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

by David Olusoga

Imperial conquest put the builders of the British Empire in a position to make such judgements, and Social Darwinism enabled these influencers to regard the act of conquest itself as proof that they were superior to the ‘dark races’. That the Africans had been conquered meant that they were inferior, so the argument went, and as inferiors their inevitable fate was to be ruled over by a wiser and stronger race. The belief that the British were such a people became more deeply ingrained and widespread in the later nineteenth century, as the humanitarianism of the abolitionist and anti-slavery eras – hypocritical and paternalistic though it was – evaporated. In its place came this harder, more biological view of race.