Content area
Full text
Until Darwin, Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race, by B. Ricardo Brown; pp. ix + 199. London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2010, £60.00, $99.00.
The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, by Edward Beasley; pp. 247. New York and London: Routledge, 2010, $135.00, $54.95 paper, £95.00, £30.00 paper.
In Until Darwin, Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race, B. Ricardo Brown sees early nineteenth-century racism as the consequence of secularly minded scientists overthrowing the Christian view of the unity of mankind and replacing it with a polygenetic theory of origins that divided the human species into biologically distinct races. According to Brown, this racially loaded form of science-which could be used to support the institution of slavery-met its demise when Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories became dominant after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. While Darwin's ideas were secular, they were like earlier religious ideas in that they upheld the belief in a monogenetic origin for human beings which mitigated the harshness of the more racist polygenetic theory. Monogenesis was compatible with the idea of the unity of mankind, pushing aside the notion that some supposed "races" were naturally slaves. Brown quotes a key passage in Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) to the effect that:
Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race . . . T he diversity of judgement does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shows that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them." (qtd. in Brown 101-02)
Brown takes this passage to mean that Darwin's view of classification did not rely upon fixed species, but posited provisional arrangements for the forms of life. Darwin's nonracist science went hand-in-hand with his non-racist politics, as typified by his participation in the attempt to impeach Edward John Eyre, the governor of Jamaica who, in a panic, had ordered the extra-judicial killing of black rioters after their insurgency had ended.
Edward Beasley's account of...