Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

The misery that Reade sought to avoid and the blood he was determined to safeguard was that of white settlers, no massacre of the Africans was too extreme and no war of extermination too vast if it was undertaken in the spirit of ‘self-protection’ of the white race. In the closing chapter of his long and rambling book Reade called upon Europeans to accept his assertion that as the white race expanded across the African continent the African peoples themselves ‘may possibly become exterminated’. This process might be the result of philanthropic murder but deeper forces were also at work. The extinction of Africans would come as it was in accordance with the ‘beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong’.