The Creation of Mentalities

Where to start with this week’s readings? There was something just so exciting about the overturning of some teleological perceptions which we have about Empire. Firstly, George Morgan, what an absolute badass (except for the part where he stole from a street musician), and also what a fantastic illustration of race-formation. By looking at George Morgan’s story, we see the thought-process of those who were grappling with the question of “what is race?” in the 19^th Century. Before biological determinism had taken control of the debate, a man of a non-white ethnicity was able to convince a British judge to legally classify his “race” as “European”, not solely because he was a Christian, but because he could also present his argument and his character before the court in a “European” manner. What is fantastic about this article is that Clare Anderson is able to analyse a transnational actor’s history as an introduction to broader transnational forces, which the other two articles also do quite well. The transition which Anderson maps from George Morgan being able to convince Europeans that he is a European, while simultaneously taking pride in his allusions to Jim Crow, to the place in time where Jim Crow and blackface cabaret shows became an attempt at subjugation and race-formation and how this occurred on the periphery of Empire, with its origins being rooted in the economic and security concerns surrounding multicultural convict labour, is interesting. The homogeneities of “Empire” and “Imperial racism” are seen to be much more layered, with different mentalities surrounding both “Empire” and “race” resulting from the varying geographical locals, the targeted groups, and the oppressive group’s perceptions of these groups across the Empire. One question this article leaves me with is this: if the concept of race is constantly in flux, then at what point can we say that a mentality of racism in Empire became systematised enough that “race” becomes a “thing”?

                        The Sugata Bose article was my favourite for it potentially (if my definitions are anything to go by) provided the perfect argument for transnational approaches being more reflective of the historical reality than global approaches. When it comes to Empire, the typical line of analysis in global history is to analyse the relationship between the metropole and its colonial periphery. What this avoids, but Bose highlights, is that within a single Empire there may be multiple poles. The conquest of political sovereignty does not mean that a nation’s economic and cultural influence suddenly disappears transnationally. What Bose shows is that there were incredibly rich and deep transnational linkages across the entire Indian Ocean which were totally Indian and were formed fundamentally independent from British oversight. Indian financiers provided the capital to establish businesses on different continents, and these enterprises would bring Indian business culture overseas, as well as skilled labourers, well-connected merchants, and Indian communities and customs. It is a refreshing argument to read that perhaps British political control and economic manipulation did not completely sever the links which had formed across the Indian Ocean hundreds of years before the British ever arrived. However, this leads me to my question in regard to this reading: was the relative decline of Indian communities and capital on the rim of the Indian Ocean after independence due to nationalism in post-colonial states on the Ocean’s periphery, or was it also due to a reorganisation of Indian capital towards domestic issues once the British had left?

                        Finally, the Conrad article was another refreshing, albeit rather grim, re-evaluation of what “Empire” and “race” meant historically. Conrad traces some of the origins of anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic racism in Germany in the late-19^th/early-20^th Centuries and its rather worrying how non-mythical it was. Essentially, increased immigration from Eastern Europe worried some Germans, because they threatened their economic stability and also because they seemed to be more impoverished than their German counterparts. Correspondingly, it was believed that they were less clean and therefore threatened the physical wellbeing of Germans by simply existing in the same space since they were seen to bring disease. The discourse surrounding these two concerns (that Eastern European migrants were economic and health threats) found roots in earlier Teutonic discourse and worked circularly with new biological and global conceptions of race to present the “Pole” as a race to be feared by Germans. The question of whether there was actually anything of issue with “Polish culture” is answered by the fact that the central government routinely failed to construct a solid legal definition of what a “Pole” was and by the subsequent inability of border guards to then identify said “Poles”. The racism against Poles (and Jewish Eastern Europeans) arose because they were the transnational migrants who arrived, and worked, in Germany. It is unlikely that if the Ruthenians had been the first to work in Prussia, and not the Poles, that the Prussian landowners would have been happy with these workers. Instead, a similar process of racialisation may have occurred painting the migrant labourers as “bad” while other “races” would be classified as “allies” in the fight against this “bad race”, just as had occurred with the Poles. I suppose this article leaves me with lots of depressing questions regarding the origins of Nazi racial theory, but I should also focus on the historiography of the article: despite heavily using primary sources of German national political rhetoric, does the focus on international migration make this article “transnational” enough to make it a transnational history?

Apologies for the rather unattractive looking blocks of text, but just thought I’d try preparing a question regarding each reading going into this week, which subsequently involved me just doing a lil analysis of each article. I have a couple ideas floating about for essay titles so maybe I might explore that next week.