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

by David Olusoga

Promoters of this new, darker, supposedly scientific racial interpretation of the recent past asserted that the central message of the abolitionists had been disastrously flawed; the African was neither fully a man nor a brother.

Rather than endure hard and disciplined labour on plantations, they had fallen back into what Carlyle ridiculed as a form of basic subsistence agriculture, a way of life that enabled them to spend the bulk of their time in idleness.

The intellectual movement that became known as Social Darwinism – of which Darwin himself was not an advocate

had held their regions of the globe in trust, in providential anticipation of the eventual arrival of the higher white race. No longer needed, now that the ‘higher’ white race had arrived to take up its birth right

Anthropological Society of London were predominantly men who believed in polygenism,

Many were advocates of the pseudoscience of phrenology

A group of members centred around Richard Burton formed the ‘Cannibal Club’, an all-male dining club that met in the private banquet room of Bartolini’s Dining Rooms off Fleet Street.

‘the good people of Newcastle’ somewhat optimistically dubbed the ‘wise week’, Hunt presented a paper, entitled ‘On the Physical and Mental Character of the Negro’. The paper laid out Hunt’s view that Africans were a separate species, closer to apes than Europeans.

The conclusion of Dr Hunt’s speech, the newspapers inform us, was ‘received with mingled cheers and hisses’.17 William Craft then rose to respond. He began by rejecting Hunt’s suggestion that the physical attributes of Africans were markers of any innate inferiority, remarking that, ‘The thickness of the skull of the negro had been wisely arranged by Providence to defend the brain from the tropical climate in which he lived. If God had not given them thick skulls, their brains would probably have become very much like those of many scientific gentlemen of the present day.’18

rest of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, were influenced by the racial debates that exploded out of the Morant Bay Rebellion and its brutal aftermath.

Although the black population were the overwhelming majority they had almost no political voice. In the election of 1863 only 1,457 people on the entire island met the property qualifications required to vote,

Between 1859 and 1865 the cost of living in Jamaica rose by around 60 per cent.28

But the distress caused by the American Civil War merely added to economic difficulties whose roots were in the employment crisis that had confronted Jamaica ever since 1838.

By the mid-1860s the situation in Jamaica was this: a free people who were blithely and routinely accused of being congenitally lazy were being prevented from gaining access to the land upon which they might demonstrate their industriousness and self-reliance, as well as provide for themselves and their families.

The petition was steeped in the language of self-help, self-improvement and the Victorian cult of work.

Samuel Smiles’ book Self Help, a manual for self-reliance that perfectly caught the spirit of the age.

The business plan contained within the ‘Humble Petition’ was a long-term proposal for what we would today call economic diversification, and was founded upon a firm understanding of the market economy, the workings of credit and the time value of money.

For six weeks units of the West India Regiment, accompanied by the local militia, were let loose upon the rural population of St Thomas parish.

This six-week rampage of killing and destruction, which left a great scar across the east of Jamaica, was brutal even by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century.

same approach in Ireland

War had suggested that the liberation of the enslaved peoples of the American South would result in a racial conflict fought on a continental scale believed that in Jamaica they had seen a portent of things to come.

The London papers noted that when news of the Morant Bay Rebellion reached the South alarm spread through the white population, which now prepared itself for a ‘general insurrection’ from among the freedmen.36

The Jamaica Committee coalesced around the figures of the abolitionist Charles Buxton and the eminent philosopher John Stuart Mill.

The Jamaica Committee pressured the government to launch an inquiry and later demanded that Eyre be put on trial. Some believed that the charge against the governor should be murder.

Further demonstrations against him took place in London and the governor was even burnt in effigy in Hyde Park.45

On the Eyre Defence Committee were some of the most eminent of the Victorians: Charles Dickens, the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and Westward Ho!. Also supporting Eyre was John Ruskin, the critic and virtual arbiter of artistic taste in mid-Victorian Britain.

‘to establish, by a judicial sentence, the principle that the illegal execution of a British subject, by a person in authority, is not merely an error which superiors in office may at their discretion visit with displeasure or condone, but a crime which will certainly be punished by the law.’

Bloody Sunday

‘For the last half century’, the magazine asserted, ‘the negro has been an idol to the masses of the British public, and all classes of society have refused to listen to any depreciation of this chosen race . . . Nearly all classes in England have . . . agreed that the negro is a being very little (if at all) inferior, either mentally or morally, to the European.

This is exactly what right wing twitter says sbout muslims now

come forward to defend this fashionable idol from any assaults his dignity may have sustained at the hands of the few who have declined to swell the strain of adulation.

‘a small party in England, which within the last three years . . . has done something to stem this current of popular delusion’.

had not Governor Eyre shown such prompt severity, we should now be sending out troops to save white men’s lives, instead of a Commission to sit upon black men’s carcases.

In 1864 he gave his dark imagination full rein when considering how his principle of philanthropic massacre might be applied to the peoples of Africa.

In chilling terms Reade foresaw a not too distant future in which ‘young ladies on campstools under palm-trees will read with tears “The Last of the Negroes”, and the Niger will become as romantic as the Rhine.’56

It is often said that it was at the Berlin Conference that the continent of Africa was carved up by Europeans.

rules of engagement by which they would bring the continent under their legal control, resulting in a period that would become known as ‘New Imperialism’.

In the minds of a number of statesmen and colonial theorists, Africa’s new role was to act as a safety valve for Europe. It was to be an outlet for Europe’s energies,

In Africa, those new colonists would find what German theorists were, in the late nineteenth century, already beginning to call ‘Lebensraum’ – living space.

In 1870, 10 per cent of Africa was under European control and 90 per cent of the continent was ruled by Africans. By 1900 that situation had been reversed.

The final piece of the jigsaw was the Maxim machine gun, a piece of military technology that enabled tiny numbers of European soldiers to overwhelm enormous armies of Africans,

The late Victorian age was regularly scandalized by imperial outrages, such as the Zulu victory over a British force at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879,

Another theory which gained ground in the second half of Victoria’s reign was the idea that black children were lively and bright when young but after puberty lapsed into a lethargy, making no further intellectual progress.

a widespread disdain for foreigners and sense of superiority over people of African heritage did become increasingly a feature of Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, just as opposition to slavery had been a key feature of the national self-image in the middle decades.

colonial exhibitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which have, with good reason, been described as ‘people shows’ and ‘human zoos’.

by holding an international exhibition smaller cities were able to momentarily burst upon the world stage, as Wolverhampton and Cork did in 1902,

These ‘native villages’ purported to be authentic arenas for genuine representations of African life, and were contrasted in the official programmes with the displays of European industry and technology in the pavilions that surrounded them.

It was slightly less popular than the Ceylon Village and the Irish Village, both of which were more successful than the Our Indian Empire pavilion.

Their next stop was not the Horn of Africa but the Belgian town of Liège. It was clear that the Somalis were a professional outfit whose leaders had done financially very well by touring the European circuit of colonial exhibitions and African shows,

That the Europeans, played by re-enactors or former soldiers, wore uniforms and the Africans appeared semi-naked all added to the sense of spectacle and exoticism.

But what disturbed a number of Victorian and Edwardian commentators more than the exploitation of African people was that such exhibitions brought African men into contact with white British women,

‘how then’, he asked, ‘is it possible to maintain as the one stern creed in the policy of the Empire the eternal supremacy of the white over black?’

Deposed and exiled, Cetshwayo was no longer a military threat and could thus be feted as a ‘noble savage’ and leader of an exotic warrior people.