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What Is Richard Francis Burton's Hierarchy Of Race

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The Imperialist, Richard Francis Burton and His Hierarchy of Race

Richard Francis Burton’s minor works published on the website burtoniana.org have provided scholars, historians, anthropologists, and geographers with valuable primary sources of Burton’s expeditions of India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Specifically in Africa, Burton had the fortune of being the first European to enter many African lands never explored by outsiders. Burton led the expedition to East Africa that in 1858 discovered Lake Tanganyika and, through his deputy Captain John Hanning Speke, the headwaters of the Nile, Lake Victoria Nyanza. After trekking the Cameroons Mountains in 1862, he led an extraordinary expedition to the King of Dahomey in 1863 (Grenfell, Biography). Unfortunately, Burton’s records and published works depicted the people of Africa as uncivilized people who were nothing more than deceptive savages who were untrustworthy of any white man’s confidence. Burton described the people that he met in Africa as a vastly inferior race of people as he was a believer and strong supporter of British Imperialism. The ideological significance behind Burton’s position was his belief in the hierarchy of race in addition to his entrenchment of his contempt of anything that had not been civilized by …show more content…
The argument from Burton placed a natural hierarchy of white Europeans above “people of color and blacks.” Likewise, Burton does not try to portray any kind of equality between that of the East Africans and the Europeans who brought civilization to the savage and undeveloped of East Africa. His argument criticized everything in East Africa that was not placed by European imperialism. Therefore, it was abundantly clear that Burton placed black Africans at the bottom, the Arabs in the middle, and white Europeans at the top of the hierarchy of

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