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Race, Empire, and Biology Before Darwinism1 Sujit Sivasundaram

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Race, Empire, and Biology Before Darwinism1 Sujit Sivasundaram chapter five Race, empire, and biology before Darwinism1 Sujit Sivasundaram n 26 November 1818, about a mile away from the temple that is said Oto house Buddha’s tooth, in the highlands of present-day Sri Lanka, at a site that became known as “Hangman’s Hill,” two chiefs were executed by their British colonial overlords.2 Before being executed, one of them, Kap- pitipola, washed his face and hands and begged to be left for a short time to perform religious observances. From within the folds of the cloth wrapped around his loins, he took out a small Buddhist prayer book. He was still reciting the Nine Attributes of the Buddha in Pali, the formal language of Buddhist scripture when his neck was struck with a sharp sword. “At that moment he breathed out the word Arahaan, one of the names of Boodhoo. A second stroke deprived him of life, and he fell to the ground a corpse. His head being separated from his body, it was, according to Kandyan custom, placed on his breast.”3 Henry Marshall (1775–1851), who was later hailed as the father of medical statistics, was at this time serving as a military sur- geon in Ceylon. The two chiefs’ skulls fell into Marshall’s hands. Eventually, Kappitipola’s skull made the long journey to Scotland, and was presented by Marshall to the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh. Phrenology was by all accounts—even at the height of its amazing popu- larity—a controversial science. It asserted that the brain was the organ of the mind, and that the brain was composed of a set of organs which were spread across the head. This meant that temperament could be read off the skull.4 Phrenology was founded out of the work of the Austrian race, empire, and biology before darwinism 115 anatomist Johann Franz Gall in 1795, and then popularized by others who made their name from phrenology, such as Johann Spurzheim and George Combe. Combe’s text The Constitution of Man (1828) was one of the most widely read books of science in the early nineteenth century. The September 1832 issue of The Phrenological Journal and Monthly Miscellany carried an article entitled “On the Character and Cerebral De- velopment of the Inhabitants of Ceylon.” By examining nineteen skulls from Ceylon, including that of Kappitipola, this article urged a typology of races, differentiating aborigines and naturalized foreigners on the island. The article asserted that the race of the “Cingalese” had generally “well filled up” heads in the region of Benevolence and Veneration, which was unsurprising given their devotion to Buddhism. The great size of the organ of Cautiousness was explained by the terror in which the Cingalese held demons and devils. The separation of Sinhalese and “Malabars,” later termed Tamils, became entrenched in the racial classification of colonial Sri Lanka and continues to plague the country. Yet the fate of Kappitipo- la’s skull shows that this racial divide did not emerge merely from colonial policies or indigenous ideologies; it was interlocked with practices of mea- surement and collection, which were scientific. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when science became rec- ognizably modern and new scientific disciplines such as phrenology were arising out of the former natural history, race and science were bedfel- lows. This chapter aims to unravel the complicated story of how this came about. The emergence of a science of race is sometimes mistakenly dated to the middle of the nineteenth century and aligned with the spread of Darwinism across the imperial realms. Because the sciences led to an identification of racial and national types they were an important part of the framework that upheld empire, both at home, amongst the populace in Europe, and abroad, amongst those who found themselves governing the colonies. Biology neutralized the question of whether empire was moral, by showing how races and peoples could be “improved,” and so a justi- fication was provided for rule by the supposedly superior colonizers. At the same time, empire provided the raw materials for science and helped to define the stereotypes. Kappitipola’s skull would never have arrived in Edinburgh but for British colonization in Ceylon. These fundamental syn- ergies between race and empire suggest that the study of the human body was vital to European expansion from the very start. To make sense of the interlinking of science, race, and empire, it is important to begin not with the high point of modern empires, after the 116 sujit sivasundaram—chapter five middle of the nineteenth century, but with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The early modern period provides an important context for the science of race; there were continuities throughout this long period rather than intermittent revolutions in thought. This does not mean that the sci- ence of race was uncontested: for its hegemony should not be assumed in any historical period. It is also crucial to keep view of developments in both Europe and the colonies. Race was made into a scientific concept out of new intercon- nections in thinking across a newly emerging world. The first part of this chapter concentrates on what might be called the Atlantic world of Eu- rope, America, and to a lesser extent the Caribbean and West Africa; the second part considers the greater Indian Ocean, stretching from the South Pacific to South Asia. Today biology is a global discipline with practition- ers everywhere. From one perspective, this chapter shows how and why biology was globalized. The Atlantic triangle The study of race in the early modern period was first and foremost a theo- logical enterprise. Theologians interpreting the Bible considered scrip- tural geography, natural history, and geology, and sought to encompass the origins of newly discovered peoples within their explanations. Seven- teenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant ethnologists hoped to interpret the differences between people in relation to such biblical events as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Flood, and the confusion of human language at the Tower of Babel. They believed that their study of people would lead them to an intricate set of family relationships, which could be traced back to the original man and woman in the Genesis story.5 Central to the orthodox theological view was a com- mitment to what was termed monogenesis, the belief in a singular creation of human beings. But from the intellectual margins there was some sparring: the French- man Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) created an uproar after publishing, in Latin, his Prae-Adamitae (1655), which was translated into English as Men Before Adam (1656). Peyrère held that there were two creations, first that of the Gentiles, and then that of Adam, the father of the Jews. The ques- tion of whether there was a singular creation or multiple creations was crucial to the character of the biology of race in the nineteenth century. race, empire, and biology before darwinism 117 Though Peyrère’s book was publicly burnt in Paris by the Parlement, its legacy remained. It was reprinted eight times before 1709. Another ancient theory that came to have an important bearing on race biology in the nineteenth century was that of the Great Chain of Being. According to this scale, all of the created realms could be organized, rang- ing from rocks, to trees, to animals, humans, angels, and then the deity. In addition to gradation, the Great Chain of Being highlighted the plenitude of nature, and its inherent unity, for higher organisms were shown to be re- lated to those below.6 It was with this view of interrelation that the Swedish natural historian Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), who established a system of bo- tanical nomenclature, wrote: “I cannot discover the difference between man and the orangoutang, although all my attention was brought to bear on this point.”7 Linneaus combined the concept of the Great Chain of Being with the idea of a divine economy of nature, where nature awaited improvement by human intervention, for instance by way of acclimatization. Georges- Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), the author of the voluminous Histoire naturelle (1749–89), which eventually ran into more than forty vol- umes, also placed humans and animals in the same system of natural history (see Roe, Chapter 2, this volume). The Great Chain of Being was certainly a pliable idea, and its tidiness lent support to Christian views of origin. Yet in the eighteenth century, it was perceived to be a threat to monogenist under- standings because of the way it placed humans right next to beasts. One of the detractors from this scale, the German doctor and physi- ologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) insisted on a separate taxonomic category for humans in his book On the Natural Variety of Man, first published in1776 .8 Blumenbach held that human variety was explain- able by climate, modes of life, and upbringing. But Blumenbach’s scheme still took on the nature of a hierarchy and so harped back to the Great Chain of Being. Indeed, it was he who invented the term “Caucasian” because he thought that the people living near the Caucasus Mountains, where Noah’s Ark may have landed, possessed “really the most beautiful form of the skull.” He also held that white was the “primitive” or original color of humanity.9 The Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper (1722–89) sought to rebut the Great Chain of Being but in the end inadvertently lent support to its claims. Camper was renowned for his charts of skulls, and was the holder of a pro- fessorial chair at Groningen by 1763.
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