Science, Race Relations and Resistance: Britain, 18701914

(Hardback)

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The focus of this study goes beyond just a history of ideas to encompass issues of racism within the wider context of Victorian and Edwardian race relations and of anti-racist resistance. The book reconstructs the debate on racial subordination in its full complexity and also explores the impact of resistance to prevailing racist thinking. Douglas Lorimer begins by documenting the establishment of a scientific racist orthodoxy in the 1880s and 1890s, and he explores how the concurrent rise of professionalism in science, mass consumerism and the new imperialism created conditions for the predominance of racist-thinking in elite and popular culture. However, racism was never simply a scientific theory, but served a political purpose in shaping contemporary race relations. In the period from 1870 to 1914 the humanitarian agencies, for example the Aborigines Protection Society, made compromises with the prevailing racist ideology and with colonialism, and failed to impede the advance of racism. Despite this failure, there were sources of resistance to the racist hegemony. This book recovers those voices of resistance among the victims of racial oppression and among a minority of radicals. These agents of resistance also failed, but in the long-term they found a rival anti-racist tradition.

Reviews

Appropriate for specialists on Victorian racism as well as those new to the subject, Science, Race Relations and Resistance gives an illuminating and critical examination of the development of scientific racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Science, Race Relations and Resistance impresses with its exploration of racial rhetoric, and convincingly unravels the tangled relationship between scientific racism and the real problems posed by the colour question. It thus manages to align imperial history and anthropological history in a new and credible way, and will undoubtedly be valued by scholars in both fields.
Elise Juzda Smith, The Journal of the Historical Association, Volume 101, Issue 347

Ultimately, Lorimers Science, Race Relations and Resistance, 18701914 is a wide ranging and important survey of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century 362 Book Reviews debates on race and race relations that will be of interest to historians of Britain, imperialism and racism.
Sadiah Qureshi, The University of Birmingham, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
25 Mar 2015.

A great strength of Science, Race Relations and Resistance is its refusal to generalize or simplify British ideas about race in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through systematic analyses of a wide variety of sources, from popular science works, to humanitarian journals, to writings by scholars and administrators interested in the colour question, Lorimer shows that there was always a multiplicity of views about how best to manage race relations.
Elise Juzda Smith, University of Warwick, Journal of the Historical Association

Author Bio

Douglas A. Lorimer is Professor Emeritus, History Department, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario