BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

ust, all of which kept a rein on optimism well into the century, the mid-Victorian decades
marked a disenchantment with Enlightenment humanist ideals, such as the concepts of universal
brotherhood and the perfectibility of man, that brought a hardening of social and racial
attitudes. 19 Several developments at home and abroad have been blamed for this demise of
Liberal idealism. Disenchantment on the domestic front stemmed from the perceived failure of
the Poor Laws and social unrest associated with Chartist agitation. Overseas, the Crimean War
(1853-5) and Indian Mutiny (1857), with their widely publicized horrors and atrocities, shook a
public accustomed to thirty-five years of relatively peaceful diplomacy, colonization and
commercial expansion. In 1865 Governor Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaican Rebellion
won broad support as well as criticism, but by that time the failure of missionary expeditions and
the deflation of exaggerated commercial expectations had already dispelled earlier Evangelical
and Utilitarian optimism bred on the belief that non-Western cultures would readily adopt
European ways, or that free trade would miraculously lead savages to civilization without the
need for annexation and forceful repression. 20 Pessimism regarding the moral foundations and
future of the British empire thus grew not only with doubts about Britain’s capacity to sustain its
lead in the face of foreign competition, which paradoxically produced a more stridently militant
19 Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 77-80, 89, 92, cites the Floggings Act (1863), the
Prisons Act (1865), The Criminals Act and The Habitual Criminals Act (both 1869) as evidence
of a tougher attitude toward social problems that undermined previous assumptions of innate
human rationality and spelled the end of sentimentality and idealism based on Rousseau’s Social
Contract. This change depended in no small part on the polygenism of Christian Literalists and
the “inherited prejudice” of ethnologists and anthropologists, many of whom misapplied
Darwinian models to human society.
20 Ibid., 69, 73, 77. See also Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 28, on the support among
English intellectuals and clergy for harsh measures in Jamaica, and pp. 30-31, on the Liberal
ideal of commerce as a civilizing “miracle.”
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