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