Race before Darwin: Variation, adaptation and the natural history of man in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790–1835

There has never been a better time than now to explore the ways in which the idea of distinct human races has been socially constructed over the centuries. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provide a particularly enlightening example of the ways that the meaning of race can shift and change in surprising ways over time.

In my paper I explore the circulation and reception of theories of race at the University of Edinburgh’s medical school. This is a particularly significant context, as it was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period. Generations of students maintained a lively and illuminating debate on the subject over several decades, which is preserved in their lecture notes and the dissertation books of student societies. Many of these students, most famously including Charles Darwin, went on to become important figures in British natural history in later decades.

Their ideas were drawn from a wide variety of earlier and contemporary thinkers, some of the most cited including Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, John Hunter and Samuel Stanhope Smith. These thinkers all believed that the races had a common origin. One other eighteenth-century figure mentioned by students, Henry Home, Lord Kames, had thought that the races represented different species, each with a distinct origin. However, a large majority of Edinburgh students mentioned this opinion only to firmly reject it.

Two principal interpretations of race overlap in time in the Edinburgh sources, the second gradually displacing the first as the majority view. The first was ultimately underpinned by the ‘Great Chain of Being’. Early eighteenth-century natural history had been dominated by this concept, which suggested that everything in the universe could be linked together in a scale that reached all the way from inanimate matter to God. According to this scheme, the races occupied adjoining rungs in this hierarchy. It was suggested that favourable or unfavourable environments could move populations up or down the scale given enough time. Even the most ‘degraded’ racial groups could therefore reach the same level as the most ‘perfect’ if their conditions of life were improved. By the early decades of the nineteenth century the ‘Great Chain of Being’ was largely discredited, but this type of degenerationist racial theory long outlived the collapse of the model of the natural order that underlay it.

The second interpretation saw the races as having become adapted to their physical environments over time. In its most developed form, this posited a mysterious, but natural, source of variation in populations. Those varieties best suited to their environment would survive, reproduce and pass on their characteristics, while others would die out. The similarities of this scheme to Darwin’s later theory of evolution by means of natural selection need hardly be emphasised; however, it should be borne in mind that most, but not all, of the Edinburgh advocates of this theory did not consider that it applied to species, but only to varieties.

Read Bill Jenkins’ BJHS article in full Race before Darwin: Variation, adaptation and the natural history of man in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790–1835

Main image: Diagram showing the relationships between the races of man, from an undated set of student notes taken in Robert Jameson’s natural-history lectures at the University of Edinburgh by an anonymous student, Edinburgh University Library, CC-BY.


 

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