Summary
‘Old mischief’ is a name for ideas that go on working after the interests that produced them have gone. It comes from the closing pages of Eric Williams’s ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ (1944), on the racial ideology that defended slavery: such ideas “continue long after the interests have been destroyed and work their old mischief which is all the more mischievous because the interests to which they corresponded no longer exist”.
Katie Donington traces those ideas of African inferiority into post-war Britain. Omar Mohammed of the Global Narrative Hive finds old mischiefs in development work’s assumptions about where expertise resides: “The mischief is that they often become invisible.”
Rationale
We describe arrangements and dispositions propping each other up. Williams adds a harder case: the arrangement falls and the idea carries on, harder to see now that nothing it served is left.