Regeneration of Empire: Agrarian Vision and Philanthropic Colonisation in H. Rider Haggard's Novels

<p>This thesis focuses on H. Rider Haggard’s fictional use of philanthropic colonisation to illustrate his vision of agriculturally regenerating the British Empire. Haggard’s panacea for poverty, unemployment, urban crowding, and tenuous control of imperial holdings relies on returning people back to the land. Retraining people to become farmers is the solution to all these issues; philanthropic colonisation is the mode through which his vision would come to fruition. Between 1896-1919, Haggard’s depictions of Empire shift from semi-stable to precarious—a sign of his public work as an agricultural reformer influencing his fiction. I argue in this thesis that focusing on three novels, The Wizard (1896), The Ghost Kings (1908), and When the World Shook (1919), written during Haggard’s work as an agricultural reformer, provides a scope in which to watch Haggard’s agrarian vision develop, climax, and fade. I analyse Haggard’s use of philanthropic colonisation to reflect the desired virtues of his agrarian vision as well as the charitable endeavours which expand or prolong the Empire’s reach. Chapter one, “‘The Rider Haggard of the New Crusade:’ Philanthropy and Declining Civilisations,” traces the degradation of Haggard’s hopes to regenerate the Empire through philanthropic colonisation. In The Ghost Kings, Haggard uses Rachel’s charity to extend the Empire and to demonstrate the effect one individual’s virtue can make in saving or destroying a civilisation; in When the World Shook, Haggard shows the depth of imperial corruption through the decay of Christian missions. Through Arbuthnot and Oro, Haggard struggles to understand the fate of the Empire; using both characters to grasp the concept of civilisation, Haggard concludes that although the Empire has serious flaws, it is ultimately worth trying to save. Chapter two, “Zealot, Renegade, and Reformer: Haggard’s Vision for the Empire,” uses Gerald Monsman’s idea of Haggard as a “heretic in disguise” to look at how Haggard utilises Christian missionary characters to propagate ideas of imperial regeneration. The move between zealot, renegade, and reformer character types reveals Haggard’s developing sense—from the late 1890s through to 1919—that the Empire needs to be rejuvenated. Chapter three, “The Role of Condescension in Interracial Friendship,” explores how Haggard’s vision of a rebirth for the Empire is endangered by interracial friendships. Friendship strips away the prescribed roles given to both coloniser and native, allowing for something more intimate to develop. Thus, any interaction between a white and black person was socially scripted—language borrowed from philanthropic condescension. It is the act of condescension that enables interaction between a coloniser and native; only when deviating from prescribed roles does friendship become a possibility.</p>

Regeneration of Empire: Agrarian Vision and Philanthropic Colonisation in H. Rider Haggard's Novels

<p>This thesis focuses on H. Rider Haggard’s fictional use of philanthropic colonisation to illustrate his vision of agriculturally regenerating the British Empire. Haggard’s panacea for poverty, unemployment, urban crowding, and tenuous control of imperial holdings relies on returning people back to the land. Retraining people to become farmers is the solution to all these issues; philanthropic colonisation is the mode through which his vision would come to fruition. Between 1896-1919, Haggard’s depictions of Empire shift from semi-stable to precarious—a sign of his public work as an agricultural reformer influencing his fiction. I argue in this thesis that focusing on three novels, The Wizard (1896), The Ghost Kings (1908), and When the World Shook (1919), written during Haggard’s work as an agricultural reformer, provides a scope in which to watch Haggard’s agrarian vision develop, climax, and fade. I analyse Haggard’s use of philanthropic colonisation to reflect the desired virtues of his agrarian vision as well as the charitable endeavours which expand or prolong the Empire’s reach. Chapter one, “‘The Rider Haggard of the New Crusade:’ Philanthropy and Declining Civilisations,” traces the degradation of Haggard’s hopes to regenerate the Empire through philanthropic colonisation. In The Ghost Kings, Haggard uses Rachel’s charity to extend the Empire and to demonstrate the effect one individual’s virtue can make in saving or destroying a civilisation; in When the World Shook, Haggard shows the depth of imperial corruption through the decay of Christian missions. Through Arbuthnot and Oro, Haggard struggles to understand the fate of the Empire; using both characters to grasp the concept of civilisation, Haggard concludes that although the Empire has serious flaws, it is ultimately worth trying to save. Chapter two, “Zealot, Renegade, and Reformer: Haggard’s Vision for the Empire,” uses Gerald Monsman’s idea of Haggard as a “heretic in disguise” to look at how Haggard utilises Christian missionary characters to propagate ideas of imperial regeneration. The move between zealot, renegade, and reformer character types reveals Haggard’s developing sense—from the late 1890s through to 1919—that the Empire needs to be rejuvenated. Chapter three, “The Role of Condescension in Interracial Friendship,” explores how Haggard’s vision of a rebirth for the Empire is endangered by interracial friendships. Friendship strips away the prescribed roles given to both coloniser and native, allowing for something more intimate to develop. Thus, any interaction between a white and black person was socially scripted—language borrowed from philanthropic condescension. It is the act of condescension that enables interaction between a coloniser and native; only when deviating from prescribed roles does friendship become a possibility.</p>

It Starts Early: Toward a Longitudinal Analysis of Interracial Intimacy

Researchers regard interracial intimacy as a mechanism for integration because of the assumption that the partners come from distinct social worlds (e.g., racially homogeneous friendship networks). Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the author investigates the relationship between interracial friendship and interracial intimacy, specifically the question of how young adults’ chances of having an interracial romantic relationship depend on the racial composition of their friends during adolescence and their exposure to interracial relationships among these friends. The author finds that early interracial friendship remains a significant positive influence on the likelihood of subsequent interracial intimacy, even after controlling for opportunities for interracial friendship, personal characteristics, local variations in social distance, and selection effects. This suggests that a substantial fraction of interracial romantic relationships in early adulthood involve partners from social worlds that are already racially heterogeneous. Despite the robustness of this finding, there are also substantial variations in the magnitude of the association between interracial friendship and intimacy, which furthermore coexists with social distances larger than the effects of interracial friendships. In brief, the primary influence of interracial friendship may be to produce the perception of select individuals as exceptions to their respective race-gender groups.

“Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name”

Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, as well as the focus of “‘Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name’: Power, Privilege, and the Bodying Forth of Resistance,” provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in important ways. Exploring Williams’s engagement with previous legacies of resistance, Chapter 4 draws attention to her disruption of a “neoliberal problematic” via her distinct problematization of the mind-body split and associated tropes of mediation such as the “as-told-to” dynamic. Like Wilson, Williams interrogates the indecipherability of black rage within both interracial and intra-racial liberal matrices of privilege and authority; like Keckly, she destabilizes the “Mammy” figure and undercuts liberal models of interracial friendship; and like Cooper, Williams cultivates an insurgent politics of sound. Becoming together with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in the aforementioned ways, Williams’s fiction exhibits a comparable attentiveness to situating blackness beyond conventional registers of containment, intervening into Enlightenment-era discourses of knowledge and self.

Trust in the Bayou City: Do Racial Segregation and Discrimination Matter for Generalized Trust?

The key role that generalized trust plays in social capital formation is well documented, but its determinants are not well understood. Many studies suggest that racially and ethnically diverse areas have lower generalized trust than more homogeneous areas, but evidence regarding the impact of the spatial arrangement of racial and ethnic groups is not conclusive. Further, while scholars theorize that discrimination may play a role in racial trust gaps, no study has empirically supported this linkage. We examine the impact of racial residential segregation and perceived discrimination on generalized trust in two highly diverse Texas counties using data from the 2014 Kinder Houston Area Survey. Results indicate that perceived racial discrimination negatively impacts trust and may mediate the black-white trust gap, whereas racial segregation is positively associated with trust. Additionally, having an interracial friendship, one form of bridging ties, moderates the segregation-trust relationship such that, up to a certain level of segregation, having an interracial friendship increases one’s likelihood of trusting others. Together, these results provide insight into processes that generate or sustain the general trust that makes social capital formation possible and point to the continuing importance of race in shaping experiences and outcomes in modern American society.