Abstract
To many, any distinction between racist and racialist may be a little academic. However, the differences are important. Race is used to denote any group of people, united by common descent and identified by skin colour and physiognomy. Common bonds are also usually expressed in terms of shared language, history, culture or outlook. In the nineteenth century, race became a social scientific tool to explain not only diverse characteristics and types, but also levels of development. It became a universal tool of categorisation, but also the key to understanding customs and behaviour.1 Racialism was thus a term used to describe differences between races.2 Racism, by contrast, is a belief that some races are inherently superior, and that others are inferior and those races therefore require different treatment. Stereotyping of temperamental qualities, intelligence, capacity for work and the ability to create a valuable culture typically follow. Explanations for racism vary: from economic needs to find and harness an underclass of slave labourers, to Satre’s explanation that racism was sexually motivated by a fear that another race would take its women.3
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Notes
See Les Back and John Solomos, eds, Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (London, 2000).
Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 1–11.
Michael Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule (London, 1968), pp. 11–12.
Mark Ferro, Colonisation: A Global History (London and New York, 1997), p. 18.
Mary Bennett, The Ilberts in India, 1882–1886 (London, 1995), p. 50.
David Livingstone, Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (London, 1975), p. 141.
Cited in H.G. Rawlinson, The British Achievement in India (London, 1948), p. 104.
M.E. Chamberlain, Decolonisation (2nd edn, London, 1995), p. 50.
W. David McIntyre, British Decolonisation, 1946–1997 (London, 1998), p. 22.
Robin Neillands, Fighting Retreat: The British Empire, 1947–1997 (London, 1996), p. 1.
Richard Holmes, Firing Line (London, 1985), p. 400.
Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia (London, 1999), p. 92.
Charles Allen, Tales from the South China Seas (London, 1983), p. 65.
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism (London, 2001).
Alice Pennell, Pennell of the Afghan Frontier (London, 1914).
Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 1997), p. 456.
Wm Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’, in Judith Brown and Louis, eds, The Oxford History of the British Empire IV (Oxford, 1999), pp. 31–2.
Ian Hernon, The Savage Empire (London, 2000), p. 86.
P.J. Marshall, The British Empire (Cambridge, 1996), p. 373.
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© 2003 Robert Johnson
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Johnson, R. (2003). Was the British Empire racialist or racist?. In: British Imperialism. Histories and Controversies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4031-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4031-5_8
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