ABSTRACT
The British Empire was racialist, from one point of view, though racialism was in the nineteenth century an as yet ill-defined term that involved both cultural and biological concepts. Within the whole body of the Empire it was probably the East which expressed the strongest siren call. The lure of the East has been a potent force both in the politics and literature of Empire. The very attributes of Englishness that the author examined earlier became exaggerated in these transplanted suburban communities and their existence served merely to emphasize that aloofness and sense of superiority which was so much a part of the Imperial mystique. All the versions of The Four Feathers have demonstrated, in scenes of the writhing mass of black humanity imprisoned in the fortress-prison of Omdurman, the basic inhumanity of black man to black man, which is what the British, according to the cinema of Empire, are in the Sudan to stop.
