Search results
This book tells the story of a short-lived but vehement eugenics movement that emerged among a group of Europeans in Kenya in the 1930s, unleashing a set of writings on racial differences in intelligence more extreme than that emanating from any other British colony in the twentieth century. By tracing the history of eugenic thought in Kenya, it shows how the movement took on a distinctive colonial character, driven by settler political preoccupations and reacting to increasingly outspoken African demands for better, and more independent, education. Eugenic theories on race and intelligence were widely supported by the medical profession in Kenya, as well as powerful members of the official and non-official European settler population. However, the long-term failures of the eugenics movement should not blind us to its influence among the social and administrative elite of colonial Kenya. Through a close examination of attitudes towards race and intelligence in a British colony, the book reveals how eugenics was central to colonial racial theories before World War II.
This book provides a clear and accessible guide to the essential features of interwar British fascism. It focuses on the various fascist parties, fascist personalities and fascist ideologies. The book also looks at British culture and develops the knowledge of undergraduate students by providing a solid source of background material on this important area of interwar British history. The focus on fascist culture throws new light on the character of native fascism and suggests a potentially rich vein of new enquiry for scholars of British fascism. The book considers the membership strength of Britain's interwar fascist parties. The ideas of racial Social-Darwinism influenced British fascism in a number of ways. To begin with, hereditarian ideas and biological determinist models contributed to the emergence of racial theories of anti-semitism. The anti-semitism of the Imperial Fascist League was of a very different order from that of the British fascism. Moreover, to Britain's fascists, artistic modernism, with its creative use of distortion, disintegrative images and general disdain for the traditional discipline of the art form, made a virtue of deformity. The search to uncover the anti-liberal and anti-capitalist pre-fascist lineage would become a highly subjective exercise in invention and take the fascists on an imaginative journey deep into the British past.
racial theories in Britain is the subject of this chapter, uncovering the political complexity of the question of ‘native mentality’. Confusion over the meaning of the research at first succeeded in attracting a powerful amalgam of voices to the campaign. As the debate in Britain unfolded, the contradictions within the campaign over native welfare, development and the eugenic emphasis on innate
or anti-Semitism.5 A number of subsequent articles on Nazi Germany published in Studies took their tone and analysis from Binchy. One in 1938 by the Rev. Denis O’Keeffe, then Professor of Ethics and Politics at UCD, rub- FANNING 9781784993221 PRINT.indd 76 19/01/2016 13:25 The limits of cultural nationalism 77 bished Nazi racial theories and argued that their real importance was as psychological tools of nation-building: It is a natural tendency for nations to seek an escape from the inadequacies of the present in a mythical past. This is a common experience
urban travellers, however, rarely used racial theory with rigour and coherence. The pioneering Henry Mayhew borrowed freely from contemporary racial theory in writing the interpretative preface to his London Labour and the London Poor , but any putative logic was undermined by the plurality of empirical material on the experience of the poor recorded in the corpus of the work. Nonetheless, the tradition
nineteenth-century Filipino intellectuals. In this chapter, we will see how one of Paterno’s pieces in particular engaged directly in contemporary racial debates in France. Paterno’s appropriations of French racial theories are not appropriations of the thought of the colonizer of the Philippines, but they are appropriations of the authority of advanced European science and civilization. The power of Paterno’s appropriations lay in part on the authority of European science and civilization, authority that he was not contesting, but to which he was laying claim. Paterno
origin without difficulty, many Africans were unconvinced and argued that the fundamental concepts of the AIDS from Africa hypothesis resided in racial theory and not in science. For example, Yinka Adeyemi, the science and health correspondent of the Nigerian Weekly Concord , wrote in July 1985: To the average European
In moving from an analysis of Freeman’s views on the Teutonic origins of English freedom to the wider context of his Aryanism, we must proceed with caution. Not only are Victorian attitudes towards race notoriously difficult to interpret, but the word ‘Aryan’ has connotations in the twenty-first century which it did not have in the nineteenth. Analysing the only work to contain a systematic articulation of Freeman’s racial theory, the relatively obscure Comparative Politics (1873), I argue that his views were not idiosyncratic or extreme when judged by the
opportunity within the context of the struggle with the rival factions. Italian and Fascist Racism While forms of both spiritual and biological racism had existed in Italy since the nineteenth century and a number of Italian scholars adhered to northern 90 ‘The Racial Inferiority of Anglo-Saxons’ 91 European racial theories, the fact that people like de Gobineau and Chamberlain, the fathers of biological racism, held the Italians in contempt alienated most Italian intellectuals.2 Even when, with the development of anthropology, eugenics and archaeology, the European
This book examines the nineteenth-century ideology of 'martial races', the belief that some groups of men are biologically or culturally predisposed to the arts of war. It explores how and why Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs and Nepalese Gurkhas became linked in both military and popular discourse as the British Empire's fiercest, most manly soldiers. The violent disruption of the Rebellion of 1857, and the bitterness with which it was fought on both sides, had effects in both Britain and India that went far beyond the cessation of hostilities. The reactions of the British and Indian armies to the European threat created the preconditions for the rise of martial race ideology and discourse. This book also argues that in addition to helping shape Victorian culture more generally, the army influenced the regional cultures of the Highlands, the Punjab and Nepal in remarkably enduring ways. The Victorian army was in fact instrumental in shaping late Victorian British popular culture. The book documents the concrete ways that the 'martial races' themselves were, in a very real sense, self-conscious constructs of the British imagination in spite of the naturalised racial and gendered language that surrounded them. The book bridges regional studies of South Asia and Britain while straddling the fields of racial theory, masculinity, imperialism, identity politics, and military studies. It challenges the marginalisation of the British Army in histories of Victorian popular culture, and demonstrates the army's enduring impact on the regional cultures of the Highlands, the Punjab and Nepal.