Abstract
‘What is Empire but the predominance of Race?’, exclaimed Lord Rosebery the Liberal Imperialist in 1900 at the height of the war in South Africa: ‘How marvellous it all is! … Do we not hail, in this, less the energy and fortune of a race than the supreme direction of the Almighty?’1 Whether God or the white mystique was the prime cause, the expansion of Europe led to several different kinds of empire; all involved the reinforcement of white dominance. White immigrants sometimes entered lands declared to be virgin, empty, free for settlement, but these lands were the homes of hunters and pastoralists: the Bushmen of Australia, or the Indians of the American prairie. Other temperate lands where whites arrived to settle were already occupied by identifiable owners, such as the Maoris in New Zealand or the Zulus in Natal. In either case the whites displaced the indigenous people and reduced their status to that of primitive intruders, to be isolated in ‘reservations’ in the backlands.
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Notes and References
Charles Wentworth Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London, 1890) part vi, ‘Colonial Problems’, ch. 2, ‘Labour, Provident Societies, and the Poor’.
R. A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830–1910 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976) p. 141. Huttenback demonstrates how ‘the Natal formula’ was adapted by all the White Dominions.
P. C. Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration (London, 1923).
For a detailed description of this emigration, see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London, 1974).
The Kenya episode is narrated in detail in Hugh Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth, 1920–1950 (London, 1976) ch. 2, ‘The Claim for Equality’.
Gunnar Myrdal, ‘Biases in Social Research’, in Arne Tiselius and Sam Nilsson (eds), The Place of Value in a World of Facts (Stockholm, 1970) p. 157.
The exposure of colonial exploitation was the work of intellectuals, not socialist party workers; see especially J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), and
Paul Louis, Le Colonialisme (Paris, 1905).
Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, 4th ed. (London, 1948) pp. 107–8.
R. A. Ferrell, American Diplomacy: A History (New York, 1959) p. 245.
Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1933) p. 145.
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© 1977 Hugh Tinker
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Tinker, H. (1977). Imperial High Noon. In: Race, Conflict and the International Order. The Making of the 20th Century. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15807-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15807-2_2
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