The Waning of British Antiracism

Great Britain

I’ve encountered this several times now in my research: during the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, “anti-racism” was briefly ascendant in social science in Britain and the United States, and it later lost influence during the antebellum era, waxed again during Reconstruction, and waned during the Jim Crow era.

Stephen Drescher brings this up in reference to the failed utopian experiment in free labor in Sierra Leone:

“Thomas Winterbottom, a physician, was to study tropical medicine. He became the dominant ethnographer of West Africa and contributed to the antiracist scientific tradition that dominated British racial science during the first third of the nineteenth century.”

In France, anti-racism was ascendant under the Jacobins who abolished slavery in all the colonies of the French Empire and made blacks into citizens with equal rights.

Later under the Consulate, Napoleon restored slavery, banned the Black Undertow from the soil of the Republic, banned miscegenation, and arrested the black members of the French parliament.

I want to say that blacks became French citizens after slavery was abolished in the Second Republic following the 1848 Revolution and later gained voting rights in France in 1870 during the Third Republic.

I know for certain that the story rise and fall of racialism in the West is far more complex than most White Nationalists commonly assume.

Update: Drescher cites Philip Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850. Google Books has a preview. This should definitely be worth reading.

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17 Comments

  1. Thanks for these facts.

    Analysis:
    (1) Social progress comes and goes
    (2) Genocide is forever

    The first one should strike despair into the hearts of progressives. The second is the big threat we face.

  2. “Corsican. A different island.”

    In fact, although born there, Napoleon was from a family of minor nobility from Tuscany who had ruled the island from the 1600’s.

  3. Napoleon came from an Aristocratic Italian family that had been invovled in afrench parlements.

    He has some sort of distant North African ancestry according to DNA research.

  4. The Pakistani pimp story apparently led to an outpouring of on air rants about pakis scum etc etc. It does wax and wane. It’s going to get very racist soon.

  5. http://www.igenea.com/en/index.php?c=46

    there’s a good chance that Napoleon was the distant scion of a Semitic fellow of some sort. A Levantine. One ancestor of his was called “Il Moro”. He was at first a Corsican nationalist. Then he’s a revolutionary Frenchman, then an Emperor. And he had the gall to call the British a nation of shopkeepers. He was a magic carpet salesman extraordinary.

    Some of his aggression in the treatment of the

  6. Cool your jets English John, you sound like you’ve been watching too many Sharpe re-runs. Wellington, when asked who was the greatest general of the day, answered: “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”

  7. Napoleon was a good general. Terrible Emperor. Wellington or a subordinate also suggested that the French “came on in the same old way and we shot them down in the same old way”. The Cunctator knew his craft and never lost an army.

    Also his record in Egypt was terrible. He’s lucky he was able to suppress info about the debacle.

  8. Anti-racism is directly proportional to the size of the shaft normal whites get from elite whites.

    When normal whites feel like they have solidarity from the mucky-mucks, they reciprocate. When they don’t, they join other disaffected groups to overturn the mucky-mucks.

    When Aristocracy and Capitalism went too far, whites joined with other tooverturn it.

    Just as now, Jewish Multicult Genocide is leading to an upsurge in white pride world wide.

  9. “I’ve never gotten the hype over Napoleon myself, esp since Wellington ground him down and lost fewer men.”

    Wellington and England did most of their grinding down with troops from countries other than England. (A good thing for the English.) I too used to be skeptical of both Napoleon and Julius and Augustus Caesar but upon mature reflection they did bring peace, order, and materially productive civilization to vast parts of Europe.

    I now agree with Napoleon and many others that his greatest positive legacy was his institution of the Napoleonic Code of law to Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Italy, and other conquered areas.

    This brought in the consistent practice of due process in both civil and criminal proceedings which had been sorely lacking in the more feudalistic mish-mash of legal rules which preceded it.

  10. “When Aristocracy and Capitalism went too far, whites joined with other tooverturn it.”

    When has Capitalism ever not gone too far and where has it ever been successfully overturned?

    Stalin merely instituted state capitalism for privately owned capitalism for a while. (All those T-34s came from Soviet-built steel mills and factories.)

    China expelled mercantilist parasites not capitalism itself and that has now been supplanted entirely by the fastest growing capitalist economy on the planet.

    And Cuba’s experiment will be over immediately upon the death of the Castro brothers.

    Finally, in regard to aristocrats, the landed gentry everywhere have simply been replaced by super-rich industrial plutocrats.

  11. “It probably should have been followed in 1914.”

    Not really. The English were just as guilty as the French, Germans, Austrians, and Russians for fomenting and starting the genocidal First World War. The English were also complicit in the insane and unjust peace treaty of Versailles which led to even more genocide on both sides in the continuation in 1939 (think Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay.) Britain repeatedly refused to negotiate offers of peace from Hitler after starting the thing by stymying negotiations over the Danzig Corridor and then being the first to declare war on Germany in 1939.

    The United States never should have entered WWI as that would have led to a negotiated peace as both sides were already completely spent of men and with hungry populations at home.

    It’s high time for the English to acknowledge their war guilt for starting and pursuing both WWI and WWII.

  12. Rudel says:
    September 22, 2012 at 6:01 pm

    “It’s high time for the English to acknowledge their war guilt for starting and pursuing both WWI and WWII.”

    You mean the Rothchilds and their monied pals.

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