| Popis: |
Mixed-race origins and mixedness (métissage) in India are detailed from the first arrival of Europeans through early phases of community formation in the nineteenth century. Initial open-mindedness towards interracial sex is explained principally in terms of religious/denominational (i.e. Catholic vs. Protestant) and national rivalries between European powers. To secure Anglican/English predominance in initially tenuous colonial footholds, intermarriages with local or mixed-race women were at first officially sanctioned and financially incentivised. Social closure against the mixed, forcing their separation into a distinct and largely self-contained group (endogamy), followed a series of economic prohibitions on their employment in East India Company service from 1786–1808, triggering an increasing political self-consciousness within the group, articulated in a series of petitions to company state and imperial metropole in the 1820s. The reasons for this dramatic policy reversal are debated, alongside analysis of how a contrary attitude towards mixed-race women permitted them to retain a more elevated position, allowing for a prolongation of widespread "miscegenation" through the early nineteenth century. Thereafter the growth of racial and color prejudice is explored through literary sources and the emergence of so-called "scientific racism". Economic displacements from clerkships were followed by increasing employment by the group in the railways. |
