This used the mob rage in Durban to probe the question – who were more reactionary in racial matters, the British or the Americans? In the middle of the nineteenth century, said ‘D. B.’, the British were seen as progressive imperialists, who had abolished slavery and promoted free trade. Their empire was ‘free to every nationality, and within its confines was known no distinction, Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free’. But soon things changed. ‘Under the stress of the Indian mutiny [of 1857] and the Jamaican rebellion [of 1865], we developed a
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