Orwell and Empire by Douglas Kerr;

Author:Douglas Kerr; [Kerr, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192679017
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

8

Race

The demographic mix of the United Kingdom today may turn out to be the most lasting legacy of imperial history for the British, but it is the fruit not of empire, but of the end of empire. Substantial immigration from former or current British possessions did not get going until after the Second World War. In George Orwell’s lifetime, very large numbers of people living in Britain had next to no contact with people of a different colour, or with foreigners of any kind. The exceptions, of course, were those who had lived and worked in the empire.

What is race? It is likely that Orwell did not know. The term is notoriously hard to define, no doubt because it refers to a phenomenon with no basis in nature, and people of his generation used it quite promiscuously to describe all sorts of large groups of people. The English were a race. Anglo-Saxons were a race, or possibly a mixture of two races. Blacks and whites were different races, as anyone could see. So were Japanese, and Indians. Italians, Spaniards, and the like were the Latin races. The British, according to Winston Churchill, were an island race. The Germans were a race too, but so were the Aryans, and in Hitler’s view they were superior to other races, but especially to the Slavs and the Jews, who were inferior races.

It is probably inevitable that racial thinking involves these hopeless tangles, muddling geographical, political, and linguistic groups, ‘colours’, and often fanciful ideas of heritage. But it is probably inevitable too that it comes with an idea of the inequality of races. Orwell seems to have been happy to use the term loosely. He was equally casual with the word ‘nation’, and in his great essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’, he oddly talks about the ‘passionate nationalistic feeling’ inspired by movements and tendencies like Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat, and the White Race, none of which are nations.*

A science (or ‘science’) of race had come into being in the late nineteenth century, an age of nationalism, imperialism, and Social Darwinism. It considered that a race was a large group of people with shared physical characteristics (biology), and that these were systematically associated with certain kinds of behaviour or character (anthropology); in the end, even the most scientific descriptions of racial difference tended to end up with cultural difference. Race was a heuristic; the difference between races was held to explain, for example, why some groups of people were powerful, rational, and modern, while others were weak, instinctive, and primitive. You can find a kind of allegory of this in the story of the pith helmet, that imperial fetish ridiculed by Orwell:

You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different. There were quite a number of ways in which Europeans in India used to believe, without any evidence, that Asiatic bodies differed from their own.

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