified every act that subdued populations across the world. The ideas varied over time. In 1492, racism was mixed with Catholicism, by the Spanish invaders. By the time the Reformation and the Settlement of the Calvinists into America, racism was mixed with the new religion. By the 19th century, race and the Darwinian idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ took a new turn. Over hundreds of years, racism has adapted to the prevailing ideas of the time, always to the interests of the Nation-State. Then in the 20th century, as Nationalism rose to a new pitch of intensity in Germany, race and racism developed further under Hitler and the rise of the German Reich.

Germany under Hitler took the concept of the ‘master race’ for themselves. The logic of the concept hit home to ruling classes in Europe and the USA. For the first time, light-skinned people, particularly, but not solely, the Jewish people were massacred. Hitler’s Nazi Germany illustrated the systematic, widespread and public application of the logics of racism. Thereafter, racism was dropped as public national policy across the colonising nation States.

It is worth noting, that racism as an ideology did not die a slow death. Racism has always been connected to nationalism, and in periods of history when nationalism becomes more intense and apparent, as our present period of history illustrates, racism reappears among large sections of our populations. As we see, this can be pushed forward by those peoples who are especially disaffected by unsettled conditions, as well as by elites.

My key argument is that racism is like a virus, it is always changing according to historical and political circumstances. The central aspect of racism is that there are superior and inferior people called races, that does not alter with time, but the application of racism or the intensity of racial hatreds alters considerably. The lack of clarity about the concept and the practice is one of racism’s central characteristics. This and next week’s blog explore race in its historical usage.

Impoverishment and race

Back to colonisation and racism where the contemporary concept began. Racism justified the impoverishment of the vast majority of all invaded populations, in all continent of the world, yet many academics still argue otherwise. The methods by which poverty was created varied widely, as did the style of invasions across the world. But there was a pattern. In each case, local peoples were used for cheap or free labour. Parts of the world that were settled by Europeans - Ireland, the Americas, southern Africa, Australia, Kenya Algeria - had different experiences; but everywhere, colonisation at least partially transformed all invaded societies. Europeans changed the many ancient modes of production into capitalism, through private ownership of land and paid or unpaid labour. Private ownership of land was widely foreign and was itself profoundly disliked.

Alongside European annexation came new inter-dependent capitalisms throughout the world. Right up to 1945, colonisation was considered by the industrialising powers as the 'common sense' policy of the time, the rational method of increasing personal and national wealth. As new states - USA, Germany and Italy - came into being in the 19th century, they also began to obtain colonies.

Colonisation in different parts of the world shared similarities: principally the extraction of mineral resources, and agricultural production for the benefit of the colonizing power. In all cases, colonisation created totalitarian rule by the European powers, and that is perhaps why so many of today's generation of leaders are ashamed of their countries’ pasts.

Racism: the Ideology of European and American Colonialism

Racism can best be understood as the official national ideology that covered the entire colonial period. All sections of European, and later North American, society, believed that white people were superior to everyone else. Racism was fused with nationalism and Christianity and was the key ideological structure which held the edifice of Empire together.

The notion of 'the Great Nation' was understood through a supposedly unbroken line of continuity with ancient Greece and Rome. Today such ideas may seem quaint, but for leaders in Britain, France and now the USA, notions that their governments were natural world leaders was an important justification for their behaviour. Being connected with Greece and Rome also exorcised any connection with Islamic civilization which, up to the 10th or 11th centuries, had flourished. Europeans might well have reflected that their developing civilisation originated in the Islamic world through Arab and Jewish mathematicians and medical practitioners. Jews, Muslims and Christians were all descendants of Abraham. When the Jews fled the Spanish inquisition in the 16th century, they went to the Arab world, not Europe. So why did European colonials decide that its ideological inheritance was Greek and Roman, and not Islamic?

Racism as a set of ideas emerged from the politics of the Greek and Rome Empires of an earlier age. There are a small number of intellectuals who wrote about the British or French empire such as, Edward Gibbon in his book 1776: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thomas Macauley in 1849: A History of England or Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History (12 Volumes). Each author could have considered that the French or British empires had originated from brown-skinned Mesopotamia. But they didn't, rather they argued that that British or French “Greatness” stemmed from the fair-skinned Greek and Roman empires. In practice, other than the fact the Greeks and Roman had empires like the British and the French, there was very little else of similarity. The British and French empires provided the material conditions for the Industrial revolution. The Greeks and the Romans empires never led to such earth-shaking transformations. Macauley, Gibbion and Toynebee could have chosen the continuity of Empires from any of the older empires. The connection to ancient Greek and Rome was spurious. That they chose to identify with fair-skinned people of past empires was simply part of the racist ideology.

Western Nations distinguished themselves from the ‘despotic’ east as well as from the nearer Ottomans. Nationalist, European colonial ideology claimed a direct heritage with democratic Greece and Rome. Once the racist ideology took hold, a lack of evidence was no barrier. The ideas themselves had a life of their own.

The ‘Classics’ - Greek and Roman history - formed a key part of the curriculum at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. All are once removed, of course, from direct racism, but are part of the understanding and framework that provided an explanation for western world dominance. The facts that nearby Eastern civilisations preceded the rise of Western science could be conveniently ignored. White superiority was simply accepted throughout the centuries, and when the Americans established global dominance after World War Two they had their racial frames of reference to justify themselves, to themselves.

Racism integral to colonialism

Western social science tends to divide scholarship into parts. Racism has a literature of its own and can be studied within sociology. The problem is that once racism is defined as an ideology it is removed from its context and history, which creates serious difficulties for understanding it. Patrick Wolfe has studied the subject for decades. He argues that "Historically the emergence of the ideology of race accords with the shift from mercantilism to an industrial economy” as we see at the end of the 18th century. Importantly he notes that "Race, it cannot be stressed strongly enough, is a process... Race registers the state of colonial hostilities. The common factor is Whiteness". Wolfe’s notion of ‘whiteness’ is correct of course, but he has removed ideology from the flow of history.

Everyone understands the social world as a part of their time, but our job as historians is to identify how people saw their world at any particular time. Race has for 500 years been the European manner of seeing ‘other’ peoples. As white people became rulers, how they 'saw' other people determined how they divided the people they had conquered. At the period which Wolfe identifies racism as emerging, he is seeing race as 20th and 21st-century peoples see the subject, i.e. free of its additives. In the earlier periods when the Portuguese used race to identify 'inferior' peoples, they understood the whole social world in religious terms. Race and religion in the 1490s were one. Racism then, as it is now, is a collective of ideas; our ideology at any one time determines how we act in the world. When understanding race and racism throughout history we must place these ideas in their social and political context, or we risk being anachronistic.

Racism at its simplest can be understood in the following terms: that people are categorised as being of different races, and that whites are superior. Racial superiority was considered as an undisputed fact, with 21st-century scientific enquiry concluding that races of peoples do not exist and had been a figment of our imaginations all along. Today this is more widely accepted, yet from the beginning of the western invasions of the 1490s, right the way through to 1945, and, some might argue, to the present time, racism as 'the' ideology has had a continued existence.

Justifications

The Jewish Holocaust of the 20th century was a consequence of 400 years of racist thinking, culminating in the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority and the horror of the Holocaust. Yet this thinking and ideology were not uncommon, racial dominance had been the ‘common sense’ of the European and American colonial invaders.

For example, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed in the notion of eugenics. As he wrote to his cousin Ivor Guest on 19 January 1899, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday:  “The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life.” Like most educated people of the time, Churchill was much impressed by the theory of eugenics. Eugenics was based on the belief that heredity was far more important than environment in determining the physical and mental qualities of the population, and the eugenics movement enjoyed a considerable vogue between the turn of the century and the First World War. As Professor Addison, Director of the Centre of 2nd World War studies, argues:

According to the eugenists, Britain was threatened by the “degeneration of the race.” The “unfit,” who were concentrated among the poor, were reproducing themselves more rapidly than the “fit,” who were to be found mainly among the middle classes. The remedy, they argued, was for governments to practise positive eugenics through tax incentives to the middle classes to have more children, and negative eugenics through measures to prevent the procreation of the unfit.

Racial superiority had not been something that needed to be scientifically proven; it was considered a known fact, at least in the hearts and minds of Europeans and Americans. It was only when these ideas were used on European soil to systematically kill millions that most ‘official’ and overt racism came to an end. It has taken other forms, however, not least through the superiority of western laws and democracy, and the assumption that we have better social infrastructures than our ‘enemies’.

Racism as an ideology to justify the Holocaust was of course only the tip of a very large iceberg. Racism permeated every aspect of all colonial invasions, conquests and the structure of the colonised society over a long period. It had been used to justify the extermination of peoples in the Americas, Australia; and again, at the end of the Ottoman Empire against Armenians before and after the 1914 war. Europeans lived separate privileged lives in all the colonies they ran, taking all the main positions in government and commerce. They set themselves up as a class above any existing native hierarchy. Although there was intermarriage, huge efforts were made to keep marriage separate between white and the 'natives'. Rape by black men of white women (always the symbolic horror) was treated as the most heinous crime – unlike rape by white men of black women.

Many an innocent man was castrated and hung on a tree in horrendous levels of retributive violence, both in the Americas and in the colonies of Africa and India. Examples abound: In the West Indies after slave risings in the 1820s and 30s; in India after the end of the first war for independence in the 1860s; in the USA after the US civil war in 1865/7 in the long period termed Jim Crow; and in Kenya after Mau Mau in the 1960s.  The assumption that ‘the other’ (all colonised peoples) were not human opened the way for barbarism.

---

Copyright Notice. This blog is published under the Creative Commons licence. If anyone wishes to use any of the writing for scholarly or educational purposes they may do so as long as they correctly attribute the author and the blog. If anyone wishes to use the material for commercial purpose of any kind, permission must be granted from the author.