Empire, Race and Progress

Lecture Nine

Agenda

• Reason and rationalisation• The biological sciences,

scientific racism and eugenics• The new imperialism• The ‘dark side’ of the

Enlightenment?

Joseph Merrick

Joseph Merrick (1862-1890)

“Tis true my form is something odd, But blaming me is blaming God. Could I create myself anew, I would not fail in pleasing you. If I could reach from pole to pole, Or grasp the ocean with a span, I would be measured by the soul, The mind's the standard of the man.” - Poem by Isaac Watts regularly recited by Merrick.

Reason and Progress

Rationality: To use principles of logic and systematic method in the analysis of evidence and ideas in order to reach conclusions about ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ (“ratio-nising”)

Rationalisation: (1) Arranging components of a process to eliminate wastefulness; OR (2)The act of using the appearance of rationality to justify an action already taken or a belief already-held

Scientific Method

Top (left to right): Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778); Gregor Mendel (1822-1884); Charles Darwin (1809-1882); Ernst von Haeckel (1834-1919). Left: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

Scientific Method

Plate 49 from Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1904).

Shows sea anemones, classified as Actiniae.

Scientific Method?

Copy of embryo drawings originally by Haeckel (1892)

‘Scientific’ Racism

Left to right: Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882); Josiah C. Nott (1804-1873); Samuel George Morton (1799-1851)

‘Scientific’ Racism

A drawing from Nott and Giddens’ Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857).

By comparing the skulls of ‘Greek’, ‘Negro’ and ‘Chimpanzee’, the drawing seeks to present a hierarchy of development linking black people to primates.

Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Francis Galton (1822-1911)

Madison Grant (1865-1937)

Pseudo-Science

Phrenological Diagram

American Phrenological Journal

Pseudo-Science

Above: P. T. Barnum (1810-1891); Left: The Fiji Mermaid

The New Imperialism• Expanding imperial powers of old: France,

Britain, the Netherlands, and (to a lesser extent) Russia

• New imperial powers: Germany, Japan, Belgium, the United States and Italy

• Collapsing powers: Spain, Portugal, Chinese Empire, Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungary (see next lecture)

• New colonial possessions or formalisation of existing rule in Africa, Asia and South Asia

• Informal colonialism in the Americas

1828

1897

The New Imperialism

• Economic arguments: excess capital, need to secure primary materials, search for new markets

• Diplomatic arguments: imperial rivalry, political crises on the periphery

• Cultural arguments: e.g. Edward Said’s Orientalism