Different races were no longer depicted as equal in the sight of God, sharing a common humanity, if at an earlier stage of historical development than that of the Victorian Englishman. Instead, textbooks now emphasized racial difference and the alleged racial inferiority of subject peoples: ‘The Australian natives are an ugly, unprepossessing people, with degrading and filthy habits’, as one geography textbook put it: ‘Like beasts of prey . . . the Malays are always on the watch, to assuage their thirst of blood and plunder’; ‘The tribes [of Nigeria] . . . are extremely savage, practising
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