Carlyle, Mill, Bodington and the Case of 19th Century Imperialized Science

Abstract

The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his notorious anti-emancipationist perspective in "The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," followed by John Stuart Mill's divergent response to him in 1850 titled, "The Negro Question." In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman's perspective, "The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question" by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. This paper first compares the three essays to show the underlying hegemonic racial discourse and then presents the imperialist subtext that underlies Mill's views. In this, I argue that it is crucial to read these three essays within the scientific discourse of the era, to see how 19th century science, especially phrenology and contemporary researches of evolution became "hegemonic systems (1)" which seeped into the normative racial ideologies of the period as seen through these writers. Brian Regal in Race and the Search for Origins of Man mentions that even before the advent of Darwin's theories about evolution there were comparisons between human beings and apes. Regal points out: "European systematizers ranked groups as superior and inferior using their own faces as the measure." (2) As Regal states 'Savage' races were equated with savage beasts in the growing tide of racial stereotypes. Ape imagery dealt with race, class, the spread of empire and even gender issues, as well as evolution and human origins. The ape became a metaphor of everything dark and troubling in European minds.... (3) In the same vein, Patrick Brantlinger also notes: "The theory that man evolved through distinct social stages--from savagery to barbarism to civilization-led to a self-congratulatory anthropology that actively promoted belief in the inferiority, indeed the bestiality, of the African." (4) Researches into the question of human evolution and racial hierarchies were a large part of the discourse of Carlyle's epoch and he shares certain assumptions from such scientific discourses. Although Carlyle doesn't directly depict Africans as apes, he does relegate them to a bestial, animal status, since he views them as "two-legged cattle (5)" with "excellent horse-jaws." (6) In addition, Carlyle leaves no hope that Africans would have been capable of making any improvements to the putrefied lands of West Indies; he argues that the Black man knows "whether ever he could have introduced an improvement." (7) As he states, "Am I gratified in my mind by the ill usage of any two--or four legged thing; of any horse or any dog? Not so, I assure you." (8) While attempting to argue against the exploitations of slavery, his associations still operate amidst the animalistic images of horse, dog or any four-legged thing compared to the "negro." In the amended version of the essay, Carlyle also depicts Africans as, "a swift, supple fellow, a merry hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature, with a great deal of melody and amenability in his composition (italics mine)." (9) Here, Carlyle strips the African man of his humanity and relegates him to the status of a singing, dancing "creature." Edward Said discusses Carlyle's works in Culture and Imperialism and observes that ... Carlyle's energetic animadversions on revitalizing Britain, awakening it to work, organic connections, love of unrestricted industrial and capitalist development, and the like do nothing to animate "Quashee", the emblematic Black whose 'ugliness, idleness, rebellion' are doomed forever to subhuman status. (10) This kind of "othering" dominates all spheres, and as Said says, "No area of experience was spared the unrelenting application of these hierarchies" [and] "quasi-scientific concepts of barbarism, primitivism," etc. …