The Transformation of the World (184 page)

Even more important was the strategy of replacing slaves in dynamic sectors of the economy with newly recruited immigrants from Europe. The ex-slaves found themselves economically marginalized, inhabiting a different labor market from that of the new immigrants, so that the fierce competition that typically fueled racism elsewhere in the world was a factor of minor significance. Nor did race ever become a contentious issue in regional politics in Brazil; no special areas defined themselves in terms of a racial identity that suggested secession as a solution to their problems, as the South did in the United States. Indeed, the elite took pains to preach an inclusive nationalism and a myth that the older slave system had been exceptionally humanitarian. This made it possible to construct the national history as a continuum stretching from colonial times to monarchy to the republic.

The material position of blacks in postemancipation Brazil was in no way better than in Alabama or South Africa; the state simply did not concern itself with them. There was no equivalent of Reconstruction, but also no backlash in the shape of official apartheid; the authorities did not think it was their job to uphold racial barriers. If much racist violence went unpunished, this was not because it directly emanated from the state but because the state itself was too weak. The abolitionists were incapable of influencing the social order after emancipation.
⁷³
Meanwhile in Cuba, whites and blacks fought together against the Spanish in the war of independence, and the workforce in the sugar economy had a wider mix of skin colors. After the end of slavery, politics was therefore more “colorblind” than in other postemancipation societies, especially the United States. White racial supremacy did not assert itself on the island.
⁷⁴

All processes that led to the abolition of slavery in the West had one thing in common apart from Christian and humanitarian aspects: namely, a liberal hope that under free market conditions ex-slaves would respond to positive incentives and work as productively as before in export agriculture. Economists and politicians saw emancipation as a great experiment. Former slaves would have a chance
to prove their “rationality” (their human worth by the standards of an enlightened age) by behaving in the manner of the
Homo oeconomicus
of liberal theory, oriented to hard work, profit, and accumulation. An organized transition from slavery to freedom (often, as in the British Empire, conceived as an apprenticeship) was supposed to facilitate this for them. The granting of full civil and political rights would then crown this development of a “moral personality.”
⁷⁵

The reality often looked different. Freed slaves tended to behave in unexpected ways, preferring the security of their own small plot of land to wage labor in a large enterprise, or opting for some combination of the two. The result was a reduced market orientation in comparison with the age of plantations producing for export. The reformers experienced another disappointment when many ex-slaves failed to aspire to bourgeois ideals of family life. The two together seemed to demonstrate that, because of anthropological peculiarities, black Africans were unable to cope either with market rationality or with civilized norms of personal conduct. Although this was not a
cause
of racism, it did strengthen racist tendencies. The great experiment of emancipation left largely unfulfilled the illusory, self-serving hopes of its liberal protagonists.
⁷⁶

3 Antiforeignism and “Race War”

The Rise and Fall of Virulent Racism

In 1900 the word “race” was in common usage in many languages around the world. The global climate of opinion was saturated with racism.
⁷⁷
At least in the global “West,” to be found in every continent in the age of imperialism, few doubted that mankind was divided into races with different biologically determined capacities, and that therefore they did not all have the same right to shape their own existence. Around 1800, although practices in the colonies and the transatlantic slave trade were based on differences in skin color, such ideas were mainly being developed in European academic circles. By 1880 they were a basic part of the collective imaginary in Western societies. Fifty years on, racism was already a touch less acceptable around the world.

In the “white” West, prosperous African Americans with a bourgeois appearance still found it difficult to find a hotel room, but academics at least tended to be less uncritical in dealing with the concept of “race.” Japan's attempt at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to have a clause against racial discrimination written into the charter of the newly founded League of Nations failed mainly because of resistance by the British dominions and the United States, but it showed the extent to which racist discourse and practices were by then subject to challenge.
⁷⁸
After 1933, the racist rhetoric and actions of the German National Socialists caused greater consternation in international public opinion than they would have done around the turn of the century, though they were often negligently played down abroad as a German “quirk.” By 2014 racism is discredited
throughout the world, its propagation is a punishable offense in many countries, and any claim to scientific credentials are laughed out of court. The rise and fall of racism as a force capable of shaping history occupied the relatively short period between 1860 and 1945. Its macabre cycle spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Race was a central issue in 1900 not only in countries where the “white man” (as he was now known) formed the majority of the population. Ruling white minorities in the colonies worried over the threat to their supremacy from subject “inferior” races, and in Japan or China groups of intellectuals were appropriating the vocabulary of European racial theories. “Race” was taken seriously as a scientific concept. Biologists and ethnologists especially liked to talk about it. But in neighboring disciplines too, a
Volk
or “people” referred increasingly to the common biological descent of an
ethos
, and less than in earlier decades to the political community of a
demos
. Such discourse did not leave sections of the political Left untouched; there was even a socialist variant of eugenics, a theory for planning healthy heredity, which claimed to serve the advent of an ideal society of equals.

But racial thinking was essentially situated on the political Right. It contradicted Enlightenment ideas such as the natural equality of human beings, their inborn rights, and their striving for freedom, peace, and happiness. Racial thinking tended to be collectivist rather than individualist; terms such as the German
Volk
or
völkisch
became its most important semantic bearers, even if there was not a complete identity between theories based on race and
Volk
. “Social Darwinist” conceptions of race war and the inevitable subjugation of the weakest were part of the picture. In fact, whites could end up the losers as well: some of the early racial theorists had pessimistic inclinations, and many colonial practitioners waited in a mood of imperial melancholy for the white man to be ground down by the rigors of tropical life.
⁷⁹

Racial thinking cultivated certain aversions and hate objects: Jews and coloreds, democrats, socialists, and feminists. Heads of state, scholars, and street mobs, who otherwise had nothing in common, were united in their racist prejudices. The main imagery was of bodies and physicality: people spoke of threats to “the national body” from enemies and pests. The old physiognomy of the eighteenth century reappeared in theories suggesting that the body expressed racial “inferiority” or a criminal disposition. Racial thinking caused, made possible, or facilitated genocide in the Congo Free State, German South-West Africa, and Amazonia; anti-Jewish pogroms in the Tsarist Empire; and sadistic lynchings or attacks on ethnically alien immigrants in the Southern United States. Aggression and fear were usually closely associated with each other; simple race hatred was never the only, and seldom the principal, source of such acts of violence. Homicidal masses and college professors who would never harm a fly found themselves spontaneous accomplices in the business of fabricating “purity” of the race and the nation. So it was that a brief period of virulent racism began around 1870. It
paved the way for the German mass murder of European Jewry—without making it inevitable, since further elements of extremism had yet to appear after the First World War.

Race Theories: Prerevolutionary and Postrevolutionary

Racism is extremely difficult to break down into types and to classify. Looking only at the strategies proposed and the practices implemented we may distinguish between four variants along with their different consequences:

1. 
repressive
racism leading to the formation of politically and economically deprived underclasses

2. 
segregatory
racism culminating in the establishment of formal or informal ghettos

3. 
exclusionary
racism fostering suspicion of the outside world and aiming at closely patrolled borders of the nation-state

4. 
exterminatory
racism stigmatizing specific groups as “racial enemies” and persecuting them to the point of systematic annihilation

The arguments and narratives associated with race were of different kinds. The picture would also have to include a whole series of transnational connections. Just as, in the decades around 1900, race was the Western intellectual's favorite category in building macropictures of the relations among states and nations, national racisms reacted to one another and thinkers who believed in the “breedability” of man were especially inclined to join forces across frontiers.
⁸⁰

As an extreme form of ethnocentrism, which sees the chief distinction among human groups not in changeable modes of cultural behavior but in immutable, biologically inherited physical properties, racism came into being during the early modern period, when contacts between societies became more intense across the globe. But it was not the dominant worldview among Europeans, not even among seafarers and colonial conquerors, until well into the nineteenth century. Any quotation from an early modern travel report that may be read as a disparaging remark on non-European human groups is more than outweighed by expressions of respect and admiration; travelers were more interested in the morals and customs of other peoples than in any phenotype.

Racist attitudes and stereotypes, but not yet elaborate racial theories, developed in the various milieux of the Atlantic slave trade, the American plantations, and the immigrant societies of the Western hemisphere where perceived color differentials served to construct social hierarchies. The first extensive apologia in racist language for the institution of slavery, based on references to the anthropology of the age, was
The History of Jamaica
(1774) by the planter Edward Long. Racism was not the cause of slavery, but in the late eighteenth century and especially the first half of the nineteenth, it increasingly served to justify it.
⁸¹
At many frontiers of European expansion, differences between settlers and indigenous people were still being given a cultural rather than a biological interpretation.
In general, the relationship between slavery and imputed racial characteristics is flexible. Numerous slave systems in history did not rest ultimately upon physical differences. Slavery in Greco-Roman antiquity and military servitude in the Ottoman Empire (where recruits were supplied from the Balkans or the Black Sea area) are two good examples of this. Even in North and South America, there were slaves lighter in color than many of their European owners and guards.
⁸²

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, classification and comparison became fashionable scientific methods among European intellectuals. Proposals were made to divide mankind into “types,” and comparative anatomy and phrenology (cranial measurement as a pointer to intelligence) gave such approaches a veneer of credibility according to the standards of the time. Some authors, consciously spurning the Christian doctrine of the Creation, went so far as to postulate the separate origins of various races (polygenesis) and hence to question the basic affinity between whites and blacks emphasized by abolitionist movements. Until the mid-twentieth century, racial classification remained a pet activity for many anatomists and anthropologists, while colonial administrators tried using it to bring order into the motley variety of their subjects.

Like phrenology, this diversity was a popular theme throughout the nineteenth century, regularly presented in visual displays at world's fairs and special exhibitions. Some of the categories developed before 1800 clung on stubbornly: “the yellow race,” “Negro,” or “Caucasian” (the latter going back to the Göttingen scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and still employed today in the United States as a euphemism for “white”). Classificatory systems led to endless confusion, especially since the English word “race” was also used to refer to nations, as in “the Spanish race,” and so on. By the late 1880s, the number of races distinguished in the US literature alone varied between 2 and 63.
⁸³
There is no straight line leading from Blumenbach or Kant to the exterminatory racism of the past century. At worst, late Enlightenment taxonomies and early attempts to rank racial types or subspecies of humanity could serve to justify a repressive, exploitative racism, but not one with murderous intent. Nor could they legitimate a demand for the segregationist color bars that were characteristic of racism after 1900, but much less significant in colonial practice before the 1850s or thereabouts. Late-nineteenth-century racism was not an uninterrupted continuation of eighteenth-century developments.

The racial theories of the nineteenth century were postrevolutionary. They presupposed a loosening of the ties of Christendom but, above all, a world in which hierarchies were no longer seen as part of a divine or natural order. They emerged less in the largest colonial power (Britain) than in France or the United States. British political thought has never been emphatically egalitarian, so that the tension between the theoretical promise of equality and the unequal reality on the ground was never felt as strongly as in the lands of the Declaration of Independence and the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen. After roughly 1815, racial theories of a new type became possible. The first premise
for this was a farewell to the idea that environmental influences could lastingly shape human nature, even in its phenotypical variations.
⁸⁴
The idea of “betterment” dropped out of racial thinking, to stage a comeback only in the last third of the century as eugenic biotechnology. Concepts of race thus began to clash with the idea of a civilizing mission. The second premise was a claim—much more sweeping than any advanced by late Enlightenment naturalists—that race was a central category in the philosophy of history, a universal key to understanding both past and present, in direct competition with such terms as “class,” “state,” “religion,” or “national spirit.”