Introduction and Scientific Racism
Overview
Statewide Dual Credit Modern World History: Unit 11, Lesson 1
A discussion of scientific racism, its origins, and how it was used to justify colonialism and imperialism. It explores the role of thinkers such as Linnaeus, Darwin, and Spencer in promoting these ideas, and the devastating consequences of their application, including eugenics and the Holocaust.
During the 18th and early 19th centuries, European nations began a massive wave of expansion. Armed with modern technology such as muzzle and breach loading rifles, cannons and artillery, steamboats and railroads, and modern methods of bureaucracy and medical care, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium began to acquire colonies in Africa, Asia and Oceania. European nations justified their imperial expansion with claims of spreading modernity, civilization, and Christianity, but these rationales often concealed their primary motivations of acquiring raw resources, expanding political influence, and securing strategic advantages. Although colonialism did raise the standards of living for some conquered peoples who worked in the military or civil service of various colonial regimes, for most Africans and Asians colonialism offered little improvement and further separated them from the systems of power while denying them the ability to govern their lives as they wished. This chapter examines the rise of imperialism throughout the world and the response of indigenous peoples to this challenge.
Scientific Racism
Popular from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries, scientific racism used discredited theories to assert that certain groups or “races” of people were biologically and culturally superior to others. In the mid-1700s, Enlightenment thinkers argued that human beings were primarily rational and capable of using science and education to improve their lives and the well-being of their societies. This desire to “rationalize” the world was exported as European Empires covered the globe.
In 1735, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) published his magnum opus Systema Naturae, which categorized by species over 10,000 plants and animals. Although describing humans as a species of primate originating in Africa, Linnaeus classified homo sapiens into four varieties—European, African, Asian and American Indian. He depicted white Europeans, such as himself, the most biologically and socially advanced group of humans. Although Linnaeus’s work influenced philosophers like Jean Jacques Rousseau, it also helped imperialists justify the exploitation of non-white peoples. Other intellectuals picked up on Linnaeus’s work with devastating results.
In the 1850s, Catholic Monk Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) conducted experiments with peas at the monastery of St. Thomas in Moravia. Mendel selectively bred pea plants, noting that parents passed distinctive traits such as pod length, seed shape and flower color to their offspring. He accordingly calculated the laws of inheritance, including the concepts of dominant and recessive traits. Mendel’s work on inheritance, although foundational to the field of genetics, was later co-opted by those promoting eugenic policies in the early 20th century.
Mendel's work paralleled that of British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who, in his seminal work On the Origin of Species (1859), argued that through the process of “natural selection,” different species which compete with one another pass down to their descendants’ random mutations such as longer legs to run faster or camouflaged fur to hide better. In time, these individuals survived longer and had more children, creating entirely new species that would compete with the old species for resources. Thus, competition could lead to the extinction of the old species a process which Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) dubbed “survival of the fittest.”
In the 1880s, Spencer pioneered “Scientific Darwinism,” the belief that in the brutal world of international relations, some cultures, such as white European nations, were more adaptable and thus more deserving of survival than others. Spencer used his ideas to support not only imperialism and colonialism but also the idea of laissez-faire capitalism. He believed that the cutthroat business world of the late 1800s mirrored the natural world. Therefore, nations or empires that prospered at the expense of their weaker neighbors were merely following the “law of the jungle.” Scientific Darwinism influenced businesspeople like Andrew Carnegie (1835- 1919), writers like Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), and even politicians like Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919).
Spotlight On | PHRENOLOGY
In the early 1800s, German doctor Franz Joseph Gall developed the field of phrenology, the belief that the size and shape of the human cranium determined the mental capacity of different ethnicities. Throughout the 19th century, phrenologists like Charlotte Fowler Wells (1814-1901) with her husband, two brothers, and sister-in-law, toured the United States and Europe. Phrenologists were active in popular science texts and helped to create their own professional journals that popularized their “findings.” The “science” of phrenology and the journals that published their work attempted to provide justification for the enslavement of African Americans and the dispossession and control over Native Americans and their land based on the size and shape of human craniums. Phrenologists often intentionally selected the skulls of children or smaller-than-average individuals to artificially buttress their claims.
In 1883, Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822- 1911) coined the term “eugenics.” This represented the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding. American zoologist Charles Davenport (1866- 1944) founded the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations in 1925, which sought to maintain white racial purity by warning against “intermingling” with other non-white groups. Davenport helped influence the creation of strict immigration laws which favored white asylum seekers from European countries over individuals of African, Asian or Latin American descent. Even progressive social workers like Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) argued that those unable to afford children should use contraceptives or agree to sterilization so as not to create a drain on charitable and social services.
In the 1920s and 1930s, fascists like Adolph Hitler (1889-1945) and his followers used scientific racism to justify his Lebensraum policy. In Nazi ideology, the biologically and culturally superior Aryan Germans had a natural right to dispossess and murder millions of Jews, Slavs and other “undesirables” to build a greater Germany across Europe. Although the uncovering of the Holocaust in the later stages of World War II discredited scientific racism throughout the world, the concept continued to exist in reduced forms down to the present.