Recordering Racism: Imperialism and the Challenges of New Contact in the Nineteenth Century

With some earlier exceptions, Western European powers into the 1850s limited their contacts with Africa and Asia to the establishment of coastal trading stations. But beginning with the British parliament’s assumption of control of India in 1858, European powers and eventually the United States moved to acquire colonies ruled by representatives from the “mother countries.” As that happened, management of race relations reached a new, tenser level across the globe. White males had to rethink their attitudes toward both white women and dark-skinned men. The questions debated in and for India or French West Africa, for example, affected the story of race and lynching in America.