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Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology,
1870-1900Author(s): Douglas LorimerSource: Victorian Studies, Vol.
31, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 405-430Published by: Indiana
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Douglas Lorimer
THEORETICAL RACISM IN LATE- VICTORIAN ANTHROPOLOGY,
1870-1900*
THE CRITIQUE OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM THAT DEVELOPED FROM THE
1930S
through the 1950s still shapes much of our understanding of
nineteenth- century racist thought, and consequently our view of
Victorian racism is in some ways distorted. The
mid-twentieth-century assault on racist doctrines challenged the
scientific standing of racialist theories, and suggested that this
ideology of racial inequality owed its development and strength to
the activi- ties of Victorian scientists. The emphasis upon the
role of science in creating a set of false and pernicious doctrines
led to a historical quest for the origins of sci- entific racism
and for the "pseudo-scientists" who propagated these theories.
This concern with origins means that much of the study of
Victorian racist theory has concentrated on the 1850s and '60s,
when a fierce debate occurred between defenders of the orthodox
theory of monogenesis and advo- cates of polygenesis. Both schools
of thought followed the established prac- tice of classifying the
varieties of man by racial type, and both assumed that a hierarchy
of races existed with Europeans at the top of the scale. The theory
of common origins or monogenesis was compatible with Christian
teaching, and its leading advocates had links with humanitarian
movements for the ab- olition of slavery and the protection of
aboriginal peoples. The polygenists advanced a more extreme
racialist position by placing greater emphasis on the differences
between racial groups, and by arguing that anatomical com- parisons
proved that races were species with separate origins and distinct,
bio- logically fixed, unequal characteristics. In Great Britain the
principal creator of polygenetic theory was Robert Knox
(1791-1862), whose Races of Man ap- peared in 1850. 1 His ideas
gained a public platform when his follower James Hunt (1833-69)
founded the Anthropological Society of London in 1863 and
The author is indebted to the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and to Wilfrid Laurier University for
financial assistance for the travel and research for this paper.
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action,
1780-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 377-382; Michael Banton,
The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 46-48; Mi- chael D.
Biddis, "The Politics of Anatomy: Dr. Robert Knox and Victorian
Racism," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 69 (1976),
245-250.
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Douglas Lorimer
used its meetings and publications to proclaim the superiority
of Anglo-Saxons over all other, and especially over nonwhite,
peoples. 2
Existing histories of racism tend to exaggerate the impact of
mid- Victorian polygenist typologies. Evidence for the survival of
polygenesis after Darwin rests less on British scientific works
than upon French authors not so subject to the new evolutionary
orthodoxy and American sources more at- tached to polygenesis
because of its utility for defending white supremacy. 3 For
developments within the British scientific community, the Journal
of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
provides a year-by-year record of the thinking of those scientists
who claimed to have a special inter- est in the study of race. The
Journal's contents serve as a means to avoid preselecting authors
by reputation, and provide some indication of which au- thorities
were important in shaping late-Victorian anthropologists' ideas.
Furthermore, information about the Institute's membership and
organization permits some analysis of the background of subscribers
to the Journal, and al- lows some insight into the social as well
as the intellectual context of late- Victorian racist thinking.
In comparison to the scholarly attention paid to the boisterous
de- bates of the 1850s and especially the 1860s, the more subdued
scientific de- liberations after 1870 have received much less
notice. Yet the last thirty years of the nineteenth century saw
significant developments in scientific thinking about race.
Furthermore, these later developments have closer affinities to the
racism of the post-1918 period than do the racial typologies of the
1850s and '60s. A study of Victorian scientists' ideas about race
after 1871 (the year of the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man
and of the formation of the An- thropological Institute) also
provides a clearer understanding of the social and political
context which fostered scientific racist ideas.
I
The Anthropological Institute was formed in 1871 out of the
reunion of the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London
(it became the
2 J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian
Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1970), pp.
118-136; George W. Stocking, Jr., "What's in a Name? The Origins of
the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837-71)," Man, n.s., 6
(1971), 369-390; Ronald Rainger, "Race, Politics and Science: The
Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s," Victorian Stud-
ies 22:1 (Autumn 1978), 51-70; Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class
and the Victorians: English Atti- tudes to the Negro in the
Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press,
1978), pp. 137-161. The continuity in scientific racism from the
1850s onwards is emphasized by Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes
to Race (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 1-28; Nancy
Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960
(Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982).
3 For examples see George W. Stocking, Jr., "The Persistence of
Polygenist Thought in Post-Darwinian Anthropology," in Race,
Culture and Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 42-68;
Stepan, chap. 4.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
Royal Anthropological Institute in 1907). As a consequence of
this amalga- mation the Institute began with an inflated membership
of 585 fellows, but soon a more rigorous maintenance of membership
lists reduced the size to be- tween 440 and 480 fellows for most of
the 1870s and '80s. 4 A further decline in numbers in the 1890s
reduced the society to 363 members by 1900 (JAI 30 [1900], 1-12).
Only a minority of members, from twenty to fifty in the 1890s,
attended meetings in London. 5
The membership lists, which were in effect lists of subscribers
to the Journal, gave the addresses for almost all of the fellows,
and for one third of the names included some additional information
about social rank or occupa- tion (RAI, A20 and A31 [membership
lists]). Of the 638 addresses on the membership lists for 1879 and
1881-85, just under half were for London, 35 percent for the
"provinces," and the remainder for overseas locations (chiefly the
colonies and particularly India, with over 40 subscribers). The 203
mem- bers for whom social position, education, or occupation was
listed included 33 titled gentlemen and 14 members of Parliament.
There were more than 20 members of the Royal Society, and at least
70 of the fellows belonged to one or more of the other learned
societies, with the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal
Geological Society being the most common, followed by the Linnean
and Zoological Societies. Of the members whose professional
affilia- tion was given, the most numerous were the 63 medical
doctors, followed by 43 army officers, 36 scientists or other
academics, and 30 clergymen. Forty percent of the army officers
listed colonial or Indian addresses, and about one-third of these
served as doctors. Most of the handful of naval officers in the
Institute were also medical men. If the military officers are
combined with those who served in the foreign, colonial, and civil
services, some 74 fellows, or over one-third of those whose
occupation is known, were em- ployed by some branch of the
government.
The most apparent change between the early membership lists and
that of 1900 was the decline in the number of army officers and
clergy (to less than 10 in each category). Although the total
number of members had de- clined by 1900, the place of the clergy
and military had been taken up to some extent by an increase, to 44
members, of academics and scientists affili- ated with colleges,
universities, or museums. Most of this group had training in
medicine or biological science. This change in membership reflected
the decline in the participation of interested amateurs and the
growth of special- ized academic and scientific professions by the
end of the century.
4 "Report of the Council for 1871," Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (hereafter
cited asJAI) 1 (1871-72), 379. The number of members was given in
each annual report.
5 Royal Anthropological Institute Archives (hereafter RAI), A14
(1), "Attendance books, Ordinary meetings, 1892- ." I would like to
thank the Institute for permission to cite archive materials in
this paper.
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Douglas Lorimer
The analysis of the membership of the Anthropological Institute
holds few surprises. As one might expect, the Institute was
dominated by the London-based professional middle class, and within
this group a significant minority had some training in medicine or
the biological sciences. As indi- cated by the remarks of several
of the Institute's presidents, these profession- als believed in
social advance by merit and not by patronage, but at the same time
they saw social rank as indicative of inherited potential. Thus
they be- lieved in the value of education, but thought that the
existing social system protected the aristocracy from the process
of social selection and worried that excessive democracy would
swamp the inherited ability of the educated mid- dle class with the
mediocrity of the masses. 6 The combination of these elitist
assumptions with a strong orientation toward medicine and natural
science makes it hardly surprising that these late-Victorian
members of the Institute, a significant number of whom had military
or colonial connections, should look for biological explanations
for the geopolitical reality of the expansion of European dominion
over nonwhite peoples.
Nevertheless, the correlation between the social background and
aca- demic training of members and a propensity toward scientific
racism is not quite so straightforward as it may seem. The feuding
between the Ethnolo- gical and Anthropological Societies in the
1860s, and the attempt by Hunt and others to apply the racist ideas
of Knox's anthropology to political topics of the day, have been
identified as the birth-pangs of scientific anthropology in Great
Britain. The calmer deliberations of the 1870s and '80s reflected,
then, the successful institutionalization of anthropology within
the British scientific community (Stocking, "What's in a Name?" pp.
369-390; Rainger, pp. 51-70). It would be premature, however, to
think that this step marked the arrival of anthropology as a
professional, independent discipline. As late as 1900 only three
fellows held teaching positions as ethnologists or anthro-
pologists. In contrast, no less than seven Institute members held
chairs in anatomy. 7 For even the most active members of the
Institute anthropology was not their profession but their
avocation.
In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, there were
two groups of amateurs in the Institute. On the one hand, there
were those inter- ested in prehistoric archaeology and in exotic
cultures. They tended to have little technical training in human
biology, but often had some personal expe-
6 See presidential addresses by Francis Galton, JAI 15
(1885-86), 497-499, and 18 (1888-89), 406- 407; and by A.
Pitt-Rivers, JAI 11 (1881-82), 507. See also John Beddoe, Memories
of Eighty Years (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1910), p. 312.
7 JAI 30 (1900), 1-12. See also Meyer Fortes, "Social
Anthropology at Cambridge since 1900," in R. Damell, ed., Readings
in the History of Anthropology (New York: Harper and Row, 1974),
pp. 429- 433, and especially George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian
Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 257-269. I completed
my research prior to the publication of Stocking's important study,
yet we seem to have reached similar conclusions about the
professional status of late-Victorian anthropology.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
rience with alien societies as travellers or officials posted
overseas. For the large contingent of clergymen, army officers, and
colonial officials who fell within this category, the
Anthropological Institute fulfilled a purpose like that of the
Royal Geographical Society. It enabled travellers and officials to
report their observations or to read about individuals with
experiences similar to their own. In this way the Institute and the
Royal Geographical Society became important channels for the
dissemination of information about outposts of the Empire. 8 These
reports of colonial encounters, usually casual descrip- tions
mixing facts and prejudice, seldom attempted to relate observations
to a larger theoretical framework of human physical or cultural
evolution.
The anthropologists prided themselves on being able to attract
large audiences, including in particular clergymen and some
adventuresome women, to their lectures at the British Association,
and according to John Beddoe (1826-1911), a president of the
Institute, the audience responded warmly to a defence of British
imperialism (Memories, p. 315). Although these enthusiasts for
accounts of exotic cultures were not trained profession- als, they
nonetheless thought their study had a profound moral and political
purpose. In his report on the British Association meetings in 1872,
A. Lane Fox (1827-1900), an officer in the Grenadier Guards, a
landed gentleman, and a collector of ethnographic artifacts,
claimed that there was an urgent need for anthropological studies
because "the manners and customs of uncivi- lized races are
changing with a rapidity unprecedented in the world's history, and
... the continued existence of some of these races is becoming a
question of only a few years." Furthermore, "a nation which from
its vast colonial posses- sions is placed more continuously in
contact with savage races than any other" had, in Lane Fox's view,
a special responsibility to promote anthropology.9
The second group of amateurs in the Institute were those who
brought some technical expertise in human biology to their subject.
These medical doctors and biologists, whose interest in
anthropology was an offshoot of their primary professional
responsibilities, expressed dissatisfaction with the casual
observations of travellers, distrusted conclusions drawn from
cultural or linguistic evidence, and looked to comparative anatomy
for a more scientific assessment of the differences between racial
groups. 10 These practitioners of comparative anatomy had the
advantage of being able to examine skeletal remains at home in
England without venturing overseas to see the living
8 Dorothy O. Helly, ' "Informed' Opinion on Tropical Africa in
Great Britain, 1860-1900," African Affairs 68 (1969), 195-200.
9 A. Lane Fox, "Report on Anthropology at the British
Association," JAI 2 (1872-73), 360; later reports inJAI 5
(1875-76), 348, 485-486; 6 (1876-77), 167, 178; 11 (1881-82),
507-508.
10 George Busk, remarks on G. W. Leitner, "Siah Posh Kafirs,"
JAI 3 (1873-74), 368-369; W. L. Dis- tant, "On the Term 'Religion'
used in Anthropology," JAI 6 (1876-77), 60-63; H. H. Risely, "The
Study of Ethnology in India," JAI 20 (1890-91), 235-249.
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Douglas Lorimer
specimens, but nevertheless their science had its drawbacks.
Beyond the diffi- culties that there was no clearcut way to
distinguish acquired from inherited characteristics and no adequate
theory of biological inheritance, the physical anthropologists had
established no consensus about the forms of measure- ment or the
significance of their results.
This division between the ethnographers and the physical
anthropol- ogists should not be exaggerated, for there was little
evidence of conflict be- tween the two approaches to the study of
human evolution. When presidents of the Institute attempted to
define the scope of anthropology in their annual addresses, their
statements encompassed both approaches, but little effort was made
to integrate the two sides of the new science of man. 11 The
physical anthropologists claimed that their findings about
inherited characteristics re- vealed differential intellectual and
moral attributes between racial groups, but they gave little
consideration to what the ethnographers had to say about the
customs, values, and practices of the living representatives
descended from the skulls measured in the laboratory. Similarly,
while the ethnograph- ers seemed to accept the physical
anthropologists' claim that races were une- qual in inheritance,
their diligent pursuit of unilinear evolution of weapons, boats,
games, and intoxicants, and their readiness to use living cultures
as evi- dence of Stone Age life in Europe, presumed the psychic
unity of mankind. 12 Although they were sometimes provided with a
questionnaire requesting anthropometric data, authors of
ethnographic papers only occasionally in- cluded a detailed study
of physical characteristics. The usual pattern for Insti- tute
proceedings was for an ethnographic paper by a visitor from
overseas to be followed by a shorter detailed technical description
of specimen crania of the racial group in question (the Royal
College of Surgeons had at hand over 3,000 such specimens from
around the world). 13 Occasionally Institute presidents, for
example, John Evans (1823-1908) and E. B. Tylor (1832-1917),
expressed
l See, for example, A. Lane Fox, JAI 5 (1875-76), 470; E. B.
Tylor, JAI 9 (1879-80), 443-458; W. H. Flower, JAI 13 (1883-84),
488-500.
12 A. Lane Fox, "On the Principles of Classification adopted in
the Arrangement of his Anthropologi- cal Collection," JAI 4
(1874-75), 293-308, and "On Early Modes of Navigaton," JAI 4
(1874-75), 399-437; A. Pitt-Rivers (Lane Fox), "On the Egyptian
Boomerang and its Affinities," JAI 12 (1882-83), 454-463; E. B.
Tylor, "On the Game of Patolli in Ancient Mexico and its Probably
Asi- atic Origin," JAI 8 (1878-79), 116-131; A. W. Buckland,
"Ethnological Hints afforded by the Stimulants in use among Savages
and among the Ancients," JAI 8 (1878-79), 239-254. See also the
extensive literature on kinship systems, for example, A. W. Howitt,
"The Dieri and other Kin- dred Tribes of Central Australia," JAI 20
(1890-91), 42, 98-104.
13 Sometimes living specimens of exotic peoples were examined at
the meeting, as for example some Lapps on exhibit in London. See H.
H. Prince Roland Bonaparte, "Note on the Lapps of Finmark (in
Norway)"; A. H. Keane, "The Lapps: Their Origin, Ethnical
Affinities, Physical and Mental Characteristics, Usages, Present
Status, and Future Prospects"; and J. G. Garson, "On the Physical
Characteristics of the Lapps," JAI 15 (1885-86), 210-213; 213-235;
and 235-238. On the Royal College of Surgeons collection, see W. H.
Flower, "On the Aims and Prospects of Anthropology," JAI 13
(1883-84), 497-498.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
concern that papers on physical anthropology were
under-represented, and in a more petulant tone Beddoe, an
enthusiastic craniologist, complained in 1890: "there is no fear .
. . that ethnography will ever lack cultivators" (Beddoe in JAI 19
[1889-90], 490; Evans inJAI 7 [1877-78], 529-530 and JAI 8
[1878-79], 419; Tylor in JAI 9 [1879-80], 453).
There was a measure of truth in this complaint. An examination
of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1871-1900
reveals that craniol- ogy and anthropometry always represented a
minority of papers given. In the 1870s presentations on prehistoric
archaeology and on early historic migra- tions in Europe
outnumbered those on ethnography and craniology com- bined, whereas
during the 1880s ethnography had become the dominant field in the
Journal. Presidents' reports in the early 1870s classified papers
by topic, and I have used this scheme for contributions to the
Journal from 1871-1900. At no time during this period did the total
number of papers on comparative anatomy, craniology, anthropometry,
and the occasional broad racist treatise outnumber ethnographic
papers, and only in 1887 did presentations on phys- ical
anthropology surpass the number of historical or archaeological
papers. This dominance of cultural studies occurred even when, from
1884-91, the presidents were anatomists or anthropometricians. From
a comparative per- spective it would appear that the genteel
professionals in the Anthropological Institute put less emphasis on
comparative anatomy, craniology, and anthro- pometry than did their
colleagues in France, Germany, and the United States, and at the
same time these late Victorians laid the foundation for a
distinguished tradition in cultural and social anthropology. 14
II
Bearing in mind that ethnographic topics dominated the
Institute's proceedings and that the observations of these
travelers and officials con- veyed racist attitudes and assumptions
in a rather unsystematic fashion, it may still be useful to look at
the anthropologists' efforts to construct a theo- retical
explanation for man's racial varieties. This reconstruction will
bring into question the notion that scientific racism was a
continuous, cumulative development from the polygenist typology of
the 1860s, and will suggest that greater attention needs to be paid
to the post-1885 period when biological- determinist explanations
were both reinvigorated and more widely popularized.
The rancorous controversy between the Ethnological and Anthropo-
logical Societies in the 1860s was a scandal both to the
respectable public and
14 J. Beddoe, "President's Address," JAI 20 (1890-91), 349-355
and Memories, pp. 321-322; Stocking, "The Persistence of Polygenist
Thought," pp. 42-68; John S. Haller, Outcast from Evolution: Scien-
tific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1971).
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Douglas Lorimer
to the scientific community. Hunt's godless polygenesis outraged
the advo- cates of the antislavery and missionary movements and
equally infuriated the respectable audiences at the British
Association, who hissed and booed his views on blacks. Hunt and his
leadership of the Anthropological Society also alarmed the leaders
of the scientific community, who saw him as a quack and a
charlatan. Members of the influential X-Club persuaded T. H. Huxley
to step in, and he chaired the discussions which led to the
amalgamation of the two feuding societies (Lorimer, pp. 138-161;
Stocking, Victorian Anthropol- ogy, pp. 245-257).
The fortuitous death of Hunt in 1869 and the creation of the new
An- thropological Institute did not suddenly bring to an end the
freewheeling racist theorizing of the 1860s. Nonetheless, during
the 1870s and '80s the scandalous disputes of the earlier decade
and the contentious works of Knox and Hunt were rarely mentioned in
the proceedings of the new Institute. 15 In the early numbers of
the Journal an occasional paper appeared which mixed racist the-
ory and contemporary political commentary after the fashion of
Hunt's An- thropological Review, but the Institute members had not
much time for these presentations, and devoted most of their
attention to the question of prehis- toric man. 16 In fact their
enthusiasm for archaeology led some fellows with more interest in
race and psychology to follow Richard Burton into the new London
Anthropological Society in 1873. This division was shortlived, and
within two years the secessionists rejoined the Institute to
participate in its saner, if duller, discussions (Lorimer, pp.
158-159).
The agenda for the anthropologists' discussion of race in the
1870s was set by a paper read by T. H. Huxley before the
Ethnological Society in 1870. Huxley provided a classification
scheme of racial types based on skin colour, hair colour and
texture, eye colour, skull shape, and body stature. Us- ing this
range of criteria, and not a single measure such as skull shape,
Huxley identified five main races: Australoid; Negroid; Xanthochroi
(fair whites of Europe); Melanochroi (dark whites of Europe, North
Africa, Asia Minor, and Hindustan, including the Irish, Celts,
Bretons, Spaniards, Arabs, and Brahmins); and Mongoloid (including
the peoples of Asia, Polynesia, and the Americas). Although Huxley
did not rank his categories by intelligence or ability, and
although he did not attempt an evolutionary account of de- scent
from lower to higher forms, his descriptions, like those of most
systems
15 For the thirty years of the Journal (1871-1900), I came
across only one reference to Knox and one to Hunt, both in the
1880s: J. Park Harrison, "On the Relative Length of the first Three
Toes of the Human Foot," JAI 13 (1883-84), 265 (to Hunt), and G.
Bertin, "The Races of the Babylonian Empire," JAI 18 (1888-89), 115
(to Knox).
16 For example, see the responses to J. W. Jackson, "On the
Racial Aspects of the Franco-Prussian War," JAI 1 (1871-72), 30-43;
the discussants preferred conventional military and political
reasons to Jackson's racial ones to explain France's defeat.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
of classification, contained pejorative remarks. For example, he
observed that the Negro forehead revealed a "good deal of the
feminine, or child-like character," and similarly he suggested that
individual dark whites, or Melan- ochroi, may "be equal to the best
of the Xanthochroi" in intelligence or beauty. 17
In many ways Huxley's paper revived the procedure of James
Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), the leading advocate of monogenesis in
the early nineteenth century, and the man Tylor identified as the
founder of ethnology in Great Britain. 18 By basing his
classification scheme on a variety of charac- teristics and by
plotting their geographical distribution, Huxley, like Prichard,
emphasized the wide variation in physical features within his five
classes and pointed to the many intermediate gradations in human
phenotype. For Huxley the five major classes of race were not
"pure" types and, unlike the mid-century polygenist typologies, his
scheme pointed to the intermingling and intermixture of racial
groups. His conclusion suggested that the next question to be
resolved was how the similarity of physical type in the Americas
and the wide diversity of form in the Pacific Islands could be
explained. 19
Huxley may have identified the racial question which would most
puzzle late-Victorian anthropologists, but the Institute did not
immediately take up the issue. Attention began to focus on this
problem only in the mid- 1870s, when rivalry in the area between
France, Germany, the United States, and Great Britain began to
intensify. The threat of foreign influence and controversy over
migrant labour practices prompted colonial legislators in New
Zealand and Australia as well as English planters and missionaries
to press for direct intervention on the part of a reluctant British
government. Meanwhile the anthropologists' interest was excited by
reports of first en- counters between Europeans and remote island
societies in the Pacific. For the decade from the mid-1870s to the
mid-1880s, numerous papers on the various groups and subgroups in
the area of the Indian and Pacific Oceans - on a north-south axis
from the Andaman Islands to New Zealand, and on an east-west axis
from the Hawaiian Islands to Madagascar - appeared in the
17 T. H. Huxley, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief
Modifications of Man," Journal of the Ethnological Society, n.s., 2
(1869-70), 405, 408.
18 George W. Stocking, Jr., "From Chronology to Ethnology: James
Cowles Prichard and British An- thropology, 1800-1850,"
introduction to James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical
History of Man (1813; rpt. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1973); E. B. Tylor, "President's Address," JAI 9 (1879-80),
443-447.
19 Huxley, p. 409. Huxley's old antagonist Richard Owen
(1804-92) sharply criticized Huxley's paper, especially his claim
that there was a resemblance between ancient Egyptians and
Australian Abo- rigines; see R. Owen, "Contributions to the
Ethnology of Egypt," JAI 4 (1874-75), 231; see also JAI 8
(1878-79), 323. Huxley's friends came to his defence - A. Lane Fox
("Early Modes of Navi- gation," pp. 414-416) and George Busk
("President's Address," JAI 4 [1874-75], 478-491).
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Journal, making this topic the most extensive debate on race
between 1870 and 1900. 20
The issue at stake was the distribution, origin, and affinities
of those groups identified as black (Australian Aborigines,
Papuans, Melanesians, and Negritos) and those identified as brown
(chiefly Polynesians, but also Indo- nesians and Malayans). 21 The
discussion divided over issues reminiscent of the old
monogenist-polygenist controversy, though contributors never drew
the connection with this supposedly dead issue. One side argued
that the brown and black peoples shared a common, probably black
ancestor, and sub- sequent change in physical characteristics had
occurred most commonly by migration and intermixture with other
groups, and rarely by geographical iso- lation and adaptation. The
other side argued for a classification of Papuans and Polynesians
(or more broadly blacks and browns) as two distinct groups sharing
no physical or linguistic affinities except in cases where obvious
inter- mixture had occurred. Among those who argued for a common
origin and closer linguistic connections were Alfred Russel Wallace
(1823-1913), C. Staniland Wake, and two missionary linguists with
long residence in the area, R. H. Codrington and George Brown. The
theory of two distinct groups was advanced by several authors, most
notably by Augustus Keane (1833-1912). 22
Keane, a professor of Hindustani at University College, London,
was a frequent contributor to the Journal, served on the Institute
Council in the 1880s, was a vice-president of the Institute from
1886 to 1890, and became in the 1890s an active publicist of
geographical and anthropological texts which advanced an extreme
racist position. 23 His theory of the distinct origins of the
peoples of the Pacific claimed that the Polynesians were descended
from an earlier "Caucasian" race in Malaysia ("Inter-Oceanic
Races," pp. 258- 259, 275, 285-289). At Institute meetings Keane
conducted a rather rancor-
20 J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A. Benians, eds.,
Cambridge History of the British Empire, 8 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1933), VII, pt. 1, Australia, 345-362;
R. Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century, 1815-1914: A Study of Empire
and Expansion (London: Batsford, 1976), pp. 337-341; A. Lane Fox,
"President's Address," JAI 6 (1876-77), 496; H. N. Moseley, "On the
Inhabitants of the Admiralty Islands," JAI 6 (1876-77), 379-429
(Moseley was the naturalist on board HMS Challenger).
21 Part of the discussion involved defining various groups, and
although the brown-black dichotomy used here was rejected as too
simple, the discussion continued to contrast Papuans and
Polynesians as two broad categories; see S. J. Whitmee, "The
Ethnology of Polynesia," and "A Revised Nomen- clature for the
Inter-Oceanic Races of Man," JAI 8 (1878-79), 261-275, 360-369.
22 For the common origin view, see C. S. Wake, "Notes on the
Polynesian Race," JAI 10 (1880-81), 109-123 and "The Papuans and
Polynesians," JAI 12 (1882-83), 197-222; R. H. Codrington, "On the
Languages of Melanesia," JAI 14 (1884-85), 341-43, and a review of
the debate, George Brown, "Papuans and Polynesians," JAI 16
(1886-87), 311-327. For the dual-origin view, see A. H. Keane, "On
the Relations of the Indo-Chinese and Inter-Oceanic Races and
Languages," JAI 9 (1879-80), 254-289; W. L. Ranken, "South Sea
Islanders," JAI 6 (1876-77), 223-244; and Francis A. Allen, "The
Original Range of the Papuan and Negrito Races," JAI 8 (1878-79),
38-50.
23 Edward Brabrook, "A. H. Keane," Man 12 (1912), 53; Who Was
Who, 1897-1915 (London: Adam and Charles Black), p. 389.
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ous dispute with Wake, another Council member and exponent of
the theory of common origins (see Keane's responses to Wake's
papers in JAI 10 [1880- 81], 32-33; 12 [1882-83], 220-222). Keane's
position stemmed in part from his extremely antagonistic attitude
toward blacks, which led him to claim that any attempt to posit a
common origin of race or language meant that "the Melanesian, that
is, the lower and unaggressive race, had imposed its speech on the
Malayo-Polynesian, that is, the higher and more enterprizing
races." 24 Such a result, in Keane's view, flew in the face of both
biology and history.
Even though the discussion involved the complete repertoire of
late- Victorian anthropological method, including anthropometry,
philology, and cultural comparisons, and even though contributors
often based their obser- vations upon long residence in the area,
the deliberations proved inconclu- sive. The physical
anthropologists laid claim to the most scientific methods, yet they
felt hampered in their contributions. Travellers' accounts, even
those based upon the Institute's Notes and Queries on Anthropology
(1874; rev. ed. 1892) or other such guides for collecting data
rarely provided a sufficient range of reliable measurements, and
anatomical specimens in England were too few in number to make a
base for generalization. More importantly, the anatomists
recognized the diversity of peoples in the area, and since the
avail- able data failed to fit into a clear pattern of racial
types, they drew the conclu- sion that the region was one of great
racial intermixture. 25
Philology proved no more conclusive than comparative anatomy.
The philologists did not accept language as an indication of race
as readily as they had between 1840 and 1870. For example, several
discussants on language kept before themselves the dictum of A. H.
Sayce (1845-1933), Professor of Comparative Philology at Queen's
College, Oxford, that language was a test not of race but of
"social contact." 26 Nonetheless, the philologists, despite
24 Keane's remarks in discussion of Codrington, JAI 14
(1884-85), 42; see also his remarks on G. W. Parker, "On the People
and Languages of Madagascar," JAI 12 (1882-83), 492-493.
25 See for example H. 0. Forbes, "On the Ethnology of
Timor-Laut," and J. G. Garson, "On the Cra- nial Characters of the
Natives of Timor-Laut," JAI 13 (1883-84), 8-31, 386-402. For
examples of physical data in travelers' accounts, see H. N.
Moseley, "On the Inhabitants of the Admiralty Is- lands," JAI 6
(1876-77), 382-387; E. H. Man, "On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of
the Andaman Islands," JAI 12 (1882-83), pt. 1, 69-75, and "The
Nicobar Islanders,"JAI 18 (1888-89), 354-394; W. H. Flower, "On the
Osteology and Affinities of the Natives of the Andaman Islands,"
JAI 9 (1879-80), 108-135, and "On the Cranial Characteristics of
the Natives of the Fiji Islands," JAI 10 (1880-81), 153-154, 171.
Notes and Queries on Anthropology, originally edited by Lane Fox
for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874,
was re-edited for the Anthropological Institute by J. G. Garson and
C. H. Read in 1892.
26 A. H. Sayce, "Language and Race," JAI 5 (1875-76), 212-213.
The distinction was not accepted by all of his audience (see pp.
217-220), but it was repeated by Lane Fox (remarks on Peter Comrie,
"Anthropological Notes of New Guinea," JAI 6 [1876-77], 115) and by
Tylor ("Address to the De- partment of Anthropology of the British
Association," JAI 9 [1879-80], 240). Sayce himself did not adhere
to the distinction and had a hand in reviving Aryan racism; see
"Address to the Anthropo- logical Section of the British
Association at Manchester," JAI 17 (1887-88), 166-177.
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the skepticism of prominent cultural evolutionists such as
Tylor, still looked for signs of the root language in order to
trace which racial groups were origi- nal, and which were migrant
or had borrowed the language of other cultures (see Tylor's remarks
inJAI 9 [1879-80], 236-239). This use of language as ev- idence of
change, migration, or intermixture also invited speculation about
which groups involved in these processes were aggressive or
passive, domi- nant or subordinate. Occasionally there was a
suggestion (usually put forward by those arguing for two distinct
peoples) that in the midst of evidence of physi- cal diversity and
intermixture, language demonstrated a stronger fixity of type
(Keane, "Inter-Oceanic Races," p. 227; remarks on Codrington, pp.
40-43; re- marks on Parker, pp. 492-493).
The debate between the linguists involved contradictory claims
by one expert against another, yet philology together with
comparative anatomy remained more trusted methods than the newer
approaches to the study of culture. Lane Fox and Tylor, both
skilled in the art of tracing cultural evolu- tion by the
comparative method, recommended that more attention be paid to
cultural affinities in the region. 27 Ethnographic studies of
individual socie- ties gave details about tools, artifacts,
customs, and beliefs, but there was some resistance to using this
evidence to trace possible links between Polyne- sian and
Melanesian people because of the inability of observers to distin-
guish cultural borrowings from independent inventions. 28
III
The Anthropological Institute's lengthy discussions of the
diversity of racial groups in the region of the Indian and south
Pacific Oceans came to no clear resolution, but simply ceased to be
of much interest as other areas, espe- cially Africa, came into
prominence after the mid-1880s. Nonetheless, the discussion of the
Oceanic races had raised significant problems for Victorian
scientists interested in the racial question. Although the
participants were concerned with problems of classification by
anatomical comparison, the dis- cussion was not simply a
continuation of mid-nineteenth-century racial ty- pologies. Races
were not seen as distinct species, but rather as outcomes of
27 A. Lane Fox, "Observations on Mr. Man's Collection of
Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects," JAI 7 (1877-78), 444-445,
450-451; E. B. Tylor, "Notes on Asiatic Relations of Polynesian
Cul- ture,"JAI 11 (1882-83), 401-405; Henry Yule, "Notes on
Analogies of Manners between the Indo- Chinese Races and the Races
of the Indian Archipelago," JAI 9 (1879-80), 290-304.
28 See, for example, Ranken, p. 230. Keane rejected Wake's use
of such evidence in his remarks on Wake's "Notes on the Origin of
Malagasy," JAI 11 (1881-82), 32. See also W. H. Flower, "Aims and
Prospects of Anthropology," pp. 491-492.
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evolution, and most importantly, as products of intermixture
between groups. Even though the evolutionary synthesis was accepted
as a given, the discus- sion was not in any precise sense
Darwinian. 29
Few references were made to Darwin's work, and although authors,
out of intrinsic interest in the subject, paid attention to the
sexual preferences of various cultures, no one attempted a
Darwinian study of sexual selection as the explanation of racial
varieties. Nor did the concept of natural selection enter
prominently into the discussion. Since the physical environment in
the region was accepted as common to all groups, there was little
sense in attempting to explain particular traits - for example,
long-headedness as against broad- headedness - as adaptations
enhancing a particular group's survival capac- ity. Although there
were some suggestions that geographically isolated groups, for
example the Andaman Islanders or Tasmanians, might be "living
fossils" representing an earlier form of man, there was no
systematic attempt to trace an evolutionary progression of physical
types in the region, with more "advanced" forms evolving out of
more "primitive" ones.
The predominant mode of explanation was historical-diffusionist.
The cultural, linguistic, and physical mix of peoples of the
Pacific was as- sumed to be the product of a long history of waves
of immigration which led to intermixture between new migrants and
previously settled peoples. This quest for a historical form of
explanation with its mix of anatomical, linguis- tic, and cultural
evidence retained a form of typological thinking about race, but it
had more in common with the monogenist tradition of Prichard and
the Ethnological Society than with the mid-century polygenesis of
Knox and Hunt.
Late-Victorian anthropologists as a rule described
lighter-complexioned Polynesians in more favourable terms than
darker Papuans and Melanesians. This bias was not simply a product
of the contrast in skin colour or culture be- tween Melanesians and
Victorian middle-class professionals, but was the re- sult of an
established association growing out of Europe's long-term
historical links with Africa and the enslavement of its peoples. By
the 1880s the Journal of the Anthropological Institute strengthened
these negative associations be- tween blacks, savagery, and
inferiority by publishing sensationalized accounts
29 The question of what is "Darwinian" is problematic. Some
authors prefer to use the term extremely broadly; see Gertrude
Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1968), pp. 314-332, and Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English
Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory
(Brighton: Harvester, 1980). Others prefer, as I do especially in
this context, lim- iting the term's use to specific ideas advanced
by Darwin, chiefly that of natural selection; see R. J. Halliday,
"Social Darwinism: A Definition," Victorian Studies 14: 4 (June
1971), 389-405. On Dar- win's theory of sexual selection as applied
to the origin of human races see Charles Darwin, The Descent of
Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John
Murray, 1871), I, 248-251; Stepan, pp. 59-65; Lorimer, pp.
142-145.
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of African peoples and cultures by travelers, missionaries, and
officials pro- moting European penetration of the "Dark Continent."
30
Between 1879 and 1885, in the midst of the discussion of the
Oceanic races and of the new interest in Africa, two leading
members of the Institute attempted to sum up the current position
of science on race. The first was Tylor, the foremost student of
cultural evolution, and the second was W. H. Flower (1831-99),
President of the Zoological Society, Director of the Natu- ral
History Museum, and a respected authority on comparative
anatomy.
Tylor's statements on race tended to attach less significance to
physical differences than to learned behaviour or culture. His
statements were often in- consistent, however. For example, in
Primitive Culture (1871) he argued that it was "both possible and
desirable to eliminate considerations of hereditary vari- eties of
races of men, and to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature, though
placed in different grades of civilization." 31 Similarly, in a
paper be- fore the Institute in 1890, arguing for a statistical
approach to the study of culture, he claimed that "the institutions
of man are as distinctly stratified as the earth on which he lives.
They succeed each other in series substantially uni- form over the
globe, independent of what seem the comparatively superficial
differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human
nature acting through successively changed conditions in savage,
barbaric, and civilized life."32
On the other hand, Tylor's textbook Anthropology (1881) gave
greater scope to racial determinism by classing differences in
intelligence and tem- perament as racial traits, and by suggesting
that subsequent generations of ra- cial crosses reverted to primary
types. 33 In his textbook Tylor's treatment of physical
anthropology depended heavily on the work of Huxley and Flower.
Ironically Flower, in an otherwise favourable appraisal of Tylor's
book in a speech before the British Association, criticized the
cultural evolutionist for not giving due weight to the study of
race (JAI 11 [1881-82], 185).
In his President's Address before the Anthropological Institute
in 1879, Tylor gave a historical account of developments since
Prichard's stud-
30 See in particular H. H. Johnston, "On the Races of the Congo
and the Portuguese Colonies in Western Africa," JAI 13 (1883-84),
461-479, and "The People of Eastern Equatorial Africa," JAI 15
(1885-86), 3-15; see also C. E. Conder, "The Present Conditions of
the Native Tribes in Bechuanaland," JAI 16 (1886-87), 76-96; R. C.
Philips, "The Lower Congo: A Sociological Study," JAI 17 (1887-88),
214-229; James Macdonald, "Manners, Customs, Superstitions and Re-
ligions of South African Tribes," JAI 19 (1889-90), 264-296, and 20
(1890-91), 113-140. See also Patrick Brantlinger, "Victorians and
Africans: The Geneology of the Myth of the Dark Continent,"
Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 166-203.
31 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: John Murray,
1871), I, 6-7. 32 E. B. Tylor, "On a Method of Investigating the
Development of Institutions applied to Laws of
Marriage and Descent," JAI 18 (1888-89), 269. 33 E. B. Tylor,
Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization
(London: Macmillan,
1881), pp. 56, 74-75, 80-81.
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ies in ethnology, and noted that "there lies between Prichard's
time and ours the period of popularity and decline of the
Polygenist doctrine." In spite of its demise, he observed that
polygenesis had helped gain acceptance for the great extension of
the length of human history required by evolution, and he saw it as
the task of anthropologists to record the development of human
vari- eties by "the effects of the intermarriage of races, and
their change under al- tered condition of life" (JAI 9 [1879-80],
444; see also Anthropology, pp. 5-7). In an address before the
British Association, also delivered in 1879, Tylor again stressed
the vast extension of biological time, putting great emphasis on
the fact that man's main racial groups had come into being in the
prehistoric period, and on the difficulty of tracing changes in
racial type because of the crossing of racial groups. Consequently,
he concluded, "the close resem- blance of all men in body and mind,
and the freedom with which races inter- cross" made it probable
that mankind descended from "one original stock" (JAI 9 [1879-801,
235-236). Although he had warned elsewhere that it was futile to
attempt to locate the place of man's origins, he speculated that
hu- man beings originated in the tropics, and probably in the
region "from Africa across to the Eastern Archipelago" (p. 239; see
Anthropology, pp. 112-113). Tylor then turned to the question of
the origins of civilization, observing that it began among nonwhite
people, and remarking that the ancient Egyptians were probably "a
mixed race, mainly of African origin" (pp. 240, 241). Tylor's
survey of anthropological science's position on the racial question
in 1879 was clearly far removed from that of earlier racial
typologist works such as Hunt's The Negro's Place in Nature (1863),
but Tylor, as a cultural evolu- tionist, may have given less weight
to racial determinism than those of his colleagues who were more
attuned to the biological sciences.
In his capacity as President of the Zoological Society and of
the An- thropological Institute from 1883 to 1885, Flower gave an
anatomist's assess- ment of the place of race in anthropological
studies. In an address before the British Association in 1881, he
delivered a cautious treatment of the subject which was similar to
Tylor's position. From the evidence of intermixture, Flower
observed that scientists no longer debated that old question of the
common or independent origin of racial groups; but within an
evolutionary framework and allowing for the great antiquity of man,
they thought that from a probable common ancestor "racial
differences began slowly to be de- veloped through the potency of
various kinds of selection acting upon the slight variations which
appeared in individuals in obedience to the tendency implanted in
all living things" (JAI 11 [1881-82], 188). He stressed the role of
geographical isolation in the development of particular racial
traits, in- cluding "intellectual and moral qualities" (p. 189).
The anatomist also sug- gested that in the long course of human
evolution some racial groups may
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have died out or been absorbed by more successful rivals, and
that some new races were formed from the intermixture of earlier
groups. While admitting that the fossil record needed to
reconstruct this evolutionary process had yet to be uncovered,
Flower depicted the biological history of man as "a constant de-
struction and reconstruction; a constant tendency to separation and
differentia- tion, and a tendency to combine again into a common
uniformity" (p. 189).
Given this fluid picture of human evolution, Flower then took
the un- usual step of admitting that the term "race" itself had no
adequate definition: "any theory implying that the different
individuals composing the human species can be parcelled out into
certain definite groups, each with its well- marked and permanent
limits separating it from all others, has no scientific foundation"
(pp. 189-190; see also JAI 9 [1879-80], 128). Flower also
questioned the value of craniology, which he described as an
attempt "to make use of what appear trivial characters, and
compensate for their triviality by their number" (p. 190). While he
questioned if any productive results would come from these
laborious efforts, he held out the hope that improve- ments in
measurement and greater agreement among scientists about their
methods would lead to more definite conclusions (pp. 190-192).
In subsequent statements about the place of race in
anthropology, Flower gave a less restrained view. In his
President's Address before the Insti- tute in 1884, he insisted on
the primacy of comparative anatomy above both philology and
cultural comparisons ("Aims and Prospects of Anthropology," pp.
491-492). He asserted that physical distinctions "are probably
always as- sociated" with differences in "temper and intellect,"
and claimed that as a con- sequence anthropology had important
lessons for politicians seeking to govern the diverse peoples not
only within the Empire but even within the British Isles (pp.
492-493). He argued that policies suitable "to mitigate the
difficul- ties and disadvantages under which the English artisan
classes may suffer in their struggle through life, would be
absolutely inapplicable, for instance, to the case of the Egyptian
fellaheen. It is not only that their education, train- ing and
circumstances are dissimilar, but that their very mental
constitution is totally distinct." In cases where contact occurred
between races even more dissimilar, as between Englishmen and
Africans, American Indians, Austra- lian Aborigines, or Pacific
Islanders, the result, the anatomist claimed, "gen- erally ends in
the extermination of one of them" (p. 493).
In his President's Address the following year, Flower outlined
his scheme of racial classification. Once again he admitted that
any classification scheme would contain inadequacies because of the
existence of many inter- mediate gradations and because of the
frequency of intermixture (JAI 14 [1884-85], 379-380). Although he
used a variety of physical traits and meas- urements to classify
groups, his threefold primary division of blacks, yellows, and
whites clearly rested upon skin colour (pp. 381-382). On the vexed
ques-
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tion of the peoples of the Pacific, he placed Melanesians in the
black class, and Polynesians in the yellow or Mongolian class,
while admitting that both groups showed signs of intermixture. He
went so far as to suggest that some Polynesians, for example the
Maoris, came close to a "Caucasian" appear- ance, but he rejected
Keane's theory of a primitive Caucasian origin for want of
sufficient evidence (pp. 384-385, 388-389). He followed Huxley in
divid- ing whites into the "blonds" and the "darks," but in
contrast to Tylor, he claimed that the ancient Egyptians were
"nearly pure Melanochroi" with some traces of Ethiopian ancestry
(pp. 391-392). In concluding his presenta- tion, Flower observed
that in its general features his classification scheme, in spite of
a vast increase in knowledge, "scarcely differs from that of Cuvier
nearly sixty years ago" (pp. 392-393).
To Flower this continuity confirmed the essential truthfulness
of the classification scheme. As an anatomist Flower, like his
predecessors, simply followed the trusted practice of the
biological sciences of seeking order in na- ture by classification.
Even Darwinian evolution did not abandon existing schemes of
classification, but simply provided a new explanation for their ex-
istence. Consequently Victorian scientists still thought in terms
of racial ty- pology in spite of Darwin's transformation of the
significance of species, in spite of abundant evidence of racial
intermixture, and in spite of a momen- tary hesitation in the 1870s
and early '80s, when some leaders of the scientific community
paused to consider what they meant by race. This was only a pause,
however, for, as the contrast between Flower's remarks in 1881 and
1885 indicates, racist thinking experienced a revival in the
1880s.
IV
The revival of theoretical racism in the mid-1880s resulted in
part from innovations in anthropological method. After a period of
criticism of the sheer tedium, confusion, and inconsequence of
craniology, a new inter- national agreement in 1886 on the cephalic
index led to greater certainty about skull measurements. 34 New
developments in psychology, particularly David Ferrier's
localization of functions of the brain, opened up the possibil-
34 For criticism of craniology, see George Busk, "President's
Address," JAI 3 (1873-74), 509, 520- 525; J. Beddoe, "On the
Anthropological Colour in Phenomena in Belgium and Elsewhere," JAI
10 (1880-81), 374-380; Paul Topinard, "Observations on the Methods
and Processes of Anthro- pometry," JAI 10 (1880-81), 212-214,
223-224; J. G. Garson, "The Frankfurt Craniometric Agreement with
critical remarks thereon," JAI 14 (1884-85), 64-83. For the new
consensus, see J. G. Garson, "The Cephalic Index" and "The
International Agreement on the Classification and Nomenclature of
the Cephalic Index," JAI 16 (1886-87), 11-17 and 17-20.
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ity of comparing the brains of civilized and savage men to
demonstrate un- equal mental development. 35
A more important development was the shift away from the
emphasis on skull shape and size alone to anthropometry, which
encompassed not only measurements of the entire skeleton, but also
tests of the sense and motor functions. 36 At the same time
innovations in statistical analysis, pioneered and promoted by
Francis Galton (1822-1911), President of the Anthropolog- ical
Institute from 1885 to 1889, allowed data to be handled in a more
sophis- ticated manner, including the use of range rather than mean
as a standard of comparisons, the employment of percentiles and
curves of normal distribu- tion, and the concepts of standard
deviation and regression analysis. Galton was extremely active in
promoting new methods to improve the quantifiable and - in his view
- scientific presentation of anthropological data. One of his more
ingenious initiatives in the use of new technology was specifically
in the study of race: he advocated superimposing individual
photographs of rep- resentatives of racial groups one on top of the
other so that distinctive traits would stand out in a composite
picture. 37
Galton's particular interest in anthropology, as in biology and
mathe- matics, stemmed from his preoccupation with demonstrating
the influence of heredity over environment in determining an
individual's attributes and po- tential. His interest in the
"nature versus nurture" question, to use Galton's own phrase, first
became apparent in Tropical South Africa (1853), an account of his
travels in South-West Africa in 1850-52. He held a generally
contemp- tuous attitude toward the peoples of Africa, and claimed
innate characteris- tics explained both the differences between
various peoples in South-West Africa and the overall inferiority of
Africans to Europeans. In spite of his ear- lier travels and his
subsequent role as Honorary Secretary to the Royal Geo- graphical
Society during the exciting "Search for Sources of the Nile" in the
1860s, he showed little interest in ethnography or even in peoples
outside the British Isles. His first attempts at advancing the
eugenic principles of inherit- ance, particularly "Heredity Talent
and Character" (published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1865) and his
book Hereditary Genius (1869), pointed to differ- ences between
races to illustrate the importance of inherited
characteristics.
35 D. Ferrier, "On the Functional Topography of the Brain," JAI
17 (1887-88), 26-31; H. D. Rolleston, "Description of the Cerebral
Hemispheres of an Adult Australian Male," JAI 17 (1887- 88), 32-42;
see also Alexander Bain, "The Scope of Anthropology and its
Relation to the Science of Mind," JAI 15 (1885-86), 380-388.
36 "Extracts from the Report of the Anthropometric Committee of
the British Association," JAI 9 (1879-80), 345-351; Francis Galton,
"On Recent Designs of Anthropometric Instruments," JAI 16
(1886-87), 2-9; British Association, Anthropometric Investigation
in the British Isles (London: Royal Anthropological Institute,
1909).
37 Francis Galton, "President's Address," JAI 18 (1888-89),
401-419; "Composite Portraits," JAI 8 (1878-79), 132-144. For an
example of the method, including photographs, see Joseph Jacobs,
"On the Racial Characteristics of Modem Jews," JAI 15 (1885-86),
53-56.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
In the 1860s he had to contest established environmental
explanations for human differences, but by the 1880s his ideas
found a more receptive audi- ence. 38 By this time he had also come
to play a leading role in the Anthropo- logical Institute, where
his presentations dealt largely with the application of statistical
methods to human populations. His main interest lay not in differ-
ences of race but in differences within the British population,
usually on the basis of social class. 39
On one occasion before the Institute, when Galton dealt in a
presi- dential address with populations in the colonies, he
observed that in temper- ate zones where Europeans had settled the
aboriginal inhabitants faced "rapid diminution" and thus "their
peculiarities are losing present interest and are becoming
historical and archaic" (JAI 16 [1886-87], 392). He then expressed
a greater sense of urgency about the study of British populations,
particularly those living in tropical colonies. For the heat Galton
recommended air condi- tioning, using new techniques of
refrigeration. For the more difficult obstacle of disease, he
thought that natural selection itself would lead to the survival
and reproduction of the minority of whites with immunity. Otherwise
he thought some intermixture with blacks (illustrated by an analogy
of mixing black and white fluids to various shades of coffee to
demonstrate the mathematical laws of heredity) would produce a
breed of whites capable of survival (pp. 394-402).
In addition to his innovations in method, Galton's most
substantial contribution to the Anthropological Institute was his
work as a publicist. At the International Health Exhibition in
South Kensington in 1884, Galton reported in a presidential
address, he found over 9,000 individuals who were willing to spend
twenty minutes being measured in his tiny anthropometric laboratory
(JAI 14 [1884-85], 205-221; 17 [1886-87], 346-355). In 1887 he gave
a series of public lectures at the South Kensington Museum, but the
series, although sponsored by the Institute, was on Galton's own
limited conception of the discipline, for he lectured on "Heredity
and Nurture" (announcement in JAI 17 [1887-881, 79). His example
was followed in 1889 by a group of Institute members who offered a
public lecture series on the more conventional topics of physical
and cultural evolution (announcement in JAJ 19 [1889-90],
441-442).
38 Raymond E. Francher, "Francis Galton's African Ethnology and
its Role in the Development of his Psychology," The British Journal
of the History of Science 16 (1983), 67-79; R. S. Cowan, "Nature
and Nurture: The Interplay of Biology and Politics in the Work of
Francis Galton," in W. C. Coleman and C. Limoges, eds., Studies in
the History of Biology, 7 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), I, 133-208. See also D. W. Forrest,
Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (New York:
Taplinger, 1974), especially chaps. 2, 3, and 5.
39 Francis Galton, "On Recent Designs of Anthropometric
Instruments," pp. 2-9; "President's Ad- dress," JAI 15 (1885-86),
489-499; "President's Address," JAI 18 (1888-89), 406-407; "On the
Head Growth in Students at the University of Cambridge," JAI 18
(1888-89), 155-156. Even the presentations of those who followed
Galton's methods dealt with populations in the United King- dom;
see Jacobs, "Racial Characteristics," and also his "The Comparative
Distribution of Jewish Ability," JAI 15 (1885-86), 23-62 and
351-379; J. Jacobs and Isidore Spielman, "On the Compara- tive
Anthropometry of English Jews," JAI 19 (1889-90), 76-88; John Venn,
"Cambridge Anthro- pometry," JAI 18 (1888-89), 140-154.
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Douglas Lorimer
Galton's one promotional enterprise dealing directly with the
ques- tion of race was the Anthropological Conference on the Native
Races of the British Possessions held at the Colonial and Indian
Exhibition in 1886. This series of lectures and exhibits, including
both artifacts and some live speci- men "savages," offered
presentations by white colonists and officials. In con- trast to
Galton's emphasis on quantitative scientific studies, these papers
were rarely scholarly. They provided generalized descriptions of
indigenous populations and, in accordance with Galton's
introductory remarks, offered impressions about the impact of
Europeans upon traditional ways of living. Most speakers from areas
of European settlement reported on the decline in the size of the
aboriginal population and the disintegration of indigenous cul-
tures, but depicted colonial administrators as providing benevolent
protection. Some speakers used the occasion to engage in the
promotion of colonial devel- opment and described the "natives" as
a pool of productive labourers (the pro- ceedings of the conference
were published in JAI 16 [1886-87], 174-236).
In the midst of these efforts to promote anthropological
science, there was also a revival of some of the more extreme
speculations about the origin and nature of racial groups. The most
notable example was the revised ver- sion of the Aryan theory in
the late 1880s. Sayce and Isaac Taylor (1829- 1901), Canon of York
and a noted philologist, followed recent continental works in
arguing for an Aryan homeland in northwestern Europe, against the
established convention of a central Asian origin linking Indian and
European peoples through a common linguistic heritage. Although
Taylor's paper re- ceived a largely hostile reception before the
Institute, the revival of the de- bate also reintroduced the
confused connection between race and lan- guage. 40 The 1880s also
saw a new effort to identify a Jewish type both by anthropometry
and by use of historical evidence. 41 Led by Beddoe, there was also
a renewed interest in the racial composition of the British
population and a revival of the idea of fixed types that persisted
in spite of historical evi- dence of a mixed ancestry. 42
In addition to this interest in European populations, members of
the Institute in the 1880s attempted to deduce an evolutionary
account for the
40 Isaac Taylor, "The Origin and Primitive Seat of the Aryans,"
JAI 17 (1887-88), 238-269, and the responses to it, 269-275; A. H.
Sayce, "Address to the Anthropological Section of the British
Associa- tion," JAI 17 (1887-88), 166-177. For examples of the
confused link between race and language, see C. R. Conder, "The
Races of Modem Asia," JAI 19 (1889-90), 30-43; J. Beddoe,
"President's Ad- dress," JAJ 19 (1889-90), 491-493.
41 See Jacob's articles and G. Bertin, "On the Origin and
Primitive Home of the Semites," JAI 11 (1881-82), 423-437.
42 J. Beddoe, "English Surnames from an Ethnological Point of
View," JAI 12 (1882-83), 231-242, and The Races of Britain: A
Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (Bristol: J. W.
Arrow- smith, 1885); J. Park Harrison, "On the Survival of certain
Racial Features in the Population of the British Isles," JAI 12
(1882-83), 243-255; A. L. Lewis, "On the Evils arising from the Use
of His- torical National Names as Scientific Terms," JAI 8
(1878-79), 325-335.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
varieties of race from their distribution around the globe. The
most notable example was a presentation in 1885 by James Dallas,
Curator of the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, who used a threefold
primary division of races into black, yellow, and white, and a
twofold north-south division for zones of evolution. Thus he
claimed that blacks evolved from a centre in south India and spread
east into the Pacific islands and west into Africa, whereas a sepa-
rate centre of evolution north of the Himilayas led to the
emergence of white and yellow types who subsequently migrated over
the Eurasian land mass and the Americas. The polygenetic
implications of Dallas's theory were clear, but his paper went
virtually uncontested in 1885.43
Subsequently papers from more respected authorities using
anatomical and anthropometic methods hinted at a similar
polygenetic account of evolu- tion. Flower pursued his studies of
short varieties of black populations, in- cluding Andaman Islanders
and the Pygmies of Central Africa, to develop a theory that these
people were the primitive and childlike stock out of which Africans
and Melanesians evolved. 44 H. H. Risley's anthropometric study of
caste in India also served to strengthen the idea of a north-south
racial divi- sion, arguing that the caste system originated as a
division by race, not by so- cial function. Risley claimed that
physical distinctions were perpetuated by exogamy, and that dark
Dravidians from the south composed the lower castes compared to the
higher caste Aryans from the north ("Ethnology in India," pp.
235-263). These attempts to deduce an evolution of racial types
grew out of the earlier debate on the Oceanic races. Although at
first they were seen as speculative ventures, they became
entrenched in standard texts on ethnology and human geography in
the 1890s and even into the 1920s and '30s. 45
V
By the end of the nineteenth century, the new methods and ideas
of the 1880s had become standard scientific accounts in texts aimed
at the general reader. Keane led the way in producing these new
general texts, translating for-
43 James Dallas, "On the Primary Divisions and Geographical
Distribution of Mankind," JAI 15 (1885-86), 304-330; for other
examples, see W. S. Duncan, "On the Probable Origin of Man's Ev-
olution," JAI 12 (1882-83), 513-525; G. Bertin, in "The Races of
the Babylonian Empire," pp. 104-120, argued for a universal
low-class "ground race."
44 W. H. Flower, "On the Osteology and Affinities of the Natives
of the Andaman Islands," JAI 9 (1879-80), 127-132; "Descriptions of
two Skeletons of Akkas, a Pygmy Race from Central Africa," JAI 18
(1888-89), 3-19; "The Pygmy Races of Man: A Lecture at the Royal
Institution," JAI 18 (1888-89), 72-91.
45 A. H. Keane, Ethnology (1895; 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1896), pp. 221- 241; A. C. Haddon, The Races of
Man and Their Distribution (1909; rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1929), pp. 139-156.
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Douglas Lorimer
eign travel, scientific, and ethnological works and editing
school geography books. For Stanford's Compendium of Geography and
Travel, a frequently reissued reference work, he helped produce
volumes on Africa (1878, 1884, 1895, 1904), Asia (1882, 1893, 1896,
1906), Australasia (1879, 1883, 1888, 1908), and Central and South
America (1878, 1885, 1901, 1909-11). He wrote two texts on
anthropology: Ethnology (1895) and Man, Past and Present (1899). He
also contributed to The Living Races of Mankind: a popular illus-
trated account of the customs, habits, pursuits, feasts and
ceremonies of the races of Mankind throughout the world (1905), a
serialized magazine amply illustrated with photographs of exotic
peoples. In 1908 he published another illustrated text, The World's
Peoples: A Popular Account of their Bodily and Mental Charac- ters,
Beliefs, Traditions, Political and Social Institutions. For his
efforts in ethnol- ogy, Keane received a civil list pension in 1897
(Who Was Who, p. 389).
Keane's books were largely descriptive, providing a catalogue of
char- acteristics for each racial or ethnic group in turn. Unhappy
with the inade- quacies of physical classification, Keane thought
that mental characteristics could also be classified and would
reveal sharper differences of race. As a re- sult he had no
hesitation about drawing up psychological profiles for each ra-
cial group (Ethnology, p. 171). In Man, Past and Present, each
chapter began with a taxonomy of the race which included a brief
description of "tempera- ment." Sudanese Negroes, for example, he
described as "sensuous, indolent, improvident, fitful, passionate
and cruel, though often affectionate and faith- ful; little sense
of dignity, and slight self-consciousness, hence easy accept- ance
of yoke of slavery; musical."46 Southern Mongols received an
equally uncomplimentary description: "Somewhat sluggish, with
little initiative, but great endurance, cunning rather than
intelligent; generally thrifty and indus- trious, but most indolent
in Siam and Burma; moral standards low, with slight sense of right
and wrong" (p. 170). At the other extreme stood the "Caucasic
Peoples," who are "All brave, imaginative, musical, and richly en-
dowed intellectually" (p. 442). Keane reserved his highest praise
for the Saxon, who remained an identifiable type in spite of the
mixing of various peoples that made up the British population: "The
Saxon also still remains the Saxon, stolid and solid, outwardly
abrupt but warm-hearted and true, haughty and even overbearing
through an innate sense of superiority, yet at heart sympathetic
and always just, hence a ruler of men; seemingly dull or slow, yet
preeminent in the realms of philosophy and imagination (Newton,
Shakespeare)" (p. 532). Keane justified these confident
descriptions of men- tal as well as physical attributes by the
claim that he depicted only "ideal types" from which real
individuals might vary (Ethnology, pp. 223-229). This philosophical
nicety made little imprint on the general reader, for Keane's
46 A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1899), p. 36.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
ideal type frequently appeared on the page as a photograph of a
real living person.
Keane's confident assertions about racial types rested not upon
the ex- isting state of comparative anatomy, but upon his training
as a linguist. In his more analytical work, Ethnology, Keane
reviewed the findings of the physical anthropologists and noted
that the evidence of the fertility of racial crosses and the fact
that almost all existing races were of mixed ancestry confirmed the
specific unity of man (pp. 142-143, 150-156). Even though his
descrip- tions of racial types, for example of the Saxon, were
reminiscent of Knox's, Keane identified the Scottish anatomist as
part of the discredited American polygenist school, and looked with
favour on Prichard's founding work in ethnology (pp. 165-166).
Nonetheless, Keane inclined toward polygenesis. Because of the
work of the anatomists he was forced to admit all mankind belonged
to one species, but he still claimed that existing races "are to a
certain extent of diverse ori- gin, that is to say, descend in
diverging, converging or parallel lines from their several
pleistocene precursors" (p. 162; see also pp. 223-229, 239-240).
Keane claimed that his scheme reconciled the conflict between
monogenesis and polygenesis, but in a letter to Wallace his
insistence upon the autonomy of the white race and its independent
origin was expressed more frankly: "My theory of the evolution of
black, white and yellow, not one from the other, but independently
from their several pleistocene precursors (the generalized human
type) seems to meet such cases as these. The white man is thus, not
a late arrival on the scene, but of equal antiquity with the
others, and so starts simultaneously with them on his life
history."47 For Keane the greater sophis- tication and precision of
the anatomists limited the possibility of broad gener- alizations
about racial groups, whereas his own field of linguistics together
with observations drawn from a wide range of travel literature
permitted a freer speculation about the mental characteristics and
the independent histori- cal development of the human races
(Ethnology, pp. 42-44, 171, 191-205).
Although Keane was the most active publicist in the 1890s, he
was not alone. A. C. Haddon (1855-1940), a pioneer of fieldwork on
the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898 and a founder of the study of
anthropology at Cambridge, published The Study of Man in 1898. In
this general text he made extensive use of 1880s issues of the
Journal of the Anthropological Institute, and included descriptions
of racial groups similar to those of Keane. 48 With A. H. Quiggin,
Haddon reissued Keane's Man, Past and Present in 1920, and Haddon's
own The Races of Man and their Distribution (1912) appeared in
re-
47 A. H. Keane to A. R. Wallace, 22 November 1899, Wallace
Papers, British Library Add. MS 46437, ff. 67-68.
48 A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man (London: Bliss, Sands, 1898);
see also A. H. Quiggin, Haddon the Head Hunter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1942).
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Douglas Lorimer
vised form in 1929. These later editions did not substantially
alter the racist observations and conclusions of earlier versions,
so that the post-1885 gener- alizations about race, entrenched in
general texts on anthropology in the 1890s, were passed on to a new
generation of students after 1918.
Victorian racism reveals two persistent continuities from at
least the 1850s: the belief in the natural inequality of human
beings, and a readiness to generalize freely about the character of
racial and ethnic groups. Neither of these patterns of thought were
derived from systematic science, but were hab- its of mind shaped
by the larger social and cultural environment. Much of the
Victorian discussion of race took place in a haphazard fashion,
mixing the ob- servations of travelers with common prejudices. This
was the commonplace discourse not only of everyday conversation and
of the daily press, but also of scientific gatherings and
publications including the organs of the British As- sociation, the
Royal Geographical Society, and the Anthropological Insti- tute.
Prior to 1900 at least, scientific developments failed to
counteract the distorting influences of commonplace prejudices, and
in fact served to give these observations both greater coherence
and greater authority. The reasons for this failure will be found
in a historiography of nineteenth-century science which goes beyond
a recounting of ideas to place science and scientists within their
social and ideological contexts. 49
In the second half of the nineteenth century, two external
conditions sustained the inegalitarian assumptions and race
generalizations of scientists. First, the external reality of
expanding European domination over the globe and its peoples
encouraged Victorians to rank racial groups by their power and
status. Second, the presumptions and values of the professional
middle class gave focus to the scientists' inquiries. Both elements
were evident in the Anthropological Institute. Its members were
drawn largely from the profes- sional middle class, many with
colonial connections or experience, and the Institute's proceedings
gave a forum for the presentation of colonizers' views of race and
race relations.
A more exact sense of the chronology of developments provides a
more precise measure of the place of scientific racism in
nineteenth-century images of race. Although the 1850s and '60s may
well be the point of origin for modem scientific racism, the
innovations of the 1880s and '90s were more important for the
character of scientific racism in the 1920s and '30s. Knox, Hunt,
and the Anthropological Society of London may have liberated the
science of man from religion and humanitarianism, a somewhat
exaggerated benefit, but they met with public ridicule and
rejection by leaders of the sci-
49 Robert Young, "The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts
of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature," in M.
Teich and R. Young, eds., Changing Perspectives in the History of
Science (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 344-473.
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THEORETICAL RACISM, 1870-1900
entific community, and their works went virtually unnoticed in
the scientific discussion of race in the last three decades of the
nineteenth century.
Why, then, did Galton and his colleagues have so much greater
suc- cess after 1880? By this time an institutional framework
existed for the more effective dissemination of scientific ideas.
In part the professionalization of science, in this case the
medical and biological sciences, rather than anthropol- ogy itself,
gave writers and lecturers greater authority than the old-fashioned
morality and casual impressions of clergy, philanthropists, and
travelers. The development of a technical vocabulary and the
application of statistical methods added to the professional
mystique and authority of the scientists. Specialized publications,
such as the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, or a magazine
such as Nature for the broader community of professionals, kept
scientists informed about innovations in anthropometry and new
ideas about the origin and diversity of human racial groupings.
With greater professionalism also came increased specialization
and protection from potential sources of criticism. By the 1890s
founders of Brit- ish sociology such as Patrick Geddes and L. T.
Hobhouse began to query the weight given to biological determinism.
But just as the comparative anato- mists and the ethnographers in
the Anthropological Institute never at- tempted to reconcile their
approaches and findings, so too the sociologists and biological
determinists pursued their specialties, neither group affecting the
other. Finally, from the 1890s the extension of education,
especially at the secondary and post-secondary levels, created a
readership among the growing ranks of teachers and students, and
thus a market for general texts and popular magazines whose authors
- by their own inclination but also by the demands of the form -
were drawn into making broad generalizations about racial groups.
In the case of anthropology, public displays at museums and
exhibitions also played an important educational role.
These institutional elements may explain why the scientific
racists spoke with a more powerful voice from the 1880s, but they
do not explain why they spoke with a more acceptable voice. The
principal ideas of the sci- entific racists had been current since
the late eighteenth century, but prior to the 1880s the exponents
of these ideas had been on the fringes of scientific orthodoxy, in
some cases identified as notorious eccentrics. This description
certainly fits Edward Long, Henry Home [Lord Kames], and Charles
White in the late eighteenth century, and equally applies to Knox,
Hunt, and Burton in the mid-Victorian period, but it hardly suits
Galton or Flower. In one sense racism as an ideology was a
pseudo-science in the 1850s and '60s, but an established science
from the 1880s onwards.
By shifting attention away from the origins of scientific racism
in the 1850s and '60s to its institutionalization in the 1880s, we
can begin to make
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Douglas Lorimer
more intelligent sense of the context in which these ideas
prospered. By the 1880s promoters of scientific racism no longer
met outraged shouts at the British Association, nor did
anthropologists rail against radical philosophers or naive
believers in human rights. In the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, members of the professional middle class were
confident in the realism of their vision and yet foresaw a future
full of worrisome change and potential decline. The national
destiny seemed threatened externally by powerful foreign rivals and
internally by an urban mass culture incapable of generating the
talent and character needed to sustain the national fibre, let
alone Britain's world leadership. In the Empire the realities of
international rivalry and indigenous resistance to western
imperialism forced the pace of formal colonization, and from the
British perspective the problem was how to administer an estab-
lished and expanding multiracial empire inhabited by peoples of
exotic ap- pearances and strange habits who were apparently
unsuited to the advanced practices of Victorian civilization.
Late-Victorian scientists, as evidenced by the membership of the
An- thropological Institute and the contents of its Journal, helped
forge a common link between the domestic and imperial crises by
identifying issues of race and class as questions of heredity and
environment. This link is most clearly seen in the work and
patronage of Galton and in the connection between the per-
sonalities and ideas of anthropology in the 1880s and the eugenics
movement in the Edwardian period. Similarly, a continuity exists
between the anthro- pometry of the 1880s and the psychometrics of
the 1920s. 50 By the 1880s, at least for the professional
specialists who saw themselves as natural scien- tists,
environmentalism was on the losing side of the nature/nurture argu-
ment. It was weakened in part by the assaults of the
pseudo-scientists, the polygenetic racial typologists of the 1850s
and '60s, but the strength of nature over nurture derived more from
the changed social and political context of the 1880s and '90s.
Biological determinism offered simple and universal ex- planations
for complex historical changes, and by analogy to nature favoured
winners and survivors over losers and victims. Furthermore, these
ideas car- ried the new professional authority of science and had
at hand its institu- tional apparatus for the dissemination of the
message of racial supremacy.
Wilfrid Laurier University
50 Stepan, pp. 111-139; Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1986), pp.
92-119.
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Article Contentsp. [405]p. 406p. 407p. 408p. 409p. 410p. 411p.
412p. 413p. 414p. 415p. 416p. 417p. 418p. 419p. 420p. 421p. 422p.
423p. 424p. 425p. 426p. 427p. 428p. 429p. 430
Issue Table of ContentsVictorian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3
(Spring, 1988), pp. 319-474Front Matter [pp. 350-404]Patronage,
Professional Values, and Victorian Public Works: Engine