Douglas A Lorimer

Colour, Class, and the Victorians

"The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw a subtle yet significant change in English racial attitudes. The widespread sympathy for the plight of the oppressed blacks aroused by the anti-slavery movement did not simply decline: the prevailing temper came to express a new harsh racism which condemned blacks as inherently inferior to whites. This study examines the reasons for this transition by exploring a new range of sources including the experience of blacks in Victorian England and the origins of a derogatory stereotype of the Negro within the popular culture. This evidence demonstrates that the Victorians perceived blacks as a social as well as a racial group: in fact, comparisons of race and class typified the mid-Victorian discussion of race and slavery. Professor Latimer finds that the sources of mid-Victorian racism lay not simply in a direct response to the proponents of scientific racism, nor to the overseas needs of empire, but in the changing social and political climate of mid-Victorian England itself. The perception of colour remained constant, but as perceptions of class shifted, so Victorian racism intensified." --

Douglas A. Lorimer

Science, Race Relations and Resistance

By exploring the dimensions of race, race relations and resistance, this book offers a new account of the British Empire's greatest failure and its most disturbing legacy. Using a wide range of published and archival sources, this study of racial discourse from 1870 to 1914 argues that race, then as now, was a contested territory within the metropolitan culture. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, this book uncovers the conflicting opinions that characterised late Victorian and Edwardian discourse on the 'colour question'. It offers a revisionist account of race in science, and provides original studies of the invention of the language of race relations and of resistance to race-thinking led by radical abolitionists and persons of Asian and African descent living in the United Kingdom.