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The British Empire and Victorian Britain 2. .
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‘I take a practical mining geologist from the School of Miners to tell us of the Mineral Resources of the country, then an economic botanist to give a full report on the vegatable productions – everything which may be useful in commerce. An artist to give the scenery, a naval officer to tell of the capacity of the river communications and a moral agent to lay the foundation for knowing that aim fully. All this machinery has for its ostensible object the development of African trade and the promotion of civilization’ (David Livingstone, 1858)
‘Mr Livingstone, I presume!’ • * * * * * • "Mr. Baldwin, I presume!" (Chinua Achebe’s greeting to James Baldwin upon meeting him "in the jungles of Florida in 1988...„) • (Achebe, Hopes and Impediments)
Cecil Rhodes Cecil Rhodes
Oriel College, Oxford • „We are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.” (Cecil Rhodes) • Rhodes statue, Oriel College, Oxford • ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign
British India (the Raj) • Cantonments (only 20.000 Britons) • ‘Roman proconsul’ self-image • Selfless work + glamour (feudal style) • INDIAN MUTINY (1857) trauma for the British betrayal (of the Sepoys)
Lucknow • Tennyson: „The Defence of Lucknow” • Dion Boucicault: Jesse Brown or the Defence of Lucknow (play, 1857) • J. G. Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur (novel, 1973)
„The Indian Government never ought to have tolerated the religion of the Hindoos at all. If my religion consisted of bestiality, infanticide and murder, I should have no right to it unless I was prepared to be hanged. The religion of the Hindoos is no more than a mass of the rankest filth that imagination ever conceived. ..The sword must be taken out of its sheath, to cut off our fellow subjects by their thousand”. (Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, 1857) • “I wish I were Commander in Chief in India… I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.” (Charles Dickens)
Ideologies of empire: science, exploration • 1826 Zoological Society of London (Humphrey Davy, Stamford Raffles, etc.) • 1830 Royal Geographical Society • 1836 Botanical Society of London • 1843 Ethnological Society of London Augustus Pitt Rivers
Theories of race and racism After 1850 France (Franco-Germanic gentry vs Gallic middle class) Germany (unification, Blut und Boden) Britain (Darwinist roots) Before 1850: monogenesis – polygenesis Robert Knox: The Races of Man: A Zoological History of Mankind (1850)
social Darwinism „The law of survival applies to races as well as to animal species. It is pure sentimental bosh that Africa belongs to a lot of naked blacks. It belongs to the race that can make the best use of it. I am for the white man and for the English race.” (Rudyard Kipling)
‘scientific racism’ Phrenology, craniometry, anthropometry, physiognomy A. Retzius: ‘the cephalic index’; atavistic ‘stigmata’ Rider Haggard: “In all esentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical” G. A. Henty: “The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of an European child of ten years old” Dr. John Beddoes: ‘index of Nigrescence’ within Britain (melanin) racialising the Irish
The Hottentot Venus
Sawtche Saartjie Baartman the Hottentot Venus
„Love And Beauty: Saartjie the Hottentot Venus”
Saartjie Baartman wax cast
Willie Bester’s statue (2000) • Susan Lori-Parks: Venus (play) • Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children (Cape Town)
Boy scout movement Lord Robert Baden-Powell Public school ethos Hero-worship Thomas Hughes: Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) Imperialism
Rudyard Kipling: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) Dan and Una + Puck Two Roman centurions (Parnesius and Pertinax, defending Roma Dea and Hadrian’s Wall) Two medieval knights (Richard and Hugh), defending Puck’s Hill Manor
Orientalism • Edward Said: Orientalism (1978) • Discourse: scholarship (academic discipline) and fantasy; producing knowledge • Lord Curzon: orientalism is the „necessary furniture of the Empire” • G. Ch. Spivak: „epistemic violence”
Edward William Lane (Mansoor Efendi) Translator of Arabian nights Author of The Manners of the Modern Egyptians, 1836
Frederick Goodall: The Finding of Moses
Orientalism • Gustave Flaubert: “Egypt had the air of a painted landscape, of immense theatrical props set up expressly for us”
Ruins • “Splendid cities, once teeming with a busy population and embellished edifices, the wonder of the world, now deserted and lonely, or reduced by mismanagement and the barbarism of the Moslem creed, to a state as savage as the wild animals by which they are surrounded” (David Roberts)
Gerome Turkish Bath
Louis Bouchard: After the Bath