Making of the English: ideas of race in British scholarship 1870-1914 (original) (raw)
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In this article, I situate Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover’s thoughts against the backdrop of travelling discourses of Aryanism as manifested from the nineteenth century onward. Depicting the constructions of prejudices by British and German Orientalist philology against figures born of intermixture, I show how British appropriations of Aryanism disturbingly helped disenfranchise Anglo-Indians in colonial India, as Dover suggests in his work. Discussing how Dover uses his anti-racist oeuvre to problematize philology and, by extension, eugenics, I delineate Dover’s arrival at the realization that race as a category needs to be abjured. The repudiation of race, states Dover, is necessary because all bodies—including those of British and Anglo-Indian alike—are born of indeterminate intermixture. I show how Dover uses this conclusion to conceptualize a transnational coming community of the intermixed—a community in which Anglo-Indians may participate to write back agains...
Syllabus: Inventing Race in the British Empire
This course reveals how the British encounter with racial difference in the Caribbean, Australasia, and India could both validate and subvert the project of empire-building. We will begin by examining the ways in which ethnographical and anthropological societies in the metropole clashed over the question of racial differentiation in the nineteenth century. We will then determine how these “scientific” theories of race were deployed in colonial settings; did they inform relations between colonized and settler populations, or did the local states innovate novel race-based policies to undergird their rule? By investigating how an array of actors instrumentally invoked race to accomplish specific objectives, we will further deconstruct the narrative of a unitary, overarching “civilizing mission.” A host of primary sources, including anthropological treatises, missionary accounts, public speeches, and fictional works, will aid us in this pursuit.
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British Ethnogenesis: A Late Antique Story
Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic influence in the Construction of British Identities, 2020
This chapter will deal with the origin of the people known as the Britons as defined under the headword 'Briton, n.1. A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany' in the OED, rather than the neologistic sense which has gradually displaced it and become more common since the late seventeenth century as applied to inhabitants or citizens of Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The principal argument here will be that this identity came into being in the course of Late Antiquity (i.e. c. 300-700). Parts of this argument will contest the essentialist view that medieval British culture represents a direct continuity from pre-Roman identity on the island, which, it is suggested, would have been far from homogenous. Equally, however, this argument will contest the view that the medieval Britons were the direct cultural heirs of the Romano-British population. Britishness, like Englishness, was a product of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire. : It has long been recognized that medieval Britons derived their culture from a mixture of Roman and Celtic heritage. Whilst Welsh, for example, is classed as a Celtic language it contains more than 900 words borrowed from Latin during Antiquity, including terms for quite prosaic items such as 'fish', in sharp contrast to the mere dozen or so words borrowed from Celtic into Old English. The British language also displayed a greatly simplified morphosyntactical structure, as compared to its contemporary Celtic cousin Old Irish, which was probably brought about by a degree of creolization between Latin and the Celtic dialects it encountered in Britain.¹ In this chapter I will look at both the way in which British identity was constructed out of Roman and Celtic elements, and the way in which the Late Antique Britons understood that relationship. I will argue, inter alia, that from as early as the mid-sixth century, when Gildas, writing in Latin, attempted to reconstruct recent history from fragmentary sources, the relationship between Romano-British of the imperial era and the people who self-identified as Britons ¹ Charles-Edwards (2013) 75-115.
Journal of The Royal Asiatic Society, 2007
This volume highlights some of the ways in which questions on origins challenge historical reconstructions. The debate on Indo Aryan, a linguistic phenomenon, revolves around two opposing views. One, that its initial presence within north-west South Asia can be verified only from the second millennium BC onwards, and the other, that it was native to the region. Those who now support the first view do not offer explanations that are based on the Aryan invasion theories of the nineteenth-and the early-twentieth centuries. Rather, they perceive the possibility of small-scale migrations of Indo Aryan speakers into Punjab and Northwest India. In contrast, the indigenists (see Bryant's definition, p. 468) who propose the origins of the 'Indo-Aryans' in South Asia locate the validity of their premise mainly through the archaeological record of the Greater Indus Valley, which provides no traces of large-scale dramatic invasions, or smaller groups of people migrating into this region during the second millennium BC. The theoretical slippage that recurs in historicising a linguistic phenomenon through its speakers stokes a controversial debate at present, which resonates on the appropriation of an academic exercise for conjuring a primordial Hindu nationhood for India (but Bryant, p. 471). Both, the research methods of the indigenists, and the kinds of evidence they promote as scientific and valid, are controversial. As the volume reminds us, it is the historicity of the speakers of Indo Aryan, a subject of more than a century-long research that continues to stage discussions regarding what ought to be a 'true story' of 'origins'.
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Another British World? Tamils, Empire, and Mobility
Recent efforts in 'British world' studies attempt to recover British diaspora histories from nationalist channels, which they had settled into in the aftermath of decolonization in the midtwentieth century. The impetus for such efforts originated with J. A. Pocock's pleas for a reformed British history. 1 The debate which followed raised awareness both of the possibilities as well as the problems of integrating temporally and spatially vast and varied literatures. 2 From the outset of this process the historiography suggests a reluctance to fully take into account nonwhite Asian and African histories of Britishness. 3 For example, the British world project that was outlined by Bridge and Fedorovich is ambiguous on this subject, stating on the one hand that 'the British world was a phenomenon of mass migration from the British Isles', while acknowledging 'this world was not exclusively white'. 4 It is curious that recent inquiries into Britain's imperial past, which has so rapidly led to remarkable scholarship, has not fully addressed the importance of key figures in this world. 5 As a parallel historiographical trend, non-white groups have received attention in a stream of fascinating studies on the relationship between British identity 1 and imperial connections. 6 As Saul Dubow has observed, the present situation might simply indicate that the time has come for British world scholarship to more precisely consider its intellectual foundations and goals. 7 With this ambition in mind, this paper outlines a more precise re-categorization of non-white British identity during and after the height of empire, by focussing on the Tamils of Jaffna in northern Ceylon (known as Sri Lanka after 1972).