Sydney Olivier on Socialism and the Colonies

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Abstract
Of all the Fabians Sydney Olivier (1859–1943) was the only one who became interested in the extension of Fabian socialism, in one form or another, to the British colonies. One reason for this perhaps is that he was the only one among the first generation of Fabians who was extremely conscious of his mixed origin. “I have,” he once wrote to his wife in 1884, “a rather fatal facility of seeing several sides to many questions at the same time. That is the result, I expect, of my being such a mixture of French, Irish, and Puritan-Saxon blood. I have two or three brains, and one is always criticizing the other. I shall never be a single-minded bigot.” In an age when European civilization was believed to be “everything” and everything else “nothing” such a temperament was highly conducive to the entertainment of sympathies toward non-European peoples and lands. A biographer of the Webbs came very close to saying this. “Sydney Olivier,” she remarked, “with his rich background of culture, tinged with a streak that can only be called romantic, perhaps derived from his Latin heredity, was … the voice predominantly of the moral sense.” And as is usual in several such controversies concerning the Fabian Society, the word of Bernard Shaw can never be neglected. To Shaw the French ancestry of Olivier enabled the latter to form an objective view of the British Empire and its role in history and it also helped him to get along quite well with non-English Britons.

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