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.9 16, 194 8, 204 36, 338 42. 08 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:46 Page 194194 Douglas LorimerPeter Mandler s civilisational perspective.Victorian liberal elite culturehad confidence both in its sense of superiority and its belief in theprogress of the barbarian and the savage towards a civilised ideal overtime.Here the evolutionary paradigm provided a vastly longer period ofhistorical time, and defined stages of development in economics, society,and politics as well as in biology and culture.The many applications ofthe evolutionary stages of development with their ambiguities aboutrace and culture fuelled the colonisers confidence that both the coloniserand the colonised would benefit from the conversion to conditions ofmodernity.40Like an earlier generation of abolitionists, enthusiasts for colonialdevelopment greatly underestimated the immensity of their modernisingproject.They faced one evident political reality the colonial subjects ofcolour who were to be the instruments of this transformation did notbehave in accordance with the stereotypical attributes ascribed to them bythe scientific experts.Therefore, social, political, and legal relationshipshad to be constructed out of a mixture of coercion and consent thatdefined the negotiated outcomes between the colonisers and their colonialsubjects of colour.In the task of constructing colonial race relations,policy makers and political commentators had in mind the norms of themetropolitan culture.These norms were not even those of an inventedtradition , but rather were the new practices of Victorian democracy.Thediscourse on race served the purpose of defining multiracial colonialsocieties as fundamentally different from the metropole, and thus theemerging conventions about the democratic rights of citizens as politicalparticipants and the rights of subjects under the law need not apply.In the late Victorian and Edwardian period, the imperial metropole ofLondon stimulated the creative ferment of new thinkers and new ideasabout politics, society, and culture.The rich mix of Positivist, Progressive,New Liberal, Ethical, Fabian, Labour, and socialist, as well as other clubsand organisations, established a circle of friendship for discussion of thechallenging issues of race, empire, and democracy.The leading and mostinfluential participants, for example the members and associates of theRainbow Circle (including J.Ramsay Macdonald, J.A.Hobson, SydneyOlivier, John M.Robertson, William Pember Reeves, Graham Wallas,40Peter Mandler, Race and Nation in Mid-Victorian Thought , in S.Collini, R.Whatmore,and B.Young (eds), History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History (Cambridge, 2000),pp.224 44; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp.169 79, 285 314; Burrow, Evolution andSociety, pp.251 77; Lorimer, Victorian Values , pp.115 17. 08 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:46 Page 195FROM NATURAL SCIENCE TO SOCIAL SCIENCE 195and L.T.Hobhouse), moved between the worlds of political advocacy,journalism, and the academy (mainly as lecturers in university extensionprogrammes).For some, for example J.A.Hobson, their unorthodoxopinions were an impediment to academic positions, but others benefitedfrom the expansion of the universities and from the establishment of newchairs and departments in the social sciences.Here the lead was taken bythe newly founded London School of Economics, but London, Oxford,Cambridge, and the new civic universities recruited established authors,many with experience as journalists, to staff these new academic ventures.Just as the natural sciences had led the way in the change from gentlemenamateurs to research professionals, so too the creation of new social sci-ence disciplines meant that the production of knowledge was increasingly,though never completely, in the hands of professional academics.41In these formative years of the new social sciences, largely outside ofthe academy, the contentious matters of race and empire played a signif-icant role in the social and political theories of leading authors.In largepart, these considerations imposed themselves through external events,principally the South African War and the reconstruction of the newSouth Africa.42 For this new kind of multiracial society, historical prece-dents or contemporary examples were few in number.As constructed bythe late Victorians, the history of the West Indies since emancipation,including the use of indentured coolie labour from India, pointed to theneed for some form of compulsion to produce a reliable, disciplinedlabour force.India was often cited as a successful model of benevolentbureaucratic rule by a small British elite over a much larger populationalien in race and religion.The recent history of the southern states inAmerica with its legalised segregation under Jim Crow and widely41Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp.221 38; Harold Perkin, The Rise of ProfessionalSociety: England since 1880 (London, 1989), pp.116 70; Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire:British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895 1914 (London, 1968), pp.138 46,156 68; Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978), pp.9 27, 54 61;Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT, 1999), pp.164 83;Michael Freeden, Hobson, John Atkinson (1858 1940), Social Theorist and Economist ,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn, 2006); Michael Freeden, Rainbow Circle(act.1894 1931) , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn, 2006).42Ronald Hyam, The British Empire in the Edwardian Era , in J.Brown and W.R.Louis (eds),Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol.4: The Twentieth Century, pp.47 63; John Eddy andDerek Schreuder, The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and SouthAfrica First Assert their Nationalities, 1880 1914 (Sydney, 1988), pp.19 62, 192 226; M.D.Blanch, British Society and the War , in Peter Warwick (ed.), The South African War: TheAnglo-Boer War, 1899 1902 (Harlow, 1980), pp.210 37. 08 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:46 Page 196196 Douglas Lorimerreported vigilante terrorism of the lynch mobs proved more troubling andcontentious.43 Some authors, for example L.T.Hobhouse and GrahamWallas, probed a broader theoretical concern about race, empire, anddemocracy
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