A Response to the Commentators

Abstract

First, let me thank the three commentators for taking the time and trouble to read and discuss Civilising Subjects. Critical and constructive responses are what all authors want, and I am grateful that these scholars, whose work I greatly admire, have given my book their attention. To have the chance to reply is, of course, even better! The central argument of Civilising Subjects is that being a colonizer was part of the construction of Englishness in the nineteenth century. Given my location as a white English woman formed through socialist and feminist politics, my task as an historian, as I defined it at the end of the 1980s, was to explore Englishness as a racial formation. The complex ‘‘race’’ politics of postcolonial Britain with its multicultural population posed a challenge to the national story, the ‘‘island story’’ of the homogeneity of the English-British nation. What were the possible chains of connection in racial thinking between imperial and postimperial times? I wanted to understand what difference it made to the English-British sense of self in the nineteenth century that Britain was at the heart of an empire. In the United States race was understood as an issue within from the moment of the inception of the nation: the Native American and AfricanAmerican presence ensured this. Race was not present in the same way in British society, for empire was always at a distance and people of color had a relatively small presence in the metropole. Prior to decolonization and the arrival of large numbers of erstwhile imperial subjects in the metropole, issues of race were commonly conceptualized as belonging to the empire, outside of the nation. It was only in the wake of the migrations of the late 1940s and 1950s that race came to be seen as a problem of the ‘‘inside’’ rather than the ‘‘outside.’’ Yet if, as Frantz Fanon argued, colonialism shaped the colonizers as much as the colonized then how was this expressed in everyday culture? How was it lived ‘‘at home’’ as well as in the empire? How did Englishmen and women become colonizers, and what kind of racialized and gendered selves were these? And if particular kinds of racial thinking were embedded in what it meant to be English, then what were the implications of this for postcolonial times? I aimed to explore the construction of the colonizer and to break the binary of inside-outside through two case studies, one of Jamaica, the other of England. I focused on a relatively short period—between 1830 and 1867—in an effort to understand the shift in English racial thinking