The Twin Traumas of War and Influenza

Abstract

In 1921, Frederick Lugard, now retired but still an influential member of the Colonial Service, published a review essay in The Edinburgh Review entitled “The Colour Problem.” One of the books in Lugard’s review, The Rising Tide of Colour, by the American Lothrop Stoddard, raised the prospect of “a pan-Coloured alliance for the universal overthrow of the white hegemony at a single stroke, a nightmare of race-war beside which the late struggle in Europe would seem the veriest child’s play,” a possibility Lugard did not dispute. Encouraged by Bolsheviks, who purportedly welcomed miscegenation as a means of bringing about communist revolution, “admixture with alien races” would bring about “the deterioration of the Nordic race-type” and ultimately annihilate the white races. “The union of opposite types, such as the Negro or Australoid with the Nordic,” Lugard noted, explaining Stoddard’s thesis, “rapidly tends to the elimination of the latter, owing to the prepotency of the black race.” As befitting a servant of empire, Lugard took the occasion of the review to pronounce “the true conception of the interrelation of colour: complete uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and culture, equal opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve,” but, in the realm of the physical and the material, of the social and racial, “a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own racepurity and race-pride.”