THE IDEA OF RACE IN SCIENCE: GREAT BRITAIN, 1800-1960 St Antony'slMacmillan Series General editor: Archie Brown, Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford This series contains academic books written or edited by members of St Antony's College, Oxford, or by authors with a special association with the College, The titles are selected by an editorial board on which both the College and the publishers are represented. S.B. Burman CHIEFDOM POLITICS AND ALIEN LAW Wilhelm Deist THE WEHRMACHT AND GERMAN REARMAMENT Ricardo Ffrench-Davis and Emesto Tironi (editors) LATIN AMERICA AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER Bohdan Harasymiw POLITICAL ELITE RECRUITMENT IN THE USSR Richard Holt SPORT AND SOCIETY IN MODERN FRANCE Albert Hourani EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (editors) NATIONALIST AND RACIALIST MOVEMENTS IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY BEFORE 1914 Richard Kindersley (editor) IN SEARCH OF EUROCOMMUNISM GiselaC. Lebzelter POLITICAL ANTI·SEMITISM IN ENGLAND, 1918- 1939 C.A. MacDonald THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN AND APPEASE­ MENT, 1936-1939 Pat rick O'Brien (editor) RAILWAYS AND THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1830-1914 Roger Owen (editor) STUDIES IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF PALESTINE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES Irena Powell WRITERS AND SOCIETY IN MODERN JAPAN T.H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher (editors) POLITICAL LEGITIMATION IN COMMUNIST STATES Marilyn Rueschemeyer PROFESSIONAL WORK AND MARRIAGE A.J.R. Russell·Wood THE BLACK MAN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN COLONIAL BRAZIL David Stafford BRITAIN AND EUROPEAN RESISTANCE, 1940-1945 Nancy Stepan THE IDEA OF RACE IN SCIENCE Guido di Tella ARGENTINA UNDER PERON, 1973-76 Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead (editors) INFLATION AND STABILISATION IN LATIN AMERICA Rudolf L. T6'kes (editor) OPPOSITION IN EASTERN EUROPE THE IDEA OF RACE IN SCIENCE: GREAT BRITAIN 1800-1960 Nancy Stepan Department of History. Yale University M in association with MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan To Adam and Tanya © Nancy Stepan 1982 Sof'tcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced. copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1982 Reprinted 1984 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TO Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-05454-1 ISBN 978-1-349-05452-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05452-7 Contents Acknowledgements VU Introduction: Science, Race and History IX 1 Race and the Return of the Great Chain of Being, 1800-50 1 2 'Race is Everything': The Growth of Racial Determinism, 1830-50 20 3 Evolution and Race: An Incomplete Revolution 47 4 Race after Darwin: The World of the Physical Anthropologists 83 5 Eugenics and Race, 1900-25 III 6 A Period of Doubt: Race Science before the Second World War 140 7 After the War: A New Science and Old Controversies 170 Notes and References 190 Index 223 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to the students at Yale who have attended my seminar on the history of racial ideas in science since the spring of 1977. Their questions often challenged me to think again and to re-examine sources with fresh eyes. A first draft of the book was completed while on academic leave in England during the year 1978-9. That draft would not have been completed without the extraordinary view from my window, especially of the Meade's pear tree. A part of the year 1978-9 was spent as a Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, Oxford University, which gave me some very congenial colleagues and friends. While at Oxford, through the kind invitation of the Rhodes Professor of Race Rela­ tions of the University, Kenneth Kirkwood, I presented some of my ideas to the seminar on race relations. From Oxford, too, I would like to thank Dr. Vernon Reynolds, University Lecturer in Physical Anthropology, for his comments on an early version of the last chapter of the book. While in England, I was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London, for which I thank Professor Roy MacLeod, Professor of Science Education at the Institute. Several scholars have helped me with their advice. John Burke, Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles, and John Greene, Professor of History at the University of Con­ necticut, both of whom have written on the history of race science, read the entire manuscript and contributed several use­ ful suggestions for revisions. John Greene in particular proposed certain changes in Chapter 3 which I have been happy to adopt, though the final product is of course my own. Herbert Odom, of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Tech­ nology at the University of Toronto, wrote some years ago a short analysis of physical anthropology and race in the nineteenth century which I found immensely stimulating when I began the work for this book in the fall of 1976; he kindly read the manus- vii Vlll Acknowledgements cript and his comments are most gratefully acknowledged. Throughout the writing of the book friends and colleagues from Yale University were indispensable in providing intellectual stimulation. Among many, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from the De­ partments of Afro-American Studies and English, was a tremen­ dous support as well as an astute reader of the book; John Rhoads, from the Department of Anthropology, steered me towards some work in physical anthropology germane to the book and suggested emendations to the last chapter; and Gillian Gill's excellent critical sense helped me towards a reformulation of the introductory chapter. Marty Achilles typed the manuscript with exemplary care and patience. As always, my thanks to AI. In retrospect one's choices of scholarly topics make very personal sense. In many ways this book is the outcome of my parents' interest in colonial freedom and their commitment to a less racially divided world. N.S. Yale University November 1980 Introduction: Science, Race and History The idea of race is one that has played a critical role in determin­ ing how people have seen themselves and others. Human races first became objects of systematic investigation by natural scien­ tists at the end of the eighteenth century. Subsequently, the idea of race came increasingly to occupy the centre stage of science. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a very complex edifice of thought about human races had been developed in science that was sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, racist. That is to say, the language, concepts, methods and authority of science were used to support the belief that certain human groups were intrinsically inferior to others, as measured by some socially defined criterion, such as intelligence or 'civilised' behaviour. A 'scientific racism' had come into existence that was to endure until well after the Second World War. I The purpose of this book is to describe the main stages in the history of the idea of race in the natural sciences in Britain. I first ask how, when and why a fundamental set of ideas about human races became elaborated in the natural sciences in the early part of the nineteenth century. I then examine what changes occurred in racial ideas as the century unfolded. How did Darwinian evolu­ tion, or the new science of heredity associated with Mendel, affect racial themes? What elaborations and additions were made to racial ideas as new fields became scientific, such as physical an­ thropology and psychology? I am also interested in how and when the racial science of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did, eventually and surprisingly late, come to an end. By the 1950s, it appeared that the obsession of scientists with human racial differences was a thing of the past. Many scientists even claimed that the very word 'race' was unnecessary for the scienti­ fic analysis of human diversity. Whether or not one retains the word race in science, I would argue that a new science of human IX x Introduction: Science, Race and History diversity developed in the 1950s and 1960s that pushed the idea of racial types to the sidelines in science. This did not mean that popular racism disappeared, nor even that race was no longer a matter of controversy in science. The recent debate about race and intelligence is too prominent to let us think that. Even 'socio­ biology', which some scientists see as a new ordering of biological and social knowledge based on population genetics, evolution and ecology, has kept alive some of the issues connected with racial science, such as the nature-nurture issue. But the old racial science itself, based on anatomy, morphology, typology and hierarchy, for the most part has ceased to be important. This, then, is the story I propose to tell. In telling it, I have been guided by a number of assumptions that should be clearly stated at the outset. The first assumption is that scientific racism represented something relatively new to the Western world. The modern period from 1800 to 1960 covered by this book was one in which people were preoccupied by race. 2 The book is bounded at one end by the great enlightenment debate about slavery and abolition; it is bounded at the other end by the Second World War, in which six million Jews were exterminated in Hitler's Germany, in part because, according to Nazi ideology, they belonged to an inferior 'race'.