John Eyre, the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, and the Racialisation of Western Political Thinking

Abstract

The process of the racialisation of the Western political thinking and its expansion into the Western political thinking is analyzed in the context in the British colonial experience and the phenomenon of Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. Jamaica – whose economy been based traditionally on sugar plantation – suffered by the decline of world prizes, abolition of slavery, and end of trade monopoly in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The British colony witnessed widespread poverty and deterioration of racial relationships. The methods used by Governor Edward John Eyre to suppress the revolt of local black populations in October 1865 compromised the image of Great Britain as “moral empire”, split the British public opinion and demonstrated visibly the crisis of the Western liberalism challenged by the political and social problems in the overseas.