Left-Wing and the 'Other' History: The Australian History Wars

Whenever academic history and popular history intersect during a major shift in historiography we see intense debates about the study of the past. Often they become embroiled in a 'culture war' with Left-wing and Right-wing figures becoming associated with a certain viewpoint of history. For example, there were the volatile debates about 'truth' and 'accuracy' surrounding the testimonio of Guatemalan Maya activist Rigoberta Menchu; there were intense discussions in Poland on culpability in the Holocaust following the publication of Jan Gross's Neighbors in 2001, which detailed the Jedwabne pogrom; and, around the centenary of the start of the First World War there were debates in Britain over the war in British popular memory. One of the most famous examples of this clash is the History Wars in Australia. Especially prominent in the 1990s and 2000s academics and historians were split into two: those who argued that Australian identity is built on the backs of the genocide of Aboriginals, and those who argue this is an exaggeration. 

Background

In World History we looked at the settlement of Australia, which you can read here, and reading it you can see which side of the debate I take. The 'History Wars' have had a long precursor, and what is most important to remember is that these debates were largely between white academics. Although, indigenous voices are present - especially in the accounts of the Stolen Generation resulting in a 1997 report - it is white academics and politicians who are making these debates. I want to emphasise this as Aboriginal Australians have been emphasising this aspect of Australian history throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In academia the seeds of the History Wars were planted in 1968 when anthropologist William Stanner used the term the 'Great Australian Silence' during a publicised lecture. He argued that a 'cult of disremembering' characterised Australian historiography and national identity, where the history of the Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders becomes a footnote. Furthermore, the genocidal violence done against them, and the continued repression were forgotten, and a consequent result was that Australian history was 'incomplete'. Stanner's lecture was clearly inspired by two major changes rocking both Australia and the world: the New Left and subaltern rights. 

A portrayal of the Stolen Generation entitled The Taking of the Children on the 1999 Great Australian Clock, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, by artist Chris Cooke

The 1960s, especially around 1968, saw a resurgence in libertarian Left-wing thought which has become known as the New Left. This was an umbrella term for a wide range of activists and political theorists - this ranged from the hippy movement, anti-Vietnam War activism, post-modernism, a new wave of anarchist thought, and a new wave of Maoist thought. Linked to this was increased activism from subaltern peoples worldwide desiring greater rights - this included African-American activism, the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the gay rights movement, and the birth of the West Papuan independence movement. In Australia, there was also a movement by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to challenge racism and discrimination which they faced in society. Among the claims were for a return of stolen land, respect for indigenous rights, and justice for the 'Stolen Generation'. The Stolen Generation was actually a series of generations, technically beginning under British rule in the 1860s and ending in the 1970s, where indigenous peoples were forcibly taken from their families to be 'fostered'. This policy was not limited to Australia - America and Canada also had similar policies. The indigenous rights movement and Stanner influenced a new wave of historiography which aimed to tell Australia's history from below; it aimed to write indigenous communities back into history.

Beginning of the History Wars

In the 1980s and early-1990s the History Wars started to begin. By this time Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders were pushing for the return of land, equal rights, and justice for the Stolen Generation, but now they were getting gains. As expected, any movement of a subaltern is met with a reactionary movement, and there were pushbacks against these developments. It took form in quite unusual ways as well - in Crocodile Dundee (1986) the titular character says that Aboriginals and whites are both 'fleas on the land' about the return of land. This created a false equivalency between the two parties. What really kicked off the History Wars was the government of prime minister Paul Keating (1991-1996). Keating wanted to move further away from Britain, such as wanting Australia to put less emphasis on ANZAC Day as an example. Part of this was Keating's intervention in history by supporting the new line of historiography and emphasising that Australia had to recognise the continued repression of indigenous communities. Among this, was the creation of an inquiry in 1995 about the Stolen Generation policy resulting in the Bringing Them Home report of 1997 which aimed to highlight the trauma and consequences of the policy based on oral testimony. Part of this was a genuine attempt by Keating to foster a sense of 'One Australia' by encouraging an embracing of multiculturalism. However, it was also a cynical political move. Keating's Labor party had a long history of involvement in the Stolen Generation, and the White Australia Policy - a virulently racist immigration policy. Unfortunately, Keating was using the trauma of indigenous peoples to distance Labour from its culpability in the past. However, his involvement is what sparked the History Wars.

The History Wars

In 1993 conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote an article which attacked both Keating and the new historiography. His coining of the names for the two 'sides' has since became the common terminology during the History Wars, so I will use the terms here. Blainey said that Australia was moving away from the 'Three Cheers View', which emphasised a positive rendition of Australian history, to an unwarranted 'Black Armband' history, which emphasised the legacies of racism and colonialism. This began a series of heated debates, which translated into popular mediums like TV and paper opinion pieces, between the 'Black Armband' and 'Three Cheers View' of Australian history. However, it fully became a 'war' when Keating's successor, John Howard, intervened. Howard was from the conservative Liberal Party, so he opposed the re-evaluation of Australian history by the new historiography. Howard fiercely criticised the 'Black Armband' and used the typical tropes of a Right-wing culture war stating that 'soft-left' political-correctness was 'infiltrating' universities. His Labor successor, Kevin Rudd, further criticised the 'Black Armband' history stating that:

Time to leave behind us the polarisation that began to infect our every discussion of our nation's past. To go beyond the so-called "black arm" view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish. But time, too, to go beyond the view that we should only celebrate the reformers, the renegades and revolutionaries, thus neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers, and of our entrepreneurs. Any truthful reflection of our nation's past is that these are all part of the rich fabric of our remarkable story ...

Two key topics surrounded the History Wars: the question of genocide and Stolen Generation. Conservative historians argued that allegations of genocide were either exaggerated or entirely fabricated by more Left-wing historians. One of the key figures in this was Keith Windschuttle who wrote two books entitled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - the first calling the genocide of Tasmanians an exaggeration or an outright fabrication, and the second that the Stolen Generation was a myth. His main opponent in the ring was Robert Manne who ended up accusing Windschuttle of genocide denial. Among the claims by Windschuttle, Blainey, and other academics arguments was the the sources used to 'prove' a genocide happened. However, key historians showed how flawed Windschuttle's book Fabrication was - Henry Reynolds highlighted how Tasmanian settlers regularly used terms like 'extermination' in their diaries, and Lyndal Ryan has corroborated this by showing how there are many sites where massacres took place. What is particularly insidious, 'Three Cheers View', mainly social commentater Andrew Bolt, went as far as to call Bringing Them Home was an outright lie! Robert Manne tore Bolt apart with a basic point - Bolt never actually used sources to back up his claim. 

Since the 2000s

In 2016 the History Wars continue

The History Wars have continued to periodically plague discussions of history. At the end of the first peak of the History Wars in 2003 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark released The History Wars, a book which I used a lot in writing this post, to explain the debates. It is an understatement to say that the 'Three Cheers View' did not like it - Windschuttle accused it of making the 'Three Cheers' a 'caricature', while Greg Melleuish said the book comes from 'pro-communist polemics of the Cold War'. I would criticise Anton Froeyman's attempts to discuss the History Wars and German Historikerstreit, a series of debates on the Holocaust, who argued that the highly personal attacks by both sides in both debates meant that an 'objective' history could not be written. However, Froeyman does not acknowledge that this was not like other historical debates, such as whether the famous African Olaudah Equiano was actually born in Nigeria or the US, but about whether a genocide happened (in the case of the History Wars). This is especially a shame as his discussion on the History Wars is extremely insightful. An 'objective', meet-in-the-middle history cannot be written when one side was denying genocide. As Australia is facing a similar rise in xenophobia and Right-wing governments, the History Wars will still rage on. In settler societies the nation is always built upon the exploitation, and often the outright genocide, of the indigenous communities. Consequently, any history which wants to entirely portray the nation as spotless will result in the denial of genocide.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, (Melbourne: 2003)

-Lorenzo Veracini, 'A Prehistory of Australia's History Wars: The Evolution of Aboriginal History during the 1970s and 1980s', Australian Journal of Politics and History, 52:3, (2006), 439-454

-Neil Levi, '“No Sensible Comparison”? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia's History Wars', History and Memory, 19:1, (2007), 124-156

-Anton Froeyman, 'The ideal of objectivity and the public role of the historian: some lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars', The Journal of Theory and Practice, 20:2, (2016), 217-234

-Bringing Them Home

Thank you for reading, for other Left-Wing and the 'Other' History posts we have a list here. For other blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

World History: Australia and New Zealand

Australian Gold Diggers

Throughout the nineteenth century, and last time when we looked at colonialism, new forms of states emerged, including the new settler colonies of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia. Coming after the older settler colonies in the Americas new settler colonies emerged in Oceania, and Kenya and Zimbabwe. Despite being colonised by Britain around the same time we will see the major differences which emerged in these colonies. This occurred through various reasons ranging from geography to the conditions of the pre-colonial regions. A hint at a possible World History 2 I aim to look at these pre-colonial societies, but that is another discussion for a long time in the future. Instead we'll go over a basic summary here.

Australia and Aotearoa before Europe

The landmass which we now call Australia has been inhabited by people for over 30,000 years, and possibly as far back as 65,000 years - we discussed this all the way back in my first year of university with our first World History post. The site of Lake Mungo, from around 40,000 years ago, exhibits burials and some of the oldest cremations indicating that prehistoric indigenous Australians had by then developed religious rituals. It is difficult to write a history of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians in just this short section, as it is impossible to understand the complexity and diversity of life over such a large period of time, and over a geographic area. There are over 900 ethnic groups, and just before European colonisation they were organised in over 250 'nations', which were then divided into smaller and localised units, speaking over 250 languages. Unfortunately, through genocide only 50 of these languages remain. Through oral tradition, and outdated ethnographies, we can piece together life and culture just before European colonisation - Nancy Williams and Lesley Jolly have discussed how Arrernte men and women lived in 'separate but intersecting spheres' of activity.

Meanwhile, it is easier to understand the pre-colonial history of Aotearoa/New Zealand. For one, Aotearoa is the Maori name for New Zealand, and in this post I will refer to the islands as 'Aotearoa' until European colonisation became 'complete' which is when that I'll switch to 'New Zealand'. Despite theories that alleged that before the Maori there were Egyptian, Indo-Aryans, Celtic, or Phoenician colonisation of Aotearoa, it was Polynesians (the ancestors of the Maori) who first settled on the islands. Aotearoa is one of the most isolated regions in the world, so it would make sense that the Polynesian linguistic group - who are one of the most geographically diverse peoples - were the ones to settle there. Unlike Australia, having tens of thousands of years of inhabitation, the first people to permanently settle on Aotearoa only arrived in the thirteenth century. As a result, Maori and Moriori religion, language, and culture contains similarities with other Polynesian groups. Due to the recent nature of their settlement, and the smaller geographic area, the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa have a more homogenous set of beliefs and cultures compared to Australian Aboriginals. Society was organised into various competing networks of alliances or rivalries called iwi, and this was further divided into a smaller, intimate unit called hapu. Of course, these models were often changing and various events could change the structure of the iwi and hapu. There was a further hierarchical system among these units with the rangatira (often seen as aristocrats) and tutua (commoners). Rangatira based their prestige on mana - power and influence which derived from your genealogy and your physical resources.

Contact and Invasion

A depiction of Captain Cook

It should be noted that Australian Aboriginals, Maori, and Moriori did not live in 'isolation' from the rest of the world - after initial settlement of Aotearoa there were other waves of settlement, and Aboriginals in the north traded for centuries with the Makassans in modern Indonesia. In fact, through this trade some Aboriginal groups had access to European goods before they even made 'contact' with Europeans! Oceania became known to Europe during the so-called 'Age of Discovery' - which you can read about here - but its existence had been theorised for centuries. Since the time of the ancient Greeks a Terra Australis Incognito (Unknown Land of the South) had been theorised, and in the 1540s 'Java La Grande' first appeared on French maps. While Portugal was likely the first European state to spot Australia, it was the Dutch who first landed in 1616 when Dirk Hartog arrived by accident. The Dutch would continue mapping the region, eventually calling it New Holland, and in 1642 Dutch East Indian Company governor-general Anthoine Van Diemen got Abel Tasman to map a route to the Spanish colonies in Latin America. During this time he mapped what is now Tasmania and eventually Aotearoa. These islands got their name from the explorations - Tasmania came from Tasman, but it was originally called Van Diemen's Land, and New Zealand is named after Zeeland in the Netherlands. No settlements were formed until the voyages of Captain James Cook in the late-1700s. Originally sent to help improve navigation, and using Venus as his guide to do so, his ship, the Endeavour, travelled across the Pacific - from Tahiti to Australia to Aotearoa to Hawai'i. Motivated by both capital accumulation and Enlightenment scientific inquiry Cook carefully documented and even met the inhabitants of the places he explored using Tahtian aid. His description of Aboriginals is loaded with the stereotypical 'Noble Savage' tropes, saying they were in 'a pure state of nature', but he does acknowledge that they had adapted to a land where European-style farming could not exist. This was in Botany Bay, an area which Cook would call initially Stingray Bay because of its stingrays. While some encounters were peaceful, others were not. At Botany Bay Aboriginals tried to scare them off, and Cook himself would later get into a fight with Hawaiians leading to his death on Valentine's Day in 1779.

A depiction of the First Fleet

Thanks to the cartographic mapping and diaries left by Cook and other explorers Britain started to have the Pacific in mind. Why Australia, then renamed New South Wales, was first chosen for colonisation is still up for debate. The first answer is obvious - penal colonies. Britain had been using the Americas as penal colonies, but the American Revolution had closed that off so they needed a new place for prisoners. However, only a third of the population of the 'First Fleet' which ended up founding Sydney were convicts. In 1952 Ken Dallas first challenged this idea and the debate continues to rage on. He, and later historians, argued that although Botany Bay was always intended as a penal colony, it was not the only, or possibly even primary, reason. The creation of Sydney could open a way to challenge the Spanish and French, as well as economic ventures. When the First Fleet was dropped off the ships made their way to Indonesia and China hoping to trade, and the Second Fleet were converted into whaling ships. Regardless, on 18 January 1788, now known as Australia Day or Invasion Day, the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay with naval officer Arthur Phillip as the first governor of the new colony. There was an issue for the new settlers. Despite being rich in life the climate was not good for European style farming, and the fact that people already lived there, so other colonies were made to supply goods to the newly emerging Sydney. Timber was especially needed, something plentiful in Aotearoa, so Phillips ordered it to be collected from Aotearoa. This would pave the way for the colonisation of Aotearoa. The first settlers, called Pakeha by the Maori, were actually seamen and convicts escaping despotic captains and poor conditions on ships becoming the 'Pakeha Maori'. It would be sealing, not timber, which would create the first Pakeha settlement in 1792. Constructing European-houses at Dusky Sound in 1792 they returned to Sydney with 4500 seal skins. 

Trade and Conflict along the Frontier

In both Australia and Aotearoa initial contacts between settlers and indigenous peoples can be considered a mixture of cooperation and conflict. As was the case with all the other European empires, the settlers were initially reliant on the local peoples - for trade and so they wouldn't attack them. In 1828, for example, one entrepreneur called John Rodolphus Kent married Tiria, the daughter of the first 'Maori King' and chief Te Wherowhero, to secure access to resources and labour. Not mentioned till now was the devastating impact disease had on both Maori and Aboriginal populations - smallpox especially wiped out many communities. Christian missions were opened in both colonies to convert the local peoples, and also to make sure the settlers did not sin too much. This had a devastating impact on indigenous culture as Christianity was forced onto them. From religion to identity was changed by colonial evangelising - the Maori had a third gender concept called wakawahine which missionaries tried to cast as sinful and to be cast out. Most famously, however, guns and potatoes were traded to the Maori which revolutionised their society. Potato, being such an easy to grow crop, became a staple in their diet, but muskets radicalised warfare. The Musket Wars waged from 1807 to 1837 in something which Michael King describes as a time of 'Guns and God'. As muskets gave iwi an advantage over their opponents this caused a boom in trade as Pakeha exploited the growing need for iwi to defend themselves. A genocide also occurred. The Moriori on Chatham Island had long abandoned violence; when Europeans had shot one the community blamed themselves showing this aversion to violence. Due to displacement caused by the Musket Wars the Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama invaded in 1835 and commit a genocide. Many Moriori were killed, the rest were enslaved, their language forbidden, and holy sites destroyed. From around 2,000 individuals in 1835 by the time they were freed only around 101 remained. 

Meanwhile, similar actions were taking place in Australia. The initial years were hard due to the land - while it created allowed for a diversity of life it was not suited for European style farming. In a standard ironic twist in history Governor Phillips viewed the Aboriginals as being squatters on the land with no actual ties to it, but the land which proved to be most fertile happened to be the areas which had seen Aboriginal farming techniques being used. Instead, animal farming was more prosperous - within fifteen years the sheep population rose from 29 to 20,000. Experiments in selective breeding allowed sheep and cattle to become adapted to the Australian climate, and soon enough Australia became known for its lamb and beef. Landowners started emerging due to close connections with the governor, 'British democracy' did not exist in Australia for many decades to come. Close allies to governors allowed them to have large holdings, with over 80,000 acres, which opened the door for them to prosper through pastoralism. Not only did this push out smaller farmers it also created conflict with Aboriginal peoples. Not only around Sydney - other settlements started emerging across the eastern half of Australia including Newcastle, Adelaide, and Melbourne. The British government, not wanting to be drawn into costly colonial wars, called for the settlers to not disturb the Aboriginals, but this was easier said than done. For one, Aboriginal communities were not happy that their land was being taken from them - it is widely believed that John Batman's 1835 treaty with the Kulin, which founded Melbourne, was only a 'treaty' as the Kulin did not understand that they were permanently giving up their land. Different concepts of land ownership meant that they thought that they would be sharing the land. It was also not uncommon for settlers to initiate violence in order to move into Aboriginal land. In May 1804 panicking soldiers in Van Diemen's Land shot 40 people on a kangaroo hunt thinking they were a war party. This would be a standard throughout the 1800s.

Life and Culture in the 'Frontier'

An Australian bush hut used by settlers

A wide range of people came to Australia and Aotearoa for various reasons, ranging from convicts to farmers wanting a new life. The farms were ran by forced convict labour, and many of the newly emerging economies relied on convicts. A significant percentage of those on the whaling ships which arrived with the Second Fleet happened to be convicts. Economic pressures meant that many convicts were soon declared free, especially coming towards the 1850s, so they could fully partake in the new economies. As described by David Day, although the land of New South Wales was not fertile, 'the women certainly were'. Of the convicts which arrived with the First Fleet 188 were women, and as they were settler colonies there were no bars on women coming to the colonies. Australia and New Zealand gave women the vote a long time before they did in Europe, and this is a similar trend as seen in the US West. To 'tame' the land women were given a lot more agency compared to those in the metropole which allowed an easier fight for rights. However, there was an expectation to be a model of the virtuous housewife. As argued by Ann Stoler, there was colonial anxiety over white women and non-white men having sex and 'transgressing the colour line'. Transposing their own ideas of gender onto indigenous peoples white men argued that Aboriginal men exploited and made women their slaves. As argued by Mary Anne Jacobs and Anna Haebich, 'White men stole Aboriginal women's labour and sexuality much as they usurped their land and resources.' In rural areas white settlers fathered mixed-race children, whether they accepted their children was another matter. Syphilis became endemic thanks to Europeans introducing the disease. Cultural changes deeply impacted indigenous peoples, colonialism created a cultural genocide as missionary activity tried to enforce Christianity and European culture. Some were caught in the middle. Bennelong was captured by Arthur Philips, used as an interpreter, and even went to Britain. Due to him being indigenous meant that he was rejected by the settlers, while his adoption of European cultural practices made him a pariah among indigenous peoples.

Colonial Wars 

A depiction of the Flagstaff War

Land expropriation and clashes meant that wars broke out. In 1840 Pakeha hoped to avoid further conflict with the Maori, but this decision would prove contentious and problematic. The Treaty of Waitangi, written in both English and Maori, was forged between iwi and New South Wales Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson, Aotearoa was then still seen as being part of New South Wales. There were three articles: first, 'Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand...cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty...over their respective Territories'; second, guarantees that chiefs and tribes had access to land; and third, that all Maori would become British citizens. There were naturally issues - these words and concepts emerged through British thought which did not map onto Maori thought. For one, sovereignty was translated as kawanatanga which in Maori implied that they still had some form of governorship. Similarly, the translation over land had a wider meaning, this also included cultural resources, not just material. Furthermore, not all iwi accepted the Treaty, and it did not take long for Pakeha to directly ignore it themselves. A 1846 Native Land Purchase Act which tightened government hold over Maori land. From the 1840s to the 1870s was a period known as the 'Maori' or 'New Zealand Wars'. These were a series of wars between Pakeha and their allies, and iwi over the Treaty. One such one, the Flagstaff War, sparked when Maori in 1845 cut down a British flag seeing it as encroaching on their sovereignty. The Maori managed to fight so well, incidentally, because of the British selling them muskets decades earlier - the Musket Wars had changed Maori community structures to better resist attack. However, they could not resist entirely, and by the 1870s the Pakeha had broke the back of the Maori resistance.

Australia similarly saw a colonial war against Aboriginal peoples. Before we discuss this we need to quickly go over the 'History Wars'. From the 1960s historians started having a look again at colonial Australia, and began writing histories of colonial Australia and the genocidal wars. However, from the 1990s conservative historians, under the guise of objectivity, that 'leftists' were re-writing Australian history. In particular, the 'Black War' was singled out, largely as it has been seen as leading to the near-extinction of the Tasmanians. However, this debate was not about 'objectivity', but really about trying to make Australia's colonial history less drenched in blood. Evidence speaks otherwise. As argued by Lyndall Ryan, the Black War emerged as a way to solidify settler rule by massacring communities. The 'Black Line' was even formed as a way to systematically corner communities - Batman got into his position to form 'Batmania', later Melbourne, through his participation in the Black War. Estimations have put that for every settler killed, five Aboriginals were killed - due to a small population this seemingly drove them to extinction. The 'Frontier Wars' across Australia were not as genocidal as the Black War, but the mixture of violence and disease 'subdued the frontier'.

Mining and Migration

Bushrangers

The economies of Australia and New Zealand stagnated until the discovery of gold and minerals in the 1850s. Thus started the Australian and Otago Gold Rush. A big reason why the Maori Wars took place was due to the discovery of gold in Maori lands. Suddenly, Australia, in particular, went from a farming colony to an industrial one. Emigration to Australia rose from 20,000 a year to 90,000 a year in just a year! People came from Britain, Germany, the US, and China looking to make a fortune in the new gold mines, and the mine owners replaced the landowners as the wealthiest in society. The gold mines, naturally, were far from the cities, and with colonial power weaker there it allowed crime to proliferate. Missionaries decried the 'depravity' of the mining settlements where prostitution, alcoholism, and violence seemed to rule. In reality, each community formed their own structures and cooperated with each other, but with it being excluded from traditional power structures, and what it looked like, it was demonised. That does not mean that crime did not exist. Weak crime enforcement allowed the rise of the 'bushrangers'. Why mine when you can just steal the profits others made? While demonised at the time, in later years they became a point of pride for Australian national identity. Ned Kelly became the most famous for his raids and wearing of metal, knight-like armour earned him fame, and his execution in 1880 led him to become a folk hero like Billy the Kid. The bushrangers eventually vanished when the periphery of the nation became closer to the metropole. Cities expanded and to create a congruent nation railways and telegraphs made Australia more connected. This allowed both Australia and New Zealand to start developing their own identities.

The Rise of Democracy and National Identity

A depiction of the Eureka Rebellion

Australia and New Zealand have become famous for more progressive politics, for years Australia has been known as 'the Working Man's Nation'. This was largely thanks to the industrialisation and migration. Britain was still sending convicts well into the late-nineteenth century, including many political radicals. Similarly, European and American migrants brought new ideas like socialism and liberalism to the colonies very quickly. A spark for Australian democracy emerged in the gold mines with the 1854 Eureka Rebellion. Wanting a more democratic nation with workers' rights miners took control of the fields of Eureka, and, despite it being crushed, it proved to be a radical alternative for Australians. Mark Twain in 1890 described it as one of the most important events in the history of the colony, and left-wing activists even suggested using the Eureka flag flown by the rebels as an alternate flag of Australia. It is unsurprising that feminist and trade union movements quickly emerged in this context, and at times they were the same movement. In the early-1900s women engaged in unions in order to pressure the government into bringing equal pay for women. In 1884 Henrietta Dugdale formed the first suffrage society, and in 1897 the 'Grandmother of Australia' Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman to run for parliament. 

This surge in political activity allowed the two colonies to move towards becoming quasi-independent from Britain. How they would look as dominions was an alternate question. Originally, it was decided that they would form one big state, Australia's constitution still claims New Zealand showing this. Although New Zealand is as close to Sydney as Sydney is to Western Australia to divide by sea made them appear as two very separate states - while Western Australia reluctantly became part of the Federation of Australia, New Zealand solidly held fast. Instead New Zealand tried to build on different aspects to differentiate itself from Australia - ironically using its indigenous populace. The Treaty of Waitangi and Maori resistance to complete cultural domination gave New Zealand a false sense that it treats its native populace well. It is true that Australia had certainly treated its indigenous peoples badly - the looting of Aboriginal art and boom in anthropological accounts about them in the 1890s occurred as there was a belief that Aboriginals would soon go extinct. Furthermore, shortly after independence Australia began the 'Lost Generation' where Aboriginal children were taken from their families and placed into schools to 'civilise' them, a destructive policy which lasted well into the 1900s and solidified a cultural genocide. This gave New Zealand an easy difference to exaggerate - becoming part of the Australian Federation would infringe the rights of Maori. A cartoon from 1900 in the New Zealand Graphic shows a personified New Zealand, hand-in-hand with a Maori, rejecting the Australian ogre with its arms in chains, a likely reference to the convict past which could 'stain' New Zealand. However, both states positioned themselves as being 'white'. With the exception of the IWW, which emerged from anarco-syndicalist politics, trade unions were horrifically racist, and shortly after independence Australia passed the 'White Australia Policy' barring emigration from Asia and Melanesia. 

Conclusion

New Zealand and Australian troops at Gallipoli

As we have seen New Zealand and Australia had very similar but also very different histories. Through the legacies of settler colonialism and working-class agitation the modern states which we now know emerged. However, upon independence in 1901 (Australia) and 1907 (New Zealand) there were still debates about what they would look like; merging the two colonies was still not an unlikely scenario. Although a radical movement wanted to bring about a republic there was still an urge to remain part of the British Empire - both states immediately jumped into the First World War. As we will soon see it was this war which firmly set out their own national identity. The baptism of fire at Gallipoli would firmly set out their own identities. These shifts we have discussed today would shape the two countries up until now, and likely will continue to do so.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, (London: 2003)

-David Day, Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia, (Sydney: 1997)

-Denis McLean, The Prickly Pair: Making Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand, (Dunedin: 2003)

-Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans, (eds.), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, (Sydney: 1992)

-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (London: 1975)

-Vincent O'Malley, Bruce Stirling, and Wally Penetito, (eds.), The Treaty of Waitangi Companion: Maori and Pakeha from Tasman to Today, (Auckland: 2010)

-Lyndall Ryan, 'Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania 1823-34: A Case Study of the Meander River Region, June 1827', Journal of Genocide Research, 10:4, (2008), 479-499

Thank you for reading, and next time we will be looking at the First World War. For other World History posts please see our list. For other blog posts please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

The Quagga and Colonialism

This article was first published by Retrospect Journal on 02/12/2019, and can be read here.

On 12 August 1883 the last known quagga died in captivity in Amsterdam Zoo, surveys could find no traces of quagga in the wild confirming its extinction. Long thought to be a species of zebra, DNA tests in the 1980s found it to be a subspecies, it was once common across the plains of what would become South Africa. Unlike other infamous cases of animals being driven to extinction by human activity, most notably the moa of New Zealand and dodo of Mauritius, quagga had lived alongside humans for millennia. In fact, the name ‘quagga’ partially comes from the local Khoikhoi name. Instead the extinction of the quagga was deeply entwined with imperial culture and the formation of settler rule in South Africa.

From the early-1600s Dutch settlers created colonies on the southern coast of what would become South Africa. From 1795 the British took over the colony to secure shipping routes to India, and clashes began between the Dutch and British settlers. To avoid British rule the Dutch farmers began what has since been known as the ‘Great Trek’ after 1836; these ‘voortrekkers’ would later become a key part of Afrikaner national identity, especially as British rule tried to reassert itself over the voortrekkers. The white settlers claimed they were pushing into ‘free’ land where they could make a new start, however, this claim was at the expense of Africans. Although there was no intensive sedentary farming, that did not mean that the land was actually unclaimed. Various African peoples made claim to the lands hosting a range of different states and economic structures ranging from pastoralists to small-scale farming to the expansionist Zulu Empire. These voortrekkers enslaved or displaced Africans from their land, and helped destabilise the Zulu Empire to prevent them from being a threat. 

The arrival of Europeans changed how the environment was treated. Although it is important not to fetishize pre-colonial land usage, wide-scale pastoralism had caused increased pressure on the land in Zulu and Xhosa communities, but it is important to stress how land usage shifted dramatically. Just as in the American West, land areas of the southern African land were divided between individual farms – of varying sizes – which limited where wild animals could move. For herding animals, like the quagga, wide areas are needed so they have plenty of food to eat without destroying the local area – millions of zebra and wildebeest make the trek from the Serengeti in Tanzania to the Masai Mara in Kenya for this reason every year. Herds of quagga, therefore, tried to go on their regular grazing grounds but were faced with Boer farms. To prevent the quagga from competing with their own grazing herds, or from eating their own crops, farmers resorted to shooting stray herds of quagga. Quagga meat was also a good way to get quick food without killing off a possibly prized animal, and their skins could be sold for extra funds.

At the same time, the quagga became a prized animal for menageries back in the metropole. The quagga’s unique skin made it an interesting addition for any wealthy elite’s personal collection – Cusworth Hall in my own town of Doncaster even had quagga grazing on its grounds in the 1700s. When the first zoological gardens started emerging in the 1820s, such as London Zoo, quaggas were in high demand for their appearance and for colonial experiments. Naturalists hoped to breed quaggas with horses to create a new species that could be used in both Europe and Africa. There is also an underlying colonial ideology about why exotic animals were in demand for zoos and menageries. As argued by Harriet Ratvo, having a seemingly rare, unique, or exotic animal was part of a wider imperial power dynamic – if you could have an animal from a colonised region it showed by the power of empire and your own wealth. It showed Britain’s power to move an animal across the world, and the owner’s importance by engaging in this power play.

However, many zoos were unequipped to look after exotic animals initially, and it was not uncommon for new animals to die within a year. London Zoo’s A.D. Bartlett, who oversaw the animal population during the late-nineteenth century, wrote how they had to invest a lot to look after elephants and rhinos because they were hard to get, but as monkeys were cheap to obtain, they did not have to worry in case they died. Initially the quagga was viewed this way. Their large herd sizes and apparent abundancy meant that they were seen as dispensable, but still sought after, animals. Furthermore, brutal capture and transport of animals meant that many more had to be caught than what was needed due to high mortality.

These factors mentioned are what drove the quagga to extinction. Demand to fill zoos in Europe, and policies of extermination to preserve farms in Africa, meant that quagga numbers quickly dwindled. As they were only found in southern Africa it meant that the population rapidly went extinct – although common, they were only common in one area. London Zoo’s single mare was photographed five times between the 1860s and 1870s before she died by the zoo’s chief photographer Frederick York. The rapid extinction of the quagga meant that they are the only photos of a living quagga. The last known wild quagga was shot in 1878, and when the last one died in captivity in 1883 the zoo requested hunters find another one not realising how quickly it had gone extinct. Albeit, locally all zebras were referred to as ‘quaggas’ which may have caused the confusion. Thanks to colonial settlement and exploitation the quagga had gone extinct.

Studying the quagga shows the various ways colonialism impacted colonised societies. Unfortunately, the quagga was not the only case of settler colonialism driving animals to extinction – passenger pigeons, thylacines, and almost the bison suffered the same fate. The quagga offers a warning for the future. Neo-colonialism means the natural world is being destroyed in order to fund the economies of the global north threatening both humans and nature. Colonialism very likely will drive orang-utans, macaws, and caimans, just to name a few, to extinction.

World History: Science and Racism

Phrenology from Types of Mankind (1854) by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon

Discrimination and prejudice have unfortunately been a constant throughout human history. However, a new form of racism emerged in the nineteenth century - scientific racism. Scientific racism emerged partially from the discrimination that characterised older forms of racism, and from new ideas; it is also important to note that older forms of racism did not disappear with the advent of scientific racism. For example, the Nazi paper Der Stürmer in the early-1930s recycled centuries old stories of the 'blood libel' to rile up hatred against Jews. Today we will look at the emergence of scientific racism, how racism pervaded society, eugenics, and how it still shapes today. I should add some caveats to this - I will largely discussing racism in the past, contemporary racism deserves its own blog post. As a white person I cannot experience racism, so I cannot adequately discuss modern racism, but I would recommend reading up on it - a personal recommendation is Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Rene Eddo-Lodge. This post will only look briefly at structural racism - readers must bear in mind that structural racism is too great a topic to be discussed in such a small blog post. I am also referencing the Wordpress of a friend of mine who is a fantastic researcher and writer - her website will be linked at the end and I highly recommend reading it.

Racism before the 1800s - A Very Concise Overview

Historically, racism and discrimination has been tied up with representations of the 'Other' - differing identities were regularly viewed with suspicion and, at times, outright contempt. The Ancient Greeks referred to anyone who was not Greek as 'barbarian', and until the late-nineteenth century China and Japan did as well. In the sixteenth-century the Luochong Lu (Record of Naked Creatures) was published in China which depicted non-Chinese peoples in pejorative terms - due to strained relations with Japan the Japanese were referred to as 'dwarf bandits'. The entry on 'the Huns' could have come straight from a nineteenth-century anthropological text: 

This breed comprises five types. One, with yellow hair, from a mountain ghost and a cow. One, short-necked, stout and fat, was born of the juejia-ape and a wild hog. [. . .] Since Shemo killed the chief of the A’nuo tribe with his own hands, to this day they perform human sacrifice to their banner. Their customs set in archery and killing. They worship the Zoroastrian god, and do not maintain ancestral temples. They carve felt into icons, and put these onto fur bags. Whenever they take actions, they smear the icons with butter.

When the book was published in Japan, as Ikoko monogatari, the section on Japan was heavily edited to remove the discriminatory descriptions of Japan. Nicholas Dirks has further argued that one of the possible reasons why Dalits, the so-called 'untouchables', emerged outside the caste system in India was due to their ancestors being stateless peoples who migrated to India. Meanwhile, in the Christian and Islamic worlds the religious Other became subject to demonisation - calling for the First Crusade in 1095 Pope Urban II declared that 'an alien people, a race completely foreign to God...has invaded Christian territory'. Another spark of anti-Judaism broke out thanks to the Crusades. As Jews were excluded from Christian hegemonic structures they were seen as subversive elements working against Christianity. Jews were massacred by crusading armies, and until the 1700s Jewish communities faced regular pogroms and expulsions (such as from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492). Myths that Jews were poisoning wells and the 'blood libel', where Jews would use the blood of kidnapped children to make Passover matzah, were used to justify pogroms. 

Religious discrimination could, in theory, end thanks to conversion. However, European expansion helped influence a change in this. In 1514 in a letter Martin Luther wrote that Jews could never truly become Christians unless told to by God, and the Spanish Inquisition from 1492 heavily scrutinised conversios, converted Muslims and Jews, as their conversion was seen as not being complete. Thanks to European expansion physical attributes started to increasingly emerge as reasons for discrimination. Francis Drake described the people of Batjan in the Moluccas as 'comely in body and stature...The men go naked, saving their heads and privities' while Christopher Columbus in 1492 focused on the physical characteristics of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. 'Savage', 'barbarian', and 'cannibal' regularly appeared in texts, and, as expected, faith was used as a justification. Discrimination based on skin colour had emerged in the Arabic world thanks to slavery, and it did so with the European world. The enslavement of black Africans was justified by using the story of Ham, as Ham had look on Noah's nakedness he and his descendants were cursed to a life of slavery. Black Africans were described as the descendants of Ham, so their enslavement was not a sin. The Spanish Empire, and Spain itself, developed the theory of limpia sangria - cleanliness of blood. Entry into higher institutes of society - such as universities - in the 1700s were barred if their blood was deemed 'impure' - if you had Jewish or Muslim ancestors in Spain, or indigenous or African in the Americas this could mean that you were 'impure'. Meanwhile, what could be classed as positive were still steeped in racism thanks to the 'noble savage' trope - Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan about indigenous Americans, Jacques Cartier about the Iroquois, and Michel de Montaigne about the Tupinamba are good examples of this. Colonised peoples could be 'noble' but they still were viewed as 'savage' or 'uncivilised'. 

The Emergence of Scientific Racism

An example of racial classification used by pseudo-scientists

Thanks to the European Enlightenments what we can call 'scientific racism' emerged. There were continuities between older forms of racism and the new scientific racism - white, Christian Northern Europeans put themselves as being 'superior' to other peoples, but this was based on biological factors over faith. As argued by Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, 'Ideas of savagery, barbarism and civilisation predetermined the space that the idea of "race" occupied, but were themselves reconstituted by it'. Several of the early racial scientists did not view their work as contradicting Biblical teaching, but rather reaffirming it. A noted example of this was French naturalist Georges Cuvier who argued that there were three races, (Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian), which could be classified by beauty and 'quality of civilisation'. He argued that Adam and Eve were Caucasian so the other 'races' were therefore deviations and inferior. What made scientific racism different from earlier forms of racism was a focus on physical characteristics, as well as culture and behaviour, to distinguish between 'races'. In late eighteenth-century Germany, Peter Camper claimed that facial angle could distinguish 'races'. Phrenology, the measuring of skulls and skull shape, became a central part of new forms of racism and a justification for empire. Scottish lawyer George Combe in A System of Phrenology (1830) emphasised the shape of the skull to justify British rule in India. He wrote that 'the Hindoo head is small, and the European large...The Hindoo brain indicates a manifest deficiency in the organs of Combativeness and Destructiveness; while in the European, these parts are developed.' Meanwhile, Samuel Morton filled skulls with seeds to determine brain capacity which he argued could classify five 'races' (Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American, and Ethiopian) which were divided further into 'families'. The classification of animal life by Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus, who himself tried to classify human 'races', was very influential to phrenology.

One of the most influential use of phrenology was Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. Often considered the 'Father of Criminal Anthropology' Lombroso argued that skull shape and size could characterise criminal tendencies in people. Instead of focusing on actual causes of crime, namely environmental and economic factors, Lombroso argued it was purely genetics. Thicker foreheads, curled hair, larger noses, and broad jaws were seen as characteristics of criminality - of course these fed into racist and antisemitic discourses. In a 1895 lecture in Turin Lombroso discussed so-called 'savage' children he had studied and stated that 'they have extraordinary anomalies of the face and of the skull, asymmetry, macrocephaly, exaggeration of the length or breadth, strabismus, ears badly placed or too large, enormous jaws, bad conformation of the teeth...'. Lombroso's theories were soon combined with eugenics and influenced Nazi racial policies. Believing that chronic unemployment, criminality, prostitution, and mental illness were inherited the Nazis would sterilise, and later outright murder, those deemed Untermensch. 

Darwin and Social Darwinism

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution would prove greatly influential in forming scientific racism. In The Origins of Species (1859) Darwin discussed his theory, although he would not be the first to argue this. Using evidence from his travels on the HMS. Beagle to the Galapagos Islands Darwin argued that animal species, or 'races', adapted to environments over generations; those with genes best suited to an environment survived to reproduce and evolved into new species. He never actually argued for 'Survival of the Fittest', instead Darwin argued that 'It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change'. In The Origins of Species Darwin never discussed the evolution of humanity, but he did so in The Descent of Man (1871). Naturally, Darwin's theory was immediately controversial as it contradicted the Book of Genesis, and religious figures scoffed at the idea that humanity could be descended from a similar ancestor to apes. However, racial scientists adopted Darwin's idea and changed it, most notably Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term 'Survival of the Fittest'. Spencer asserted that 'races' were in a struggle for survival where the 'lesser' would naturally disappear thanks to an inability to compete. There are debates about whether Darwin himself was a social Darwinist. In line with social Darwinists he argued that there were lesser and higher 'races', but he argued these 'races' constituted one species and that 'disappearance' of 'lesser races' was unnatural. This was partially thanks to the genocide and extinction of indigenous Tasmanians. British settlers waged a genocidal war against Tasmanians, quoting Darwin 'Death pursues the native in every place where the European sets foot', resulting in indigenous Tasmanians being murdered en masse. Social Darwinism would influence eugenics and governmental policies - especially in Latin America. Brazilian educators from the 1890s to the 1940s implemented school check-ups and meals not for altruistic reasons, but to seemingly 'uplift' the population. Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Brazil further encouraged Northern European migration hoping that it would 'save' their nations from 'racial backwardness'. Argentina went as far as to hide statistics on the population of Afro-Argentinians with the belief that by making it seem a 'white nation' compared to its neighbours it could encourage more migration. When the US barred entry to Chinese and Japanese communities Latin America welcomed them, again not for altruism, but rather, as they were deemed 'white' so could 'uplift' the country.

Social Darwinists at the end of the nineteenth century would directly inspire the Nazis, and would castigate earlier ones for not being racist enough. Two noted ones were Joseph Arthur, the Comte de Gobineau, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races Gobineau argued that 'races' were inseparable barriers and that 'racial mixing' would bring down European civilisation. He also applied the term 'Aryans' to Germans, and argued that they were superior to other 'races'. Meanwhile, Houston Stewart Chamberlain in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1897) would combine German nationalism, virulent antisemitism, Aryan supremacy in a highly influential book that would greatly inspire the Nazis. Chamberlain himself would become a close associate with Hitler. Gobineau and Chamberlain argued that culture was a product of race, so 'superior races' had to dominate society. Social Darwinism shaped how race was understood. For example, anti-Judaism evolved into antisemitism as it was argued that Jews were not just a religion apart, but a race apart - part of a newly invented 'Semitic people'. The idea that apes like gorillas and orangutans are 'missing links' stemmed from white supremacy; it was believed that non-white peoples reproduced with apes influencing their evolution. Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Irish were also seen as being 'inferior' by white supremacists - they toed the line between acceptability and inferiority in their eyes. Modern beauty standards developed from this - emphasis on white skin, blond hair, straight hair, petite bodies in women, and small noses were based off of racial stereotypes. Darker skin, curly hair, and broad noses were associated with 'undesirable races', like Jews and Africans, so were seen as 'uglier'. In the 1940s the winner of Miss Africa had to dress according to European beauty standards in order to win. As a result, we see this continued today - lighter skinned people of colour are more likely to be rated attractive compared to those with darker skin, I would recommend watching this video here about it. 

Eugenics

Schloss Hartheim, a centre used by the Nazis to euthanise mentally ill patients as part of their eugenics programme

First coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in the 1880s it was an idea that societies could be improved by carefully selecting who could, and could not, reproduce. Gobineau and Chamberlain believed that interracial relations were degenerating humanity, and American white supremacist Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) recommended segregating 'inferior races' to protect the racial hygiene of the 'Nordic race'. Unsurprisingly, Hitler was a great admirer of Grant. In Germany Alfred Ploetz coined the term Rassenhygiene (race hygiene) in order to explain his support for eugenics. The idea of Volk, people, developed in Germany as part of post-unification nationalism - if Germany was to survive its people had to be built-up. A big reason for this was the emancipation of German Jews - Jews were seen as alien subversives threatening to undermine Germany, so 'true' Germans had to be defended. This idea was not limited to Germany. Japan from the 1910s began adopting eugenicist ideas, such as confining the mentally ill, and by the 1930s, with fascism in full swing, a section of the Imperial Army emerged, called the Imperial Way, declaring that as Japan was so pure it did not need modern weaponry. The British working class were seen as being degenerate, backward, and inferior thanks to poor living conditions, and instead of being blamed on conditions created through industrial capitalism it was, in turn, blamed on genes. This is best seen in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) - millennia in the future the upper classes have evolved into the beautiful work-shy Eloi living in a utopia, while the working classes have evolved into the troglodyte subterranean Morlocks. Eugenicists argued that certain types of people - namely disabled, mixed-race, mentally ill, unemployed, homosexuals etc. - could pass on their 'deficiencies' to future generations degenerating society. Ann Stoler has particularly emphasised the importance of eugenics in colonial empires during the early-twentieth century. Relations between colonisers and the colonised were seen as polluting society, and mixing concrete racial barriers. Mixed race children in French Indochina were referred to as 'the fruits of a regrettable weakness'. Dehumanisation involved in eugenics resulted in horrific abuses in the name of 'racial purity' - across the world those deemed 'inferior' could be subjected to sterilisation. Over 60,000 mentally ill people were sterilised in the US from 1907 to 1963, most were in California which influenced the Nazi policy of sterilisation. 

The Dreyfus Affair - A Case Study in Antisemitism

The degredation of Dreyfus

From the 1880s antisemitism saw a resurgence across Europe. The British press demonised Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, Karl Luger became mayor of Vienna based on a campaign of anti-Jewish rhetoric, and in Germany's 'Culture Wars' antisemitism became a tool to identify German identity. As argued by Miles and Brown, as the Jews were perceived as stateless they were seen as wanting to betray their country - whether as a greedy capitalist pulling the strings, or a radical socialist wanting to overthrow the state. A case study of this is the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 French Alsatian captain Alfred Dreyfus, a man of Jewish descent, was convicted on flimsy grounds of treason - someone had been selling secrets to Germany and he got the blame. He seemed the perfect scapegoat - he was Alsatian, which had been annexed by Germany in 1871, and as he was Jewish he was seen as a subversive. Dreyfus was sent to prison on Devil's Island in French Guyana where he would spend over five years alone. The Dreyfus Affair would drag on until Dreyfus was finally acquitted in 1904, but in doing so it split France in two and caused an outpouring of antisemitism. Dreyfus's family had kept up the campaign to exonerate their relative, and another court case in 1896 revealed found conclusive evidence that Major Ferdinand Esterhauzy was to blame, but the military command swept it under the rug. In 1898 famous French writer and thinker Emile Zola published J'accuse...! condemning the military and bringing the Affair to public attention. France was split between the pro-military, pro-Catholic, and conservative Anti-Dreyfusards and the secular, pro-republic Dreyfusards; antisemitism became commonplace in France as a result. Following Zola's publication antisemitic riots broke out in 20 cities, causing deaths in Algiers, and new papers emerged riling up hatred against Jews. One notable one was by noted anti-Dreyfusard Edouard Drumont and his paper La Libre Parole. Drumont's Jewish France (1886) sold 150,000 copies in its first year alone. In 1904 Dreyfus was finally freed but as he was so long in isolation he struggled to speak. The Dreyfus Affair had showed how quickly antisemitism could spread in society - for this reason one of Zionism's modern 'founders', Theordor Herzl, started arguing that Jews would never be welcome in Europe so had to have their own state. 

Sara Baartman - A Case Study in Race, Science, and Sex

Sara Baartman on display in the Museum of Man

I want to briefly focus on the case of Sara Baartman, sometimes you might see her referred to as Saartjie Baartman, and I would recommend reading my friend's post about her. Of Khoisan descent, born around 1789, Baartman was enslaved from her home in what is now South Africa and sold to British surgeon Alexander Dunlop. Baartman had a condition named steatopygia which caused her buttocks to become enlarged, for this reason Dunlop had her put on display in 'freak shows' and advertised her as the 'Hottentot Venus' (after the famous Venus statuettes). She was subjected to horrific and degrading public performances for jeering crowds in London before being sold to a Parisian animal showcaser in 1814. In Paris she was forced to pose, often semi-naked with animals including rhinos. Naturalist Georges Cuvier started 'studying' Baartman producing naked illustrations of her, and when she tragically died her body was put on display in the Museum of Man until 1973. It took until 2003, even then after seven years of demands, for Baartman's body to be returned to South Africa. Baartman's objectification shows the combination of race, science, and sex during the colonial era. The only parts of Baartman's body to be preserved was her skeleton, her brain, and her genitals. As argued by Edward Said, the Other became the Other because those with power could make it an Other, it could be objectified and commodified for European imagination. Her treatment in life was exemplary of this - forced into freak shows and human zoos Baartman, and other colonised peoples, were compared to animals to be studied. Khoisan were argued to be one of the most 'inferior races' and closest to animals according to racial scientists - gorillas were believed to reproduce Khoisan women. Obsession with phrenology meant that Baartman's brain was preserved; it could be used in pseudo-science to prove that Khoisan were closer to apes than humans, so their subjugation was justified. Unfortunately, Sara Baartman was not the only person to be subjected to this. Freak shows were common across Europe and America displaying so-called 'freaks' for a paying public, one of the most famous ones being the freak show in P.T. Barnum's circus, and human zoos regularly displayed colonised cultures in Britain, France, Germany, and even Japan. One of the last Tasmanians, Trugianini, asked to be cremated so her body could not be examined - instead in 1878 her skeleton was put on display.

An advert for Baartman in London

A key part in racism is the sexualisation of ethnic minorities. Edward Said has discussed how European art regularly depicted the Islamic world as being hedonistic where orgies took place in every harem. Colonial empires regularly saw sexualised racial violence against women - concubinage was encouraged in Dutch Indonesia until the early-twentieth century, and Japan extensively used Korean and Chinese women (as well as some Japanese women) as 'comfort women' during the Second World War. Baartman's sexualisation is part of this, as argued by Anne McClintock colonialism was tied with a 'long tradition of male travel as an erotics of ravishment'. Sexuality and sex were tied with race, the Khoisan were regularly subjected to demeaning searches and questions about their genitals, and Cuvier was determined to examine Baartman's labia. She refused, but he eagerly examined her genitals when she died, and a plaster cast of her half-naked body, with her buttocks exposed, was put on display in the Museum of Man. In a voyeuristic way Cuvier only decided that Khoisan were the same species as Europeans when he examined her labia.

Empire and Capitalism

An advert for 'Monkey Brand' soap

Racism was integral to empire, as we saw when we discussed colonialism. Empires throughout history have used racism as a way to structure society - the colonisers, whether they be Roman or French or Japanese, would impose their own identity and culture onto the colonised. In the European, American, and Japanese Empires an idea of superiority - in both culture and race - were used to justify colonialism. Japan's conquest of Korea, Taiwan, and northern China was justified in social Darwinistic terms; if Japan did not secure East Asia Europe or America would and that would endanger Asian civilisation. A perception that colonised peoples were inferior linked to empire, colonialism had to happen in order to 'protect' the colonised. This is shown in Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899) about the US conquest of the Philippines containing the lines, 

'Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild —

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.'

Colonial empires regularly imposed racial hierarchies arguing that certain 'races' were naturally superior to others, this would lead to disaster when empire fell. German, and later Belgian, colonisers in Rwanda declared that the Tutsi and Hutu were separate races - some historians, like Martin Meredith, have argued that the Hutu-Tutsi distinction may have originally been a class one - and that the Tutsi were predisposed to rule. The stoking of animosity between Hutu and Tutsi would spill over into ethnic cleansing following independence and genocide in 1994. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, empire justified itself as 'white men saving brown women from brown men' - men of colour were regularly portrayed as sexual predators enslaving their women. This was often used to justify intervention in private lives of the colonised, and also to control the bodies of women. Diana Jeater has discussed how in Nigeria British authorities worked with local chiefs to limit the movement of single women. Interracial relations were viewed with suspicion. 'Black Perils' in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia broke out in the 1920s and 1930s based on an unfounded fear that black African men would rape white women. In New Guinea the White Women's Protection Ordinance of 1926 imposed the death penalty for rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a non-white man, however, the law did not apply to the rape of non-white women by white men or men of colour. Women were seen as the point of 'racial degeneration' showing the intersection of sexism and racism. Racial depictions of colonised peoples were regularly imported to Europe. For example, black Africans were often depicted as being ape-like which were often applied to the Irish in the 1890s, and the British working-class were compared to apes in a similar light.

This brings us to the commodification of racism. Anne McClintock has written an interesting book, Imperial Leather, about how soap was used to sell imperial racism. A good example is Pears' Soap which depicted their soap as bringing cleanliness and civilisation to Africa. McClintock identified four main fetishes appearing in soap adverts: the soap itself, white clothing, mirrors, and monkeys. In the 1880s 'Monkey Brand' soap depicted working-class children - coded to create a link with Africa - being half-child, half-monkey using the soap and becoming a white child. The depiction of Africa of dirty and undomesticated was used to legitimise violent enforcement of European culture and commodity capitalism. In 1899 McClure's Magazine during the Anglo-Boer War ran an advert stating that 'The first step towards lightening THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. PEARS' SOAP is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilisation advances'. Timothy Burke has further discussed how Lux soap and Lifebuoy in what is now Zimbabwe advertised itself as being modern and hygienic to Africans, directly implying that European hygienic practices were superior to that of Africa. In 1873 Florence Kate Upton created the golliwog, a racist caricature of a black man featuring exaggerated hair, smiles and in minstrel attire, was adopted in advertisements to sell racism. Golliwogs appeared on a wide range of products ranging from children's dolls to jam to sell a non-threatening racial stereotype to a white consumer. Of course, white supremacy was explicitly sold. D.W. Griffiths's The Birth of a Nation (1915) glamorised the Ku Klux Klan (and led to the rise of the second KKK); postcards were sold of lynched African-Americans in the 1920s; and as late as the 1960s British pubs tried to attract patrons by displaying signs reading 'No dogs, no blacks, no Irish'. During the aforementioned Dreyfus Affair papers used antisemitism to appeal to the anti-Dreyfusard crowd. Today racism sells - white beauty standards sells plastic surgery and skin-lightening products reinforcing centuries old racism.

Conclusion

The impact of scientific racism touches society today. The legacies of eugenics, racist advertising, and segregation continues to impact communities. It took the horrors of the Holocaust for racial science to be discredited, and even then it continues to impact communities. In 1994 Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve used pseudo-science and outright false information to try and argue that there were intellectual differences between 'races'. Nineteenth and early-twentieth century racism shapes how people of colour are perceived today: depictions of black men as aggressive continue as people argue that more communities experience more crime as they are more violent; beauty commercials feature light-skinned models; Brazilian clinics offer more money for white sperm donations compared to non-white donations; and in 2015 ninety percent of Roma in Britain reported facing racial abuse. Authorities have reported that antisemitic speech is on the rise worldwide based off of Twitter and Facebook posts; and we have seen several racially motivated mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the Christchurch mosque shooting, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and the recent El Paso shooting. We have only touched a small fraction of racism's impact today. As my focus is on Europe, Latin America, and Africa we have not looked at how racism manifests itself in Australasia and Asia which adds another layer of complexity. We have also not discussed institutional racism which pervades societies worldwide. It is a true tragedy that racism is so pervading in history that we have only scraped the surface today.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Ann Stoler, 'Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures', American Ethnologist, 16:4, (1989), 634-660

-Timothy Burke, '"Sunlight Soap has Changed my Life": Hygiene, Commodification, and the Body in Colonial Zimbabwe', in Hildi Hendrickson, (ed.), Clothing and Difference, (Durham, NC: 2012), 189-212

-Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (London: 1995)

-Diana Jeater, 'The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century', in Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins, (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford: 2004)

-Justin Parkinson, 'The Significance of Sarah Baartman', BBC News Magazine, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35240987, (7 January 2016), [Accessed 08/08/2019]

-Sadiah, Qureshi, 'Displaying Sara Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus"', History of Science, 42:2 (2004), 233-257

-George Combe, A System of Phrenology, (London: 1830)

-Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: 1978)

-Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe: 1870–2000, (London: 2001)

-Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, Racism, Second Edition, (New York, NY: 2003)

-Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West, (Baltimore, MD: 1996)

-Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, (Cambridge: 2008)

-Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West, (Cambridge: 2009)

-'Social Darwinism', In Our Time, BBC, (20/02/2014)

-'The Dreyfus Affair', In Our Time, BBC, (08/10/2009)

-Carissa Chew, 'Science, Race, and Empire: The Case of Sara Baartman (c.1789-1815)', Carissa Chew, https://carissachew.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/sara-baartman/, [Accessed 05/08/2019]

-Carissa Chew, 'Science, Race, and Empire: The Search for the “Missing Link”', Carissa Chew, https://carissachew.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/science-race-and-empire-the-search-for-the-missing-link/, [Accessed 05/08/2019]

Thank you for reading. I would highly recommend reading Carissa's website here, she is one of the best writers I know so check her work out. For other World History posts we have a list here here, and next time we will look at the origins of modern nationalism. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.