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Abstract
Finzsch's analysis of Australian sources of the late Enlightenment and Romantic period, written between 1788 and 1850, shows that racism did not begin with the mid-nineteenth century. In these texts, the indigenous Australian populations are portrayed as non-religious, indolent, idle, hideous and as uncivilized cannibals. Aborigines, according to these sources, did not own the land because they did not till it; they allegedly had no respect for property rights and lived as nomadic hunter/gatherers without fixed abode and useful implements. Their number was thought to be decreasing rapidly due to their cultural backwardness. Their presumed lack of a proper language with a developed vocabulary made them less than human, almost on a level with primates. These early racist discourses formed the necessary preconditions for two centuries of discrimination, dissolution and genocide of indigenous peoples in the absence of scientific racism. One would be drawing a false dichotomy between ‘ideology’ and ‘reality’ if one insisted that these discourses were purely theoretical and had nothing to do with genocidal practices. The discourses analysed by Finzsch were the reality of British/indigenous relations for the British, and thereby constituted the limits of their imaginative capacity to address those relations. British settlers obviously perceived Aboriginals as an abject Other, a view particularly prominent among frontier settlers who had to contend with ferocious indigenous resistance. Some of these settlers tended to endorse brutal suppression in the form of genocidal massacres. The wilful blindness to or impotent disapproval of such unauthorized settler actions on the part of colonial authorities can be construed as their implicit acceptance of the destruction of the indigenes.
Notes
Boris Vian, Et on tuera tous les affreux (Paris: Le Terrain vague 1965).
I wish to thank the two anonymous referees for constructive criticisms in the preparation of this article. The quotation in the title is from Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, during the Years 1828, 1829, 1830, and 1831: With Observations on the Soil, Climate, and General Resources of the Colony of New South Wales (London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1834).
Norbert Finzsch is Professor of Anglo-American History at the University of Cologne.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer (New York: New American Library 1950), 123.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray 1859).
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton 1981), 72. Darwinian ideas reached both Australia and North America right after 1859; see Barry W. Butcher, ‘Darwin down under: science, religion, and evolution in Australia’, in Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (eds), Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1999), 39–59 (41–3); Jon H. Roberts, ‘Darwinism, American Protestant thinkers, and the puzzle of motivation’, in Numbers and Stenhouse (eds), Disseminating Darwinism, 145–72 (146–8). Even if Darwin treated human development fully only in 1871 in his treatise The Descent of Man, references to human biology abound in On the Origin of Species. Referring to the idea of constant struggle for survival, for instance, Darwin notes: ‘There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny’ (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 45). The inclusion of humankind in Darwin's consideration is by no means exceptional, since Malthus treated humanity already as a biological entity. Another word of caution: the dates 1859 and 1871 only denote a discursive threshold after which it became acceptable to include humans into the biological realm; the question of when and where this idea of human development emerged is beyond the point I want to make.
Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso 1991), 37–67 (42–4).
Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge 2004); Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia, 3rd edn (Münster and Hamburg: LIT 2003); Richard G. Hovannisian, Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2003); Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004); Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002).
Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1996), 23. Reynolds answers the question of whether these warlike acts constituted genocides in the negative because ‘[the] Aborigines survived the invasion’, and thus falls prey to a frequent misunderstanding of the term ‘genocide’ and its meaning (53). Tony Barta, ‘Discourses of genocide in Germany and Australia: a linked history’, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, 43.
Carl Schmitt suggested that the history of peoples is the history of taking land (Landnahme) and that every real Landnahme produces a new nomos; a pre-state order of society is therefore based on land; Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Cologne: Greven 1950). Pertaining to the ‘taking of the land’ in North America, see Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press 1994). A broad, if somewhat general, overview is presented in Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press 1990). For a Native American perspective, see Robert A. Williams, Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge 1999).
Thomas Jefferson is a prime example of how aesthetic judgements and proto-scientific data converge in early racisms. In his justification of slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781, he makes both aesthetic and scientific observations on the corporeal and mental abilities of Africans; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Boston: Wells and Lilly 1829), 144–51, 169–71.
Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Domesticity and dispossession: the ideology of the “home” and the British construction of the “primitive” from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries’, in Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds), Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2002), 29–33.
On the intellectual origin of the stage theory, see David Armitage, ‘The New World and British historical thought’ and Peter Burke, ‘America and the rewriting of world history’, both in Karen Kupperman (ed.), American in European Consciousness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1995).
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray 1871), i.184; Butcher, ‘Darwin down under’.
Elbourne, ‘Domesticity and dispossession’, 29.
Geoffrey Bolton, ‘Reflections on a comparative frontier history’, in Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia 2003), 161–7.
Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen's University Press 1989).
A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2004). For an elaboration of the concept of ‘settler imperialism’, see my chapter in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Colonialism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2006, forthcoming).
John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press 2002).
Jacob Abbott, American History, 8 vols (New York and Boston: Sheldon, Gould and Lincoln 1860). Volume 1, entitled Aboriginal America, refers to Amerindians as ‘American Aboriginals’ (60, 61, 144, 153, 257, 275, 277). Watkin Tench, referring to Australians, states: ‘Like ourselves, the French found it necessary, more than once, to chastise a spirit of rapine and intrusion which prevailed among the Indians around the bay’; Watkin Tench, ‘A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay’, in Tim F. Flannery (ed.), Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration: 1788 by Watkin Tench; Life and Adventures by John Nicol (Melbourne: Text Pub 2002), 62.
Here I follow Barta, ‘Discourses of genocide in Germany and Australia’.
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1860 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books 1982), 47–9; Michel Foucault, ‘Ein Spiel um die Psychoanalyse’, in Dispositive der Macht: Über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit (Berlin: Merve 1978), 123; Michel Foucault, ‘Le Jeu de Michel Foucault’, in Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard 1994), iii.299; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. from the French by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books 1977), 174.
United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the U.N. General Assembly on 9 December 1948, United Nations Treaty Series, no. 1021, vol. 78 (New York: United Nations Treaty Series 1951), 277.
John Stevens Henslow, ‘On the requisites necessary for the advance of botany’, Magazine of Zoology and Botany, vol. 1, 1837, 115.
The ‘exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings’, who hint at the ‘unlivable [sic] and uninhabitable . . . zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” [sic] is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject’; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge 1993), 3. Jonathan Swift uses the term abject when he discusses the Yahoos, the human ‘slave race’ in the country of the Houyhnhnms; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels [1726], ed. Herbert John Davis, vol. 11 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift (Oxford: Blackwell 1941), 265–7.
Michel Foucault, ‘Body/power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. and trans. from the French by Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press 1980), 55–62.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. from the Italian by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1998). See also Attwood and Forster (ed.), Frontier Conflict, 22–3.
See the special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, vol. 54, no. 1, 1997, on the construction of race in colonial America. On pre-Darwinian racial discourse in North America, see Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press 1995); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press 1996); Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001).
Socorro Babaran Cario, ‘Eighteenth Century Voyagers to the Pacific and the South Seas, and the Rise of Cultural Primitivism and the Noble Savage Idea’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, 1970; Terry Jay Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001); Jean Woolmington, Aborigines in Colonial Society, 1788–1850: From ‘Noble Savage’ to ‘Rural Pest’ (Armidale, NSW: University of New England Press 1988). In the field of morals/ethics, a trajectory of the Noble Savage was still visible, fitting the genealogical division of an older and a younger discourse; see James Cook's remarks about New Holland, in ‘James Cook's Journal of Remarkable Occurrences aboard His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, 1768–1771’, online edition of the original journal at the National Library of Australia, http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/cook_remarks/092.html (viewed 10 February 2005). However, most of the time, Aborigines are portrayed as fickle, treacherous and thieving; see Tench, ‘A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay’, 59, 190. For the same mindset, see Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia.
Louise K. Barnett, The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1975); John K. Lodewijks, ‘Rational economic man and the Ignoble Savage’, History of Political Economy, vol. 32, 2000, 1027–32; Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1976); Beulah V. Thigpen, ‘The Indians of The Leather-Stocking Tales: A Study of the Noble and the Ignoble Savage’, Ph.D. thesis, East Texas State University, 1982.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975, 6–18.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tales of Dark-Skinned Women: Race, Gender and Global Culture (London: University College London Press 1998), 337.
Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1999), ii.45.
Paul Guyer, ‘Beauty and utility in eighteenth-century aesthetics’, Eighteenth-century Studies, vol. 35, 2002, 439–53 (439–40).
Cf. the depiction of the animal-like, abject Yahoos in Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 266–7 and also ch. 1.
Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2001), 98–108.
George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1985), xii.
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2000), 54–5.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 1990), 161. Lynette Russell shows how this scopism made its way into British museums after 1850; Lynette Russell, ‘“Well nigh impossible to describe”: dioramas, displays and representations of Australian Aborigines’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 2, 1999, 35–45.
See Alan Barnard, ‘Hunting-and-gathering society: an eighteenth-century Scottish invention’, in Alan Barnard (ed.), Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology (Oxford and New York: Berg 2004). Istvan Hont, ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the “four stages theory”’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1990), 253–76.
Paul G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan (eds), The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn, 1787–1789 (Sydney: Australian Documents Library 1979), 58; James Grant, The Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery Performed in His Majesty's Vessel the Lady Nelson, of Sixty Tons Burthen, with Sliding Keels, in the Years 1800, 1801, and 1802 to New South Wales (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia 1973), 157.
Gascoigne, The Enlightenment, 149.
Ibid., 150.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press 1988), xxv.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge 1995), 22.
Louis Montrose, ‘The work of gender in the discourse of discovery’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), New World Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993), 197–217 (178).
Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993), 157.
Johannes Stradanus [i.e. Jan van der Straet], New Discoveries: The Sciences, Inventions and Discoveries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as Represented in 24 Engravings Issued in the Early 1580s (Norwalk, CT: Burndy Library 1953); Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London, New York: Routledge 1990), 171.
See Susan Morgan, Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Books about Southeast Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1996), 11. Morgan asserts the importance of gender as a structuring principle of colonial discourse. See also Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge 1992).
McClintock, Imperial Leather, 24.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press 1988), 42.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London and New York: Methuen 1986), 3.
McClintock, Imperial Leather, 27.
Ibid., 26–7.
Tench, ‘A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay’, 53–4; William Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales: The Journal of Lieutenant William Bradley RN of HMS Sirius, 1786–1792 (Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales 1969), 142; Peter Miller Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales: A Series of Letters, Comprising Sketches of the Actual State of Society in That Colony; of Its Peculiar Advantages to Emigrants; of Its Topography, Natural History, &c. &c., 2 vols (London: H. Colburn 1828), ii.15, 36–7.
‘The aboriginal inhabitants of the country were of races formed with constitutions, both physical and mental, adapting them to obtain their livelihood by fishing and the chase—modes of life by means of which North America might sustain perhaps twenty or thirty millions of inhabitants. The Caucasian race, which was introduced from Europe, is endowed with constitutions adapting them to gain their livelihood by agriculture, commerce, and the manufacturing arts, a mode of life by which the same territory is capable of supporting many hundred millions—we know not how many. Under these circumstances it was an inevitable, and as much in fulfillment of the designs of divine Providence, that the old races should be supplanted by the new, as that the horse and the cow should displace the alligator and the elk, and brakes and bulrushes yield their native ground to corn’; Abbott, American History, i.275–6. The plantation owner and US statistician Joseph Camp Griffith Kennedy predicted both the extinction of Native Americans and of emancipated African Americans; Joseph Camp Griffith Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office 1864), xi–xii. See also Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1982); Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2003); Reynolds, Frontier, 54; Barry W. Butcher, ‘Darwinism, social Darwinism, and the Australian Aborigines: a reevaluation’, in Roy Macleod and Philip F. Rehbock (eds), Darwin's Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1994), 371–94.
Charles D. Bernholz, ‘American Indian treaties and the presidents: a guide to the treaties proclaimed by each administration’, Social Studies, vol. 93, September–October 2002, 218–27. The legal basis for the denial of indigenous land rights in both America and Australia was almost identical: in the 1823 US Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh (8 Wheaton, 543), Chief Justice John Marshall argued that, by reason of conquest, native lands became the property of the US government and Indians were to be considered occupants. In 1831 the same court ruled in Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia (5 Peters, 1, 16–19) that tribes were ‘sovereign nations’ but not ‘foreign nations’, establishing a guardian relationship between Indians and the government.
Reynolds, Frontier, 133–8.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1765–9), i.104.
In Attorney-General v. Brown (1847) one finds confirmation for the suggestion that, upon the settlement of New South Wales, the unqualified legal and beneficial ownership of all land in the colony was vested in the Crown. Arguably, the judgement of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in this case seems ambiguous in that the judges confined the proposition to ‘waste lands’, which they defined as ‘all the waste and unoccupied lands of the colony’. Careful reading of the judgement makes it clear that it implicitly assumed all the lands of the colony to be vacant at the time of its establishment in 1788. See Attorney-General v. Brown (1847) 2 SCR (NSW) APP 30 (FC).
The complete collection of sources can be accessed online at www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/histsem/anglo/html_2001/matrix.htm (viewed 11 February 2005).
On cannibalism as a traditional European reference to Indians, see Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide, 17–91; Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1998); David English and Penelope Van Toorn, Speaking Positions: Aboriginality, Gender and Ethnicity in Australian Cultural Studies (Melbourne: Victoria University of Technology 1995); Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen's University Press 1989); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1997); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books 1979).
William Dampier's account of his 1691 voyage in the Cygnet was published in Ernest Scott (ed.), Australian Discovery, 2 vols (London: Dent 1929), vol. 1, ch. 9, available online at www.gutenberg.net.au/ausdisc/ausdisc1-09.html (viewed 11 February 2005).
David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, from Its First Settlement in January 1788, to August 1801: With Remarks on the Dispositions, Customs, Manners, &c., of the Native Inhabitants of That Country, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies 1798–1802), ii.180.
‘James Cook's Journal of Remarkable Occurrences aboard His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, 1768–1771’, online edition of the original journal at the National Library of Australia, http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/cook_remarks/092.html (viewed 10 February 2005).
Tench, ‘A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay’, 252–3.
Grant, The Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery, 158.
Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia.
Tench, ‘A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay’, 161–2, 264.
Jane Rendall, ‘The Enlightenment and the nature of women’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860 (New York: Schocken Books 1984), 7–32.
George Bouchier Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon (Sydney: Library Council of New South Wales 1978), 47–8.
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage round the World of H.M.S. ‘Beagle’ under the Command of Captain Fitz Roy, R.N. (London: John Murray 1913), 462, 469.
Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, ii.46–7, 49–50.
Charles Dunoyer, L'Industrie et la morale considérées dans leurs rapports avec la liberté (Paris: A. Sautelet 1825), 146–7.
Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco, in the Summer of 1859 (New York: Saxton, Barker and Co. 1860), 151.
On this point, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the “racial century”: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, 30.