Science, race relations and resistance

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.