[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Hi Andrew,
You didn't define racism. And I don't see how this belief in 
unilinear cultural evolution is racist, though it is paternalistic 
and oppressive:

>Canny argues that one of the outstanding features of English
>colonization of Ireland was the development of a secular ideology that
>propounded a theory of unilinear cultural evolution, of national
>development, wherein the Irish were coded as barbarians (undeveloped)
>and the English as civilized (in fact, the highest level of development
>humankind had yet obtained). This processual theory, something quite new
>to the English (and paralleling contemporary modernization theory),
>rested upon an earlier static cultural distinction drawn between the
>Gaelic and the English cultures during the 12th-13th century invasions.

Or how is this racist?

>At the same time the colonizers claimed that their mission was a moral
>one: to rescue the Irish from their paganism and their barbaric
>existence-white man's burden. English propagandists proclaimed that
>their religious and civic duty was to train the Gaelic beasts "in
>vertuous labor and in justice, and to teach them our English lawes and
>civilitie and leave robbyng and stealing and killying one of another."

Please define your terms.

And is this from your own writing?

Yours, Rakesh