ABSTRACT

Europe’s growing obsession with questions of race marked virtually all aspects of nineteenth-century life and culture. The Atlantic Charter, the first statement of war aims issued in 1941 by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, offered the people of occupied Europe freedom and democracy coupled with a vague promise of ‘social security’. Industrialization and the rise of capitalism in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries owes a considerable debt to British involvement and subsequent domination of the Atlantic slave trade. The historic roots of internal and externally derived racism, although distinct with clearly differing ideological, political and economic determinants, also frequently intersect and overlap. In Britain, Cohen argues that the racism intrinsic to the postwar welfare state has its origins in the ‘hidden history of anti-semitism in turn of the century Britain’. Postwar migrants to Europe encountered racism on a massive scale. But Europeans somehow managed to distance that racism from that which had informed Nazism.