Race matters: confronting the legacy of empire and colonialism

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Notes

1 When in prison in the interwar period, Gramsci wrote a number of essays trying to make sense of the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Fascism in Europe. This term ‘morbid symptoms’ was used in one of the essays later published as his Prison Notebooks to identify a number of social symptoms that emerged in the transitional phase during which an old order was already dying, but a radically different new one was not yet born.

2 According to the cultural backlash thesis, the surge in votes for populist parties is not just an economic phenomenon but in large part a reaction against progressive cultural change. The ‘silent revolution’ theory of value change holds that the extraordinarily high levels of existential security were experienced by the people of developed Western societies during the postwar decades brought about an intergenerational shift toward post-materialist values, such as multiculturalism, generating rising support for left-leaning parties and other progressive movements advocating human rights, equality and environmental protection (Inglehart and Norris 2016)

3 The Clarendon schools (Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, St Paul’s, Merchant Taylor’s, Shrewsbury, Rugby and Charterhouse) were declared as the ‘Gold standard’ of independent education. The Clarendon report published in 1864 was led by George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon (1800–1870) who had land in Jamaica and a vested interested in empire.