British imperial ideology was inculcated through nursery verse, schooling, and university lectures

Evidence

“For the inhabitants of these islands at the beginning of this century the British Empire was for better or worse what Lord Curzon described as ‘a great historical and political and sociological fact which is one of the guiding factors in the history of mankind.’ Most of them (at least outside Ireland) seem to have thought it to be for the better… . They would have been brought up in the nursery on the patriotic verse of Robert Southey and Thomas Campbell. At school their minds would have been moulded by men with the robust and simple-minded patriotism of Charles Kingsley and of William Johnson Cory, that vehement: enthusiast who taught so many future members of the ruling class at Eton, not least among them Lord Rosebery and Lord Esher. From schools … this generation passed to universities where they came in contact with professors like John Ruskin: Ruskin, who told the audience at his Inaugural Lecture as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1870 that it must be the task of Englishmen ‘still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood,’ to ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able formed of her most energetic and worthiest men;—seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.’ If they were historians, they would be introduced to the works of Carlyle and Froude, who spread the same message.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2311

Categorization

• SEED: Ruskin naming ‘the best northern blood’ as the ‘worthiest men’ to seize ‘fruitful waste ground’ is a striking artifact of racial-imperial ideology emanating from an arts lecture at Oxford — good material for an essay on how aesthetic/pastoral culture carried the colonial message.
• XREF: Fits the reader’s causal question: the cultural reproduction of empire through education is part of the ideological environment that the Black radical tradition arose against.