2 Powerful ideas: European racial ideologies
Military, political, bureaucratic and economic power are obviously important to any understanding of how empires exerted power. But, to concentrate exclusively on such factors misses the role played by ideas, systems of knowledge, culture, and ideology. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion that ‘the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire’, this section explores how what people thought and believed, in both metropoles and colonial contexts, helped to sustain empires (Said, 1994).
Arguably, all empires are underpinned by what we might call ‘imperial ideologies’. What does this mean? A definition from The Encyclopedia of Empire (2016) is given below:
Imperial ideologies are the ideas, concepts, explanations, and justifications for empire which imperial societies have articulated for themselves. They are the means by which dominant imperial societies make sense of how they acquired an empire, why they continue to maintain an empire, and what form and shape their empire might take on in the future. They are the worldviews of imperial societies, and have formed the basis of how imperial societies have sought to organize their empires politically, socially, and economically
Early imperial endeavours on the part of European countries were justified by a range of different ideas. Spanish colonialism, for example, was legitimated in part by the papal bulls issued by Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) which gave the Crown the right to occupy the Americas to convert the indigenous population.
Alongside religious justifications, some theorists debated the concept of terra nullius (empty land) – the idea that undeveloped territory (even if it contained people, provided they had not exploited the land by the fruits of the labour) could legitimately be taken to rule.
A third strand embraced the idea of a secular ‘civilising mission’. The idea that ‘more advanced’ and enlightened populations, such as those in Europe, had a duty to improve and lead ‘less developed’ populations out of their state of ‘barbarism’.
These three strands of imperial ideology – religious, legal, and cultural – were used to justify and legitimate a range of acquisitive activities which often involved the use of force.
From about the eighteenth century, increasingly sophisticated justifications of empire developed rooted in ‘stadial’ theories of race. This refers to the idea that different populations were at different stages on a common journey towards the advanced state of civilisation represented by European countries. These ideas of empire still included discussion of racial difference – perceived cultural or biological differences between populations - but this difference tended to be seen as primarily either cultural or influenced by environment.
As the nineteenth century progressed, however, new supposedly ‘scientific’ ideas about race came to the fore. These focussed more overtly on the division of humans into distinct and largely immutable racial categories, with an increased focus on biological markers and determinants. ‘Scientific’ racism was a foundational part of eugenic thinking in the twentieth century.
Ideologies of race were used by European colonisers to legitimise and justify the treatment of colonised peoples including enslavement and exploitation. These concepts were powerful – the legacies and effects of racial thinking established during periods of colonisation, continue to shape people’s attitudes and experiences on a global scale today.
Activity 2 Thinking through the ideology of difference
Read the two extracts below and then answer the following question:
- In what ways do the words spoken by these two important politicians demonstrate embedded ideas of superiority and difference?
Speech given to the House of Commons by the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour in 1910.
‘Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government [...] You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries – and they have been very great – have been passed under despotisms, under absolute government. All their great contributions to civilisation – and they have been great – have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government. [...] Is it a good thing for these great nations – I admit their greatness – that this absolute government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing. I think that experience shows that they have got under it far better government than in the whole history of the world they ever had before, and which not only is a benefit to them, but is undoubtedly a benefit to the whole of the civilised West. … We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.’
Jules Ferry, Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry. Discours sur la politique extériure et coloniale, (1893–1898), p. 210–12
‘[T]he superior races have a right vis-à-vis the inferior races [...] I repeat that the superior races have a right, because they have a duty towards them. They have the duty to civilise the inferior races [...] Can you deny, can anyone deny, that there is more justice, more order (material and moral), more equity, more social virtue in North Africa since France conquered it? Can it be denied that in India, despite the shameful episodes which form part of the history of that conquest, there is today infinitely more justice, more light, more order, more public and private virtue since the English conquest than before?’
Discussion
It is clear from even these short excerpts that both Balfour and Ferry (former Prime Ministers for Britain and France respectively) believed that a clear cultural distinction could be made between East and West, with the latter developing progressive national democracy and the former remaining wedded to absolutist forms of rule. It is possible to see in these excerpts an assumption that the West knows what is best for the East. Arguably, this certainty that they were ‘doing the right thing’ was a key component of the will to rule on the part of the British and French imperialism. Ideas like these formed part of the imperial imaginary of politicians, and thereby informed the way in which empires were run.