Globalisation, Evolution, and the Science of Race

Bronwen Douglas
The Australian National University

Frontispiece: A.H. Guyot (1884), “Johnson’s World, Showing the Distribution of the Principal Races of Man”, David
Rumsey Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~207059~300312

This chapter relates the history of the modern science of race, or raciology, to two contexts. One,

“globalisation”, is empirical – the encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans and the expanding

transnational networks of European savants which enabled Europe’s racialisation and colonisation of

much of the rest of the globe. The other, “evolution”, is intellectual – the genealogy of ideas about

development and transmutation inspired by increasing geological, physiological, anatomical, social, and

anthropological knowledge. My examples are mainly French, British, and German.

Globalisation
Globalisation, defined by Robertson as “the compression of the world and the intensification of

consciousness of the world as a whole”, is often taken as a 20th-century product of modernity, though

these processes span more than 2,000 years.1 I identify four phases in the history of globalisation but

1
Robertson, 1992, pp. 6-8.
 2

focus on the second and third, correlating the expansion of geographical knowledge with shifting

European conceptions of human difference or race. In the first, the spatial contours of the globe emerged

following 15th-century Iberian movements beyond Europe. In the second, most of the globe was mapped

during the century of scientific travel and commercial expansion after 1750. In the third, vast zones were

annexed by European, United States, and Japanese colonialisms during heightened imperial competition

after 1850. The fourth, postcolonial phase after World War II is beyond my scope. By making

cartographic history a synecdoche for globalisation, I display graphically the accelerating knowledge and

racialisation of the globe during the second phase and its colonial encompassment in the third.

During the first phase, encounters with Amerindians and sub-Saharan Africans unsettled ancient

European assumptions of universal human similitude.2 Until the late 18th century, bodily variation was

generally regarded as a superficial product of the balance of personal humours and the effects of climate,

lifestyle, and religion on a single, variously civilised human race seen biblically as posterity of one

couple.3 However, from the mid-16th century, mounting European involvement in the west African slave

trade triggered negative substantivisation of the Iberian descriptive adjective negro (“black”) as a pan-

European synonym for the noun “African”, implying paganism, backwardness, ugliness, inferiority, and

enslavement.4

Early in my second phase, Buffon codified and collectivised the venerable belief in climatic

determination of human corporeal qualities. Ascribing the emergence of “varieties in the human species”

to degeneration triggered by the impact of climate, diet, and milieu on a single, migrating species, he

argued that differences in form and temperament were “external” and impermanent.5 Bellin’s world map

of 1764 (Illustration 1) depicts in incomplete coastal outline the world then imperfectly known to

Europeans. Purely geographic in emphasis rather than ethnographic, it marginalises the Pacific Ocean as

an almost empty space with patchwork littorals and blank southern reaches uncluttered by the long

imagined, still sought Terra Australis incognita (“unknown south land”). Riverine networks inscribed

2
Pagden, 1982.
3
Douglas, 2014: chapters 1, 2; Wheeler, 2000, pp. 2-38.
4
Boxer, 1963, pp. 1-40; OUP, 2013, “Negro”,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/125898?redirectedFrom=negro
5
Buffon, 1749, pp. 447-8; 1766, pp. 311, 313; 1777, p. 478.
 3

across the Old World and parts of the New camouflage contemporary European ignorance of much of the

Asian, African, and American interiors.6

Illustration 1: J.N. Bellin (1764), “Carte réduite du globe terrestre”, David Rumsey Map Collection,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~232594~5509294

Three decades later, the great Enlightenment scientific voyages had largely mapped the Pacific

islands and filled coastal gaps outside polar regions. The empirical legacy of these escalating global

encounters doubly challenged climate theory. On the one hand, the “uniform red copper-colour” and

“long straight hair” attributed to Americans across varied climatic zones provided sceptics with strong

“proof” that “the colour of the skin is not the effect of climate”.7 On the other, the co-habitation of

“blacks of the Papuan races” and “yellow Malays” in diverse temperatures in the South Sea Islands

suggested the same conclusion.8 Whereas Buffon’s “environmental” causality made geography and

civility the primary motors of human diversity, Kant redefined the previously insignificant genealogical

term “race” as a taxonomic category denoting stable, irreversible “hereditary differences” between

animals of a “single stock”.9 Blumenbach originally classified mankind into four or five “varieties”

6
Bellin, 1864.
7
White, 1799, pp. 106-9.
8
Virey, 1817, pp. 263.
9
Kant, 1777, pp. 128-9.
 4

determined largely by climate and lifestyle but later popularised Kant’s criterion of “unfailing heredity”

and reconstituted the varieties as five “principal races”.10

From the late 18th century, the longstanding presumption of essential human similitude was

displaced by belief in essential racial inequality, with French naturalists in the van.11 They were led by

Cuvier who saw inequality as an invariable, measurable product of physical organisation, especially the

size of the brain: a “cruel law”, he asserted, had “condemned the races with depressed and compressed

skulls to eternal inferiority”. On that basis, he classified humanity into three “eminently distinct” major

races, characterised somatically and ranked by relative “beauty”: the “Caucasic” race (“to which we

belong”), with its fine “oval head form”; the “Mongolic” race typified by a “flat face” and “narrow,

slanting eyes”; and the “Ethiopic” race whose “black” complexion, “compressed skull”, “squashed nose”,

and “thick lips” put it “visibly close to the apes”.12 This blend of syllogistic logic with visceral race pride

was a hallmark of emergent raciology.

So too was bitter conflict between proponents and opponents of the heretical doctrine of original

human plurality, labelled “polygenists” and “monogenists” in the 1850s.13 Buffon, Kant, and

Blumenbach had sought scientific resolution of the puzzle of human diversity while defending the

orthodox principle of human unity against sporadic philosophical challenge. By 1800, some anatomists

and zoologists openly maintained that the human genus was originally divided into morphologically

distinct species.14 Influential taxonomies of multiple human species, often sourced to separate “centres of

creation”, were published in France in the mid-1820s.15 Polygenism was consistently associated with

harsh racial attitudes but some monogenist savants resisted categorical usage of the term race – notably

Prichard, influenced by Evangelical philanthropy, and Alexander von Humboldt who had travelled

widely.16 Yet the general language of human difference steadily hardened as most monogenist naturalists

qualified faith in original human unity with firm commitment to craniometry and acceptance of the

permanence and inequality of races.17 By 1850, race as a biological category was embedded in discourses

10
Blumenbach, 1776, pp. 41-3; 1779, pp. 63-4; 1797, pp. 23, 60-3.
11
Blanckaert, 2003; Douglas, 2008.
12
Cuvier, 1817a, vol. 1, p. 94-100; 1817b, 273.
13
Gliddon, 1857, pp. 402, 428-31.
14
Virey, 1800; White, 1799.
15
Bory de Saint-Vincent, 1825; Desmoulins, 1826, p. 335.
16
Humboldt, 1845, pp. 378-86; Prichard, 1833; Stocking, 1973.
17
Douglas, 2008, pp. 44-58.
 5

on man in western Europe, the Americas, and Europe’s colonies. Supposedly collective, hereditary

physical differences were hypostasised as markers of permanent racial hierarchies while the word race

became an abstract noun condensing a total system, as in Knox’s maxim: “Race is everything”.18

The emergence and normalisation of raciology occurred in a complex historical conjuncture.

Intellectually, a glut of information about non-white people nourished the new disciplines of biology and

anthropology which treated human beings as natural objects. Publicly, reports of indigenous violence

towards Europeans provoked fear and revulsion of “savages”. Morally, defenders and critics of slavery

adopted opposed positions on the humanity of Negroes. Ideologically, renewed colonialism sought

philosophical grounds to suppress or govern indigenous people. Politically, revolution in France triggered

dread of savages at home and abroad while its reactionary aftermath represented internal conflicts as the

racial clash of “Gauls” and “Franks”. Knox observed, and Prichard unhappily confirmed, that the “war of

race” in continental Europe and Ireland in 1848 brought the word into “daily use”.19

A few ethnographic maps were published from the 1760s but they proliferated from the late

1820s when race became a primary element in Euro-American cartography (see Frontispiece20). For

example, in charting a novel geographic classification of the Pacific Islands, the navigator-naturalist

Dumont d’Urville formulated the explicitly racial neologism “Melanesia” (from Greek melas, “black”) to

label the southwestern region, “as it is the homeland of the black Oceanian race”. Derogatory racial

connotations are patent in his characterisation of “the Melanesians” as the “true natives” of Oceania, lacking

government, laws, or religion, “hideous” in appearance, and “very inferior” to supposedly conquering

“yellow” or “copper-coloured” immigrants. Yet all Pacific Islanders “naturally” ranked below the “white”

race. A “law of nature” resulting from “organic differences” in the “intellectual faculties” of the diverse races

determined that “the black must obey” the “yellow”, “or disappear”, while the white “must dominate” the

others, even when numerically inferior.21 This increasingly familiar formula was at once reflex of Europe’s

ongoing global colonisation and blueprint for its imminent extension across still uncolonised areas.

From about 1850, in the third phase of globalisation, another way of demarcating the world began to

infiltrate European cartography, signifiying the subsumption of debate over geographical or racial

18
Knox, 1850, p. 7.
19
Knox, 1850, p. 13; Prichard, 1850, p. 147.
20
Guyot 1884.
21
Dumont d’Urville, 1832.
 6

nomenclatures within the expanding global politics of colonial rivalry. My particular cases – Africa and

the supposed racial melting pot of Oceania – were the principal objects of rampant European imperialism

from 1880. The cartographic shift is evident by comparing maps of Oceania in successive editions of

Andriveau-Goujon’s Atlas classique et universel. From 1835 to 1850, brightly coloured hatched lines

mark Dumont d’Urville’s racial regions while a legend summarises his “Division of Oceania by

peoples”, including his conflation of place with race and opinion of the “Black race” as lawless, “wretched,

fierce, stupid peoples”. This arrogant racialisation also ironically registers ongoing indigenous control of much

of Oceania, confirmed by the map’s exiguous traces of colonialism.22 But in 1854, this map was supplanted by

another version which downplays racial names and boundaries and replaces the racialist legend with a key to

the map’s faint delimitation by colour of “European colonies”.23

From a global perspective, a world map in the 1850 edition of Andriveau-Goujon’s Atlas divides the

globe non-racially into five geographic segments.24 A similar map in the Allgemeiner Hand-Atlas of 1856

explains the process in a key. Neither refers to Europe’s colonies. However, the German atlas contains a map

of Oceania juxtaposing “European possessions and colonies” with uncolonised “Native populations”,

distributed into three racial “stocks”.25 This mid-century balance in the relative cartographic emphasis on

spaces, races, and colonies was short-lived. Within a decade, Europe’s burgeoning colonial pretensions

dominated both global and regional maps. Ziegler’s Geographischer Atlas bases a “Trade and colonial map”

on a rigid geopolitical division into “European possessions”, “Former European possessions” (all in the

Americas), and shrinking “Non-European states”. His map of Africa leaves vast spaces blank, does not

mention races, and has a patchy garland of thin coloured lines signalling European and Turkish colonies. His

map of Oceania symbolically dissociates races and colonies. On the one hand, green and brown lines denote

an indigenous cleavage between “the olive-coloured race” and the “dark-coloured race”. On the other,

coloured coastal outlines begin to envelop the colonial “possessions” of encroaching immigrants convinced of

their own racial superiority and right to govern.26

The colonial encompassment of much of the globe by1914 is vividly proclaimed in the solid blocks

of imperial colour that emblazon maps of all national persuasions, belying the often shaky foundations and

22
Andriveau-Goujon, 1835; 1850, plate 36.
23
Andriveau-Goujon, 1854.
24
Andriveau-Goujon, 1850, plate 13.
25
Kiepert, 1856.
26
Ziegler, 1864.
 7

limited reach of actual colonial rule. Andree’s Allgemeiner Handatlas has an elaborate map of “World

traffic, colonies and merchant fleets” (Figure 2), fringed by 44 flags of mostly Euro-American nations,

empires, and shipping lines. A graph delineates just over half the earth’s land area as “colonial

possessions”, nearly half British, none Japanese. This atlas relegates the world’s “peoples” to one of four

small maps. Its “Political overview” of Africa is dramatically different from Ziegler’s map, with the

entire continent, the Sahara apart, now an unbroken imperial kaleidoscope. So too are “The Islands of the

Great Ocean”, including Australia.27

Illustration 2: R. Andree (1906), “Weltverkehr, Kolonien und Handelsflotten”, David Rumsey Map Collection,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~239273~5511709

Each phase of globalisation resulted from imperial initiatives but local inhabitants were not

supine victims of irresistably superior force and knowledge, even in heavily colonised situations. Many

indigenous rulers cooperated with colonial authorities who everywhere relied on local intermediaries to

meet, interpret, police, and administer subject populations. European presence forced or enabled

indigenous people to travel globally, most notably and tragically as slaves or captives, but also as guides,

seamen, traders, missionaries, wives, labourers, soldiers, and students. Over more than five centuries,

expanding transnational networks facilitated the acquisition and exchange of anthropological collections

and information while global encounters with non-Europeans inspired savants to conceptualise human

27
Andree, 1906.
 8

differences. Condensed as raciology in 19th-century science, such thinking provided ambiguous

ideological underpinning for colonialism and helped forge imperial and colonised identities.28

Evolution
The previous section globalised the production of anthropological and geographical knowledge and its

cartographic representation by highlighting the empirical impact of encounters beyond the metropoles.

The intellectual liaison of science and globalisation was also manifest from the mid-18th century in

emergent developmentalist and evolutionary ideas. I focus on two interlinked strands and their

raciological connotations: philosophical theories of stages of civic or economic development, ultimately

labelled social or cultural evolution; and biological theories of the transmutation of species, ultimately

labelled the theory of evolution. The significance of overseas experience is patent since Darwinism’s

leading advocates – Darwin himself, Wallace, Huxley, and Hooker – were profoundly influenced

empirically and conceptually by extended travel in south America and Oceania.

From about 1750, instability in France and rapid change in Scotland prompted civic theorists to

investigate the origins of civil society. They universalised Montesquieu’s correlation between subsistence

practices and the relative complexity of the “code of laws” into a ladder of progress “from rudeness to

civilization”, historicised as the “distinct states which mankind pass thro” en route to “the Age of

Commerce” – “Hunters”, “Shepherds”, and “Agriculture” successively.29 This “stadial” theory saw

agriculture as crucial to the emergence of civil society. But the ethnocentric association of civility with

historically-specific agricultural practices denied history or coevality to living indigenous people with

other lifestyles.30 The terms race and civilisation acquired their modern signifieds around 1800. Their

shifting historical nexus entailed changing emphasis from abstract belief in general perfectibility, even of

“brutish & savage man”, to intensifying pessimism about the capacity for improvement or even survival

of certain races.31 By appropriating stadial or evolutionary concepts, raciology froze racial and colonial

hierarchies, denying the capacity of most non-European races to achieve a European level of civilisation.

28
Ballantyne, 2002; Staum, 2003; Stoler and Cooper, 1997; Thomas, 1994.
29
Ferguson, 1767, p. 2; Montesquieu, 1749, vol. 2, p. 90; Smith, 1978, p. 14; Turgot, 1808, p. 172-82.
30
Ferguson, 1767, pp. 122-4; Fabian, 1983.
31
Brosses, 1756, vol. 2, p. 347; Stocking, 1968, pp. 35-6; Williams, 1985, pp. 57-60, 248-50.
 9

The term evolution was applied to social processes by Comte as l’évolution sociale and Spencer

as “evolution of the social organism”.32 A century earlier, preformationists and epigenesists alike had

used the word in rival explanations for the development of an individual embryo. The epigenetic sense

was ultimately confirmed by Baer who argued that embryonic evolution involved ever-increasing

complexity of structure.33 This embryological usage was the word’s dominant biological meaning until

the 1860s when Spencer differentiated embryological development from the evolution of species which

Darwin initially called “descent with modification through natural selection”.34

The concept of species was a prime biological battleground in the long struggle between

teleological, supernatural, and naturalistic explanations for the origin and change of physical and organic

phenomena. The modern notion is attributed to Ray who characterised a species as an unchanging

product of original creation and subsequent propagation.35 From Ray to Darwin and beyond, scientific

definitions of species oscillated between versions of fixity, progression, creation, and transmutation. In

France, Buffon paid lip service to the dogma that species were original and eternal, at first prudently

discounting the formation of new ones as “a thing impossible to Nature”. However, he later

acknowledged that animal species could be reduced to “a quite small number of families or principal

stocks” from which all others might “have issued”.36 Lamarck’s transmutationist theory made species the

unstable products of spontaneous generation. “Formed successively” in a natural “progression” from the

“simplest” to the “most perfect” organisation, they adapted to circumstances over immeasurable

geological time. Two “natural laws” explained how alterations in the situation of “each race of animals”

would trigger “new needs” and change of habits which might in turn alter their form: that organs were

strengthened or weakened by relative use or disuse; and that individual acquisition or loss of characters

would be transmitted by generation.37 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire admired Lamarck but denied progressive

complexity and argued that the “surrounding milieu” provided the main impetus for transmutation by

triggering inheritable embryonic changes.38 This “philosophical” transformism posed a serious challenge

to Cuvier’s positivist adherence to “facts”. It threatened his core premise of the fixity of species “since

32
Comte, 1839, esp. pp. 623-736; [Spencer], 1857, p. 456.
33
Baer, 1828-37; Bowler, 1975; Canguilhem, et al., 2003.
34
Darwin, 1859, p. 459; Spencer, 1864, p. 133.
35
Ray, 1686, 40; 1691, 221.
36
Buffon, 1753, pp. 377-90; 1766, p. 358.
37
Lamarck, 1809, vol. 1, pp. 62-75, 132-3, 233-40, 266-71; vol. 2, 61-90.
38
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1828, 1833.
 10

the origin of things”, a corollary of his thesis that recurrent global catastrophes had caused mass

extinctions of species. Lamarck explicitly disputed this proposition while Geoffroy, too, argued that

living animals had descended “from the lost animals of the antidiluvian world”.39 Cuvier’s denunciation

of Lamarck as a speculative materialist and his acrimonious public debate with Geoffroy in 1830 helped

entrench a fixist conception of species and suspicion of transformism for several decades,40 amongst

polygenists and monogenists alike.

In Britain, where the teleologies of design and special creation were widely held,

transmutationist principles were rejected, thought, and debated across the discursive spectrum, well

before and after their public profession by Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace between 1852 and 1859.

Prichard promoted the fixity of species, refuting as “absurd” the transformist idea “that men and toads

descended from the same original parents”.41 Equally concerned for “the dignity of man”, Lyell’s

agonistic reading of Lamarck led him to deny any “progressive development of organic life”, even as

admitted by natural theology. He refuted Lamarck’s transformism, arguing that the “system of the natural

world” was “uniform from the beginning”. Man’s recent special creation aside, all species were created

simultaneously with enduring “attributes and organization”. Lyell paradoxically coupled a teleological

explanation for man’s origins with a naturalistic account of the inorganic world which inspired Darwin

and Wallace.42 In sharp contrast, Spencer endorsed transmutation in 1852 in two anonymous essays. The

first rejects all special creations in favour of “the theory of Lamarck”, renamed “Theory of Evolution” in

1858. Spencer’s “development hypothesis” conflates embryonic evolution and specific transmutation as

“generically the same”, differing “only in length and complexity”. The second essay reworks Malthusian

demographic pessimism into the utopian argument that the “pressure of population” would eventually

stimulate emergence of “a higher form of humanity”. This paper anticipates the idea of natural selection

in Lamarckian terms with respect to man – the “ceaseless exercise of the faculties” to combat population

pressure, and the “death” of all who failed, jointly ensured a “constant progress towards a higher degree

of skill, intelligence, and self-regulation”.43

39
Cuvier, 1812; 1817, vol. 1, pp. xx-xxi, 19-20; Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1828; 1833, p. 74; Lamarck,
1809, vol. 1, pp. 75-81.
40
Appel, 1987, pp. 202-37; Rudwick, 1997, pp. 82-3, 99, 168, 179.
41
Prichard, 1829, p. 227.
42
Lyell, 1830-3, vol. 1, pp. 144-66; vol. 2, pp. 18-65; see Bartholomew, 1973.
43
[Spencer], 1852a; 1852b, pp. 498-501; Spencer, 1858, p. 389.
 11

I have merely sampled the shifting gamut of stances on the fixity or transmutation of species in

the century before Darwin’s paradigm-shattering explanation for their “mutability” through “the

preservation and accumulation of successive slight favourable variations”.44 During his voyage on HMS

Beagle (1831-6), Darwin had contemplated novel American and Oceanian fossils and species whose

adaptive characteristics defied Lyell’s alternative mechanisms of migration or extinction.45 Darwin began

the long gestation of his idea of natural selection in 1838 after reading Malthus’s Essay on Population.46

Wallace, also influenced by Malthus and Lyell, compelled Darwin to publish Origin of Species two

decades later by reporting his fever-induced insight in the Malay Archipelago that, in the natural

“struggle for existence”, the “best adapted” species would thrive while “the weakest and least perfectly

organized must always succumb”.47

French ambivalence about transformism lasted well into the 1860s, particularly in the heavily

anthropometric polygenist anthropology controlled by Broca. Having long maintained that species were

fixed, he formally endorsed the principle of “the evolution of organic forms” in 1870 but coined the term

“polygenic transformism” to insist that living beings had multiple origins and “primordial forms”.48 Like

most French savants, Broca attributed a long French genealogy to Darwinism, stretching at least back to

Lamarck. His disciple Topinard, a convinced transformist, labelled it “Natural selection through the

struggle for existence, applied to Lamarck’s transformism”.49 Yet even in Britain, Darwin’s Lamarckian

antecedents or omissions were noted. Grudgingly accepting transmutation in 1868, Lyell concluded that

Darwin had proven it highly “probable” that Lamarck was “right”.50 Spencer praised the “obvious”

“truth” of natural selection in “the general doctrine of evolution” but argued that Darwin had

underestimated “functionally-acquired modifications” – Lamarck’s “use and disuse of parts” – as crucial

to organic change, especially in complex organisms such as man.51 Darwinism was popularised by the

prolific, widely translated German Haeckel who synthesised ideas from Darwin, Lamarck, and Geoffroy,

44
Darwin, 1859, p. 480.
45
Darwin, 1839.
46
Lyell, 1830-3, vol. 2, pp. 23, 173-5; Malthus 1826.
47
Darwin and Wallace, 1858, pp. 56-7.
48
Broca, 1858-9, pp. 434-41; 1870, pp. 170, 190-3, original emphasis.
49
Broca, 1870, pp. 170-85, 218-39; Quatrefages, 1870, pp. 19-74; Topinard, 1876, pp. 547-64, original
emphasis.
50
Lyell, 1868, p. 492.
51
Spencer, 1864, pp. 445, 449, 455, 457; see also Lamarck 1809, vol. 1, p 239.
 12

notably in his theory of the ontogenetic recapitulation of phylogeny. Haeckel’s version of transformism

divided mankind into ten or twelve species distributed into two “series”. One, “woolly-haired”, was at a

“much lower stage of development” and “closer to the apes” (from which all human species descended)

than the other “lank-haired” class.52

Conclusion
By the 1850s, embedded racial and stadial thinking was manifest in widespread gloom about the future

prospects of “inferior” races expressed in popular, religious, and scientific discourses, by humanitarians

and racialists, monogenists and polygenists. Prichard saw racial “destruction” as the inevitable outcome

of encounters between “simple” tribes and “the more civilized agricultural nations”. Knox thought the

“dark races” were “doomed to destruction and extermination” by physical and psychological

“inferiority”, since they could not “become civilized”. Broca declared it “incontestable” that certain

American races and “all the black races” of Oceania would “soon disappear”.53

These a priori but purportedly empirical prognoses seemed scientifically validated by the

application to man of Darwinian theory which generalised specific demographic decline into universal

law.54 Wallace initially predicted that Darwin’s “great law” meant the “inevitable extinction” of the “low

and mentally undeveloped populations” encountered by “superior” Europeans in the Americas and the

Antipodes.55 Darwin believed empirically and theoretically in the certain displacement of “the lower

races” in the struggle for existence. In 1839, recalling an encounter with a party of “black aborigines” in

New South Wales, he lamented the “mysterious agency” which apparently dictated that, “wherever the

European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal”, “the stronger always extirpating the weaker”.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin systematised that agency as the “principle of evolution” whereby “savage

races” were positioned nearer the “anthropomorphous apes” than “civilised races” who would soon

“exterminate and replace” both savages and anthropoids.56

In 1868, Haeckel argued in stadial terms that the “peoples most highly developed in civilisation”

– the “Indo-Germanic branch” of the “Caucasian species” – had surpassed all others by their “persistent

52
Haeckel, 1866, vol. 2, pp. 148-70, 300; 1868, pp. 511-20; 1870, pp. 603-17.
53
Broca, 1859-60, p. 612, note 1; Knox, 1850, pp. 145-91; Prichard, 1839, p. 497.
54
Brantlinger, 2003; McGregor, 1997.
55
Wallace, 1864, pp. clxiv-clxv.
56
Darwin, 1839, pp. 519-20; 1871, vol. 1, pp. 169, 200-1, 238-40.
 13

and enormous progress”. He added the Darwinian coda that they would “sooner or later conquer and

displace” most other species in the struggle for existence. Already, the Americans, Polynesians, and

“Alfurus” of southwest Oceania faced “complete extinction”. Within two years, Haeckel’s stance had

hardened. He now asserted that the Indo-Germanic race, due to “their more highly developed brain”, had

“outstripped” all other races and species and were stretching “their dominion over the whole globe”. He

added the Papuans and Hottentots to his list of imminently doomed species.57

Enormously popular in his heyday, Spencer was demonised from the mid-20th century as the

main avatar of social Darwinism, an umbrella term connoting the presumed application of Darwinian

biological laws in human, social, and economic affairs, including by eugenics and Nazism.58 Spencer’s

general crime was evidently his advocacy of “evolution”, “organic progress”, and laissez-faire principles

in all domains, from cosmology and biology to “Society”, “Government”, “Manufactures”, “Commerce”,

“Language, Literature, Science, Art”.59 Though Darwin clearly applied natural selection to man, shared

prevailing laissez-faire ideology, and preached the “importance” of British colonisation “for the future

history of the world”,60 his more narrowly biological perspective usually spared him the same obloquy.

Notwithstanding Spencer’s utopian vision for humanity, unshared by Darwin, his particular sin was to

invent the term “survival of the fittest”, synonymous with natural selection. Yet, far more than Darwin,

Spencer qualified its sway over human intellect and aesthetics.61 Moreover, Darwin himself adopted

Spencer’s phrase, as did Lyell.62

The Darwinian inspiration for eugenics is patent, personally in the seminal contributions of

Darwin’s cousin Galton and theoretically in the movement’s recommended application of selective

breeding principles to human populations.63 The salience of biological evolution was far more mixed in

ideas about socio-cultural evolution proposed by late 19th-century successors to the French and Scottish

stadialists. Sociologists and anthropologists from Comte and Spencer to Lubbock, Tylor, Morgan, and

Frazer published a range of theories hypothesising a progressive, unilineal process of human social,

cultural, and technological development culminating in present-day Western civilisation. Attitudes to

57
Haeckel, 1868, p. 520; 1870, p. 618.
58
Hodgson, 2004; Weikart, 2009.
59
[Spencer], 1857, p. 446.
60
Darwin, 1885.
61
Spencer, 1864, vol. 2, pp. 444-5.
62
Darwin, 1868, vol. 1, p. 6; Lyell, 1868, p. 491.
63
Paul, 2003.
 14

living “savages” varied but, in this high colonial era, they were usually placed on the lower rungs of the

evolutionary ladder as exemplars of earlier phases of human progress.64

This chapter shows the complicity of several sciences – natural history, comparative anatomy,

biology, geography, cartography, ethnology, anthropology – in the hierarchical ordering of humanity that

supplied raciology’s cornerstone. This process classed entire categories of the world’s populations as

lesser beings, inherently fitted for slavery, exploitation, or colonial domination and often allegedly

doomed to extinction in the face of encounters with superior races. Ironically, raciology’s claim to

objective scientific status is consistently belied by a priori assumptions, specious categories, subjective

logic, and the vagaries of political and economic interests. Its methods, too, were remarkably dubious,

epitomised in the often bizarre techniques or instruments adopted for racial mensuration, from

phrenology to craniometry, facial angle to cephalic index, callipers to craniograph. Other social, political,

popular, and religious discourses colluded with or opposed raciology but its scientific credentials gave

the idea of race a compelling aura of truth that is not yet entirely dispelled.

64
Stocking, 1968, pp. 69-132.
 15

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