British liberals presumed Africans a lesser stage of civilization

Evidence

Around the time of the American Colonization Society’s founding, European nations were increasingly turning their capital and guns from the slave trade to the cause of colonizing Africa (as well as Asia). English, French, German, and Portuguese armies fought African armies throughout the nineteenth century, trying to establish colonies in order to exploit Africa’s resources and bodies more systematically and efficiently. This new racist drive required racist ideas to make sense of it, and Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans arrived right on time. Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 394 (#complicates, via linked claim)

But Smith was only recasting ideas he had heard in England between The Masque of Blackness, the founding of Virginia, and the founding of New England, ideas English intellectuals had probably learned from Spanish enslavers and Portuguese slave-traders. … These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 86 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Liberalism’s colonial critique was selectively aimed at rivals, sparing free-trade Britain — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 248; British race-relations thought drew on South Africa and the colonial empire — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 661; British colonial racism framed itself as progressivist educability versus boer naturalism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1394 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• European colonization of Africa preceded and required the racist ideas justifying it #complicates (0.82) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 394
• English racist ideas about Africans echoed Spanish and Portuguese enslavers rather than emerging locally #complicates (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 86