Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

iting Africa and Asia, or from the effort to settle tropical
environments for which Caucasians were naturally ill
adapted. The principal English and French advocates of biological
racism in the mid–nineteenth century—Robert Knox
and Arthur de Gobineau—were both highly skeptical about
the virtues of overseas imperialism. When the United States
became an imperial power after the War with Spain at the
end of the nineteenth century, many of the most fervent
advocates of Jim Crow in the South opposed acquisition of
the Philippines on the grounds that the nation had its hands
full with the problems created by inferior and degenerating
racesathome. 14 In Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler was retrospectively
critical of Germany’s joining in the scramble for overseas
colonies in the period before World War I. Germany
should have let the British do what it could with the colored
races of the world, he averred, while Germany expanded
directly eastward. The only desirable colonies were those
that “seem in large part suitable for settlement by Europeans.”
Tropical regions that were thickly settled by non-Europeans
he deemed useless, and he thought that Germans
should have as little to do with them as possible. 15
Nevertheless, the ideology of imperialism did inspire
the architects of segregation in the United States and South
Africa. At the beginning of the twentieth century, what became
South Africa was composed of two British colonies
and two Afrikaner republics (which were then in the process
of losing their independence and being absorbed into
the empire). From the end of the South African War in 1902
to the emergence of an autonomous, white-dominated
Union of South Africa in 1910, the British imperialists who
were in control laid the foundations for the policy that
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