Race, Anti-Caste and the Victorians

Benjamin Disraeli famously declared ‘all is race’, but historians of Victorian Britain find it puzzling to decide what exactly ‘race’ was, even as they establish its importance. Just a few years after Disraeli voiced this rule in Tancred (1847), the Scottish ethnologist Robert Knox similarly asserted that ‘race is everything’ in his Races of Man (1850), his ‘philosophical enquiry into the influence of race over the destinies of nations’.1 An anatomy lecturer and leading member of the Ethnological Society of London, Knox made a contribution to Victorian racial thinking that historians have overstated, while the romantic, historical perspective of politicians and authors such as Disraeli has probably been underplayed.2 Race could easily indicate ‘social as opposed to colour distinctions’, reflected in ‘the nineteenth-century tendency to elide social, moral and physical distinctions into a single racial hierarchy’, as Kenan Malik puts it.3 Pseudo-scientific theorists such as Knox, who denied the monogenesis of common ancestors for all races, offered poisonous well-springs of racist ideas. However, most Victorians did not need science to confirm their prejudices about people with a different tongue, hue, and history. Whatever the similarities of their statements, Disraeli and Knox offered individual interpretations of a capacious, flexible term, explored in a range of recent works. Colin Kidd has shown the centrality of theological debate and biblical exegesis to the uncertain development of race as a biological category.4 Sadiah Qureshi has brilliantly investigated exhibitions of displayed peoples as a prism to understand the abundant proliferation of theories of human variation, arguing that ‘the often twinned notions of diachronic human variation and developmental civilization (stadial or otherwise) remained both powerful and relevant to discussion of human history and national difference’.5 Catherine Hall finds something similar in the racism of Charles Kingsley, when she examines his writing as one of the cultural legacies of British slave-owning families’ wealth. The novelist, she shows, ‘drew on stadial theory and by the late 1860s it was in its post-Darwinian moment, a harsher evolutionary version that saw the timing of the civilising process as glacial’.6 Such research elaborates on the crucial role assigned to culture in shaping ‘scientific’ inquiry, as Douglas Lorimer argued in his path-breaking work.7

Art · Caste · Literature · Romance · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Australian History and Society · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy

• Evolution and society

  J W Burrow•Evolution and society•1966

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• Peoples on Parade

  Salman Qureshi, Sadiah Qureshi•Peoples on Parade•2011

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• Freedom Burning, Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain

  Joshua Newton•The Journal of Imperial &…•2013

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• The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race

  Open Access•Charles Hirschman•Population and Development Review•2004

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