In fact, concepts of race and colour have been labile throughout history. As late as the nineteenth century, concepts of racial differences were not at all like those of today. 1/
For instance, in 1865, the Daily Telegraph reported on a demonstration in Southampton against Edward John Eyre, the governor of Jamaica. Eyre was at the heart of controversy over his brutal and bloody suppression of an uprising by Jamaican peasants. 2/
The Telegraph commented that ‘there are a good many negroes in Southampton who have the taste of their tribe for any disturbance that appears safe’. 3/
In fact, as historian Douglas Lorrimer observes in his book ‘Colour, Class and the Victorians’, ‘the Daily Telegraph’s “negroes” were… the very English and very white Southampton mob who thronged the streets outside the banquet hall…’ 4/
‘…while their more respectable working class colleagues attended the largest popular meeting in the city’s history to protest against the official reception given to Governor Eyre.’ 5/
This view of blacks and workers as belonging to the same ‘tribe’, and indeed the description of white workers as ‘negroes’, was not unusual within the mid-Victorian elite. 6/
Race in the nineteenth century was as much a description of class differences within European societies as it was of ethnic differences between European and non-European peoples. 7/
As an 1864 report in the magazine ‘Saturday Review’ on the East London working class put it: ‘The Bethnal Green poor... are a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours…’ 8/
This separation of the classes is important because each had to keep their allotted place in the social ladder. Again from the ‘Saturday Review’: ‘The English poor man or child is always expected to remember the condition in which God has placed him…’ 9/
‘…exactly as the negro is expected to remember the skin which God has given him. The relation is both instances is that of perpetual superior to perpetual inferior.’ 10/
These ideas only began to change at the end of the nineeenth century. Imperialist expansion exacerbated the sense of difference between Europeans & non-Europeans. 11/
While the development of democracy at home inevitably modified the application to the working class of the language of racial inferiority (though not necessarily the belief). 12/
