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.35The advocates of anthropology, especially the promoters of itsapplication to the problems of colonial administration, had envisioned30 Anthropological Institute: Augmentation of Title , Man, 7 (1907), p.112.31H.H.Johnston,  The Empire and Anthropology , Nineteenth Century, 64 (1908), pp.133 5;the essay was reprinted in Johnston s Views and Reviews (London, 1912).32Johnston,  Empire and Anthropology , p.137.33RAI Archive, Council Minutes, 5 May 1908, A10(3); Journal of the Anthropological Institute,38 (1908), pp.489 92; Man, 9 (1909), pp.85 7; The Times, 10 March 1909, p.10d; see also AdamKuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922 72 (Harmondsworth, 1975),pp.125 7.34Memorial on Imperial Bureau of Anthropology, printed copy, RAI Archive, no date, A56;Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 42 (1912), p.5; Man, 11 (1911), p.157.35 Proceedings of Societies Anthropological Teaching in the Universities , Man, 14 (1914),pp.57 72.08 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:46 Page 192192 Douglas Lorimera network of universities to provide research and teaching facilities.Following the controversial birth pangs of anthropology in the 1860s, andespecially in the period since 1880, scientific racism, made potent by thepresumptions of a scientific naturalism that accommodated the ambigui-ties of race and culture, managed to establish its academic credentials.Itdid so within the context of the late nineteenth-century expansion ofempire and intensification of global racial conflict.At the same time, theinstitutional basis of the production of knowledge had been transformed.This new institutional context of the modern university, staffed by pro-fessional academics ready to serve the interests of state and empire, madethe scientific construction of race authoritative.The expansion of stateeducation and improvements in print technology also gave the scientistsaccess to a larger public.The production and sale of textbooks, referenceworks, and serialised magazines, often illustrated with photographs of the primitives that the text classified by racial type, first appeared in the1890s.While there is little sign that colonial officials premised policies onthese typologies, scientific racism and its popularisation conveyed themore general message that the inequality of the human races was sanc-tioned by science.Beyond this general influence, the western science ofman, or anthropology, as it stood in 1914, was itself a cultural artefact ofcolonialism.36IIThe anthropologists and biologists constructed this natural inequality ofthe human races by depicting each racial type within what the scientistsdescribed as its natural habitat.The task of modern colonialism or trop-ical development, according to advocates such as Benjamin Kidd, was totransform these natural habitats into modernised productive economiesparticipating in the global market.In this task, Kidd recognised that theprocess of development necessitated the use of what he termed the natives or  coloured races.37 The recruitment, training, and disciplineof the peoples of the tropics might well require the use of coercion, and36D.A.Lorimer,  Science and the Secularization of Images of Race , in B.Lightman (ed.),Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, IL, 1997), pp.212 35, and Terence Ranger,  FromHumanism to the Science of Man: Colonialism in Africa and the Understanding of AlienSocieties , Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (1976), pp.115 41.37Benjamin Kidd, The Control of the Tropics (London, 1898), pp.1 5, 20 4.08 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:46 Page 193FROM NATURAL SCIENCE TO SOCIAL SCIENCE 193certainly colonial advocates had no doubt that politically and sociallycoloured colonial labour would be subordinate to white administrators,employers, and traders.In other words, the task of colonial developmentinvolved the construction and management of new forms of race rela-tions.38 The anthropologists and biologists defined their field of observa-tion as the  natural or  primitive as distinct from  modern human-madeenvironments.From a contentious past and from their creed of  objectiv-ity , they also deliberately abstained from the world of politics.The con-struction of new forms of race relations under late nineteenth-centuryand early twentieth-century colonialism was an intensely political exer-cise.It should come as no surprise that the authors who had the mostinteresting and influential observations to make about the inequality ofracial groups were those who understood and were ready to engage in thepolitical arena.In the course of their deliberations, they invented a newlanguage of race relations.Unfortunately, our histories of racist thought tend to overlook theconstruction of racial inequality in the political practices, the law and itsadministration, and in the emerging social conventions of multiracialcolonial societies.As Michael Adas has ably shown, the confidence, evenarrogance, of nineteenth-century Europeans, who believed in the morallegitimacy of their colonial interventions and in their political capacity toeffect this modernising transformation, did not come in the first instancefrom theories of racial superiority.Developments in western science andtechnology, most evident in the emergence of industrial economies andthe growth of western-dominated world trade, provided the readiestmeasure of the comparative status of the world s peoples, and the besttest of the presumed superiority of western civilisation.Although Adassees racist ideology, which he defines in terms of biological determinism,as a secondary theme in the construction of western imperial ideology, itscivilising mission and its secularised goal of modernisation, the power ofthe ideology of race grew out of the ambiguity of race and culture.39Although he puts more weight on technology as a Victorian measure ofdevelopment, in cultural terms Adas s assessment is not dissimilar from38There is an extensive literature on colonialism, slavery, and labour.Frederick Cooper, ThomasHolt, and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labour and Citizenship inPostemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), provides a useful introduction: on Africa,see Cooper,  Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free Labour Ideology in Africa ,pp.107 49 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]