The White Man, Race and Imperial War during the long Nineteenth Century

This paper explores the transnational formation of the gendered and racialized figure of the ‘white man’ in the constitutive relations of colonial conquest and imperial rule across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The self-styled bearer of a ‘civilizing mission’ to Indigenous peoples, the ‘white man’ became a perpetrator of violence and atrocity as imperial rule and colonial settlement encountered continuing resistance and guerrilla warfare. In the process the older ideal of “moral manliness” gave way to a more modern conception of masculinity characterized by toughness, aggression and a capacity to use firearms to “pacify the natives.” The “white man” was a figure beset by contradictions: defined by power, even as he was haunted by his vulnerability, beset by fear all the while asserting his mastery, seemingly omnipotent, yet fundamentally frangible. In frontier wars white men were as likely to forfeit their manhood as to prove it. The “white man” engaged perforce in systematic denial and disavowal, evasion and euphemism and narratives of nation-building that justified his right to rule, but his record of violence brought that right to rule and capacity for governance into question. Imperial military aggression left its own complex legacies of recrimination, continuing violence and nationalist mythologizing alongside the achievement of post-colonial independence.