A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (The Cultural Histories Series) 9781350067530, 9781350067578, 1350067539

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Praise for A Cultural History of Race
General Editor’s Preface Marius Turda
Introduction Marina B. Mogilner
1 Definitions and Representations of Race Roland Cvetkovski
2 Race, Environment, Culture Emily Kern
3 Race and Religion Marwa Elshakry
4 Race and Science Projit Bihari Mukharji
5 Race and Politics Sergey Glebov
6 Race and Ethnicity Richard McMahon
7 Race and Gender Maria Sophia Quine
8 Race and Sexuality Myrna Perez Sheldon
9 Anti-Race Lynn M. Hudson
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE VOLUME 5

A Cultural History of Race General Editor: Marius Turda Volume 1 A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity Edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey Volume 2 A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages Edited by Thomas Hahn Volume 3 A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age Edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim Volume 4 A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment Edited by Nicholas Hudson Volume 5 A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and the Nation State Edited by Marina B. Mogilner Volume 6 A Cultural History of Race in the Modern and Genomic Age Edited by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE AND THE NATION STATE VOLUME 5

Edited by Marina B. Mogilner

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 Marina B. Mogilner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover image: The African Native Choir, 1891. © Michael Graham-Stewart / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The editor and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mogilner, Marina, editor. Title: A cultural history of race in the age of empire and nation state / edited by Marina B. Mogilner. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Cultural histories A cultural history of race ; volume 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021017344 | ISBN 9781350067530 (hardback)  Subjects: LCSH: Race–History–18th century | Race–History–19th century. | Race–History–20th century. Classification: LCC HT1507 .C858 2021 | DDC 305.8009/034–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017344 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6753-0 Set: 978-1-3500-6757-8 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist

of

P raise

I llustrations 

for

A C ultural H istory

vi of

R ace 

G eneral E ditor ’ s P reface Marius Turda Introduction Marina B. Mogilner

ix xi

1

1 Definitions and Representations of Race Roland Cvetkovski

19

2 Race, Environment, Culture Emily Kern

37

3 Race and Religion Marwa Elshakry

57

4 Race and Science Projit Bihari Mukharji

75

5 Race and Politics Sergey Glebov

93

6 Race and Ethnicity Richard McMahon

111

7 Race and Gender Maria Sophia Quine

127

8 Race and Sexuality Myrna Perez Sheldon

149

9 Anti-Race Lynn M. Hudson

165

N otes 

181

B ibliography 

183

N otes

213

I ndex 

on

C ontributors 

215

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 Veiled woman, Kajar soldier, warrior, peasant. Drawing by Jules Laurens from ‘Journey in Persia’ in Arthur de Gobineau, Journal of Geography, Travel and Costumes

5

0.2 Exhibition of Akka dwarves at the German geographical congress in Stuttgart, Germany, c. 1871

6

0.3 Illustration of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, 1815

7

0.4 Anthropometric system of Alphonse Bertillon. Comparative forms of the ear, Paris, 1894

9

0.5 Examples of physiognomy of criminals, illustration from Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), L’uomo delinquente (Thug Man) 

13

0.6 Francis Galton’s First Anthropometic Laboratory, 1884–5

15

1.1 Anonymous, Casta painting containing complete set of sixteen casta combinations (racial classifications in Spanish colonies in the Americas), late eighteenth century

23

1.2 Five types of the human race. Based on the analysis of human skulls by the German physiologist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), late nineteenth century

25

1.3 Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, 1797

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1.4 ‘This is a White Man’s Government. We regard the Reconstruction Acts (so called) of Congress as usurpations, and unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.’ – Democratic Platform. Anti-reconstruction cartoon from Harper’s Weekly (5 September 1868)

33

1.5 ‘Better baby contest.’ Mothers and infants gather on the stoop of the Cathedral of St Paul for the ‘Better Baby Contest’ in the 1920s. Mrs A. J. Gillette, who sponsored the event, is pictured in the centre

35

2.1 ‘A Correct Map of the Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden or Paradise’, in Flavius Josephus, The Whole and Complete Works of Flavius Josephus, the Learned and Authentic Jewish Historian and Celebrated Warrior 

41

2.2 ‘Mammifères Pl. A, “Homo sapiens”’, in F. É. Guérin-Méneville and Georges Cuvier, Iconographie du règne animal de G. Cuvier: ou, Représentation d’après nature de l’une des espèces les plus et souvent non encore figures de chaque genre d’animaux, vol. 1

43

ILLUSTRATIONS

vii

2.3 Cover page, Indigenous Race of the Earth, 1857

47

2.4 Hypothetical sketch of the monophyletic origin and of the diffusion of the twelve varieties of men from Lemuria over the earth, 1876

53

3.1 Title page of Louis-Pierre-Eugène Sédillot’s Histoire des arabes (History of the Arabs), first published in 1854

60

3.2 The Book of Ingenious Devices, a large ‘Abbasid era illustrated work on mechanical devices, including automata, and published in 850 was increasingly referred to and creatively resuscitated in modern histories of the Arabs and of Islam

61

3.3 Ernest Renan

63

3.4 Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

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3.5 Jurji Zaydan

70

4.1 James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848)

79

4.2 ‘The Microscopic Structure of the Human Hair’ in Hermann Beigel, The Human Hair: Its Structure, Growth, Diseases and Their Treatment 

80

4.3 Franz Ignaz Pruner (1808–82)

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4.4 An old German manufactured scale for measuring hair colour at the Calcutta University’s Department of Anthropology. This was the first department of anthropology in the country

83

5.1 A Chino-Russian frontier post in Manchuria, Coolies entering Russian territory. Illustration for The Illustrated London News (1 April 1899)

96

5.2 To the events in China. An arms factory in Shanghai. Niva, 1900

103

5.3 Execution of foreigners during the Taiping Rebellion. Niva, 1900, N. 34

105

5.4 Chinese reading Taiping proclamations. Niva, 1900

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5.5 Chinese and Russian railroad authorities on Chinese eastern railroad, Qiqihar. Niva, 1900. N. 40

106

5.6 Russain railroad worker captured by the Chinese during the Taiping Rebellion. Niva, 1900

107

5.7 Training of Chinese troops near Shanghai. Niva, 1900

109

6.1 Typical ethnological map of Europe, illustrating the history and migrations of ancestor tribes, from Sophie Bryant, Celtic Ireland (London: K. Paul, Trench, 1889)

113

6.2 Typical ascriptions of European national races in mainstream late nineteenth-century race anthropology

115

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ILLUSTRATIONS

6.3 This map, from William Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, used place name evidence to emphasize the racially mixed character of Britain and Ireland

123

7.1 Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1866

131

7.2 Eyre Crowe, ‘Sketches in the Free and Slave States of America’, in The Illustrated London News (27 September 1856)

132

7.3 Eyre Crowe, The Slave Auction, Richmand, Virginia, 1861

133

7.4 Paolo Mantegazza

137

8.1 Venus de Milo, engraving by Lasinio from a drawing by Calendi, from Francesco Costantino Marmocchi, Raccolta di Viaggi (Travel Collection), vol. 3

152

8.2 Robert Knox

153

9.1 Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological researches based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history : illustrated by selections from the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by additional contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson

166

9.2 Atlanta washerwoman

171

9.3 The Birth of a Nation, 1915

175

9.4 Delilah Beasley

177

PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

‘The detailed, deep and comparative historicization of racial thinking is a very much needed and timely project: much writing about race is temporally and geographically focused and, in its wide-ranging ambitions, this Cultural History of Race represents a very welcome alternative. The use of a common chapter structure throughout the six volumes is a very valuable feature, which makes it easy for readers to follow particular themes, while the multidisciplinary approach is also highly attractive when dealing with a subject as mercurial as race.’ Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK ‘Learning from the past is a necessary act of cultural advancement and A Cultural History of Race, a project of sustained historical inquiry from Antiquity to the present, makes a muchneeded and exquisitely timely contribution. It argues for rigor and depth of exploration through nine recurring categories of inquiry across the six volumes and challenges the notion of a restrictive timeline of the ‘history of race’ as the product of modernity. It transcends temporal and geographic limits while expanding our understanding of the variant and shifting terminologies of race. As a result, readers will appreciate the breadth of material and value highly the intellectual diversity of the project’s multidisciplinary approach.’ Ian Smith, Richard and Joan Sell Professor of the Humanities, Lafayette College, USA ‘Marius Turda, the eminent cultural historian of science and racialization is the general editor for this foundational six-volume study attuned to this ‘moment of global reckoning’ sparked by #BlackLivesMatter and Indigenous justice movements. This is an outstanding critical, nuanced, useful, anti-racist cartography from European ‘Antiquity’ through the ‘Renaissance,’ into colonial ‘Empire’ formations and state eugenics practices through the racially-coded high tech, big data ‘Genomic Age.’ Epic and often brilliant, we become painfully aware of how narrow nationalist and nation-bounded scholarship are so painfully limited in contrast to this masterful, satellite counter mapping. Yes, racism and contesting this degeneration of humans and the natural world is a deeply embedded history and of the moment, it’s relational and intersectional, and it has infected all transregional cultural discourses. A must for all academic and public libraries - five stars!’ John Kuo Wei Tchen, Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities, Rutgers-Newark University, USA ‘In a contemporary moment afflicted by concocted culture wars that are also proxy race wars, this important collection of essays does what is urgently needed - by explicating the concept of race in a historical frame. Between them, these volumes show how concepts of ‘race’ and ‘an impressive racial edifice’ emerged in the West over several centuries, and became such a powerful political, scientific and cultural force. An important contribution to the historical literacy that is needed if we are to challenge race and racism effectively.’ Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

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PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

‘A Cultural History of Race is an admirably ambitious survey of the cultural landscape of race and racism. Analysing the concept of race all the way from antiquity, and drawing in research from every relevant discipline, it paints a story of how difficult it has been for humans to grapple with the idea of human difference. Clarifying and comprehensive, it is sure to become necessary reading for every scholar who wants to understand what race means. It couldn’t have more contemporary relevance either. Truly outstanding.’ Angela Saini, Author of Superior: The Return of Race Science (2021) ‘A Cultural History of Race stands on a league of its own within the broad domain of race studies. This splendid, thoughtful array of essays by scholars in a truly diverse number of fields offers an unprecedented, kaleidoscopic panorama of the myriad permutations of race and racism in the West – from Greek and Roman antiquity all the way to the ages of the Genome and Black Lives Matter. The contributors to this collection exemplify just how fresh and engaging historical insight is when we as scholars remain fully engaged with the pressing issues of our own time. As a whole, this collection of essays forcefully delivers important lessons for a broad readership: first, race, racism and human rights advocacy itself are transhistorical phenomena reaching back to the foundational moments of Western civilization. Second, any truly critical history of race and racism requires an honest scrutiny of the manner in which our own fields of knowledge have been shaped by troubled legacies. And, most urgently, the identification of multiple forms of stigmatization, discrimination and persecution in our times – not to mention the quest for social justice – can hugely benefit from a rich reckoning of the multiplicity of  situated  forces that have shaped overt and systemic racism to this day.  A Cultural History of Race will remain obligatory reference for generations of readers.’ Nicolás Wey Gómez, author of The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (2008) ‘In this moment of global racial reckoning, there is a tectonic shift underway. As a more structural, systemic, and historical analysis of race and racialization is emerging, A Cultural History of Race, will be an important accelerant to this process. The pivot from a focus on identity towards one that more critically considers processes and patterns of identification is a process, one that takes time, sustained engagement and a nuanced understanding of the past and its relationship to the present. A Cultural History of Race is just such a text. Its recent completion will be a gift to scholars, activists, the human rights community, and others invested in a more just future, one that doesn’t posit certain people or for that matter species as disposable; there is no such thing! The time has come for us to embrace this reality and work towards a world in which this eliminationist ideology no longer governs our political, social, economic or philosophical spaces. A Cultural History of Race will prove to be a trusted companion and a useful tool for the long journey ahead and will certainly stake a claim to being a cornerstone text for the pivot that is underway.’ Milton Reynolds, Educator, Author, Diversity Equity Inclusion Practitioner, Critical Race Theorist

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE MARIUS TURDA

A Cultural History of Race documents the long history of the concept of race from antiquity to the present day. In the six volumes collected here, scholars from a range of academic disciplines engage not only with the historical, cultural and philosophical realities of race but also with its aesthetics, literary functions and representations. To capture the elasticity of race as a concept, one needs to travel widely, across historical periods and geographical locations, to examine texts and images, cutting through the multilayered fabric of culture, science and politics. Viewed on a broad timescale, the densely textured content of the history of race is approached intersectionally, with an understanding of race’s complex relationship with other concepts such as gender, religion, class and nation. Given these vast territories of knowledge, then, to harmonize so many different aspects of the history of race is not an easy task. Besides mediating between the localized traditions of race and their transnational framework, A Cultural History of Race highlights entanglements, disruptions and mutations. At the same time, various national traditions are examined from a global perspective, and, thus, their purported uniqueness is challenged. It is important to understand the long history of race, not only through references to past events but also through the prism of current systemic racism. Engaging with the legacy of slavery, empire, colonialism and genocide, and not just with the overall historical trajectory of race, is another important aspect of this collective work. The concept of race cannot be decoupled from the very idioms that had been used throughout history to describe and classify humans, nor can it be expunged from projects of domination, subjugation and oppression. These projects were politically motivated, state sanctioned and often blessed by scholars and scientists. As adherence to a racial worldview became more explicit and formalized in culture, science and politics, however, its predatory ability widened. Scholars, politicians, artists, philosophers and poets were stirred by it. They created an impressive racial edifice that has, alas, endured until the twenty-first century. A Cultural History of Race offers critical perspectives on the traditional paradigms of thinking about the concept. It reflects as much shifting methodologies in the scholarship as the need to engage publicly with the normative saliency of race in the production of various forms of knowledge. Yet this is not just another cultural history of race but a decidedly analytical attempt to dislodge race from the intellectual pre-eminence it had occupied for centuries, and to disclose racial conceptions, beliefs, values and practices that had been used throughout history to make distinctions among groups of peoples on the basis of the colour of their skin and/or their intellectual abilities. The concept of race manifested itself in different ways at different times, but it always had supporters as well as detractors. Acceptance of race was not always universal. It was often met with suspicion and occasionally rejected. Anti-race thinking occurred in numerous spheres, including but not limited to religion and science.

xii

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

A considerable amount of literature exists on the history of race, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But race had infiltrated major traditions of cultural, religious and philosophical reflection about human diversity already in antiquity. Elements of this discussion survived in the medieval and early modern periods, and new ones were added, particularly as colonial and imperial projects began to emerge in Europe. During the Renaissance and Reformation, and then more forcefully during the Enlightenment, race became a powerful concept, used not just to describe physical features of peoples but also to explain cultural achievements and behavioural attitudes. The subjugation and exploitation of non-European peoples, alongside slavery and extermination of Indigenous populations, only enhanced the power of race in defining white Europeans and their global expansion and dominance. During the nineteenth century and, especially, during the twentieth, horrendous atrocities, most notably the Holocaust, discredited the concept of race and eroded its tentacular grip on social and political discourse and realities. Yet, race survived into the early twenty-first century, continuing to impact the lives of millions with reference to their biological attributes, cultural traditions and historical experiences. Although developments in human genetics, particularly in the second part of the twentieth century, completely dismantled any pretention of scientific respectability appropriated by racists, current debates in genomics reveal how race continues to impact our scientifically informed worldview. Incredibly, the completion of the Human Genome Project, for example, even spurred attempts to define a concept of race that is scientifically credible. A Cultural History of Race is timely. It provides not only academic guidance but, equally important, a nuanced and innovative critique of race and racism as well. These six volumes are informed by research and academic reflection and, equally, by lived experience. This is a critical moment to review how myriad assumptions and attitudes rooted in the history of race and its toxic ideology continue to affect our world in ways both obvious and hidden. To understand the past and present of race in all its different representations is essential in order to name and remove its symbols of discrimination, injustice, abuse and violence against Black, Indigenous and other peoples of colour. Any work on the history of race must unambiguously expose the extraordinary damage caused by racist thinking and practice. While not exhaustive, A Cultural History of Race nevertheless provides numerous historical examples and options of interpretation for anyone who wants to engage, in an accessible way, with problems of race and racism characterizing the world today. Both together and separately, these volumes reassess historical traditions, scientific paradigms and political agendas put forward in the name of race. Equally important, the volumes’ insights and clarity are accompanied by incisiveness and commitment to anti-racist scholarship. The overall aim is to strike a balance between scholarly detachment, empathy and direct participation in the current conversations about decolonization, whiteness, anti-racism and Black Lives Matter. In the twenty-first century, the assumption is that race as a meaningful category of analysis has been de-ritualized and de-politicized. The truth is that race continues to lend itself to theories of social, cultural and political inequality. Combined with an aggressive rhetoric of national protectionism and ethnicity, race continues to frame regional, national and international issues around immigration, social justice and gender equality.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

xiii

Wide in scope and detailed in analysis, A Cultural History of Race is therefore strongly embedded in current conversations about race and racism. We are in a moment of global reckoning. Presidents are banned from social media platforms, statues are being torn down, names of university buildings are being changed, museums are being decolonized and stolen artefacts are returned to their countries of origin. Continued scholarly engagement with anti-racist activism is critical, not just for understanding the decisions being made today but to help preserve the lessons learnt for future generations.

xiv

Introduction MARINA B. MOGILNER

This volume covers the period of ‘the long nineteenth century’ in its most generous rendering, and, as if further underscoring the cultural conditioning of any historical chronology, it describes the long nineteenth century as the ‘age of empire and nation state’. In their magisterial volume Empires in World History, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, the two premier scholars of imperial formations, have emphasized exactly this power of historians to frame narratives and perceptions of the past. Pointing to the persistent tendency to frame past experiences through national lenses, they remind us that ‘the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old’, whereas ‘throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not pretend to represent a single people’ (Burbank and Cooper 2010: 1). Indeed, empires as regimes of differentiated governance over diverse societies had dominated the world’s political landscape well before 1760, and they certainly did not disappear by 1920. From this perspective, ‘the age of empire and nation state’ in the title of the present volume should be taken not as a literal diagnosis but as a reference to a certain analytical framework that aspires to capture the process of formation of complex societal structures and their dynamic transformation in response to the emerging idea of national groupness and nation state. The proliferation of racial thinking and racialized culture was one of the most obvious features of this transformative long nineteenth century. Moreover, the entire experience of this century suggests that the concept of race was immanent to the very situation of societal transformation on a global scale. ‘Race’ emerged as a dominant epistemology in the context of the conflicting entanglement of empire and nation as two alternative but quite compatible forms of social imaginary. It penetrated all spheres of life under the novel conditions of the emerging mass culture and mass society and with the sanction of anthropocentric and positivistic science. Allegedly primeval and parasocial, ‘race’ was seen as a uniquely stable constant in a society in flux amid transforming institutions, economies and political regimes. Therefore, avoiding any structuralist simplifications, this volume looks at specific imperial, nationalizing and hybrid contexts framing the semantics and politics of race in the course of the long nineteenth century. In different parts of the globalizing world, various actors were applying their own notions of ‘race’ to others and to themselves, embracing it simultaneously as a language of othering and personal subjectivity. Consequently, the cultural history of race as told in this volume unfolds on many levels, in multiple loci and in different genres, thus reflecting the qualities of race as an omnipresent and all-embracing discourse of the time.

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE AND THE NATION STATE

THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY The ‘long nineteenth century’ paradigm is usually traced to the famous trilogy of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (1962), The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (1987). As a leading social historian of his time, Hobsbawm prioritized class, industrial development and imperialist exploitation over race as chief explanatory concepts. His first volume grounds the long nineteenth century in the French Revolution and Britain’s Industrial Revolution, thus laying the foundation for the two competing narratives developed in subsequent volumes. One is the narrative of the political struggle and transformative power of ideas. The other is the narrative of the material transformative and globalizing force of industrial capitalism. While not directly engaging race in these narratives, Hobsbawm set the scene for later generations of historians who recognized the importance of race thinking as a response to the problems produced by the synchronic processes of social differentiation, global integration and political democratization that he studied (a number of significant more recent works specifically focus on the transformative nature of the nineteenth century and the globality of its evolving modernity: Bayly 2004; Lieberman 2009; Osterhammel 2014). In this rapidly changing world of the long nineteenth century, the profound structural divides separating people, such as classes and nations (Hobsbawm 1990), were begetting truly global and universal scholarly interpretations and mobilizing ideologies that brought about unity on a different level. Moreover, in the emerging mass societies and developing sphere of mass politics, the need was especially pronounced for such universal and accessible narratives that offered a vision of fundamental social cohesion unaffected by deep social, economic, regional or gender inequalities. In the age of revolutions, capital and empire, as Hobsbawm described it, the sacral nature of power and privilege had been contested, and individuals and their political unions became the only true sources of political legitimacy and success in developmental competition. These modern political communities formed mass societies, as opposed to socially and culturally compartmentalized societies of the old regime. The local knowledge and culture of previously semi-isolated legal estates, regions and confessions were brought into the emerging common public sphere. As a result, all members of these new nationalizing societies had to deal with cultures, practices and knowledge that were foreign to them in one way or another. Under these circumstances, old mechanisms of communal control or references to some assumed traditions proved inefficient. New institutions as well as expert discourses that would be interiorized by members of the emerging mass societies were needed to construct and preserve the new social order, now extensively relying on self-policing and self-censorship of citizens. The pragmatic need to understand human nature in order to manage it and develop effective mechanisms of social control furthered a fundamental shift in sciences and humanities towards anthropocentric explanations. This shift in priorities coincided with and was fostered by the influx of new information and data, assembled in different parts of the exceedingly accessible world, and natural and social thinkers’ adoption of the narrative of steady development. The new rendering by eighteenth-century Enlightenment humanism of the old sophist dictum ‘Man is the measure of all things’ based itself on emerging positivist science and modern political theory, and in the most literary way. The generic ‘Man’, devoid of any social, demographic or psychological characteristics, could mean only a biological species. This species’ relation to ‘all things’ social and cultural could be measured quantitatively to explain the observable variations and inequalities

INTRODUCTION

3

of the long nineteenth century. Thus operationalized, the fundamental humanism of the period in conjunction with imperial or imperialist politics of hierarchical comparison brought about a new notion of race – a point of constellation of social and natural, individual and collective. Race was both a theoretical concept and a factor of daily body politics based on a seemingly intuitive categorization of differences. This notion could split or homogenize a society, for example, when used as a criterion of political participation (citizenship). It was employed in economic and cultural discourses, establishing civilizational hierarchies and justifying occupational or class inequalities. Politically, references to race could promote both radical social engineering and conservative policies. This semantic plasticity, broad practical applicability and a reputation for being a product of progressive humanist thinking explain the omnipresence and unique importance of the race concept during the long nineteenth century.

THE WORLD DEFAMILIARIZED The universal acceptance of race as a fundamental scientific category in the nineteenth century gave way, at least in Europe, to its equally unanimous discarding as a pseudoscience in the wake of Nazi atrocities. But it took the cultural turn in historical studies to make possible the comprehensive deconstruction of ‘race’ as an epiphenomenon of the more fundamental social imagination that dominated certain societies during a particular time period. Only with the cultural turn, that is, starting roughly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ‘histories that presumed the existence of social categories were contested by cultural critiques that focused on the construction and therefore deconstruction of those categories’ (Hunt 2014: 29). In the process, it was recognized that the deconstruction of racial discourses, often coded in gender, economic or cultural terms, can reveal some fundamental patterns of social thinking and interaction otherwise obscured to scholars of social theory and movements, legal thought and political institutions. Structural anthropologists were instrumental in bringing about this conceptual change by showing that kinship and race are not natural and self-evident, that their reality is enabled by social signifiers, such as ‘mother’, ‘father’ or ‘patriarch’, and by social orders based on taboos and regulations. Without being able to understand how the terms of kinship function as placeholders for categories of social, gender and political hierarchies, that is, without accepting that ‘the kinship system is a language’, scholars are left with nothing but the corporal realm of ‘bodies and pleasures’ (Levi-Strauss [1949] 1969; Dosse 1997: 23). Michel Foucault’s writings on sexuality were another major influence in developing this new approach to race as a discourse. And similar to sexuality, which was not just a discourse but also a practice of govermentality (Foucault [1976–84] 1979–92; Stoler 1995), ‘race’ had an important disciplinary function. A comprehensive discussion of the entanglement of race and sexuality is offered in this volume by Myrna Sheldon, who claims that ‘during the nineteenth century sexuality became a secular theory of race’. Scholars today tend to accept that the factor of race reveals itself in all the paradigmatic manifestations of the evolving and multidirectional global modernity of the long nineteenth century. As Projit Muharji notes in this volume, race ‘appears to be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time’. So, how do we write a cultural history of race as a distinct phenomenon, when it has become so ubiquitous that it blends in with modernity and hence disappears?

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE AND THE NATION STATE

The format of an edited volume allows different stories to be assembled into one complex and multifaceted narrative about race that represents various disciplinary and regional perspectives on race and combines specific case studies with theory-oriented interpretations. Such a complex, polyphonic and at the same time culture-specific narrative helps to connect race thinking to fundamental ‘defamiliarization’ of the world in the long nineteenth century as described by leading cultural historians, such as, for example, Carlo Ginzburg. In one of his classical essays, Ginzburg explicates a distinctive type of social imagination and analysis that proliferated widely in the second part of the nineteenth century and made race thinking truly universal (Ginzburg 2013: 87–113). It was based on the interpretation of clues, symptoms and signs, and reflected a sense of the world that had ceased to be predictable, coherent and familiar as a result of major social and cultural dislocations and revolutionary upheavals. In this regard, Ginzburg’s approach resonates with the work of another intellectual historian and premier theoretician of historical temporality, Reinhardt Koselleck, who sees in such defamiliarization the main feature of the long nineteenth century’s modernity. Koselleck calls the years between 1750 and 1850 ‘the saddle period’, during which ‘the old experience of time was denaturalized’ and the new horizon of the future has emerged, not having been directly determined by past experiences and knowledge. Progress acquired independent semantics and became an explanation of ‘the difference between the past so far and the coming future’ (Koselleck 2002a: 120), and new knowledge, ideas, concepts and contemporary experiences began to form horizons of expectations: ‘We need only refer to the two accompanying concepts of progress and development, both conceived for the first time as categories of universal history at the end of the eighteenth century’ (Koselleck 2002b: 165). Conspicuously, the infamous Aryan theory was formulated at the end of Koselleck’s ‘saddle period’. One of its originators, Arthur de Gobineau, chose race as a category capable of stabilizing if not arresting the unpredictable social evolution leading to the open-ended and hence threatening future (Turda and Quine 2019) (Figure 0.1). In his pessimistic Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–5), Gobineau hastened to ascribe the traits formerly associated with aristocratic exclusivity to the higher White race, which he endowed with beauty, force and supreme intelligence. The Aryan-German race in particular became the pinnacle of the white race’s perfection (Gobineau 1915). In the case of Aryanism, the defamiliarization of the old world revealed itself not only in the selective recoding of social privilege as race but also in the transcendence of any temporary societal arrangements and a focus on the imagined fundamental and ‘suprahistorical’ (Nietzsche) human condition and self-consciousness. The latter necessitated a global scale of hierarchal comparison of the human species. Roland Cvetkovski in this volume locates changes leading to this paradigmatic shift in three distinct historical contexts: that of colonial expansion ‘in which new horizons of experience were established’; in the field of natural science where Enlightenment naturalists ‘put man in a new coordinate system’; and in the arena of the social, destabilized by revolutionary transformations. All three provided foundational contexts for the long nineteenth century’s modernity, and all three were truly global. Sanjay Subrahmanyam captures this global conditioning of the paradigmatic shift towards new social imagination and scientific thinking particularly well in his description of modernity as ‘historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse

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FIGURE 0.1  Veiled woman, Kajar soldier, warrior, peasant. Drawing by Jules Laurens from ‘Journey in Persia’ in Arthur de Gobineau, Journal of Geography, Travel and Costumes (vol. 5, no. 24, 14 June 1866). © DEA/Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Getty Images.

phenomena’ (1998: 99–100). Race discourse can be imagined as such a point of contact, a key concept of the anthropocentric modernity that offered a new logic of social analysis and new ways of imagining and managing groupness through various encounters in different parts of the world.

THE SEMIOTICS OF BODY PHYSICAL AND BODY SOCIAL By the mid-nineteenth century, the industrial revolution had solidified a new status of science as practical knowledge that directly benefited individuals and society as a whole. The emerging type of mass-educated public that now flooded industrializing urban centres had never received any training in humanities – the privilege of old elites that was losing its rationale beyond the sphere of government service and academic careers. Readers of cheap press and popular literature and devotees of popular spectacles, including industrial and colonial exhibitions, in their everyday lives they shared cheap rented apartments, married late, lived away from their families and communal control, and often found themselves in legal grey zones, where encounters with the police were not rare. Through all these experiences, the low- and lower-middle-class public was becoming familiar with fragments of the new knowledge about the world and its practical applications. New discourses of sexuality and crime, domesticity and deviance, and exotic and normative

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were interiorized with various degrees of success both through learning and immediate, physical encounter with realities associated with these abstract notions. In the early nineteenth century, these people frequented freak shows and human zoos; in the second part of the century, industrial exhibitions and other public displays of civilizational otherness, scientifically organized and often endorsed by leading scientists, politicians and public activists (Burton 1983; MacKenzie 1984; Rydell 1984; Buzard, Childers and Gillooly 2007; Blanchard, Boetsch and Snoep 2011) (Figure 0.2).

FIGURE 0.2  Exhibition of Akka dwarves at the German geographical congress in Stuttgart, Germany, c. 1871. Woodcut. © Bildagentur-Online/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

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Historians single out one live exhibit in particular – the ‘Hottentot Venus’ or ‘Hottentot woman’ (Figure 0.3), known under the name of Saartjie Baartman, whose arrival in Europe (first in London, then in Paris) in 1810 marked a new stage of the popularization of racialized science. Though she was not the first person to be publicly exhibited, she ‘was the first to be an object at once of entertainment, media interest, “sexual fantasy,” and science’ (Boëtsch and Blanchard 2014: 191; emphasis in the original). Her body ‘served’ science even after her death in 1815, when it was dissected and disassembled into pieces (sexual organs, anus, brain and other anatomical parts were removed for study and preservation). Each part served as a sign of racial otherness, and the ‘Hottentot Venus’ as a type became a reference-specimen. Her story marks a break between the period when

FIGURE 0.3  Illustration of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, 1815. © Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis/Getty Images.

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exhibitions of exotic human objects were fewer, satisfied the tastes of a limited aristocratic public, and generated little scientific interest and mass response, and the period between 1840 and 1940 when these became incorporated into world’s fairs, museum exhibitions, circuses and theatre performances, and firmly associated with scientific narratives of racial difference, inequality and civilizational hierarchies. The change had occurred ‘both in Western countries (colonial powers and non-colonial powers alike), as well as in Japan and the U.S.’ (Boetsch and Blanchard 2014: 188). Leading nineteenth-century European anthropologists such as Rudolf Virchow and Johannes Ranke endorsed human exhibitions as having ‘general interests both from a scientific perspective and from a cultural historical perspective’ (Andreassen 2014: 123). Individual bodies in these settings represented not exotic oddities but entire cultures and peoples, and the racial and civilizational differences between them. E. P. Thompson (1974) famously characterized this culture and social disposition of the lower- and lower-middle-class public as ‘plebian’, using this notion not in a pejorative sense but in an analytical one. As one social historian has explained, the term works exceptionally well to designate nondiscursive communities, that is, people who do not produce coherent discourses themselves and whose life strategies are not shaped primarily by discourses. Rather, they resort to mass discourses situationally and incoherently, while operating through social practices that substitute for discourses as a universally shared repertoire of moral judgement and social action in plebian culture (Gerasimov 2018). In this sense, the nondiscursive plebian society of the mid-nineteenth century dominated by people without systematic education and knowledge embraced a social imagination described by Ginzburg, that is, the logic of interpreting fragments, clues and signs. This logic was heavily centred on the physical body as the most immediate and obvious medium of communicating meaning, embedded in familiar practices and thus prioritized body politics as a mode of social interaction. The new epistemological and political centrality of the human body as a social factor was duly recognized by the leading intellectuals of the late nineteenth century. In this respect, Ginzburg’s sampling of key interpreters of ‘clues’ is both unexpected and characteristic of this type of social thinking. The sampling includes the author of the method of attribution of art works by the statistical analysis of the most trivial body details, Giovanni Morelli; the originator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; the creator of Sherlock Holmes and his ‘science of deduction’, which resembled Morelli’s approach to art, Conan Doyle; and the police officer and biometrics researcher, who developed a system for identifying criminals based on anthropometric measurements, Alphonse Bertillon (Figure 0.4). Together, these intellectuals exemplified the centrality for their epoch of the vision of the physical body as concealing some ‘true’ essence of individuals and holding the key to deciphering their social, cultural and even civilizational background. In an age of growing social, economic and geographic mobility, this vision reflected the urge to stabilize the fluid reality in which educated and law-abiding ‘coloured’ people or representatives of lower classes with financial means could emulate cultivated forms of life and hence claim the same status as old or new European elites. They could create intraracial or intraclass unions based on shared values. As Lynn Hudson shows in her chapter, they could even employ the same modern knowledge and hegemonic discourses of respectability, domesticity, legalism and morality to resist racial and gender discrimination and defend their humanity. To counter these mechanisms of normalization and sustain old social hierarchies, trained experts were needed, who were able to interpret bodily semiotics when previously obvious cultural and social signifiers became irrelevant or invisible as a result of acculturation and democratization.

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FIGURE 0.4  Anthropometric system of Alphonse Bertillon. Comparative forms of the ear, Paris, 1894. © Adoc-Photos/Corbis/Getty Images.

TAMING THE ‘SAVAGE WITHIN’1 The Enlightenment worldview, particularly Immanuel Kant’s anthropocentric philosophy, based on the idea that rational nature, and it alone, has absolute and unconditional value, remained one of the greatest intellectual influences in the nineteenth century. But Kant also exercised a very direct and specific influence on the emerging discipline of physical anthropology, especially in Germany. He corresponded with young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who is often considered the founder of the modern, scientific notion of race and lectured on anthropology himself (Hill and Boxill 2001; Bernasconi 2002). Part two of the published manual of Kant’s anthropology course focused on characteristics of individuals, sexes, races and the species, and was subtitled ‘On How to Discern Man’s Inner Self from His Exterior’ (Kant [1798] 1974: esp. 151–94). Kant meant the inner self as a ‘physical character’ produced by nature. As Thomas McCarthy details, the inner self ‘includes our individual natures [das Naturell] and our temperaments. In [Kant’s] lectures on anthropology, individual nature is said to be the basis of natural abilities or talents, and temperament to be the basis of inclinations, insofar as they are related to bodily constitution’ (2009: 49). These natural abilities and temperament were hidden behind the exterior, but, according to Kant, they more than anything else constituted race and explained racial inequalities. Anthropology was a discipline and method that could uncover this true self concealed behind the visible exterior. The Darwinian revolution – one of the greatest epistemological revolutions of the long nineteenth century – reinforced the power of such expert semiotics and the cultural trend that amplified the centrality of human bodies as vessels containing essential information

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about individuals and the entire human species. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859; his more controversial and sensational The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in 1871. Both works presented a narrative of evolution based on the interpretation of signs, clues and fragments, and both became foundational texts for the further development of science and popular culture. In the decades following its original publication, On the Origin of Species was translated and published in French, Russian, German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese, and many more translations ensued (Secord 2010; Glick 2014). Darwin’s biological metaphors, themselves borrowed from the contemporary cultural repertoire (take, for example, ‘the struggle for existence’, ‘natural selection’, ‘economy of nature’ or ‘the branching tree of life’ metaphors), entered the language of mainstream social analysis, resonated in literature and inspired popular ideological movements (Young 1985; Campbell 1987; Beer 2009; Depew 2009). One of the most consequential outgrowths of Darwinism, which conflated scientific and popular views of social normativity, was eugenics. It explicitly aspired to tame the explosive and dangerous Other hiding within the standardized modern body. In the words of Marius Turda, ‘just as Darwinism may be seen as challenging the hegemonic role of religion and the biological fixity of the human species, eugenics may be seen as supporting the very notion of humanity as defined in terms of the hierarchy of distinct social bodies, some better biologically equipped than others’ (Turda 2010b: 20). It is quite symbolic that the ‘father’ of eugenics, Francis Galton, happened to be Darwin’s half-cousin. In their case, real kinship can be taken as a sign of metaphorical kinship that underlined all fantasies of race. However, family relationships between Darwin’s own theory and eugenics were not without complications. Unlike historicist Darwinism, eugenics was present- and, even more so, future-oriented. It worked to restrain and guide stochastic mechanisms of Darwinian evolution to enable an ideal future humanity. Maria Sophia Quine’s chapter in this volume highlights the most essential internal contradiction of turn-of-the-century eugenicist thought: the combination of avant-garde social engineering and innovative scientific methods with profound social conservatism and the most basic sexism and racism. Eugenics’ fixation on regulating ‘sexual selection’ as the mechanism of race production exposed one more fundamental feature of the long nineteenth century’s racialized science and population politics – the Western-centred social imagination’s interiorization of typical colonial anxieties. These anxieties could never have been remedied due to the dynamic nature of colonial encounters, so the scientific project of Western social engineering was locked in reproducing the fear of the ‘savage within’ by turning to new types of contact, in new circumstances. Eugenics was not the only science dealing with various threats hidden in modern standardized bodies. Disciplines from medicine to sociology and from history to philosophy shared the same concern, and cultural anthropology contributed its own share to the growing anxiety over the leveling effect of mass society. The same year that Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871a, 1871b) appeared in print, Edward Burnett Tylor, the Oxford University professor and founder of cultural anthropology, published his main work, Primitive Culture (1871), which advanced the vision of a uniform ‘prehistoric’ society as a necessary stage in the development of all human collectives. Tylor’s Primitive Culture became an archetypal text of cultural evolutionism, complementing the foundational Darwinian narrative. Classifying different forms of beliefs as stages of the linear progression from animism to religion and then to science, Tylor formulated the concept of ‘survivals’. According to Tylor, these were

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processes, customs, and opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved. (Tylor 1871: 15) In other words, Tylor understood survivals as empty shells of the practices that used to have meaning in the old times but had lost them in contemporary culture. Anthropologists were to interpret them as signs of the primitive condition and compare them across cultural contexts and epochs in order to reconstruct universal developmental patterns historically. Repeating the success of Darwin’s works, Tylor’s Primitive Culture became not only a foundational work of new scholarship but also a fact of popular culture. Having been dissociated from its original academic context, the concept of survivals could easily be applied to designate everything unfamiliar and hence frightening (the latter being readily associated with certain racial, class or gender groups). The public success of Tylor’s anthropology inspired another famous anthropologist of the time, James George Frazer of Cambridge University, to write a scholarly book that from the outset addressed a much broader non-academic readership (Downie 1940: 9). In 1890 he published two volumes of his seminal The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. The book stirred readers’ minds in Frazer’s native Britain and in other countries. A student of belief in primitive societies, Frazer hypothesized that all of them had at some point gone through a stage of human sacrifice to their most worshiped gods. Even in Christianity, clear remnants (‘survivals’) of the ancient ritual of human sacrifice could be easily detected. In the first edition of his book, Frazer limited his study to a specific ancient cult (Frazer 1894). But in the third edition of the study, published on the eve of the First World War, he included words that read as an emotional indictment of the practice of murderous scapegoating in modern times. Frazer testified that the savage mind and savage instincts were still present in European modernity: The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. … In short, the principle of vicarious suffering is commonly understood and practiced by races who stand on a low level of social and intellectual culture. In the following pages I shall illustrate the theory and the practice as they are found among savages in all their naked simplicity, undisguised by the refinements of metaphysics and the subtleties of theology. The devices to which the cunning and selfish savage resorts for the sake of easing himself at the expense of his neighbour are manifold. (Frazer 1913: 1–2) Tylor’s and Frazer’s anthropologies not only enjoyed broad popularity but informed legal discourses and practical politics. For example, despite anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic trends in the late nineteenth-century United States, the First Amendment was never violated with regard to the right to freely exercise Catholicism or Judaism. However, in 1883 the US Congress passed the Indian Religious Crimes Code, which outlawed all dances, ceremonies and religious rights as survivals of primitive Native American culture. Anthropological discourse played a role in forming this hierarchical perception (Baker 2010: 17–18). Similarly, across the ocean, medical and ethnographic experts in

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newspapers, parliaments or courts also evoked racial clichés and the language of scholarly cultural anthropology when describing a primitive state of mind, referring to atavistic criminal types, or discussing ‘traditional societies’, primitive instincts, institutions and rituals. For instance, in a series of trials that took place between 1892 and 1896 in the Middle Volga region of the Russian Empire, five men from a Votiak (Udmurt, a FinnoUgric people) village were accused of committing the ritual murder of a Russian man. A learned expert in the courtroom explicitly referred to the authority of Tylor and presented the murder as a ‘survival’ of primitive animism, a ritual human sacrifice committed by representatives of a lower race, whose Christianity and external Russification were pure shams. In 1913 a similar accusation was levelled against a Jewish man in Kiev, in the southern part of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine; the so-called Beilis affair) (both cases are discussed from the point of view of anthropological expertise in Mogilner 2017). Science experts insisted in each case that the accused Votiak peasants and the Jewish factory superintendent from Kiev were acting out of a primitive racial instinct, and this argument resonated with the public. A journalist from the city of Kazan – an important imperial administrative and educational centre near the region populated by the Votiaks – described the deep shock produced by the news about ‘ritual murders’ being practiced literally nearby: ‘It’s hard to [accept the fact] that this incident occurred not somewhere in central Africa, India, or Polynesia, but just [two hundred miles] from a university city which is the center of missionary work’ (1894, quoted in Geraci 2000: 535). Two decades later, a scientific expert at the trial in Kiev testified: ‘One must admit, with the anthropological criminologists, that the psychological basis of crimes of that type is sought in racial revenge’ (Weinberg 2014: 99–100). This was a radical position acknowledging the dangerous omnipresence of savages in an age and place where they did not belong, and the mortal hold of their ‘survivals’ over progress. The dialectic of progress and degeneration that reveals itself in such examples characterized the liberal, socialist and conservative as well as nationalist and imperialist intellectual cultures of the late nineteenth century. Daniel Pick branded this universal obsession with ‘degeneration’ a ‘European disorder’ and noted that ‘various conceptions of atavism, regression, relapse, transgression and decline’ had reached their greatest prominence precisely in the age ‘identified as the quintessential age of evolution, progress, optimism, reform or improvement’ (1989: 2). The famous, or infamous, Italian school of criminal anthropology and its founder Cesare Lombroso exemplify this paradox very well: Lombrosianism was conceived during the optimistic period of Italian national unification and modernization, and it achieved truly international prominence. By bringing primitivism and criminality together and conceptualizing the atavistic ‘criminal type’, Lombroso influenced physical anthropology, criminology and the social theory of his time (Figure 0.5). But in addition, he accomplished the political task of objectifying the problematic place of rural and economically depressed Southern Italy in the project of Italian national unification and modernity (Gibson 2002; Horn 2003; Cimino and Foschi 2014). The rhetoric of atavisms and racial degeneracy helped to configure the so-called Negro question in the Reconstruction era in the United States, or the so-called Jewish Question in the epoch of new, scientific anti-Semitism. In all these cases, the notions of blood, civilization, degeneration, culture, atavism and race were used interchangeably because ‘there was not a clear line between cultural and political elements or between social and biological heredity’ (Stocking 2001: 8). The interconnected deployment of naturalscientific and cultural narratives helped to establish internal colonial relationships and objectify human inequalities under different political regimes and in different polities. In

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FIGURE 0.5  Examples of physiognomy of criminals, illustration from Cesare Lombroso (1835– 1909), L’uomo delinquente (Thug Man) (Milan: Hoepli, 1876). © DEA/G. COSTA/De Agostoni Editorial/Getty Images.

this sense, the discourse of race was indeed both universal and intersectional. Physical and cultural anthropologists, or representatives of sociology or philology could disagree on the definition of race, hold polygenist or monogenist views and reject racism and racial hierarchies. However, they could not claim exclusive authority over the discourse of race. In the age of the proliferation of mass culture and modern knowledge as the foundation of scientifically guided politics, one could not keep such a powerful and universally applicable explanatory trope within the confines of academia. Whether expressed in the language of culture, gendered stereotypes, legal theories or economic rationalism, in the nineteenth century, race simultaneously divided humanity and connected the world more than any other concept did.

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EMPIRES AS CONTEXTS The nineteenth century’s nationalizing empires were institutional contexts for the world’s unequal globality, and thus were true laboratories of race. Among other things, imperial infrastructure ensured regular travel and a supply of data and research objects to natural scientists, including Charles Darwin himself (Browne 1996). ‘Darwin’s renown was truly global’ – Marwa Elshakry asserts in her Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 – ‘and he was as much shaped by new global realities of travel, trade, and empire as he was an influence upon the lands they reached’ (Elshakry 2013: 6). His noless-famous cousin, Francis Galton, was similarly involved in an imperial network of exchange and transfers of scholarship, practices and social and political imagination. Galton’s experiments with fingerprinting, for example, build on two precedents: an early study of the founder of histology, J. E. Purkynê, and a report on the practice of fingerprinting by Sir William Herschel, the chief British administrator in the Hooghly district of Bengal (Galton 1892). As a colonial administrator representing a modern state culture obsessed with control and security, Herschel deeply distrusted locals. According to his published recollections, the population of the Hooghly district continuously provided false information about their identities and hence evaded control. Once, in 1858, when preparing to sign an agreement with an Indian supplier, Herschel noticed markings on his hand. This triggered the idea of using this man’s fingerprint for a signature (Herschel 1916: 7–8). In the 25 November 1880 issue of Nature, Herschel described how his administration experimented with fingerprints for more than twenty years before the practice was officially introduced in 1877 for registering the local population and jailed criminals in Hooghly district (Herschel 1880). Later Herschel ‘gladly’ placed all his materials on fingerprints at Galton’s disposal (Herschel 1894). In his own book on fingerprinting, Galton explained that ‘there was a real need for an efficient method of identification in the British colonies, and not in India alone: natives were illiterate, quarrelsome, cunning, deceitful’, and in addition they were virtually indistinguishable to a European eye (Ginzburg 2013: 111). Galton believed the method could be borrowed to keep track of the mobile and unruly lower-class population in the metropole, which was his main concern. But in focusing on the English workers and paupers, he kept race as an essential part of his project (Figure 0.6). In particular, Galton attempted to theorize racial peculiarities in fingerprints and planned to continue his research on Indians in the hope of discovering among them ‘a more monkey-like pattern’ (111). Galton and Herschel did not see any problem in a direct transfer of the method from the colony to the metropole. The empire not only provided a natural framework for such transfers but also promoted in both poles a shared sense of racial and social uncertainty and anxiety. Politically, empires were spaces of differentiated subjecthood and citizenship, of inclusion and exclusion, but as the example above shows they were also shared and entangled spaces. Human diversity within empires remained a reality even during the age when the nation state came to embody the future and when old empires with their irregular human diversity came to be seen as anachronistic ‘survivals’. Even the modernized or newly created modern empires were never able to resolve the predicament of irregular diversity that, in the long nineteenth century, under the challenge of the ideal of national purity, was reconsidered as a problem rather than a natural state of things. Attempting to rationally segregate diversity into internally homogeneous simple categories, empires in

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FIGURE 0.6  Francis Galton’s First Athropometric Laboratory, 1884–5. © Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images.

fact kept reproducing the entangled difference on a new, more sophisticated level – both within the metropole societies and in the colonies. Employing the systematic politics of global comparison, imperial elites succeeded in constituting the idea of ‘the West’ as a category of global superiority. But along the way, the seemingly clear notions of otherness, primitivism or underdevelopment were relativized by constant juxtaposition to some other, greater or smaller otherness, primitivism and underdevelopment. Internal European ‘savages’, defined in terms of culture or class, could have had much more in common with colonial peoples or the children of racially mixed couples in the colonies, who threatened the integrity and superiority of whiteness. This relativizing gaze and the politics of imperial strategic relativism (assuming different approaches to different imperial subjects, depending on context2) de facto blurred the Manichean duality of metropole and colonies as symbolized by racial whiteness and non-whiteness, so central to the ideologies of modern imperialism. The empires of the long nineteenth century simultaneously promoted such racial ideologies and cultivated practices and spaces where they were not unequivocally applicable. This affected the functioning of race as a fundamental epistemology ‘of the uneven globalization’ characteristic of imperial formations (Zimmerman 2010: 8).

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THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL POWER OF THE WEST Sometimes referred to as ‘the first globalization’ (O’Rourke and Williamson 1999), the entanglement of the world during the long nineteenth century was characterized by dramatic asymmetry. Imperial domination was instrumental in promoting the idea of the civilizational ‘West’, which, in turn, served the legitimization of imperial hegemony. This was not just military and economic hegemony resulting from the accumulation of technological and political potential in Europe (and soon also in North America) but a hegemony in the Gramscian sense, that is, cultural hegemony that rested in ideology, science and values (Gramsci 2011). The idea of progress as open-ended historical time, advanced scientific knowledge and technological innovations as well as the more general intellectual predispositions underlying them, such as rationalism or economic pragmatism, were identified as exclusive innate qualities of the ‘West’. Furthermore, ‘the world order dominated by Europe forced the rest of the world to engage with European cosmologies and ways of interpreting the past’ (Conrad 2016: 25). In the second part of the nineteenth century, the very notion of ‘Western science’ was invented, together with what Roy MacLeod has called the ‘creed of since’, that is, the widespread acceptance of science and technology as the embodiments of the triumph of progress (Adas 1990; MacLeod 2000; Elshakry 2010). Many non-Western intellectuals readily acknowledged the centrality of Europe as a current leader of scientific, economic and technological progress, but not as the locus of a superior civilization in principle. When employed by them, the concept of civilization was often ‘understood as universal to be sure, but not bound a priori to Europe’, that is, not legitimizing any unconditional and atemporal political or cultural hierarchies (Hill 2008; Conrad 2016: 29). According to Marwa Elshakry, in the case of Arabic intellectuals, the discourse of European civilization included the idea of its demise, as had happened earlier to Arabic or Islamic civilizations. The translation, adaptation and appropriation of Western knowledge was thus a conscious choice, a way to recover past glory and status under new global conditions. Similarly, as Gérard Siary has argued, ‘East Asia borrowed from the West’s technological and colonial library … blending it with autochthonous trends and schools of thought.’ A key component of this library – the concept of race – was adapted to the local lexicon of power and knowledge as ‘lineage in China, purity in Japan, and conflated with ethnicity in both China and Japan (and Korea)’ (Siary 2014: 147; see also Dikötter 1997). This active stance towards accepting the Western episteme problematizes the self-proclaimed ‘Western’ monopoly on modernity. The non-linear developments and multidirectional entanglements of the long nineteenth century were shaping a new complex reality (shorthanded as ‘modernity’) as a product of constant multilateral, if asymmetrical, negotiations and reinterpretations that also concerned key notions of modernity such as race, subjecthood or citizenship. Sergey Glebov’s chapter explores the ambiguities of this process in the context of the imperial situation in the Russian Far East. He registers the incongruity between the modern discourse of race promoted by imperial administrators and intellectuals, on the one hand, and the grassroots practices of operationalizing race, on the other hand. Glebov also points to the even more stark contrast that existed between elite modernist population politics and pragmatic practices of collaboration, inclusion and exclusion on the ground. Modern empires exploited the myth of exclusive ‘Western modernity’ to consolidate and legitimize their hegemony through derivative ideologemes, such as the ‘white man’s burden’, mission civilisatrice, the evolutionary struggle for existences, or protection of the so-called traditional societies. However, paradoxically, empires

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remained resilient and stable as long as they were able to rule through pronouncedly ‘non-modern’ mechanisms based on exceptions, legal pluralism and particularism. Imperial modernity was permeated with tensions, framed by strategic relativism and systematic violations of proclaimed rules more than by any sustained ideologies and policies (Cooper and Stoler 1997).

THE CHALLENGE OF NATIONAL GROUPNESS The major threat to this unstable imperial equilibrium in the long nineteenth century came not from the nation state itself, which was still practically non-existent, but from the idea of nation. Modern nations were also products of empires; they were conceived of within imperial societies in the processes of their gradual rationalization and revolutionary reimagining. The demand for a territorial, exclusive nation state was not a necessary or even typical attribute of national movements of the period. Nation as a form of social and cultural self-organization within a composite democratized imperial polity remained a plausible alternative for many nationalisms even at the end of the long nineteenth century (Adelman 2009; Judson 2016; Mantena and Mantena 2018; Shumsky 2018). But the proliferation of the political language of nationalism solidified the hitherto inconsistent hierarchical organization of diversity in empires. This new language brought about a more radical social imagination that mentally disentangled imperial societies into ‘nations’, aligning race, territory, culture, language and traditions into a syncretic concept of the homogeneous political community (Turda and Quine 2018). In this volume and elsewhere, Richard McMahon claims that ethnicity and race became connected and then overlapped in the European context starting in at least the 1830s (McMahon 2019a). An ethnic community was believed to develop from a physical race and then give rise to a nation. In many cases, European ethnicities were racialized and nationalized earlier and more consistently than colonial peoples. But overall, imperial formations generated different types and kinds of nations and nationalisms: some were explicitly based on racial foundations; others on imperial loyalty and the embrace of the hegemonic imperial culture (imperial nationalisms in the Russian, Habsburg or British empires at the end of the nineteenth century); and still others on the cultivation of a culturally coded ethnicity. The fact that nations had formed in empires, even if under anti-imperial slogans, explains why people could simultaneously retain various forms of loyalty and belonging. They could embrace the idea of ethnicity yet associate nation with imperial subjecthood; or they could think in racial terms and did not differentiate between ethnicity and nation. McMahon’s concept of ‘national races’ describes such composite units whose internal structure was not identical. More important, these units defy the widely accepted opposition of race as a biological type of groupness to nation as a cultural and political entity, an imagined community of conscious participation, loyalty and shared culture. This opposition does not withstand either historical or theoretical scrutiny. Both race and nation were imagined and constructed analogously to extended family – as a network of kinship, reproduced through endogamy and the regulation of sexuality. Moreover, as Emily Kern shows in this volume, from a history of science standpoint, race thinking in the nineteenth century was not purely biological. It operated through the interplay of ‘biologicalenvironmental and linguistic-cultural categories and phenomena’. This is one important lesson from the long nineteenth century for the twenty-first century, when biological race as a scientific explanatory paradigm of human difference has been discredited but racism

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persists. In the words of Etienne Balibar, ‘culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin’ ([1988] 1999: 22). By the end of the long nineteenth century we find both imperial elites and imperial subalterns speaking in the language of nationalism and race. The age of empire was gradually coming to an end, but the era of race thinking was not. Imperial subalterns in particular embraced it as part and parcel of their anti-imperial nationalisms, an element of the political repertoire of reclaiming authentic subjectivity. Peter Perdue, a scholar of Chinese history, writes about the ‘re-racing’ of the Chinese nation by the early twentiethcentury Chinese (Han) intellectuals, who advanced a neopositivist understanding of racial purity and superiority in their struggle against Manchu political and ideological hegemony. Purdue’s analysis of the conceptual borrowings of young Han activists from the global repertoire of anti-imperial groupness answers the question that he posits at the beginning of his study, which resonates with many scholars of modern empires: ‘Why did the passage from empire to nation produce such a violently racist ideology?’ (Perdue 2007: 145). Nationalization of politics in imperial metropoles contributed to the radicalization of anti-imperial movements. Nationalizing empires perceived ‘the tensions of empire’ as a ‘scandal’ (the paradigm of the ‘scandal’ comes from Dirks 2006) and sought to arrange diversity as an orderly hierarchy of homogeneous ‘nations’ with a differentiated scale of rights and obligations. This model of empire was incompatible with imperial strategic relativism, an underrationalized matrix of human diversity, legal pluralism and other old and new elements of the earlier imperial ‘repertoire of rule’ (Burbank and Cooper 2010). It undermined the imperial order from above, while antiimperial nationalisms did it from below.

CONCLUSION The fundamental contradiction between the reality of irregular human diversity in imperial metropoles and imperial colonies and the political ideal of neatly bounded homogeneous national compounds, framed in the categories of Western modernity, informed the proliferation of race science, race politics and race culture in the long nineteenth century. By the end of the historical period covered in this volume, a proactive self-racialization manifested itself as a subaltern strategy aimed at normalizing one’s own groupness in the language of the hegemonic episteme of the time. The chapters that follow reflect the complexity of this process and the problem of race in general. Some chapters are written in the tradition of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), others develop approaches of the history of science and ideas, and still others pursue a social history approach. Some chapters are broadly comparative and others explicate the specifics of one particular context or one selected case study. This diversity of scale, methodology and genre is intentional. In my view, only such incoherence can produce a coherent representation of the growing complexity of the world in the long nineteenth century and of race as a central idiom in this world, embedded simultaneously in multiple traditions, languages, temporalities and myriad personal experiences. ‘It is only that which has no history, which can be defined’, Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals (1913: 94). Race certainly does have a history, and a very rich one – hence it cannot be defined – but one can study race and think about race in a historical perspective.

CHAPTER ONE

Definitions and Representations of Race The Deep Difference ROLAND CVETKOVSKI

Only that which has no history is definable. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Most of us would probably associate modern racism first with the dark and catastrophic occurrences of the twentieth century: the genocide of the Armenians, the racial segregation in the United States maintained up to the 1960s, the apartheid regime in South Africa, the mass extinction of ethnic groups during the wars in Bosnia and Rwanda and, above all, the cruelties of National Socialist Germany. The blunt ruthlessness with which the Nazi regime effaced whole populations and the dreadful orderliness by which it executed millionfold murder exceeded by far all devastation that had been and would be caused in the name of race. Their industrial killing produced and, what is more, presupposed the total dehumanization of the victims. So amidst ongoing terror the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observed in 1944 that to the National Socialists especially the Jews signified ‘the antirace’: in reducing them to a ‘mere violence’ and to a ‘natural peculiarity’ the Nazis created a faceless multitude by which they could transform the Jews into ‘the negative principle as such’. According to Horkheimer and Adorno this destructive anti-Semitism was driven by an overall ‘rage against difference’ which erupted against ‘the natural minority’ ([1944] 2002: 137–8, 172). It was thus no coincidence that the topos ‘racism’ came into the picture in the 1930s. Considering the ineffable atrocities committed in the Third Reich, a new concept had become necessary to describe those theories on which the Nazis grounded their persecution of the Jews. The National Socialist anti-Semitism was only one, if unquestionably the most monstrous manifestation of modern racism. But the motive of what the two German philosophers had labelled so tellingly ‘rage against difference’ drew its substance from a more general figure of thought that structured not only the anti-Jewish discourses around 1900 but many others. The thinking that differences between humans represented essential categories and even invariant biological facts characteristic of a certain group boomed at the turn of the century. Marcel Proust, for example, lumped together Jews

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and homosexuals, dubbed them ‘damned race’ and stigmatized otherness as an abnormity running counter to middle-class moral values (Recanati 1979: 141). The US-enterprise United Fruit, however, saw in the division of labour along the colour line on its Caribbean sugar plantations a prerequisite for progress. The company believed in the civilizing effect of labour and thought it could contribute to stabilize white supremacy on a global scale (Colby 2009). In Germany, by contrast, the völkisch ideas easily coalesced with antiliberal and reactionary race concepts leading to narrower national conceptions in which progress and race were sometimes even perceived as inconsistent (Conze 1984: 170). Yet, there were some, such as the Austrian sociologist and economist Friedrich Otto Hertz, who utterly repudiated the race concept. Hertz demonstrated that it rested on paradoxical and at times absurd assumptions and concluded that the race paradigm was entirely ‘obsolete’ (Hertz 1915: VI). Apparently, the concept of race was all-pervasive and a common category of difference. And there were several reasons why it has become ever-present in public consciousness around 1900: for quite some time it had structured collective memory, collections and museums (MacKenzie 2009); had instructed public entertainments (Andreassen 2015); and had also found its way into literature and the arts (Cardoso 2015). But most importantly, it had become a major object of scientific research (Stepan 1982; Manias 2013; McMahon 2016). The sciences were the ultimate authority to make clear that race necessarily was a rational category with which biological objectivity could be established. But as the few examples already indicate, race seemed not to have a specific content; one could use it to make a distinction in the name of culture, ethnicity, descent, sexual orientation, gender or skin colour. Above all it was powerful in producing clarity, in compelling unambiguousness and in creating hierarchies. The modern concept of race had no clear definition; it offered rather a conventional epistemic frame in which distinctions could be made. Race obviously acted as a universal ordering principle: for one thing it established a classification system, and for another it generated a whole meaning system (Hall 2017: 33). Against this background racism appears as a specific mode of thinking that in different historical situations resorts to classificatory mechanisms in order to produce and reproduce specific meaning. These historical situations were as various as they did not unfold consecutively but were instead, at least to some degree, spread in time and space. Therefore, the history of modern racism cannot be conceived as a linear story; in other words, racism’s original settings were diverse, if not necessarily disparate. Thus not its historical definitions are vital to tell the story of modern racism but rather its different contexts of emergence, its changing representations and functions. When we look for decisive racializing moments we seek for those contingent historical circumstances under which the contemporaries viewed racial arguments as relevant and appropriate criteria for distinction (Holland and Brooks 2011: 10). Thinking in racial dimensions meant in the first place to be situated in fields of discourse in which mankind was divided into immutable features. However, it did not follow from this that racial thinking inevitably led to racism, even though this transition could often be observed; anti-colonial movements probably show most clearly that racial thinking was not tantamount to acting like a racist (Mbembe 2013). With that said racial thinking can be characterized, first, as distinguishing durably between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Second, the permanence of this difference was ensured by distinctions which were regarded as biological and thus unalterable. And third, racial thinking then turned into racism, when questions of power were involved, that is when

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those making a distinction viewed their own group as superior and deemed it legitimate to treat other groups disparagingly (Fredrickson 2002; Geulen 2017). Particularly this latter point is the very reason why research largely considered Europe and the Western world responsible of racism’s bloody success story, since the most decisive racial moments had obviously emerged in the context of aggressive colonialism and were connected with the presumptuous Western self-image of superiority (D’Souza 1995; Hannaford 1996). Although this is certainly true, it should also be taken into account that Western racial theories could not have been adopted and transformed in other parts of the world had they not found similar conditions and predispositions on the spot that facilitated their reception. Racial and racist thinking was no genuine European invention (Dikötter 1997; Shoemaker 1997; Glassman 2004), even though the European variant was probably most efficacious on a global scale. However, beyond all regional differences one can observe a general historical development distinctive of modern racial thinking: first it was based on corporeal and strictly de-politicized features; then it slowly evolved into a coherent ideological system of thought structuring several discourses with the result that the race concept became increasingly flexible, lost its substance and finally turned into a universal as well as politicized function of discrimination.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: REASON OF NATURE AND DE-POLITICIZATION OF MAN The decisive racial moments out of which arose consistent concepts of race unfolded only in the eighteenth century. These were, of course, not the first historical situations when racial thinking entered the stage of world history. One can identify three important premodern developments featuring proto-racist attitudes. First there was the anti-Semitism already fully fledged by the late Middle Ages. With the accusation that the Jews needed Christian blood for their religious ceremonies the Christians had expelled them from human society (Poliakov 1974–5; Mosse 1978). A second precursor was related to the ever-growing late medieval and early modern African slave trade as pigmentation of the skin advanced to a major distinguishing feature and put whiteness above blackness. Especially in North America an obscure passage from the Bible (Gen. 1:21–7), the socalled Ham legend, supported the view that the enslavement of Blacks could be considered the will of God (Jordan 1968; Peterson 1978; Braude 1997). And finally, the third and probably most significant strand of pre-modern racism can be observed in Spain, where in the course of the reconquista the Christians interpreted the origins of both the Jews and the Muslims as a stigma which could not be removed even by baptism (Ingram 2009–16). Although all these cases represent materializations of racist practice their protagonists still moved within the traditional religious and societal hierarchies. This changed considerably in the eighteenth century. Under the influence of increasing both experiential pressure and empirical fascination the proponents of Enlightenment began to conceive of groups and their related cultures as natural manifestations. In systematically classifying all humans by allegedly inherent criteria they gradually removed them from their traditional social ties. Neither religious nor social and political references were now essential; they were gradually superseded by nature so that the soma came to the fore to identify man. In the eighteenth century the first ideological coherence of racial thought became manifest as hegemonic discourses began to enter the field of experience and to veer towards the body. These momentous changes of course unfolded in three secular settings: one racial

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moment occurred in the broader context of colonial expansion in which new horizons of experience were established; the second could be observed in the field of science where the Enlightenment naturalists put man in a new coordinate system; and, finally, it had a place in the arena of the social as the revolutionary demands for equality by the end of the eighteenth century unsettled the Western world to the utmost. Since the mid-eighteenth century unprecedented shifts of power and structural changes loomed for the European colonial empires. Whereas Spain and France continually lost ground, Great Britain could keep its position as a global player and even amplify its hegemonic status after the subjugation of great parts of India in 1756, the gain of territories in North America after the Seven Years’ War and the settlement of Australia from 1788. Simultaneously, the increasingly severe politics of the metropoles provoked in the British and Spanish Americas independence movements of Creole colonial elites which slowly eroded the existing power relations. More serious, however, was that during the eighteenth century the conception of power altogether changed fundamentally. The religious impact which had driven the colonial empires’ mission from the very outset now gradually morphed into a secular mandate of civilizing the ‘savages’ and the ‘barbarians’ (Muthu 2003; Osterhammel 2005, 2006). True, on the one hand, they acted in accordance with the philanthropic spirit of Enlightenment implying that mankind in general had to be educated for the better. But, on the other hand, this change had also resulted from concrete circumstances caused by economic growth and increasing demand of workforce, especially from Africa (Thornton 1998). And this immediately found expression in the colonial peripheries. Whereas nearly 460,000 Africans had been deported in the British, Dutch and French Caribbean during the seventeenth century, their numbers grew in the eighteenth century: it saw a transportation of further 3.2 million Black slaves only in that region, 1.9 million arrived in Portuguese Brazil and still 350,000 Blacks had been brought to British North America (Curtin 1969: 268). This enormous quantitative leap did not only reflect the growing requirements of carefully globalizing markets but also involved in the first instance the representatives of the colonial empires being confronted with Black slaves on an unprecedented scale. The body and with it the concrete sensual experience increasingly became the focus of attention (Molineux 2012; Greene 2013). For example, when moving into Havana in 1762, the British Army soldiers wondered why they were more vulnerable to diseases than the natives and why their mortality rate exceeded that of the locals significantly. Their only answer was that the physical constitution of European Whites and Caribbean Blacks must be substantially different. The latter’s specific corporeal resilience, they concluded, could only be explained by that those living in cold countries differed ‘specifically from the blood’ of the inhabitants of hot countries. As most of the soldiers probably saw Black people for the first time, they apparently could only translate visible, physical differences into terms of biological precondition (Charters 2012: 230). But the racial divide made its presence felt not only in immediate experiential encounters. Questions of identity became particularly problematic during the eighteenth century as national concepts gained importance and raised serious problems for the European colonial empires. The contradiction between heterogeneous empire and homogeneous nation broke open, and it became clear that the debates about (national) identity could not be resolved on the European continent solely. In the colonial societies the Creole elites and occasionally the slaves began to stake a claim to affiliation with the concepts of francité, Britishness or hispanidad, including delicate issues such as forced labour and slavery (Killingray 2008; Vidal 2009). However, this did not imply a mitigation of colonial racist practices; in the long run the divide was deepened, especially in legal terms. As in the

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British Empire, voices were being raised against the slave trade by the end of the eighteenth century, they did finally achieve abolition in 1834, but the empire’s representatives still stood by the idea of discrimination and refused former slaves full integration and equal treatment (Adas 1989: 108–22; Burbank and Cooper 2010: 290–3). As to the colonial societies of the eighteenth century proper, they dealt with the problem of the colour line very differently. In North America the racial boundaries were drawn quite sharply, whilst in the Caribbean, Central and South America they appeared considerably more porous (Figure 1.1), and in Dutch Batavia tolerance towards interracial relations had even been partly blurred. Yet all colonial experiences, however different they might have been, largely ran into two practices which fixed racist attitudes firmly

FIGURE 1.1  Anonymous, Casta painting containing complete set of sixteen casta combinations (racial classifications in Spanish colonies in the Americas), late eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 148 cm × 104 cm. © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

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in the horizon of experience of all colonial societies. For one thing nowhere except in Central and South America had emerged stable and viable mixed societies. Interracial relations had mostly been considered illegitimate which, needless to say, did not protect the local women against sexual abuse and exploitation (McClintock 1995; Jaffray and Mangan 2018). And for another, the separation of the Europeans from the locals mostly originated in the formers’ unshakable conviction of superiority. When the British temporarily occupied Java between 1811 and 1816 they raised the race barriers in Batavia anew and immediately took steps to reintroduce the culture of the European elites. In their view the Dutch had unprecedentedly compromised themselves because they had not only engaged with the native Asians but, as an English observer remarked disparagingly, even spawned a ‘mixed breed’ (Taylor 2003: 97–8). The scientification of humans represented the second arena in the eighteenth century in which a biological concept of race took hold effectively. Abandoning the plan of salvation and trusting rather in reason and the natural sciences, the Enlightenment naturalists began to anthropologize humans. But in so doing they likewise distanced themselves from the assumption that man should be considered solely a zoon politikon. As they started to systematize mankind after somatic features social ties faded into the background and man’s nature gained in importance instead. Race developed into an analytical instrument and provided a scientific, and that is a reasonable, model to construe the world. Racial thinking thus fitted into the great rationalization project, which was so characteristic of the thinkers in the eighteenth century. The natural scientific proponents of the Enlightenment made out of race a coherent concept of human order based both on the laws of reason and on the secular concept of natural history. Natural history was largely imagined as an umbrella term embracing several of what one would later call natural scientific disciplines. Most momentous was, however, that their proponents assumed reason as a single agent in nature and that natural history was related to unalienable natural law. In their view the former substantiated the latter. They conceived a kind of tableau where they assigned any creature to a particular place within the natural system. But even if this classification scheme embraced every being it did not actually include the idea of development which would later become central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. For the time being, creatures did not evolve into something new, they only realized themselves according to the possibilities inherent in their substance or form. In the eighteenth century natural history was static (Lepenies 1980). Although the natural scientists appeared as staunch advocates of secular science they still cherished two ideas which could directly be connected to the history of creation: they believed in the constancy of species, that is, creatures could not modify substantially, and they built on the existence of the great chain of being, an idea going back to Plato’s and Aristotle’s so-called scala naturae. It meant that from minerals and plants to animals and humans providence had created a well-ordered and consistent whole and equipped any species appropriately for each environment (Lovejoy 1936). But in so doing the natural scientists obviously carried on the Christian idea of unity: even though they recognized solely biological features they still retained the notion of one mankind and concluded that the observable differences between the races could only be explained by external influences. Carl Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, probably the most significant natural scientists in the eighteenth century, in their analyses harked back on these assumptions and were convinced that all human races had actually one origin. They too made clear that only environmental factors were responsible for human diversity, that is that climate, nutrition, tradition and mores alone were crucial

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for the manifestations of racial difference. But as a matter of fact their interpretations of the somatic features differed considerably. Linnaeus, for instance, connected them with moral qualities according to which the Whites were creative and orderly, the Blacks idle and insincere, whereas Lamarck entirely refrained from such stereotypical conclusions. But principally, all of them saw races as specific chance variations only dependent of material factors (Goulven 1997; Roger 1997; Koerner 2000). The German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the founders of physical anthropology, argued in his treatise on diversity of species in the same vein. His lasting impact on future generations of race theorists is grounded on the fact that he introduced an aesthetic moment to the debate (Hudson 2008). On the basis of his Latin written dissertation first published in 1776 and reissued as a revised and significantly extended German version in 1798 (Blumenbach 1798), he distinguished between five races: the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the American and the Malayan (Figure 1.2). Like his colleagues and predecessors Blumenbach was convinced that not descent but

FIGURE 1.2  Five types of the human race. Based on the analysis of human skulls by the German physiologist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), late nineteenth century. © Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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only environmental influences explained all differences. No race had features which could not be detected on others. But additionally, Blumenbach also believed that the aspect of beauty played a particular role. In his view the perfect body had been modelled by the ancient Greek artists, as could be seen, Blumenbach contended, in the symmetrical face. But this, he continued, could only be found in the temperate zone, whereas regions with a more extreme climate did not produce this feature. As was standard for most of the naturalists Blumenbach too correlated the apparent comeliness of the Caucasian race with its tempering and orderly character, but he tried to provide empirical evidence for this assumption by comparing skulls. He hoped that skull forms would allow him to draw conclusions to intelligence and to man’s nature in general. Blumenbach became the founding father of the so-called craniology, a science which sought to provide insight into human existence by applying exact measurement methods. Facial angles, profile scales, cranial shapes now were illustrative findings that could precisely be identified and which served as basis for an aesthetical judgement. By craniology Blumenbach did not only introduce an exact classification system but also bound aesthetics, science and racial difference together and gave the hierarchical order of races a methodical fundament. Although he still stood by the environmental theory to explain racial differences, Blumenbach’s approach to connect subjective features of beauty with physical-empirical data and to subject them to natural law laid the foundation for the biologization of difference, which fully unfolded over the course of the nineteenth century (Rupke and Sauer 2019). The third authoritative moment in which racial, and in this case also racist, thinking came into effect in the eighteenth century emerged in the context of the American and French revolutions and their call for political equality. It is hardly surprising that especially these contexts facilitated mechanisms of discrimination. Evidently, as the levelling effect of any ideology of equality always severely cuts into the traditional fabric of social relations, it immediately arouses opposition of those who formerly highly benefitted of societal inequality. As a rule they strive for restitution of difference either by re-establishing old hierarchies or, more probably, by conceiving new criteria which mirror the old privileges and rankings. The egalitarian principle represents a fundamental threat to established orders. Christianity too is an ideology of equality: all men are equal before God. But exactly the metaphysical character of this postulation was the reason why Christianity never seriously began to sway. It claimed equality of men but left social hierarchies untouched. The revolutionaries in America and France, however, did not call only for abstract equality of men even though they formulated a universal demand. Above all they aimed for concrete socio-political equity and thus necessarily challenged slavery as well as the pariah-status of the Jews. Despite its reminiscence of Christian belief the principle of the Declaration of Independence – ‘all men are created equal’ (my emphasis) – could hardly be reconciled with the bondage of the Blacks or the ghettoization of the Jews, except one excluded these groups from mankind. Probably the best-known example of equality’s doublespeak had been provided by Thomas Jefferson himself. He insisted on biological otherness for this very reason: on the one hand, he held that the Indians were principally capable of assimilation but should be expelled or even be extinguished should they refuse to give up their traditions and to assimilate to White culture. But for the Blacks, on the other hand, he continued, skin colour was an a priori impediment and made assimilation impossible from the outset. ‘This unfortunate difference of colour’, Jefferson wrote, ‘and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people’. And if the Blacks should actually be liberated one had to ensure that they ‘be removed beyond the reach of mixture’ (Jefferson 1788: 154; Hinrichsen 2016).

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In France, however, the claim to democratic rights was more far-reaching as already suggested the wording of the first article in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen stipulating that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’. The National Assembly instantly suspended the exclusion of the Jews, exempted them from special taxes and from restrictions of residence, made them full citizens and abolished slavery in the colonies. In 1788, in Paris the Société des Amis des Noirs had been founded, speaking against the slave trade and espousing the rights of the free Blacks, the so-called gens de couleur. Yet this undertaking was not without contradictions. The famous Abbé Grégoire, for instance, strongly condemned colonial rule and slavery but endorsed at the same time the necessity of ‘civilising’ the non-European peoples. Nonetheless, the slave uprising that broke out in Saint Domingue during the revolution did not change the revolutionaries’ idealistic minds and they declared every free man a citizen of the French Republic, irrespective of skin colour (Figure 1.3). But this experiment did not last long; in 1804 the colony separated from the motherland and proclaimed the world’s first Black

FIGURE 1.3  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767–1824), Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1747–1805), Deputy of Saint Domingue (Saint-Dominique) and Convention member, 1797. Painting, 158 cm × 111 cm. © Corbis Historical/Getty Images.

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republic of Haiti. And Napoleon finally put an end to the revolutionaries’ egalitarian attempt: after the foundation of the empire and the separation of Haiti he reintroduced slavery in the remaining colonies and passed legislation which again discriminated the Jews (Rosanvallon 2011: 64–6). By contrast, in the United States the situation was different. Here in 1787 the Northwest Ordinance had organized the American state with no regard for religion, ethnicity or any other social features; it was solely based on territory. But that did not mean that anyone living on that territory became a regular member of the polity. In 1790 the Naturalization Act decreed that only free White people who among other things had lived on the territory for at least two years could become American citizens. Thus for the European immigrants it was easy to obtain citizenship, for Black Africans and Indians, however, it was impossible. But from this it also followed that the government could not justify this exclusion on political grounds. It had to find reasons for discrimination beyond the political. In 1823 the Supreme Court consequentially labelled the Indians an ‘inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government’ (Burbank and Cooper 2010: 223–9, 261–7, quote 263). Obviously, the argument was that they lacked biological qualification for equal treatment. Since the Indians and the Black Africans, at least before the Civil War, were outside of the political and societal system it was no contradiction that the principles of equality were not applied to them. The notion of race seemed to offer a serious answer to how to maintain difference in the face of political postulates of equality; end even the universalistic claims of equity immediately evoked counter-concepts (Koselleck 2004). And this pattern of alleged universalism remained effective later on.

NINETEENTH CENTURY: POLITICIZATION OF NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF DISCRIMINATION Had the importance of race concepts been augmented during the eighteenth century since corporeal and secular prerequisites gave ideological coherence, in the nineteenth century racist thought gained increasing ground because racial thinking had slowly turned into a general function of discrimination. This was not only due to the multiplying situations in which racism could materialize. Technical progress, acceleration of communication, improvement of infrastructures, trade expansion, increase of migration and colonial expansion during New Imperialism brought about a new world order that was characterized by manifold contact zones pushing material as well as non-material exchange (Osterhammel 2014). But racial thinking was also disseminated due to its politicization. In light of the world’s growing complexity race offered the contemporaries a naturalized concept of order which promised to bind together the fragmentary social realities and, backed by the sciences, to re-establish clarity. Race and likewise racism began to pervade more discourses, it changed its criteria of inclusion according to requirements, connected different debates and structured new fields of action in which the protagonists could confirm their leading position and extend their scope of action. Under the influence of increasing global interconnectedness in the nineteenth century racism morphed into a visionary project, into a utopia of unambiguousness manifesting itself in martial aggression. Whereas proponents of the Enlightenment had considered nature as a unifying whole, by contrast, the contemporaries of the nineteenth century emphasized its disjunctive function. The hegemonic-corporeal discourses which once had

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been located beyond the political now transformed into politicized identity discourses because arguments of historical legitimization began to play a critical role for the formation of group identities. It was essential that in early nineteenth century racial thinking came into use against the background of cultural-biologistic identity formation. Although race had made the concept of nation to a subcategory during the eighteenth century (Hannaford 1996: 213–32; Hudson 1996), the latter saw a boost after the Napoleonic Wars as the flowing patriotisms of late eighteenth century slowly took the shape of the modern nation state. Under the influence of the romantic idea that a people, understood as a kinship community and as a community of common descent, made up the core of a nation the conceptual boundaries began to blur: race, nation and people became, if not synonyms, very similar expressions. Particularly in historical works – James Cowles Prichard spoke of ‘race of people’ and William Frédéric Edwards of ‘race historique’ – such conceptualizations surfaced early on and signified this semantic confluence (Prichard 1813b: 238, 384 and passim; Edwards 1829: 3–4). Their phrasing evidently abandoned a mere natural conception of race as, for instance, Blumenbach had previously suggested. No less significant was the impact of comparative linguistics. Its representatives related affinities of languages to ethnic units with the result that linguistic families were equated with specific ethnic groups whose continuity of kinship was substantiated by the concept of race (Thiesse 1999: 67–81). In Europe this process was completed by the mid-nineteenth century, the equivalence of race and nation did not require any further explanation which is why Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and future statesman, put it: Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race. … All is race, there is no other truth. (Disraeli [1847] 1866: 105–6) Indeed, similar trends could be observed in non-European regions too. The reason why in China, Japan and Korea European scientific race discourse was so easily absorbed by the end of the nineteenth century laid in the fact that here too racial as well as protonational debates had previously been running in parallel (Dikötter 1992; Weiner 1995; Tikhonov 2012). In declaring race the true substratum of nations the mechanism of exclusion came to the fore and began to regulate affiliation: if race was conceived in biological dimensions then nation-building could no longer be considered a political fact but a natural one. Nation no longer signified the sovereign as was the case in eighteenth-century political theory but a community of a congeneric population – nation became something pre-political. Yet this equivalence of race and nation had wide-ranging consequences as it amalgamated with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and promoted an extremely aggressive concept of history. Darwin had introduced the principle of ‘natural selection’ and considered ‘the struggle for existence’ as a motive force in the development of each species (Darwin 1859, 1871a). Social Darwinism now expanded this agonal momentum into historical reality with the result that the survival of one’s nation was identified with the survival of one’s race (Gautier 1880). Accordingly, the German natural scientist and zoologist Ernst Haeckel opined that there was ‘a relentless and endless war of all against all’ (Haeckel 1878: 21), whereas the geographer Alfred Kirchhoff deduced from this assumption a

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nightmarish optimism about the future. He held that ‘in the international struggle for existence … the physically and morally more capable people is always triumphant’ because ‘the constant competition of the nations which eradicates the degenerate peoples [Völker] ensures supremacy to the most capable and guarantees the continual progress of mankind’ (quoted in Querner 1975: 448). In these conceptions, national as well as racial affiliation seemed to advance to the only historical subject both governing individual action and controlling social conduct. The race concept also continued to infiltrate colonial contexts. The ethnicization of the collective self-image and its racial formulation often appeared as import from Europe triggering off debates about ethnic identities among the locals (Glassman 2011; Osborne 2014). To colonial rulers, however, considering their successful territorial expansion, their supersession of local culture and elimination of Indigenous tribes, stratification by ethnicization gave a strong justification to behave as an invader race. This manifested itself most clearly in the settler colonies. It is true, in North America, for instance, there had been quasi-ethnic conflicts since the seventeenth century as white settlers tried to expel or even to exterminate the Indians. But generally this ethnic pressure was felt most intensely between 1830 and 1890 as white settler populations spread from Siberia and Oceania to South Africa to the American continent and critically threatened the existence of the Indigenous people through expropriation and harsh assimilation (Bayly 2004: 432–50; Finzsch 2008). It became apparent how accepted the racist paradigm was, even among those who actually regarded the natives rather favourably, but still believed that small tribes naturally had to defer to the law of the stronger. Henry Baker Tristram, an English biblical scholar and ornithologist, was deeply appalled when faced with the ‘atrocities’ white settlers had perpetrated on the ‘red man’. He believed that ‘the impossibility of coexistence, if there be such, is caused not by the qualities of the race, but by its locality’. But this explanation was not good everywhere. In his view it ceased to be valid for ‘the lowest types of degenerate humanity’, that is, for those Indigenous people who had lived isolated from civilization such as ‘the Australian and Tasmanian’. Since here, Tristram opined, ‘the Darwinian axiom’ came into force so that ‘the weaker must perish in the struggle for existence’ (1871: 543, 545–6). Nevertheless, racial distinction occurred not only outwards. By the same token a minority within a ‘homeland’ society could be viewed as a biological rival threatening one’s own racial stock. Particularly in these cases it became obvious that racial thinking, and the category of race itself, was actually flexible and variable in content. The high adaptiveness of ‘race’ pointed to its increasing functional use and also heralded its political exploitation. The best-known example probably is anti-Semitism. The concept emerged in the 1870s in Germany and pretended that the struggle between the Aryans and the Semites provided the basis for cultural progress in general. But the anti-Semites’ self-definition was not only grounded on a simple rejection of the Jews. Anti-Semitism was also a medium of national self-assurance at a time when imperial expansion, domestic tensions and increasing class antagonisms put the nation state under pressure from several sides. Interestingly, anti-Semitism broke out in Germany at a moment when the integration of the Jews was at its peak; the North German Confederation had awarded them civic rights in 1869, the empire in 1871. For the anti-Semites, however, the levelling of legal difference and the general blurring of the boundaries was intolerable; to them this egalitarian moment seriously endangered the purity of the German racial community. The wording of the famous historian Heinrich von Treitschke is notorious; it was in this context that he coined the sinister phrase: ‘The Jews are our misfortune’ (Treitschke 1879: 575).

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Conversely, there were also Jewish theoreticians, mostly Zionists, picking up on the category of race and applying it to themselves. Richard Andree, J. M. Judt, Elias Auerbach and especially the Austrian physician Ignaz Zollschan tried to establish the Jews as a racial type and to integrate them into a völkisch model of progress. The objections raised in their own ranks not only took offence at the nebulous usage of the notions blood, race and people; a reproach which the non-Jewish theoreticians had also to put up with. Much more serious was the question whether it was sensible (and possible) to take up an opposite position to anti-Semitism in adopting the enemy’s racial model (Mosse 1978: 121–7). Another version of inward racial discrimination occurred in the name of AngloSaxonism. It originated in the idea that the free and democratic traditions of the Anglo-Saxons were first curtailed by the Normans in 1066 but then regained in the mid-seventeenth century during the English Civil War; this was regarded as evidence for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race (MacDougall 1982). In the nineteenth century this form of thought penetrated several discussions about national white identities but pursued different goals and referred to different groups. In the United States, for example, it took shape in the course of the immigration waves that had been flooding North America since the 1840s. Early on voices were raised against the in-migration, especially of the Catholic Irish, on the grounds that they allegedly belonged to a foreign tribe and thus to another race. The naturalization of the American nation condensed in the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, whose contours became even much sharper by the end of the nineteenth century, as eastern European and particularly Jewish immigrants poured into the country (Horsman 1981). Much more evident was the rupture within the white settler colonies in Australia. Here the English colonists even dubbed the Irish a race, which called into question the superiority of the English-speaking world as a whole (Richards 2008; Hall and Malcolm 2016). And the unionists in Scotland expressed their loyalty to the crown to the effect that they saw themselves as representatives of the Teutonic race but considered the Saxonborn in the lowlands superior to the Celtic race of the highlands, taking the view that they derived from the more pure, namely the ‘better’, English blood (Kidd 2003). Most severe was the inward discrimination against the Black population. Slavery certainly was the most delicate issue in nineteenth-century race discourse. Despite its elimination in the British colonies and partial abolition in North America before the Civil War, slavery had an enormous economic significance: during the nineteenth century between eleven million and fifteen million people fell victim to human trafficking (Geulen 2017: 39). In the Caribbean, for instance, the plantation system played a crucial role and developed the main features of a modern slave-holder society. It manifested itself in a paternalistic rule where the planters were meant to compensate those in bondage and slavery with a duty of care. The alleged neediness of Black people reinforced the conviction that slaves belonged to an inferior race. Similar to the colonial empires which were steeped in the mission to civilize their ‘savages’ the planters too felt obliged to educate their ‘backward’ slaves. The planter took his self-ascribed role as a strict but caring head of the family to justify the exploitation of the Black people as his workforce. His position as supposed benevolent patriarch seemed to whitewash the slaves’ factual dehumanization that he himself had been pushing ahead by transforming the Blacks into a mere economic commodity for the sake of his own profit. Actually, this modern connection between economic exploitation, social marginalization and racialization nowhere found a better expression than in Europe itself. Here industrialization had tremendously shaken the social order – it had given birth to a working class but had simultaneously humiliated it to such a degree and engulfed it in such a misery that the workers were eventually

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viewed as a group outside society. On occasion of the resurrection of the silk weavers in Lyons in 1831, a critical article was published in the famous Journal des débats in which the manufacturers, as one could read, were compared to ‘planters’, whereas the workers appeared as ‘slaves’. Even though its author, the French man of letters François Auguste Marc Girardin, in the first instance expressed his deep consternation about the consequences of industrialization, his dismay also revealed obvious racial implications. ‘The barbarians’, he wrote, ‘who are now menacing society were not coming from the Caucasus or the Tatar steppe but they live in the suburbs of our industrial cities’ (Girardin [1831] 1859: 145, 147). It is hardly surprising that in the vernacular these miserable workers were dubbed ‘white negroes’ (Rosanvallon 2011: 118–21). Similar to the situation at the end of the eighteenth century, the United States again came under pressure after the Civil War. In the 1830s, racism became manifest in reaction to the abolitionist movement in the northern states, arguments gained ground that insisted on white supremacy. In the case of Dred Scott the Supreme Court even passed a sentence in 1857 that Blacks were denied citizenship only because of their Blackness. But this regulation did not run long. After Civil War and the complete abolition of slavery in 1868, all US-born people – except Indians – were awarded the same equal civil rights. But as in all previous cases where egalitarian pressure had immediately provoked demands for restitution of difference, grim resistance again was aroused amongst the Whites; especially the south was engulfed by violence (Rable 1984). In order not to abandon old societal hierarchies the Whites applied so-called ‘black codes’ to vilify the Blacks and to degrade them anew to second-class citizens. Discrimination finally culminated in the Jim Crow laws, which officially approved race segregation. Generally, after the abolition of slavery, racism in the United States evolved in two directions: one against the Blacks and another against the Chinese and South Asian labourers, the coolies, who now mostly did the jobs enslaved Blacks had done previously (Jung 2005; Atkinson 2017; Brooks 2018). If the advocates of slavery in the 1830s had adopted a condescending and paternalistic tone and emphasized the innate childish character of the Afro-Americans, the racist reactions at the end of the century turned out incomparably fiercer. At best the Blacks were now regarded as wild animals and sometimes even as fair game (Williamson 1984). Thus this development can only to a limited extent be interpreted as a continuation of antebellum slave-holder society. The extraordinarily abrasive and cruel form racism had assumed under the egalitarian pressure after the Civil War was rather a creation of the reconstruction period (Figure 1.4). The race concept particularly inspired the visionaries of unambiguousness to see their utopias finally come true. Miscegenation was centre stage. In the minority, however, were those who endorsed miscegenation, for instance, the famous English natural scientist and author of the bestseller The Malay Archipelago Alfred Russell Wallace; he believed that miscegenation was even necessary for the civilizing process as a whole (Clement 2016). True, such political-anthropological optimism was not widespread; even in Brazil, where miscegenation was more common from the outset of colonial rule, mulattoes had constantly suffered severe racial discrimination (Marx 1998: 65–76). Instead fears and extreme phobias against all that seemingly threatened the purity of one’s race prevailed (Becker 2004; Hartman 2012). Growing interconnectedness through spatial globalization that made Europeans and non-Europeans come into contact more frequently might have played a major role in this process of increasing racial anxiety. It is no wonder then that the idea that all races could be traced back to one origin as had advocated most of the eighteenth-century naturalists now was seriously called into question. By

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FIGURE 1.4  ‘This is a White Man’s Government. We regard the Reconstruction Acts (so called) of Congress as usurpations, and unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.’ – Democratic Platform. Anti-reconstruction Political Cartoon from Harper’s Weekly (5 September 1868). © Archive Photos/Getty Images.

the mid-nineteenth century in racial thinking the theory of the so-called polygenesis had evolved into the leading, if not necessarily the only, paradigm. This meant that the scientific explanation for the race differences was actually suspended because by pushing reasons for difference back to different origins the concepts of development and evolution seemed to lose definitional power (Stocking 1982: 38–41). Thus race became mostly a matter of unchangeable nature. However, the contemporaries did not discard eighteenthcentury wisdom entirely; they still borrowed from its naturalists as was, amazingly enough, the case with environmental theory. Medical textbooks in North America, for example, promoted the polygenetic model with conviction but simultaneously the students also

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learned from them that climate and outside factors furthermore have a determinant influence on the formation of race features (Willoughby 2017). All the same, the concept of polygenesis backed by ethnological research, which proved the concept’s purported validity, largely reinforced the fears of miscegenation. The most notorious example in this vein came from the French author and diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who published a four-volume essay on the inequality of the races in the 1850s (Gobineau 1853–5). Gobineau made race the key concept of historical development and embedded it in a melancholic drama of civilization’s demise. This downfall was the result of the principle of racial weakness. The three races he assumed – the black, the yellow and the white – proved themselves not stable enough to resist the historical forces which finally compelled them to mix and thus doomed them to degenerate. The white Aryan race, Gobineau opined, which in countless tribal wars had demonstrated its leading role for centuries, had dug its own grave by mixing with those peoples and tribes it had previously conquered. In the mid-nineteenth century the result could be seen: the Aryan race, he mourned, had collapsed. Gobineau’s pessimistic story of biological demise through miscegenation earned him the dubious reputation to be the founding father of racism (Fortier 1967; Hannaford 1996: 274–80; Barrow 2000: 68–108; Nale 2014). As Gobineau had interpreted interracial mixing as a global disaster that could not be averted, the proponents of eugenics, by contrast, did not want to sit back and do nothing. This new science actually initiated a thrust reversal inasmuch as it began to focus on preserving and even generating the blood purity of a race through controlled reproduction. Eugenics relied on racial continuity by connecting the mechanisms of heredity with political will (Bashford and Levine 2010). The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by the English Francis Galton, although his preoccupation with it had a longer history, as he had published his early ideas in 1869 in a later-famous book (Galton 1869). He investigated the conditions under which certain features – he deemed intelligence, diligence and zeal the most important – were inherited. He held that a couple which promised extraordinary offspring deserved unconditional support and should represent an object of national policy. Key to racial health, Galton believed, was to understand that healthy parents brought healthy children into the world; a process that had to be supervised strictly. He proposed to strengthen race, that is, one’s own race, through controlled production of desirable features both of body and mind (Figure 1.5). As he had already phrased only a few years before: ‘If talented men were mated with talented women’, Galton wrote, ‘generation after generation we might produce a highly-bred human race, with no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown in our long-established breeds of race-horses and fox-hounds’ (Galton 1865: 319). This conception is obviously based on the idea that existence is not fated by achievement, merit or luck; instead heredity solely decided success and failure in one’s life. Men were unequal, which mirrored their genetic constitution. Thus in the last third of nineteenth century eugenics not only provided a scientifically substantiated biologization of identity. Against the background that race had been connected to nation, eugenics also helped create national ethnic bodies whose quality was now measured by their health, that is, by their purity. Nations were conceived as living organisms that operated on biological preconditions and that distinguished themselves by racial features; these had to be passed on to the next generations time and again. Especially in the colonies this new science produced strange effects inasmuch as their supposed laboratory conditions seemed to write out a carte blanche. Here eugenics could unhamperedly give proof of its modernity and practice a purely scientific colonization without the moral misgivings of the Old World

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FIGURE 1.5  ‘Better Baby Contest’. Mothers and infants gather on the stoop of the Cathedral of St Paul for the ‘Better Baby Contest’ in the 1920s. Mrs A. J. Gillette, who sponsored the event, is pictured in the centre. © Corbis Historical/Getty Images.

(Campbell 2007). In the eugenicists’ view the hygiene of the ethnic body was of high priority because the a priori of the biological could obviously be influenced by breeding and demographic control (Camiscioli 2001). Creation was no longer a coincidence that stretched individual life between the poles of birth and death but a promise of collective eternity relying on the sober-minded practice of race preservation. Primacy of heredity, biologization of nature and politicization of science were the outcomes of the eugenics movement, which eventually led to an overexcited ‘eugenic ontology of the nation’ after the turn of the century (Turda 2010b: 6).

CONCLUSION: EPISTEME, SUBSTANCE, FUNCTION Adorno and Horkheimer construed racism as the bastard of secular Enlightenment and in the face of the ruins that the National Socialists had left of human civilization also as the pathology of modernity. But only a few decades earlier, racial thinking contained none of that monstrosity. Around 1900 race embodied a principal episteme which even those who vehemently opposed its racist consequences could not do without (Spiller 1911). By the same token the liberal forces as well as the progressive did not close their minds to race discourse as was the case with the German anthropologist Rudolf von Virchow (Goschler 2002); and in so-called backward countries racial thinking signified modernity

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per se (Mogilner 2014). In the early twentieth century racial thinking evidently provided a spacious and adaptable figure of thought with which one could negotiate affiliation, rationalize fears and refer visions of order to natural conditions. It did not signify a specific content but a modus, which explains why racial thinking could be found in so many different global contexts and places and why it could be used simultaneously to stabilize very different communities (Dikötter 2008): it justified the discriminating practice of colonial empires, it encouraged empires to expand, it founded nations by ethnic units, it created collectives by skin colour, but it could also instruct faith in progress, fortify gender hierarchies, explain class idiosyncrasies and systematize social behaviour by biological preconditions. This set of facts suggests that against common understanding race is obviously not an essentializing category. The racialization of communities did not mean that their boundaries were impermeable; by contrast they remained, as we have seen, highly alterable and flexible, which is why racial thinking could structure, for instance, the constitutive narratives of both empires and nations, consistently (Leonhard and von Hirschhausen 2011). The premises that made racial thinking turn into an ideology and distinguish itself from the proto-racisms of the early modern period were rooted in the eighteenth century: for one thing in decoupling nature from the social sphere, and for another in entirely rationalizing the biological. Consanguinity now constituted communities in accordance with ratio. To understand the way modern racism could actually evolve so powerfully from these decisive shifts one has to be aware of the fact that they certainly did not initiate the naturalization of racial ancestry, rather, they implied that not substance but racist behaviour was natural. Not matter but instinctively proper conduct rested on reason and made racism materialize effectively. Obviously, racist behaviour manifested itself most vigorously when doctrines of political equality appeared on the scene, which many of the contemporaries perceived as a misguided approach to reality and thus a massive menace to the ‘natural’ hierarchical order. Racisms thus represented attempts to restitute natural inequality under the conditions of the latter’s delegitimization (Geulen 2004: 60). Where political-egalitarian norms were supposed to be implemented or had already come into force biological reasons had to be adduced to still justify the exclusion of certain groups. However, in conformity with the ideas of many nineteenth-century race theorists, the contemporaries actually looked on race as a remedy, as a kind of hidden substance which sometime had disappeared but had to be raised to the surface again and reactivated. But certainly substance or essence did not give race its invulnerability, rather, one could observe that in the nineteenth century race was viewed as one of the most important tools for distinction that had advanced to a warrant of clarity. This is why one had to keep race’s discriminatory function constantly running by disseminating it in, and applying it to, a variety of contexts. Race perfidiously euphemized discrimination as was the case in any colonial setting, but at the same time it could reconcile antagonisms as it had brought together the Irish and the Black Africans in their joint struggle against American AngloSaxonism (Guterl 1999). If one understands modernity in its broadest sense, as a process which is mainly occupied with erecting new regimes of order, then race certainly is one of its central – and most cynical – categorical agents. But it is revealing that racism as the harshest modern ideology of unambiguousness and homogeneity cannot refer to race but only to a mere formal and content-free category: only under the guise of universalism could modernity’s destructive particularisms develop their full murderous potency.

CHAPTER TWO

Race, Environment, Culture Between Philology and Biology in the Nineteenth Century EMILY KERN

INTRODUCTION In the history of anthropology, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 1775 treatise On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (in Latin, De generis humani varietate nativa) is treated as a foundational moment in the study of race. The most famous image is a comparative sketch of the skulls representing Blumenbach’s five (delineated in the third edition of 1795) human races: the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the Malay and the American. It was in the much-expanded third edition that Blumenbach fleshed out his arguments for how these differences in the shape and weight of bones, colour of skin, texture of the hair and ways of existence of different human groups had been fundamentally shaped by the climate of the regions in which they were found. Looking at varieties of squirrels, horses, birds and other animals around the world, Blumenbach argued that each had ‘degenerated’ as a result of changing climate, atmosphere and diet, while still remaining members of the same species. Likewise, humans could ‘degenerate’ into variable forms along gradients of climate and culture, although in such a way that it should be clearly visible to an observer that each variety of humankind ‘does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them’ (Blumenbach 1865a: 98–9). Blumenbach was, above all else, a monogenist who was centrally concerned with understanding how humans could take on such a wide variety of physical forms while still being a part of the same, singly created species. ‘No doubt can any longer remain’, he concluded in the 1795 treatise, ‘that we are with great probability right in referring … as many varieties of man as are at present known to one and the same species’ (Blumenbach 1865b: 275–76). The questions that drove Blumenbach to try to make sense of the wide variety of human difference were not unique but shared by many of his contemporaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What were the causes of variation among human beings? How does their structure resemble and, critically, differ from those of the other primates? What sets humans apart from other animals? Are all members of different human tribes, nations or races members of the same species? How are people in tropical or frigid climates different from those who come from temperate zones. In many ways, these questions were not new. Classical authors, among them Aristotle, Ptolemy and Pliny, all proposed the existence of a ‘torrid zone’ filled with

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strange creatures and peoples who had been shaped (or twisted) by their lives in the tropics, a concept that was reincarnated in the Renaissance and given new importance as the age of European oceanic expansion began in the fifteenth century (Wey-Gómez 2008; Davies 2016). Oceanic exploration brought European observers into contact with peoples and climates they had never previously encountered; extreme climates were believed, as Surekha Davies has shown, to breed monsters (Davies 2016). Some observers turned to humoral theory to explain how tropical climates could act on physical appearance, cultural practice and moral character, laying the groundwork for centuries of subsequent medical investigation into the impact of tropical climates on different types of racialized bodies. However, Blumenbach’s emphasis on exclusively physical and biological characteristics was not the only way that race was parsed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Race could be a product of environmental pressures, as Blumenbach extensively described, although over the course of the nineteenth century, ideas of racial fixity increasingly came to displace paradigms of environmental influence, in part because, after two centuries of European colonial presence in the tropics, it seemed likely that environmental exposure alone did not produce rapid racial transformation. But there were other characteristics that set humans apart from both each other and from other animals, especially our closest relations, the great apes, including speech, reason and cultural habits. Language occupied a fascinating, liminal place in discussions of race throughout the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. The study of the origins of language, and the historical genealogies of contemporary human languages, played a major, underrecognized role in the formation of nineteenth-century racial thinking, including in disputes over the monogenesis or polygenesis of the human species, the location of the so-called ‘cradle of mankind’ and the nature of evolutionary change. In this chapter, I want to show how race thinking in the nineteenth century was produced by an interplay between biological-environmental and linguistic-cultural categories and phenomena. We can understand race-making as fundamentally an Enlightenment-style classification process, concerned with book-keeping varieties of racial hybridity and tracking and typing human bodies and souls in manners that lent themselves to the economic and moral logics of slavery and imperialism. Including language groups in a system of racial classification did not make it any easier to discern what was a ‘true’ race and what was not, or to simplify the proliferating systems that categorized anywhere from two to more than sixty living human races. But, as even Blumenbach’s thesis demonstrates, making race concepts at the end of the eighteenth century also came out of a desire to understand the processes, both biological and historical, and the forces that shaped humanity either at remote points in the past or that were still present and acting on bodies and nations in the present day. The effect of a tropical climate on a European body could be observed in real time by physicians and natural historians but understanding how rapidly or slowly change could become permanent and understanding the historical arc of race differentiation and acclimatization required other sources. This need could be partly filled by studying historical anatomical material, where it was available, but men of science also turned to other kinds of evidence in order to understand the long biological arc of human history, from creation to the present. This chapter will begin by delineating the contours of the rich literature on the interplay between culture and environment in historical race-making, before exploring these dynamics in the writings of nineteenth-century ethnologists, naturalists and

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popularizers, including James Cowles Prichard, Georges Cuvier and Robert Chambers, the anonymous author of the mysterious and sensational Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1845). After the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, the intellectual terrain around evolution, language, race and origins shifted, but in ways that incorporated older traditions and made them compatible with the new evolutionary paradigm. Some philologists became interested in the metaphorical applications of Darwinian mechanisms (descent with modification in particular) to language transformation over time, but many others continued to be interested in exploring how language could be used literally to track evolutionary history over time, especially if the acquisition of language was treated as the last major threshold between pre-human and fully human. This idea was not confined to philologists: the great evolutionary synthesizer and Darwinism popularizer Ernst Haeckel drew on philological ideas from his German university education in his 1868 work, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, translated into English as The Natural History of Creation. In Haeckel’s schema, passage from the penultimate stage of protohuman to full human was conditioned by the acquisition of speech, from ‘speechless ape-man’ (Pithecanthropus alalus) to speaking, intelligent Homo sapiens. Haeckel’s ideas significantly influenced Dutch physician and amateur paleontologist Eugène Dubois when he set out to hunt for the evolutionary ‘missing link’ in Java and Sumatra in the 1890s. When Dubois unearthed the fossilized remains of a skull and femur in a riverbank in 1891, he named his find Pithecanthropus in recognition of Haeckel’s influence, although the fragmented fossil left Dubois unable to determine whether or not his fossil had been ‘human-enough’ to be capable of speech. My goal here is not to argue that linguistic formulations of race identity were somehow more central or important than race identifications based on physical characteristics and explained by climate; it is not at all the case that the philologists were the ‘real’ race scientists all along or that biological-environmental understandings of race did not matter in the nineteenth century. As the following case studies illustrate, language thinking was simply present, in a very fundamental and generally underexplored way, in the arguments of many scholars about the origins, evolution and development of human diversity. It was especially influential in arguments over the location of the ‘cradle’ of humankind but also functioned in a diverse array of analytical frameworks in the human sciences. Even as disciplinary boundaries became increasingly formalized in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the professional and ideological lines between anthropology, ethnology and philology were more firmly drawn, ideas about language, its significance for human evolutionary development and its utility in solving questions about origins and difference stuck around in evolutionary contexts. By the end of the nineteenth century, this influence was increasingly sublimated, as the humanistic disciplines lost ground to the natural sciences, particularly, as Andrew Zimmerman has shown, in the disciplines that studied ‘natural’ racial variety in humans (Zimmerman 2001). This shift was apparent in both explanatory frameworks, which shifted to privilege naturalistic, bio-evolutionary explanations for racial development, and in the changing fortunes of philology and ethnology as a site for prestige and authority to make claims about human nature. However, this did not mean that biological-cultural conceptualizations of race and race difference vanished outright. These racial-linguistic conceptualizations of rooted bio-cultural identity have continued to shape the rhetoric and politics of nationalist and racial supremacist groups from the nineteenth century to the present day.

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PHILOLOGY AND THE INVENTION OF RACE As European colonial and commercial empires expanded their reach into East Asia and South Asia, beginning in the sixteenth century, ancient and modern texts in Asian languages began to make the journey in reverse into the hands of European collectors and scholars. For researchers operating within the bounds of sacred history – framed by the Old Testament, with the Genesis narrative describing the emergence of humankind from the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which was itself historically located in Asia – the narratives that emerged from these texts, largely from China, Japan and India, began to present some difficulties. In 1650, the Anglo-Irish Archbishop James Ussher had painstakingly reconstructed a complete chronology of biblical events and concluded that the earth was created in 4004 bce. However, it rapidly became apparent to the translators of Vedic or Buddhist texts, or Japanese or Chinese chronicles, that the Asian texts described events and dynasties that predated the apocalyptic Flood and even the moment of Creation, at least according to Ussher’s calendar. This had multiple effects in European intellectual culture. First, more scholars turned to the comparative study of ancient Asian languages, cultures and texts and attempted to reconstruct the long history of the Eurasian world, from Creation to the present, and this process accelerated in the eighteenth century (Figure 2.1). Some scholars, such as Voltaire and his contemporary Jean Sylvain Bailly, for example, sought to disprove biblical accounts, while others, for instance the British jurist and administrator William Jones, wanted to use ancient Asian texts to validate Genesis and locate Eden, as well as to better prepare himself to serve as a magistrate in the Bengal Supreme Court on behalf of the British East India Company (App 2009b). After his arrival in India, Jones sought out tutors and legal scholars who worked in Sanskrit, believing that the language would both allow him better insight into the legal history of the subcontinent and possibly allow him to come closer to understanding the lost ancient language of the biblical patriarchs (Trautmann 1997). By studying Sanskrit, Jones realized the language shared significant grammatical similarities with other European languages he already knew and intuited that these similarities only made sense if the languages were all descended from the same, singular parent language, which he dubbed Indo-European. In a series of lectures presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal between 1786 and 1792, Jones argued for the existence of a now-lost Indo-European language and with it a shared Indo-European culture and people, who had occupied a central, ancestral country, which he placed in the vicinity of modern Iran (App 2009a, 2009b). Jones’s efforts drew special attention to Sanskrit Vedic texts as the oldest extant Indo-European-adjacent texts, holding special insight into the origins of humankind, civilization and culture. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, Indo-European studies was established as a lively intellectual field in Europe, but especially in the German universities and in London, where the British East India Company’s large collection of Sanskrit manuscripts was held. Indo-European philology was thus inextricably linked in its origins with two forces: Christian sacred history and European imperial and commercial power. If Genesis described a single creation of all living beings, then how could European men of science make sense out of the immense variety in physical appearance and cultural practice that they observed in the wider world? How could you fill in the gap between Creation and the present, the space between sacred and modern human history? Some thinkers, most notably Blumenbach, used the methods of natural history, reasoning by analogy with plants and animals, which also varied all over the world in respect to size,

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FIGURE 2.1  ‘A Correct Map of the Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden or Paradise’, in Flavius Josephus, The Whole and Complete Works of Flavius Josephus, the Learned and Authentic Jewish Historian and Celebrated Warrior (New York: William Durrell, 1792). © Courtesy of Victoria University Library, Toronto.

plumage, behaviour and species, and arguing that species had been singly created and then degenerated from this state of grace through the influence of climate. Others, though, argued that humans were fundamentally distinct from other animals – specially created to have dominion and responsibility over the planet, blessed by the Creator with reason, faith and speech. Studying human difference via comparison to other living things was not enough; it was also necessary to look closely at what made humans different, to perform analysis by comparing like to like.

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This was a classification process that was inextricable from the practices of power. Theology, history, slavery, commerce and empire were all wrapped up in this sprawling intellectual project to understand the cause and meaning of human difference, and linguistic, cultural and physical data were weighted differently depending on what segment of that mélange was at the forefront of an individual investigator’s concerns. Philology was most closely bound up with theological projects to locate the Garden of Eden, identify the ancient languages of Creation and argue for the singular creation of humankind. Race and slavery also had significant if variable theological implications. In many early nineteenth-century writings on race and human origins, we find references to the Hamitic hypothesis, which justified the enslavement of Black African people by arguing for an original sin committed by Noah’s son Ham, whose son Canaan was supposedly the patriarch of Black African peoples (Goldenberg 2003; Kidd 2006). The lack of theological clarity present in the Hamitic hypothesis is only matched by its amazing tenacity, which existed alongside other theories on the theological meanings of dark skin and the idea of a ‘torrid zone’ (dating back to Aristotle), which was inhabited by strange peoples whose humanity could be neither guaranteed nor assumed (Wey-Gómez 2008; Curran 2011). By the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the Hamitic hypothesis was undergoing a strange metamorphosis from being the story of the cursing of Ham and justifications for the enslavement of Black Africans to the basis of several Victorian myths of a lost white tribe hidden somewhere in the mountains of East Africa, but it still held significant intellectual and theological sway for thinkers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Robinson 2016). National intellectual contexts also mattered: in broad terms, the philological study of Sanskrit was particularly advanced in Britain and the German principalities; in the latter case, the influence of Herder was particularly important for connecting the dots between language and an idea of a deep transhistorical racial soul (Turner 2014). In the words of historian Leon Poliakov, it is striking how little distinction many continental philological and theological scholars drew between language and race in their writings (Poliakov 1974a). Early nineteenth-century British ethnologists, such as James Cowles Prichard, also saw enormous value in incorporating language into their studies of race difference, especially for researchers who were interested in the prehistoric relations between different human types (Burrows 1967). In France and the United States, racial categorization based on strictly physical grounds (especially craniology) dominated, but cultural and linguistic analysis frequently found its way into physical characteristic-based classificatory schema (Staum 2003; Fabian 2010; Conklin 2013; Redman 2016). Between 1800 and 1850, the study of human difference began to split along cultural versus physical lines, with the adherents of the former describing themselves as ethnologists and the latter as anthropologists, although, again, the parameters of each field were porous, contingent and varied with national and institutional context. In general, as many of the following case studies demonstrate, individual researchers mixed physical analysis with cultural analysis, using language families to nuance and subdivide physicalist divisions and bridge gaps between seemingly unrelated populations. One prominent enthusiastic adherent of integrating language into the physical classification of the races was the French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier. The chair of animal anatomy at the Muséum nationale d’histoire naturelle in Paris, Cuvier wanted to develop a rational system of natural classification for animals, organized according to major functional groups. In his 1817 four-volume anatomical study, La règne animal distribué d’après son organisation, Cuvier described three chief races (Caucasian,

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Mongolian and Ethiopian) of the human species, following Blumenbach, according to their physical appearance, including skull shape, hair texture, skin colour, aesthetic beauty and, in two out of three cases, their linguistic affiliations, cultural practices and psychospiritual tendencies (Cuvier 1817). Only the Ethiopian race was not further divided along linguistic lines, reflecting a deep dismissal of African cultures and peoples in Cuvier’s schema. Some races were cultural and historical, this narrative implied, while others were not (Figure 2.2).

FIGURE 2.2  ‘Mammifères Pl. A, “Homo sapiens”’, in F. É. Guérin-Méneville and Georges Cuvier, Iconographie du règne animal de G. Cuvier: ou, Représentation d’après nature de l’une des espèces les plus et souvent non encore figures de chaque genre d’animaux, vol. 1 (Paris: J.B. Baillière, 1829–44). © Biodiversity Heritage Library, contributed by the Smithsonian Institution. Public domain.

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Struggling to characterize the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Cuvier noted that while their physical appearance suggested they might be distantly related to the Mongolian race, their ‘innumerable’ languages that bore no apparent relationship to any known Asian languages made him loath to deliver any more definite pronouncement (Cuvier 1817: 99–100). Among the Caucasians, the Aramaic or Syriac branch (both terms that originally designated languages and then peoples) were notable for both their physical features and their inclinations towards ‘mysticism’, while the Indo-German-Pelasgian branch linked together the physically distinct but grammatically related peoples of both the German states and the Indian subcontinent (95). Language affiliation could fill in gaps where physical racial analysis failed, while linguistic similarities connected peoples, for instance the Hindustanis and the Germans, who would have otherwise been divided in a racial classification system based purely on either skin and hair colour or geography. Similar syllable structure made similar facial structures more obvious, even to the trained anatomist’s eye. One of the most prominent British proponents of philologically-based ethnology was James Prichard. His chief concern, advanced in his 1813 Researches into the Physical History of Man, was to prove that all humans were members of the same species, sharing a single point of origin and thereby affirming the literal truth of the biblical Genesis account of a single creation (Prichard 1813a). His descriptions, performed in the style of a classifying natural historian, combined physical characteristics such as skin and hair colour with language, using the latter to show fine-grained distinctions between subgroups within the same broad racial category and to demonstrate the historical relationships between different racial groups. For Prichard, it was critical to explain how the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, southern Africa and Australia could speak languages that had seemingly no relationship to any major Eurasian language, if all contemporary people had descended from a common ancestor. In order to make sense of the physical and cultural differences of these populations, he argued that their ancestors had migrated away from the original homeland or ‘primitive abode’ of the human species – which he located in western Asia roughly where William Jones had placed the homeland of his Indo-Europeans – before any human beings had ‘advanced to civilization’, a process that included attaining language. African, Australian and American languages were therefore autochthonous developments that did not invalidate the argument for monogenesis. Eighteen years later, Prichard published a supplemental treatise to his 1813 Researches, which delved more deeply into the relationship between languages and races and the ways relationships among the latter could be proven by careful study of the former. In the treatise, titled The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations, Prichard sought to furnish further proofs of the arguments Prichard made in the Researches, in more depth than had been originally feasible (Prichard 1831). It was, however, a standalone work, which did not retread ground already covered by Prichard on the origins of races and nations of men and was meant primarily as an intervention into philological scholarship. Looking closely at cognate languages showed their close resemblances and ‘proves the affinity of the races of men’ who spoke these vernaculars, a general principle Prichard had argued in the 1813 Researches and extended in The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations. Most of the supplement was taken up with this kind of extremely detailed examination of grammar and idiom, examining deep structural phenomena in Indo-European languages and then demonstrating how the Celtic languages were also properly included under this umbrella. ‘Among the investigations which belong exclusively to the history of our own species’, Prichard wrote, ‘an analysis of languages, affording the means of comparing their

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component materials and ascertaining their affinities and diversities, is one of the most important’ (1831: 3). Language mattered to Prichard because it was unique to humans, because humans were not the same as animals. Certainly, men of science could argue about humanity and the races on the basis of hair and skin colour, bone density, size and plumage from studying the ways animals vary all over the world, as Blumenbach, for example, did. But, to Prichard, humans were also not the same as animals; they were set apart by the Creator and understanding their history of multiplication and variation required more analysis than accessible by comparative mortal flesh alone. It would be too much to expect that philological analysis could definitively establish the original unity of race or idiom in the whole human species. ‘But’, continued Prichard, ‘this resource, if properly applied, will furnish great and indispensable assistance in many particular inquiries relating to the history and affinity of nations’ (4). As an example, Prichard pointed to the origins of the Polynesian races, which encompassed people found on extremely remote islands in the Pacific whose existence was sometimes presented as an argument for them having been created on those islands. (Polygenism being a more plausible explanation than, perhaps, boats.) ‘But a comparison of their languages’, wrote Prichard, supported the idea that all of the remote island nations of the Pacific had a common origin and were most closely related to those spoken by peoples in portions of India and the Indonesian archipelago. ‘Even the history of the African and American tribes has been in many particulars elucidated by an inquiry into the relations of their languages’, he continued, although frequently the results had not actually borne out scholars’ intended hypotheses (Prichard 1831: 7). Significantly more work remained to be done among the African and American ‘tribal’ populations that would allow their languages to be connected to those spoken on other continents. Philological research had managed to illuminate questions about the ‘origin and affinities of nations, when all other historical resources have failed’ (7). The identification of truly cognate languages, Prichard argued, must be taken as evidence of racial kinship, with exceptions offered only under ‘very peculiar circumstances’ (1831: 8). In independent Haiti, for example, French seemed likely to remain as the common language of the people and government, even though its people were of primarily West African descent. ‘But conquest, or even captivity, under different circumstances, has scarcely ever exterminated the native idiom of any people’, Prichard argued, and, certainly, the continued usage of Haitian Creole would seem to support this view (8). The Roman occupation of Britain did not lead to the wholesale adoption of Latin in the province, nor to the obliteration of Basque, Breton or Catalan in Roman Gaul or Iberia. (These points are, certainly, arguable, but show how Prichard was weighing the available evidence strongly in favour of presuming continuity over discontinuity at every stage.) Linguistic similitude could be established through similarity of idiom and vocabulary, but also through shared, unusual grammatical structures, which Prichard took as presumptive evidence of a long-lost connection among disparate tongues. Why did so many diverse languages exist? Prichard felt there were two possible ways of arriving at an answer: either there had existed multiple languages from the very beginning of creation, or there had been some kind of divine intervention, in the style of the Tower of Babel passage in Genesis, through which ‘the languages of mankind were rendered various’ (1831: 11). Prichard found the first option fairly ridiculous: ‘It implies that the world contained from the beginning, not three or four, as some writers are willing to believe, but some hundreds and perhaps thousands of different human races’ (11). In a footnote, he noted that German philologist Ulrich Jasper Seetzen had

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estimated that there were about 100 or 150 different languages regularly spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, while Spanish Jesuit philologists had estimated there were more than 1,500 indigenous languages in South and North America – far, far too many races to handle. Prichard preferred instead to rely on faith in Sacred History, which could certainly provide a diversifying or splintering push to human language in addition to the Creation as a whole. Language was proof of relationships that were both historical and biological, and even in circumstances where history in the forms of colonization or invasion or enslavement intervened, underlying racial-linguistic legacies would win out (except in Haiti, apparently). As Prichard’s concern for this point suggests, language study played a recurrent role in the arguments of polygenists, who claimed that different human races (of variable numbers, depending on which polygenist was asked) had been separately created, or descended from different pre-human ancestors. Vastly different languages could be in their own way as telling for a polygenist as were the purportedly vast differences in the cranial capacity of skulls. In his 1839 work Crania Americana, the American polygenist Samuel Morton identified two chief systems of classifying the human species: the physical, which relied on external, visual differences, and the ethnographic, which arranged human groups according to ‘analogies of language’ (1839: 40). His own work lay firmly on the side of the physical, but Morton acknowledged that both physical and ethnographic analysis were trying to measure equally foundational racial phenomena and that the combination of both methods would create the most ‘natural and comprehensive’ total classificatory system. In his introductory essay, Morton drew on Blumenbach’s five races (three primary and two intermediary) and then introduced a further twenty-two subdivisions, that he termed families, which were largely constructed on the basis of language. Morton emphasized that the families were not assumed to be identical to races but should be seen instead as ‘groups of nations possessing, to a greater or less extent, similarity of physical and moral character and language’ (1839: 4). After Morton’s death in 1851, his fellow polygenists Josiah Nott and George Gliddon published an edited volume of polygenist thought in 1857, Indigenous Races of the Earth, which mustered the studies of (as the lengthy subtitle described) philology, paleontology, archaeology, pathology, comparative geology, craniology and natural history to prove that all human races had been immutably present from their moments of separate creation (Nott and Gliddon 1857) (Figure 2.3). The first essay was written by French ethnologist and philologist Alfred Maury, titled ‘On the Distribution and Classification of Tongues’. Maury quoted the German philologist M. A. F. Pott, who had argued that speech was actually a better representation or measure of human intelligence than the measurement of facial angle or cranial volume, because, after all, the volume of brain was less important than what one did with it: ‘A powerful mind may inhabit a slender and misshapen body, whilst a well-made tongue, rich in forms and nuances, could not take its birth among intellects infirm or degenerate’ (Maury 1857: 36; emphasis in the original). Maury was not entirely convinced that Pott’s argument could be extended so far; some advanced civilizations had ‘a language very imperfect in its forms’, while simultaneously people from a ‘savage tribe’ might speak a language ‘possessing a certain grammatical richness’ (36). However, his extensive studies of both physiological and linguistic heritage had led Maury to observe ‘with tolerable exactitude’ that the linguistic families more or less coincided with the dominant accepted racial divisions of humankind. Each of the races Maury deemed ‘superior’ could be neatly subdivided into two major linguistic families that also mapped onto certain subtle

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FIGURE 2.3  Cover page, Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857). © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

differences in physical characteristics – or, in other words, Maury divided the Caucasian race into two language groups, Semitic and Indo-European, the Mongolian race into the ‘monosyllabic’ (referring to Chinese and Tibetan) and the Finno-Japonic, and then argued that the languages of Africa, Australia, Polynesia and the Americas had no discernible homogeneity and therefore could not be classified under his scheme. The fact that the majority of the world’s peoples and languages did not actually fit into this joint linguisticracial framework was, apparently, not an argument against its suitability or validity. Integrating studies of language and cultural material into race classification also solved some problems that could not be met by a system that strictly relied on the measurement and classification of physical features. Changes in languages could be tracked historically in written records or even further in time through philological analysis. Although these studies did not give evidence on the skull shape or skin colour of the language’s speakers, race classifiers such as Morton argued that cultural material could be combined with skull measurements and body analysis of living populations and used to extrapolate the racial identity of long-lost civilizations and cultures.

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Analysing philological linkages could be dry and isolating work (anthropological research, such as cranial capacity measurement, frequently suffered from the same occupational hazards). Nevertheless, philological and ethnographic analysis leaked into the public sphere. In 1844, the anonymously authored Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation appeared for sale in London book markets (Secord 2000). Vestiges was a vibrant hybrid, combining genre norms from fiction, science and philosophy, and a spectacular publishing success, selling more than ten thousand copies in its first five years in print. The mystery of the identity of the author only added to the furore; it was not until the 1880s that Vestiges was confirmed to be the work of Scottish publisher and geologist Robert Chambers. If it was assumed that all humans shared a common ancestry (Chambers was a biblically informed proponent of monogenesis), and that language was the ‘chief novelty’ attendant on the development of the human race, it should be possible for scholars to use language commonalities to trace back their relationships and thus identify the first language of the human species, not just in its content but in space. Chambers believed Indo-European to be the parent language of all subsequent human dialects and thus proposed the cradle of humankind should be located in northern India: Standing on that point, it is easy to see how the human family, originating there, might spread out in different directions, passing into varieties of aspect and of language as they spread, the Malay variety proceeding towards the Oceanic region, the Mongolians to the east and north, and sending off the red men as a sub-variety, the European population going off to the north-westward, and the Syrian, Arabian and Egyptian, towards the countries which they are known to have so long occupied. ([Chambers] 1845: 205–7) The ‘varieties of aspect and of language’ that Chambers saw in the world he inhabited were closely associated with one another. The Indo-European family of languages could be found in the region that ‘nearly coincides in geographical limits with … the Caucasian variety’ ([Chambers] 1845: 198). Other language families included ‘Africa’, with no further detail given; the Polynesian languages, which included languages in South and Southeast Asia as well as in Australia and Oceania; and the indigenous languages of the Americas. Chambers’s understanding of race and language were interwoven; group names crossed from one category to the other almost seamlessly. Philologists ‘have thrown the earth’s language into a kind of classification’, Chambers wrote, and grouped languages together based on their resemblances and geographical proximity into six overarching families. The first was the Indo-European family, which ‘nearly coincides in geographical limits with these which have been assigned to that variety of mankind which generally shows a fair complexion, called the Caucasian variety’ ([Chambers] 1845: 198). This family occupied the territory from India through Persia to Europe, with the exception of Hungary, Finland and the Basque provinces of Spain, since those regions possessed languages that were clearly not Indo-European. The second family was the Syro-Phoenician, which included Hebrew, Arabic, ‘Syro-Chaldaic’ (Aramaic) and Ge’ez; the third, ‘Africa’, with no further detail given. The remaining families were the Polynesian family, which included languages from around South and Southeast Asia, as well as Australia; the Chinese family, which grouped Chinese with the languages of most of ‘Central and Northern Asia’; and, sixth, the indigenous languages of the Americas. Still, though, Chambers believed Indo-European was the ancient parent language of all

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the other families, even the ones that had diverged so far as to be apparently unrelated; its history was treated as a reasonable proxy for that of the human race as a whole. He admitted one possible exception to this overarching schema, where physical differences appeared to be so marked that it was difficult for him to understand how this group of people might be related to the other groups he had just described: ‘The negro alone is here unaccounted for; and of that race it may fairly be said, that it is the one most likely to have had an independent origin, seeing that it is a type so peculiar in an inveterate black color, and so humble in development’ ([Chambers] 1845: 206). Variations in ‘external form and color’ were at least partly the product of the environment in which people lived: he cited cases where Arab and Jewish families settling in North Africa had become ‘as black as the other inhabitants’, as well as facts that seemed to suggest that a skin colour transition could happen the other way, from darker to lighter over time (194). Studies of the climate’s effects on race and studies of language change over time did complimentary work, since they both fit into a monogenetic but still plastic model of human development. Environmental effects were a plausible cause of observed variations in skin colour and body shape, while language studies ran in parallel showing that a common ancestry had existed at one point in time, even if no physical exemplars of that original intermediary race remained for examination. The one inescapable challenge, for Chambers, lay in deciphering the philological genealogy of African languages. Unless some compelling philological evidence proved that the languages of sub-Saharan African peoples were in fact obviously descended from Indo-European, Chambers was prepared to abandon his belief in the single origin of the human species and allow that people in Africa, alone of all the continents, could have come from ‘at least one other line or source of origination … which resulted in the production of a being identical in species, although variously marked’ ([Chambers] 1845: 207). According to what Chambers termed the development hypothesis, the ‘original seat of the human race’ should be in a place where the quadrumana, or ‘four-handed’ primates, namely the great apes, were also found. He noted that these apes were most abundant, in terms of both population and number of species, in Southeast Asia. However, the then-‘recent’ researches of the English anatomist Richard Owen on chimpanzees in West Africa suggested that instead it was the chimpanzee that ‘approaches nearer to man than any known species of Indian simiae’ (207). Chambers suggested that perhaps this meant chimpanzees provided plausible support for a thesis of separate African origins, while the rest of the world was settled by humans who first emerged in Asia and might be more closely related to the orangutan and gibbon. Like many topics discussed in Vestiges, Chambers’s claims about the origins and history of language were immediate spurs to controversy. At the 1847 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, there were no fewer than five papers about philology and ethnology, responding to – and contesting – different elements of Vestiges (Aarsleff 1967). Most of these objections reacted against very specific elements of the philological-ethnographic theory advanced in the text, and especially about the conditions required for the original emergence of human language, but did not contest the way that Chambers brought together race, culture and language when he discussed the early migrations of the human species. Following this history from William Jones to Robert Chambers, we can see how philological categories and anthropological categories became intertwined in thought and writing, even as practitioners heartily disagreed about the nuances and practices of both modes of classification. The genealogies of languages could be biologized, while language

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was used to cover the gaps when physical examination of human specimens was not possible. Terms such as ‘tribe’, ‘family’ and ‘stock’ moved fluidly between philological and anthropological circles, their way eased by the fact that it was possible for one person or one set of scholars to write in both fields simultaneously, and to cross the porous boundaries of nascent disciplines without much friction, although by the 1840s this disciplinary fluidity was beginning to decline. Nevertheless, the idea remained that race and language could be used together to approximate the history of different human groups. It would be left to the next generation’s scholars to attempt to begin to untangle the two concepts.

RACE AND LANGUAGE IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, laying out an argument for descent with modification from a common ancestor and for the influence of natural selection on evolutionary change. Famously, Darwin does not discuss human evolution explicitly in Origin. He did, however, make a reference to the genealogies of language in a chapter on classification, mutual affinities and morphology. ‘If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind’, wrote Darwin, ‘a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world’ (1859: 422). The transformations of language offered a useful analogy for the processes of descent with modification that Darwin sought to illustrate, and certainly many philologists, such as Friedrich Max Müller and August Schleicher, to name only two, seized on Darwin’s articulation of descent with modification as a perfect illustration for the ideas contained in their own works on language over time (Alter 1999). But, as the foregoing history of race and philology shows, language and its transformations had a long history in debates over race, creation and the unity or polycentricity of humanity. Darwinian ideas destabilized and reconfigured existing monogenist-polygenist arguments about race and natural selection, and provided a mechanism by which climate effects could possibly select favoured racial variations in a specific environment. Darwinian monogenism meant it was entirely possible – as Darwin himself recognized – for all languages in the world to be related to one another and mapped accordingly, if the complete data were available. By the 1850s, professionalization and increased disciplinary specialization began to place the blending of physical-biological study and linguistic-cultural study under pressure. The discovery of fossilized humanlike bones in the Neander Valley in 1856, alongside the discovery of stone, bronze and iron artefacts of apparent great antiquity throughout Europe led scholars to increasingly suspect that the prehistoric period might be a great deal longer than they had previously expected. A longer stretch of geological and evolutionary time troubled religious scholars, but it also troubled philologists who realized their studies might fall far short of the actual primeval languages of humankind. In the summer of 1861, philologist Friedrich Max Müller gave a series of public lectures at the Royal Institution in London on the history and latest developments in ‘the Science of Language’. Far from being the dry and dusty work of obscurantists, like Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Müller described philology as an active and dynamic field that offered valuable insights into some of the most perplexing political questions of the nineteenth century. In continental Europe, revolutionaries argued that ‘nations and languages’ would supersede dynasties and complex diplomatic allegiances as the organizing principles of the political future. In the United States, Müller remarked,

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‘comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific argument, the unhallowed theory of slavery’ (1861: 12). In his own early lectures and publications, Müller frequently elided the distinctions between the history of a given language or dialect and the histories of the people who spoke those languages, reinforcing the idea that the Indo-European language – or, as Müller preferred to refer to it, the Aryan language – had been spoken by a racially distinct ‘Aryan race’, to whom modern speakers of Indo-European languages could distantly trace their ancestry. However, the casual slippage between language and race was increasingly under pressure. In December 1862, a Scottish physician and ethnologist, John Crawfurd, read aloud a paper at a meeting of the London Ethnological Society, ‘On Language as a Test of the Races of Man’. While it was clear to Crawfurd that studies of language were valuable in deciphering history, cultural relationships and migrations, he did not accept that language was actually reasonable proof of a person’s (or group’s) race. ‘The proofs of this are, in my opinion’, he wrote, ‘abundant, and I select a few of them in illustration’ (Crawfurd 1865: 1). The majority of inhabitants of the British Isles, who were not, by Crawfurd’s account, representatives of a Germanic race, spoke a language derived from German; the handful of lingering languages that were indigenous to the islands, Celtic languages such as Welsh and Cornish, were on the verge of being wiped out, ‘without doubt, doomed in a few generations to extinction as living languages’ (Crawfurd 1865: 1). The enslaved African populations of North and South America no longer communicated in their own languages but instead spoke Germanic and Romance languages; an outside observer who fully embraced the idea that language was a ‘sure test’ of race would therefore have to conclude that Black West Africans were Germanic. If all languages had a common origin, why had no one yet managed to link any New World languages to Indo-European? How would an ethnologist make sense of the evidence of the Malay-derived languages in Southeast Asia – Crawfurd’s own area of specialty – which were clearly related to each other but spoken by people who could not plausibly be grouped into one race? Even though the philological evidence linking Sanskrit and European languages together was compelling, Crawfurd argued there was no evidence whatsoever that either light-skinned, fair-haired European-looking peoples had ever been spotted in India. Nor could people with dark hair or brown skin common to the subcontinent be attested to in the long history of Europe, and since, as Crawfurd explained, ‘neither time, climate nor locality will produce any material alteration of race’ (1865: 2), the purported synonymy between race and language was nothing more than an ‘ethnological figment’. Crawfurd was an avowed polygenist and strong believer in the deleterious moral influence of warm climates (Livingstone 2002). If races were mutable – perhaps on a short or long timescale – then language, which was also mutable but left more archaeological traces of its transformations, could establish the past relationships between now physically distinct peoples. But, for scientists who believed in the fixity of the races, as did Crawfurd, there was no point trying to understand race through language or the environment. Evolutionists were also beginning to raise some questions. In 1864, Thomas Henry Huxley was also at work on a series of public lectures for working men on the subject ‘The Races of Mankind’.1 His first five planned lectures dealt with the history and characteristics of different racial groups, while the last lecture was simply headed ‘Problems’. In his scribbled notes, the final heading of the outlined ‘Problems’ lecture read ‘Consider language evidence’, and another line questioned ‘value without physical characters’.

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Indo-European, Aryan or Indo-Germanic was a reconstructed language without any reconstructed bodies to accompany it; yet both men of science and the general public casually assumed that the terminology described both a people and their speech. In another lecture, published in The Fortnightly Review in 1865, Huxley questioned the conflation of language and race outright. ‘Without the least desire to depreciate the value of philology as an adjuvant to ethnology’, began Huxley, ‘it seems obvious to me that, though … unity of language may afford a certain presumption in favor of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages’, it did not prove ‘unity of stock’, unless philologists could actually demonstrate that national conquest and the adoption of a new language also led to a total replacement ‘of blood corresponding with the change in language’ (Huxley 1899: 216). Certainly, Huxley was arguing, it was not unreasonable to surmise that there might be a racial connection felt among, for example, the politically disunified German-speaking peoples of continental Europe. But the possibility of a ‘unity of stock’ did not mean that a priori all speakers of Germanic languages past and present could be automatically assumed to have been of the same racial stock. Ultimately, Huxley argued for the superiority of the ‘zoological method’ of sorting human beings, treating humans as examples of a particularly widely distributed sort of fauna and limiting one’s conclusions to those that could be derived from strictly physical study. Darwinian evolution offered a new way to understand human biological and cultural diversity. As Huxley wrote in the same article of 1865, Darwinism was the answer to the continuing monogenist-polygenist dispute, offering a materialist, non-special creation argument for the biological unity of the human species that also allowed for gradual physical differentiation over time – descent with modification, via natural selection. It was not necessary to assume separate evolutionary pathways in order to explain the physical (much less cultural) diversity of human beings (the polygenist case), but neither was it necessary to believe that all race formation resulted from environmental effects alone (the monogenist position). Sure, Huxley conceded, pale-skinned Europeans sometimes ‘are readily tanned and embrowned by the sun’ in tropical climes, but there was not ‘a particle of proof’ showing that such tans were heritable (Huxley 1899: 246). Likewise, if tropical climates were all that were required to give rise to people with ‘Negro’ features, then surely there would be Indigenous Negro peoples in all tropical regions, not just in the tropical climates found on the African continent. Here, Huxley wrote, Darwinian evolution provided the solution. Descent with modification explained how multiple and very distinct races, species or genera could evolve from a shared common ancestry. Over many generations, prehistoric humans found themselves migrating through diverse landscapes, experiencing changes heightened by the retreating Ice Age, and thus ‘what opportunities must have been offered for the play of natural selection, in preserving one family variation and destroying another!’ (Huxley 1899: 252). The physical traits that formed the basis of then-modern race classifications, Huxley argued, were not short-term adaptations to a warm climate but long-term adaptations that conveyed some comparative or absolute survival advantage. Darwinian evolution provided sufficient explanation for racial difference; evolutionists should thus confine themselves to studying heritable physical characteristics for proofs of evolution, leaving aside both language (as evidence) and climate (as mechanism). What was at stake in defining the relationship between race and language varied depending on the larger context in which these ideas were mobilized. In his 1868 Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of Creation), Haeckel sought to

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naturalize Darwinian ideas for a German audience, tracing a lengthy and impeccable intellectual lineage of distinguished men of science and letters – mostly German – whose work in some ways presaged or anticipated Darwin’s own (Haeckel 1868; Richards 2008). Haeckel’s goal, above all, was to normalize evolution, especially with reference to human, and to make it clear that natural selection could have given rise to humanity without requiring any form of divine intervention or supernatural forces. In explaining the process of evolution and the emergence of humanity, Haeckel walked his readers through twenty-two stages of increasing structural and biological complexity, from (1) monera to (2) single-celled organisms to (8) sack-worms (end invertebrate stage) to (12) mud-fish to (18) ‘semi-apes’ to (20) ‘man-like apes’ to (21) ‘ape-like Men (pithecanthropi)’ and, finally, (22) full humans. The penultimate stage consisted of the ‘Affenmenschen’ (Pithecanthropi, or Ape-men) or ‘sprachlose Menschen’ (Alali, speechless) who had become completely adapted to bipedal movement but had not yet gained the capacity for language (Haeckel 1868: 507). For Haeckel, the emergence of humanity was a two-stage development, where the first stage was the development of bipedalism and the second was the development of language, which allowed for the development of abstract thought and higher consciousness. In the first edition, Haeckel placed the likely location of this development of an ape-man human ancestor as ‘likely in southern Asia or eastern Africa’, but by the second edition, in 1870, he had instead proposed a lost continent, Lemuria, in the Indian Ocean, with humanity migrating first north through the Indian subcontinent – possibly with branches that diverged to the west and east early to settle in eastern Africa and the Indonesian archipelago – and then out into the wider world (Ramaswamy 2004) (Figure 2.4).

FIGURE 2.4  Hypothetical sketch of the monophyletic origin and of the diffusion of the twelve varieties of men from Lemuria over the earth, 1876. © Library of Congress. Public domain.

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Haeckel underwrote these claims with the dual logics of comparative anatomy and comparative philology. Humans were clearly all members of the same species, since members of different racial groups were demonstrably able to have children together. But racial divergence had happened early, possibly before humans even had truly mastered the power of speech. If language did not have a common source, Haeckel reasoned, it could explain the hierarchy of races that he arranged in a twelve-part progressive schema, placing the Papuans of Papua New Guinea and the Khoisan (‘non-Bantu’ Indigenous peoples) of South Africa at the bottom of the developmental rankings. Perhaps the acquisition and development of language was a multistep process where the development of more elaborate forms of language and complex grammar reciprocally altered the shape and structure of the human brain, spurring on more complex development. The most highly developed of Haeckel’s races was the Indo-German, who he described as inheritors of a language that could be traced back to great antiquity in central Asia. If language shaped the brain and therefore guided further evolutionary development, understanding the history of language was a very useful key into understanding the evolutionary history of racial difference. Here, language was connected to measurable, heritable physical characteristics; environmental factors played no direct role.

CONCLUSION In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, several influential European philologists, ethnologists and archaeologists began to doubt the plausibility of the Aryan hypothesis and with it, the possibility that the history of human languages provided insights into the deep evolutionary history of the human species. Part of the problem grew out of the growing recognition that human history and activity long outpaced the traceable history of language. Neolithic remains in Western Europe were unearthed in digging projects, or discovered by amateur archaeologists, their work inspired in part by books such as Charles Lyell’s The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863). Geological evidence that suggested that these ‘primitive men’ of prehistoric Europe had fished, hunted and made simple stone tools for a period much greater than the span of time that could be reconstructed using philological analysis (Sommer 2007; Manias 2013). From the outset, many studies supporting links between race, language and the environment centred on European peoples who were in the process of becoming nation states: a deeply rooted Germanic or Francophone racial and cultural history reaching its fullest expression in national political cohesion. Many of the most compelling counter examples – where race and language did not align, where similarities of language would imply a false cognate of biological relationship – were taken from the annals of European colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade, and underscored the point that biological difference would always top cultural and historical connection in the construction of global racial hierarchy. This position had solidified by the end of the nineteenth century, as further distinctions were drawn, especially in German anthropology, between the study of ‘historical’ (European) peoples and ‘natural’ peoples, for instance the Indigenous populations of Germany’s new overseas colonies (Zimmerman 2001). The role of imperialism in shaping these discourses about race between culture and biology cannot be overstated. The initial documents that drove the development of philological study were brought to Europe through global trade and colonial expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of the point-counterpoint discussions among the monogenist and polygenists ethnologists and anthropologists in different

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European metropoles were informed by data collected by colonial and missionary workers. As George Stocking Jr (1968) has shown, contests between polygenists and monogenists did not halt in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin, but by the late nineteenth century the conversations around race, culture and climate had undergone subtle but important shifts. These changes were driven by changes in scientific theory and practice as well as by new developments in imperial politics, as major European powers (and, after the 1890s, the United States) consolidated power and extended their control of new territory in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Researchers and colonial officials fretted over the implications of these new territories for the biological health and political stability of their imperial polities, whether through intermarriage between partners of different races or from the deleterious effects of a tropical heat and sun on a white European body and mind. By the beginning of the twentieth century, studies of cultural and linguistic difference were displaced and outweighed by studies focused on the differences of climate and biology. These studies of the biology of human difference, particularly focused on populations in the Global South, continued well into the twentieth century, with significant implications for the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the shaping of citizenship and immigration policies (Anderson 2014). Colonialism, race and the study of language were intimately connected from the beginning. It was through the further expansion of colonialism and the racial sciences that language study was ultimately subsumed by them, although not without shaping scientific and political discourses around biology, culture and human difference in profound and lasting ways.

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CHAPTER THREE

Race and Religion Modern Histories of the Arabs and of Islam MARWA ELSHAKRY

The mid- to late nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a key set of interrelated discourses around philology, race, religion and civilization. After the publication of Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, and most especially his Descent of Man in 1871, the question of racial differences was increasingly tied to ideas of human evolution, a vague categorization of the period and one which encompassed forms of social progress as much as moral evolution. It was not until Darwin addressed the question of natural selection in relation to the ‘races of man’ that his works first gained ground among Arabic readers. Of course, this new conception of ‘race’ – whether in terms of biology or sex, or as language, religion or civilization – cannot be attributed solely to Darwin. Indeed, following the many Arabic discussions of Darwin’s Descent in the two decades after its publication, one immediately notices a plethora of other references that were typically joined to his name: Ernest Renan, Gustave Le Bon, Herbert Spencer and even Ibn Khaldun were among the most common in this context. This chapter will consider how this cast of characters and this re-inscription of the idea of race, understood in terms of the evolution of language and the rise and fall of world religions or civilizations in particular, emerged in reference to the outlined creative re-readings and renditions. Following the various translations and the vast metatextual landscape they inhabited, it will focus in particular on how the rise of new evolutionary narratives of human difference were invariably understood as part and parcel of a broader historical and social process of progression, whether in terms of the progress of religions and civilizations, language families or moral societies. While much of Darwin’s Descent focused on the question of natural selection in relation to sex, this emphasis proved to be of less interest to his many Arabic readers in the nineteenth century. Indeed, much of the discussion around evolution in Arabic at this time was more or less segregated from questions of heredity as such, whether in terms of sexual propagation or bloodline lineages. Rather, they typically focused on Darwin’s ideas of descent in terms of the ‘progress’ of human ‘intellectual and moral faculties’ among ‘primitive and civilized’ peoples across the world and through the longue durée of recorded history. Coming at a time when the new European imperialism of the late nineteenth century was increasingly polarizing states and publics around questions of ‘advancement’ and ‘backwardness’ through a dual-pronged use of ideas of civilizational might and rights, understanding the historical status of the ‘Arabs’ or of ‘Islam’ along these lines seemed understandably significant to many in the region. Of course, this was

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not the first time questions of social or moral evolution were played out in Arabic. Indeed, the vast majority of these discussions of Darwin typically combined them with classical Arabic ones along similar themes: hence, many other authors were cited alongside these, whether Ibn Miskawayah or Ibn Khaldun. And while I cannot possibly cover such a broad metatextual ground in so short a chapter, I will here also attempt where possible to show how these authors and readers made reference to this longer-run textual history. In the end, therefore, while we might understand the new evolutionary sciences as having contributed significantly to a radical reinvention of notions of human difference and the reinvention if not outright invention of the category of ‘race’ in the late nineteenth century in particular, its novelty was itself not constructed from contemporary sciences or novel discourses of humanity alone. Indeed, as I hope to show, it was precisely this weaving together of the new evolutionary sciences with more classical concerns and concepts that also made room for the rise of new conceptions and, more importantly, new histories of the Arabs or of Islam as part of a broader story of the social or moral progress of peoples worldwide or of the universal history of civilizations on a global scale.

WORLD RELIGIONS AS RACIAL CIVILIZATION Modern histories of the Arabs after Ibn Khaldun The idea that ‘Arab civilization’ played a critical part in the universal progression of knowledge grew to become a key motif of the time, and many of the histories written at this time of the Arabs and of Islam – as a civilization – were constructed around this theme. Indeed, ‘civilization’ was fast becoming a marker for historical studies worldwide (on the modern idea of ‘civilization’ in Europe, see Benveniste 1971; Febvre 1973; Starobinski 1993; Bowden 2009). The term increasingly made its way into European historical, legal and political treatises by the seventeenth century and with the discovery of new worlds and peoples after the violent colonization of the Americas (Pagden 1986). As one early nineteenth-century Arabic writer put it, writing on the idea of civilization in new terms: ‘the more you go back in time, the more you can see the backwardness of people in terms of human skills and civil sciences. Conversely, as you descend and observe the slope of time (to the present), you generally see the elevation and progress of these’ (Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi 2004: 102). A later generation of Arabic commentators continued to build upon these formulations. They inclined to John Stuart Mill’s distinction in his own essay on ‘civilization’ between moral perfection, on the one hand, and wealth and worldly power, on the other. Yet, for most Arabic readers of the time, the concept would have been familiar through the works of Ibn Khaldun at least five hundred years earlier. Notions of civilization or civility in Arabic – which could be rendered by a number of terms, including hadara, tamaddun, umran or even adab – are discussed by many classical Arabic thinkers, including al-Farabi, al-Tabari, al-Mas’udi and Ibn Hazm; but it was not until Ibn Khaldun that they acquired a more specific and systematized usage (Benlahcene 2004; Schaebler 2004; Stephan 2014; Bashkin 2015). In fact, one can even trace the impact of this on the nineteenth-century rise of discussions of civilization following the various translations of the Muqaddima in Europe itself, beginning with Silvestre de Sacy’s partial translations in 1810. Ibn Khaldun’s discussion of civilization, and barbarism and savagery shared at least two features with later accounts of ‘civilization’. For Ibn Khaldun, the fact of ‘civilization’

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(‘umran, meaning a cultivated and dwelt or ‘civilized’ life, or, at times, al-hadara, emphasizing the life of ‘town-dwellers’ or ‘urbanites’) was defined through the construction of urban civitas. He also devotes considerable attention to the ‘various sciences’ fostered by these, and hence to some extent we can see why he was later seen as prefiguring the nineteenth-century interest in following the progress of the arts and sciences as a kind of tracer for the progress of the human mind or humanity itself. Alongside this emphasis on the history of the arts and sciences, Ibn Khaldun’s conception of civilization also included a marked moral dimension. When the question of civilization and the good appears, for instance, he often reverses the usual hierarchy. For him, al-barbar, or the berbers (sometimes translated as ‘barbarians’), like the original tribal Arabs, were often the more virtuous communities: they were ‘closer to being good’, as he put it, than their ‘civilized’ counterparts (Ibn Khaldun 1989: ch. 2). (Exceptions were made for the original Muslim empires whose leaders often underwent a process of religious transformation and therefore were able to justly guide, as he saw it, the expansion of the empire of God [Ibn Khaldun 1989: ch. 3].) In addition to rewriting universal history – or the history of ‘world civilizations’ – alongside the history of the sciences, nineteenth-century discussions of ‘civilization’ also presumed a model of moral progress (or regression) as the key to the rise and fall of civilizations itself, though not always consistently as we will see. By the mid-nineteenth century, among the works of Orientalists, Arabists and others, one could find entirely new histories of the Arabs and of Islam organized around this growing interest in the history of ‘civilizations’. Louis-Pierre-Eugène Sédillot’s Histoire des arabes (History of the Arabs, first published in 1854), for instance, was among the first to focus so specifically on the scientific and philosophical corpus of the Arabs (Figure 3.1). Sédillot had a long-standing interest in Arabic and Persian astronomical works, and he published extensively on the subject, including a number of critical bibliographic catalogues (a common pursuit among Orientalists of the time) (Sédillot 1829, 1834–5, 1834–50, 1841, 1842, 1844, 1845–9, 1847). He organized the history around a grand rise and fall account, or the ‘grandeur et décadence des arabes en Orient’. Much of this concerned the rise and fall of the Abbasids to the invasion of the Seljuks. Another section on the ‘grandeur et décadence des arabes en Orient’ followed the dynasties in Spain and the Maghreb. The second volume offered a ‘tableau’ account of Arab civilization beginning with the Baghdad school and emphasizing arts and letters and ‘inventions’. The categories themselves are revealing: along with the usual interest in the expansion of their dynastic realms, the history of the Arabs was also recorded in a duly positivist order, emphasizing the progress of knowledge, particularly those branches which made their way into the Latin corpus subsequently. Hence, he emphasizes astronomy over astrology. Moreover, much of his history of philosophy concerns (and begins with) the early translations of Aristotelianism. Yet he also spends time discussing the mu’tazila and the mutakallimun, or the ‘rationalist theologians’ before delving into a brief discussion of jurisprudence. But his discussion of the latter is very brief, and he does not (unlike the many classical Arabic histories he partially draws from) connect the philosophers with the question of jurisprudence itself (Leaman 1980; Gutas 2002). This concern with the history of science would organize most future histories of the Arabs or of Islam, or ‘Muhammadan Civilization’ as it was sometimes called. Take the prize-essay for the Bombay Education Society’s press on ‘The Reciprocal Influence of European and Muhammadan Civilization’ published in 1871, which made this point explicitly: ‘The epoch which goes in Europe by the name of the Dark Ages, and which

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FIGURE 3.1  Title page of Louis-Pierre-Eugène Sédillot’s Histoire des arabes  (History of the Arabs), first published in 1854. Public domain.

was really an epoch of ignorance and servitude, embraces the most brilliant period of the history of the Arabs’ (Rehatsek 1871: 64). It was not until the twelfth century that ‘many Arabic books were translated into Latin, which facilitated the progress of science’. As the essay then put it, ‘When two or more nations come into long and close contact with each other, it is a natural consequence that they will, to a certain extent, influence each other in many things’, he wrote. Adding, ‘the stronger and more cultivated will not only bestow its civilization and science, but will from its language engraft many words, and even whole locutions, on the weaker nation’ (Rehatsek 1871: 69–70). Like the clear recourse to this quasi-evolutionary terminology, this question of ‘reciprocal influence’ would, in later universal histories, also be presented as the story of translation itself. The book that had the greatest impact on Arabic histories of the nineteenth century and after, however, was Gustave Le Bon’s La Civilisation des Arabes (The Civilization

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of the Arabs) (1884). Le Bon was a French social scientist and amateur physicist, the author of several well-known and internationally circulated works, covering such diverse subjects as psychology, physics, socialism and racial science. His famous study of crowd psychology, La Psychologie des Foules (Psychology of Crowds) (1895), was published in Arabic in 1909 but many of his ideas had made their way into a variety of late nineteenthcentury Arabic works, the most popular being his history of Arab Civilization, which formed part of his ‘civilization’ series (Mitchell 1988; Selim 2009). Le Bon’s History of Arab Civilization – like those of others before and after him – was largely concerned with questions of dynastic succession, the conquest and fall of empires, but he also concentrated on ‘the rise and fall of Arab civilization’ as a whole. The question of the ‘origin of their knowledge and educational methods’ and then their later ‘decline’ was key for him as well. Le Bon also cited Sédillot when discussing the Baghdad school’s invention of an ‘experimental method’, and similarly organized his discussion of the ‘Arabic sciences’, focusing on mathematics, astronomy, geography, the natural and physical sciences, philosophy, the visual and industrial arts, architecture, and commerce in particular (once again, eliminating the jurisprudential, linguistic and astrological sciences, perhaps the three most important and most voluminous Arabic sciences). The transmission and translation of words, ideas and texts on histories of the Arabic sciences therefore worked in multiple directions here, criss-crossing disparate times and places, as much as texts and contexts, and creating a variety of heterological and homological narratives along the way (Sakai 2006) (Figure 3.2).

FIGURE 3.2  As an example, The Book of Ingenious Devices, a large ‘Abbasid era illustrated work on mechanical devices, including automata, and published in 850 was increasingly referred to and creatively resuscitated in modern histories of the Arabs and of Islam. © Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

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Le Bon’s idea of ‘civilization’ also reflected his conception of ‘race’, the only other category of human difference that was then gaining such a profound institutional and intellectual presence globally. Indeed, Le Bon began his analysis of Arab civilization with a discussion of ‘milieu’, a term he also connected to ‘race’. For him, as for many others of the time, the idea of race included climactic, geographic, physiological and linguistic considerations, and even various moral and ‘psychological factors’ such as the virtues (and vices) of any kind of racial or collectivist mentality or solidarity. In fact, in his discussion of ‘Arab civilization’, he came close to the ideas of Ibn Khaldun, especially his history of the Arabs, which had just been fully translated into French. A much-cited text, Le Bon was clearly familiar with its introduction, the Muqaddima. In a sense Ibn Khaldun had made an analogous argument to the one Le Bon made while thinking about the historical development of an Arab ‘civitas’, especially when set against the various Berber tribes they settled (or failed to): the barbara were in fact morally superior to their Arab civilizers but in the formation of new urban, political collectivities, and in the process of developing the civil sciences, arts and crafts, and trade, they lost their ta’assub, or what we might term a kind of group ‘thymos’ (θυμός) or consciousness. When Le Bon lamented, at the very end of his book, that ‘humanity is about to enter an Iron Age, where anything weak must inevitably perish’ (Le Bon 1884: 565) he argued something similar. As he explained, when the Arabs had long ago conquered the East they did not harm their subjects as they shared a common racial tie (or a kind of ‘thymic’ collective mentality). Yet, sadly, as ‘anyone who has penetrated the East knows’, the current ‘commercial deceptions’ undertaken by Europeans in the region betrayed ‘the low civilized veneer’ of this new conquest (565–6). In other words, Europe’s commercial conquest of the East, unlike the conquest of ‘Arab civilization’ there earlier, was ruinous and reactionary rather than progressive or associative. Writing during the commercial and increasingly the colonial, expansion of European empires into Ottoman lands, this formulation no doubt explained Le Bon’s popularity among Arabic readers from the late nineteenth century onwards. For many colonial intellectuals of the late nineteenth century and after, uncovering, reclaiming and even redefining one’s own civilizational descent was crucial for claiming a prominent place in the hierarchy of civilizations or the contemporary politics of world history.

Race and civilization, Islam and science Perhaps nowhere was the salience and power of the new vocabulary of race and civilization made more evident than in a press exchange that took place over ‘Islam and science’ in 1882, a momentous year for European imperialism in the region. The debate took place between the famous French academic, amateur philologist and enthusiastic racialist Ernest Renan and the revolutionary anti-colonial Muslim intellectual Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Afghani’s own peripatetic intellectual and political pursuits took him from Tehran and Hyderabad, to Cairo, Beirut and then, in 1882, Paris (Afghani has been the subject of numerous biographies, both hagiographical and critical; for more, see Kudsi-Zadeh 1970; for a recent exploration of his ideas, see Mishra 2012; there is also a vast literature on Renan, including more recently Deth 2012). Upon hearing of the main tenet’s of Renan’s Sorbonne lecture of that year, L’Islamisme et la science (Islamism and Science), and apparently after meeting Renan himself, who promptly regaled him with the details of his racial theories, Afghani decided to publish a reply (The debate made its way into the Arabic, Turkish and Farsi press: Aydin 2006; Kohn 2009; Guida 2011; Elshakry 2013).

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In the original lecture, published along with Afghani’s reply in the Journal des débats (Journal of Debates) that year, Renan began by painting a picture of the quintessential ‘Mussulman’ as full of ‘stupid pride in the possession of what he believes to be the absolute truth’ (Renan 1896: 86). This renders him, Renan continued, completely disdainful of ‘everything that constitutes the European spirit’ (86). Writing one year after the British occupation of Egypt and two years after a French protectorate was established in Tunis, Renan seemed to think it was thus self-evident to highlight the current ‘decadence’ of Muslim nations. Moreover, in response to arguments that this was nothing but a ‘transitory phase’ of decline, Renan remarked on how, ‘to reassure themselves of the future’, they merely appeal to the glory of their past (86). It is true, Renan noted, that this ‘Mohammedan civilization’, now so debased, was once very brilliant. It had men of science and philosophers. ‘It was for centuries the mistress of the Christian West. Why should that which has been, not be once more?’ (86). Of course, for Renan (Figure 3.3), this medieval

FIGURE 3.3  Ernest Renan. © Culture Club/Getty Images.

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Islamic renaissance of science and philosophy had little to do with Islam. Reflecting his views on the power of race not faith, he saw it as part of the historic and fortuitous union of both a Persian and Greek inheritance from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Renan argued that science and philosophy had been crushed in the first century of Islam through the early brutality of religious wars and conquests, and then under the heavy yoke of the Umayyads. A new spirit of rationalism had only been revived under the ‘Abbasids, whom he described as heirs of ‘the most brilliant civilizations that the East has ever known, that of the Persian Sassanidae’ (Renan 1958: 578). Through their Persian (therefore ‘Aryan’) inheritance, and through their Christian and Parsi translators, the ‘Abbasids’ ‘brilliant caliphs’ – Mansur, Harun al-Rashid and Ma’mun, rulers who ‘can scarcely be called Mussulmans’ – helped revive Greek rationalism and free thought. Renan thus classified this era of ‘Muslim’ philosophy and speculative theology as ‘GraecoSassanian’ (578). For Renan, who saw history as ‘the great criterium of races’, tracing the histories of the ‘Aryans’ and the ‘Semites’, those ‘two twins at the origin of civilization’, would reveal ‘singular destinies in the theatre of universal history’ (578). The Aryans brought mastery over nature, and hence a certain reordering of time and space, along with the invention of mythology and the sciences and arts; the Semites contributed merely the invention of monotheism. What characterized the Semite by contrast, was his stagnation and immobility, in short, a general ahistoricity (Herder 1943: 14, 43; Poliakov 1974b; Figuiera 2002; Olender 2009: 14, 43, 59). As Saussure wrote in 1878: ‘underneath research on the Aryas, that people of the Golden Age brought back to lfe by scholarly thought, was certainly an almost conscious dream of an ideal humanity’ (quoted in Olender 2009: 8). Once this golden age inaugurated by the ‘Abbasid Empire was destroyed by the ‘stupid barbarity’ of the Turks and Berbers, the seeds of Islam’s advance and its brief commitment to liberty of thought withered. From the thirteenth century, the torch of progress was thereafter carried forward by the Latin West (Ernest Renan, L’islamisme et la science [1883] in Renan 1896: 85–94). Afghani was an eminent, and at times enigmatic, Muslim intellectual who Renan later claimed had inspired him to write the lecture after they met briefly in Paris (Figure 3.4). Renan referred to him with condescending admiration as ‘an Afghan, entirely emancipated from the prejudices of Islam; he belongs to those energetic races of the Upper Iran bordering upon India, in which the Aryan spirit still flourishes so strongly’ (Renan 1896: 104). Yet Afghani held Renan’s racial – and providential – view of history in little regard.1 In his response, Afghani openly questioned Renan’s racialism: making a racial distinction between Persians and Arabs, Afghani thought, was meaningless as the Arabs had taken up Sassanid culture and learning and as they were ultimately to be defined not as a racial group but as a literary or intellectual if not a shared spiritual community. Afghani also used the language of civilizational progress against Renan. Since the claim was ‘all nations have advanced from barbarism … toward a more advanced civilization’, he wrote, Renan’s notion that there was something peculiar about Islam’s disdain for ‘free thought’ was misleading (Al-Afghani 1883, quoted in Keddie 1968: 183). The Arabs had propelled themselves from a nomadic tribal to an advanced civil state through both spiritual conquest and unprecedented political expansion. Similarly, they ‘acquired and assimilated’ the Greek and Persian sciences, which they also ‘developed, extended, clarified, completed and coordinated with a perfect taste and a rare precision and exactitude’ (Al-Afghani 1883, quoted in Keddie 1968: 184–5). To say that religious dogma and free rational inquiry were at odds, Afghani wrote, was true but no explanation of anything: one could find a similar tension within European Christendom, he noted.

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FIGURE 3.4  Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. © Heritage Images/Hulton Archives/Getty Images.

What had led to the downfall of the sciences in Islam, he thought, was precisely what explained their general decline in the present: political despotism (Al-Afghani 1883, quoted in Keddie 1968: 187). Both men were comfortable with the idea of civilizations as actors in history, and both assumed the rise and decline of a Muslim golden age; where they differed was in their analysis of its implications for the future. For Afghani it was something yet to be reclaimed; indeed, any other alternative was nothing short of political paralysis. For him, as for many other anti-colonial intellectuals of the nineteenth century and later, therefore, uncovering and redefining a classical or golden age was crucial both for establishing one’s place in the hierarchy of civilizations and for providing a blueprint for future progress. Afghani’s own vision of Muslim ‘reform’ and ‘revival’ rested critically on his understanding of a past like future age of spiritual and political unity within the Muslim umma.

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Afghani’s response to Renan was also symptomatic of the tension that increasingly characterized intellectual exchanges between Orientalists and their subjects. For Afghani, if to be modern implied a return to one’s true past, then it also entailed an embrace of a particular vision of progress-in-the-present that many European and colonial narratives also then promoted. The past was revelatory of one’s point of origin and a potential point of return to history. This historical casting and recasting, then, has to be seen against the backdrop of shifts in the very sense of history – and of time itself, something which both the growing discourses around race and civilization helped to consolidate in the late nineteenth century. After all, this had also led other Arabic, like Turkish, Indian or Chinese, scholars to create similarly new historical timelines organized around their civilizational contribution to the progress of knowledge, as well as to construct novel relations between their past and present sacral and discursive traditions. Such a reworking of history therefore also involved a reworking of tradition itself, something which increasingly took place on the world stage of historical writings of the time, particularly within the new genre of universal histories that were being resurrected globally at that time (Asad 1993; Masuzawa 1995; King 1999; Kippenberg 2002; Myers 2003; Nicholson 2010; Josephson 2012; Gottschalk 2013).

NATURALIZING RACE: EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS Darwin’s descent The construction of new theories of human origins and evolution transformed ideas of race as much as religion and civilization. Much in the same way that, as I have argued elsewhere, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection helped to reinvigorate ideas of natural theology on a global scale, so too did his ideas of the descent of man from ‘some lower animal’ meld on to and invigorate pre-existing discussions of racial civilizations (Elshakry 2013: ch. 2). It also helped propel the crude taxonomy of races created by the twin rise of philology and comparative theology in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, one can clearly detect an identifiable ‘order of things’ that defined the philological as much as biological sciences of the century. Whether coined in terms of philological, biological or civilizational origins, the history of humanity was also increasingly described in moral terms, or in the language of the times, as a blueprint for the ‘social progress’ of a people. As mentioned, it was not until Darwin addressed the question of natural selection in relation to the ‘races of man’ that his works first gained ground among Arabic readers or indeed that his name first gained its truly global popularity, if not notoriety. The earliest and most extensive discussions of Darwin took place in Al-Muqtataf (The Digest), a journal of ‘Science and Industry’, founded in Beirut five years after the publication of Descent of Man.2 Darwin’s ideas featured frequently in the journal: indeed, nearly every issue had some reference to them; and they invited equally frequent and lively responses from the journal’s readers. These early discussions also focused almost entirely upon the questions raised in Descent. Darwin’s emphasis there on the ‘comparison of the mental powers of man and lower animals’ attracted particular attention among his Arabic readers. Like Darwin, and other Victorian natural historians of the time, Al-Muqtataf’s contributors focused initially on the question of animal intelligence and they followed Darwin’s own emphasis on questions of morality and sociability when dealing with the ‘mental powers of man and the lower animals’.

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Rescripting universal histories alongside the prehistory of humanity also gave new credence to philological theories of descent, language trees and genealogical taxonomies that ranged from Aryanism and Semitism to the new sciences of phrenology and racial physiognomy. Here, too, Al-Muqtataf followed suit, and articles on the ancient languages of Mesopotamia, the evolution of the Semitic languages and especially Arabic, were a key feature of many journal issues through the turn of the century. This too allowed for creative renditions of older genealogies and references: take the 1881 article on ‘The Origin of Semitic Languages’ (‘asl al-lughat al-samiya’), for instance, which argued that ancient Canaanite was the origin of Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician and Arabic alike. Needless to say, in a region beset by contending imperial claims from the Ottoman Empire to the new overseas colonies and administrative empires of Europe, the appeal to an ‘imagined community’ through the unification of language held many possibilities once extended into the ancient history of the region. Unsurprisingly, Ottomanism, Arab nationalism, Phoenicianism and a variety of other reinvigorated ethnic and religious communalisms and even Muslim nationalism all emerged as possibilities for claims of linguistic nationalism in the region at this time. The popularity of theories of human evolution by the late nineteenth century also reclaimed an older, if not more arcane, understanding of human difference and historical time. Indeed, one could not understand the global appeal of ideas of human evolution at this time without attending to the social and moral dimensions of this narrative. In fact, Darwin’s own emphasis on the cultivation of social and moral faculties, particularly in his discussion of ‘the development of the intellectual and moral faculties during primeval and civilised times’ (Darwin 1871b: ch. 5), was also a point of repeated interest for AlMuqtataf’s editors and their readers. Indeed, as translations and discussions of Darwin and of the moral evolution of humanity proliferated through the rapidly growing Arabic press – particularly in the Levant and Egypt – so too did the nature of discussions around social or national or even civilizational progress.

Social progress and the invention of the future These growing nineteenth-century debates around the origins like the descent or progress of a peoples, borrowed therefore from a whole range of discourses, both classical and contemporary. Darwin was nevertheless a key interlocutor here in Arabic discussions as in others worldwide. Yet his ideas on natural selection in relation to sex and race and on social and moral progress were also almost invariably conflated with those of his then equally famous contemporary, Herbert Spencer. Indeed, discussions of Spencer had followed those of Darwin since the first days of Al-Muqtataf’s publications. After the British occupation of Egypt, and the journal’s subsequent move south from Beirut to Cairo, the editors’ references to Spencer became ever more frequent in fact. The question of social evolution, like their interest in the problem of progress itself, became more and more urgent in their minds, like those of their readers. In 1885, shortly after they settled into their new offices in Cairo, the editors of AlMuqtataf boldly announced the ‘discovery’ of a ‘new organism’. Relaying the news with characteristic flair, and headlining the column ‘A Prodigious Animal’ (‘Hayawan ha’il’), they described it as: an animal so massive that the image of it has not crossed the imagination of any of the Ancients has only now been discovered by the modern philosophers …. We are not

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speaking figuratively or in riddles. That such an animal exists is quite certain, if we are to believe the modern philosophers. You will ask us: ‘And what is this strange animal?’ The answer is ‘Society’ [al-ijtma‘ al-insani, literally the ‘human collective’]. (‘Hayawan ha’il’ 1885: 119) This organism functioned like others, they noted; it too operated according to natural laws that ensured its growth and evolution or its gradual decay and senescence. Speaking directly to their readers, they reminded them that ‘you too are a member of this globule [al-karriya]’ (Elshakry 2013: 82). The 1885 article served as part of a commentary on a longer series of articles published earlier on ‘The Natural History of Societies’ (Tarikh al-ijtima ‘al-tabi’i). The term ‘society’ was also largely a nineteenth-century neologism across many languages, and early Arabic discussions of the term were often heavily influenced by the new evolutionary and social sciences that then made frequent use of it. Added to this was the rising concern with the ‘social question’ that emerged in the wake of the new European imperialism in the region. In this context, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that more than a few colonial intellectuals considered Spencer’s idea that societies, like species, either progressed or decayed according to the laws of heterogeneity and evolution to also be a powerful diagnostic for the rise and fall of civilizations. Spencer’s concern with ‘society’ from the perspective of a unified vision of science was a key factor behind his appeal among Arabic readers, moreover. As Spencer and other theorists of a new ‘science of society’ liked to claim, society, like nature itself, operated according to natural laws (Simon 1960: 295). To intellectuals in Egypt under British occupation such ideas were especially resonant: ‘society’ could function as an object of imperial solicitude, a rationale for colonial occupation, or contrarily (especially later on) as a vehicle for anti-colonial mobilization. Indeed, this view of the universal laws of social progression took on extra urgency for colonial intellectuals in particular. The stagnation, decline and decay of nations, wrote the editors of Al-Muqtataf, following Spencer, and in terms that clearly spoke of what they considered to be the vexed conditions of their own ‘national’ trajectory, were themselves an epiphenomenon of progress, for the ‘very life of the social organism also depends upon the death of nations’. The rise and fall of civilizations – such as those ‘glorious Eastern civilizations of the ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Assyrians’ – thus constituted a natural law of universal progress. Yet, progress for Spencer was far from inevitable: it was conditional upon being ‘unhindered, undisturbed, unrepressed, undistorted, undwarfed, undeformed, uninjured’ (1873: 401). For him, a ‘reversion towards the old type’ (401) was one possible outcome of a hindered or disturbed society. While Spencer feared a reversion in the case of England from an industrial society to what he dubbed a ‘militaristic’ one, Sarruf and Nimr, by contrast, found the idea of a return to the past consoling in the Arab context. ‘There is an absolute and invariable law in the universe’, they wrote, ‘and that is that men’s ancestral racial traits do not easily disappear. And if they do so partially, it is quite easy to bring them back by a resumption of the necessary conditions’ (‘Al-Faylasuf Hirbirt Spinsir’ 1904: 9). It might be possible, in other words, to return Eastern civilization to its former glory. ‘The Arab East may once again be on the road to progress, if we attend to those conditions that allow for it’ (9). The editors’ organicist and holistic vision of society had classical resonances, but the novelty of this approach was that it was both nomothetic and historicist. This held particular appeal for the technocratic, colonial intellectuals that collectively comprised

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Al-Muqtataf’s authors and readers. In this sense, it was history, as much natural as national, which brought together evolution and empire for many of that generation. The new ‘natural history of societies’ (and of ‘nations’, ‘civilizations’ or even ‘races of men’) that Spencer, like Darwin, helped in large part to popularize among Arabic readers thus helped to critically transform conceptions of historical time among them too. Unsurprisingly, new conceptions of the Arab past, present and future were all thus simultaneously created or re-created. Cultivating a historicist reading of one’s past alongside a natural history of societies, after all, also allowed for a new sense of the possibilities of a social scientific diagnostic for the future. The question of rise and fall was thus also valued because it brought hope for the future: many who took up the banner of evolutionism were also key figures in the ‘Renaissance’ literary and political movement of their time, if not the key instigators and inventors of the very idea of a Nahda or Arab Renaissance itself. This ‘awakening’ of the East was to follow a broad scale ‘translation movement’, this time to transfer knowledge from West to East just as in the past it had done the converse.

RACE, LANGUAGE AND MORALITY AFTER RELIGION Arabic and the moral evolution of the umma Alongside Al-Muqtataf, Jurji Zaydan’s (Figure 3.5) literary and scientific journal, Al-Hilal (The Crescent), established in 1892, proved the other single most important venue for this growing interest in the social evolutionary sciences. Zaydan was also keenly interested in the new linguistic sciences of his time, and he often wrote on the various language trees and philological discoveries of his time for his readers. He was also an amateur historian, composing a series of highly popular novellas and histories of the Arabs and of Islam. Like many other contemporary Arab intellectuals, Zaydan often spoke of the Arab peoples as a ‘race’ but in terms of an umma (pl. umam). Ahmad Fathī Zaghlūl, in his translation of Gustave Le Bon’s Le Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples did much the same (Le Bon 1913). Substituting Le Bon’s more squarely racial prognosis of the Arab (or Semitic) races for a socio-moral critique of the contemporary Arab umma, Zaghlul could subscribe to Le Bon’s view of a ladder of civilizations without necessarily adhering to his view of a fixed hierarchy of races. Le Bon’s influence upon Zaydan worked similarly (this is the argument laid out by Selim 2009). To speak of races in this context as umam, as Zaydan did, with all the moral valences that that term implies in Arabic, shows how for Zaydan (as for Zaghlul), the emphasis was on socio-moral groupings rather than physio-racial ones. Indeed, this was rather a Victorian notion of ‘race’ itself: for Darwin too argues (in his Descent of Man) that it was the evolution of morality that provided the natural drive for human social selection. Tribes and nations of peoples rose and fell, and would continue to do so, on the basis of the strength of their moral codes and hence their very social evolution and progress. Zaydan’s subscription to contemporary views of race was coded similarly and it critically fashioned his own modernist reconstruction for his use of the term umma and as part of the new criteria for the tribes, nations or races of peoples worldwide that he often described in his popular history writings. Indeed, Zaydan regularly featured articles in his journal on ethnography and anthropology, just as he made liberal references to Ibn Khaldunian discussions of human geography. Writing on the New Physiognomy, for instance, he used the classical term ‘ilm al-firasa while covering a squarely­

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FIGURE 3.5  Jurji Zaydan. © Shim Harno/Alamy Stock Photo.

nineteenth-century view of racial groups (Zaydān 1901). He also published a book under a similarly re-worked classical title, Tabaqat al-Umam that we might translate as ‘Peoples of the World’ or ‘Races of the World’, a popular title and theme for illustrated general histories at that time. Once again, Zaydan utilizes the term umma, while simultaneously relying on modern ethnographic notions of race or races. The translation is significant, for like many of his contemporaries, Zaydan understood race to be primarily a socio-moral category of human difference. Of course, it also had its attendant geographical and physical or bodily contours (as his many publications on race, and their accompanying illustrations, show). Indeed, the other main criteria for the nineteenth-century construction of race – language – was also critical for Zaydan’s own discussion of the classes of peoples or races, including the Arabs. But the term umma, with its attendant religio-spiritual connotations in Arabic also allowed Zaydan to highlight moral, or in its nineteenth-century neologism

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‘social’, virtues when thinking about the worldwide geographic distribution of races of people. In his view after all, Islam unified the Arabs on the basis of its moral commitment to patriotism and egalitarianism. Zaydan’s evolutionary concept of civilization was one he shared with earlier commentators such as Le Bon and Guizot, as well as with Darwin, particularly as outlined in his Descent of Man. As we saw a little already, all three of these writers were hugely popular among Arab readers and writers of Zaydan’s generation. Moreover, Zaydan also defined Muslim civilization as having developed around ‘communities of interest’ (jami’at al-manfa’a) (Philipp 2014). The influence of a liberal, utilitarian views can be felt here as his attendant concern with the balance of self-interest and social utility also demonstrates. Indeed, Zaydan was part of the generation of Arab intellectuals who were as influenced by utilitarianism and liberalism, as his penchant for classical liberal virtues such as self-reliance, punctuality and hard work demonstrates, as they were by classical Arabic histories of Islam. Even when reinscribed with newly acquired socio-ethno or racial overtones, his view of a Muslim umma was after all still presented as a moral community of shared or mutual interests as much as by a divine or spiritual lineage. Zaydan was a key figure behind the broader popularization of this new, ecumenical, if not eclectic, history of the Arabs (and later Muslims) as a ‘civilization’. He was also among the first to devise a new chronology for this. For instance, he dated the ‘first’ Arab golden age (or Nahda) to that of the ‘Year of the Elephant’ in 570 ce, and not to the date of the first Muslim community or umma established by Muhammad in 622 ce, which typically marks older Arabic histories of the transition from their putative ‘dark ages’, or the era of Jahiliya, and which served as the beginning of the hijri calendar. Second, he classed the classical Arabic golden age as one among a number of other golden ages: the rise of Islam was the first – thanks to its codification of a unified Arabic language; the translation movement it created, particularly under the ‘Abbasids, formed the second; and the contemporary Nahda – a movement he helped spearhead – was the last. Indeed, Zaydan was a key exponent of the modernist construction of a contemporary ‘Arab Renaissance’, or Nahda. And it was through the construction of these past Arab ‘golden ages’ that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative of a contemporary Nahda was itself forged (Tomiche 2012; Middle Eastern Literature 2013; El-Ariss 2018). Like the many modernist ‘renaissances’ of the era, the idea of an Arab ‘awakening’ rested on the power of these new chronological schemata (Schildgen, Zhou and Gilman 2009; Sheehi 2012; Tageldin 2012). Spelling out his futurist vision for the Arabs in a posthumously published article in Al-Hilal, he imagined an Egypt of the early twentyfirst century: with a sophisticated telecommunications and transportation system, it was both progressive and pastoral, with every man and woman tending to their own gardens to support everyday dietary and natural needs, and possessing knowledge of the basic medical arts and sciences. Esperanto would be the national and international language of communication; marriages would be contracted by the fit alone, ensuring public health; and finally, the national religion would be a natural one, or a ‘rational religion’ based on the twin principles of science and the public good (Zaydan 1922; Ware 1973: 139–41). As we can see, this futuristic vision was critically tied to a scientific resurgence as much as a political one. Indeed, as was typical of the Nahdawi thinkers of his generation, Zaydan was not much interested in the pragmatics of constitutional or parliamentary political

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reform, as his perfect state was governed more by technocracy and pedagogy than by actual mass politics. (Indeed, the futurist vision of Egypt by Shibli Shumayyil and the young Salama Musa sound surprisingly similar to Zaydan’s for this reason.) Focusing on the moral progress of a people also provided Zaydan a bridge between the past glory of the Arab civilization with the Arabs’ future: for just as the past glory of one’s own civilization was founded on the concern for the public good (maslaha), progress in the future was similarly guaranteed through a commitment to a project of reform (islah) that could be founded on the same attentiveness to the common good. Zaydan proposed a series of novel periodizations for Arab as much as for universal history. In his general history, he categorized mankind into nomadic, primitive, settled and civilized types (distinguishing the latter two forms of settled civil communities as hadariya versus madaniya). In later writings, he pared this down to a triptych that charts the progression of humanity from barbarism and tribalism to the final stages of ‘civilization’, which were then categorized as one division, albeit undergoing a series of material, political and moral progressions. In his other writings on world history, he would similarly resort to the classic tripartite division between antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern ages. Only in Zaydan’s version did the universal Middle Ages contain the story of Islamic civilization itself (Philipp 1973: 68–74). In his histories of the Arabs and of Islam (published in the early 1900s) and in his later writings and lectures on history (particularly those he composed but did not deliver for the newly founded Cairo University in 1910), Zaydan turned from the subject of universal history to Arab and particularly Islamic history (Philipp 1973: 71–2; Dupont 1996).3 Yet his basic commitment remained the same: it was through a medieval Muslim efflorescence and its dual ‘golden ages’ that the real power and strength of the Arab peoples had contributed to the progress of history and humanity. Zaydan also helped popularize for Arabic readers the lives and contributions of key figures from the classical Arabic golden age of science and philosophy who are largely still familiar to us: biographies of Avicenna, Averroës, Avempace and Ibn Khaldun featured prominently in Al-Hilal and in other of Zaydan’s writings (Dupont 2006: 494). Yet Zaydan’s cast of characters was more eclectic than this might at first suggest; for alongside these medieval thinkers, one can also find Hammurabi and Cyrus as well as Muhammad ‘Ali and his descendants. In short, the novelty of Zaydan’s argument was to stretch out the historical temporality of the Arabs and their role in universal history. For while he highlighted the unification of the Arabs through the Islamic conquest, he also traced the origins of Arabic, and of Islam’s own spiritual-legal codes, as far back as the Babylonians. Indeed, features on the ancient Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians and Babylonians formed a regular feature of Zaydan’s historical entries in Al-Hilal. Stretching the genealogy of Arabs and of the Muslim umma in this way implied attaching Islam to a longer, and critically refashioned, sense of its own prehistory. In the process, Zaydan created a particular AraboIslamic antiquity, one that also brought together Islam with its own putative ‘dark ages’, or Jahiliya, in new ways (his Tarikh al-tamaddun al-Islam [History of Islamic Civilization] was published between 1902 and 1906, and his al-Arab qabl al-Islam [The Arabs before Islam] in 1908). Set against the background of many classical Arabic histories, this was a distinctive chronology, and the first of many later Arabic writers – Taha Husayn comes to mind – who redefined the history of Islam by recasting the meaning and scope of the Jahiliya. Zaydan’s reconstruction of an Arabo-Islamic chronology and history was thus also cast against his reading of the categories of Western historical time: East and West formed a critical suture for Zaydan and allowed him to rethink the history of the Arabs, and especially of Arabic, as a series of transitions along a dual timeline.

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CONCLUSION This was perhaps then the greatest enduring legacy of the racial reformulation of civilization and the evolutionary recasting of language and world religions ‘after religion’, so to speak: the transformation of history and the sense of time itself. Following these examples of popular Arabic and Orientalist histories of the Arabs and of Islam shows how new categories and concepts of race, religion and civilization transformed the stakes and stories of histories of the Arabs and of Islam. From Arabic readings of Le Bon’s Arab Civilization through the lens of Ibn Khaldun and Renan and Afghani’s debates over science and Islam to Zaydan’s universal history of Islam and the evolution of Arabic and the Arabs, they were, above all, creative translations of classical and contemporary discourses around ‘race’, ‘religion’ and ‘civilization’. Forged against the backdrop of colonial contestations and national aspirations in the region, these imagined communities thus mediated between different historical as much as political aspirations and visions of the past, present and future of the ‘Arabs’, ‘Arabic’ and ‘Islam’.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Race and Science Hair and Human Difference in the British Empire PROJIT BIHARI MUKHARJI

In 2005 a heated conspiracy erupted over the sixth and seventh grade social studies textbooks used by the California State Board of Education. The controversy was over how the ancient history of South Asia and that of the Hindu religion were discussed in these books. Certain right-wing Hindu groups in the state found, amongst other things, references to the caste system and its association with Hinduism objectionable and wanted these references expunged. The controversy grew as academic historians, linguists and religious studies scholars largely refuted the claims by religious activists. At the time, after a prolonged and bruising series of confrontations that saw most academics on one side and most Hindu activists, along with a very small number of academics, on the other side, most of the allegedly objectionable references were retained. Ten years later, in 2016, the Hindu groups once again challenged the California State Board of Education and reopened the controversy (Thaker 2018; Subramaniam 2019: 159–64). This time, the evidence they mobilized in support of their case included genetic studies claiming that the caste system did not exist in ancient South Asia (Bajpai and Arumuganathaswami 2016). The main study the Hindu groups referenced was a synthetic one produced by a scholar of religion drawing upon the works of several geneticists (Vemsani 2014). Looking further into the actual genetic studies that she mobilized for her argument, we notice that one of the key studies she used was focused on the genetic profile of the denizens of the Andaman Islands (Thangaraj et al. 2003). The study had compared recent genetic samples collected on the Islands with mitochondrial DNA they had been able to extract from hair samples held at the University of Cambridge, UK. These Andamanese hair samples had been originally collected between 1906 and 1908 by the famous anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Why and how had Radcliffe-Brown come to possess Andamanese hair clippings? What kind of racial logic informed his possession of these samples of human hair? These are some of the questions I will explore in this chapter. I deliberately choose to use the unlikely entry point of a seventh-grade schoolbook in the twenty-first-century United States to discuss race science in British India. I do so for two reasons. First, and most importantly, the incident underlines the materiality of colonial race science. The extant historiography of race and empire in the British context has all too often focused on the ideas and concepts about race rather than the material objects and practices (Robb 1998). As a result, the impression that frequently follows from

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reading these studies is that colonial race is a ‘thing of the past’, an archaic ‘pseudoscience’, which only serves to show how different the past was from the present. If we focus on the material objects and practices of colonial race science, such as the hair samples collected by Radcliffe-Brown, we arrive at a very different conclusion. Far from being radically different from our own contemporary contexts, we glimpse the remarkable continuity and vibrancy of colonial race science. Even though the formal British Empire has long disappeared from South Asia, a new combination of global science and elitist Indian nationalism continues to thrive upon the material and practical legacies of colonial race science. Second, the Californian schoolbooks highlight the strikingly connected and transnational character of race science more generally. Race, as a scientific object, notwithstanding its specific and highly localized elaborations is also an incredibly mobile object. Race science, in the nineteenth century as much as today, was constructed by and through the transregional circulation of people, samples, instruments and ideas. It is therefore crucial, in any history of colonial race science, that we do not carve it up along the geographic silos of national history. In this chapter, therefore, I will revisit the history of British race science in colonial South Asia through a dual focus on its materiality and mobility. Departing from the emphasis in the extant historiography on classificatory ideas, personalities and institutions, connected to colonial race science, I will look at a single material component of colonial race science, namely human hair. This will allow me to ground the classificatory debates in the material and mobile world of practices and samples. It will also illuminate the ways in which the coherence of individual racial groupings depended, ultimately, upon fragments of the body rather than individuals or groups.

PUTTING RACE IN ITS PLACE Race science crystalized in the nineteenth century at the intersection of Enlightenment biology of the earlier centuries and Romantic national history, geography and philology. As Claude Blanckaert explains, it was in the 1820s that, ‘linguistic-geographers, travelers, naturalists, and historians by their very rivalries strengthened a belief in the racial determination of the phenomena of material and symbolic civilization’ (1988: 18). This in turn made the systematization of ‘race’ that ‘all-absorbing question of the day’ (19). This in turn produced a consensus around the basis of racial classification, on the one hand, and the relationship between physiology and civilization, on the other. Prior to the emergence of this classification there had been two distinct ways in which race was used by different groups of scholars. Whilst one group of naturalists had sought to outline racial ‘types’, another group of historians and travellers had sought out the organic principles that underwrote distinctive cultural practices. It was by combining these two ideas of ‘race’ into a single composite idea that the Jamaica-born French scholar William Frederic Edwards developed the new, reformed idea of race and the field of study that was initially, somewhat loosely, dubbed ‘ethnology’ (Blanckaert 1988). Ethnology, however, never evolved into a tightly knit disciplinary formation. Its early heterogeneity was gradually replaced by other disciplinary formations, that were often equally plural and inchoate. Therefore, one of the challenges in studying the history of race science in the nineteenth century is that it appears to be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. At a time when the ‘gentlemanly science’ of the eighteenth century was gradually evolving into a more ‘disciplined’ and ‘professional’ form, race

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science, notwithstanding its enormous popularity, seemed to resist this disciplinary trajectory. Richard McMahon has recently argued that, given this recalcitrance of race science to disciplinary formations, it is better to speak instead of three successive ‘transdisciplinary coalitions’. McMahon argues that in the 1840s the transdisciplinary coalition that advanced the project of race classifications was Ethnology. In the 1850s this had largely been eclipsed by Anthropology. Finally, in the interwar years of the twentieth century there emerged Raciology. Attending to this shifting and ‘indisciplined’ terrain of racial science is crucial to make sense of the historical relationship between race and science in the nineteenth century (McMahon 2018). Besides the ‘indisciplined’ or ‘transdisciplinary’ nature of nineteenth-century race science its study is also complicated by its simple geographic dispersal. Indeed, Blanckaert suggests that Edwards’s own colonial birth and the later movement of his family through England, Belgium and France likely played a part in his consolidating a new notion of ‘race’ as a category that linked the physiological body to national culture (Blanckaert 1988: 20). Notwithstanding the tendency in much of the historiography to treat the histories of race science within national, and occasionally imperial, borders, this was a science that constantly crossed borders. Clarifying the nature of this gap in the histories of race science, James Poskett has helpfully pointed out that whilst historians have long acknowledged the transnational networks through which anthropological samples were collected, they have been much more reticent to countenance the transnational character of the subsequent production and consumption of the knowledge based on those samples (Poskett 2015: 266). Historians of racial ideas, though often overlooking the kinds of material practice that underwrote these ideas, have been relatively more sensitive to precisely these kinds of transnational consumptions of racial theories. Aryanism, for instance, has cropped up at and been locally redeployed in such far-flung territories of the British Empire as Ireland, India and New Zealand (Ballantyne 2007). This transnational character of nineteenth-century race science also pulled it in very different political directions. As David Arnold points out, ‘race was … a far more nebulous and often contradictory selfconcept, and rather than being the voice of white authority alone, could form part of an interactive process by which ideas of race were internalized and reworked by the subjects of European racial discourse and practice, in search of their own empowerment’ (Arnold 1999: 123). Aryanism, for instance, had been just as useful for certain elite nationalist Hindus in British India as it was for the British imperialists (Trautmann 2008). Well before the rise of full-blown Aryanism in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, another debate – over the monogenesis of humanity – had pulled the category of race in different directions. The debate over monogenesis was a shrill and powerful one in the early nineteenth century. Whilst many of the eighteenth-century scholars, including Johann Frederich Blumenbach who initiated the comparative study of human crania as the basis of racial typing, held that all men were eventually descended from the biblical Adam, some later scholars began to disagree. Though polygenist views suggesting different origins for different human groups had been articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by such savants as Paracelsus and Bruno, such views had always been marginal since monogenesis was aligned to the Christian orthodoxy. It was in the late eighteenth century that Lord Kames revived these polygenist views. Thereafter, though still marginal in Great Britain, in France and the United States the polygenist views acquired substantial support. These views repudiated the age-old view in the Western intellectual tradition that climate transformed human bodies and instead insisted on the underlying stability of inheritable characteristics (Stocking 1988: 6).

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The debate turned on how one approached the question of bodily and cultural difference. As Suman Seth points out, monogenists and polygenists could both be right depending on how they defined the question. If one looked at the physical form of humans, it appeared clear that ‘mankind was clearly once homogeneous, and races emerged later’, which supported the monogenist position (Seth 2016: 502). If, however, they looked at ‘the essence of humanity Man’s intellect and his social sense, then the emergence of races preceded the birth of humanity’, which supported the polygenist position (502). Since the nineteenth century, ethnological idea of race had combined the previously separate studies of physical types and cultural comparisons, with both monogenists and polygenists laying claim to race. Race science became the battleground upon which the rival positions jousted each other. The extent to which these debates over monogenesis and polygenesis actually mattered on the grounds of colonial scientific practice where most scientific work was constituted by ‘midlevel, mundane theorizing’ have rightly been called into question (Anderson 2003: 3). But their importance to the metropolitan builders of grand race-scientific theories is beyond doubt. James Cowles Prichard (Figure 4.1), often seen as the key foundational figure of British ethnology, for instance, was keenly interested in the question (Augstein 1999). Understanding the debate over monogenesis is important in appreciating how precisely those arguing for the common humanity of all mankind also came to emphasize physical traits of difference most forcefully. One of the key aspects of the human frame upon which these debates raged was the shape and size of the skull. Indeed, the shape and size of skulls that formed the preeminent basis of racial classification. The majority of histories of nineteenth-century race science rightly give pride of place to the study of human crania. Yet, crania were certainly not the only physical feature that was observed and systematically classified. Skin colour and hair had been deployed for racial classification since the eighteenth century. Pioneering taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, for instance, had used both the latter characteristics in classifying humans (Stocking 1988: 5). Just as the disciplinary coherence and the national homogeneity of nineteenth-century race science have been overstated in the extant historiography, so too has the extent to which cranial comparisons subsumed the systematicity and comparison of other characteristics. Even while not denying the privileged position of the human crania in race science, I will argue that other characters, such as human hair, had their own distinctive histories. Attending to these histories is important not only in order to pry open the ideational coherence of nineteenth-century race science but also to reveal the material continuities of this older race science with newer, more recent sciences of human difference. As I pointed out at the outset, many of these samples continue to be reappropriated and remobilized by contemporary genomic science. Their histories therefore are of both historical and contemporary relevance. Moreover, biometric ideas about identity that are not exclusively focused on cranial measurements but yet are descended from nineteenth-century race science continued to inform postimperial, nationalist ideologies of racialized identity throughout the twentieth century and beyond (Mukharji 2014, 2017). Finally, biometric measurements have now also emerged as a distinctive field of technological endeavour that have a range of applications for modern statecraft, which are only indirectly related to the ideologies of rule (Breckenridge 2014). Here too the specific histories of particular physical traits, such as hair, and their measurement become important to recover, independently of the history of cranial measurements.

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FIGURE 4.1  James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848). Public domain.

MICROSCOPIC HAIR ANALYSIS Human hair, some have suggested, has always been a marker of difference and identity (Prichard 1843: 98). The rise of racial science from the eighteenth century naturally incorporated it into its own repertoire of markers. Yet, these uses of human hair were largely superficial. What changed in the nineteenth century was the increasing use of the microscope to characterize what one scientific author called the ‘national differences’ of human hair (98–105). It was Karl Friedrich von Heusinger who, in 1823, for the first time explored the microscopic structure of human hair. His study was followed up in 1831 by another study undertaken by another German, Burkard Elbe (Elbe 1831). Both these authors held that ‘the human hair, like the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines and the bristles of hogs, to consist of two distinct parts, a cortical outer coat, and an internal spongy structure’ (Prichard 1843: 95). Not everyone, however, agreed with this description. Ernst Heinrich Weber, for instance, insisted that hair was made up of a single homogenous substance that could not be separated into a cortex and a medulla (95). Aside from the vertical cross-sections of individual hairs, researchers also demarcated horizontal parts of the hair. At the base was a root or bulb or bud (keim) while above it

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was a thinner filament (95). Later researchers further divided the hair into three parts: bulb, shaft and tip (Beigel 1869: 17) (Figure 4.2). Microscopic studies of human hair also attempted to locate ‘national differences’ in hair. Elbe argued, by alleged analogy to the distribution patterns of animal colouration, that no dark hair was to be found amongst the denizens of the north. He claimed that all the horses, squirrels, hares, weasels, etc. from the northern regions had white hair (Prichard 1843: 98). Naturally, such an extreme claim was difficult to sustain and was soon undermined. Yet,

FIGURE 4.2  ‘The Microscopic Structure of the Human Hair’ in Hermann Beigel, The Human Hair: Its Structure, Growth, Diseases and Their Treatment (London: Henry Renshaw, 1869). © University of Southampton Library. Public domain.

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a general belief in the principle remained. It was thought that generally southern peoples would have darker hair. Colour was not the only marker of racial marking of hair. The distribution of body hair was another such marker. It was alleged that ‘The Mongoles [sic], and other Northern Asiatics who are similar to them, are noted for the deficiency of their hair and for scanty beards; and the same character is ascribed to all the American nations’ (Prichard 1843: 98–9). In an interesting proto-Lamarckian argument, Elbe suggested that generations of manually pulling out the hair might have led to this pattern (98–9). Writing in 1843 the noted English physiologist James Cowles Prichard challenged these views. Pointing to the existence of several exceptions to every national rule, he wrote that, ‘It is probable that none of these national diversities exceed that measure of variety which occurs in the same nation in different families’ (99). Almost separate from this question of ‘national differences’ was the issue of ‘Negro hair’. As Prichard again noted, ‘The hair of the Negro has been thought the most decidedly different from that of other human races. It is commonly said that the substance which grows on the head of the African races, and of some other dark-colored tribes, chiefly inhabiting tropical climates, is wool and not hair’ (Prichard 1843: 100). Precisely how wool and hair differed had animated microscopists since Elbe and many different theories were advanced on the basis of the comparative studies of various animal wools. Some suggested that in wool the diameter of the filament was unequal and twisted, whilst others said that the difference lay in the surface of the filament of wool, which was rough and matted. Combining these views Prichard posited that, in wool ‘the filament is very different from that of hair, being of unequal thickness, and having rough, uneven edges; whereas the filament of hair is a smooth and even-sided tube, and nearly of equal caliber’ (103). Deploying this definition, and having compared the hairs of ‘a Negro, of a Mulatto, of Europeans and of some Abyssinians … with the wool of Southern sheep’, he found that the hair of the Negro was indeed hair and not wool (103). Born a Quaker (though he later converted to Anglicanism) and a strong proponent of monogenesis – namely the theory that all humans had descended from a single source (Augstein 1999) – Prichard argued that the main difference in Negro hair, as compared to hair from other human beings, was its colour and crispness (curliness), which, he also surmised, might be interrelated factors. Prichard was emphatic that these differences did not constitute enough grounds to prove that the Negro was a ‘peculiar and separate stock’ (1843: 104). Prichard’s writings are not only an early benchmark of the state of the microscopically informed studies of human hair but also a window into the larger politics of racial knowledge in the first half of the nineteenth century. Race, and hair as the material trace of it, were both caught up in debates about monogenesis of the human race. This explicit concern with human origins, in terms of the monogenesis debates, gradually disappeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead there emerged a more complex and increasingly numeralized grid of human differences. Franz Ignaz Pruner (Figure 4.3) was amongst the highest authorities on racialized hair in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pruner, though a German by birth, had risen high in the Cairene medical establishment, serving first as the director of the famous Qasr al-Ainy hospital in Cairo and then as the physician to the Egyptian royal family. Consequently, he was given the title ‘bey’ and usually referred to as Prunerbey. His official publications were usually credited to ‘Dr. Pruner-bey’. In March 1863 Pruner-bey presented one of the most detailed microscopical studies of human hair to the Anthropological Society of Paris. This study was then translated and published in

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FIGURE 4.3  Franz Ignaz Pruner (1808–82). Public Domain.

The Anthropological Review in 1864 (Bey 1864). Thirteen years later, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland once again reproduced the same study in full, this time including previously omitted microscopic slides (Bey 1877). Pruner-bey’s study produced a relatively large set of racialized measurements and descriptions without producing any final conclusion. He argued that though there were distinctly different colours and textures of hair, these were so far variable that they could not be connected to racial classification. Instead, microscopic analysis alone should be the basis of racial characterizations. Here too he pointed out that it was possible to undertake microscopic studies of both longitudinal and transverse cross-sections. But again, the variations in longitudinal sections were too great to render them a good axis for racial classification. Pruner-bey zeroed in on transverse cross-sections as the main basis upon which racial classifications could be built (Figure 4.4). He argued that the ratio obtaining between the diameter of the medulla and the cortex of the shaft of the hair could be a

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FIGURE 4.4  An old German manufactured scale for measuring hair colour at the Calcutta University’s Department of Anthropology. This was the first department of anthropology in the country. © Projit Bihari Mukharji (author).

basis for comparison. It was, he further argued, this ratio that determined the shape and texture of the hair. Whereas Prichard had used his data to emphatically repudiate polygenesis and assert that the so-called Negro belonged to the same common stock of humanity, Pruner-bey demurred from offering any conclusions whatsoever and wrote instead that, ‘I have confined myself to the study of facts. But whilst admiring the incomparable wisdom of the Creator, who has so marvelously diversified what is apparently so minute, I declare my inability to trace it back to the origin of the creature’ (Bey 1864: 23). In a fascinating recent article anthropologist Emma Tarlo has argued that, ‘Looking back at early attempts to read race through hair, one is struck not only by the sheer weight of anthropological attention devoted to this endeavor, but also by hair’s resistance to classificatory schemas’ (2019: 330). Indeed Pruner-bey’s indecision and the popularity of his study would together seem to confirm Tarlo’s impression. Yet, it would be prudent not to confuse the lack of any single, fixed classificatory schema as ‘resistance’ to such racial logic tout court. Indeed, what we see in the robust interest in Pruner-bey’s work, notwithstanding his explicit hesitation to propose any classificatory schema, is the emergence of a new type of racial logic that aims to map a large number of measurable relationships without fitting them into fixed schemas. We might think of it as a transition from a fixed racial schema to a web of measurable racial distances.

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What is also worth stressing is the absolutely central role of the microscope as an instrumental mediator of this new racial web. Both Prichard and Pruner-bey insist on the greater accuracy and validity of their studies precisely because these studies are based on microscopic analysis. Having recounted the remarkable visual diversity of human hair, for instance, Pruner-bey wrote that, ‘With such a result, furnished by simple inspection, we ask, what is the cause of this diversity? It is for the microscope to answer the question’ (Bey 1864: 6). The microscope is one of the key distinguishing marks that separate nineteenth-century racial science both from what went before it and what came after it. It is clearly different from the purely observational typologies that preceded it, as it is different from the kind of DNA analysis that is today being performed on hair samples. Each of these racial scientific momenta ought to be seen not simply as particular moments in an intellectual history but also as particular historically specific assemblages of ideas, technologies and skills. The microscope’s ability to reveal a world of potential markers of difference that were not available to the naked eye, not only opened up a new epistemic space for racial science but also allowed for new kinds of claims about objectivity based on technological mediation – prefiguring what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have called ‘mechanical objectivity’ (Daston and Galison 2007). Additionally, it is worth recalling that microscopy itself was also evolving throughout the nineteenth century and with it were emerging a gamut of other interlocking technologies. Prichard, for instance, had proudly mentioned his having analysed the wool from Southdown sheep, alongside his friend, colleague and brother-in-law Dr John Bishop Estlin, who was ‘skillful and long practiced in the use of a microscope’ using a set of lenses that could magnify up to four hundred times (Prichard 1843: 103). By contrast Pruner-bey mentioned a magnification of ‘hundreds of millimeters’. Moreover, to make these minute observations he no longer could depend exclusively upon the microscope. Instead, he mentioned using three different mutually oriented instruments: a small microscope built by Georges Oberhaeuser, a micrometer constructed by a Mr Flandin and a microtome made by [Edmund?] Hartnaek (Bey 1864: 10). The microtome cut the extremely thin and regular transverse slices of hair, the microscope made them visible and the micrometer either held the slices in place or helped measure them. Pruner-bey was candid that ‘Without the microtome it seems to me very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain transverse sections sufficiently fine for exact study’ (10). When Pruner-bey’s researches were reported back in India it once again highlighted the value attached to microscopic analysis. In a report titled ‘Hair as a Character of Race’, published in the Indian Medical Gazette, the premier professional journal for medical men, it was reported that, while Pruner-bey’s researches were already well known to the readers of the journal, the latest memoir, which ‘contain[ed] several drawings of sections of hair as seen under different microscopic powers’, would necessarily now become the standard work of reference on the subject. The report then went on to spell out the implications of Pruner-bey’s researches for British India, insisting on the ‘remarkable distinction between the Semitic and the Aryan races’ (Anonymous 1868). The importance of the microscope for the constitution of this ‘remarkable distinction’ was unmistakable. It was likely through the popularity of such studies in medical journals, such as the Indian Medical Gazette, that David Douglas Cunningham, one of the most influential medical men to work in Victorian India, became interested in the microscopic analysis of hair from an anthropological point of view. Cunningham served as Professor of Physiology at the Calcutta Medical College and as Honorary Surgeon to the Viceroy

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of India. Sir H. H. Risley, today widely remembered as the foremost exponent of race science in nineteenth-century India, stated in 1894 that ‘Dr. D. D. Cunningham, F.R.S., has undertaken to make a microscopic examination of any specimens of hair that may be sent in. The microscopic structure of the hair is regarded by European ethnologists as a very important racial character, and Dr. Cunningham’s inquiries will fill an important gap in the Anthropological record’ (Risley 1894: 434). Though Cunningham does not seem to have published the results of his analysis, the interest of such a high-ranking colonial doctor and networks of hair collection that Risley seems to suggest would both have ensured further dissemination and authority for microscopic hair analysis as a way of scientifically determining racial identities. Histories of race that focus merely on the evolution of ideas lose sight of the ways in which particular technologies allow particular forms of racial science to emerge at specific historical moments. Prichard’s analysis was just as reliant on microscopes that allowed four hundred times magnifications as Pruner-bey’s was dependent on the combination of more powerful microscopes with micrometers and microtomes. Race achieved its redolence, legitimacy and concreteness not by ideas alone but by a combination of ideas and instruments applied to specific types of bodily samples. The microscope-enabled authority for hair-based determinations of racial identities went far beyond the India, Britain or the Anglophone world. By the turn of the century the microscopic analysis of hair had not only achieved wide currency across the world but also gained a new forensic legitimacy as the basis of racial identity in doubtful cases. Marina Mogilner has described an episode in late imperial Russia where the anthropologist Dmitrii Anuchin sought to establish the national poet Alexander Pushkin’s Euro-Abyssinian (rather than Negro) ancestry by having a sample of the poet’s hair microscopically analysed by Piotr Andreevich Minakov, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Moscow University. Anuchin gave Minakov the sample without telling him its provenance and included with it other samples taken from the local Anthropological Museum in Moscow. Based on the results of Minakov’s analysis Anuchin then proceeded to emphasize the Europeanness of Pushkin (Mogilner 2013: 162–3). The episode powerfully underlines the way in which microscopic hair analysis had come to acquire a singular authority as one of the foremost scientific determinants of racial identity.

SOCIAL LIVES OF SAMPLES In comparison to Prichard’s relatively small number of local samples and his reliance on studies done by others, Pruner-bey personally analysed a wide variety of samples. These included sixteen samples from British India. He mentioned that he had obtained the samples through the kindness of a certain Mr de Montagu, who had several friends in India. Amongst these friends, Col. Pope, Col. Speak and Dr Leith were mentioned by name. All the samples came from the Bombay Presidency region and the Deccan in British India. Warwick Anderson’s fascinating and insightful study of Kuru has sensitized us to the ways in which biological material circulated within multiple overlapping regimes of exchange, thereby creating different types of value at different points in their circulatory journeys (Anderson 2000). How the military and medical men in India came to possess these bits of hair is difficult to reconstruct. Yet, we do have some clues. We know for instance that Col. Pope was an officer in a Native Cavalry regiments in the Bombay Presidency (Thackwell 1851: 133). There is also some reason to believe that he, like

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many other British men in India before the 1850s, had fathered at least one child with a local woman.1 Both these circumstances would suggest that he had more than perfunctory contact with local people and hence is likely to have acquired the samples within a relatively thick web of social transactions. Yet, these social relations did not leave a trace when the samples moved from India to Europe. We do not know if the hairs sent by Col. Pope had belonged to some of his soldiers, one of his dependents or maybe even his wife or partner. Stripped of their social identities, they lost all value as a gift. Instead, as they moved to Europe, they were marked by their anonymized, racial origins, being marked as Mahar hair, Bhil hair, Kol hair, Brahmin hair and so on. Yet, ironically, at precisely that moment it also acquired other social identities and values, as the gift given by Col. Pope to his friend Mr de Montagu who in turn passed them on as another token of friendship to his friend Pruner-bey. As Anderson points out, the rather rigid and arbitrary taxonomy of gift economies and commodity economies evokes a stark binary. On the one side of this binary is the gift object that can never entirely be alienated from the giver and therefore creates reciprocal obligations for the recipient towards the giver. On the other side is the commodity, which is circulated through perfectly anonymized transactions wherein the object is entirely stripped of all associations with the giver/seller. Yet, in the biocolonial exchanges through which biological objects are alienated from their original possessors and then circulated along social and professional networks of science, Anderson perceptively points out, such binaries become frequently blurred and indistinguishable (Anderson 2000). In the case of our hair samples this blurring is seen in the way that just as the samples lose their individual provenance and get racialized, they also get explicitly attached to named networks of friendship and professional contacts. Just as some social obligations that might have been created in Bombay by their gifting were erased from the scientific record, new obligations between de Montagu and Pruner-bey, for instance, arose and were explicitly acknowledged. Beyond the biocoloniality of exchange that marked the collection of hair samples, it is also important to consider that the brute fact collection itself was a racial discourse. As Mirjam Brusius points out with regards to the history of archaeology, ‘collecting itself is a racial discourse – one which has established notions of difference between those who collected (Occidental) and those whose objects were collected (Oriental)’ (2017: 389). The acts of collecting are therefore not prior to the construction of racial knowledge, they are in themselves part and parcel of the racial discourse that marks off those who can collect from those whose hairs are collected. While we have very little information on the actual collection practices through which Pruner-bey obtained his samples, it is worth noting that two of his three suppliers from India were high-ranking military officers and another was a doctor. Contrastingly, besides a single sample that came from a Brahmin, the other samples came from some of the lowest and most marginalized caste groups in South Asia, such as the Bhils, the Mahars and so on. Taken together these facts serve to highlight that who could collect samples and those who could only be the source from whose bodies hair was harvested was already largely fixed within the colonial hierarchy. Racial knowledge was not simply dependent on these colonial power differentials but also actually engendered in them. The point is further underlined when we realize that in metropolitan Europe even committed eugenicists, such as the redoubtable Francis Galton, had to find ways of convincing their subjects to participate in their projects of racial knowledge-production. As Elise Smith points out, Galton designed his anthropometric projects in ways that

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would encourage participants to take the competitive tests as a way of finding out their own strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, Galton’s peer, Charles Roberts, convinced participants by appealing to the desire of parents to monitor the growth of their children. Either way, both of these leading Victorian anthropometrists, had to find ways of explaining, or indeed in Smith’s words ‘marketing’, their projects to their subjects on the latter’s own terms (Smith 2020). No such effort is recorded as having been undertaken in India. It is highly doubtful whether Col. Pope or Dr Leith ever bothered to explain the project in a meaningful way to those whose hair they took. Naturally, this is not to suggest that these contributors of hair did not come to their own conclusions, or indeed that they did not have their own reasons – completely unconnected perhaps with the racial project – for giving up their hairs to these men. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that those whose hairs were collected both gave up their hair for their own reasons – such as, for instance, pleasing a man in power by gifting him something he sought – and gave their own meanings to the very act of hair collection. After all, hair in India as elsewhere has long been thought of as a potent magical substance. This in turn would take us back to Gyan Prakash’s canny observation that imperial science in colonial India was often translated as magic, simply because exposing its actual workings would detract in turn from its use in the construction of imperial hegemony (Prakash 2000). As Prakash puts is, the British imperialists sought ‘from Indians the recognition of Western knowledge’s authority’ but were ‘unwilling to acknowledge them as knowing subjects’, for the very basis of colonial domination lay in emphasizing the inadequacy or lack of Indian subjects to govern themselves (Prakash 1992: 172). These complex interpellations of science, magic, biocolonial exchanges and colonial power hierarchies through which samples of hair were transformed into scientific data on race are well illuminated in the case of the Andaman Islands. The Islands and their inhabitants were particularly keenly studied by nineteenth-century race scientists because the denizens of these islands were thought to be amongst the most primitive human group (Lane Fox 1878a). As Claire Wintle points out, ‘The Andamanese had long been seen by European observers as “a race of men the least civilized, perhaps, in the world”. But following colonization, reports and examples of Britain’s new subjects, with their “African” physiognomy and “simple” material culture, became highly sought after as verification of socio-evolutionary theories’ (2014: 145). In 1878 Major General A. Lane Fox, one of the leading ethnologists who would become better known as Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, presented a brief discussion of Andamanese hair to the members of the Anthropological Institute (Lane Fox 1878b: 438). The discussion was later published in the journal of the institute. This was the same journal that had, in the previous year, reprinted at length and with plates Pruner-bey’s old paper on human hair as a racial marker (Bey 1877). The samples upon which Lane Fox based his observations had come from a British colonial officer named Edward Horace Man. E. H. Man was what has sometimes been described as the ‘foot soldiers in the field’ who supplied ethnological data to ‘armchair scholars’ in metropolitan centres (Beek and Vellinga 2005: 137). Man’s father, Capt. Henry Man, had first taken possession of the Andamans as an officer of the East India Company in 1858. Later, from 1868 to 1871 he had been the Superintendent of the Islands. It was in 1869 that the then 23-year-old Edward joined his father on the Islands. From then until 1901, when he retired, Edward H. Man spent the entirety of his career on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. From his father he had also inherited a passion for ethnology, but his introduction to the Notes and

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Queries on Anthropology, produced by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 as a way of disciplining and streamlining the collection of ethnological data by amateur colonial officers, made him develop a highly systematic method of collecting, cataloguing and circulating ethnological objects. It was in 1878 that Man had sent the hair samples along with other objects of ethnological interest to Pitt-Rivers. At the time he was the Superintendent of the Andaman Homes (Beek and Vellinga 2005: 139), which were quasi-penal institutions where local tribespeople were detained with a view to ‘civilizing’ them (Wintle 2014: 143). Naturally, as the head of a carceral institution Man would have had access to the bodies of some of the Islanders and may well have extracted the hair from them. Though Man is generally sympathetic and admiring of the Islanders in his writings and there is nothing to suggest that he had to deploy any physical force to obtain the hair, it is difficult to overlook the constitutive role of colonial hierarchies in shaping his access to the material. Zita van der Beek and Marcel Vellinga, writing on Man’s collection practices, have noted the difficulties in finding out how he might have obtained the innumerable objects, including some biological samples such as hair and teeth, that he supplied to several European museums. Yet, they show that there is some evidence to suggest that in some cases he made use of British appointed tribal ‘headmen’ as middlemen to acquire objects. Finally, some of the items he had were probably obtained through exchange or bartering (Beek and Vellinga 2005: 148–9). It is likely therefore that he obtained the hair in one of three ways: through direct acquisition from those detained at the Homes, through the mediation of friendly local middlemen or through barter. In each of these possible scenarios, complex social ties, even if these were based purely on colonial force, had to come into play for Man to be able to access the hair. In Man’s own writings, he dwelt at length on hair. He mentioned having had Professor Allen Thomson FRS and a famous Scottish physician and anatomist microscopically analyse them. Yet, rather than dwell much upon the results of this microscopic observation, Man listed the many cultural practices and fashions related to hair. He described in detail how men and women wore their hair differently, with women being mostly clean-shaven (Man 1883: 77–9). Most of the two-page discussion of hair, out of a fifty-four-page article, is spent focusing largely upon the cultural practices associated with hair, clearly pointing towards the existence of complex beliefs about the feature. But unfortunately, he did not write directly upon these underlying beliefs. Man had established contact with Pitt-Rivers early in his career. In fact, it was probably his father, Henry Man, who had introduced the two (Beek and Vellinga 2005: 151). The former was in fact the one who introduced Man to the Notes and Queries and thus fashioned the development of his interest in ethnology along professional lines (Man n.d.: iv). It is clear therefore that the first of many consignments of ethnological things that Man sent Pitt-Rivers in 1878, was a gift to a valued friend, guide and patron. Later consignments would be sent by Man directly to museums. But this initial lot was sent to Pitt-Rivers personally affirming its status as a gift. The characterization of these samples as gifts is further confirmed by the fact that Man was scrupulous about never accepting any payment for the objects he sent, even when they were to large museums. He merely asked, on some occasions, that the recipient pay for the freight and insurance (Beek and Vellinga 2005: 141). It was this gift in turn that became the basis of Pitt-Rivers’s own brief account of Andamanese hair. There are clear differences however, in the way Pitt-Rivers and Man treated the topic of Andamanese hair. Pitt-Rivers’s account had three elements to it. First, he juxtaposed

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the comments of earlier writers, such as Dr Frederic J. Mouat and Col. (later Lt.-Gen.) Albert Fytche on Andamanese hair. Both these authors had commented on the ‘wooliness’ of Andamanese hair. Pitt-Rivers also compared these comments, without any explanation, to a set of other observations upon the hair of Papua New Guineans. Next, Pitt-Rivers gave a physical description of the samples sent by Man. ‘The samples of hair sent by Mr. Man, and now exhibited, are distinctly in small tufts, but it is only by an examination of the scalps that the question can be determined. In point of colour the specimens now exhibited vary from jet black to dark red’, he wrote (Lane Fox 1878b: 438). Third and finally, Pitt-Rivers slotted Man’s samples into a colour-scale devised by Paul Broca, the pre-eminent disciple of Pruner-bey. He stated that the ‘patterns’ of the hair samples, meaning their curliness, corresponded to numbers 48 and 42 on Broca’s scale. The only fleeting mention Pitt-Rivers made of the social and cultural attributes of hair was in the context of debates about whether the hair of the Andamanese grew uniformly or in small detached tufts as Col. Fytche had stated. Since Andamanese women regularly shaved their heads, urged Pitt-Rivers, it would be easy for anyone to observe whether the hair grows uniformly or in tufts upon their scalps. In stark contrast, Man’s own writings devoted a single brief paragraph to the strictly physical description of the hair, including the microscopic findings of Allen Thomson. The rest of his two-page discussion gave details about fashions and cultural practices involving hair. He pointed out, amongst other things, how women regularly shaved their heads leaving only two parallel lines termed gor running from the crown of the head to the nape. The gor was never allowed to grow more than an eighth of an inch. Men’s fashions, he stated, had changed dramatically and the older practice of having a small, circular patch of hair on the crown like a skull cap had changed in recent times to multiple varied fashions, including keeping a tonsure. Man also stated that when the heat got to be oppressive, men often shaved off their entire heads as well as their eyebrows (Man n.d.: 9–10). Amongst the many other interesting accounts of cultural practices involving hair, such as the fact that ‘it is one of the duties of the fair sex in these tribes to act as barbers’ (10), Man also gave important details about hair colouring. He stated that, though there were various shades of hair colours, the usual colours ranged from ‘black, greyish black and sooty’. Man was emphatic that contrary to what had been suggested by some earlier writers, the Andamanese did not deliberately colour their hair. They were however, in the habit of colouring their faces using a special pigment made from iron oxide and pig fat. Sometimes they would wipe their hands on their hair after having painted their faces and this would accidentally colour some of their hair (Man n.d.: 11). It is very likely that the red hair that Pitt-Rivers found was in fact precisely such an accidentally coloured sample. Whatever else we make of Man’s extensive discussions of hair-related cultural practices, it was clear that hair was considered socially and culturally important amongst the Andamanese. In fact, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown found that the Andamanese usually referred to forest spirits as being long-haired and bearded. Radcliffe-Brown noted that this was quite unlike the Andamanese themselves who never had long hair or beards (RadcliffeBrown 1933: 138). Hence, here again, we see a cultural repertoire that considers hair an important aspect of a larger worldview: as a crucial marker of the boundary between the world of humans and that of the spirits. Furthermore, there was a belief that certain ritual transgressions, such as eating forbidden animals, would lead the spirits to retaliate by turning a person’s hair white before flaying him alive (115).

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Tracking the movement of the hair collected by Man points then to several moments. To begin with the hair existed upon the body of the Andamanese as part of a complex cultural system which bequeathed to it symbolic and cosmological meaning as well as made it a part of fashion and identity-making practices. The alienation of this hair by Man required the full gamut of extractive operations necessary in biocolonial exchange: from the coerced alienation in detention centres, to persuasion of friends and middlemen. Once alienated, these hairs were then mobilized as transcontinental gifts within social, professional and scientific networks. In metropolitan centres these hair samples were stored in various museums and became the basis for comparative theories of social evolution and the origins of man. They were also numeralized by the use of both microscopes and special scales such as the one developed by Broca. It was Man’s collections that provided the baseline for Radcliffe-Brown’s later study of the people of the Andamans. Though he disputed many of Man’s statements, it is indubitable that without Man’s collections, Radcliffe-Brown’s own work would have been if not impossible, very different. Having a good baseline allowed the later scholar to map changes, correct details and develop his own influential theories. It was during his studies that he collected further samples of Andamanese hair. It is that hair which is now the basis of new genomic studies that are fuelling new disputes over race, identities and South Asian history in California and elsewhere.

CONCLUSION Race science in the nineteenth century was a many-headed hydra. Sketching its profile is a daunting task. Yet, certain aspects of that history are worth delineating. I have tried to make three interrelated points in the foregoing discussion. First, that nineteenth-century race was both ‘indisciplined’ and transnational in character. Despite its protean features however, it produced certain longer legacies. It created a broadly shared modern idea of race that sought to combine physical traits with cultural comparisons. It also created material and discursive legacies that were repeatedly reinterpreted and continue to be mined in order to curate, classify and crystallize human differences. Second, I have argued that the emphasis on approaching the history of race science first and foremost through a history of ideas about race and, to a lesser extent, through the histories of cranial measurements are both inadequate. A number of different physical features were studied and measured. Not all of these histories of physical measurements neatly lined up under the broader histories of ideas and cranial measurements. The specificities of physical traits like hair analysis are important to study because, on the one hand, they expose some of the inner tensions within nineteenth-century race scientific practice and, on the other hand, they have produced longer term material and practical genealogies whose chronologies no longer conform to the histories of racial ideas and cranial measurements. Third, I have argued that the materiality of hair and the practices by which hair was accessed needs to be seen as part of race-making. I have argued that these collection practices were not simply enabling events precedent to race-making but in fact a part of that. Moreover, these collection practices reveal both the complex patterns of exchange through persuasion, coercion and exchange as well as the most tangible ways in which imperial race science literally lives on and thrives in post-imperial national and global contexts of scientific knowledge production.

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Taken together these three arguments about the indisciplinarity, materiality and hairiness of race science, forces us to look anew at the new materialist turn in the history of race science. While there has been much interest within recent scholarship on material things, much of it has remained focused on two types of materials: blood and bones (on blood, see Bangham 2014; Lipphardt 2014; Radin 2017; on bones, see Roque 2010; Poskett 2015). These are both hugely important and their histories have done much to illuminate the histories of race science. They have also helped to emphasize the material underpinnings of all scientific works and thus helped to contextualize the overly ideaand theory-centric histories of race in the past. Yet, the exclusive focus on just two types of biomaterials have inadvertently bequeathed greater coherence to the history of race science than is sustainable. As a result, singular studies of materials such as hair have assumed that the material somehow ‘resisted’ full incorporation into racial frameworks. This in turn obscures our appreciation of the ways in which old hair continues to animate contemporary dress in new racial studies. The power of race science derives precisely from its multiplicity and protean character, its lack of any overly neat coherence, if you will. To grapple with this protean character we must push the emphasis on materiality further. Disengaging it from its locations within the narrow protocols that frame the use of particular types of matter within specific disciplines, we must track how different materials migrate from one disciplinary formation to another. We must attend also to the specific histories of each of these materials and not look only to the most conspicuous ones. Not only was nineteenth-century race science a many-headed, protean monster, it has bequeathed to us myriad different progeny. From biometrics to forms of genomic nationalism, the children and grandchildren of imperial race science continue to populate our world. To recognize their lines of descent we must revisit the histories of nineteenthcentury race not through a history of ideas alone but through their material collections and practical repertoires.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Race and Politics A History from an Imperial Borderland SERGEY GLEBOV

Although the concept of race was widely discussed in the Russian Empire by the midnineteenth century, it only entered the lexicon of imperial administrators (as distinct from the participants in the broader scientific or public discourses) at the very end of the century (Tolz 2012; Mogilner 2013). And when it did, like elsewhere, it co-existed with other terms of difference, some encoded in law, and some not. Race was never codified legally in imperial Russia, at least not explicitly, albeit it came very closely to be enshrined in law in very last decade of the dynasty. Race always coexisted and overlapped with legal categories such as estate, confession or subjecthood (Freeze 1986; Steinwedel 2002; Crews 2003; Burbank 2006; Lohr 2012; Smith 2014; Glebov 2017). In the imperial situation, the emergence of race as an element of social and political imagination was often complicated by various factors, such as the legacy of imperial categories of difference mentioned above, or by the geopolitical considerations in particular regions of the empire. Moreover, characteristically for imperial Russia, where the centres of political power and of the production of knowledge did not coincide, race was employed both by the agents of empire and by those who defined themselves against the autocratic state and its imperial policies (Glebov 2013). It was widely assumed for a long time that Russia was a land-based and ‘traditional’ empire, which also explains why race was never seriously studied as an important political category in the Russian past (Knight 1998; Kappeler 2001). This normative categorization has recently become a subject of critique in historiography (Gerasimov, Kusber and Semyonov 2009). Many scholars pointed out the modern developments in governance, public discourse and scientific endeavour in imperial Russia, especially following the period of the Great Reforms in the 1860s. The emergence of the public sphere, the development of professions, the increased global circulation of ideas about governance and human difference all had an impact on that transformation (Breyfogle 2008). This massive change following the Great Reforms both included and was reflected in the politics of race, even if in the imperial context it is difficult to detect any linear influence emanating from the ‘centre’ and directed to the ‘colonies’. Although discourses on race were permeated by relations of domination, they did not establish or reinforce stable regimes of difference. For this chapter, I understand ‘empire’ not just and not only in the conventional sense, as a large, authoritarian, expanding state ruling over a variety

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of populations. Rather, I see ‘empire’ as an epistemological condition and a contextsetting category (Semyonov 2008). This chapter thus uses this optics of empire to explore the ways in which race was instrumentalized in the population politics and management in Russia’s Far Eastern colonial project.

THE IMPERIAL SITUATION AND CATEGORIES OF DIFFERENCE Empire as we encounter it at the turn of the century can be better described in a poststructuralist language as an ‘imperial situation’: a world in which multiple regimes of difference and categorization coexist (Gerasimov, Glebov and Mogilner 2016). These regimes of difference are synchronic, they do not supplant each other, and they only partially overlap. For example, a person can be at one and the same time a Georgian (a category recognizable in daily life and public discourse but not in the legal sense), a nobleman (a civic status enshrined in law), a professional (a social, economic and cultural status but not reflected in legislation), a member of the revolutionary intelligentsia, an Orthodox (legal category that has little to do with one being a practicing Orthodox Christian), a Russian (especially if one resides in an imperial borderland outside of Georgia) and European and white (for instance, in the racialized environment of the early twentieth-century Russian Far East). Racial categorization might or might not add to this mix, depending on the context and situation. The imperial state treated all these different categories in different ways and also served as an active producer of new categories of difference (Burbank and Cooper 2011). The imperial situation does not mean, of course, some kind of an early version of multiculturalism. It involved power misbalances and domination but those are very difficult to describe in binary oppositions (‘Russians’ vs ‘non-Russians’, or ‘whites’ vs ‘non-whites’) or associate with a particular group. A Polish exile, a victim of imperial oppression in the European part of the empire, could be a colonizer and empire-builder in Siberia or the Far East. A peasant, the ultimate subaltern of imperial Russia, becomes a privileged colonist in the imperial borderland. But in the course of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century the imperial situation was also marked by the nationalizing efforts of the imperial centre. In the reigns of the last two emperors, both discursively and in terms of administrative measures, the imperial authorities sought to transform the Russian Empire into a national state dominated by ethnic Russians. To be sure, the meaning of Russianness shifted depending on time and place. In the case of the Russian Far East, which will serve as the locus of my attempt to trace the emergence of race as a category of difference in political and administrative discourses, the nationalizing efforts of the imperial state quickly assumed the language of race as a modern and comparative element. It made Russification efforts in the region increasingly coloured by racial terms, and established the status of Russia as a European and white power through the politics of comparison deployed by imperial administrators. The case of the Far East is neither unique nor typical for the population politics in the Russian Empire that never implemented universal categorization of population in racial terms. Until its very end, it did not introduce one universally applicable language of difference (even if difference was often understood in biological and somatic terms) and never completely rationalized and stabilized the irregular imperial diversity (Avrutin 2007). In the Soviet period this situation seems to have changed drastically. Soviet anti-colonial rhetoric and promotion of nationalities appear as the direct opposition to the late imperial

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repertoire of ideas and practices (Martin 2001). And yet, the challenges of managing, classifying and categorizing human diversity did not disappear. While Soviet efforts often destabilized essential categories of difference by introducing class as a new, constructivist category, in practice class itself was often biologized (Weitz 2002). Presumed ethnonational and racial characteristics – now derived from scientific studies – still influenced Soviet policies. Essentialist visions of groupness continued to inform Soviet policies even if they at times clashed with more universalist ideas of evolutionism (Hirsch 2014).

MAKING OF THE BORDERLAND IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST The Russian Far East presents a fertile ground for the study of the evolution of race as a category of difference. First, as one of the latest and most successful settler colonial projects in imperial Russia, the Far East was often seen by contemporaries in the context of European and North American expansion in the Pacific region (Stephan 1996; Bassin 1999; Kotkin and Wolff 2015; Zatsepine 2017). The inclusion of this part of imperial Russia into the mental map of the greater Pacific allowed for the global circulation of ideas about human difference, civilizational competence, economic productivity and so on. Russian views of human difference – and of the ways to manage them – were shaped by the politics of comparison with racialized colonial projects in America, Australia, Dutch Indies or European colonies in Qing China. Second, legal categories of imperial Russia, such as estate or confession, were often complicated in the Far East by the very nature of the colonial project. Nobility was absent; peasantry was viewed as settlers and colonists (pereselentsy and kolonisty), and even such default estates as town-dwellers (meshchane) were often in flux as the majority of the urban population was formed by soldiers and foreign subjects. Beginning in the 1880s, new ways of categorizing the population emerged: faced with the increased presence of Chinese labour, imperial authorities came to rely on the category of subjecthood to distinguish between desirable populations endowed with rights and privileges, and the undesirable ones whose task was, in the words of an administrator, ‘to make Europeans rich’ (Glebov 2017) (Figure 5.1). Finally, the presence of Chinese and Korean populations (the former constituted almost half of the population of Vladivostok in 1897, and the latter formed the majority of the South Ussuri region by the late nineteenth century), seen in the 1860s as a welcome factor in the economic development of the colonies, was viewed as highly problematic by the turn of the century as the Boxer Rebellion, the troubles of the Choson court, and the Russo-Japanese War added a geopolitical dimension to the ways in which human difference was perceived (Sorokina 1999; Petrov 2003; Nyiri 2007; Park 2019). I argue that race entered the lexicon of power and society in Russia’s Pacific colony in three different ways to supplant the old idioms of difference in the empire. First, the abovementioned global circulation of ideas about difference, especially in the Pacific region, was facilitated by the presence of an international mercantile and administrative elite. Well-travelled Europeans, Americans and Russians compared the new Russian domains and their peoples to other colonial projects and transferred notions learned elsewhere onto the realities of the Russian Far East (Vinkovetsky 2015; Bojanowska 2018). Second, perhaps unusual in the international context, was the monarch as the source of racial rhetoric. Nicholas II shared with his German counterpart a fascination with East Asia but also the rhetoric of ‘yellow peril’ against which, allegedly, the white race had to make a

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FIGURE 5.1  A Chino-Russian frontier post in Manchuria, Coolies entering Russian territory. Illustration for The Illustrated London News (1 April 1899). © Look and Learn/Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images.

stand (Schimmelpenninck van der Oye 2006). And finally, the arrival in the Far East of peasant settlers from the Western borderlands of the Russian Empire made possible the comparisons between the internal Others in the West and East, turning the Chinese into ‘Far Eastern Jews’ who did not just ‘exploit’ the peasants and the indigenous population and competed unfairly in commerce but also possessed particular kinds of bodies which allegedly enabled these proclivities. I also argue that despite multiple instances of invoking race by imperial administrators and societal actors, it never became the sole, or even the most important, category of difference. However, at times of crisis or sharpened conflicts over power or access to resources, race often was employed by those who saw themselves

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as modernizers and progressives as a new, modern and universal category free of the vestiges of the Old Regime. The Russian Empire acquired the Far Eastern territories in a series of treaties with the Qing Empire. Weakened by the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing ceded to the Russian Empire the left bank of the Amur river (Aigun Treaty, 1858) and the right bank of the Ussuri river (Beijing Treaty, 1860) (Datsyshen 2000). The acquisitions were largely driven by the relentless N. N. Muraviev (later Count Muraviev-Amurskii), who combined heightened imperialism with a progressive vision (Bassin 1999). Muraviev and his associates often saw the newly acquired Amur region as a blank slate. Drawing on Russian abolitionism on the eve of the Great Reforms and the emancipation of serfs, Muraviev and his associates envisioned the new territory as a colony of independent settlers free of the social ills of the mother country. The general abolitionist mood was also reflected in the initial attitudes of Russian administrators to the largest populations in the region that were viewed as racially distinct, namely, Chinese and Korean. For instance, in 1861, the General Governor of Eastern Siberia M. S. Korsakov asked the Governor of the Maritime Province P. V. Kazakevich to explore hiring Chinese labourers for infrastructure construction in the ports ‘along the ways of how it is done in California’ (Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East [hereafter RGIA DV.] F. 87. Op. 1. D. 656. L. 1). Admiral Kazakevich, who had travelled to California to make purchases for the Russian Navy, responded to the General Governor and explained that he considered such ‘hire of Chinese workers for our ports completely impossible’. Kazakevich cited abuses by local Chinese merchants who handled ‘the living cargo’, the greed of plantation owners in Cuba who pitilessly exploited Chinese workers and suggested that ‘in California labor migration was free and a Chinese worker labored for his own interest’ (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. D. 656. Ll. 2–3). Korsakov forwarded Kazakevich’s opinion to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1866 the Ministry communicated to Korsakov that the Chinese government signed a convention with England and France regulating the hire of Chinese labor, and sent us this convention to take as a guideline in hiring Chinese laborers. Since the hire of Chinese laborers is often accompanied by massive abuses, and in general is not different from the trade in black slaves, His Majesty decreed that any Russian agents who engage in hiring and shipping of laborers in Chinese ports cannot count on the protection of our government in this business. (RGIA DV. F. 1. Op. 1. D. 62. Ll. 1–1ob) However, by the middle of the 1870s, the expansion of infrastructure projects in the Far East, especially in the ports, demanded more labour, while Russian colonization of the region remained weak. In 1876, the first large group of Chinese labourers was hired to work on the construction of Nikolaevsk port. Vladivostok came to rely massively on Chinese labour by the end of the 1870s too (Unterbegrer 1877; Ancha and Miz’ 2015). In the countryside, Cossacks and settlers who received the enormous allotments of land impossible to cultivate by a family began to hire Chinese workers or even leased the land to them. Chinese merchants, workers, ginseng seekers, hunters and seaweed gatherers assembled in Vladivostok and spread across the Maritime Province every season, constituting at least half of Vladivostok population in the summer. No doubt, this migration was part of the global phenomenon of Chinese outmigration and it shared many characteristics with other migrations, for instance, towards the United States and Australia, such as its mainly bachelor character (McKeown 2010).

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Until the mid-1880s the legal status of Chinese and Koreans remained murky and debates on how they should be governed in Russia were ongoing. By that time, major differences also emerged in how the Russian authorities viewed these populations. While the Koreans were de facto treated as members of the peasant estate (their villages largely self-administered, self-policed and taxed), they still remained de jure foreign subjects until the 1890s. The Chinese, who were often seen as ‘unproductive’ and ‘harmful’ because they tended to return to China with their earnings and because the Russian authorities suspected a secret hold of the Qing sovereignty over them, were subjected to numerous restrictions. It is important to note, though, that imperial administrators discussed the possibility of transforming the Chinese in the Far East into an estate and to create a separate legal regime for them as it was done to most groups in the empire. For instance, in 1879, a report to the Governor of the Maritime Province suggested that the Chinese ‘ought to constitute a town estate (meshchanskoe soslovie) in accordance with all demands and conditions for that estate’. In the view of the report’s author, the Chinese have positively been turned into the town-dwellers’ estate of Vladivostok and for the complete solution of the problem they need to be granted those rights of social and civil life that are enjoyed by the town-dwellers’ estate: they need to be able to become Russian subjects and they need to acquire civil rights in terms of property ownership. (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. D. 1553. Ll. 8, 12–12ob) Still, these administrative initiatives ran into the ground and a special, legally incorporated estate for Chinese town-dwellers never came about. In part this may be explained by the multiple factors in the wake of the Great Reforms which facilitated the rise of Russian nationalism with its focus on the peasants as the carriers of the national characteristics and the essence of the ‘Russian people’. The situation changed drastically in the early 1880s. The so-called ‘Ili Crisis’ in relations with China made Russian officials weary of a possible military conflict with the Qing Empire and brought home to them the fact of the Russians’ demographic feebleness in the Far East. The solution to this problem appeared to involve two major initiatives: to increase the number of Russian settlers and to limit the number of Chinese. The first involved the organization of the circumnavigation voyages by the Volunteer Fleet from Odessa to Vladivostok, effectively adding an overseas dimension to the traditionally land-based Russian Empire (this overseas colonization remained practically unexplored in contemporary historiography, with the exception of Busse 1896; Siegelbaum and Moch 2014). The second initiative amounted to a full-blown campaign by the Russian authorities in the 1880s to separate the population of the Russian Far East into foreign and Russian subjects, adding a new dimension to the matrix of diversity. Both had a crucial impact on the development of ideas about race.

THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL SOURCES OF RACIAL RHETORIC Between 1882 and 1885, the imperial authorities abolished the article of the Penal Code which called for the deportation of Chinese subjects who committed a crime in Russia to China, a measure that was meant to end the presumed infringement of the Qing authorities on Russian sovereignty. They also introduced new border regulations, which

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required every Chinese person who was not residing in the now Russian provinces prior to 1860 to produce a national passport with the Russian consular visa and a fee-based permit for the right to reside and work in Russia. Chinese subjects were prohibited from acquiring property in Russia (albeit those who already had it retained it). Those caught without passports, visas or permits were supposed to be deported to China. Although the campaign proved of little effect and the borders remained porous, it did create a new legal reality in the Russian Far East. It also generated a lively discussion about the presence of the Chinese, which served as a conduit for new ideas about race (Glebov 2017). Discussing the required measures in regards to administering the Chinese population, the Governor of the Russian Maritime Province drew a comparison between Russia and ‘European industrial states which rushed to acquire through conquest countries with alien and often hostile populations. These populations are dense, and they have great pasts, like British India, French Indochina, or the Dutch colonies in the Malay Archipelago’ (RGIA DV. F. 1. Op. 1. D. 4355. L. 1). The framework of colonial comparisons offered the Russian administrators interpretative clues with respect to Chinese population in the Russian Empire itself. Often, they were assisted in this by representatives of the international mercantile elite who made the Russian Far East their home. For instance, the Swiss merchant Julius Brynner (grandfather of the future Hollywood star Yul Brynner) arrived and settled in Vladivostok after a sojourn in Hong Kong and Nagasaki. Having built a successful shipping and mining empire, Brynner became one of the pillars of local society and was often invited to share his opinions on matters of governance (even if he became a Russian subject only in 1892). Presenting himself as an expert on colonial affairs and citing his ‘16 years of experience in observing the Chinese’, Brynner advised the Russian authorities about the Chinese in Vladivostok and the Russian Far East. Brynner viewed the Chinese as shaped by centuries of despotic government and claimed that only collective responsibility will assure proper control over them. He also suggested, citing examples of other European colonies, a policy of spatial separation between the Europeans and the Chinese (RGIA DV. F. 1. Op. 1. D. 204. Ll. 51–3). Brynner’s ideas found grateful listeners among the administration and in 1885 a commission was formed to explore the governance of the Chinese in the Russian cities of the Far East. The commission produced new regulations for the urban centres. Again citing examples of other colonial cities, the commission proposed introducing Chinatowns in the Russian cities. These regulations cited social problems associated with the presence of Chinese labourers, such as overcrowding, hygiene, crime, gambling and smoking of opium. Since these problems, in the view of the commission, were a consequence of a particular kind of human bodies, segregation along the lines of race (Koreans were also included in the project) represented perhaps the first racialized project of managing human difference in the imperial Far East (RGIA DV. F. 1. Op. 1. D. 204. Ll. 76–83). The Russian authorities were aware of the discussions about race occurring elsewhere and in particular cited the American Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as an example to follow. As an official memo submitted to the General Governor of the Priamur krai put it, ‘those [Chinese] who are unable to settle in the city on the principles of civility, had to be exploited mercilessly and had to provide for us those same kind of Chinese as in Hong Kong, San Francisco, and other cities, whose task it is solely to enrich Europeans’ (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. D. 1553. Ll. 13–13ob). As was the case with dividing the population into Russian and foreign subjects and policing them accordingly, the projects to segregate urban spaces in the Russian Far East largely failed. However, the Chinese presence was continually discussed in increasingly racialized language cast in a global and comparative perspective.

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But while the global circulation of ideas and practices of modern colonialism inspired the elite views of the Chinese, race also arrived in the Russian Far East through an interregional circulation of popular views. If the elites imagined the Chinese as poor, numerous, unhygienic and prone to crime, the popular visions saw them as a threat. One particular venue for the articulation of this popular vision of race appears to have been the resettlement process itself. The beginning of overseas colonization in 1884, conducted with the help of the government, brought thousands of settlers from the Western borderlands of imperial Russia to the Maritime Province. Combined with the  growing nationalist rhetoric of the counter-reform era, the arrival of the settlers also came to influence the ways in which local society and bureaucrats viewed the Chinese in the Maritime Province. Many of the settlers (and officers of the Far Eastern garrisons) came from the rural milieu of the Western borderlands of the Russian Empire and carried with them the mental maps of aliens and outsiders developed in that milieu. Beginning in the early 1880s, the local Far Eastern newspaper Vladivostok, began to publish correspondence from smaller towns and villages of the South Ussuri region, in which the Chinese were explicitly compared to Jews. For instance, in 1884, correspondence from the military post of Pociete complained about ‘our local gesheftmakhers who pitilessly exploit us’. The author used the anti-Semitic idiom to link the mental maps of the Western borderlands to anti-Chinese sentiment and suggested that all these exploiters were ‘either baptized Kikes or Manzas’ (‘Correspondence’ 1884: 4; ‘Manza’ was a regional term for the Chinese). The same issue of the newspaper published a short article about the problems of local retail, alleging that high prices for food on the market of Vladivostok were due to the activities of ‘local Yids-Manzas’, who buy up all the goods from the peasants and resell them with unjustified margins (4). Those characteristics that were ascribed to Jews – such as an inclination to exploitation, cunningness and the absence of ethical rules in dealings with outsiders – were also ascribed to the Chinese but they were accompanied by an emphasis on Chinese unreliability and a proclivity to engage in banditry or piracy. The old complaints of the Russian administrators that Chinese economic practices, such as cutting oak trees to grow shiitake mushrooms, were allegedly wasteful, were now supplied with a more or less developed popular idiom of the Jew as an internal Other. By the beginning of the next decade, the idiom of Chinese as ‘Far Eastern Jews’ made it into the official documents. The draft of the report of the Governor of the Maritime Province to the Emperor for the year 1893 claimed that Chinese entrepreneurs exploited the peasant settlers, destroyed Russian commerce and ‘became the same kind of spider as the Jews in European Russia’ (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. D. 101. L. 11ob). In 1911, Vladimir Klavdievich Arseniev, a famous explorer and imperial administrator, frustrated by the failure of his efforts to limit the Chinese presence in the region, lamented that the Russians failed to institute ‘a Pale of Settlement for the Chinese similar to the one we have for Jews in the Western borderlands’ (RGIA DV. F. 702. Op. 1. D. 716. L. 35). In 1891, the Russian Empire introduced a new customs tariff. Developed by the Minister of Finance I. Vyshnegradskii with the help of the famous chemist D. I. Mendeleev, the tariff had an unmistakable aura of a nationalizing measure (Gordin 2018: 152–7). Unlike the tariffs designed to increase the volume of taxes and fees going into the treasury, the new tariff had an explicit goal to protect ‘Russian’ industry and commerce and thus fitted well with the nationalizing spirit of Alexander III’s reign. The introduction of the tariff led to discussions about the future of the porto-franco regime in the Russian Far East and provided a new language to describe the successes and failures of economic activities from below. Russian merchants in the South Ussuri region were quick to seize

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on the opportunity to present their grievances against the Chinese in light of this new rhetoric. Several dozens of petitions were sent to the General Governor of the Priamur krai from 1889 to 1893, in which the merchants from Vladivostok, Nikol’sk-Ussuriiskii and other towns pleaded with the authorities to intervene on their behalf. For instance, in September 1893, merchants from Nikol’sk named Khmeltsov, Fedorov, Nikitin, Shubin, Titorenko, Stavitskii, Sitkevich, Rodionov and Khlebnikov claimed that they resettled in the province hoping for less competition but found themselves unable to trade with profit due to Chinese merchants. They claimed that the Chinese were about ‘to strangle all retail trade still remaining in Russian hands’. They also suggested that only eight Russian merchants still traded in Nikol’sk, whereas they counted at least eighty Chinese shops and stalls. Russian merchants argued that their failure to compete can be explained by unfair conditions and different nature of Chinese commerce. The Chinese, they pointed out, live in the province without families, in large groups, eat the cheapest food, wear the cheapest cloths and inhabit the tiniest spaces. Trading in companies, Chinese merchants secure lower prices, and even bringing goods from Russia itself they outperform Russians, who can only afford smaller deliveries. Russian merchants also alleged that Chinese merchants are dishonest with the clients, and since they are undocumented, they pay no taxes or dues, unlike the Russians. The merchants concluded their petition with a request to protect Russian trade against the ‘alien nation’ (chuzhaia natsia) (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. D. 618. Ll. 9–10ob). Similar petitions were sent by craftsmen, who complained that all orders went to the Chinese, who offer lower prices. In all of them, the main reason why the Russian merchants failed to compete was the particular nature of the Chinese body – its ability to survive on a meagre diet and to live in crowded conditions, all of which made it possible for the Chinese to keep the prices low. These petitions triggered the bureaucratic machine, which requested numerous opinions and studies from the local officials and representatives of the business community in Vladivostok. Adolf Dattan, a Prussian German and a newly minted Russian subject who ran the largest trading company in the region, the Hamburg-based Kunst & Albers, explored the Chinese commerce in the Far East and offered a gloomy picture of Russian prospects. He pointed out that Chinese merchants win the competition ‘with mathematical precision’. He showed that although the Chinese began importing Russian goods from Odessa only in 1891, by 1893 they already brought in half of all the goods imported from there. The Chinese merchants spread the risks and kept costs low, and so their prices were bound to remain 10–15 per cent below those of the Russians. Dattan suggested that only administrative measures by the government will help restore Russian trade and proposed to outlaw Chinese retail beyond specifically designated areas of Chinese settlement, imposing a poll tax on arriving Chinese along the lines of the Australian one, and fostering an agreement between Russian merchants to keep prices under control should the competition decrease when Chinese trade is limited (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op 1. D. 618. Ll. 47–66). Dattan’s study provided a link between the popular accusations of petty Russian traders and the ‘scientifically established’ threat of the ‘Yellow peril’. The idea of the fundamental difference of the Chinese body became a commonplace in administrative and scholarly discourses in the first decade of the twentieth century. These discussions about the Chinese commerce are particularly interesting in the context of the rise of racial rhetoric in the Russian Far East. While most of the debates about the Chinese presence invoked cultural (Chinese tradition) and political (loyalty to Qing authorities) rather than somatic arguments, the economic debates came to rely on the notion of the fundamental difference of the Chinese body. Russian officials

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began to compile comparative data on how much Chinese workers spent on maintaining themselves, and their findings ‘proved’ the ability of Chinese to survive on a modest, plant-based diet, resulting in salaries at least a third lower than that of their Russian counterparts. Russian employers claimed that although Chinese workers are cheaper, their productivity is also lower in comparison to Europeans (RGIA DV. F. 704. Op. 1. D. 339. L. 41–56). In this racial rhetoric, few references were made to ‘scientific’ studies of race. Another peculiarity of this discourse was that it did not treat the racialized body as degenerate. Rather, in its adaptability and limited demands, the Chinese body was threatening as it enabled the Chinese to compete and win in the economic battle perceived as a clash of races, civilizations and peoples.

RACE AS A CATEGORY OF DIFFERENCE IN THE LAST DECADE OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad intensified both the peasant colonization of the Russian Far East and the influx of Chinese labour required for the construction. The development of the gold-mining industry on the Amur also hinged on the availability of Chinese labour, so did the success of agriculture. Nicholas II, as the chairman of the Committee for the Settlement of the Russian Far East personally intervened in the debates on the desirability of the Chinese presence. Whether his views were inspired by personal experiences of the attack in Japan, which he visited as heir apparent, by his correspondent and relative Kaiser Wilhelm or by his vision of a homogenous and Orthodox Russia, Nicholas supported those who turned the ‘Yellow Peril’ into a matter of state policy (Wortman 2006; Lukoianov 2008). According to this vision, it was the task of the paternalistic Russian state to protect the Russian workers from unfair competition by the Chinese, while mounting ‘a wall protecting Russia’ from the onslaught of ‘Yellow races’ (Figure 5.2). Whether Nicholas was influenced by foreign policy or his foreign policy was inspired by his racist visions, at the turn of the century a series of international and domestic factors worked to radicalize racial politics in the Russian Far East. The Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War provided geopolitical fodder to the ‘Yellow peril’ idiom. In the summer of 1900, as the Boxer Rebellion engulfed China and Blagoveshchensk on Amur was fired upon by either Qing forces or rebels, the panic reigned in the city. Mass violence erupted when the local governor, General K. N. Gribskii, ordered all of the Chinese in the city across the river into Manchuria. During the operation, thousands of Chinese drowned. At the same time, mobs of reservists, city dwellers and settlers rounded up the Chinese in the city and on embarked steamers on the river, while Cossack and peasant militias attacked the villages of Manchus on the Russian side of the river, ending the Qing enclave on the Russian territory (Deich 1906; Datsyshen 2011). Chinese merchants and workers fled Vladivostok en masse, sending local industry and retail into a state of collapse and prompting the local governor prohibit emigration as the local business cried for help (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. F. 1574. Ll. 9, 14, 130, 132, 144). This was not the only instance of mass racial violence in the Russian Far East. Judged by the documents of the ‘Commission for the Restitution of Lost Property in Vladivostok Events of 1905’, the first revolutionary uprising in the city on 30 October 1905 was little more than a Chinese pogrom as the rebels were primarily interested in ravaging and burning Chinese stalls and stores at the city market (RGIA DV. F. 87. Op. 1. D. 908).

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FIGURE 5.2  To the events in China. An arms factory in Shanghai. Niva, 1900. N. 41. Public domain.

The post-revolutionary era – the last decade of imperial Russia – was marked by the almost universal acceptance of the language of race in the Far East. Former Governor General of the Priamur krai, P. F. Unterberger, discussed the presence of Chinese and Koreans in the region in terms of the ‘influx into our borders of the yellow race’. Unterberger’s contribution in this period is particularly important. An imperial administrator who had spent over thirty years in the Far East, Unterberger was the first to bring Chinese labourers to Russia in an organized manner in 1876. He ran both the Maritime Province as a governor, and the Priamur region as General Governor. It is telling that in his work in 1912, Unterberger made no distinction between the Chinese and Koreans. He described his proposal to extend the regulation by which the General Governor had the right to tax all Chinese and Koreans with a personal fee. His proposal also included measures such as the prohibition to hire Chinese workers for state-funded projects, prevention of those Chinese who ‘could not maintain themselves’, that is, disabled and elderly or those suffering from chronic diseases, from arriving in Russia, and a set of measures to control the borders and the coast (Unterberger 1912: 74–7). Unterberger was especially adamant in his claim that Koreans, who had been treated by the administration more leniently than the Chinese, were unassimilable according to ‘40 years long experience’. Unterberger

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argued that ‘conditions of Korean agriculture and their entire worldview are so dissonant with those of the Slavic race that it is hard to count on their assimilation even in the most remote future’. He also generalized that ‘in the case of Asian nationalities outcomes of attempts at assimilation are almost always negative’ (83–8). But if Unterberger’s proposal was infused with the language of race, it was still fairly limited in terms of restrictions imposed on the Chinese and Korean labour. The public debate on the ‘yellow peril’ gathered momentum, resulting in dozens of publications between 1905 and 1917 (Guzei 2014: esp. 140–98). The parliament (the State Duma), which received Unterberger’s bill, refused it because it was not radical enough. The ‘yellow question’ combined concerns of the Right with the Russification policies and of the Left with the conditions of the workers. The Duma members demanded a complete prohibition on hiring Chinese workers at state enterprises, giving state contracts to foreign subjects and allowing local peasants to lease land to foreign subjects. The debates about the new immigration law stalled due to conflicts between different ministries, with the War Ministry especially concerned about the cost of infrastructure projects. As a result, in 1909, the Council of Ministers promulgated Unterberger’s proposal rather than supported the Duma initiative. The new era between the two revolutions also came to be associated with the name of Nikolai Lvovich Gondatti, the first civilian General Governor of the Priamur krai. A scholar with background in anthropology and statistics, Gondatti developed a reputation as an expert in Finnish mythology prior to embarking on a career in the state apparatus. He served as an imperial administrator in Chukotka, where he combined anthropological studies with governing the remote region. He then served in the Resettlement administration and as a governor of a Siberian province. In 1910, Gondatti was appointed to lead the last large expedition in imperial Russia charged with exploring the area for the construction of the Amur railroad, which was supposed to run on the Russian territory in parallel to the Chinese Eastern Railroad in the Japanese-threatened Manchuria (Figure 5.3). Within the framework of this expedition, participants explored both the Chinese and the Korean question. In particular, Vladimir Vladimirovich Grave, representative of the Foreign Ministry and future diplomat in Beijing, composed a thorough study of the Chinese and Koreans in the Russian Far East. The treatise included a section titled ‘Racial Characteristics of the Chinese’, in which Grave listed ‘essential features of the Chinese’, such as their discipline and self-organization (Figure 5.4). Although many of these ‘features’ seemed to be cultural rather than biological, Grave also shifted to the language of the body in his description. The Chinese, he argued, ‘have little concern for death which leads to them ignoring the demands of basic hygienic and sanitary requirements’. The diplomat repeated the now commonplace assertion that ‘the Chinese are able to limit to the minimum personal demands for cloths, food, shelter, etc’ (Grave and Gondatti 1912: 103). Gondatti read several of the reports presented by members of the expedition and marked on one of them that ‘we need measures to remove (ustranit’) yellow workers’ (RGIA DV. F. 823. Op. 1. D. 10. L. 2). Gondatti’s tenure from 1911 to 1917 was characterized by economic expansion, modernization and the most radical anti-Asian policies to date. Gondatti successfully used the case of the Asian cholera epidemic of 1911 to push through measures to maximally close the Russian labour market to the Chinese and introduced various regulations to expel Chinese laborers from the territory of the region. He was assisted in this by Vladimir Klavdievich Arseniev, perhaps the best-known explorer of the Far East whose literary legacy was catapulted to global prominence by the Oscar-winning film Dersu Uzala (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1976).

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FIGURE 5.3  Execution of foreigners during the Taiping Rebellion. Niva, 1900, N. 34. Public domain.

FIGURE 5.4  Chinese reading Taiping proclamations. Niva, 1900. N. 42. Public domain.

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Arseniev and Gondatti shared in a particular kind of political ecology, which combined protection of nature and Indigenous peoples from the allegedly harmful presence of and exploitation by the undesirable Chinese and Koreans. In 1911–13, Arseniev, who was transferred by Gondatti from the military to the Resettlement Administration, travelled to the interior of the Maritime Province to identify and deport those Chinese who allegedly pretended to belong to the indigenous group Tazy (the latter, as an indigenous group and Russian subjects, were entitled to land allotments). The problem of Tazy unexpectedly came to occupy a significant place in the internal debates of Russian administrators: since Tazy were Russian subjects and the Chinese were not, the distinction between the two had to be made for a successful policy towards both groups. The problem resided in the fact that Tazy were a hybrid group. Descendants of mixed marriages between the native Udehe and Nanai women and Chinese men, the Tazy spoke Chinese, wore Chinese style dress and practiced gardening, hunting and ginseng gathering like the Chinese. As a local official admitted, ‘distinguishing a Taz from a Chinese is in practice impossible’ (RGIA DV. F. 702. Op. 1. D. 716. L. 46). When Arseniev undertook his expeditions on Gondatti’s instructions to identify the Chinese and deport them, and to issue certificates to the Tazy in their Russian subjecthood, the work resulted not just in expulsion of hundreds of Chinese residents and the burning of their dwellings and hunting equipment. The violent means themselves seem to have been rooted in the inability to reconcile the essentialist visions of race with the complexity of the hybrid identities on the ground. As Arseniev wrote in his study of the Chinese in the Maritime province echoing the views of P. F. Unterberger cited above, ‘to count on the Russification of the Chinese is groundless. I can say even more, it would be naïve. It is well known that all “yellows” are very difficult to assimilate and in that regard, they possess a certain kind of an aggressive force’ (Arsen’ev 2012: 218) (Figures 5.5 and 5.6).

FIGURE 5.5  Chinese and Russian railroad authorities on Chinese eastern railroad, Qiqihar. Niva, 1900. N. 40. Public domain.

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FIGURE 5.6  Russian railroad worker captured by the Chinese during the Taiping Rebellion. Niva, 1900. N. 43. Public domain.

The task, thus, was to guard the Russian realm from the ‘yellow race’ whose representatives’ potential to become more like Russians was very limited. But Gondatti also was, like Arseniev, frustrated by the inability of Russians to perform as good colonizers. He argued for the economic strengthening of the colonists and framed his argument in terms of the clash of two irreconcilable races on the ar Eastern frontier: Entering the arena of economic competition with the yellow race, one needs to be properly armed. We need to be in full possession of material and cultural forces and we need to firmly remember that only those strong in spirit will emerge victorious in that struggle. Those ordinary uncultured settlers with their known poverty and lack material and spiritual means should have no place here in the Amur. Rural proletariat type of settler households, as they need constant support of the government, cannot be Russia’s pillar in the Far East, where to cultures so different in their spirit clash. (RGIA DV. F. 823. Op. 1. D. 69. L. 32) By the 1910s, when Gondatti and Arseniev undertook the last attempts to sort out the population based on racial criteria, race became a fairly common category in discussing the Chinese presence in Russia. Yet, it never became universal. Two cases can help illustrate this lack of the universal application of race. The first was the case of the Indigenous peoples, and the second that of Koreans. In the case of the former, Arseniev presented his arguments to Gondatti in 1912. He suggested that the Tazy of the South Ussuri region, whom he helped sort out from the Chinese, ‘to their misfortune have become settled’. As such, they now had no means of sustaining themselves as they were pushed off the lands

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by the Russian settlers and exploited in a brutal manner by Chinese merchants. Arseniev suggested that the Tazy be immediately given access to land, a proposal that Gondatti apparently supported (RGIA DV. F. 705. Op. 5. D. 289. L. 1–2). Moreover, Gondatti and Arseniev developed a draft of the new Statute for the Inorodtsy of the Priamur region,1 which equalized the Indigenous peoples with Russian peasants, thus granting them land allotments at the rate of 15 desiatins (approx. 40.53 acres) per male member of the family. The draft, which was not enacted due to the beginning of the First World War, also included a series of measures forecasting the Soviet developments: introduction of state sponsored trading posts, opening of medical stations and organization of mobile medical groups, introduction of bathhouses, ‘spiritual help’ by the missionaries, instruction in modern techniques of fishing and gardening, etc. (RGIA DV. F. 705. Op. 5. D. 109. Ll. 5–14). Among the measures the drafting Commission discussed was, curiously, the proposal ‘to settle Korean peasants in indigenous villages so that they could teach the natives agriculture’ (RGIA DV. F. 705. Op. 5. D. 109. L. 14). The idea that Koreans could be ‘civilizers’ of the Indigenous peoples is also illustrative of the multifaceted way in which race was perceived in this period. A brief survey of how the Korean population was treated may be instructive in this regard. The Koreans began to cross the border in 1864 and settle on land in the very south of the Ussuri region. They were largely welcomed by the Russian administration because in the absence of Russian settlers, Korean agriculturalists were expected to provide food for provisioning hungry garrisons and towns. With a few exceptions, Russian officials described Koreans as a hard-working, loyal and trouble-free population. Unlike the largely bachelor Chinese, Koreans migrated to Russia with their families and thus promised a long-term ‘productive’ presence. Many noted that Korean agricultural techniques were better suited to the particularities of the region and expected Koreans to be ‘pioneers’ who could teach Russians how to cultivate land in the Far East. Koreans appeared to welcome conversion to Orthodoxy, built schools where their children could learn Russian and served in the peasant militia during the time of crises (such as the two hundred Koreans who participated in the Russian invasion of Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion). In the late 1880s and 1890s, many Koreans who had settled in Russia were accepted into Russian subjecthood and inscribed into the peasant estate. Especially after 1910, when Korea was annexed by Japan, Koreans arriving in Russia continuously asked for Russian subjecthood and often received it. To be sure, Russian authorities were concerned about the concentration of Koreans along the border and began to develop plans for their relocation into the interior already in the 1860s. These plans always ran into the ground due to the lack of interest on the Koreans’ side and the absence of resources and willingness to use force on the side of the imperial administration. But despite many suspicions about the Koreans and their loyalty to Russia, their similarity to Russian peasants seems to have secured their position as members of the peasant estate. The treatment of Koreans was not entirely free of racial considerations though. When the Korean villages swore the oath of allegiance to Russia, members of the village communes were asked to sign a declaration in which they acknowledged the right of the administration to resettle them to other parts of the Maritime Province. The signatories also acknowledged that they agree to receive land allotment – 15 desiatins per family – which was drastically lower than what Russian peasant settlers received (15 desiatins per male head in the family). Overall, though, by the end of imperial regime many Russian Koreans had access to land and were members of an established peasant estate despite the anti-Korean turn of the 1910s discussed above.

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FIGURE 5.7  Training of Chinese troops near Shanghai. Niva, 1900. N. 39. Public domain.

The period which began with the Boxer Rebellion and the Russian invasion of Manchuria in the summer of 1900 saw an almost universal acceptance of the language of race to describe difference (Figure 5.7). Moreover, this language did not just enter the administrative paper flow of the imperial authorities. Perhaps uniquely in imperial Russia, race as a category came very close to being enshrined in the imperial legislation as discussions of the new ‘immigration law’ moved to the imperial parliament. A number of instances of mass violence – including the Blagoveshchensk massacre and the revolutionary uprising in Vladivostok – clearly had a racial aspect. And yet, as the case of native peoples and Koreans demonstrates, race never became a universal category that structured perceptions of difference. Other categories, such as ethnicity, class, estate, confession and subjecthood, continued to inform the imperial authorities’ views of the diverse populations of Russia’s Far Eastern territories. Perhaps more importantly, no stable regime of categorization based on race ever emerged in the imperial Far East.

CONCLUSION The Revolution and Civil War seemingly created a new reality in the Russian Far East. Koreans and Chinese were now natsmen (abbreviation of ‘national minorities’) and thus objects of the Soviet policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization) (Martin 2001). By the end of the 1920s, Korean and Chinese schools multiplied across the Far East, newspapers were published in Chinese and Korean languages, and the Communist Party came up with the promise to resolve the land question for the Koreans by the end of 1923, the first year after the unification of the Far East with Soviet Russia. And yet, many of the challenges

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the old imperial regime encountered did not disappear under the Communist power. The land question remained acute as the Communist Party’s plans for colonization of the Far East – now in the name of development rather than Russification – came to clash with the Korean demands for land. Continued immigration of Koreans complicated issues of citizenship and eligibility for land allocation. Charges of disloyalty, accusations in proclivity to engage in opium production applied both to Chinese and Koreans. The logic of essentialist and racializing thinking also did not disappear after the end of the empire.2 Throughout the 1920s, the Soviet regime was politically committed to guided promotion of national minorities, the policy that was more successful among the Koreans than among the Chinese. But as collectivization strained the resources in the Far East and some Koreans fled across the border from hunger and devastation inflicted by the Stalinist policies, Japanese invasion of China and Soviet-Japanese military encounters heightened the atmosphere of fear. In 1936, the Soviet secret services cleansed Vladivostok of its Chinese presence, casting the operation as a fight with criminality. The deportation ended a half-century-long history of Millionka, the Chinese quarter in Vladivostok. In 1938, in what was the first mass Soviet deportation of an entire people, the Koreans were forcibly moved from the Far East, primarily to Central Asia (Chernolutskaia 2011; Chang, Yang and Matteson 2016). It is still a matter of debate whether the well-known report by V. K. Arseniev to Dal’krakom in 1928 on the geopolitical situation in the Far East had any impact on the decision to deport the Koreans. Arseniev’s report was written in a strikingly racialized language and presented the Soviet rulers of the Far East with the picture of an eternal struggle between the races. We have no hard evidence to prove that it had a role to play in the brutal Stalinist deportation of Koreans, but what it does illustrate is that the demand for rationalization of imperial diversity in the language of race did not die out in the post-imperial period. The early Soviet years present what appears as a paradox at first sight: the promotion and support for formerly oppressed nationalities transformed in a matter of one decade into the politics of ethnic cleansing. This transition appears as a paradox, though, only if one disregards the historical arc of transformation of the language of race from one which is an element in the multitude of categories of difference to the one which is increasingly a universal one. As the Soviet politics of nationalities was progressively based on the understanding of ethno-nationality as an essential, immutable and even rooted in descent (and so approximating race), thinking about nationalities became indistinguishable from thinking about race. The logic of Soviet nation-building in many ways came to rely on the idea of ethnic collectivities (after the Second World War summed up in the concept of ‘etnos’) as lasting, real entities with clear boundaries. Thus the nationalizing thrust of the late imperial period – the attempt to transform the diverse empire into a nation state of the Russians – was replaced in the Soviet period by the notion of multiple nations each inhabiting their ‘own’ territories (Martin 2000). Within this context of the national teleologies, race became intertwined with the increasingly primordial understanding of human collectivities, setting the stage for a particular kind of ‘landscaping the human garden’ (Weiner 2003).

CHAPTER SIX

Race and Ethnicity Science with a Nationalist Heart RICHARD MCMAHON

INTRODUCTION This chapter argues that what I call the scientific race classification tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth century offers a crucial perspective for understanding the dynamics of race, ethnicity and nation. As the recognized scientific authority on racial identity, classifiers played a crucial social role in establishing race as the explanatory key to the ethnonational identity of European and other modern industrialized nations. Most scholars now treat ethnicity, race, gender, class and nation as politically important identity categories, socially constructed through discourse, interacting closely in complex ways and shifting over time (Verdery 1993: 39–42; Eriksen 2010: 6). However the political scientists, historians, anthropologists and sociologists who study race, ethnicity and nation strongly disagree about how to define and differentiate these categories. Ethnic and racial studies scholars commonly contrast biological race with cultural ethnicity. The example of scientific race classification by contrast demonstrates that the concepts of nationalism, race and ethnicity were superimposed on one another from the start. The terms race and nation were often used interchangeably. Though they gradually separated, they informed one another’s meaning from the start and continue to do so. Scientific race classification, termed ethnology from 1829, anthropology from the 1850s and raciology in the interwar period, was centred in continental Europe. Its strongest associations were with what became physical anthropology, though when race classification first emerged, modern scholarly disciplines were still in the process of differentiating from one another. Until recently, historians of anthropology and of the political use of race both neglected this former scientific project. They instead focused on the twentieth-century roots of current social and cultural anthropology in Britain, France and North America (Marks 1996: 345; Evans 2010: 5; Manias 2013: 9) and the earlier evolutionary anthropology of ‘continental races’ such as ‘blacks’ or ‘Mongoloids’ in overseas colonies (Manias 2009: 737). The scientific race classification of modern nations was organized fairly separately from either of these overseas anthropologies. It used different methods and supported different political agendas. A trickle of historical work since the 1970s has addressed this national race classification, but historiographical interest has particularly swelled during the past decade (e.g. Reynard-Paligot 2011; Manias 2013; McMahon 2016). The discourses of national race classifiers are important for three reasons. First, this was an elite scientific community at the heart of power, with social authority. Several

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leading European race scientists were important politicians, including one Polish Prime Minister (McMahon 2016: 29–30). Leading intellectuals such as Ernest Renan and the psychologist Gustave Le Bon joined the Paris Anthropological Society (Hecht 2003: 58, 77). Second, as a result, race classification had a key role in the early development of discourses about race, ethnicity and nation and the connections between them. This gave scientific and therefore social authority to a discourse that linked race with ethnicity and strengthened both. Rogers Brubaker traces the general public’s current typological, ‘essentialist and often hierarchical’ ‘commonplace’ ‘folk understanding of race’ from the race science of this time (2015: 49). Biological race reinforces the naturalness and eternal quality of ethnicity. Ethnicity meanwhile makes race biology important for crucial political issues. Although science entirely discredited the race concept in the mid-twentieth century, the reinfusion of the racial-ethnic connection into the public reception of genetic anthropology studies and even into the scientific work itself, demonstrates the powerful influence of race classification on ethnicity to this day (McMahon 2020). Finally, race classifiers tightly connected race with nationalism in a more systematic way than do most racial, ethnic and national discourses. Section one of this chapter argues that evidence from race classification challenges the dichotomy of biological race and cultural ethnicity that ethnic and racial studies scholars such as Peter Wade advocate. Wade connects race mainly, or even exclusively, with the negative representation of others and with the ‘continental races’ (Black, White, Caucasian, Mongoloid, etc.) that were constructed in the specific historical context of Europe’s encounter with other continents through colonialism, slavery and migration (2014: 591–3). However race classifiers also used race to reinforce the identity of their own European nations and to understand their culture and history. Their races therefore were not usually continental races; nor were they represented in entirely negative or biological terms. Scholarly debates about the relationship between ethnicity and nation revolve around the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. These categories are central to nationalism studies but heavily contested within it. Section two of this chapter examines the counterintuitive case of anthropological classifiers using racial representations to underpin even civic nationalism. This demonstrates that civic, ethno-cultural and ethnoracial identity categories were intertwined in complex and changing ways at the micro level of race classification discourse. I argue that this can help us to reinterpret top-down taxonomies such as Hans Kohn’s famous distinction between ‘civic’ Western and ‘ethnic’ Eastern nationalism (Kohn 1944).

From early ethnology to raciology The scientific race classification of Europeans is historically crucial because it blurred distinctions between ethnicity, race and nation so early in their conceptual histories. The name of its earliest iteration, ethnology, exemplifies this complex bonding of concepts. It reinforced the use of the word race as a common synonym for people or nation, including in non-pejorative references to one’s own nation. William-Frédéric Edwards, a naturalized French physician of Anglo-Jamaican origin, proposed the term ethnology in an 1829 letter to the historian Amédée Thierry. Edwards mobilized physical race evidence from comparative anatomy in support of Thierry’s 1828 cultural argument that the French nation was a mix of native Celtic Galls and Germanic Kimris (Edwards [1829] 1841: 51–3, 59). This placed biological differences at the centre of ethnology,

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which until then had been a central European science of purely ‘geographical, historical, linguistic’ human groups (Stocking 1987: 56; Dias 1991: 18–20; Vermeulen 1995: 50). Edwards’s ethnology aimed to identify ‘the various peoples who constituted the nation’, and ‘the vicissitudes of their fate’, uncovering ‘ethnic and organic factors underneath cultural practices and social revolutions’ (Edwards [1829] 1841: 2; 1845: 14; Blanckaert 1988: 19; Spencer 1997: 357). Whereas Enlightenment naturalists had focused on the continental races and typically classified ‘all white peoples’ within the Caucasian type, Edwards established the study of Europeans as a major ‘branch’ of race biology (Blanckaert 1988: 27–8). Throughout Europe and the West, waves of ethnological societies in the 1840s and anthropological societies from the 1850s were followed by university posts (Fischer 1923: 7; Curtis 1968: 29). Ethnology established what I call the ‘national race’ concept. This was anthropological race classification’s key model until the project was discredited in the mid-twentieth century (McMahon 2019b: 1). National races were ancient collective organisms that connected nations with their chosen ethnic ancestors through a common physical ‘type’. They scientifically reinforced the already long-established folk model of ethnic groups as natural, ancient, biological communities, directly descended from ancient tribes such as the Anglo-Saxons, Gauls or Slavs (see Figure 6.1). The historian Thierry therefore differentiated the Galls and Kimri in ancient Gaul by cultural factors such as language,

FIGURE 6.1  Typical ethnological map of Europe, illustrating the history and migrations of ancestor tribes, from Sophie Bryant, Celtic Ireland (London: K. Paul, Trench, 1889). Public domain.

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customs and ‘social state’, but spoke of them in biological terms as ‘two great families’ (Edwards [1829] 1841: 51–3 and 59). This model was familiar from classical and biblical accounts of specific peoples as the descendants of Romulus and Remus or the sons of Noah, and from the breeding of horses, dogs and aristocrats in an agricultural society (MacMaster 2001: 23, 54–5). The politics of slavery and the defence of traditional prerogatives in a period of rapid social and political change reinforced it (Keith 1917: 15, 21; Stocking 1991: 251). Early ethnologists often ascribed a single national race to each nation. Race classifiers such as the French ethnologist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, and the American anatomist Samuel Morton thus took it as proven that the French were largely Celtic ‘by blood’ (Morton 1839: 17; Bonté 1864b: 198). Around the Revolution of 1830, Romantic historians such as Thierry, François Guizot and Henri Martin popularized this essentialist racial vision which permanently established the Celtic Gauls as ‘a primary ethnic foundation’ of the modern French (Poliakov 1971: 44–8, 62; Dietler 1994: 588, 592). Over decades, research increasingly undermined the assumptions that modern peoples and then that individuals were of pure race. By the interwar period, raciology divided each nation’s population into a formula of racial types which were ostensibly defined on purely physical grounds. Even then, however, types were often still associated in historical accounts with particular national races, on the basis that ancient ancestral tribes were once racially pure. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, most race theorists believed that the substantive difference between ‘race’ and ‘people’ disappears ‘as we recede from civilisation’ or go ‘further back in prehistory’ (Wilde 1849: 230; Kossinna 1909–10: 19). This shaped scientific practices. Race classifiers systematically sought untainted vestiges of original pure races among isolated mountain communities (McMahon 2016: 108). Twentieth-century German and Polish classifiers described long-skulled people who spoke Slavic languages as ‘culturally but not anthropologically Slavic’ and the Nordic race type as the ‘irreplaceable’ nucleus of Germanic cultures (Talko-Hryncewicz 1902: 761; Lutzhöft 1971: 96, 98). Classifiers used accounts of ancient interactions between types to project contemporary geopolitical conflicts into prehistory. In the two decades preceding the First World War, for example, the opposition between Germanic and CeltoSlav races, which lay at the core of the recognized European system of races, aligned with the continent’s rival geopolitical alliances (McMahon 2016: 203; see Figure 6.2). German scholars increasingly disputed with French and Slavic colleagues which of these types was the original Aryan race. The resilience for over a century of this national race model of discrete races offers evidence for its political usefulness. This model survived a major mid-nineteenthcentury theoretical controversy about the relationship between biology and language and the failure of late nineteenth-century craniology to produce conclusive results. Each of these crises led to a major reconfiguration of the interdisciplinary organization of race classification. In the 1850s it became anthropology and in the 1920s raciology, while continuing to racalize nations. After 1918, the completely new race classification system of blood-type or sero-anthropology reproduced much of this model of national races, expressly connecting its blood-type races with nations and their ethnic ancestors (Mazumdar 1990: 193; Marks 1996: 346; Pogliano 2005: 47). When monogenism, Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics radically challenged the national race model at various points from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, race classifiers assimilated versions of these new insights that were compatible with the national race model. The central early controversy in ethnology, about whether

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FIGURE 6.2  Typical ascriptions of European national races in mainstream late nineteenthcentury race anthropology. © Richard McMahon.

human races had a single (monogenic) or multiple (polygenic) origin, exemplifies the adaptability of the politically useful national race model (Stocking 1992: 350). Polygenism appealed to supporters of slavery and anticlerical French ethnologists, while religiously influenced monogenism dominated English ethnology (Blanckaert 1988: 43–4; Stocking 1991: 246; 1992: 350). Edwards’s polygenist conviction ‘that human physiognomy was impervious’ to environmental action, was the scientific foundation of the national race model (Spencer 1997: 357). His Paris ethnological society saw biological traits as ‘deeper, more general and surer’, because they were more permanent than ‘intellectual and moral character, languages and historical traditions’ (Dias 1991: 20–1). Monogenist ethnologists such as James Cowles Prichard in England insisted on the primacy of language in the definition of race, but their model of race was close enough to that of the polygenists to allow participation in their classification project. By the 1860s, it became increasingly clear that accumulating physical evidence of hair, eye and skin colour, stature and various measures of the head and face clashed with linguistic geography. Along with the professionalization of linguistic philology and its furious competition with physical anthropology to offer authoritative expertise on ethnicity, this undermined the ethnological model (Dias 1991: 18). Race classifiers therefore reorganized themselves as anthropologists with new interdisciplinary alliances,

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to continue their politically useful project of explaining national history, politics and character. In particular, they replaced linguistic comparative philology with the newly flourishing scientific archaeology, as their method for reconstructing ethno-racial prehistory. Race classifiers studied recently discovered skulls such as the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon as evidence of Celtic or Basque ethnic prehistory rather than as part of the puzzle of human evolution (Pruner-Bey 1864a: 332–3).

Ethno-racial construction of national character and class Racial accounts such as the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist narrative of British nationalists could support a wide range of ideological, geopolitical and ethnic agendas. Many Romantic era non-scientific writers such as Thomas Carlyle had attributed Britain’s enduring ‘free institutions’, inherited directly from ancient Germania, to the racial ‘skills and talents’ of Aryan Anglo-Saxons (Ballantyne 2002: 6 and 41). Several race classification works, such as the popular 1850 book The Races of Men, by Scottish anthropologist Robert Knox, gave scientific backing to Britain’s descent from Germanic Anglo-Saxons (1850: 46 and 59). Knox and other race classifiers characterized the rebels and autocrats of the recent 1848 Revolutions across Europe as racial factions (Knox 1850: 57 and 60; Dublin University Magazine 1855: 734). By opposing AngloSaxons to the Celtic race, as mortal enemies since prehistoric times, Anglo-Saxonists combined two geopolitical enemies, Britain’s restive Irish subjects and the French, into a single natural-born foe. Knox argued that whether ‘Frenchman, Irishman, Scottish Highlander, Welshman; under every circumstance’ the Celtic race was ‘precisely the same’ (Knox 1850: 318). This also helped justify unsympathetic policies towards the many Irish immigrants who fled to British cities during the potato famine of the 1840s. One race anthropologist described the Irish quarter of English towns as ‘the most filthy, squalid, wretched rookery’, adding that you naturally expect pauper mutinies and crimes ‘of savage violence and unmerciful brutality’ from the Irish (Avery 1869: ccxxv). As this suggests, the identification of racial components within nations was also often used to biologize and naturalize social classes, some of which had already been constructed as ethnic descent groups for centuries. Since the sixteenth century, for example, French aristocrats had used claims of descent from Germanic Franks to justify their privilege and power over racially Gallic commoners (Hankins 1926: 142; McKendry 1999: 182). Backed by imperialist propaganda and eighteenth-century acceptance of the ethnic construction of class, these myths of noble founders from abroad proliferated, including Trojans in Rome, Normans in England, and ‘ex oriente lux’ accounts of superior civilizations coming to Europe from Rome, Greece and the Fertile Crescent (Lutzhöft 1971: 139; Dietler 1994: 587; Boia 2002: 32). In reaction, French Revolutionary Romantic nationalists identified the Third Estate with ‘our ancestors the Gauls’. In 1798 therefore, the revolutionary Abbé Sieyès exhorted the third estate to send ‘back into the forests of Franconia [in Germany] all these families who maintain the insane claim to have issued from the race of conquerors’ ([1789] 2002: 8). This reflected the wider democratic enthusiasm of the nineteenth century, whose identity narratives of national origin increasingly stressed ancient native ancestors of the masses, including the Anglo-Saxons in England and blond Teutons in Germany (Lutzhöft 1971: 139; Dietler 1994: 587; Boia 2002: 32). Even the Aryan race, from which many classifiers derived the alleged biological superiority of Europeans, was ultimately nativized. William Jones, a British comparative philologist in India, initially identified the Aryans or Indo-Europeans in the 1780s, by noting

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linguistic similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin (Poliakov 1971: 95). While nineteenth-century scholars generally placed the Aryan racial cradle somewhere in Asia, right-wing nationalist authors, such as the race archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, began from the 1880s to trace Aryan culture from the blond Nordics of Scandinavia (Sklenář 1983: 147; Orsucci 1998: 2). From the later nineteenth century, as the industrial, urban capitalist class system became more widespread and more threatening to conservatives, race classification again swung towards supporting class hierarchies. Anthropologists such as John Beddoe in England and Gustaf Retzius in Sweden bemoaned the ‘depressing’ but undeniable prospect that the aristocratic blond northern Germanic type, whose children withered ‘in the fatal atmosphere’ of towns and who ‘seems ill-fitted to cope successfully’ in the industrialized world, was giving way to a shorter, broader-skulled ‘offspring of the proletariat’ more adapted to the demands of industrial life (Beddoe 1905: 237; G. Retzius 1909: 300–1; Barkan 1992: 26). Liberal British ethnologists criticized portrayals of ‘dark-eyed’ proles as dangerous and disorderly ‘social debris’ (Lewis 1872: 264; Jackson 1873: 399–402). The bold sociological theories of the French antiSemite George Vacher de Lapouge and Otto Ammon in Germany created the discipline of anthroposociology in the 1890s, correlating anthropological with socio-economic statistics to prove race largely determined social class (Deniker [1900] 1971: 318). Though progressives successfully marginalized anthroposociologists in professional anthropology (Clark 1984: 152), their assumptions, methods and hierarchies became endemic in eugenics (Kevles 1985: 70–2) and interwar Nordic supremacist raciology (Günther 1933: 59–60, 93; Eickstedt 1934: 352).

ETHNIC VS CIVIC NATIONALISM Focusing on race classification enables me to contribute to a wider scholarly move away from the top-down normative labelling of whole societies as civic or ethnic and towards more micro-level applications of this dichotomy. Scholars such as Anthony Smith in the 1980s turned from identifying whole countries or national movements as ethnic or civic to identifying these factors in particular elements, tendencies or stages of national movements (Brubaker 1999: 58). Many scholars now identify ethnic and civic elements in all or most nationalisms, and advocate studying their relative salience and balance in each case (Fenton and May 2002: 7; Kuzio 2002: 20). Brubaker’s influential cognitive approach helped to ‘link macro-level outcomes with micro-level processes’ (2001: 16; Semyonov 2017: 35–9). He focused on how and when ‘specific people identify themselves, perceive others, experience the world, interpret their predicaments and orient their actions’ in racial, ethnic or national terms (Brubaker 2001: 16). Following Steve Fenton and Stephen May (2002: 7), my bottom-up cognitive approach unbundles the civic-ethnic dichotomy into two interacting and mutually influencing factors. One is the concrete practices or strategies of specific social and political actors, regarding citizenships rules, which people and territories should belong to the nation, the treatment of minorities and relations with other countries. The other is the competing discursive representations and ideological justifications for these practices and strategies, entailing different approaches to claiming descent and marking difference among individuals and boundaries between peoples. Eriksen, for example, connects the idea of a nationalism stressing shared civil rights with policies of birth-right citizenship (jus soli) and ethnic nationalism with blood-right citizenship (jus sanguinis) (2010: 144).

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Ideas of civic nationalism strongly emphasize social organization rather than biology. However, this section demonstrates the complexity of bottom-up civic-ethnic interactions by examining three ways that race classifiers justified civic society, paradoxically attributing racial underpinnings to it. Engaging with Kohn’s East-West distinction, I conclude the section by considering the extent to which empires differed from multiethnic nation states.

Civic race psychology One means of linking civic and racial ideologies was by scientifically legitimating tropes of cultural national character as race psychology.1 Race classifiers from Edwards onwards believed that the permanent intellectual and moral faculties and inclinations of races gave societies their historical meaning and caused social phenomena (A. Retzius [1842–56] 1864: 28; Edwards 1845: 43; Quatrefages 1871: 73; Blanckaert 1988: 30–2, 40). From the late nineteenth century, for example, competing accounts promoted the brunette Celto-Slavic and blond Germanic races as biologically hard-wired for civilization and bearers of the original Aryan culture. Classifiers widely accepted that the Germanics were the national race of the Germans and English. They therefore attributed diametrically opposed psychological characteristics to the Celto-Slavic2 race of France and eastern Europe. By attributing particular race psychologies to national races, liberal and conservative scholars legitimized their preferred politics as biologically appropriate for their own nations. This allowed some race classifiers to create a direct racial underpinning for civil society and especially for democracy. A key element in representations of the AngloSaxon racial psychology was its superior, racially inherited capacity for democracy. Knox’s made his Saxons ‘democrats by their nature, the only democrats on the earth, the only race which truly comprehends the meaning of liberty’ (1850: 46, 59). The literary critic Matthew Arnold’s Anglo-Saxons retained ‘an inalienable part of freedom and selfdependence’ ([1867] 1962: 347). The Anglo-Saxon was the variety of the Germanic or Nordic race3 that stretched discursive representations of the Germanic furthest in a democratic direction. Race classification discourse consistently associated Germanics with freedom, but this always sat uneasily with powerful tropes of Germanic conquest and aristocracy (Woltmann 1903: 228–9, 269, 287; Hankins 1926: 142; Horsman 1976: 387–91). The solution was for pro-Germanic race classifiers to represent this type as an elite of dashing, free aristocrats, migrating to conquer and rule lesser peoples. Their race argument that civilization and progress depended on an aristocratic blond elite maintaining its purity by strictly avoiding interbreeding with social inferiors, colonial subjects and Jews supported policies that maintained strict hierarchical social divisions (Woltmann 1903: 272–3; Todorov 1993: 134–9; Hannaford 1996: 328). By contrast, liberal and autocratic conservative race scientists across Europe praised or denigrated the Celtic or Celto-Slav race as natural bourgeois democrats, pointing to the contrast between the French Third Republic and autocratic Germany. The Celtic race was stereotypically represented as sedentary, peaceful, quietly productive peasants and petits bourgeois, doggedly resisting conquest but never conquering (Broca [1859] 1871: 292; Obédénare 1877: 253; Topinard 1878: 508; 1885: 400–1; Ripley 1900: 470, 473). The Nazi Germanicist anthropologist H. F. K. Günther associated this brunette race’s democratic doctrine of equality with ‘carping and envy’ and ‘revulsion, even hate’ for ‘all human excellence’ (1933: 65, 93). Leading French anthropologists by contrast linked the Celtic race type to the advanced arts, ‘superior civilisation’ and growing material

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and intellectual prosperity of France, which was very racially mixed and could absorb even colonial natives (Broca [1859] 1860: 7–8; [1859] 1871: 282; Quatrefages 1889: 313). For Germanicists, aptitude for civilization was racially inherited, but French racial accounts made it a product of exchange. They celebrated the democracy, egalitarianism and cosmopolitan cities that encouraged this mixing.

Race vs ethnonationalism A second approach linking race to civic nationalism ran through the suppression of potentially explosive ethnonationalism. This aimed to neutralize the nationalism both of separatist ethnic minorities such as the Irish, Bretons and Poles, and of core imperial ethnicities such as the Russians and English. Historians of empire have particularly explored the interaction of states with these ethnic groups. Since the 1990s, the New Imperial History has incorporated cognitive insights and, since the millennium, increasingly challenged the opposition between empire and nation state (Pavleeva 2011: 44; Berger and Miller 2015: 2; Kumar 2017: 56). It presents nineteenth-century nations as very often imagined within constraining or enabling multi-ethnic imperial frameworks such as Britain, Spain, Russia and Austria (Burbank and Cooper 2010: 363–4, 367; Pavleeva 2011: 45; Kumar 2017: 57). Historians of anthropology address the role of race in this nation-empire nexus. Marina Mogilner has recently identified a particularly imperial style of race anthropology in central and eastern Europe. She says that increased scholarly interest in the complex tsarist and Soviet engagement with race is opening up ‘a new perspective on Russian and Soviet history’ and their particular ‘imperial modernity’ (2019: 207). Maria Rhode applies Mogilner’s imperial anthropology concept to Austria-Hungary and identifies strong commonalities and connections among the race anthropologies of Germany, Vienna and Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century (2019: 106, 108–9). Empires sometimes adopted chauvinist programmes of Anglo-Saxon, Russian or Austrian-German ethnic nationalism, favouring the state’s dominant ethnic group and systematically discriminating against subject peoples as different and inferior (Berger and Miller 2015: 9; Rhode 2019: 109). Nationalistic anthropological race classifiers supported this agenda. For the ethnocentric Anglo-Saxonist Knox, therefore, the Celtic race in Ireland were ‘all papists and jacobites’, who ‘must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England’s safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself’ (Knox 1850: 379). However the relationship of political ideology and national identity representations was not straightforward. Conservatives and liberals deployed interacting and competing ethnic, linguistic, civic, religious and racial representations of Russia, for example, and its relationship with minorities (Pavleeva 2011: 47–9). The newer scholarship on imperialism and nationalism emphasizes the aspiration of many nineteenth-century state ideologies across Europe to a polyethnic ideology of multiple ethnicities harmoniously sharing a state. Eriksen links civic nationalism in practice with this, so that, for example, the United States can elect a president from its African American minority ethnic group because enough trust exists among ethnic groups for common civic issues to outweigh the politics of ethnic identification (2010: 141, 144). From the 1860s onwards, the Habsburg state similarly adopted a programme of unity within cultural diversity (Rhode 2019: 109). To an extent, its concept of ‘federative multiethnic empire’ recalled the relationship of the UK to its four nations (Berger and Miller 2015: 17). The tsarist empire meanwhile promoted

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loyalties to the ‘confessional state’ or imperial dynasty that ‘preserved a particularistic imperial approach to its multiple internal regions, peripheries, and subjects’ (Mogilner 2019: 208). Liberal anthropological race classifiers across Europe promoted linguistic and cultural diversity within an inclusive society and marginalized scholars such as the anthroposociologists, who advocated ethnic chauvinism or racial hierarchies among white peoples (Pogliano 2005: 446; Mogilner 2013: 169–70; Rhode 2019: 109). From the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, liberals dominated race anthropology establishments. Rhode argues that leading figures such as Rudolf Virchow in Berlin, Dimitri Anuchin, who was known as the ‘Russian Virchow’, and Felix von Luschan, who moved from Vienna to Berlin, all shared a liberal political commitment to universal civil rights and rejected racial hierarchies and the racialization of cultural communities. Their aim was a state that would depoliticize all ethnicities, dominant or minority, by giving all state citizens equal access to social and civil rights. The conservative autocratic imperial regimes, which alternated between depoliticizing rising ethnic nationalism with generosity and suppressing it with violence, alienated liberals (Godina, Butovskata and Kozintsev 1993: 5; Mogilner 2013: 131; Rhode 2019: 109). However, Rhode traces liberal values in Russia and Austria from the ‘specific imperial situation’ of accepting imperial diversity (2019: 108–9). Anthropologists ‘intentionally or not’ supported polyethnic policies by the Habsburg authorities (109). Mogilner says members of the pre-revolutionary Moscow School of anthropology catalogued and took pride in the Russian Empire’s ‘exceptional diversity’ in ethnicity, physical types and cultural stages, compared to western Europe (2019: 220–1). The acceptance and assimilation of diversity was a less pressing issue in Germany than Austria, but was exemplified by Virchow’s determined opposition to anti-Semitism (Massin 1996: 89). Aleksei Ivanovskii in Moscow, similar to Virchow and British liberal classifiers, undermined ethnic politics by identifying racial connections between the state’s dominant and minority ethnic groups. By connecting Slavs with non-Slavs, for example, Mogilner says Ivanovskii ‘profoundly undermined imperial hierarchies of power’ that were topped by the Slavic Russians (Pavleeva 2011: 48–9; Mogilner 2019: 227). The lesser but nevertheless important complementary role of Finno-Ugric peoples with respect to the Slavic ‘superior race’ in Russian ethnic identity accounts resembled the relationship that liberal British anthropologists established between ethnic Celts and Anglo-Saxons (Berger and Miller 2015: 9–10). Race classifiers represented both these relationships in racial terms. Russian anthropologists were often ready to accept the junior role of Finns in Russia’s racial synthesis (Beddoe 1890: 488; Zograf 1893: 7, 11–12; Bounak 1928: 224; Bunak 1932: 469–73, 486, 492–5). This was despite the widespread portrayal of Finns in race anthropology, across Europe and into the interwar period, as inferior Mongoloids (Broca 1872: 22; Fischer 1936: 277; Kemilainen 1994: 402–3). These racial connections were also extended further afield, obscuring distinctions between strategies of national and imperial integration. Mogilner notes that anthropologists helped to blur boundaries between the metropole and peripheries in the ‘contiguous heterogeneous Russian empire’ (2019: 208). Imperial institutions such as geographical and anthropological societies identified the racial affinities of the Italians, Spanish and Japanese with colonial subjects in east Africa, around the Mediterranean or in Korea (Sergi 1900: 6, 168; Taylor 1988: 57; Berger and Miller 2015: 5; Nanta 2019: 244). Late nineteenth-century theories of common Indo-European racial origins helped Britain justify ruling Aryan India (Horsman 1976: 393).

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The political climate influenced national race classification discourses. As the midnineteenth-century shift from Anglo-Saxonism to liberalism in Great Britain demonstrates, classifiers in multi-ethnic states used narratives of race mixture in periods of greater national confidence to justify the incorporation of subject peoples. Maciej Górny found that times of war and retrenchment encouraged Austrian and Polish anthropologists to represent ethnic minorities as racially alien and inferior (2019: 285–7). Japanese anthropological race narratives moved from purity towards synthesis after conquering Korea in 1904 and back to purity during the Second World War (Nanta 2009: 48). Hungarian anthropologists increasingly stressed ideas of ‘racial purity’ after the country lost most of its ethnic minority subjects following the First World War (Turda 2010a: 34).

Race and assimilation into the civic state The third racial support to civic nationalism went a step beyond a harmonious polyethnic society. It dissolved ethnic groups within a melting pot by welcoming and assimilating individuals into the state’s civic institutions and culture. Some scholars link this civic nationalism with cultural ethnicity. They argue that the political community of civic nations is built upon and promotes a strong sense of ‘peoplehood’, ‘fraternity’ or ‘community of values’, which is generally based on the ‘language, culture, symbols and anniversaries’ of the dominant ethnic group (Brubaker 1999: 61; Kuzio 2002: 30–1; Banks 2005: 154). The benefits of a single civic society are inextricably tied to this culture. National policies such as promoting the state language, for example, help to equalize social and political access for all citizens but simultaneously erode minority ethnic identity (Brubaker 1999: 63). Marcus Banks therefore disputes that true polyethnic nationalism is feasible (2005: 154). He and others believe the ‘relentless press towards homogeneity’ in all nation states will efface or exclude ‘ethnic particularism’ in favour of the state-centred common identity (Banks 2005: 154; Kuzio 2002: 28; Verdery 1993: 43). In this view, civic nations dissolve minorities into the state culture except for unthreatening residual markers like those of American hyphenated-ethnicities or Chinese minorities performing folk dances for tourists. Several scholars identify the use of biological descent discourse to underpin the legitimacy of the cultures at the heart of civic communities. Kuzio says ‘all nations since the late-eighteenth century have appealed to ancestry and history’, including the ancient Gallic or Anglo-Saxon ethnic ancestors of supposedly civic nations such as Switzerland, France and England (Kuzio 2002: 33–4; emphasis in the original). Eriksen argues that language such as motherland, brotherhood and nation, whose Latin root means ‘to be born’, makes all nationalism ‘a form of metaphoric kinship’ (2010: 142). Believing tolerance towards ethnic minorities ‘would stimulate a natural process of social integration and cultural assimilation’, many late imperial Russian liberals supported the assimilating strand of imperial nationalism (Pavleeva 2011: 47–9). Some liberally minded Russian and Austrian anthropologists downgraded ethnic groups to ‘nationalities or tribes, rather than nations’ (Rhode 2019: 108–9). In 1860s Britain, classifiers associated with the liberal Whig establishment, such as Arnold, Darwin’s close friend Thomas Huxley and the naturalist John Lubbock also put forward racial arguments for peaceful assimilation of minorities. They appropriated race science to oppose Anglo-Saxonism and especially its brutal proposed remedies for the problem of Britain’s restive Irish subjects. Huxley and Lubbock instead aimed to use evidence of race mixture to break the vicious cycle of angry British repression and resentful Irish separatism (Lubbock 1887: 418; Foster 1997: 434). A later anthropologist

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said Huxley’s 1870 address on ‘English’ ethnology was ‘forced on him by the unhappy state of affairs in Ireland … then going from bad to worse’ (Keith 1928: 305). Due to the admixture of Celtic and Germanic blood throughout the British Isles, Huxley regarded Ireland as possibly less Celtic than the west of England (1870: 201). Lubbock wrote in the Times newspaper that recognizing ‘the undeniable ethnological fact’ that England, Scotland and Ireland were ‘all composed of the same elements’, in similar proportions ‘would do much to mitigate our unfortunate dissentions and add to the strength and welfare of our common country’ (1887: 420). Arnold argued that the British should allow their German, Latin and Celtic parts ‘to continue and perfect’ one another, instead of clashing ([1867] 1962: 383). English ineptitude in the plastic arts, emotional and sentimental approach to religion and the ‘style, melancholy and natural magic’ of English poetry was due to ‘the Celtic part in us’, so that no European nation’s poetry caught ‘the passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius’ like Byron’s did (Arnold [1867] 1962: 355, 371; Morash 1998: 212). British liberal unionist race classifiers explicitly used race mixture to negate ethnic difference (Foster 1997: 434). For Lubbock, the UK was ‘so much intermingled’ that its four ‘nationalities’ were not real races (1887: 418, 420; see Figure 6.3). Arnold advocated as a natural, irresistible, ‘necessity of … modern civilisation’: The fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, Englishspeaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities …. The sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better for Wales itself. (Arnold [1867] 1962: 296–7) While romantic historians and novelists in England and Germany often stressed a single Germanic ethnic inheritance, French counterparts such as Jules Michelet and Thierry celebrated their nation’s mixed heritage (Poliakov 1971: 44–8, 62). French identity discourse had a more consistent tradition of diverse and complex multi-racial combinations. Since at least the sixteenth century, narratives of Celtic ancestors of the common people, Germanic Frankish nobles and Roman origin myths blended, clashed and interacted with political debates about liberty and oppression (Reynaud-Paligot 2011: 67–70). The eighteenth-century Frankish-Celtic ‘quarrel of two races’ inspired Thierry to identify ‘two great families’ in ancient Gaul, brunette Galls and blond Kimris (Edwards [1829] 1841: 51–3, 59). After the ethnologist Edwards, variants on Thierry’s French racial synthesis were adopted in 1859 by Paul Broca, and other members of the French School of Anthropology that he founded and dominated (Deniker 1897: 126; Collis 2003: 63). Race anthropologists at different times termed Paris ‘a vast melting pot’ and identified a blend of up to seven ethnic or racial components in the French ‘complex nation’, which had a Germanic Frankish name, Latin ‘civilisation’ and Gallic ‘chief glory’ (Broc 1836: 31; Bonté 1864a: 628; Broca 1878: 200; Pogliano 2005: 48). As in Britain, tropes of racial mixture were used geopolitically and to counter minority ethnic mobilization. French writers after 1870 contrasted France’s fruitful racial diversity to the German obsession with ethnic and race purity. Ernest Renan’s famous 1882 lecture, Qu’est ce que une nation?, stressed that France and other nations were racially mixed in order to reject Germany’s ethnic nationalist claim to linguistically German AlsaceLorraine (Hannaford 1996: 288). The pamphlet the Prussian race, dashed off in 1871 by

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FIGURE 6.3  This map from William Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1900), used place name evidence to emphasize the racially mixed character of Britain and Ireland. Public domain.

French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages, served two geopolitical objectives. First, it attributed the philistine barbarity of the 1870–1 war, including a fold-out map of artillery bombardment of the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle where Quatrefages worked, to Prussians being a incomplete and unstable fusion of Germans with Slavo-Finnish racial elements (Quatrefages 1871: 80–2). Second, this was not ostensibly intended to advocate racial purity but to discredit accounts of a racially homogenous Germany. He argued that

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the unification of the mongrel Prussians with real racial Germans of south Germany in 1871, to create the German Empire, was therefore based on ‘an anthropological error’ (Quatrefages 1871: 104; emphasis in the original). Ironically, the French state used the Celtic French origin myth to counter Breton ethnic nationalism and eradicate the only Celtic language still spoken on its territory (Dietler 1994: 593–4). Race discourse helped by claiming the Breton racial heritage for Celtic France as a whole. From the 1790s onwards, French nationalists established the Celticspeaking Bretons in national myth as the purest descendants of France’s Gallic ancestors (Thiesse 2001: 54, 125). In evidence, Edwards and later anthropologists sought linguistic correspondences between ancient Gallic, Breton and modern French (Edwards 1845: 36–8; Pruner-Bey 1864b: 661). Broca (1860) used his research finding that Bretons were small and dark to argue that France’s Celtic ancestors also had this racial type. The ‘mixed type’, recognizing the absence of racial purity at even an individual level, was a key racial support for assimilation (Rhodes 2019: 108–9). From the 1890s to the First World War, the leading Hungarian physical anthropologist Aurel von Török represented the ancient Magyar ancestors of Hungarians as racially mixed, supporting policies of assimilating national minorities over polyethnic integration (Lafferton 2007: 707, 727). Ivanovskii and other later Moscow School scholars focused on classifying the extensive ‘meticization of our population’ (Mogilner 2019: 230, 232). In 1904, Ivanovskii proposed novel anthropological groups that deliberately divided up Slavic peoples like the Russians into physical types, some of which he also associated with various Tartar peoples. Mogilner says such strategies often supported visions of ‘a democratized empire’ (2019: 232).

Kohn’s dichotomy and the micro-level analysis of race discourse Imperial forms of civic nationalism flourished in central and eastern Europe. This undermines Kohn’s dichotomy of civic Western and ethnic Eastern nationalism as well as presentist traditions in nationalist historiography, which assume that, from the nineteenth century, strongly ethnic nationalist movements challenged anti-nationalist empires in the east (Berger and Miller 2015: 6; Semyonov 2017: 35–9; Yeomans 2019: 297). Mogilner complicates this assertion further by showing that the logic of the Russian imperial situation inherently tended to hybridize clear forms (nation/ethnicity/race or civic-ethnic) (2019: 206, 209). Like western counterparts, liberal eastern classifiers used racial links among ethnic groups to argue for inter-ethnic harmony. However in their search for a language to describe what they defined as racial diversity within the common context of an empire, they tended to avoid nationalizing language that assumed strict boundaries between groups or required total assimilation of certain imperial subjects. For example, ‘ethnic minority’ was not a part of either official or scholarly language in the turn-of-the-century Russian Empire. Scholars such as Maria Rhode and Emese Lafferton identify similar strong traditions of cultural pluralism and integrationism in late nineteenth-century German, Hungarian and Austrian anthropology (Lafferton 2007: 712; Rhode 2019: 106). Mogilner and Rhode identify this as a strategic relativism that is typical of the Russian and Habsburg imperial situations. It meant that imperial subjects ‘identified themselves and were identified by the state through overlapping’ and competing definitions of national identity, religion, citizenship, loyalty to the regime, regional origin and social estate, but never explicitly or exclusively by nationality or race (Mogilner 2019: 206–8; Rhode 2019: 109–10). These allowed ‘race’ to be constructed situationally and with multiple signifiers, from social to linguistic, none of which retained

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an absolute stability and significance. Rhodes argues that liberal, imperial anthropology therefore opposed the new, language-based ethnic nationalism (2019: 109). Many Polish race anthropologists meanwhile were obsessed with the ‘feudal’ hierarchies, based on class and religion, and especially the traditional gentry class from which many of them stemmed (Stojanowski 1930: 9; Schwidetzky 1935: 297–9; Czekanowski 1948b: 22; 1956: 6, 23; Rhode 2019: 113, 129). Władisław Olechnowicz’s craniological research for example distinguished the gentry from other Poles, as ‘representatives of the pure Slavic type’ with ‘no foreign blood in them’ (1893: 9, 31–4). Such examples suggest that eastern European anthropological nationalism shared something with the contemporary disquiet of conservative western anthropologists such as Beddoe and Retzius about darker proletarians threatening the dominance of blond elites (Beddoe 1905: 237; G. Retzius 1909: 300–1). Evidence from race classification suggests that Kohn’s ethnic East–civic West dichotomy may only properly hold true after a wave of neo-romantic right-wing cultural movements, including Germany’s völkisch movement, spread through Europe in the 1890s, emphasizing exclusive ethnic nationalism, race and social Darwinism (Bollenbeck 1999: 300–2; Turda 2004; Lafferton 2007: 712; McMahon 2016: 36; Rhode 2019: 110). Rhode, Lafferton and Mogilner tell similar stories of this 1890s nationalistic wave increasingly making ethnic origin the definitive criterion for Polish, Hungarian and Russian identity, and challenging multi-ethnic models of the nation (Lafferton 2007: 730; Mogilner 2019: 208; Rhode 2019: 110). In Russia it was promoted by a new tsarist state ideology of Russification and in Poland it was preceded by left-wing populists bringing peasants into the Polish nation in the late 1880s. After the multi-ethnic Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires finally collapsed in 1917–18 ethnic nationalism justified and reinforced the newly independent smaller states that replaced them. The race classification writing of interwar scientific raciologists such as Egon von Eickstedt in Germany (1934: 366, 375, 388, 400–2), Jan Czekanowski in Poland (1948a: 16, 31–4) and George Montandon in France (1933: 247–9) was therefore much more overtly nationalist than that of late nineteenth-century counterparts.

CONCLUSION Just before the May 2019 European Parliament election, Peter Casey, a Trumpian Irish candidate, defended describing himself as an ‘Irish racist’. ‘Of course I’m racist’, he declared, ‘I’m a very proud Irish man’. His premise was that ‘Irish race’ could still be used as a synonym for the Irish people. It may be a little too old-fashioned to offer a fig leaf of plausible deniability to this exercise in dog-whistle politics. However, the idea that nations are races (or made up of races) is alive and well in popular and journalistic reception of the flourishing industry of reconstructing the ethnic history of peoples and individuals through DNA (McMahon 2020). This matters because globalization, European integration, immigration, separatism and populist nationalism have made defining membership of the national community an ever more important political issue. Rightwing populism, genetics, the new racism debates and more recent scholarly interest make this a vital time to investigate how race still competes and interacts with constructions of the nation as a cultural ethnic group or as a civic political compact (Fenton and May 2002: 3). The present chapter offers two reasons why the history of anthropological race classification is important to understanding this issue.

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First, race anthropology and nationalism grew up together and shaped one another. Like other modern social sciences such as history, political science and sociology, anthropology was a vital intellectual infrastructure of nationalism, theorizing and reconstructing the racial underpinning of nations. It took the lead in creating the assumed relationships between nation, ethnicity and race that Peter Casey, his supporters and purchasers of ethnic DNA tests still take for granted. This inheritance is revealed in unselfconscious language about ancient Celts, Slavs or Anglo-Saxons as national ancestors, but also in the detail of references to national origin myths. The Blood of the Irish, a popular Irish TV series presenting genetic evidence on Irish identity, therefore regurgitated centuries-old nationalist narratives of civilized Mediterranean origin by hinting that the ‘truest’ Irish came from Iberia (Blood of the Irish 2009). This was also a commonplace in nineteenthcentury race science, proposed by both British and Irish nationalists to distinguish the two peoples and demonstrate that one was superior to the other (McMahon 2016: 253–8). Anthropological genetics even revives race classification practices. To trace ethnic groups for example, it treats supposedly genetically homogenous ‘indigenous populations as historical isolates’, directly descended from prehistoric locals (Sommer 2015: 131). Second, scientific race classification demonstrates the intricate interweaving of civic, ethno-cultural and ethno-racial elements in discourse about nations and how this interacts with policies regarding citizenship, minorities, social hierarchies and relations with other states. Focusing on micro-level discourse within communities of discourse such as race classification brings out the importance of geographical and temporal context to the specific relationships between these elements. This emphasis on context offers a useful perspective on top-down analytical distinctions. In the discourse of race classifiers, for example, Kohn’s dichotomy of ethnic Eastern and civic Western nationalism only emerges strongly in the early twentieth century (Kohn 1944). Beforehand, from Russia to Britain, liberal classifiers often used strategies of multi-racial taxonomy. These cross-cut and undermined ethnic divisions, supporting peaceful and friendly interethnic relations and a civic concept of nationality. Earlier ethno-racial discourses such as Anglo-Saxonism meanwhile appear in western Europe. Like analyses of nationalism since the 1960s (Kuzio 2002: 21, 27–8, 31), this evidence highlights spatial and temporal patterns in civic and ethnic nationalism resembling those that Kohn and the theorists of imperial situations identify, but demonstrates that they are contingent, contested and changing.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Race and Gender The Protection of White, Male Privilege and Power MARIA SOPHIA QUINE

In 1797, Germaine de Staël asked Napoleon who he thought was the greatest woman in history. General Bonaparte reputedly replied to a woman whose intelligence was widely celebrated: ‘The one, Madame, who has the most children’ (Fairweather 2005: 3). Through her many writings, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein (1766– 1817) had earned a reputation as one of the most brilliant minds of the age of letters, an era which produced many prominent women scientists, intellectuals and polymaths. De Staël played an active role in public life and politics, crossed swords with Napoleon, and helped bring about his downfall, advised Alexander I, the Tsar of Russia, conversed with Thomas Jefferson and influenced many great writers, including Tocqueville, Byron, Goethe, Pushkin and Tolstoy (Guerlac 2005). While female intellect and achievement were held in great esteem in many circles in high society in pre-Revolutionary France, Napoleon prized the ‘motherly’ and ‘feminine’ qualities of women. In addition to having plentiful children, Napoleon was once quoted as saying, women should ‘stick to the knitting’ rather than use their brains or meddle in politics (Lewis 2001). The expansive world of Enlightenment that created a formidable thinker like Germaine de Staël changed in the nineteenth century, however, as gender roles became more starkly and sharply defined. Europe harnessed the power of steam, coal, oil, iron, steel and electricity and grasped socio-economic modernity and global domination. The processes of empire-building, nationalization, industrialization, modernization and demographic change were altering European societies dramatically. The consolidation of an ‘androcentric’ (Gilman 1911) system in which men had a monopoly of power was connected to these transformations. The rise of race science, together with the ascendancy of Darwinian evolutionism, also played a huge part in the severe circumscription of women’s intellectual and social opportunities which occurred. Modernity rested upon a gendered ranking order which did not just affect women. Not all men were deemed to possess a ‘birthright’ to have mastery over others; indeed, in the colonial order fully operative in the nineteenth century, an imperially-inscribed; ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) arose out of the historical reality in which the colonizers enjoyed great wealth and power and, through their status and class, had the means to determine the governing norms of society and prevailing I would like to thank Joy Dixon, Marina Mogilner, Marius Turda and Samuel Quine-Church for their comments on a draft of this chapter.

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gender and race relations. The men who ruled over society, industry and empire shaped a culture which defined white, European males like themselves as the creators and bearers of ‘civilization’. The belief and self-belief that white men of European origin were inherently superior to all women, and, indeed, were superior to everything and everyone, became an organizational principle of modern society in the West. The male/ female binary paradigm of gender interacted with the white/non-white binary paradigm of race in the nineteenth century in numerous ways. The androcentric and ‘patriarchal’1 system of white, male power and privilege had sovereignty over people of colour, who, like women, were subjected to conquests, oppression and marginalization. This chapter seeks to address the issue of gender in the long nineteenth century in novel ways. It aims to provide a broad coverage of the entirety of the long nineteenth century in order to uncover important shifts. Gender relationships were not linear in the period under consideration. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of definitions of the social determinants of gender inequality which had currency before the rise of biological materialism and evolutionism. The critical importance of changing perceptions of women’s ‘mental capacity’ cannot be underplayed. These attitudes comprised a strong undercurrent within European/Western culture; they operated as a bulwark to the entire edifice of male domination and determined access to education and the means of advancement. As they became more retrograde and rigid, they shaped and limited women’s lives in substantial ways. Therefore, competing understandings of women’s psychological and intellectual ‘nature’ will be a significant theme. This chapter will then chart the advent of a modern, capitalist culture which commercialized degrading representations of women. In the first half of the nineteenth century, art played a critical role in this process of reinforcing gender inequality by glamorizing and idealizing female servitude and victimization. Some of the key canonical cultural representations of powerless women in the nineteenth century were racialized, so the intersection between gender and race will be explored. This chapter draws on the intersectionality of nineteenth-century epistemologies and imageries of gender and race, as they informed and constituted each other through complex hierarchies of Orientalism (Said 1978) and Otherness (Simone De Beauvoir introduced the concept of ‘othering’ as a kind of ‘Master-Slave’ Hegelian dialectic: [1949] 1976). A transnational perspective is adopted, with a specific focus on Italian sources. When seen as part of a larger modern European culture which validated white, male supremacy, the Italian case is revealed to exist on a spectrum of beliefs. Italian theorists of human biological difference brought into greater clarity and to the fore some of the more disturbing aspects of modern European culture as a whole. Italian Darwinism and race science, which have been described as superficial, deficient and merely ‘mimetic’ of ideas originated elsewhere, produced leading intellectuals, whose innovative and original works had a wide, global impact. The international dissemination of Darwinism was not a one-sided transaction, with Britain leading and other countries following; rather, reciprocity and cross-fertilization of knowledges enriched an evolving and diverse tradition of evolutionism (Pancaldi [1983] 1991: xv, 168–9)

EDUCATION AND EQUALITY DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT The industrial technologies that developed in tandem with the progress of the natural and social sciences produced new ideas about human progress and perfectibility and the inalienable rights of the individual and the Self. Enlightenment thinkers embraced

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the principle of the democratization of knowledge; some even championed the cause of the education of women. Long considered to be a ‘gospel’ of progressive thought, the Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, more commonly known as the Encyclopedia, is a significant source on attitudes about gender. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, its editors, published thirty-two volumes between 1751 and 1780, containing about 18,000 pages of text. Specific articles addressed the issues of women’s place within marriage and society, and women’s ‘nature’. A polymath of illustrious aristocratic lineage, Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt wrote the article on ‘Wife’, which was published in volume six in 1756. His contribution argued that ancient and modern jurists, theologians and legislators established laws and customs which gave all governing power to the male, on the grounds that Man was ‘the one endowed with the greatest strength of mind and body’. Yet, the logic behind the subordination of women was flawed, Jaucourt contended. Inequality between the sexes was not based upon natural law; nor did man always possess ‘greater strength of body, wisdom, spirit or conduct than woman’. Rather, social convention created an unfair system in which men were masters and women subservient (Jaucourt 2004). The belief that the differences between men and women were social, rather than biological, in origin was echoed in the chapter on ‘Women’. In this, Joseph-FrançoisÉdouard de Corsembleu de Desmahis observed that, while women ‘do not differ from men so much in heart and mind as in size and shape’, their poor education and upbringing ‘modified their natural disposition’ detrimentally. While men exhibited ‘force and majesty, courage and reason’ and women ‘graces, beauty, delicacy and emotion’, these differences were due to the impoverishment of women’s education, which left them ‘uncultivated’. ‘For women, education is as bad as it is general, and more neglectful than useful.’ Social expectations were such that women were utterly debased; they were forced to channel all their energies into the ‘search for beauty’ so that they might attract and hold a man. While men made laws, women had to live under them; and existing laws and customs directed women solely to the pursuit of marriage and motherhood. Women either learned the ‘art of pleasing’ a man or they would be left unmarried, unprotected and, ultimately, unable to fend for themselves. ‘This art of pleasing, this desire to please everyone, this desire to please above all else, this silence of the heart, this disturbance of the mind’ rendered women utterly ‘servile’ and destroyed their true nature (Corsembleu de Desmahis 2004). Diderot and his contemporaries have been accused by some feminist critics of propagating a form of pseudo-feminism masking a ‘tacit complicity with the status quo’ (Trouille 1994: 13). However, most philosophes did espouse egalitarian doctrines which endorsed the advancement of women, as well as people of colour, through education, employment and reform. Voltaire, for example, rejected the notion that women should be treated as the property of men and that their assigned roles in life were to be limited to motherhood and marriage. He derided the existing socio-sexual system for being oppressive to women and believed that legislatures everywhere should accord women full and equal rights with men (Adé 1964; Bates 1995). Many philosophes believed fervently in the credo that every individual, regardless of sex or skin colour, had a fundamental right of freedom, in the fullest of senses. Jaucourt, for example, compared the servile state of European women with the high status enjoyed by some non-European women, who were celebrated for their intellectual gifts and accorded political power; similarly, he condemned the slave trade as morally abhorrent and contrary to natural law and considered black people to be equal in abilities to white people. ‘Master-slave’ relations operated at all levels in the existing gender and racial order. Women were treated like

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young children or members of a slave class, who were denied rights of ownership of property or, even, of their own bodies, thoughts or emotions. Along with ‘Negroes’, Jaucourt argued, European women would achieve parity with men, once they had access to education, which was the primary catalyst for emancipation (Ferenczi 2017). Advocacy of the right of the ‘servile sex’ (and ‘slave race’) to an education was a profoundly radical position, because it was premised upon the belief that women were not intellectually inferior to men. As the century progressed, this single idea became the most highly contested and politicized topic in debates about the ‘Woman Question’. During the age of the encyclopedia, important changes were already beginning to limit the intellectual and social landscape for women. Voltaire and Rousseau both died in 1778, before the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789 and the changes which the nineteenth century brought. The radical ideas of Enlightened progressives did not come to fruition. The various leadership factions in charge of the French National Assembly after the Revolution of 1789 conspired to limit the role of advocates of female emancipation. Although women made a few gains with the Constitution of 1791, they remained non-citizens without any political rights or equality before the law (Scott 1996: 5–9). Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804 systematized family and property law and made the principle of patriarchy the very legal foundation of French society. It denied women all civil and political rights, banned women from the professions, and even denied women the ability to enter into any contractual agreement without the written consent of their fathers or husbands; divorce was made harder for women to obtain and husbands could have their wives imprisoned for adultery, but women could not. Introduced in France and throughout Napoleonic Europe, the Code of 1804 influenced civil law in many countries across the world (Sledziewski 1995).

REPRESENTATION OF GENDER AND RACE A dominant motif in much of nineteenth-century Western art consisted of representations of women as mere delectable objects of the male gaze. Perhaps the most representative of this type is the genre of painting that arose out of the Romantic Orientalist craze for the erotic in the exotic, which, almost always, relied upon the stock, repetitive portrayal of a captive, passive and powerless woman (or women). One of the most famous of these paintings captures the essence of the ‘Master-Slave’ dynamic which the philosophes argued was the underpinning of society. First brought to attention by the pioneering art historian Linda Nochlin (1931–2017), Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Slave Market of 1866, (Figure 7.1) is a supreme example of the Orientalist aesthetic. Nochlin argued that the ethnographic and scientistic verisimilitude of the painting masked its complicity with imperialist ideology and the prevailing racial and cultural stereotypes of the era. She was challenging the depoliticized interpretations of the art historical establishment, a rarefied world, dominated by Ivy League- and Oxbridge-educated, privileged, white, male scholars, curators and critics (Garb 2017). Nochlin argued that Gérôme should not be considered a great artist because his works are ‘visual documents of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology’ (Nochlin 1989: 35). Since the 1990s, art historians have resuscitated Gérôme’s work and restored him to the hallowed canon of great Western art (Ackerman 1997). Gérôme’s paintings (and those of other Orientalists) have skyrocketed in value and prestige in global art markets in recent years. Many find the sumptuousness of Gérôme’s technique spellbinding. Mary Morton, who curated a major Getty exhibition on Gérôme’s ‘spectacular’ art, which

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FIGURE 7.1  Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1866. Oil on canvas, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA. © Sepia Times/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

toured the world in 2010, captures the essence of his appeal: ‘His images are so powerful, they slip into your memory. What people who hate him really hate about him is the way his images stick in the imagination’ (Finkel 2010). The ‘new art historians’ remind us that Gérôme’s paintings were more than the outdated fantasies of a well-heeled Parisian gentleman and voyeur (Allan 2010). In fact, I would argue that these revisionists are quite right to emphasize that Gérôme’s images have power and were never pure fantasy, ideas which run contrary to Nochlin’s thesis of an erring, over-arching Orientalist imaginary, which mythologized reality. Gérôme made at least six lengthy trips to Egypt alone (as

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well as visiting Asia Minor) between 1856 and 1880; he learned Arabic; and he travelled with his own caravan, local guides, camels and dromedaries, and even his own heavy photographic equipment and portable dark room (Ackerman 1997: 84–5). Acquired by rich American admirers in 1930 (along with others by the same artist), and held in the Sterling and Francine Clark collection in Massachusetts, The Slave Market is currently described by the museum’s curators as a work which invites the viewer to ‘censure’ the practice of slavery. In 1866, slavery was outlawed in Europe, but permitted under Islam, and still legal and prevalent in the Ottoman Empire, of which nineteenthcentury Egypt was a part. First and foremost, I see nothing in the painting’s visual representation to suggest that Slave Market had an ‘abolitionist’ intent. The probable location of the painting is Cairo, so the target audience of Parisian high society and wealthy Europeans and Americans would have felt a distance between their infinitely ‘superior’ world and that of the painting, whose composition includes only people of colour. The painting, I would argue, is not intended to elicit an emotional response in the viewer about the horrors of slavery. If we compare it to a verifiable work of protest, such as The Richmond Slave Market (Figures 7.2 and 7.3), which was drawn and painted by the lesser known English artist, Eyre Crowe, the differences become apparent.

FIGURE 7.2  Eyre Crowe, ‘Sketches in the Free and Slave States of America’, in The Illustrated London News (27 September 1856), page 315. © Cambridge University Library.

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FIGURE 7.3  Eyre Crowe, The Slave Auction, Richmand, Virginia, 1861. Oil on canvas. 76.3×107 cm. 30×42 1/8 inches (private collection). © Francis G. Mayer / Corbis Historical / Getty Images.

Though he grew up in France, and would have been exposed to French Orientalist painting, Crowe worked in the genre of social realism, which attempted to show reality in an unembellished way and could, at times, be used for the purposes of social criticism. Crowe travelled to America with the author William Makepeace Thackeray, and, on 3 March 1853, saw an advertisement for a slave auction in which ‘fifteen negroes’ were to be ‘disposed of between half past nine and twelve–five men, six women, two boys and two girls’. The artist attended the sale and, in revulsion at what he witnessed, he made a sketch (Figure 7.2) of the ‘stifling atmosphere of human traffic’ as a record, before being ejected, angrily, by the dealers. Published in the Illustrated London News in 1856, the sketch was seen by a large reading public. The artist wanted to capture an even larger audience, so he painted Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (Figure 7.3), which shows members of a slave family being sold separately. The artist consciously Europeanized the appearance of the slaves in the painting; he did so not to make them more attractive to a white audience, but rather to ‘reduce the sense of otherness for white viewers’ (Haven 2009). The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1861, where it caused quite a sensation: discussed in the Times, the Athenaeum and other major publications, the painting was universally seen as a reminder of the ‘accursed system of slavery’ and as a criticism of the fact that, because of its dependence upon cotton, Britain was arming the South, despite its official policy of neutrality in the American Civil War. A very different intent characterizes Gérôme’s oeuvre. Gérôme was a studio painter, who relied upon models. He also utilized his own studies, which he made during his

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travels as aides-mémoires (Nineteenth-Century European Paintings 2012: 359–60). Whether the artist witnessed such a market at first-hand is less relevant than the fact that these markets did exist and that they were glamorized by French writers and artists. One such glamorization, and a probable source for Gérôme’s imagination, was Gérard de Nerval’s immensely popular accounts of his travels, which were serialized in a popular magazine in 1846–7, published in book form in 1851, and translated into English in 1930. Nerval’s account makes no attempt to see the impact of the slave trade upon those men and women who were enslaved. Its perspective is that of the white, male European, with the means and time to travel to ‘exotic’ places for his own amusement. Nerval described a slave market, precisely as depicted in Gérôme’s painting. Nerval recounted going to the bazaar quarter in Cairo and coming upon a courtyard, where ‘dark-hued merchants’ approached, shouting ‘Essouad? Abesch?’ (meaning ‘Are you here to purchase Black or the lighter-skinned Abyssinian women?’). Nerval entered a room, where he saw ‘five or six Negresses’, all semi-nude. Nerval found these women distasteful, even though, as he described it, ‘their bodies were wonderfully perfect; their figures virginal and pure beneath their tunics’. They were unappealingly non-European in appearance and possessed ‘prominent jaws, low foreheads, and thick lips’ that repulsed him. He explained: ‘these Nubian women are not ugly in the absolute sense, but their beauty is of a type quite contrary to any that we can appreciate’. He would not ‘deprive himself’ of the pleasures of ‘these picturesque creatures’, if he had little money; but, he would gladly pay more, as a ‘woman with good looks costs no more to feed than one of the other kind’. Another chamber contained more Black women, who were ‘younger and more beautiful’ (and even suggesting, ambiguously in the text, that they might have been actual children), but, as they still had the ‘same facial type’, he found them wholly unattractive. ‘The merchants offered to have them undressed’, Nerval wrote, and ‘opened their mouths to show their teeth, made them walk up and down and were particularly careful to show off the elasticity of their breasts. The poor girls did all they were told without seeming much put out.’ Nerval observed casually that their enslavement was a good thing that probably saved them from a life of misery and poverty in their own countries. Nerval inquired about where the most prized chattel was to be found. The drogman (merchant) replied that there were no Abyssinians present; being so desirable and expensive, these women were not shown in public. There were, in fact, many private okels (markets) where these and other women, brought in caravans from Dongola, Mecca or the Hedjaz, were sold. Pilgrims often sold their own women at the end of their journeys, as they ran out of money, and rich Arab merchants brought steady supplies of women (Nerval [1851] 1930: 83–7). The slave trade was prevalent in certain regions of North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East well into the twentieth century. Slaves came largely from sub-Saharan Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia and even central and eastern Europe, as well as southern Europe, mainly Italy. In contrast to the Atlantic slave trade, in which captive males predominated, the Arab slave trade had a preponderance of women (a category which included children) to men, indicating that this commerce consisted mainly of female sex slaves and domestic servants, rather than farm labourers. These realities were reflected in images which showed lighter-skinned and even White women slaves, surrounded by darker-skinned men and women slaves. Crucially, as Patrick Manning and other historians argue, this trade within Africa depended upon external demand from Western countries (Manning 1990; Davis 2003: 43–5). Although Nochlin has been criticized for failing to mention that Egypt was not a French colony in the nineteenth

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century, and could, therefore, the reasoning goes, not be understood within a model of ‘imperialist art’, this interpretation fails to recognize France’s continued interests in the region in the post-Napoleonic period and the complicity of French men in the trafficking of sex slaves (Warraq 2010). The era of Gérôme was characterized by France’s desperate search for its own empire to rival that of Britain; the French frenziedly acquired territory and artefacts from Northern Africa and the Middle East. They, along with other Europeans, also participated in the sexual exploitation and enslavement of local populations. Sex tourism in far-flung exotic places, even when it involved human beings who lived in bondage as slaves, was an established social practice. Gérôme exhibited The Slave Market at the 1867 Salon, which was, then, the biggest and most prestigious annual (or biennial) art event in the Western world. Rather than being pornographic erotica for private consumption, this work was made for public consumption and was, indeed, seen by many people. As only one of three art professors at the École des Beaux-Arts, moreover, Gérôme was an influential purveyor of culture. In 1863, he had married the daughter of Aldophe Goupil, who was an extremely successful art dealer. The artist’s relationship with Goupil catapulted Gérôme to a level of international, commercial success which was unparalleled. Goupil had offices in New York, London, Paris and Berlin and began heavily to promote Gérôme’s works, which were mass reproduced in the form of collectible images and marketed to a large audience in Europe and America. Under Goupil’s patronage, Gérôme became, arguably, the first modern, commercially-minded, profit-driven artist, with an international audience; he was, certainly, recognized in his own time as the most reproduced and profitable painter of his generation (Brown 1989: 180–1). Gérôme’s works did not ‘anticipate and predict the qualities of incipient mass culture’, as Nochlin argued: they were mass culture (Nochlin 1989: 57). Gérôme’s works are some of the most powerful signifiers of the processes by which modern culture fetishized naked, passive, submissive female bodies and normalized acceptance of the victimization and objectification of women through male domination, violence and exploitation. They depicted women as property to be bought and sold and, thereby, exemplify, explicitly, how female bodies became commodified under industrial capitalism. Moreover, these highly commercialized, popular representations, and many others like it, such as the ubiquitous odalisques favoured by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and others (which fed the male fantasy of possessing not just one, but a whole harem of slave girls), helped to consolidate modern ‘patriarchy’ by extolling an ideal of ‘captive’ women and proffering models of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ based upon the presumption of male entitlement to female bodies and male power over women. In the later decades of the century, evolutionary theory, with its prescriptive views about gender norms, contributed in significant ways to this complex process of solidifying the unequal power relations between the sexes. The paintings of Gérôme and the other Orientalists depicted the subordination of women as artificial constructs – the product of another, foreign culture which was inferior to that of France and the West. White, European males could view these paintings and feel ‘superior’, while at the same time enjoying the display of naked, female flesh. Evolutionary theory described the subjugation of women, including subjection to rape and violence, as a by-product of biology. By defining concepts such as reason, mind and objectivity as gendered male, evolutionism also undermined Enlightenment ideals about the social origins of the inequality between the sexes. The philosophes took examples of emancipated women drawn from contemporary non-European cultures and ‘primitive’,

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hunter-gatherer societies to argue that European women could and should be allowed to wield power in the public and private spheres. Their radical re-imaging of the traditional socio-sexual-gender order would be undermined by the cultural shifts which the new biological determinism engendered.

SEX DIFFERENCE IN BODY AND BRAIN Darwinian evolutionism provided seemingly incontrovertible proof about the existence of biological gender difference and predetermined sex roles. Darwin’s understanding of Malthus allowed him to make the breakthrough that he did in conceptualizing natural selection as the struggle for organisms to obtain advantages in the competition for survival. Darwin’s model was based on the idea that the organs of the human body were designed to perform certain specific functions in the great battle of life. Through the gradual and cumulative process of natural selection, nature worked in a determined fashion to render organisms capable of surviving and procreating. Darwin did conceive of variations as accidental, spontaneous occurrences, but, by scrutinizing even the slightest variations and weeding out those traits that were injurious to reproduction, natural selection operated upon these in a determined fashion, he believed, and ensured that ‘desirable’ characteristics were inherited and preserved (Darwin 1979: chs. 3 and 5). In Darwin’s Malthusian model, which placed great emphasis on the competition for resources, the battle for life and survival depended upon the success of the most select males to compete for females and the ability of females to appeal to those males. In this constricting schema, women’s intellectual abilities were seen as inferior to those of men and were understood to be superfluous to the biological imperative that women fulfil their essential procreative and maternal roles. Darwin defined ‘sexual selection’ as the competition ‘between males for the possession of females’; he perceived this ‘sexual struggle’ as a major mechanism of organic evolution, operating alongside the ‘law of variation’ and ‘the law of natural selection’ (Darwin 1871b: 398). Darwin believed, wholeheartedly and consistently, throughout his writings and life, in the ‘natural’ inferiority of women and directly influenced and participated in contemporary debates about the Woman Question in science and society (Jones 1994). His attitudes towards race were more conflicted, however. Although he professed a commitment to the monogenetic idea of the unity of the human family, Darwin believed in the existence of a racial hierarchy and assumed that White Europeans were infinitely superior to the African and antipodean peoples of the world. He saw sexual selection as being operative on a large-scale and predicted a future world where inter-group competition would lead the ‘civilized races of man’ to replace ‘the savage races’ (Darwin 1871a: 201–2). Darwinism and social Darwinism helped to embed the concepts of biological sex difference and separate sex roles in Western culture. The sociologist Herbert Spencer, like the biologist Thomas Huxley, echoed Darwin’s ideas about the presumed arrested evolutionary development of women and popularized arguments which buttressed traditional gender stereotypes (Gray 1984). Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the ‘father’ of eugenics, explored the achievements of ‘great men’ in his Hereditary Genius of 1869, a work which determinedly championed the view that the supremacy of the white, European male was fixed and natural (Galton 1864–5, [1869] 1892). Compiling masses of statistical ‘evidence’ at his London laboratory, Galton sought to prove the biological inferiority of women. One of Galton’s most audacious scientific endeavours was to corroborate the view that women’s primary evolutionary role was to attract a man and preen for her mate. At a time when

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women began actively to seek the vote, Galton explored the prospects for the survival of the ‘white race of Europe’ by depicting the ‘modern woman’ as a threat. His work on ‘illustrious’ men focused on their inborn ‘genius’; in contrast, intelligence and ambition in women were to be discouraged for their dysgenic impact. Galton, a committed member of the Anti-Suffrage League, produced ‘beauty maps’ that graded women in Britain from the ‘ugliest to the most attractive’ (Pearson 1930: 359). Supporters of these views were thick on the ground in nineteenth-century Italy, where scientific ideas seemed to get ample confirmation in the pronounced gender inequalities within Italian society. Darwin’s Italian followers argued that their method was objective and that they were simply observing differences between the sexes which were biologically ordained. Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), Darwin’s most influential, self-professed disciple in Italy, was one of the first and one of the most important anthropologists in Italy, Europe and the Americas, where he travelled extensively and where his writings had a huge following. In 1869, he was appointed to Italy’s first chair in anthropology, in Florence; that same year, he founded the Italian Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, as well as a leading journal in the field (Landucci 1987: 137–206). One of the greatest popularizers of science in the nineteenth century, Mantegazza wrote novels and pamphlets, in addition to scientific and popular medico-scientific works (Figure 7.4). The persuasive power of the Darwinian-Galtonian paradigm about the essential nature of biological sex difference can be found in many of Mantegazza’s writings, but especially in his works devoted exclusively to women. His two-volume study on The Physiology of Woman underwent numerous editions and translations from its publication date in 1873

FIGURE 7.4  Paolo Mantegazza. © DEA/Biblioteca Ambrosiana/De Agostini Editorial/Getty Images.

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to the 1940s and beyond, as it rose to become an international bestseller. Mantegazza started with the understanding that women did not enjoy even a modicum of the freedom and rights enjoyed by men. Women, moreover, were the unknown ‘second sex’. He expressed an anthropological interest in placing women under the same kind of rigorous scrutiny as other ‘objects of study, such as primitive races, fossil remains, or plant species’ (Mantegazza 1893a: 5, 15, 58). He began with the premise that ‘independently of race, age, and individual constitution, human beings are different because they are born male or female’. Nature separated human beings into two sexes and these ‘two separate, but parallel forms of Homo sapiens’ differed in every way – anatomically, emotionally and mentally. The physical differences between them were so great that women were ‘condemned to be inferior to men’. Mantegazza concurred with the view of many leading scientists, such as Carl Vogt and Alexander Ecker, who believed that women’s intellect was infantile and underdeveloped. On this matter, Mantegazza affirmed, there was widespread consensus within the international scientific community that women lacked ‘thinking power’ and were ill-adapted to higher pursuits (Mantegazza 1893a: 62–5, 69– 73, 76–8, esp. 77). Though women varied greatly amongst themselves, Mantegazza argued, ‘above all because of the race to which they belong’, they were all designed by nature to be the ‘custodians of the seeds and the generatrix of men’. Mantegazza indulged in a reverie about the varying aesthetic appeal of women, ruminating on the bodily markings that distinguished the most reproductively ‘favoured’ and the least sexually desirable in a way reminiscent of Galton. However, Mantegazza ranked the different regions of Italy and the different nations of the world by the beauty of their women, which he considered to be an important sign of evolutionary success (Mantegazza 1893a: 139–40). The ‘lowliest races’, he argued, had the ugliest women, with the Aboriginals of Australia ranking, for him, at the very bottom of the scale. Though ‘Negroes’ differed widely in the darkness of their skin tone, with Arabs being more appealing because of their lighter complexions, women of colour all shared the same attribute of being quite appealingly slim in their youth and then growing fat and matronly as they aged: characteristically, they were ‘covered in wrinkles and shrew-like in middle age’. Having travelled widely, Mantegazza could say with confidence that, apart from Paraguayan women, who possessed European features, as they were of mixed ethnic heritage, he had never met a pure-bred ‘Native American Indian’ woman who was fanciable (Mantegazza 1893a: 152–4). Not surprisingly, given his Eurocentric and xenophobic perspective, he considered European women, collectively, to be the most beautiful. The French woman was ‘serpentine and feline; gracious in appearance, even if she is not beautiful, and delightfully feminine’. The Spanish woman was ‘majestically beautiful’, with ‘small hands and feet and large eyes like windows that open to reveal marble palaces, … burnished by the sun of the East’. The German woman, by contrast, was ‘graceless in movement and line, but solidly constructed’. Though too ethnically diverse to be classified as a single type, the Russian woman was a ‘woman of the East transplanted to Europe’. And the English woman could, in her own way, be beautiful; she was the best representative of the blonde type found, above all, in Scandinavia (Mantegazza 1893a: 175, 186–8). Diverse in nature and beauty, Italian women had different types and ‘different blood’, which was reflected in their physical characteristics. They could be: ‘Plump, round, sensually soft and with a Celtic nose’, as they are in Lombardy; ‘Titian blond, with pallid skin, like marble’, as they are in Venice; ‘with a divine and sculptural form’, as they are in Bologna; ‘almost Latin and more elastic than the Roman type’, as they are in Tuscany;

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‘marmoreal and imperial’, as they are in Rome; or ‘tremendously Greek’, as they are in Naples and Palermo. Despite this diversity, ‘the Italian woman possesses almost all the beauty of the European Eve’. She represented for him the most beautiful of all; and she possessed the beauty which distinguished ‘the most glorious of races’ from all the rest (Mantegazza 1893a: 144, 182–9). Judgements like these, about women’s appearance and desirability, were an integral part of race science in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beauty was depicted as a woman’s chief evolutionary asset and as an absolute ideal to which all women must aspire. There were few voices of dissent, since, as Mantegazza contended, a broad consensus of expert male opinion existed, which endorsed the view that a woman’s most important attribute before marriage was beauty and after marriage the maternal instinct, which directed her to her mission, having and rearing children. Women’s reproductive ‘utility’ to the race was consecrated through nature’s grand design. In Italy, one critic of this view was Maria Montessori (1870–1952), a pioneer, feminist, physician, activist, reformer and educator, best known for the compassion-based, child-centred educational movement and philosophy, which she founded globally before the First World War (Montessori 1914: 1–9). Montessori had set her sights early on the study of medicine, but was thwarted, as women were barred from medical schools. Authorities allowed her to study physics, mathematics and the natural sciences; she gained her undergraduate degree in these subjects in 1892. A devout Catholic, she was awarded a special dispensation from Pope Leo XIII, gaining her admittance to medical school, where she faced harassment and hostility. Despite the obstacles, she qualified as a doctor in 1896, with exceptionally high marks and honours, and became one of only two qualified female physicians in all of Italy in her generation. Leading an unconventional life, she had one child but remained unmarried; she did not want to have to give up her career as a teacher and doctor, which she would have been forced to do had she been married (Kramer 1976: 12–14). Less well known is her scientific research in anthropology. In 1906, she published an important paper that refuted the premises of the beauty myth which was being propagated by male scientists, such as Galton and Mantegazza. Male scientists throughout the West have spent far too much time looking for the perfect women, she maintained; they studied skeletons, skulls, sculpture and drew up maps and graphs. What she proposed to do was study real, living women to test the theory that perfection existed and that this could be found in distinct ethno-racial types. Applying the methods of Galtonian anthropometrics, she undertook a four-month research project examining over two hundred young women in the nation’s capital to determine whether a unique Roman ideal-type existed. Unlike many of her male colleagues, working on vulnerable or working-class women, she did not examine or photograph women naked without their express consent. Almost half of her sample were long-term patients at a public hospital in Rome, where Montessori worked as an internist. Other recruits comprised working-class women who attended a recreational club run by nuns. She also gathered data from female office workers at a local printing factory. She examined each woman for an average of seven to eight hours and took all the routine measurements (thorax, chest, face, limbs, etc.) that anthropologists used to classify people. She took photographs of her subjects, some of which she published; only one woman consented to be photographed in the nude. Armed with her preconceptions, all of which had been reinforced, she said, by the theories of modern science, she thought she was going to find ‘tall and shapely Roman women’ (Montessori 1906: 37–44). What she discovered was not the ‘statuesque Roman maiden or matriarch’, made famous by art and science, but a prevalence of short, slim women. Roman women exhibited

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certain imperfections that deviated from the ideals propagated by artists and scientists. Though slender, they characteristically had sunken chests, flabby tummies, saggy bottoms and droopy breasts. Even the ‘virgins amongst them’ (meaning, presumably, women who had not yet experienced pregnancy and childbirth), Montessori stated, did not match the idealizations favoured by men. This led her to the conclusion that aesthetic perfection, as embodied in artistic and scientific ideals, was impossible to find in nature, where irregularity prevailed. ‘It is impossible to find in any individual’, she wrote, total perfection … From my research in anthropometrics, I have found in some races an artistic perfection visible in their faces and in others in their hands or feet. … What we consider human beauty, and what we love in art, is rarely found united in one individual or race. Rather beauty is scarce in nature and is distributed amongst the different races. (Montessori 1906: 103, 108–16) Montessori’s findings showed that existing classifications of beauty and type were faulty. It is important to note that Montessori was working within the confines of positivistic science; she did not seek to overturn the methodological framework of contemporary anthropology. She accepted the premises of the mental universe of her male gender and race scientists and conscientiously applied (with the proviso that the consent of her subjects, and respect for them, were important to her) their method in her examinations. Her research findings, she admitted, were not what she had expected them to be; to her credit, she was brave and bold enough to report to the scientific community that real women did not live up to the male fantasy of the ideal woman found in representations that purported to be factual. There were other women scientists, feminists and scholars who criticized the biases of Darwinian evolutionism and biological materialism and challenged the severely circumscribed roles allotted to women in the prevailing system (Kohlstedt and Jorgensen 2001). Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921), the first female Protestant minister in the United States, took on Darwin, and Spencer and Huxley too, in her scholarly writings, and questioned the scientific basis of their belief in the mental and physical inferiority of women. Evolutionary theory, she pointed out, had affected many women grievously; putative natural ‘laws’ proving that men were superior have been used to bolster outdated social customs, she argued, which ‘interfered unwarrantably’ with women’s ‘property, their children, and their political and personal rights’ (Blackwell 1875: 6). Like Montessori, Blackwell had fought hard for her right to an education. Her family permitted her to study Hebrew and Greek privately during her vacations from teaching. Authorities at Ohio’s Oberlin College allowed her to enroll in theology courses but denied her the right to obtain a degree for her efforts. Why only White, European men ‘evolved’, and enjoyed privileges not given to others, was the question of paramount importance that was begging for an answer; but even many feminists found it difficult to articulate that line of questioning at a time when women were excluded from the institutions that accorded access to power and influence (Gowalty 1997: 1–18). There were others, too, such as the Lombroso sisters, Gina and Paola, who embodied many of the contradictions and conflicts that women of that era faced, both in their private and public lives. The two intellectual daughters of the famed criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and his wife, Nina De Benedetti, enjoyed, in their childhoods, educational parity with their brothers. As an adult, Paola Lombroso

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(1871–1954) carved out a life for herself as a wife and mother (marrying one of her father’s students), and as a journalist; she embraced socialism but not feminism. An important part of her life’s work was her commitment to the cause of fighting illiteracy amongst children. In the 1890s, in Turin, she founded after-school clubs for workingclass children and rural, mobile libraries and teaching centres for peasant children. These programmes were so successful that once Mussolini came to power in 1922, he absorbed them into the welfare system run by his dictatorship’s party and state. A Jew and an antifascist, she faced persecution under fascism. Gina Lombroso (1872–1944) took her first degree in literature and philosophy in 1897, before gaining admittance to medical school and qualifying as a doctor in 1901. Gina put her own career ambitions on hold to support her husband, but she did work tirelessly as a research assistant and secretary to her father, though she did so privately and anonymously (Dolza 1990: 185–239). Gina, a doctor and criminologist, was not credited for her extensive collaborations with her father, while her husband, Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), the historian and travel writer, was named as co-author to the international bestseller The Female Offender (Lombroso and Ferrero 1897). Many women accommodated the prevailing social values and scientific arguments of the day concerning separate spheres and women’s true nature as the guardians of the home, reproducers of the race and caretakers of men and children.

THE REALITY BEHIND THE BEAUTY MYTH A century after the philosophes recognized the transformative powers of education for women’s advancement, most women were still being prevented from possessing the power to make and change their own lives. Even when they were lucky enough to be educated, women did not have equal employment opportunities. The Italian census data from 1901, for example, showed the segregation of working-class women in the most poorly paid, least skilled jobs in industry and agriculture; and, there were precious few opportunities for middle- and upper-class women in the professions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were only forty-seven women doctors in the whole of Italy, and no female dentists, lawyers, architects, notaries, accountants or engineers (Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria, e Commercio [Min. AIC] 1904: 28–31). Despite these pronounced inequalities for women, some scientists felt that Darwin had not gone far enough to define the assigned roles of men and women. In Italy, this inclination towards even more stark understandings of the socio-sexual ‘natural’ order than conventional Darwinism or social Darwinism promoted was a distinct trend. Mantegazza revealed that he had some doubts after reading the English edition of volume two of the Descent of Man (Mantegazza 1871). Mantegazza’s biggest charge against Darwinism was that it failed, in his estimation, to explain the fact that men and women were like two separate species. He wrote that the ‘spermatic secretions’ had special characteristics: ‘once activated and unleashed in puberty’ they ‘imbued and soaked in all the body’s tissues’ and took control of a man’s brain and body. He defined women, by contrast, in negative terms as ‘the other sex’, which did not produce sperm. Darwin, he said, was wrong to claim that the beauty, adornment, song, dance, gestures and overtures of the male assisted him in the ‘struggle for love’. What determined success in the competition for females had nothing to do with such trivialities. The male seeks, pursues and conquers his mate, so his appearance was an irrelevance, especially given the reality that women could be forced to submit to sex because of their inferior strength. A woman, once ‘conquered’, Mantegazza argued, could be ‘fertilized’ without her consent.

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But for a man, ‘certain conditions have to be met before he is in a position to be sexually aroused’. Male sexual desire mattered to the propagation of the species, and this was dependent upon the beauty of the female. Reproductive success, moreover, meant that men had to spread their sperm around as widely as possible (Mantegazza 1871: 321). Mantegazza’s most serious objection to the principal of sexual selection was the fact that the females of many species exercised no real choice over their sexual partners. Though men were polygamous by nature, society dictated that they be bound by monogamy and marriage. ‘If only one of many males can win possession of the harem, then the women have no need of beauty in the male’. Moreover, the females in a harem, he wrote baldly, ‘are there in the first place not because of the man’s beauty at all’ (Mantegazza 1903: 238). What mattered to the male struggling for supremacy over his harem was force, not beauty. Mantegazza defined sex and reproduction as a battle between men for dominance over women. Victory in this contest, he argued, depended upon which male possessed superior physical force. He also gave this interpretation a racialized dimension. He remarked that in the ‘lower races’, the many and observable differences between men and women were less pronounced, a ‘fact’ which caused him to question Darwin’s understanding of sexual selection. Only in the ‘civilized white races’ of Europe, Mantegazza argued, were true beauty and morals in women to be found in great abundance; moreover, these estimable racial qualities had to be preserved, as they were, along with the outstanding physical strength of men, the real engine behind the perpetual progress which was achievable in the West (Mantegazza 1903: 241–2). Like other male scientists of the age, Mantegazza was projecting his own views about sex, sexuality, race and gender upon evolutionary theory. Mantegazza’s The Sexual Relations of Mankind gained the endorsement of the American eugenics community and became an international bestseller. An abridged English edition of his ‘trilogy of love’, comprising three volumes on The Physiology of Love (1872), The Hygiene of Love (1877) and The Sexual Relations of Mankind (1885), originally published in Italy, was received as progressive and modern. Mantegazza stated that he aimed to end ‘hypocrisy in sexual matters’ and encourage open-mindedness. The volume explored the great variety of sexual expression and mores that existed throughout the globe. His travels and his research had led him to wonder at the complexity and diversity of sexuality. Mantegazza’s attitudes towards what he called ‘sexual perversion’, however, were far from moderne and progressive. He defined masturbation, for example, as a ‘true physical and moral disease’. Though an ‘extremely common occurrence in the Far East and Orient’, this ‘vice’ was ‘rare among European women’, except ‘amongst prostitutes’, whose clitorises and sexual apparatuses had grown so ‘unduly sensitive’ from over-use that only this heinous form of gratification could lead to orgasm. He had known many married women in Italian high society who found heterosexual sex a ‘pale and colorless thing’ and took a female lover, even a long-standing one; lamentably, there was no known ‘cure’ for same-sex relations, he remarked. He expressed disgust at some of the ‘extremities’ of human behaviour which he had observed. ‘Cohabitation with goats and cows’ was common in rural Italy and encouraged depravity: ‘Italian men are very fond of anal sex’, Mantegazza wrote. He rated ‘sodomy’ as the most ‘abject’ and ‘decadent’ form of sex. He defined homosexuality as ‘one of the most terrifying facts to be encountered in human psychology’; a ‘good deal more common than many people believe’, love between men was the most ‘shameful sexual perversion’. Man may ‘love as an animal’, as he affirmed, but, for Mantegazza, the ideal was a heterosexual union of a man and a woman within the confines of a patriarchal marriage. For European man,

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who was the ‘highest type of humanity’, all those ‘lower’ forms of love would lead to an irreversible, biological degeneration of the human species; however ‘impossible and imperfect’ it was, monogamy was the cornerstone of the family, the nation and the race (Mantegazza 1935: 80–5, 95, 287, 297–301). The ideal that Mantegazza had in mind was, most decidedly, a marriage of unequals. He devoted an entire volume to the subject of human psychology and began with the question of whether women were as intelligent as men. His answer was categorical: because women spent their energies in the vital maternal role, there was not a sufficient ‘surplus’ for them to have proper careers, as this would result in an imbalance and deficit (Mantegazza 1893b: 3, 190). Women could think analytically, philosophically and even intellectually, he admitted, but they lacked ‘inventive minds’, as even John Stuart Mill, a self-declared feminist, acknowledged (192–3). Mantegazza explained that he agreed with Herbert Spencer, whose work had demonstrated definitively that women’s intellect was defective and infantile (Mantegazza 1935: xvi–xvii). Few nineteenth-century writers were read as widely by scientists and the public, both within and outside of their own country, and reprinted so often, as Paolo Mantegazza. Darwin himself frequently quoted him in the Descent of Man, and such eminent scientists as Lombroso in criminology, KraftEbbing in psychiatry, Patrick Geddes in biology, Herman Heinrich Ploss in anthropology, amongst many others in diverse fields, considered him a forerunner and leader. When he stated, emphatically, that the ‘mission of the female human is to make and nurture men’, his words would have had immense cultural weight and authority. To carry out this supreme duty, he asserted, Woman needs Man. Her own beauty and the force which her mate commands are ‘essential components of the work of creation’ (Mantegazza 1893b: 208–9, 213, 223–4).

THE ‘MORAL IMBECILITY’ OF MODERN WOMAN As a cultural turn of great import occurred, and evolutionary and biological explanations of patriarchy abounded and took hold, the nineteenth century largely rendered women powerless in the public and private realms. The dominant depictions of Woman engendered by Darwinism and social Darwinism focused on her mental incapacity and inferiority. As the twentieth century dawned, fear of the ‘modern woman’ who expressed an unbridled sexuality, eschewed motherhood, demanded rights and rejected conventions spread. It would be difficult to find any single leading authority on the subject, who assisted more in the process of defining the ‘modern woman’ as the aberrant Other, than Lombroso. For him, the entirety of womankind was ‘abnormal’. As early as in 1881, he identified ‘moral imbecility’ as the defining characteristic of female thieves and prostitutes; he also stated that female psychology in general was so defective that the ‘prevalent characteristic shared by all women was complete apathy and a lack of a moral sense’ (Lombroso 1881: 198–204). Greater emancipation for women, however slight it may have been in the decades before the First World War, instilled widespread anxiety in the male psyche, which was reflected in cultural representations such as those found throughout Lombroso’s misogynistic works. In his study of ‘sexual ethics’, Roberto Michels, who is better known today for his writings in political sociology, elaborated on Lombroso’s theory of the moral failings of women. The German-born Michels, who eventually joined the Italian Fascist Party in 1924, published Sexual Ethics in 1914. Like Mantegazza before him, Michels claimed that his aim was to educate and enlighten; he too wished to ‘break the hypocrisy and silence about

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sex’. The ‘purity fanatics’ were organizing campaigns against personal freedoms, but had to be challenged. He called himself a ‘progressive’: to illustrate this, he narrated the story of when he was approached, in the lobby of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, by a hawker selling pornographic photographs. Michels admitted that he still wished, years later, that he had purchased the prohibited material because, ‘owing to the physical beauty of the two figures, the artistic grace of the pose, and the expression of a certain inward spirituality’, the images would have given him ‘artistic enjoyment’. He held troubling views about women. He defined women as ‘lower animals’, more akin to the ‘primitive races’ and to children. For the sake of social order, women had to be restrained within the confines of marriage and motherhood because of their moral infirmity. He believed in the ‘animal nature’ of men, which drove them to be highly sexed, promiscuous and aggressive. ‘All young men from 15 to 20 years of age exhibit a tendency to cruelty’, which was a natural expression of their ‘sexual instinct’ (Michels 1914: 5, 130–1). This view echoed that of Mantegazza, who postulated that civilized man, who had achieved his ‘elevated position through climbing one by one all the lower and intermediate rungs’, still had ‘in his veins the blood of those men who conquer their women by beating them over the head’ (Mantegazza 1935: 294). ‘European Man’ was still a wild beast, while women, Michels wrote, played the artful game of ‘erotic coquetry’ and ‘seduction’ to entice suitors. Feminine nature, he argued, dictated that women invite pursuit from men, feign modesty and, finally, submit to sex. Michels discussed a 1909 court case that had reached the national press, which involved a Turinese peasant who murdered his girlfriend during an assignation in the woods. The woman, whom Michels called a ‘demi-virgin’, because she was not completely ‘innocent’, had enticed the man, but, ‘having aroused him’ then refused to have sexual intercourse with him. The poor lad was condemned to ten years’ imprisonment, but the court, Michels argued, should have taken into consideration ‘the extenuating circumstances’ of his having been deceived by the woman and, then, having been overcome by ‘uncontrollable desires’. ‘Feminine resistance to manifestations of male sexual desire’ were ‘an empty form’, he argued, and a ‘violated woman’ was always an ‘accessory to her defilement’. He disputed whether rape actually existed, given women’s confused and impaired psychology. Legal enquiries in rape cases routinely showed ‘the girl to be a consenting party in most cases’. He explained: ‘the successful consummation of rape implies in the woman a profound lack of resisting power … and goes far to justify the belief that she set no very high price upon what she lost’. The ‘typical’ rape scenario involved a woman who ‘encourages a man, who becomes a sexual animal, then withdraws for fear of a child or the loss of her virginity’; her virginity was her ‘best chance in life’, so it had to be prized and protected. He quoted the old proverb that a ‘hard dick does not reason’ (cazzo duro non ragiona) to support his views. Michels concluded with strong words about the legal and social subjugation of women, which he defined as a natural consequence of female inferiority and as a desirable means to protect feminine virtues and family honour from predatory males (Michels 1914: 121–5, 128–9, 131–2, 150–62). It would be hard to find a more explicit defence of pornography and patriarchy and a better illustration of the rapist mentality than this important, pre-war scientific work by Michels. The volume would pose difficulties for those historians, however, who define rape as ‘an act called such by a participant or third party’; in the past, sexual violence was not always recognized for what it was, even by the victim (Bourke 2007: 9). In Italy, traditional attitudes towards rape and such practices as bride kidnapping,

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which was a legalized form of rape and abduction, very common in the South, were (and are) very slow to change; even lawmakers supported (and continue to support) social conventions which confused rape with ‘seduction’, defined rape as a criminal offence only when the victim was a virgin (or was ‘attractive’ or resisted sufficiently) or exonerated the rapist, as was permitted by law in liberal Italy, when he agreed to marry his victim and, therefore, ‘rehabilitate’ her, as she was considered a ‘fallen woman’ (Pitch 1990). As Michels made very clear, in his text, the purpose of such blatant inequalities that existed in law and custom were to ensure that modern women had sufficient incentive to preserve their chastity and commit to marriage and motherhood. The underlying anxiety of such hardcore texts as these was a fear of the destructive power of unrestrained female sexuality. This theme was a pervasive leitmotiv in much modernist art. Many unchaste and frightening women appear in fin de siècle paintings, such as the recurring Salome, drawn and painted by Edvard Munch, in 1894–8, and painted as Judith by Gustav Klimt in 1901 and, again, in 1909. Klimt’s 1901 painting, Judith I, depicts a cold, detached but beautiful man-killing Judith holding the severed head of her male victim, Holofernes, as she smiles, with parted lips, as if in erotic ecstasy. In the 1909 version, the glare and satisfaction are still there; but, she is an even colder murderess, displaying the decapitated head like a trophy (Sine 1988; Tojner 2003: 71). Unleashed female sexuality and power were represented as emasculating and terrifying. The brilliant Egon Schiele painted what many considered to be sexually explicit, provocative, even pornographic images of women, who were splayed, with legs wide open, naked and defiant, or standing and staring right back at the viewer, challenging the male gaze with an assertiveness and a defiance never seen before in painting, not even in the work of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec (Schiele Reloaded 2019). These sexually powerful women were not the demure object of desire that Gérôme saw in his slave girl.

CONCLUSION: THE ‘PRESENT-NESS’ OF THE PAST Perhaps the historian should not ask how it is that those who viewed/view images such as The Slave Market were/are blind or oblivious to its powerful gender and racial encodement. I would disagree with this position. Many years ago, John Berger showed that there were multiple ‘ways of seeing’ art and that cultural representations contained encrypted ‘ideologies’ that needed to be decoded (Berger [1972] 2008). One task of the historian is to uncover the meanings behind those hidden messages. This chapter has situated Orientalist paintings within the historical context of political Otherness, not just in relation to race but also in relation to gender. A male point of view claiming universality became the dominant mindset in the West during the long nineteenth century. While all human activities and qualities associated with men were valued, women were deemed to exist outside of culture, politics and history; the realm of ‘the feminine’ became marginalized. Nineteenth-century theories about the socio-sexual order naturalized and normalized women’s subordination by embracing the notion of inborn and fixed sex difference and using this ideology to sustain and, indeed, to bolster a multiplicity of modes in which men controlled society. Gender inequality became the norm, as male legal, political, medical and scientific experts increasingly represented the strict sexual division of roles as immutable biological ‘facts’ rather than as artificial social constructions. The system of male rule which arose functioned not just as a discourse about a presumed innate superiority of men and inferiority of women; it crystallized into

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a complex of institutionalized structures of male power and privilege, limiting women’s access to vital and life-enhancing socio-politico-economic resources, and operating comprehensively and systematically within both the private and public spheres. In the nineteenth century, cultural representations of powerless and, indeed, in some cases, of enslaved women, became commonplace and, even, the norm. The century’s dominant ideal of femininity and womanhood, perpetuated by white men in power, in all the realms that ruled over lives, was predicated upon the layering and embedment within the culture of justifications for the disempowerment of women and the divestment of their access to fulfilment outside of marriage, meaningful employment outside of the factory or field, and education extending beyond domestic training for life as a wife and mother. Just as European art rendered women as objects, theories of femininity and masculinity propounded by Darwinian evolutionism and race science helped construct and bolster societal models which constrained the choices and opportunities for women in the past to enjoy independence and self-determination. Many scholars locate the root cause of our ‘rape culture’ in this generalized domination and objectification of women found in modern ‘patriarchy’ (Fanghanel 2019). The nineteenth century certainly went some way towards creating a cultural environment which engrained certain myths about rape, such as male entitlement and female culpability, and defined male aggression and gender violence as normal. This chapter has shown that scientists, just as much as artists, were seeking incarnations of their ‘ideal woman’ in their racialized characterizations of physical beauty. Indeed, one of the most significant hidden realities which scientific texts contain is the extent to which they are no less subjective in nature than pieces of art, despite the claim of objectivity which was a foundation of modern positivist epistemologies. Scientists looked frantically for their perfect woman, despite the great unpredictability and variety of human difference observable everywhere around them. This chapter has also presented some of the ways in which ‘traditional’ or ‘folkloric’ attitudes about sex-gender differences, as exemplified by Napoleon’s thinking, and about the importance of women’s physical appearance, were given scientific licence and legitimacy in the nineteenth century and then disseminated. They gained currency as putative ‘eternal verities’ and were deeply embedded in the culture. The search for female perfection which permeates our culture can appear quite incidental at times; but, its damaging power is revealed in certain cultural practices which cause untold suffering, such as judging the seriousness of the offence of sexual assault by grading how ‘pretty’ the victim is, or how ‘sexily’ she is dressed. Many of the cultural norms created during the age of industry and empire persist to this day, highlighting for me the uncomfortable present-ness of the themes addressed in this chapter. Women still live under a tyranny which undervalues their achievements and overvalues ‘female beauty’, narrowly defined. A whole host of intersectional forms of differentiation and discrimination, exemplified by the androcentric writings of Darwin and Mantegazza, help explain why attitudes which the twentieth century defined as sexist, heterosexist and racist have proven to be so resistant to change. For much of the twentieth century, the landscape of opportunities and choices for European women shrank even further. By 1920, the year in which this volume ends, the ‘shock of the new’ had turned into the ‘shock-troopers’ of authoritarian movements and regimes, which aspired to confine women to an assigned role as reproducers of the race. Only in the twenty-first century have new models of the gender order, encompassing intersexuality, transgenderism, fluidity and self-identity as norms,

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together with a growing advocacy of women’s and human rights, as well as a resurgence in activism directed at Black liberation, begun to overturn outmoded definitions of White, male entitlement, power and privilege. The struggle continues, however. After the release in 2016 of the 2005 ‘grab them by the pussy’ tape, which captured Donald Trump bragging about how he, a rich and powerful White man, could sexually assault women with impunity, pundits wrongly predicted his downfall. Before Trump brought such an ‘aggressive and unapologetic misogyny to the Oval Office’, we had already ‘normalized’ it in ways which this chapter has sought to elucidate (Filipović 2017).

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Race and Sexuality A Secular Theory of Race MYRNA PEREZ SHELDON

During the nineteenth century sexuality became a secular theory of race. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate the plausibility of this statement with some preliminary historical evidence, and to consider why recognizing such an idea is not only critical for histories of this period but also for our understanding of the transformations that made and continue to undergird secular nation states. We have struggled to account for what race is in modernity, and how it is both different from, but also dependent on, older views of human variation. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences have tracked the transition from climatic, humoral and stadial views of human variation that dominated the early modern period into the rise of anatomical and physiological definitions of human kinds. We have thus concluded that race becomes biological over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But recognizing this historical transformation does not account for why this happened. Implicit in many of these histories is a deeply held instinct that Western science is about discovery: that it is an earnest quest for knowledge about the natural world. Thus, race becomes biological simply because of the advent of modern biology. But what if we recognized that biological race science is a symptom, not a cause, of modern race? If we reframe our understanding of sexuality as a secular theory – as an intuition for how the world functions apart from the influence of divine design or intervention – we then recognize that modern sexuality is a state mechanism for regulating race. During this period, the scientific inquiry into human racial difference functioned as a technology in the enslavement, colonization and extermination of human bodies. The violence of scientific rationalization has been recognized by countless scholars, particularly those concerned with the history of the international eugenics movement. My interest in this chapter is to demonstrate that this rationalization – this technique of race – came about alongside an increased intellectual boldness amongst European and American naturalists that looked to evidence and observation, rather than scholarly or Christian scriptural tradition, as evidence for their theories of race. The very same modes of knowledge that abandoned fealty to religious authority were those that developed a confidence in humanity’s ability to engineer its future destiny. During this period, Anglo-American elites began to believe that human reproductive choice was the mechanism by which humans, not God, controlled race. And this conviction drove their interest in the observational, experimental and collecting practices of modern race science.

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Recognizing this transformation necessitates a theorization of secularism itself. Traditional histories of the rise of secularism have seen it as the triumph of scientific explanations over religious tradition. But in the past several decades, postcolonial scholars of religion have redefined the study of secularism and problematized long-held assumptions about the role of secularity in liberalism. Theorists such as Tal Asad and Saba Mahmood have rejected the view of secularity as neutral ground and instead argued that it functions to reconfigure and exacerbate older modes of exclusion and invisibility, particularly for religious minorities (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2015). But however critical these accounts have been to viewing secularity as a programme of governance, rather than as the inevitable progression of civilization, they have done little to account for the role of science in relation to secularity. In this chapter, I suggest that we get to something new, fresh and interesting – and importantly, with some explanatory power – if we consider science and the secular through the frame of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower (Foucault 2003: 239–63). Biopower is a conviction that sexual reproduction is the mechanism by which the modern state controls its racial character. Although Foucault was only suggestive about the racial conclusions of biopower, subsequent scholars, notably, Ann Stoler and Alys Weinbaum, have fleshed out the historical rise of state management of sexuality for the aims of controlling the racial composition of national populations (Stoler 1995; Weinbaum 2004). Because biopower is a description of how modern nation states organize, manage and track the reproductive lives of their citizens, it can give us a vocabulary for discussing secular power not solely as an ideology or a worldview, but as a set of material arrangements of bodies. Through biopower, we see health care, census tracking, public health campaigns, poverty measures, reproductive clinics and even environmental conservation movements as material aspects of secular modern nation states. If we revisit secularity through the frame of biopower, we move away from thinking about science in secular societies solely as a set of ideas about the world, to viewing science also as a technique for managing bodies and as a system that values the interests of the collective over the individual. I examine secularity as biopower through a materially oriented intellectual history of Anglo-American men of science who investigated the relationship between sexual choice and race during the nineteenth century. My purpose in this history is not to make claims about the political views of these men about slavery, colonialism or eugenics. It is also not my aim to press the obvious critiques of the racial, patriarchal and class violence enacted by the work and writing of these men. Rather, these texts are signatories of a larger reconstitution between race and sexuality across the nineteenth century. Through these texts, it is possible to trace a transformation from race as transcendent truth, to race as something that is created and directed by human sexual choices. I begin with two thinkers in the early part of the century, Robert Knox and William Van Amringe, both of whom believed that human racial variations were reflections of a deeper plan in nature. Notably, although Knox was a materialist and Van Amringe was a Protestant Christian, both ultimately saw race as a transcendent characteristic. Next, I analyse the novelty of Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and his proposition that sexual choices created, rather than revealed, racial character. Finally, I turn to the writings of Francis Galton, Charles Davenport and Alfred Wiggam, notable figures in the Anglo-American eugenics movement, in order to describe the social and material confidence that arose at the turn of the twentieth century in humanity’s ability to engineer its future through controlling reproduction.

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Scholars of both religion and science have long recognized that categories that are seemingly free from identity markers – religion, science, secularism or religious freedom – are in fact, deeply classed, gendered and racialized. Here I extend this observation with an argument that there is a specific, historically contingent, relationship between race and sexuality that functions as a part of secular state power. The willingness to engineer national populations underlies the actions of state institutions to control the entry and exit of individuals within nations, regulate reproductive rights and manage access to public health resources. To explore the implications of this in a preliminary way, I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this historical realization for our understanding of race and sexuality as collective and individual identities in the present day.

RACE IS TRANSCENDENT Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or is there an ideal standard of beauty that exists outside the preferences of the human mind? Anglo-American men of science were deeply interested in this question during the early part of the nineteenth century. They probed the concept of beauty in their efforts to develop systematic and useful theories of racial difference. Their discussions revealed an intuition that the variation in physical appearance among the races reflected a deeper natural architecture. Some races were more beautiful than others, not because of differences in attraction, but because some were closer to an ideal standard of beauty (Figure 8.1). This archetype of human loveliness could come from God, or from Nature herself, but it did not lie within the power of human agency. Consider, for instance, the writings of Robert Knox (Figure 8.2), the anatomist and ethnologist who became infamous for his method of procuring cadavers and embroilment in the West Port murders of the 1820s. He has been regarded by history as a radical, a materialist and a racist, as well as an abolitionist and anti-colonialist. My interest in Knox is not in discerning whether he was a monogenist or a polygenist; nor in understanding the relationship between his biography and his racial schema. Instead, I look to his 1850 book The Races of Men: A Fragment as an example of the view that differences in beauty between the races were reflections of a deeper natural order. Knox believed that what ‘nature has done for the beautiful figure’ was ‘her highest material manifestation in the existing order of things’ (1850: 270). In his view, there was a standard of ideal beauty that was both real and transcendent. Knox’s perspective on this point is clear in this passage from The Races of Man, in which he describes the lack of beauty in the Jewish race, A brow marked with furrow or prominent points of bone, or with both; high cheekbones; a sloping and disproportionate chin; an elongated, projecting mouth, which at the angles threatens every moment to reach the temples; a large, massive, clubshaped, hooked nose, three or four times larger than suits the face – these are features which stamp the African character of the Jew, his muzzle-shaped mouth and face removing him from certain other races, and bringing out strongly with age the two grand deformative qualities – disproportion, and a display of the anatomy. Thus it is that the Jewish face never can, and never is, perfectly beautiful. (Knox 1850: 126)

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FIGURE 8.1  Venus de Milo, engraving by Lasinio from a drawing by Calendi, from Francesco Costantino Marmocchi, Raccolta di Viaggi (Travel Collection), vol. 3 (Prato: Fratelli Giachetti, 1840–7). © Getty Images.

Here are two key elements of Knox’s theory of racial beauty (besides the contempt and vitriol that is painful to read in the text). First, he argues that one of the qualities that deforms the Jewish face is ‘a display of anatomy’. Knox believed that the materiality of natural beauty lay in concealment. What was beautiful to the human eye were forms that covered over internal anatomy that reminded us of morbidity and death. The smooth oval face of an English woman was therefore objectively more beautiful than the face of a Hottentot or a Jewish woman, because the latter two revealed more of the skeletal and muscular structures. The objective material reality of beauty led to the second feature of Knox’s system: a clear hierarchy of beauty among the races. He concluded that the Jewish face because of its ‘display of the anatomy’ ‘never can, and never is, perfectly

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FIGURE 8.2  Robert Knox. Line engraving. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

beautiful’. Importantly, in this passage, Knox does not consider whether the Jewish face is considered beautiful amongst the Jewish people. Rather, he asserts an objective hierarchy of beauty that ranks the features of the Jewish people low on its scale (Knox 1850: 126). Knox was part of what I have described elsewhere as an ‘incipient’ secularization of racial theory (Sheldon 2019: 745). Like the ethnologists of the American School of Anthropology – including such figures as Samuel George Morton, George Gliddon and Josiah Nott – Knox was committed to using observable physical characteristics to account for race, rather than relying on the textual authority of Christian scripture. In their correspondence, writing and public lectures, these men demonstrated their willingness to break with the chronology of the Mosaic account in order to accommodate the empirical evidence they plundered from ancient Egypt and contemporary cultures in Africa and the American West. Their fealty to observation and collection, rather than

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to theological tradition, helped advance the first generation of professional scientists in the United States. But their passion for the practices of modern science did not mean that the American School had entirely left behind religious thinking. Not only were the questions they asked of their science deeply informed by centuries of Christian theology – including for instance Christian supersessionism – but their view of race was explicitly committed to the idea that racial character was ultimately created by God (Keel 2018: 55–82). And although Knox was not personally religious, his writings demonstrated a similar commitment to the transcendent character of race. He viewed differences in racial beauty as indelible features of the world, not affected by human attraction or choice. These Anglo-American men of science had an escalating confidence in the reaches of human knowledge and the power of empirical study. But underlying this certainty were the material anxieties of nineteenth-century imperialism and the slave economies of the Atlantic world. Even as they demonstrated that scientific study had the power to describe and understand race, they sought refuge in the belief that racial character had an ultimate source. This anxiety was most fully present in scientific discussions over amalgamation between the races. Sexual mixing between the races was a persistent threat to the stability of colonial orders and slave systems across the Atlantic world. Across literature and natural history the mixed-race figure – whether the ‘quadroon’ in Haiti, the ‘mestizo’ in Grenada or the ‘half-breed’ in Kansas – was depicted as the source of slave rebellion, the end of European civilization and the wellspring of sexual immorality (Basson 2008; Clark 2013; Rappaport 2014). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that scientific elites in the first half of the century sought refuge in the notion that the transcendent character of race functioned to maintain sexual separation between the races. The conviction that the races had a natural sexual repugnance for one another was often discussed – in equal parts disgust and admiration – by Anglo-American men with regard to the Jewish race (Imhoff 2018). Knox, for instance, argued that ‘the real Jewess admits generally of no intermarriage’ (Knox 1850: 124). The conviction that a sexual fastidiousness and persistent endogamy among the Jewish people had succeeded in preserving their race through history supported speculation that similar sexual choosiness was responsible for racial integrity throughout the world. The American Protestant minister William Van Amringe wrote more expansively on this point in his 1848 An Investigation of the Theories of the Natural History of Man. In a chapter titled ‘The Great Natural Law Which Has Kept Each Species Distinct From Every Other’, Van Amringe contended that it was the ‘different taste for sexual beauty in the several races of men’, that was ‘the great natural law’ that was responsible for ‘separating and keeping distinct, the different species of men, more effectually than mountains, deserts, or oceans’ (1848: 41). Key to Van Amringe’s point was the belief that these differences had originated from God’s creative power. He argued that ‘natural beauties are scattered over the earth with an unsparing hand by the benevolent Creator; and he has so constituted human being as to have a keen relish for them’ (646). Interestingly, and importantly, Van Amringe and Knox were on opposite sides of their contemporary race theory debates. Van Amringe was a Christian and a polygenist (though his religious views were more in line with the new theories of special creation that were influential amongst the American School than with Christian orthodoxy). Knox, conversely, was a materialist and a monogenist. In the tangled literature of Anglo-American race theory in the early nineteenth century, it can be difficult to navigate the web of debates and perspectives, as it is possible to find religious monogenists and materialist polygenists, monogenists who were abolitionists and others who were slaveholders, religious men

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who objected to colonialism and those that championed it. Here my interest is less in carefully distinguishing the terms of these debates as they existed at the time and more in reading through them for what they reveal about a broader set of transformations with regard to race and sexual choice across the century. And to this end, it is useful to take Knox and Van Amringe together in order to see the similarities in their racial theories, despite the difference in their religious beliefs and their monogenism/polygenism divide. In the writing of both naturalists there is a clear sense that human beauty and sexual love are transcendent phenomena. Van Amringe spoke, for instance, of ‘the natural law of sexual love by which the races have been kept distinct’ that had been at work since ‘time immemorial’ (1848: 44). Furthermore, he wrote about this natural law as something to be recognized and abided by rather than as a phenomenon that could be managed by human action. He made this point explicitly, arguing against, ‘The opinion of some philosophers, who think that the race would be improved by uniting the sexes according to the artificial rules established to improve domestic animals, is contrary to the law of our nature’ (657). Van Amringe was so set against the idea of using the techniques of breeding applied to humans he contended that doing so would ‘cause the degeneration of the race’ (1848: 657). Knox also believed that there were natural processes that would work to keep races distinct. While discussing the view that the modern German race was an admixture of Celts and Saxons, Knox argued that ‘against such theories … great physiological laws are opposed’ (1850: 233). He contended that because of these laws, ‘no mixed races can, or ever did, exist for any length of time’ (633). Both Van Amringe and Knox were secure in their view that if racial amalgamation occurred, it was, at best, a temporary phenomenon. Eventually, only original races would persist. It is possible to interpret this security in the transcendence of race as confidence in the creative power of divine or natural architecture. In the view of these men, race was not buffeted about by the variations of environmental conditions. Nor was it fundamentally reshaped by sexual contact between the races. Rather, an empirically based racial theory would reveal that there was something secured, fixed and reliable about racial character. What was the source of this desire to discover regular and predictable laws of human race formation? Much of the history of science has been preoccupied with accounting for the emergence of distinctive scientific practices and epistemologies beginning in the early modern period. Canonical efforts to explain how experimentation or observation became reliable sources of natural knowledge, as opposed to the scholastic authority of texts, are central to the historical understanding of science (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Daston and Lunbeck 2011). Writing in the nineteenth century, Knox and Van Amringe were many generations removed from the initial transformations that gave rise to modern science. However, by recognizing that their desire to understand race was bound up with their pursuit of naturalism, we view the history of science in a somewhat different light. In the conclusion to The Races of Man, Knox affirmed his faith in the regularity of the world, arguing that ‘Nature can have no double systems; no amendments or second thoughts; no exceptional laws’ (1850: 288). This willingness to interpret the world in naturalistic, rather than in theistic or capricious, terms has often been characterized as an act of intellectual bravery on the part of European and American men of science. They have been commended for their willingness to set aside the teachings of the Church and the traditions of the ancients in order to examine the natural world for themselves. But in the writings of Knox and Van Amringe it is clear that their quest for naturalism was entangled in their efforts to build cohesive theories of human race formation. Otherwise buffeted about in the tumult of Atlantic world colonialism and slavery, the reliability of

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naturalism promised not only a trustworthy explanation of race but also a suggestion of control. If race were a natural phenomena it might be possible to predict its effects, or to profit from its outcomes. These naturalists did not yet believe that race could be engineered, it would take Darwin’s work to introduce this possibility, but they had a growing confidence that race could be measured, described and theorized.

RACE AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON Over the course of the nineteenth century, Anglo-American naturalists were increasingly willing to distance their racial theories from the authority of Christian scripture. Their interest in empirical, rather than traditional, accounts of human variety gave voice to the material practices that managed race for the colonial and imperial aims of the United States and European nations. But it was in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, published in his 1871 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, that a thoroughly secular theory of race emerged. Darwin proposed the novel idea that sexual choices created, not just revealed, racial character. And if sexuality was the mechanism of race, then it was possible for humanity to entirely control its racial future without recourse to outside (divine or otherwise) authority. Key to Darwin’s innovation was his different approach to the question of beauty. Unlike previous Anglo-American naturalists, Darwin set aside all references to God or deistic nature as the standard-holder of human beauty. Instead, he invested the definition of beauty in the differing tastes of each racial group. Consider this passage from The Descent of Man, volume 2, Let us suppose the members of a tribe, practicing some form of marriage, to spread over an unoccupied continent; they would soon split up into distinct hordes, separated from each other by various barriers, and still more effectually by the incessant wars between all barbarous nations. The hordes would thus be exposed to slightly different conditions and habits of life, and would sooner or later come to differ in some small degree. As soon as this occurred, each isolated tribe would form for itself a slightly different standard of beauty; and then unconscious selection would come into action through the more powerful and leading men preferring certain women to others. Thus the differences between the tribes, at first very slight, would gradually and inevitably be more or less increased. (Darwin 1871b: 370) In this passage, Darwin summarized the key differences in his approach to race and beauty from the views of preceding naturalists. In this hypothetical scenario of racial formation, he argued that ‘each isolated tribe would form for itself a slightly different standard of beauty’. Here beauty is particular to each tribe rather than a universal, objective standard. Furthermore, Darwin confers evolutionary action to this process – once the standard of beauty is formed he contends that ‘unconscious selection would come into action’ leading to an event where ‘the differences between the tribes, at first very slight, would … be … increased’ (Darwin 1871b: 370). In this, Darwin transforms sexual choice into a causal force of racial formation rather than an action that merely reflects static natural law. Importantly, Darwin was not the first English figure to utilize sexual choice in a material account of human society. The famed English economist Adam Smith had discussed marriage selection in his argument for a ‘four-stage’ (or stadial) theory of

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social development. Smith argued that human civilizations naturally pass through four phases of development: hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce. Smith outlined these arguments in his early lectures at the University of Glasgow, and later expounded the point further in his canonical The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1978). In Smith’s view, the status of women in society was a key sign of a culture’s ranking on the ladder of development. He reasoned that the greater freedom women enjoyed, the more a society had conquered the base conditions of primitive human life. In Smith’s view, because women were physically inferior to men, in a state of barbarity they would enjoy relatively little freedom of choice in marriage. Women’s freedom of sexual choice was a hallmark of an advanced civilization, according to Smith. Smith’s theory was notable as one of the early attempts to give a physical explanation of the status of women that did not rely solely on the Bible (Nyland 1991: 3). It was also an entry in a long tradition of American and European thinkers arguing that so-called primitive or Eastern societies mistreated women, as an argument for the necessity of colonialism (Burton 1994; Jayawardena 1995). What is critical for the purposes of this chapter is the difference between Smith’s view of sexual choice and Darwin’s use of the concept. Although Smith looks to physical, rather than theological, explanations for the role of women, he views sexual choice as a sign rather than as a cause of racial difference. This view of sexual choice as a racial signatory continued to be found almost seventy years later in Van Amringe’s writings. For instance, in this passage from An Investigation of the Theories of the Natural History of Man, he argued, ‘We may safely rely upon history for the fact that all those people who have always remained stationary or have retrograded in moral and intellectual improvement, are polygamous, and do not permit the freedom of selection or rejection of both sexes’ (Van Amringe 1848: 674). Van Amringe did not ascribe causal action to the ‘freedom of selection’ for men and women. He had a clear interest in understanding what makes some societies progress and others ‘retrograde’, but he did not suggest that sexual choice drives these differences. Rather, he described characteristics of races which were then reflected in differences in their sexual practices. The key, again, is the view of beauty. Unlike Darwin, who would suggest that each race might develop its own taste in beauty, Van Amringe argued that in ‘dark races there is no standard of beauty in the male of this species, in their sexual relations’ (634). In his view, it was the lack of this appreciation for the universal standards of beauty that reflects the base character of the ‘dark races’. They not only fail to appreciate true beauty but also, in fact, have no standard of beauty. Knox came to a similar conclusion about the aesthetic depravity of lower races and their lack of appreciation of true beauty, forcefully concluding, ‘The monstrous creations of the disordered Hindoo, Chinese and Saxon minds; these are ideal, fictitious, false; the Venus is real’ (1850: 280). Through the middle of the nineteenth century, Anglo-American naturalists contended that sexual attraction, love and choice were transcendent features of the races. In the Descent of Man, Darwin flipped this reasoning on its head. Darwin was committed to a theory of human evolution that set aside references to special creation or divine intervention. But he needed a mechanism to explain how such a process could include racial formation. Much as he had turned to natural selection as the mechanism to explain apparent design in On the Origin of Species, Darwin now turned to sexual selection as the mechanism to explain the origin of human racial variation. Natural selection had placed the action of design in the hands of indifferent and undirected natural forces. The struggle for survival fitted organisms to their environment, and if the environment changed so might those living forms. Sexual selection was organized with similar logic but placed the action of

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design in the erotic attraction amongst members of a given species. The erotic preferences of individuals – both male and female – shaped the aesthetic characteristics of a species; features that Darwin believed were the only hallmark differences between human races. In characteristic fashion, Darwin built the argument for sexual selection as a mechanism of race formation methodically through the two volumes of The Descent of Man. After opening with his intent to investigate ‘the evidence of the descent of man from some lower form’, Darwin outlined the current state of racial theories for humans in a chapter titled ‘On the Races of Man’ (Darwin 1871a: 9, 214). After surveying the current state of the scientific literature, Darwin dismissed the polygenist proposal that the races represented separate species (Darwin 1871a: 220–6). The most significant argument against this possibility, he contended, was ‘that they graduate into each other’ and that ‘it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive character between them’ (226). Empirical observation, Darwin averred, made it impossible to argue that the races were separate species, and with that, it was possible to also set aside the account of separate special creations for each race that the polygenist accounts relied upon. But if the races of man were part of the same species, and not separately created by God, how did they come about? Building to his suggestion, Darwin dismissed several other possibilities including, ‘the direct action of different conditions of life’, ‘the inherited effects of the increased or decreased use of parts’ and the ‘principle of correlation’ between racial features (246, 247, 247–8). Having dismissed polygenism, and three other empirical accounts of race formation, Darwin offered up his theory, ‘We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man; but there remains one important agency, namely Sexual Selection, which appears to have acted as powerfully on man, as on many other animals’ (249). Through sexual selection, Darwin proposed a race theory that did not ultimately rely on the creative power or design of God. However, he believed the theory could only be relied upon as credible if he ‘pass[ed] the whole animal kingdom in review’; only after demonstrating that sexual selection was at work in all animals from mollusks to mammals did Darwin return to humans at the end of the second volume (Darwin 1871b: 250). At this point, he felt confident to assert that sexual selection also worked in humans. One of the key obstacles Darwin saw for his theory was demonstrating that lower animal forms had the capacity to see and appreciate beauty (Milam 2010: 15). He knew that many Anglo-American naturalists were sceptical that birds or mollusks had the intelligence to appreciate what was beautiful. Darwin dealt with this scepticism in two ways. First, he hoped to overwhelm these doubts with the sheer amount of evidence collected; through his own observation, and the compilation of the testimony of many naturalists, Darwin sought to assure his reader that it was very probable and sensible to suppose that animals appreciate beauty. But he also changed what the definition of beauty itself was. By the time of the 1882 edition of The Descent, Darwin broke down the animal/human boundary, arguing that erotic choices in this context were not the higher order rational choices of civilized humans, When, however it is said that the lower animals have a sense of beauty, it must not be supposed that such sense is comparable with that of a cultivated man, with his multiform and complex associated ideas. A more just comparison would be between the taste for the beautiful in animals, and that in the lowest savages, who admire and deck themselves with any brilliant, glittering or curious object. (Darwin 1882: 211)

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Attraction to beauty was thus not the recognition of a universal aesthetic standard. It was not a cultivated skill. Instead, it was an instinct that all animals from an insect to a savage could possess. This reframing of attraction, beauty and choice laid the groundwork for Darwin to move sexual selection from a sign to the cause of racial character. Rejecting the common wisdom of previous generations of naturalists that ‘savages are quite indifferent to the beauty of their women’, Darwin pointed his readers instead to how ‘widely the different races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful’ (Darwin 1871b: 343, 350). If beauty was not a higher feeling or a sign of cultivation, then it could function more like a physiological process. In striking contrast to Knox’s views of the art of various races, Darwin saw artistic varieties as differences in standards of beauty, ‘In every nation sufficiently advanced to have made effigies of their gods or of their deified rules, the sculptors no doubt have endeavored to express their highest ideal of beauty and grandeur’ (Darwin 1871b: 350). By making taste for beauty relative, rather than universal, Darwin no longer had to view it as a demonstration of civilization or as an evolutionary achievement. Instead, he could see it as a mechanism for change. Much of the historical discussion on sexual selection has focused on the gender politics of Darwin’s assertion of female choice as an evolutionary mechanism. Kimberly Hamlin, for instance, has detailed how white feminists leveraged Darwin’s theories in contests for voting rights in the United States (Hamlin 2014: 25–56). Erika Milam’s definitive history of female choice in evolutionary biology locates the original debates over female agency and the division between rational choice among humans and animals in the exchanges between Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that would later be reanimated in the twentieth century (Milam 2010: 9–28). And Evelleen Richards’s magisterial volume on the making of sexual selection situates the theory in the nuances of the gender and racial politics of the elite scientific Atlantic world (Richards 2017). This scholarship has made clear how Darwin’s assumptions about male and female character, his understanding of racial difference and his articulation of sexual choice were thoroughly enmeshed in his own gender, class and racial positioning as a financially independent, middle-class, Englishman from a family with abolitionist sympathies. This historical work is critical for understanding the composition of Darwin’s theories as well as the ways in which his theories influenced cultural understanding of gender and the study of sex difference in professional biology. My aim is different, in that I am not interested in situating Darwin in his social context, nor even in understanding how his theory was leveraged by specific political and social movements. Rather, I want to understand how the theory of sexual selection opened up a new set of logical possibilities and manifested a unique set of discursive desires in the rise of secular power. And to explain this, it is worth understanding how it is that Darwin’s theory is secular and what I mean by this term. Although in histories of science ‘secular’ is most often used as an unproblematic description as the absence of religion, scholars of religion have approached it as a category of modernity that itself must be theorized. Tal Asad’s now canonical anthropological investigation of the secular in his Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003) set aside both triumphalist narratives of the rise of secularism and endeavours to demonstrate that so-called secular institutions were really religious. Instead, Asad argues that the relationship between religion and the secular is more complex, in which ‘there were breaks between Christian and secular life in which words and practices

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were rearranged, and new discursive grammars replaced previous ones’ (2003: 25). In identifying the transition between Darwin’s use of sexual choice as a natural mechanism for race rather than as a signatory of divine intent I have, quite simply, attempted to characterize and highlight an instance where a new discursive grammar replaced a previous one. The point is not that Darwin was personally less religious than his forbearers nor even that his theories were devoid of influence from his Christian heritage. Rather, the theory of sexual selection helped make possible a new Western intuition that scientifically informed breeding was the best way to improve society. Asad’s understanding of the rise of the secular is deeply Foucauldian. He characterizes, for instance, the rise of secular morality in the same terms that Foucault argues for a new biopolitics: ‘The discursive move in the nineteenth century from thinking of a fixed “human nature” to regarding humans in terms of a constituted “normality” facilitated the secular idea of moral progress defined and directed by autonomous human agency’ (Asad 2003: 24). Foucault’s argument for the biopolitical transformation of modernity rests on this premise: that beginning in the eighteenth century human beings were no longer understood as individuals but as signatories of a population. As Foucault characterized it in his lecture series ‘Society Must Be Defended’, So after the first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species. After the anatomo-politics of the human body established in the course of the eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but what I would call a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race. (Foucault 2003: 243) Asad locates the rise of secular morality in this biopolitical transformation. Scholars of religion and politics have generally theorized the ‘autonomous human agency’ that Asad describes as located in the functions of governmentality, surveillance and bureaucracy of the modern nation state. In these analyses, secularism studies has collapsed distinctions between ‘religion’ and the ‘state’ to show how secular power functions alongside, within and through modes of religiosity (Taylor 2009; Mahmood 2011; Modern 2011; Bender and Taves 2012). My intention is not to contradict these studies but to suggest that this secular agency was also a function of the rise of what historians of science Hans Jorg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille have described as the ‘knowledge regime’ of heredity. That is, the rise of a ‘strictly naturalistic concept of heredity’ was the result of ‘a metaphorical transfer of a juridical concept to a description of the generation and propagation of living beings’ (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2012: 2 and 5; emphasis in the original). In other words, the rise of state powers that managed raced populations was interlaced with the transfer of legal views of inheritance and kinship to the biological sciences. In this we see that a specific relationship between race and sexuality is part of the function of secular state power. This is an important realization, if for no other reason than it allows us to ground the emergence of influential life sciences – particularly genetics, genomics and reproductive technologies – in a concrete relationship to the transformations of modern secularity. It also locates evolutionary and hereditary sciences in a tangible relationship to secular governmentality; we see that they emerged as the places of assured knowledge for race management. Such a realization deserves a longer discussion than I have space

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for here, so I will confine myself in the last section to an account of arguments in the Anglo-American eugenics movement that claimed that not only could race be managed through sexuality but also that it was with hereditary science that this management was best accomplished.

RACE AS A MANAGEABLE PROJECT In 1922, the American Protestant minister and eugenicist Albert Edward Wiggam published a piece in New Century Magazine titled ‘The New Decalogue of Science: An Open Letter from the Biologist to the Statesman’ (1922). In it, Wiggam explained the kind of social control he believed that biology now afforded the statesman. Addressing this hypothetical politician, he contended, ‘Sir: As you know, biology is the science of life. Now, you control life on a vaster scale than any other human being …. You are in a very real sense the arbiter of the destiny of race’ (Wiggam 1922: 643). Throughout the piece, Wiggam urges the imaginary statesmen to take up the lessons of hereditary and to apply it to the improvement of the human race. Many of his arguments are levelled against traditional views of Christian charity, which he characterizes as the belief that men can be improved by education or situation. Rather he contends, ‘heredity, and not environment, is the maker of men’ (645). With this short piece Wiggam gives voice to the new discursive grammar fashioned by sexuality as a secular theory of race, Eugenics means a new religion, a new moral code, a new social and political Bible, change in the very purpose of civilization and the fundamental mores of man. It means the improvement of man as an organic being. It means that the improvement of man’s inborn capacities for health, sanity, and achievement must become the one living purpose of the state. (Wiggam 1922: 647–8; emphasis in the original) The early twentieth-century eugenics movement was the manifestation of a new discourse made possible by Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Darwin’s writings had introduced a notion of race as entirely natural, not just in the sense of being physical or material, but with no reference to a transcendent higher order. When he transferred the causal action of race formation from God or transcendent nature to human sexual choices, he opened the possibility that race could be managed entirely by human action. But the eugenics movement took this even further by introducing the belief that scientific knowledge, especially hereditary science, was the best tool for this management. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, famously coined the term eugenics in 1883. In his writings, Galton transformed sexuality from a theory of race to a programme of state management. Key to his innovation was visualizing members of a society as part of a population. He made this point in this passage from his 1894 book Natural Inheritance, The population retains its peculiarities although the elements of which it is composed are never stationary, neither are the same individuals present at any two successive epochs. In these respects, a population may be compared to a cloud that seems to repose in calm upon a mountain plateau, while a gale of wind is blowing over it. The outline of the cloud remains unchanged, although its elements are in violent movement and in a condition perpetual destruction and renewal. (Galton 1894: 164)

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Population thinking was key to viewing race as a manageable project. Rather than viewing individuals as reflections of a greater plan, or as iterations of a type, population thinking sees people as individual variants that make up a larger entity that is not itself fixed. However, the general features of that larger entity can be maintained over time. Galton expressed the point thus: ‘The cloud and the population are composed of elements that resemble each other in the brevity of their existence, while the general features of the cloud of the population are alike in that they abide’ (Galton 1894: 165). Galton’s work introduced an imaginary that made it possible to understand race as a manageable project. By viewing nation states as populations, the nation has a set of features that can be managed and organized. Just as the cloud in this passage does not exist in some form apart from the aggregation of its constituent particles, a national population does not exist in some divine or platonic ideal outside of its racial materialization. The nation, rather than reflecting divine order, is instead a naturally occurring phenomenon, that is a cloud of particles, a true population. Galton’s vision of human breeding to improve society was manifested in the international eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. One of the key voices in the Anglo-American context was Charles Davenport, one of the prominent leaders of the movement and founder of the Eugenics Records Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. It is difficult to select just one passage from Davenport about the necessity and possibility of human breeding. He was prolific and explicit on this point. The opening line of his 1911 Heredity in Relation to Eugenics declared, ‘Eugenics is the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding’ (Davenport 1911: 1). Indeed the notion of human breeding is so synonymous with eugenics it hardly seems notable to comment on it. What I have attempted to elucidate in this chapter, however, is that this eugenic confidence was the fruition of an earlier transformation that reconfigured race and sexuality in secular power. How otherwise can we account for the change from Van Amringe’s admonition in 1848 that human breeding was ‘contrary to the law of our nature’ to Davenport’s confidence in 1911 that ‘the general program of the eugenist is clear – it is to improve the race by inducing young people to make a more reasonable selection of marriage mates; to fall in love intelligently?’ (4). What could possibly account for such a transition over hardly more than a half century? To account for the rise of eugenics, historians have pointed to the rise of bureaucracy, the globalization of agricultural and husbandry practices, the innovations of the genetic sciences, and the political anxieties produced by suffrage movements and global migration in this period (Kevles 1985; English 2004; Carey 2012; Kline 2014). This historiography has greatly expanded our understanding of eugenics and demonstrated that it was a truly global movement with distinct national instantiations, that utilized a variety of scientific methods and models (Bashford and Levine 2010). My suggestion in this chapter has been to recognize eugenics as the manifestation of a secular rejection of a divine or transcendent origin for racial character (Turda 2018). This recognition helps make sense of why various eugenics movements capitalized on a range of potentially contradictory hereditary and evolutionary sciences, including neo-Lamarckian, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian, and Mendelian frameworks. Or why eugenic ideologies were taken up by figures and movements across the political spectrum at the turn of the twentieth century, ranging from liberal Protestants in the United Kingdom, the Right in Germany, the colonial British government in Kenya, and suffragettes and the early civil rights movement in the United States. We see that eugenics does not belong to a single creed or political position, nor does it rely on

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a single scientific insight. Rather, it is the manifestation of the simple belief that it is humans, not God, that control racial destiny. And it is the conviction that sexual choices are the mechanism of that control.

CONCLUSION If this preliminary history is convincing, it has important implications for our theories of the secular, as well as of contemporary identity categories. Understanding sexuality as a secular theory of race opens up the possibility of theorizing scientific knowledge in relation to secularity that does not fall into tired assertions of science as the midwife of enlightened reason. In popular histories of secularism, science is depicted as a powerful explanation of the natural world that defeats religion with reason and empiricism. It is right and respectable belief. In this narrative, those who are capable of this intellectual clarity are brave, masculine and Western, whereas those who rely on supernatural, spiritual or religious knowledge are feminized and racialized as Eastern and brown (Dawkins 2015). Of course, scholars of science and religion, and of the secular, have long rejected this conflict model of science and religion. In the last several decades, historians of science who write on its relationship to religion have tended to frame their work through the ‘complexity thesis’, which contends that there is no single historical model for understanding the relationship between science and religion (Lightman 2019: 10–12). In this literature, accounts of science and religion emphasize the specificities of temporal, geographic and intellectual context (Brooke and Cantor 2000; Livingstone 2014; Harrison 2015). And as already discussed, scholars of the secular such as Asad and Mahmood understand secularity as a property of colonial and postcolonial governance rather than as the offspring of scientific enlightenment. But even though these literatures reject the conflict model as a way of understanding science and the secular, they do not really offer an alternative one, or at least not in detail. This is largely because histories of science have done little to theorize secularity and the literature on the secular rarely deals with the specificities of scientific practices, theories and models. I have outlined one possible approach to this theoretical issue. It begins with setting aside a view of science as chiefly a form of naturalistic explanation and to regard it instead as an attempt at humanistic control. If science is primarily an explanation of the natural world, it cannot be faulted for crowding out religion. Religion is merely a bystander in the march of discovery and the desire for a clarified understanding of how the world works. But the men of science I have discussed did not merely want to understand race; they wanted to be its master. And race could not be engineered if it lay entirely within the realm of divine authority. This is why the hereditary and evolutionary sciences measured, observed and experimented. This is why race theorists counted, tested and analysed. So that race could be something that was not whimsical or mysterious. Science turned race into a feature of the world that could be counted on and predicted; one that economic fortunes could be built upon and nations organized around. Science became assured knowledge with which to enact secular governance. Importantly, this historical perspective also encourages us to more specifically theorize the relationships between contemporary forms of identity. Critical scholars and popular culture have extrapolated from Kimberly Crenshaw’s insight into the intersections of oppressive power systems, mapping the points of contact between ability, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, citizenship, class, etc. However, there is a tendency in both contemporary academic and activist settings to account for these categories iteratively

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and even interchangeably. That is, the work of intersectionality is accomplished by listing identities as if they were commutable and additive forms of oppression and marginalization. However, Crenshaw’s original argument was premised on intersecting forms of power (Crenshaw 1989: 140). In this chapter, I have argued for a specific historical configuration in which sexuality was controlled in order to achieve race. There were particular discursive grammars at play; sexual desire was cultivated, marriage laws were passed, immigration quotas set, debates over birthright citizenship were carried out and reproductive technologies were developed and restricted, because the state came to view reproduction as the mechanism of population control. Recognizing this, it becomes clear that justice is not achieved simply through representative diversity. It is not enough to document the presence of individuals who can be categorized as sexual or racial minorities. Bold imagination is required to undo and remake the logic that ties the management of sexuality to the racial identity of the nation state. Other forms of desire, belonging and human bonds must be created and lived out if we are to get free of this bind.

CHAPTER NINE

Anti-Race Resisting Racial Science, African Americans and the Creation of Race in Post-emancipation Society LYNN M. HUDSON

On the fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1 January 1868, California educator and African American leader Jeremiah B. Sanderson delivered a blistering critique of the racial ideologies that dominated the culture and politics of the United States. Sanderson spoke to what was, by all accounts, a large and boisterous San Francisco crowd to address the possibilities and limitations of freedom. The speaker was well known to Black Californians: after leaving his hometown of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he was in the company of abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, he travelled to California in 1853 (Lapp 1968). By the time of the 1868 Emancipation celebration Sanderson had waged an impressive campaign to educate African American children in Sacramento, Stockton and San Francisco. His experience in the abolitionist movement rendered him a powerful speaker with deep knowledge about African American history and the current political climate. Indeed, until his untimely death in 1875, Sanderson remained the favoured speaker at such events in the West. The day began on a festive note ‘with the usual imposing ceremonies’, including a procession of the Brannan Guards, the Pacific Brass Band donning new uniforms and the Young Men’s Union Beneficial Society, an organization founded by Sanderson and ‘devoted to self-education’ (Lapp 1968: 329). Children from the public and Sunday schools filled horse-drawn carriages and a long line of buggies followed them at the end of the parade. Adjourning to a hall in the centre of town, the programme included an opening prayer, the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and a performance of ‘Union and Liberty Forever’, sung by a local choir. Men in uniform, like those in the Brannan Guards, were meant to call up memories of Black soldiers and their role in the Union victory. Indeed William H. Carney, a veteran of the Massachusetts 54th, was the parade’s grand marshal. This demonstration of military prowess was common at Emancipation parades and was one of the ways Black communities emphasized their loyalty to the nation and patriotic service. Sanderson’s remarks that New Year’s Day, at a celebration of the ‘greatest event in the history of the colored people’, did not provide the uplifting message most had expected. Partly due to the fact that Black male suffrage hung in the balance, the mood was not altogether joyous. Although he noted the great accomplishments of African Americans, his

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address made plain that Black citizens were facing formidable foes: ‘Though men sitting in high places of power seek our moral and political annihilation, and essay to make valid as truth the huge lie that we are socially, morally, politically, intellectually and physically inferior to the white man, still with God and the right on our side, we shall win the hard fought day’ (Elevator 1868a). His argument that white supremacy was being naturalized and lies about African American inferiority made ‘valid as truth’ indicated that bids for citizenship would have to be made over and through these truth claims. The new rights that freedom promised would never come to fruition if the central beliefs about African Americans hinged on theories of inferiority that were biologically based. The chief target in Sanderson’s speech was the seminal text of what is now known as scientific racism and the men who, in his words ‘attempted to disprove the inherent equal manhood of the Negro’ (Elevator 1868b: 1). Sanderson credited Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon’s 1854 classic Types of Mankind: Or Ethnological Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of the Races, the eight-hundred-page bestseller that offered ‘scientific proof’ of the inferiority of African Americans, with shaping the political climate and limiting the prospects for freedom (Figure 9.1). Texts such as Nott and Gliddon’s, Sanderson argued, were central to the effort to ‘degrade the Negro [and] separate him from the human race’ (Elevator 1868b). This was not the first time Sanderson alerted Californians

FIGURE 9.1  Types of mankind: or, Ethnological researches based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history: illustrated by selections from the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by additional contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854). © Getty Images.

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to the dangers of scientific racism; eight years earlier, in 1860, he delivered a lecture on phrenology at a fundraiser for abolitionists (Lapp 1968: 329). Well aware of the popularity of these theories and their significance to the supporters of slavery, Sanderson reminded his listeners in 1868 that these beliefs continued to hold sway; indeed they undergirded Reconstruction-era arguments that Black men were incapable of the duties of citizenship. Less than two decades later, Frederick Douglass spoke at an emancipation anniversary parade to an anxious audience in Washington, DC. Like Sanderson, he could not deliver an uplifting address; indeed, his speech recounted the violence and terror that surrounded Black people in America, most of whom lived in the South. Douglass described a recent massacre in Mississippi where an attempted lynching turned into a mass murder (Blight 2018: 665–6). The killing of African Americans, as Douglass noted, had become commonplace, their bodies seen as disposable. As the great orator and political leader wondered how America had lost its way, many would point to the insidious effort to cast Black people as beasts. As Sanderson had predicted, beliefs about Black people as subhuman had not disappeared.

Racial science in post-emancipation America Racial science found new resonance in the United States in the years between Emancipation and the First World War. As the systems of segregation were crafted, it became increasingly clear that the promises of Reconstruction, including civil rights for Black citizens, were fleeting. Keeping African Americans in a state of second-class citizenship would require a complicated arsenal of laws, labour regimes, violence and ‘scientific’ theories. Postemancipation America also witnessed the development of multiple forms of resistance designed to strike at the core of these racial restrictions and beliefs; Black citizens fought back by entering the political arena, protecting themselves against racialized violence, addressing the intellectual foundations of white supremacy and resisting racial science in all its forms. This resistance took place in the streets, in the pages of the Black press, on stage, in women’s clubs, in courtrooms and in prisons. An investigation of the rich historiography of this era reveals the significance of racial science to the construction of post-emancipation society and the centrality of African American resistance to these ideological precepts in the shaping of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. When Black citizens such as Jeremiah Sanderson pushed back against the dangers of racial science they forced the nation to reckon with the meaning of its founding principles and the limits of a democracy bolstered by doctrines of white supremacy. The efforts of African Americans to resist, refute and reshape theories of white supremacy and Black inferiority are well documented by historians. This scholarship foregrounds the multiple ways that Black citizens celebrated and exercised their newfound freedoms at the same time as they watched many of these freedoms disappear. The civil rights laws of Reconstruction as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments reshaped the political landscape, and historians have paid close attention to the ways Black men and women interpreted this new terrain, pushing and pulling at the seams of democracy as they made their way amidst increasing violence and suffocating economic and social restrictions. While some of this scholarship fits into the rubric of traditional legal history, much of it considers the overlap of the social, cultural and political as it seeks to explain the dramatic transformations – and, in some cases, continuity – of Black life. Every region of the United States is represented in the historiography of Jim Crow. Beginning with C. Vann Woodward’s seminal 1955 text, The Strange Career of

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Jim Crow, and his assessment that Jim Crow was born in the North, the historiography has necessarily examined a wide swathe of the American landscape. This scholarship has enriched our understanding of how race was constructed in the United States and how this process is linked to modernity. African Americans harnessed a vast array of tactics to resist the doctrines of white supremacy. As Black Americans fought back against Jim Crow laws and practices, they articulated beliefs about race that countered those being offered up by the state. To be sure, Black resistance, as the scholarship shows, was never monolithic. The fissures among and between different groups of African Americans – the elite and workers, men and women, and the NAACP and the followers of Marcus Garvey, to name a few – highlight the complicated process of race-making among African Americans. However, as Black citizens resisted beliefs that concretized racial difference as irrefutable, they took a leading role in the debates about the shape of US citizenship and the modern state. The significance of racial identity and the instability of racial categories created an ideal climate for racial theorizing in post-emancipation America. Determining the racial identities of American citizenry would become an urgent project in the era of Jim Crow as one’s racial make-up dictated who could attend public schools, ride streetcars and own businesses. White Americans created and embraced a variety of scientific theories to secure their place in the racial hierarchy that emerged after the Civil War. And while racial science was not new in post-emancipation America, as Jeremiah Sanderson understood, its impact was felt acutely in the age of emancipation as over four million ex-slaves were newly free. The forms of racial science in this era were multiple including but not limited to the use of phrenology (determining intelligence and character by interpreting the shape of the skull), the cephalic index (head measurements) and eugenics (Painter 2008). Not all of these scientific theories and practices were applied exclusively to African Americans. In fact, the wave of European immigration in the late nineteenth century would inspire much racial science (Jacobson 1998; Painter 2008). The ideologies and practices of white supremacy that took root in every section of the country, would require racial hierarchies that accounted for an increasingly diverse demographic of the expanding United States and its empire. For African Americans, the implications of such theorizing could be frightening; theories that, for example, provided ‘proof’ of Black inhumanity could justify slave-like working conditions, unending prison sentences and lynching. This project – of clarifying and fixing racial identities – was a slippery and often contradictory one. The judicial system became one site where the uncertainty of racial categories was laid bare. Racial identity trials demonstrated that post-emancipation efforts to separate the races hinged on the need to ‘prove’ racial categories (Gross 2008). These trials often concerned interracial marriage or inheritance disputes, both of which required a clear determination of the litigant’s racial make-up. So-called experts, sometimes medical doctors, presented evidence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century courtrooms about hair texture, foot shape and fingernails, as they worked to convince juries and judges of a person’s racial identity. Race was made and remade in the courtroom not only by ‘experts’, however, but also by community members called to testify about their neighbours and friends (Gross 2008). Not all theories of racial science emanated from the courtroom, the halls of government, the biologist’s laboratory or the academy, however. The lessons of white superiority and Black inferiority were also delivered through the vehicle of popular culture. As Nell Painter has argued, ‘the theories of race come more from cultural imagination than from biological fact’ (1996). Historians have, therefore, cast a wide net when searching for the sites and settings where race was imagined. ‘Race

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was not something imposed from above’, argues Ariela Gross, ‘imagined by experts, and acquiesced in by ordinary people; race was created and re-created everyday through the workings of community institutions and individuals in daily life’ (2008: 10). African Americans participated in this making and remaking of race often, but not always, in American courtrooms. After the Civil War, Black citizens appeared in the nation’s courts to claim their newly acquired rights. These rights included the right to marry, the right to board a streetcar, the right to enter into contracts and the right to attend a theatre. The role of the law in constructing personhood and identity has been noted by scholars of the nineteenth century and it became particularly salient for newly free citizens of the republic (Welke 2010; Stanley 2015). For many Black men and women, the freedom to marry became a top priority in the earliest days of emancipation, the fundamental right of free people. For ex-slaves who had been denied this right during slavery, marriage held significance in the ways it marked the break from bondage; it also had the potential to increase freedpeople’s authority within the state. As Laura Edwards has shown, the right to marry for African Americans was ‘not only a civil right but also the entering wedge into a broad range of social privileges’ (1997: 37). Claiming their status as independent workers and householders, African Americans made use of the law to undermine notions of the natural dependency of Black Americans that were rooted in slavery. White supremacists could see the value in African Americans marrying each other after slavery as it would legitimize the offspring of former slaves who, in turn, would not become a burden to the state. Interracial marriages, or miscegenation (as it was termed beginning in 1864), was another matter, however, and became the focus of much litigation in the era of Jim Crow. The trials that resulted highlight political and social anxieties about racial identity and the shaky foundations of racial science. Cases involving marriages between whites and non-whites (including Indians, Asians, Latino/as and African Americans) came to court across the country as citizens challenged the power of the states and the federal government to impose restrictions on such marriages. In fact, as Peggy Pascoe demonstrated, restrictions against interracial marriage became ‘the foundation of post-Civil War white supremacy’ (2009). These cases forced lawyers, judges, marriage licence clerks and interracial couples to confront the contradiction between the imperative of racial classification, on the one hand, and the instability of racial categories, on the other. As Pascoe shows, lawyers often relied on the jury’s ‘visual scrutiny’ to determine a person’s race in nineteenth-century miscegenation trials, but the courts also looked to racial science: ‘A century-long parade of experts – beginning, in the nineteenth century, with naturalists, physicians, ethnologists, and physical anthropologists and ending, after the turn of the twentieth century, with eugenicists – had claimed scientific authority over the study of race, and all had lent their authority to various forms of white supremacy one after another’ (2009: 117). Though an impressive array of experts appeared in US courtrooms to delineate racial differences, few if any agreed on the boundaries and characteristics of racial categories. Instead of abandoning the project of classification, however, ethnologists simply added more categories. Even as social scientists were increasingly arguing that such racial classifications were arbitrary, they showed remarkable staying power. As they chose marriage partners, visited public places of entertainment or exercised their Fourteenth Amendment rights, African Americans butted up against notions of Blackness that were born during slavery. In order to justify enslavement and sustain the fiction that Black men and women were biologically incapable of citizenship, notions of the inhumanity of Africans and African Americans circulated throughout New World

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slave societies. Black bodies were determined, often through medical experimentation on slaves, to be monstrous or defective. A host of imaginary ‘black diseases’ were described in medical treatises by antebellum doctors, most notably Samuel A. Cartwright. Most of the racial science in post-emancipation America, including the idea that Black women’s bodies were monstrous and disease prone, had its roots in slavery (Morgan 2004). But with emancipation the need to prove African Americans as incapable of citizenship acquired a new urgency. Racial science became a crucial part of the ‘evidence’ necessary to uphold and justify Jim Crow laws and extralegal practices. In many ways, racial science was invigorated by the new political landscape; as Sanderson noted in his speech, pseudoscience was embraced by those in the White House and the California governor’s mansion, and a host of other Americans who found these ideas palatable and necessary to control the newly freed Black population.

Centring Black women Black women’s bodies proved central to the discourse and practice of white supremacy. As Sarah Haley (2016) has shown, gendered ideology and gendered racial terror were essential to the creation of Jim Crow and the New South. Haley’s study traces Georgia’s transition from an agricultural, plantation-based economy to an industrial one, underscoring the ways in which gender and punishment and the devaluation and dehumanization of Black life more broadly made the new world order of post-emancipation society – Jim Crow modernity – possible. Georgia epitomized the fast-moving pace of southern regeneration after the Civil War and became a symbol of New Southern prosperity. It was convict labour that provided the resources for southern modernization. The construction of the Black female deviant loomed large in the annals of the convict labour camps and prisons that proliferated in the post-emancipation South. Indeed, imprisoning and abusing African American female convicts depended in part on the illegibility of Black women. As Haley notes, ‘In the white imaginary “black woman” was an oxymoronic formulation because the modifier “black” rejected everything associated with the universal “woman”’ (2016: 21). The assault on Black women could come in many forms in post-emancipation societies and the significance and variety of Black women’s resistance has been a central feature of historical accounts of the era. Black women participated in everyday acts of resistance as they had during slavery, fighting off would-be attackers and engaging in physical and mental self-care (Camp 2004). Talitha LeFlouria, who studied convict labour in Georgia, records instances of women refusing to wear prison-issued uniforms, escaping the sites of imprisonment, and in a few cases, women likely used homeopathic knowledge to abort the fetus that resulted from rape (2015: 136–7). Tera Hunter (1997), in her study of post-emancipation Atlanta, pointed to the multiple forms of resistance that newly freed women employed. Since most Black women worked as domestics in this era, ‘women’s success or frustrations in influencing the character of domestic labor would define how meaningful freedom would be’ (Hunter 1997: 26). Domestic workers found ways to control their environment by dictating the conditions of their labour and therefore ensuring that their lives as free people looked radically different from their lives as slaves. The industrialists and merchants of Atlanta were increasingly frustrated by the success of Black women’s efforts to set the terms of their employment and went to great lengths to stymy their autonomy. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, white politicians and physicians blamed Black domestics for a wave of tuberculosis, couching their rhetoric in scientific legitimacy. Framing tuberculosis, the number one health problem in the nation,

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FIGURE 9.2  Atlanta washerwoman. © Getty Images.

as a Black disease in the formative years of segregation had significant consequences. In Macon and Atlanta, Georgia, in the early twentieth century, washerwomen were required to obtain licences, wear badges and sometimes have their homes inspected (Hunter 1997: 204) (Figure 9.2). The bodies of Black women represented a threat to the maintenance of a healthy white society, but controlling the labour of African Americans was equally if not more important to New Southern politicians as was the public health concerns over disease. The stereotypes that portrayed African Americans as biologically inferior and therefore naturally dangerous, diseased, violent or oversexed, inspired political mobilization on the part of Black citizens. This mobilization had roots in the civil rights movements of the nineteenth century, including the abolitionist movement and those of Reconstruction, such as the one Sanderson was a part of in San Francisco. In the twentieth century, the political mobilization of Black citizens is often associated with the founding of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. The NAACP’s role in creating new ways to think about Blackness and racial categories is undeniable. Though the culmination of their fight against segregation would reach fruition in the decades after 1920, the organization laid the groundwork for those critical interventions in their early repudiation of Jim Crow and the racial beliefs that held it in place. In opposition to the racial science espoused by white supremacists, members of the NAACP embraced the ideology of racial uplift with its message of self-help and class differentiation.

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‘Elite blacks’, as Kevin Gaines has argued, ‘believed they were replacing the racist notion of fixed biological racial differences with an evolutionary view of cultural assimilation, measured primarily by the family and civilization’ (1996: 3–4). The ideology of racial uplift would be critical to the struggle against white supremacist notions of unfit Black bodies, but it came with its own set of contradictions. While the work of the NAACP, and the leadership of W. E. B. DuBois in particular, have been the focus of much earlier scholarship, it was but one site of organized resistance to the pervasive ideologies of white supremacy, not the first. The most significant organization of Black women’s clubs, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), was founded in 1896 with the explicit aim of countering the claims of the white press and its representations of Black women’s sexual depravity. Race women were ‘reconstructing womanhood’, as Hazel Carby (1987) outlined in her study of Black female novelists. This project involved a concerted effort on the part of organizers, church groups, reformers and Black intellectuals to recast Black women as respectable, a topic that has been at the centre of much scholarship (Higginbotham 1993). Recently, Brittany Cooper (2017) has pointed to the malleability of the concept of ‘respectability’ and the multiple ways in which Black women navigated the demands of respectability politics during the age of Jim Crow America. In particular, she stresses the use of embodied discourse in the work of Black female intellectuals, an intervention in the notion that race women always worked to make their bodies invisible. To be sure, as Darlene Clark Hine has made plain, Black women had ample reason to engage in the practice of dissemblance – a practice whereby women worked to erase body and sex from their writing and politics – but Cooper finds evidence of other forms of politics that manifest themselves in the intellectual work of race women such as Anna Julia Cooper and Fannie Barrier Williams (Cooper 2017; Hine 1990). This work points to the multiple pathways embraced by African American women in their quest for citizenship rights and social justice. The anti-lynching movement, an essential aspect of post-emancipation politics, was spearheaded and sustained by members of the Black women’s club movement. The intrepid journalist Ida B. Wells initiated the movement when the number of victims reached epidemic proportions in the 1890s. The number of lynchings peaked in 1892 when 235 people were lynched. Wells, for good reason, focused her campaign on African American victims in the South and the ‘threadbare lies’ that white southerners used to justify the crime. Her influential tract A Red Record, published in 1895, served as a primer for later activists such as James Weldon Johnson and Walter White of the NAACP, as well as the thousands of women in clubs and church groups who formed the movement’s grassroots (McMurray 1998; Brown 2000; Schechter 2001; Feimster 2009). Exposing the lies about Black men and their natural tendency towards predation became a critical strategy of the movement (Hall 1979).

The unfit Black body One of the most pervasive applications of racial science came in the form of eugenics, popularized in the United States in the early twentieth century. Eugenicists, most of whom subscribed to the theory that African Americans constituted the bottom rung of racial classification schemes, argued that Black Americans were unfit to reproduce (Mitchell 2004). The influence of eugenicists could be seen in everything from academic conferences to popular films. These characterizations of Black bodies as unfit had dire consequences as they could be used to justify rape, lynching, sterilization and myriad forms of segregation. To counter eugenicist claims, African Americans engaged in a range

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of intellectual and political efforts to show the fitness of Black culture and families and to guarantee healthy reproduction of the race. These efforts often reflected a willingness to embrace conventional gender roles, recommending domesticity as the proper sphere for female life and work. Black women could provide evidence of proper domesticity in the form of tidy homes, better baby contests and uplifting community work. Better baby contests, in particular, were designed to showcase the fact that Black families practiced appropriate parenting skills – including ‘sanitary and hygienic precautions’ that would ensure the future of the race. In Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2004), Michele Mitchell points to the ways African American reformers resisted racial proscriptions by working to eradicate vice, eliminate poverty and reduce illegitimacy, among other efforts. As Mitchell argues, ‘Whereas African Americans had to contend with a legion of theory that implied all people of color sprung from degenerate stock, they could actually subvert racism within eugenic thought through the guise of racial uplift’ (2004: 81). This project – of embracing the tenets of racial uplift and subverting racist stereotypes – relied on women’s domestic labour: ‘women were expected to steer youths from urban vice, keep errant husbands in check, and maintain a sanitary home environment for the sake of producing better children’ (172). Resisting racial science had different outcomes for Black women and men; for women, their reproductive capacities made them particularly vulnerable to surveillance both from eugenicists and African American race men, many of whom readily subscribed to patriarchal values. Calls for racial pride were not uniform, even though most organizations advocating Black freedom adhered to a conventional – and patriarchal – understanding of gender roles. The United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamaica by Marcus Garvey in 1914, advocated a plan for Black solidarity that attracted millions of followers and a legion of detractors. When Garvey moved the headquarters to Harlem in 1917, immigrants from the Caribbean, recent southern migrants and middle-class African Americans joined up. The appeal for many was Garvey’s insistence that Black people reject the racial inferiority being touted by white society. By 1923, there were six million UNIA members and nine hundred branches in the United States alone (Taylor 2002: 41). While Garvey and the UNIA called for liberation from racial subordination and Black political independence across the globe, they also promoted ideologies of racial superiority that aligned with those of eugenicists. Garvey claimed that his organization would ‘save the negro race from extinction through miscegenation’, while the NAACP, he argued, promoted racial amalgamation (Pascoe 2009: 183). The standoff between these two organizations revealed not only the wide variety of politics in Black America but also the myriad responses to white supremacy and its call for white racial purity. Eventually Garvey’s embrace of Black racial purity led him to speak favourably of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, calling them ‘a better friend of the race than all the groups of hypocritical whites put together’ (Gaines 1996: 240). Garvey’s appeals for racial purity also translated into support for miscegenation laws, a position that, again, put the UNIA squarely at odds with the NAACP. By the 1920s a diverse group of Black leaders, including W. E. B. DuBois, Chicago Defender publisher Robert S. Abbott, labour leader A. Philip Randolph and socialist journalist Chandler Owen, were calling for Garvey’s end, some advocating deportation (Stein 1986; Gaines 1996; Taylor 2002). Yet Garvey’s appeal to Black Americans should not be discounted; it helps us understand the attraction of a strong platform and ideology that stood up to white supremacy, one that put Black people first and was unapologetically pro-Black. Further, Garveyism, as Ula Taylor and

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Michele Mitchell have shown, spoke to Black women’s concern about racial destiny and reproduction (Taylor 2002; Mitchell 2004). Being a mother and raising children meant promoting Black consciousness and race pride from infancy forward and Garveyites placed great value in this role as it meshed with the ‘movement’s primary aim of black self-determination’ (Mitchell 2004: 191). As Black migrants increasingly left the South for northern and western cities, they swelled the ranks of organizations such as the UNIA, NACW and NAACP. They were also, however, viewed with alarm by those, including race theorists, urban planners and Progressive reformers, who perceived their presence as a threat. The study of urban vice and Black criminality in particular, led to a proliferation of theories that focused on the natural – and biologically based – deficiencies of the ‘Negro character’. As Kahlil Gibran Muhammad shows, after the 1890 census, prison statistics ‘became the basis of a national discussion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous class’ (2010: 3). Black criminality became central to the way discussions of race were constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Muhammad asserts that Black criminality ‘was crucial to the shaping of modern urban America’, and the way ‘reformers imagined black people as inferior and fundamentally different’ would have reverberations in public policy for decades to come (272–3). The implications could be devastating: Black communities being left to fend for themselves, ‘often left brutalized and unprotected’ and told to solve their own problems before seeking assistance from others (273). African American researchers and reformers pushed against the tendency to see Black Americans as especially prone to crime due to biological deficiencies, but they themselves were marginalized in the field of progressive reform. W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and other Black thinkers pointed to the problematic framing of African Americans as dangerous and criminally inclined. They insisted that the racial violence directed at Black bodies by whites, most obviously in the form of lynching, should be the national priority. Anti-lynching bills stalled in Congress and were never passed in the United States. Migrants newly arrived in Chicago, Los Angeles or Harlem faced few employment choices, restricted and inferior housing options and an avalanche of Progressive-era theories that assured their unsuitability for urban life. The presence of so many female migrants at the end of the nineteenth century ‘spurred the concern that black women were defying nature’, travelling without male partners or the protection of a male figure (Gaines 1996: 140). In the labour market, Black women confronted limited choices due in part to theories of their uncivilized or untrustworthy natures. For women employed in sex work, as Cynthia M. Blair shows, their ‘presumed sexual debasement’ resulted in fewer clients and lower wages than white women doing the same work in brothels and places of entertainment. Black and white women, as Blair explained, ‘were distinctly different commodities within Chicago’s sex marketplace’ (Blair 2010: 46). Given women’s limited options for paid employment, female migrants often pieced together work in domestic settings that, like the Atlanta washerwomen of the previous generation, exposed them to the vagaries of the urban marketplace. In the era of Jim Crow, female migrants sought ways to control their labour, their bodies and the urban spaces they found themselves in, be they juke joints, boarding houses or cinemas. American cities became important sites for the manifestation of racial anxieties including fear of interracial mixing and marriage. Interracial contact on streetcars had been the subject of concern since the nineteenth century, and Black women were quick to use the courts as places to challenge segregated public transportation (Hudson 2003). Theatres, since the time of minstrelsy, had long been a place where the tenets of white

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supremacy were on display; they were also places where white supremacy was challenged as Black patrons defied segregated seating plans. With the rise of cinema, movie theatres became sites where the dangers of integration or race-mixing must also be guarded against. But as Cara Caddoo (2014) has shown African Americans were quick to realize the potential of film, producing and screening films in churches and lodges beginning in the 1890s. This experience in filmmaking and the familiarity with the medium meant that Black citizens also recognized the dangers that cinema could encompass. When D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of A Nation opened in 1915 (Figure 9.3), Black urban dwellers mobilized what Caddoo calls the first Black protest movement of the twentieth century.

FIGURE 9.3  The Birth of a Nation (1915). © Getty Images.

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The film telegraphed white anxiety about black political power during Reconstruction as well as the dangers of interracial contact. The opening of the film coincided with the Panama Pacific International Exhibition (PPIE) in San Francisco; a world’s fair where eugenics and racial science were prominent features. World’s fairs would be significant sites for the promotion of eugenics and other race science. Beginning in the nineteenth century, these venues became staging grounds for Americans to showcase new findings from the nation’s ethnographers, social scientists and anthropologists. Fairs shaped public perceptions about what constituted racial difference. But the PPIE was the first world’s fair where race science proved ubiquitous, as it hosted a range of eugenics-related displays and conferences and provided a crucial public platform for these ideas (Stern [2005] 2016). Thousands of visitors were drawn to the extremely popular Race Betterment booth (which was actually six booths) in the Palace of Education. Recently founded in Michigan by cereal magnate John H. Kellogg, the Race Betterment Foundation enjoyed quite a receptive audience in California. David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University and its current chancellor, attended the Second National Conference on Race Betterment held at the fair and soon became one of California’s leading eugenicists (Stern [2005] 2016: 51). The PPIE also attracted up and coming proponents of ‘better breeding’ including Paul Popenoe, who would be instrumental in California’s eugenics movement and one of the leading architects of the state’s sterilization programme. Popenoe designed an eye-catching photograph display for the Race Betterment booth and delivered a lecture at the fair, ‘Natural Selection in Man’ (Rydell 1984: 180). Members of the Ninth International Congress of the World’s Purity Federation convened at the fair throughout July and August, and the lectures delivered at a meeting of the Education Congress addressed race betterment as well (224). As Stern explained, ‘The nucleus of California’s eugenics movement converged at PPIE’ ([2005] 2016: 55). Fair organizers thrilled to the concentration of eugenicists at the fair, and wrote to the leaders of the Race Betterment Foundation, ‘You represent the very spirit, the very ideal of this great Exposition that we have created here’ (Kline 2001: 14). The Race Betterment conference received more press than any other attraction, more than one million lines of coverage by the Associated Press and the United Press (15). The prominence of racial discourse at the fair translated into dire predictions for Black Californians. African Americans threatened racial purity, according to eugenicists, and their presence in the state could only be a hindrance. Nearly fifty years after Jeremiah Sanderson warned of the prevalence of racial science in the state, Black citizens confronted a cultural event witnessed by millions and marked by the predominance of eugenicists. Delilah Beasley, a Black journalist, covered the PPIE for northern California’s mainstream daily and largest newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, and for one of the city’s Black newspapers, the Oakland Sunshine (Figure 9.4). Black readers in California and around the country looked to Beasley, one of the West’s most influential Black reporters, to convey news about cultural events and the pressing political concerns of a population living through the age of Jim Crow. Beasley believed that the PPIE would be an ideal setting to protest Jim Crow inside and outside the fairgrounds. Convincing her readership that race pride and racial uplift could be exercised at the PPIE would not be easy, however. For the nearly nineteen million people who attended the fair between opening day on 20 February and 4 December – and who wandered through eleven major exhibit halls, twenty-one national pavilions, over twenty-five buildings devoted to states or regions – damaging representations of Blackness would be hard to ignore. From the midway, or Joy Zone, to the ethnological exhibits and even the Palace of Food Products, visitors

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FIGURE 9.4  Delilah Beasley. © Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California.

witnessed a range of racialized subjects, stereotypes and caricatures of African Americans. While she was not the first African American to utilize fairs as opportunities to interpret the role of Black America in the nation at large, Beasley interpreted race and nation in a different context: this fair occurred during a world war, after thousands of Black women in California and other western states had earned the right to vote, on the eve of national women’s suffrage and during the opening of The Birth of a Nation. For many Black women, the convergence of these events marked the onset of a new role in American public life. A counterpoint to the fair’s representations of Black inferiority was staged by the Black women’s club movement who organized participation in the parade that occurred on PPIE’s Alameda County Day. The ‘industrial parade’ began at 10.00 am sharp on

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10 June at the San Francisco Ferry Building; it then proceeded along Market Street through the centre of the city to Van Ness Avenue, which led to the eastern gates of the fair at the Joy Zone. Marching down Market Street, a favourite large boulevard for city parades, meant parading in front of thousands of spectators; it also meant spectators could watch for free without paying admission to the PPIE. Once inside the fairgrounds, the parade moved through the Joy Zone, past the African Dip and down the Avenue of Progress, eventually finishing at the Band Concourse. The event drew hordes of spectators, and if the Sunshine accurately assessed the extent of African American participation, it was sizable. ‘Everybody shut up shop and [got] themselves across the channel to the big Exposition grounds’ (Editorial 1915). Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle (1915) claimed that the parade was ‘a revelation’, one of the best parades of the fair since its opening in February. The PPIE’s official band led the parade, and white women of the Grand Army of the Republic marched behind it. Lavishly decorated floats dominated the day. Black women’s clubs had their own plan to impress the crowd, however. Two floats sponsored by the Colored Women’s Clubs, including one overflowing with seventy-five schoolchildren all dressed in uniform and waving American flags and California Bear flags, carried African Americans across the city and through the fairgrounds. Black women who participated in the Alameda County Day parade had a surprise on their float of schoolchildren, about which most white spectators knew nothing. Earlier that year, PPIE officials and the San Francisco Call newspaper had announced a contest to name the fair. Unbeknownst to them, of the thirteen thousand entries, an African American school girl, Virginia Stephens, had won the contest with her submission, ‘Jewel City’. The committee, made up of dignitaries and Mayor James Rolph Jr learned that Stephens was African American hours after they made the selection. They chose not to advertise the fact. The Civic Center and other Black women’s clubs decided there could be no better way to enforce the message of Black equality than to celebrate the winner by presenting her on the float of schoolchildren. Stephens stood proudly under a showy banner that declared her an American. Members of the Afro-American League put it thusly, ‘As very few of our white friends knew that Miss Stephens was colored, the clubs took this means to inform the public by a large banner of her presence in the float of her nationality … It was indeed a great day for our county and especially our people’ (Editorial 1915). Beasley’s first special feature about the fair, published on 26 June, was simply called ‘Colored Race at the Exposition’. It began by reminding readers of the boycott of The Birth of a Nation, then playing in California theatres. Beasley had written repeatedly, as had her Los Angeles counterpart, Charlotta Bass, editor of the Black newspaper The California Eagle, to encourage Black Californians to protest and, if possible, ban the performances of the film. She reported that the film was enjoying a ‘return engagement’ in San Francisco and ‘we as a people will have to grit our teeth and ignore’ it. But she did not feel that protests against The Birth of a Nation by Black Californians had been in vain; in fact, she believed ‘and not without a reason’ that an invitation for African Americans to participate in Alameda County Day was a direct result of their protests. According to Beasley, Black resistance to the demeaning stereotypes of The Birth of a Nation had paid off; the state’s elite, as represented by the fair’s organizers, had taken heed of Black Californians and their numbers if not their political presence. As far as Beasley was concerned ‘the mere fact that colored children marched through the streets of San Francisco, carrying the Stars and Stripes, showed a decided advance and change of feeling toward the colored race in these parts’ (Beasley 1915). To Beasley the participation of Black women and children in the parade, on flower-covered floats beneath an American

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flag, signalled a reinscribing of the rights of citizenship. This may have been wishful thinking on her part. Black participation in the parade could also be interpreted as an appeasement strategy: the city continued to show The Birth of a Nation and gave African Americans a float or two in the parade to keep them quiet. The fair provided its millions of visitors, including African Americans, a world of information about the country’s Black citizens. Though some of the sites, lectures and exhibits reflected a deep commitment to racial hierarchies and white supremacy – especially the Race Betterment booth in the Education building – other messages about race and Black people were on offer at the PPIE. Visitors could learn about Black colleges and universities, sample the musical expertise of a number of ensembles and witness the power and tenacity of Black women’s clubs as they paraded through the city and the fairgrounds. The presence of African Americans at the fair, as visitors and presenters, as Mabel Wilson explained, ruptured ‘the nation’s narrative of freedom, liberty, and equality’ (2012: 130). Delilah Beasley hoped the parade and exhibits of African American accomplishments would override eugenicist’s claims of unfit Black bodies. The parade that Beasley attended that June day was a spectacle of citizenship and patriotism with Black women at the centre. To some observers African American women seemed out of place in the Exposition parade; and that was precisely the point. The PPIE, however briefly, became a place for African Americans to claim their fitness for citizenship and counter the eugenicist notions so prominent at the fair.

CONCLUSION The era from Reconstruction to the First World War ushered in dramatic shifts in Black life as the meaning of Emancipation was crafted by Black reformers, prisoners, domestic workers, novelists, social scientists and intellectuals. Yet as Black citizens struggled to define the meaning of freedom they faced an onslaught of damaging social and pseudoscientific constructs that aimed to place them beyond the parameters of citizenship. Jim Crow necessitated a complex web of legal, political, social and cultural enforcements, including a discourse that masqueraded as science and upheld white supremacy. African Americans resisted the pseudoscience that upheld legal and extralegal manifestations of white supremacy with varying degrees of success. Beasley and Sanderson exercised their influence in the public sphere through the press and the ballot box. But Black citizens acted on multiple levels and took their fight to the street, the pulpit, the schools and the cinema. Through boycotts, columns in the press and education, African Americans not only countered racialist theories but also provided alternative ways to understand race, difference and democracy. Measuring the success of these efforts is nearly impossible: resisting racial science meant facing a moving target. The theories and practices of white supremacy moved into the new century with renewed commitment, as the reinvigoration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s demonstrated so clearly. Nearly half a century separated the civil rights activism of Jeremiah Sanderson and Delilah Beasley. Both participated in parades in downtown San Francisco hoping for a better future for African Americans. For Sanderson the tenets of scientific racism threatened to undo a very fragile freedom in the years immediately following the Civil War, for Beasley little had changed. The theories of racial science had in fact gained more of a footing in their home state of California and across the nation. While Black westerners have often been seen as peripheral to the organization of Black resistance movements, Beasley and Sanderson demonstrate that Black Californians felt themselves

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to be central to the pressing political issues of the day. Pushing back against the systems of Jim Crow felt as necessary for these westerners as it did for the African Americans in the New South. As Black citizens shaped the contours of freedom they faced a national fabric where ideologies of Black inferiority were woven into the social, political and cultural landscape. Resistance took many shapes: from the club movement, to the organization of the NAACP, to work stoppages on chain gains, to the anti-lynching movement, to litigation aimed at exposing the absurdity of racial science. The proliferation of African American organizations, the Black press and the migration to cities north and west created new avenues – literal and figurative – where Black voices could speak out against white supremacy. The Great Migration between the two world wars would reconfigure the political and cultural landscape; Black Americans would find themselves with greater access to the ballot box, education, a free press and livable wages in northern and western cities. Although it would take another half a century before the long civil rights movement bore fruit, the seeds were sown by freedom fighters in the years between Emancipation and Progressive America.

NOTES

Introduction 1 The allusion here is to Kuklick (1991). 2 The term ‘strategic relativism’ is coined as an opposite to Chakravorty Spivak’s characterization of the modern episteme of groupness as ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak 1987: 205). Correspondingly, ‘strategic relativism’ should be understood as a discourse and stance that relativizes the bounded and internally homogeneous nature of the constituent elements of the socio-political space and governance and produces a situation of uncertainty, incommensurability and indistinction. For more, see Gerasimov et al. (2009: 20).

Chapter 2 1 Thomas Henry Huxley Collection (1864–6), Ethnology Notebook, vol. 102, 13. Imperial College Archives, London.

Chapter 3 1

Renan’s view of universal history retained deeply providential roots: Christianity ‘contains the secret of the future’ and ‘the seed of all progress’, whereas ‘the continuation of Judaism was not Christianity, but Islam’; ‘the Turk who is a devout Muslim is in our day a far truer Semite than the Israelite who has become French or, more precisely, European’ (Renan 1896: 104). 2 The journal was founded by Ya’qub Sarruf and Farris Nimr, then ‘native tutors’ of the interdenominational missionary school founded in 1866, or ‘The Syrian Protestant College’. It was also first published under the auspices of the SPC Press. Sarruf and Nimr had been among the first students to graduate from the College before working as ‘native tutors’, and it was there that they first read and studied Darwin’s works, particularly Descent of Man. It seems that they first studied this with Edward van Dyck, an amateur evolutionist (he later sent Darwin an article on the ‘Evolution of the Street Dogs of Beirut’) and the son of the better-known Orientalist and missionary instructor at the SPC, Cornelius Van Dyck. From the start, Sarruf and Nimr (with both Van Dyck’s encouragement apparently) intended the journal to work towards the ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’ and hence emphasized the connections between science and industry in particular. The journal’s subtitle shifted from ‘A Journal of Science and Industry’ upon its founding in 1876 to ‘A Journal of Science, Industry and Agriculture’ in 1888, adding ‘and Medicine’ in 1893. For more on this journal, and the evangelical context behind its publication and the journal’s growing interest in the new (and particularly the evolutionary) sciences of the time, see Elshakry (2013). 3 Zaydan was forced to resign from his appointment as lecturer in Islamic history before he could present these.

Chapter 4 1 In 1831 there is mention of a son being born to ‘the lady of Lt. G. Pope’. The phrase ‘lady of’ is usually code for a local, usually non-Christian woman (Brown and Clark 1831).

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NOTES

Chapter 5 1 The term inorodtsy had a long history in imperial Russia. Literally ‘people of another origin’, in one of its meanings it referred to the corporate estate of Inorodtsy created by the 1822 Statute on the Inorodtsy by the Governor General of Siberia M. M. Speransky. The statute draft of 1913 was meant to be an improvement on the 1822 document, which created the legal estate for the native peoples of Siberia. Inorodtsy could also refer to any native peoples, or any non-Russian group in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, but that usage was distinct from the legal category. On the introduction of the Statute, see Raeff (1956). On the smaller peoples of Siberia, see Forsyth (1994) and Slezkine (1996). On the evolution and different usages of the term inorodtsy, see Slocum (1998). 2 For a discussion of the biologizing element in Soviet class categorization, see Weitz (2002). See also Hirsch (2014) on the Soviet ethnographic imagination.

Chapter 6 1 This was the twentieth-century term (Günther 1933: 9). 2 From 1900, some termed this the Alpine race. 3 Nordic become the twentieth-century designation for this type.

Chapter 7 1 Gender historians tend to reject the concept of ‘patriarchy’ because it can be essentialist, see Joan Wallach Scott (1986). However, I believe that the term possesses use-value as a descriptive shorthand to signify an entire system of male domination. Qualified as such, it possesses some advantages, because it encompasses not just gender but also class, power, status and, potentially, race in discussions. So long as it is historicized, the concept of patriarchy, like other typologies borrowed from sociology, can, in my opinion, be incorporated in historical analyses.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Roland Cvetkovski is private lecturer for eastern European history at the University of Cologne, Germany. His research interests are located in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and range from spatial history and imperial studies to knowledge history and museum studies. He is the author of ‘Modernization through Acceleration’ (in German, 2006) and co-editor of An Empire of Others. Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (2014) as well as of Imperial Cooperation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (2015). He is currently preparing a monograph on the Art Museum in the late Tsarist Empire and the early Soviet Union. Marwa Elshakry is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, USA. She teaches on a range of subjects in the history of the modern sciences and modern intellectual history, with a special interest in Arabic traditions of science and their attendant historiographical canonization. Her books include Science, Race and Imperialism (coedited with Sujit Sivasundaram; 2012) and Reading Darwin in Arabic (2013). Sergey Glebov is an Professor of History at Smith College, USA, and Amherst College, USA, and a research fellow at Tyumen State University, Russia. He received his PhD from Rutgers University, USA, in 2004. Among his publications are From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism 1920s–1930s (2017) and, coedited with Mark Bassin and Marlene Laruelle, Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (2015). His is currently working on the history of the Russian Far East. Lynn M. Hudson is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, where she is also an affiliated faculty member of the Black studies department. Her areas of specialization include US history, African American history, women and gender history, the history of the US West and public history. She is the author of The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (2003) and West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California’s Color Line (2020). She is currently working on a biography of Marie Battle Singer, an African American expatriate who became the UK’s first Black psychoanalyst. Emily Kern is a postdoctoral research fellow in the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her research has been published in the British Journal for the History of Science, Eurozine and Merkur. She is currently working on her first book, The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, about human evolutionary origins and the search for the cradle of humankind. Richard McMahon lectures on EU politics at University College London, UK. Previously, he has been a Marie Curie senior research fellow (University of Portsmouth, UK), an

214

CONTRIBUTORS

ESRC researcher (University of Bristol, UK) and a lecturer or senior lecturer at several British, Irish and German universities. He has published several articles, a monograph, The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences 1839– 1939 (2016) and an edited volume, National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945 (2019) on the use of race in identity politics. Marina Mogilner is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, where she holds the Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History, a research fellow at Tyumen State University and a co-founder and co-editor of the Ab Imperio quarterly. She is the author of multiple articles and chapters exploring the politics of knowledge in the Russian Empire. Her most recent book, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (2013), offers a history of race science in the Russian Empire. She is currently completing a book on Jewish selfracializing in the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. Projit Bihari Mukharji is Associate Professor in History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences (2016) and Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (2009). He is currently working on a history of race science in mid-twentieth-century India provisionally titled Brown Skins, White Coats. Maria Sophia Quine was a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History in the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Since her retirement, she has held various affiliations, including, currently, as Senior Research Fellow in the History of Race, Science, and Fascism in the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Originally a social-political historian of Italian fascism and comparative welfare policies towards women and the family, she still explores the themes of the regulation and representation of sex, reproduction, sexuality, race and gender, though now, primarily, from a transnational perspective. Her most recent book, co-authored with Marius Turda, is Historicizing Race (2018). Myrna Perez Sheldon is Assistant Professor, jointly appointed in Classics & Religious Studies and in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Ohio University, USA. She researches how both evolutionary science and Christianity influence racial and sexual identities in the United States. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Isis, The Immanent Frame and Signs. She is currently the PI of a three-year grant project, ‘Critical Approaches to Science and Religion’, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which intends to reshape the study of science and religion by engaging the field with critical-race, feminist, queer and postcolonial theory.

INDEX

Abbott, Robert S. 173 Adorno, Theodor W. 19 aesthetic movement 25–6 Afghani, al-Din al- 62–6 al-barbar 59, 62 Al-Hilal (The Crescent) 69 Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) 66–9 Alameda County Day parade 177–9 Ammon, Otto 117 Andaman Islands 87–90 Anglo-Saxonism 31, 116, 118 anthropocentric explanations 2 anthropology 9, 10–12, 25–6, 37, 111, 114, 115–16, 119–20 anthropometrics 8, 78, 86–7, 139–40 anthroposociology 117 anti-lynching movement 172, 174 anti-Semitism 12, 19, 21, 30–1 Anuchin, Dmitrii 85, 120 Arabs 57–73, 134 archaeology 116 Arnold, Matthew 118, 122 Arseniev, Vladimir Klavdievich 100, 104, 106–8, 110 artistic representations 130–6, 145 Aryanism 4, 77, 116–17 Asad, Tal 159–60 Asian language 40, 42 assimilation 121–4 atavism 12 Baartman, Saartjie 7 Bass, Charlotta 178 Beasley, Delilah 176–7, 178 beauty 138–40, 141–3, 151–5, 156, 157, 158–9 Beddoe, John 117 berbers 59, 62 Bertillon, Alphonse 8 better baby contests 35, 173 biocolonial exchanges 86 biological sex differences 136–41 biometrics 78 biopolitics 160

biopower 150 Birth of A Nation, The 175–6, 178 black codes 32 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown 140 blood-typing 114 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 9, 25–6, 37, 77 Bory de Saint-Vincent, Jean Baptiste 114 Boxer Rebellion 102 Broca, Paul 89, 122 Brynner, Julius 99 Burbank, Jane 1 California State Board of Education 75 Carlyle, Thomas 116 Cartwright, Samuel A. 170 Chambers, Robert 48–9 Chinese 18, 97–110 cinema 175–6, 178 civic nationalism 117–25 civilization 16–17, 58–66 class system 116–17 classification 20, 24, 26, 38, 42, 46–8, 52, 76, 78, 111–18, 125 colonialism 21, 22–4, 30, 68, 75–6, 87, 88, 95, 99, 157 Cooper, Frederick 1 Corsembleu de Desmahis, Joseph-FrançoisÉdouard de 129 craniology 26, 37, 78 Crawfurd, John 51 criminality 8, 12, 174 Crowe, Eyre 132–3 cultural anthropology 10–11 Cunningham, David Douglas 84–5 Cuvier, Georges 42–4 Czekanowski, Jan 125 d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 129 Darwin, Charles 10, 14, 29, 39, 50, 57, 66, 67, 136, 156, 157–60 Dattan, Adolf 101 Davenport, Charles 162 de Montagu, Mr 85 de Staël, Germaine 127

216

defamiliarization 4 degeneration 12, 37 democracy 118, 167 development hypothesis 49 Diderot, Denis 129 discrimination 28–35 disease 170–1 Disraeli, Benjamin 29 Douglass, Frederick 167 Dubois, Eugène 39 DuBois, W. E. B. 172, 173, 174 Ecker, Alexander 138 education 128–30 Edwards, William Frederic 76, 77, 112–13, 115, 124 Eickstedt, Egon von 125 Elbe, Burkard 79, 80, 81 empires 14–15, 93–4, 119 equality 26–8, 128–30 Estlin, Dr John Bishop 84 ethnicity 17, 30, 111–26 ethnology 76, 87–8, 112–13, 114, 115 ethnonationalism 119–21 eugenics 10, 34–5, 161–3, 172–3, 176 evolution 10, 29, 50–4, 57, 66–9, 136, 157 Ferrero, Guglielmo 141 films 175–6, 178 fingerprints 14 first globalization 16 Flandin, Mr 84 Foucault, Michel 3, 150, 160 Frazer, James George 11 freak shows 6–8 Fytche, Col. Albert 89 Galton, Francis 10, 14, 34, 86–7, 136–7, 161–2 Garvey, Marcus 173–4 gender 127–47, 170–2 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 130–2, 133–4, 135 gift economies 86 Ginzburg, Carlo 4 Gliddon, George 46, 166 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de 4, 34 Gondatti, Nikolai Lvovich 104, 106–8 Goupil, Adolphe 135 Grave, Vladimir Vladimirovich 104 Grégoire, Abbé 27 Gribskii, General K. N. 102 Griffith, D. W. (The Birth of A Nation) 175–6, 178

INDEX

Guizot, François 114 Günther, H. F. K. 118 Haeckel, Ernst 29, 39, 52–4 hair analysis 75–91 Haiti 28, 45 Hamitic hypothesis 42 Hartnaek, [Edmund?] 84 Herschel, Sir William 14 Hertz, Friedrich Otto 20 Heusinger, Karl Friedrich von 79 Hobsbawm, Eric 2 Horkheimer, Max 19 Hottentot Venus 7 human zoos 6–8 Huxley, Thomas Henry 51–2, 121–2, 136 Ibn Khaldun 58–9 identity 22, 29 identity trials 168 Ili Crisis 98 imperial anthropology 119–20 Indian Religious Crimes Code 11 inorodtsy 108, 182 intelligence, females 138, 143 interracial marriage/mixing 106, 169, 174–6 Irish immigrants 116 Islam 57–73 Ivanovskii, Aleksei 120, 124 Jahiliya 72 Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de 129–30 Jefferson, Thomas 26 Jews 12, 19–20, 21, 27, 28, 30–1, 100, 151–3, 154 Jim Crow laws 32, 167–8 Jones, William 40, 116 Jordan, David Starr 176 Kames, Lord 77 Kant, Immanuel 9 Kazakevich, P. V. 97 Kellogg, John H. 176 kinship 3, 10, 29, 45 Kirchhoff, Alfred 29–30 Klimt, Gustav 145 Knox, Robert 116, 118, 151–6, 157 Kohn, Hans 124–5 Koreans 103–4, 108, 109–10 Korsakov, M. S. 97 Koselleck, Reinhardt 4 Kossinna, Gustaf 117

INDEX

Ku Klux Klan 173 Kunst & Albers 101 Lane Fox, Major General A. 87–9 language 29, 37–55, 67, 69–72, 115 Le Bon, Gustave 60–2, 112 Leith, Dr 85 Linnaeus, Carl 78 Lombroso, Cesare 12 Lombroso, Gina 140–1 Lombroso, Paola 140–1 Lubbock, John 121–2 Luschan, Felix von 120 lynchings 172, 174 McMahon, Richard 17 Man, Edward Horace 87–90 Man, Henry 87, 88 Mantegazza, Paolo 137–9, 141–3 marriage 106, 169, 174–6 Martin, Henri 114 masturbation 142 Maury, Alfred 46–7 Mendeleev, D. I. 100 Michelet, Jules 122 Michels, Roberto 143 microscopy 79–85 Mill, John Stuart 143 Minakov, Piotr Andreevich 85 miscegenation 32, 169, 173 mixed marriages 106, 169, 174–6 mixed-race 24, 154 monogenesis 77–8, 115 Montandon, George 125 Montessori, Maria 139–40 morality 69–72, 143–5 Morton, Samuel 46, 114 Mouat, Dr Frederic J. 89 Muhammadan Civilization 59 Müller, Friedrich Max 50–1 Munch, Edvard 145 Muraviev, N. N. 97 Nahda 71 National Association of Colored Women (NACW) 172 National Association of The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 171–2, 173 national character and class 116–17 national race concept 113–15 nations 17–18, 29–30 Native Americans 11, 28

217

natural history 24, 40–1 natural selection 10, 29, 136, 157 nature, politicization 28–35 Nazi regime 19 Nerval, Gérard de 134 Nicholas II 102 Nimr, Farris 181 Nochlin, Linda 130 Nott, Josiah 46, 166 Oberhaeuser, Georges 84 Otherness 6, 7, 15, 20, 26, 128, 145 Owen, Chandler 173 Panama Pacific International Exhibition (PPIE) 176–9 patriarchy 130, 135, 143, 146, 182 philology 37–55, 115 physical anthropology 25–6 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane Fox 87–9 plebian society 8 politics 28–35, 93–110 polygenesis 33–4, 46, 77–8, 115, 158 Pope, Col. 85–6 Popenoe, Paul 176 population thinking 161–2 Prichard, James Cowles 44–6, 78, 79, 81, 84, 115 Pruner, Franz Ignaz (Pruner-bey) 81–3, 84, 85 psychology, race 118–19 Pushkin, Alexander 85 Quatrefages, Armand de 123–4 Race Betterment Foundation 176 race psychology 118–19 racial identity trials 168 racial thinking 20–1, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35–6 racism 19–21, 26, 28, 32, 34, 35, 36, 125 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 75, 89, 90 Randolph, A. Philip 173 Ranke, Johannes 8 rape 144–5 reconquista 21 reconstruction period 32 religion 57–73 Renan, Ernest 62–6, 112, 122 representations 130–6, 145 Retzius, Gustaf 117 Risley, Sir H. H. 85 ritual murders 12

218

Roberts, Charles 87 Russian imperialism 93–110, 119–20, 125 Sanderson, Jeremiah B. 165–7 Sarruf, Ya’qub 181 Schiele, Egon 145 science 16, 20, 24–5, 59–60, 61, 62–6, 68, 75–91, 154, 155, 167–70 Sédillot, Louis-Pierre-Eugène 59 sero-anthropology 114 sex slaves/tourism 135 sex workers 174 sexual selection 136, 142, 156–9 sexuality 3, 149–64 Siary, Gérard 16 Sieyès, Abbé 116 skull shape 26, 37, 78 slavery 21, 22, 23, 28, 31–2, 42, 130–5, 170 Smith, Adam 156–7 social class 116–17 society 10–11, 68, 127–8, 130, 156–7, 160 Speak, Col. 85 Spencer, Herbert 67, 68, 136, 143 Stephens, Virginia 178 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 4 survivals 10–11 Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts 129

INDEX

Thomson, Professor Allen 88 Török, Aurel von 124 Treitschke, Heinrich von 30 Tristram, Henry Baker 30 tuberculosis 170–1 Tylor, Edward Burnett 10–11 umma 69–72 United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 173 Unterberger, P. F. 103–4 Vacher de Lapouge, George 117 Van Amringe, William 154–6, 157 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 48 Virchow, Rudolf 8, 120 Vogt, Carl 138 Voltaire 129 Vyshnegradskii, I. 100 Wallace, Alfred Russell 32 Weber, Ernst Heinrich 79 Wells, Ida B. 172, 174 Western science 16–17 Wiggam, Albert Edward 161 Woodward, C. Vann 167–8 world’s fairs 176–9 Yellow Peril 102, 104

Tazy 106, 107–8 theatres 174–5 Thierry, Amédée 112, 113, 122

Zaghlūl, Ahmad Fathī 69 Zaydan, Jurji 69–72