Economic position has functioned as a proxy for racial and civilizational worth

Evidence

A conservative critic of the French Revolution, Lorimer considered free trade to be the ‘only novel and fruitful application of the principle of fraternity’, and he saw the division of society into classes as central to material progress. Economic and racial categorisations blurred in this presentation; Lorimer argued that a state’s wealth might furnish the ‘only means available for international purposes of estimating the moral and intellectual qualities of citizens’, and he regularly compared the domestic poor to ‘barbarians’. Sanctifying wealth by treating it as evidence of superiority, Lorimer argued that, even if the same means of culture could be placed within the reach of all, ‘men’s powers of availing themselves of it differ so widely, that, relatively at least, the barbarian, like “the poor”, we shall “have with us always”’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the commodification/class-as-culture thread and the rhetoric of the deserving vs. undeserving poor in critique-of-neoliberalism literature. — connects to: The civilizational standard quietly re-encoded race as economic capacity — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 83; Racial stereotypes were inferred from economic disadvantage

Broader Connections

• Racial stereotypes were inferred from economic disadvantage #exemplifies (0.85)