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THE IDEA of RACE in SCIENCE: GREAT BRITAIN, 1800-1960 St Antony'slmacmillan Series

THE IDEA OF IN : 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 AND THE 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 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 and Tanya

© Nancy Stepan 1982

Sof'tcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982

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First published 1982 Reprinted 1984

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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 83 5 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 , 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 , 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 or 'civilised' behaviour. A 'scientific ' 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 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 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 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 , 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 , morphology, 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 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 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'. In the nineteenth century, Britons also witnessed the birth of a new Empire under Queen Victoria, an Empire which gave the British ruling class power over peoples very different from themselves in colour, and customs, prompting them to ask new racial questions. Within Europe, too, there developed national rivalries which made Europeans look inwards at themselves to inquire about the racial worth of the dif• ferent fractions of the European 'race'. The development of a specific science of the human racial dif• ferences which so absorbed the European mind was a function of a number of factors, not all of them new but coming together in the late eighteenth century to form a new context for the study of man. Of these factors, the two most important were the existence of black slavery in the colonies of Europe in the New World and the emergence of the modern, biological and human sciences. Slavery itself was, of course, not new to the eighteenth century. Ancient Greece and Rome had both been slave societies, and ancient forms of slavery, or variants of it, persisted until late in the Middle Ages. But in the ancient and medieval world, slaves were drawn, by the accidents of war and personal misforfUne; Introduction: Science, Race and History Xl

from many peoples, nations and ethnic groups. Racially speaking, slaves were often indistinguishable from their masters. As David Brion Davis shows in his masterly study, The Problem of Slavery in Western , it was precisely the absence of racially distinguishing marks in slaves that made the use of artificial signs, such as the shaved head or the more severe tattooing and mutilation, seem necessary for purposes of identi• fication. 3 When, as sometimes happened, a slave became a freed• man, he often merged into the local population, only knowledge of his personal history, not his race, serving to remind others of his previous slave status. Davis also points out that Aristotle's theory of the 'natural' slave was strained by the fact that there were no clearcut physical differences between slaves and their masters, and by the knowledge that many slaves were slaves by complete chance . .j The absence of a slave system based on race was probably clos~ly connected with another important facet of ancient slavery and ancient thought, namely the absence of any obvious colour or racial . and Romans were both curious and knowledgeable about peoples other than themselves living in the Mediterranean, in Minor and in North . We know from artistic depictions from Greece and Rome, and from literary sources, that black Africans, usually referred to by the generic term 'Ethiopians', were well known in ancient times. But a care• ful study of the sources has failed to reveal any marked racial or colour prejudice. 5 The incipient Greek science of human dif• ference was also remarkably unracialist. In the Hippocratic text, Airs, Waters and Places, for example, the physical and cultural differences between the Europeans and people from Asia Minor, and the special traits of the Scythians, were explained by the in• fluence of different climates and geography on the human form and character. What is striking is that, while Greeks assumed they were superior to all 'barbarians', no attempt was made to rank the non-Greek peoples in a hierarchy of inferior and superior types, as judged by some Greek standard of physical and cultural worth. 6 The modern situation was quite different, for by the eighteenth century Europeans were decidedly ethnocentric and racist. The origins of European racism are obviously complex and not fully understood. Its roots certainly lie in the period before the emer• gence of racial slavery. Christian hostility to 'heathens', perhaps XII Introduction: Science, Race and History borrowings from Arabic attitudes of contempt for blacks, played their parts. 7 But there is no doubt that it was the Europeans' in• volvement in the slave trade in Africa, starting in the fifteenth century, that was of crucial importance. By the end of the eighteenth century, the traffic in slaves in Europe was extensive, and slavery was almost entirely black, even New World Indians having been virtually excluded as candidates for enslavement. Slowly blackness itself, which in the ancient world had often been associated with positive qualities such as physical or moral beauty, came to be associated negatively with the degraded con• dition of slavery. Eventually, a black skin was taken as a 'natural', outward sign of inward mental and moral inferiority. The asso'• ciation between blackness and inferiority produced by racial slavery was grafted onto an earlier, primarily literary , in which blackness and whiteness comprised the terms of a binary opposition. Writes Jordan, 'White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugli• ness, beneficence and sin, God and the devil. '8 By the sixteenth century this aesthetic device was being transformed into a theory of nature. From a belief in the intrinsic inferiority of the black African there spread a general prejudice against dark, usually non-European peoples. To the first 'natural' sign of inferiority, the black skin, was added other signs, such as thick lips, a pro• truding jaw, or a particular conformation of the head. To the first 'inferior' race, the black African, were added other races as Europeans sought to understand their own special destinies. 'Race' increasingly became a primary form of self and group identification. The abolition movement of the eighteenth and early nine• teenth centuries provided another context for the emergent science of human races. The abolition movement was the first sustained, moral protest against the institution of slavery. No such protest can be found in pagan Greece ~nd Rome, nor in the first centuries of Christian Europe. 9 Paradoxically, however, as the religious and moral foundations of slavery began to be con• tested between 1775 and 1833, Aristotle's question of the 'natural' slave was re-opened. Increasingly, the moral claim of the black and other so-called 'inferior' races, slave and free, to equality of treatment was taken to be a matter not of ethical theory but of anatomy. If all races were found to be anatomically and physio• logically alike, then the rights and privileges enjoyed by the Euro- Introduction: Science, Race and History Xlll pean would be guaranteed for all peoples. The appeal to nature in deciding what was in reality a moral issue was fatal, but one made by the anti· abolitionists and eventually the abolitionists alike. Nature was now the arbiter of morality. In this context, the ability of scientists to answer questions of 'nature', the 'facts' of human similarity and difference, with authority was crucial. It was for this reason that the growth of the biological and human sciences at the end of the eighteenth century was decisive for racial debate. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been primarily a re• volution of and astronomy. Not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did the biological and human sciences begin to undergo a comparable revolution. A science of human races could develop only when the entire globe had been explored, some knowledge of the entire range of human types gathered, and this knowledge evaluated for its accuracy. 'Wild' men had to be investigated by scientists, and tales of men inter• mediate between man and laid to rest. A science of race had to await the growth of comparative anatomy, a field pioneered by and his associates in Paris in the first three decades of the nineteenth century; only with the development of comparative anatomy could the variation found within the human species be compared in detail with the variation found within and between other animal species. The idea of species, and the difference between species and varieties, had to be refined so that naturalists could begin to discuss fruitfully whether or not mankind formed one or more species. '', reproduc• tion and hybridisation were other biological processes requiring definition, so that a more sophisticated science of human races could begin to emerge at the turn of the century. The impact of the new natural sciences is seen clearly in the work of the two British scientists writing on race with whom this book starts. James Cowles Prichard's goal in 1808, when he first addressed systematically, and in one text, the long series of questions about human races that were to dominate British racial science for much of the nineteenth century, was to reassert the traditional Christian view of the unity of the different races of mankind. Though the terms of the debate had already been set by decades of controversy in Europe about slavery, abolition, and the nature of the African and the Indian in the New World, the manner with which Prichard proposed to deal with issues was new XIV Introduction: Science, Race and History to Britain. Not for him the vague speculations of the past, the un• warranted assertions, or half-formulated theories. Biological analogies, comparative and comparative linguistics were to be his tools. Prichard indicated his sense of the novelty of his approach to race, and his place in a new tradition of racial science, by associating himself in his work with the writings of the great German anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. A few years later, the second major figure of British racial science, Sir William Lawrence, was even more emphatic. Questions of race were to be answered not by a priori reasoning, nor by appeal to the - though neither methods would in fact disappear from racial science - but by the methods of the modern natural sciences. 'I design ... ,' wrote Lawrence in 1822, 'to consider man as an object of .... "0 Human variability was to be approached not only by the eighteenth-century methods of mor• phology and classification, but by the new nineteenth-century biological methods of histology, functional analysis and the study of internal organisation. By these methods, Prichard and Lawrence hoped to transcend the limits of older, naturalistic and political debates about race and establish a new, internally consistent, self-referential tradition of investigation and argu• mentation within science. This tradition of racial studies did not, of course, grow up untouched by contemporary questions and concerns. On the con• trary, as 1 have remarked, the questions were most urgent and specific. Did science show that man was everywhere alike anatomically? Were all human crosses equally fertile? Could men live in all climates? What did animal studies suggest about the process of 'degeneration' in the human species? Were there bio• logical limits to change in human beings analogous to the limits found in animals, .and if so, how did this information affect the debate about the destiny of the inferior races? All of these questions formed part of racial science. A second assumption of this book is, indeed, that factors tradi• tionally thought of as lying somehow 'outside' science in fact entered decisively into the making of racial science, as constituent elements of that science." Scientists who studied race in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not isolated then, any more than they are today, in a scientific 'republic' of their own, but were participants in the larger society in which they lived and worked. They inherited from this larger society distinct Introduction: Science, Race and History xv

social, philosophical, metaphysical, theological, political and aesthetic , as well as scientific ones. As a consequence, ideas about the nature of blackness, the social order, natural and social hierarchies, change, progress and purpose unconsciously shaped the way scientists defined scientific problems and the scientific theories they put forward to explain them. Ideological issues, broadly understood, were embedded in scientific argu• ment. And, in fact, throughout the history of racial science we en• counter the impact on scientific arguments of strong if subtle convictions about the different moral, intellectual and physical worth of different human groups. We find that evidence, often sketchy and incomplete, was unconsciously manipulated to fit preconceived notions. 12 As a result, an objective assessment about human variation was prevented by practices and procedures em• bedded in science itself. But if negative images and racial were not, and could not be, separated from the scientific study of human races, the focus of this book is nonetheless not on racism per se, nor on slavery, nor Empire. As an intellectual strategy, the question of how racism in the British colonies, or national tensions in Europe, or class antagonisms within Britain, affected the scientific study of human differences is dealt with only indirectly, through the medium of scientific works themselves. Here I am in agreement with the historian of anthropology, George W. Stocking, Jr., that trying to correlate specific scientific arguments about race with events in the history of racism, or imperialism too often results in histories that are vague and do an injustice to the complexities of the scientific issues involved, as they were per• ceived by the scientists. 13 Though scientists were people of their times, their scientific ideas gained weight in the scientific community precisely because they were based on the ideas and methods of the sciences of the day, and were expressed in the re• cognised language and forms of science. Social and political factors, such as the existence of black slavery in the Western world, or race relations in the British Empire, where the Euro• pean ruled the non-European, sometimes with genuine care but always with an ineffable sense of his own mental, moral and even physical superiority, did not determine directly the specific form scientific arguments took about race. These arguments were in• stead derived from the procedures and content of the sciences XVI Introduction: Science, Race and History themselves. As we have already noted, comparative anatomy, physiology, environmentalism and were the sources from which scientists drew directly for their thoughts on race and out of which they constructed their theories. Race science, in brief, had a history and coherence of its own to its practitioners. To understand the history of race science, we must explore that history and that coherence, and reconstruct the internal logic of scientific arguments about race as it appeared to scientists at the time. The focus of the book is therefore on the major stages in the development of a scientific on race. A third assumption is in effect a corollary of the last. I assume that though the connection between racism and science is in• escapable, the story of scientific racism is not merely a story of ''. Bad science, perhaps, but not pseudoscience.14 I spend relatively little time contrasting the 'odd', 'peculiar' ideas of the past with the 'unpeculiar' or 'correct' ideas of the present. In the first place, modern ideas about race are not themselves un• problematical. In the second place, though many of the scientists who studied race in the past were indeed guilty of bias in the collection and interpretation of their data, of failing to consider contrary evidence, and of making hasty or facile generalisations, few of them knowingly broke the accepted canons of scientific procedure of their day. Most of them were not consciously racist. Many were instead people of humane outlook, opponents of slavery, decent individuals who would have been shocked by any charge that they were .. Their work is on the whole not filled with race hatred. In fact, what makes the history of race science so interesting is that so many of the outstanding scientists of the past believed that biological races were the key to the most pressing problems of the day - the future of the , the fate of the European in the tropics, the extinction of peoples, the role of Britain in Europe. The scientists who gave scientific racism its credibility and respectability were often first-rate scientists struggling to understand what appeared to them to be deeply puzzling problems of biology and human society. To dismiss their work as merely 'pseudoscientific' would mean missing an opportunity to explore something important about the nature of scientific inquiry itself. Another decision has influenced the character of this book. In describing the career of scientific racism I have not tried to define the word 'race' for the reader at the outset, or introduce modern Introduction: Science, Race and History XVll scientific definitions of the term. The word 'race' was given a great variety of meanings in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was used to refer to cultural, religious, national, linguistic, ethnic and geographical groups of human beings. At one time or another, the 'Jews', the '', the 'Irish', the '', the 'Hottentots', the 'Border-Scots', the 'Chinese', the 'Anglo-Saxons', the 'Europeans', the 'Mediterraneans', the 'Teutons', the '', and the 'Spanish Americans' were all 'races' according to scientists. To direct my attention to one parti• cular usage of the word would mean ignoring most of what was understood to comprise the scientific literature on the subject. Even today scientists are not agreed on the meaning or usefulness of the term. Some argue that scientific discussions can be carried on without it - that everything needed to be conveyed about human variation can be done without introducing a term fraught with political significance and negative associations. Other scientists insist, on the contrary, that the word 'race' has a very concrete and real meaning and therefore a place in science. 15 My own view of the meaning or meaninglessness of the word 'race' in science will emerge as I tell the story of the science of racial dif• ferences. As an historical strategy, however, I have found it best to take the word to mean whatever scientists have decided it to mean. The intent has been to explore images of race in science, rather than to test past ideas against present ones or present 'reality' . A few other points are perhaps worth making in this introduc• tion to the history of scientific racism in Britain. First is the quality of abstraction scientists introduced into discussions of race. The goal of science was to extract regularities from varia• tion in nature, and to discover the laws behind variation. The model for the human sciences was Newtonian science, or perhaps the geological sciences, which had undergone their own 'revolu• tion' between 1770 and 1840. Travellers who visited Africa or the New World in the eighteenth century knew at first hand the range of variation in the colour, physical structure, languages and customs of the various people they encountered. The tendency in science was, however, to abstract general notions from the mass of information, ideas and suggestions about human groups collected by explorers - to transform travel litera• ture into scientific text. But such a procedure involved consider• able risks when it came to the subject of human races, where the xviii Introduction: Science, Race and Hz'story full extent of human variation - mental, moral, physical, social, in• stitutional and political - was hard always to know and to keep in mind. Only too often an abstracted 'Negro' or '', with one kind of physical form, language or customs, would be made to stand as an image of all 'Africans', and to stand comparison with an abstracted and idealised European, a 'Newton', for example. Such a reduction of human experience and variation to abstract formulas did a tremendous disservice to reality, yet ab• straction seemed to be the proper procedure of science. Closely related to abstraction was the typological orientation scientists brought to their studies of race. To the typologist, every individual human being belonged in some way or another to an undying essence or type. However disguised or hidden the individual's membership in the type might be, the scientists expected to be able to see behind the individual to the type to which he belonged. The result was to give a 'mental abstraction an independent reality', to make real or 'reify' the idea of racial type when in fact the type was a social construct which scientists then treated as though it were in fact 'in nature' .16 From this typological conception of race flowed the scientists' preoccupation with measurement and quantification, especially measurement of the skull. As I show in this book, millions of peoples had their heads and limbs measured in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the name of racial science. Sometimes measurements on one skull alone numbered in the hundreds. Other scientists introduced curious mathematical 'formulas' into racial science, such as the British scientist 's 'index of nigrescence', a quasi-algebraic equation ostensibly measuring precisely the darkness of the skinY Most of these numbers and measurements have now been forgotten, since scientists were not agreed on how to standardise their measurements, nor how to define the 'types' involved. The British genetical scientist, Lance• lot Hogben, who in the 1920s became one of the outstanding critics of racial science, remarked on the 'stupendous persistence in fruitless and trivial exploits of repetitive mensuration' in racial science. IS The most widely used object for mensuration was the skull, since it housed the brain, and since mental differences between racial types were taken to be the most important. By the end of the century, the skull had become the arbiter of all things racial. Not until the twentieth century was it realised that the skull shape was not a stable entity, that skull size did not measure Introduction: Science, Race and History XIX

mental capacity, and that the vast effort at mensuration had come to almost nought. But for most of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, to be a race scientist meant to a large extent to be a measurer, a student of the skull, and to dwell in museums. The decision to restrict my attention in the book to the history of the science of race in Britain is justified by a number of con• siderations. First is the fact that, compared to American race science, British race science has been relatively neglected. 19 Certainly no comprehensive account of the science of race in Britain from its origins in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, until its demise after the Second World War, yet exists. Yet American racial science was largely derivative of British science. Many of the scientific theories shaping the study of race originated, and had their major development, in Britain. This was true, for instance, of Darwinian evolution, and of eugenics. Second, the British theological, political and philo• sophical traditions shaping race science were in many respects different from those on the Continent and in America. Religion played a larger role in scientific matters in general in Britain, for example, than in France; religious scruples about the unity of man and man's place in nature in particular had greater weight in scientific arguments about race in Britain than they did on the Continent. These different traditions gave a particular stamp to the racial debate in science in Britain. They gave racial science a national character which warrants study. Within British science I have chosen to study the main figures in science rather than the minor ones. Since racism was a 'scavenger ideology', to use George Mosse's useful phrase, capable of feeding on whatever materials lay at hand, almost wherever one looks in science in the past, whether in medicine, embryo• logy, paleontology or psychology, one finds racial prejudice.20 I have not entirely ignored these variations on the racial theme, but have concentrated on the major scientists in Britain who directly or indirectly shaped racial studies - scientists such as James Cowles Prichard, William Lawrence, Knox, , Alfred Russel Wallace, , John Beddoe, Alfred Keane, , , and Lancelot Hogben. The word 'science' in the title of the book should be taken to refer primarily to the natural rather than the social sciences, for though the social scientists eagerly joined in xx Introductt'on: Set'ence, Race and History the search for data that would describe and explain racial dif• ferences, it was the claims of the natural scientists - the physical anthropologists, the comparative anatonists, the paleontologists, and the students of heredity - that provided the most important and seemingly 'solid' basis for scientific racism. The goal of the book has been to introduce to the reader in an accessible form some of the major ideas scientists had about race in the past, and to explore the cogency their ideas and theories had for them. In a sense the book is an act of synthesis; I have deliberately avoided dwelling on disputes of interest mainly to academic specialists. The desire has been to write a social history of ideas, not only a straightforward intellectual history of the idea of race in the natural sciences in Britain. My aim was also to be comprehensive, even though I am fully aware that each chapter of the book could be a book in itself. But I thought the story of scientific racism deserved to be told as a whole. In writing the history of scientific racism, I have been led to one major conclusion that should be stated here. This conclusion is that race science, although undergoing many changes in the course of its history, nevertheless is best understood not in terms of changing stages, but in terms of an underlying continuity. The fundamental conceptions in racial science, as they were elabo• rated in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, proved extraordinarily resilient and durable. These conceptions in fact persisted relatively undisturbed for well over a hundred years, from about 1850 until 1950, in the face, moreover, of unprece• dented changes in the natural sciences themselves in the same period. So 'natural', deep, and fixed did the differences between human races seem to scientists, and so distinct their moral, intellectual and physical value, that the scientists' view of human races served to structure the very reception they gave to novel scientific theories and to influence the interpretation they put upon new empirical data about mankind. Racial conceptions in science served as 'symbolic generalisations', allowing for 'shared expectations and judgments' about human diversity, and pre• venting racial scientists from absorbing the revolutionary import of new scientific theories. 21 The scientists' deepest commitment seems to have been to the notion that the social and cultural dif• ferences observed between peoples should be understood as realities of nature. To a large extent, the history of racial science is a history of a series of acommodations of the sciences to the Introduction: Science, Race and History XXI

demands of deeply held convictions about the 'naturalness' of the inequalities between human races. My intention in this book has been to point out the deeper con• tinuities found in racial science underlying discontinuities and change on the surface. In a sense, then, I am reversing a common interest of historians, especially historians of science, in revolu• tionary change. My concern instead is with the persistence of a set of ideas over time. The purpose of the book has been to explore this persistence and continuity as a problem in history and in the sociology of knowledge.

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