Race and the census in the Commonwealth

Abstract

Abstract Race has been a subject of enquiry in the majority of censuses in the Commonwealth. Although the validity of the investigation and the results have been open to question, the endeavour to collect taxonomic information has been universal. Few guidelines were offered by the London government, with the result that each colony tended to adopt its own system of classification, the majority of which were inherited after independence by the post‐colonial census administrations. In the attempt to depict the diversity of colonial societies, the classifications sought to solve a number of basic problems. The first was defining a European, which absorbed undue attention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second was to discern recognisable groups within indigenous societies, and the third to distinguish between immigrant communities. Many of the groupings that were identified in colonial times were retained thereafter. The problems encountered by colonial census commissioners thus remain, as only rarely has the exercise been abandoned. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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