‘Savage civilisation’

Abstract

Within the history of science the nineteenth century has been regarded as a pivotal period in the development of racial thought, with ‘scientific racism’ reifying race as biologically fundamental and immutable. Even though the polygenist theory that races were different species had been largely discredited by the second half of the century, it was superseded by a model which fixed races on a hierarchical scale of physical and mental evolution and thus naturalised the cultural gulf between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ societies. The psychological theories of British writers such as Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer, and techniques to measure the power and qualities of mind, such as anthropometry and craniology, contributed to the development of this evolutionary model in the final decades of the century. 1 However, the extent to which ‘scientific racism’ was predominant beyond its own ideologues is more open to question. Even within the still largely amateur field of British anthropology, published papers on craniology and anthropometry were a small minority compared to those taking a more cultural and historical approach. 2 Moreover, looking at the question from the broader perspective of a historian of British society and culture, Jose Harris has suggested that although ideas about race were ‘omnipresent’ in mid-Victorian Britain, they had ‘only the sketchiest of roots in biological thought’ and were more likely to be expressed in terms of constitutional tradition and political culture. And even as biologistic connotations of ‘race’ came to the fore at the turn of the century, it ‘did not invariably have the specifically ethnic and exclusionary connotations that a later generation might suppose’. It could refer to nations, groups within the nation, public health, sex, or the condition of the whole human species. Harris may overstate her case, but she 236does cast into doubt the hegemony of ‘scientific racism’ in tum-of-the-century Britain, suggesting instead that we need to think in terms of a series of parallel and overlapping ‘race’ discourses. 3