The Transformation of the World (185 page)

A striking feature of such racial thinking—as Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to recognize—was its strong propensity to determinism and hence to the marginalization of politics and any active shaping of history.
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Only after 1815, and particularly after the revolutions of 1848 caused intense disquiet among conservatives, did race-based universal theories or—to put it more critically—closed systems of delusion come to the fore. Two authors played a leading role in this. In 1850, the Scottish doctor Robert Knox published a collection of lectures,
The Races of Men
, with the aim of alerting readers to the racial backdrop of political conflicts in Europe at that time.
⁸⁶
His influence, certainly sizable, was surpassed by the impact of the
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines
(1853–55), whose author, the French count Arthur de Gobineau, was obsessed with the dangers of racial mixing. The two men were only early and prominent representatives of a Euro-American racial discourse that quickly gathered momentum after the middle of the century. Natural scientists had never abandoned the theme, although one of their greatest figures, Alexander von Humboldt, remained an uncompromising opponent of all racial thinking. Later, the revolutionizing of biology and anthropology by Charles Darwin and his followers again changed the parameters of the debate.
⁸⁷

German scholars and writers figured rather little among the international champions of racist thought after the Age of Revolution. In a new situation, where the principal dynamic was no longer one of revolution and counterrevolution but of national self-assertion in a Europe changed by the upheavals between 1789 and 1815, some followed the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (
Speeches to the German Nation
, 1807–8) in seeking an ethnic unity for the German nation, which for the time being could not be constituted through political action. Inspired by a new historical interest in origins (those of the Roman state, for example, in the emerging field of ancient history), they pursued fantasies about “Teutonic” roots of the elusive German nation.
⁸⁸
In fact,
germanisch
was an enigmatic cultural-biological hybrid category, later capable of being interpreted in a number of different ways. In the hands of Romantic nationalists, it served to prove the superiority of their own nation over its eastern (Slav), western, and southern neighbors, and ultimately also over the cultural models of ancient Greece and Rome. Even in England, never fertile ground for extreme racist ideas, writers sought to derive the present day not from medieval Norman principles
of community and law but from germs among the pagan Anglo-Saxons. In the age of slowly spreading industrialization, it was not only the “Germanic” European countries that began to study and imaginatively re-create the pre-Christian beginnings of their nationhood. New national epics came into being, such as the Finnish
Kalevala
(final version 1849) that the doctor and song collector Elias Lönnrot put together as a verse mosaic from original sources.

Almost the whole of Europe (though not Finland) became fascinated with a theory of its “Indo-Germanic” or “Aryan” origins, which initially had more to do with common linguistic roots than with biological links, and whose success was based on a deceptively simple opposition between Aryan and Semitic. This conceptual antinomy, dignified by scientific credentials, was taken over later in the century by anti-Semites, who used it to exclude non-Aryan Jews from the European cultural community. But the myth of Aryanhood provoked others to contradict it. The British, for example, were far from enthusiastic about the view that they were related to Indians, especially after the Great Rebellion made them inclined to see India as completely “other.”
⁸⁹
Not all racial thinking was antinomic or binary. There were people who racked their brains over shades of skin color and “mixed blood” percentages, or drew up gradations between noble (for the British: manly or martial) and nonnoble “savages.”
⁹⁰
In any event, racism meant thinking in terms of differences, both coarse and fine.

Dominant Racism and Its Opponents

From the 1850s on, it is possible to speak of a
dominant
racism. Though very unevenly distributed through the Western world and its colonies, it was never absent there and underlay a picture of the world that was one of the most influential of the age. From a penchant of outsiders and minorities it became a classificatory schema that marked the perception of cultural and political elites; the emergent mass electorate could be won over to it in special cases. It seemed natural to look down on “inferior races” with at best well-meaning condescension. Extreme expressions of racism, such as had been unthinkable in 1820 and would have caused a scandal in 1960, could be voiced with impunity. The production of racially skewed worldviews reached a peak in Richard Wagner's son-in-law, the British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose German-language work
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899) was an instant bestseller in Europe and a major source for Nazi racial ideology.
⁹¹
Austrian racist circles in particular, following the lead of Gobineau, became increasingly puffed up with talk of race and blood. International politics, too, could be explained in terms of a “race war”—a fateful conflict between “Germanic” and “Slavic” peoples for the influential Pan-German League. A “yellow peril” seemed to threaten from Asia in the shape of cheap Chinese laborers and Japanese marching columns.
⁹²

There were certainly individuals who escaped what David Brion Davis calls the “official racism in Western culture.”
⁹³
In a dramatic intervention on the Jamaican Morant Bay scandal in 1865, John Stuart Mill spoke out against the racist
polemic of his fellow intellectual Thomas Carlyle.
⁹⁴
Others registered doubts about the idea that modern civilization stemmed from Germanic or “Aryan” roots. W.E.B. Du Bois and the German-born Franz Boas (one of the founders of ethnology and cultural anthropology) waged decades-long campaigns against pseudoscientific racism,
⁹⁵
while Rudolf Virchow combated it with the authority of a great natural scientist. The new discipline of sociology, represented by Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Vilfredo Pareto, also stood from the beginning in opposition to the zeitgeist, refusing to accept any biological or genetic factors in its explanations. Some sociologists in this pioneering generation did invoke race—for example, the Austrian Ludwig Gumplowicz—but their work led down an academic blind alley. After the First World War, racial classifications began to lose their scientific respectability, at first in Britain and the United States.
⁹⁶

The State, Immigration Policy, and Racism

Another feature of the dominant racism after the 1860s was the leading role of the state. Older racisms had had the character of personal attitudes, but now there was a built-in tendency to seek the
realization
of a racial order. This required the help of the state: or, in other words, racists struggled to capture state power. They succeeded mainly in the Southern United States, in Nazi Germany (although Fascist Italy and Japan between 1931 and 1945 showed similar trends, they cannot be described as fully fledged racial states), and in the former settler colony of South Africa. The European colonies were not really racial states: they did not make
official
racism a guiding ideological and practical principle; the general rule was that colonial subjects (most of whom paid taxes) might not be worth as much as whites but should nevertheless be treated “decently.”

What was new in the last third of the nineteenth century was that national governments and, in a weaker form, empires saw it as their task to safeguard cultural homogeneity and ethnic purity within their borders. This happened in various ways and with varying degrees of intensity. Free movement across borders had become more widespread in the first two-thirds of the century, except for members of the lower classes. Many requirements to carry identity documents disappeared.
⁹⁷
But this trend went into reverse toward the end of the century, as passports and passport controls erected a paper wall of differing heights around nation-states.

Britain remained a liberal exception. Until the First World War, citizens of the United Kingdom had no identity documents; they could leave their country without a passport or official approval and convert their money straightforwardly into foreign currencies. Conversely, foreigners were not prevented from entering Britain; they could spend their life there without having to register with the police. Nor were passport formalities usually necessary for travel between colonies of a single empire. In continental Europe, sharper dividing lines were drawn between citizens and aliens toward the end of the century. Entry,
residence, citizenship, and naturalization became subject to legal regulation and administrative processing—an expression not so much of growing racism as of the widening scope of state activity and increased migration flows.
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The internal consolidation of nation-states meant that the question of membership in the majority “state nation” had to be posed more energetically. The reintroduction of protective tariffs on the Continent in the late 1870s showed how governments were capable of regulating cross-border flows in the case of material goods. As for persons, the issue was who should be kept out as undesirable, and who should be placed where on a scale of “naturalization worthiness.”

In many parts of Europe toward the end of the century, there was a growing tendency to regard aliens with mistrust or even animosity. However, nation-states by no means shut the door completely, and racial criteria for inclusion did not gain the upper hand. This was true not only of Britain; the French Third Republic, permeated by high patriotic sentiment, placed few obstacles in the way of immigration, partly because its unusually low demographic growth engendered a certain mood of crisis. Waves of foreign workers came into the country from midcentury on, gradually developing into ethnic communities with a high propensity to assimilation. Xenophobic campaigns were never able to have a significant impact on national legislation. France had great faith in the integrative power of its language, its educational system, and its armed forces.
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In the German Reich too, where much stronger forces on the Right were agitating for a racial concept of the nation and, in the years before the First World War, stirred panic over the influx of Poles and Jews from the East, the nation-state did not become a “racial state” in its immigration policy. A major overhaul of citizenship legislation in 1913 did not evince a Reichstag majority in favor of biological conceptions of race. Nor was it agreed to incorporate into the law of the land such colonial administrative practices as the obstruction of “racial intermarriage.”
¹⁰⁰

Racist Protectionism

It was not in Europe but in the democratic societies of North America and Australasia that a political majority was secured for racial protectionism.
¹⁰¹
This was directed mainly against Asians. Chinese had migrated for various reasons to the United States: as gold prospectors to California, as railroad workers, and as plantation coolies to Hawaii. Many of them later drifted into the cities, working as cooks or launderers and living together in their own communities. Although they were initially welcomed as hard workers, white Americans later turned against them and demanded a halt to immigration from Asia. In a language that had much in common with the attacks on postemancipation African Americans, the Chinese were increasingly branded as “half-civilized” people incapable of fitting into their American surroundings. Leaders of labor unions feared their presence would depress wages. Disgust over prostitution became the pretext for limiting the influx of Chinese women and thereby curbing the growth of the Asian population in the United States. California, in particular, witnessed pogrom-like
incidents that resulted in deaths and injuries. Finally, in 1882, supporters of a federal ban had their way; Congress passed a Chinese Exclusion Act that virtually banned immigration from China for an initial ten-year period. This proved to be the first in a long series of measures that followed until the ending of the exclusion policy in 1943.
¹⁰²
Even more bitter were the attacks on Japanese, who in many cases had come to the United States not as coolies but in response to the emigration policies of their own government. They were also more active than Chinese in sectors of the economy where they competed directly with whites and encountered especially strong resistance.

As in the American West, Asian emigration to Australia from the 1880s on became the trigger for labor union mobilizations and a burning issue in election campaigns. A “swamping” hysteria took on such proportions there that the book market produced a special genre peddling fantasies of an imminent invasion.
¹⁰³
Asians already living in the country were better treated than in the United States, enjoying a degree of state protection and many civil rights. But official support for a white Australia was even stronger than comparable tendencies in America. For a whole century—from the 1860s to the 1960s—the Australian colonies and then the federation pursued a policy of hindering immigration of nonwhites. Its rational kernel was a wish to prevent the formation of a nonwhite underclass, but the justifications acquired an ever shriller racist tone, so that any further immigration became extremely difficult from 1901 on.
¹⁰⁴
In 1910, Canada switched to a white Canada policy. In 1903 Paraguay adopted a highly restrictive law on immigration, and in 1897 the colony of Natal in South Africa tried to prohibit the influx of Indians, ostensibly to the advantage of the African population.