Chapter 3 - Anglo-Saxon Empire and the Residuum

Summary

INTRODUCTION

How did the changing contours of British empire affect the racialization of the undeserving poor? And how did the changing demographic of England’s own working poor impact the integrity of empire? In the last chapter I detailed the ways in which the deserving/undeserving distinction was formatively racialized. In this chapter I interrogate the shifting racialization of this distinction beyond the classic concern for the parish poor as Victorian Britain’s imperial project responded to several significant challenges.

In the first part of the chapter I turn to the post-emancipation era and the way in which the political franchise in Britain was framed by the politics of abolition and empire. I begin by interrogating the humanitarianism that abolition sired, which presented empire as one human family. Questions remained as to whether the nowfreed Black man could cultivate deserving characteristics or would instead be unable to shirk the undeserving essence of the slave. I then examine the 1865 Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica and its pivotal influence in undoing the humanitarianism that conceived of empire as a human family. I argue that the fallout from Morant Bay decisively re-racialized the imperial family. An Anglo-Saxon family was now envisioned, stretching from metropole to settler-colonies, which faced an agglomeration of non-white colonial subject populations that required discipline. I then make sense of the 1867 Reform Act by reference to these racial politics. The Act enfranchised a portion of the working class into the English genus and hence into the Anglo-Saxon family. In this double movement, the “deserving” took on a new form: skilled and settled working men were re-racialized as an Anglo-Saxon constituency.

What of the undeserving English poor? In the second part of the chapter I address this question. From the 1840s onwards, considerations shifted geographically to focus upon urban landscapes, especially the slums of London. The populations that inhabited these areas – part-vagrant, casual and unskilled workers – were given a new name – the residuum, or “left behind”. I consider how the residuum was racialized by analogy to savages and slaves.