1 Frederick Parsons to Frederic Wood Jones, 9 September 1922, General Correspondence, Wood Jones Papers, Royal College of Surgeons Archives, London (subsequently Wood Jones Papers), MS0017/1/12. For Elliot Smith's long-running dominance in the Anatomical Society see Barclay-Smith, Edward, The First Fifty Years of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain & Ireland: A Retrospect, London: John Roberts, 1937, p. 22Google Scholar.

2 Robert Broom to Lady Elliot Smith, 12 January 1937, Letters and Papers Concerning the Life and Work of Professor Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937), Andrew Arthur Abbie Collection, Royal Anthropological Institute Archives, London (subsequently Abbie Collection), MS 423/2/8.

3 Langham, Ian, The Building of British Social Anthropology: W.H.R. Rivers and His Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898–1931, Boston: Kluwer, 1981Google Scholar; Kuklick, Henrika, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991Google Scholar; and Stocking, George W. Jr, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998Google Scholar.

4 Kuklick, op. cit. (3), p. 129; For Elliot Smith's continuing diffusionist influence in the dominions see Elkin, A.P., ‘Elliot Smith and the diffusion of culture’, in Elkin, A.P. and MacIntosh, N.W.G. (eds.), Grafton Elliot Smith: The Man and His Work, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974, pp. 139–159Google Scholar; Raymond A. Dart, ‘Cultural diffusion from, in and to Africa’, in Elkin and Macintosh, op. cit., pp. 160–174; Anderson, Warwick, ‘Ambiguities of race: science on the reproductive frontiers of Australia and the Pacific between the wars’, Australian Historical Studies (2009) 40, pp. 143–60Google Scholar; and Crook, Paul, Grafton Elliot Smith, Egypt and the Diffusion of Culture: A Biographical Perspective, Portland: University of Sussex Press, 2012Google Scholar.

5 In 1932 Elliot Smith suffered a stroke, which greatly diminished his ability to continue the battle. Also, his most famous convert, W.H.R. Rivers, had died in 1922, and Rivers's students mostly became psychologists, not anthropologists. Therefore diffusionism lacked a strong leader and a fresh batch of British social anthropologists willing to carry on the message in the 1930s. See Kuklick, op. cit. (3), pp. 129–130.

6 Kuklick, op. cit. (3), p. 9.

7 Annan, Noel, ‘The intellectual aristocracy’, in Plumb, J.H., Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G.M. Trevelyan, London, Longmans, 1955Google Scholar.

8 Anderson, Warwick, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006Google Scholar.

9 Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960, London: Macmillan, 1982Google Scholar; Kuklick, op. cit. (3); and Evans, Andrew D., Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010Google Scholar.

10 Fredrickson, George M., White Supremacy: A Comparative History of American and South African History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982Google Scholar; and Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992Google Scholar.

11 In this sense, the project is postcolonial critique: see Anderson, Warwick and Adams, Vicanne, ‘Pramoedya's chickens: postcolonial studies of technoscience’, in Hackett, Edward et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 181–204Google Scholar; and Anderson, Warwick, ‘From subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science?’, Postcolonial Studies (2009) 12, pp. 389–400Google Scholar.

12 Le Gros Clark, Wilfrid, There Is a Transcendence from Science to Science, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press for the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, 1965, p. 2Google Scholar. Le Gros Clark was professor of anatomy at the University of Oxford from 1934 to 1962; see Zuckerman, Lord, ‘Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark. 1895–1971’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1973) 19, pp. 217–233Google Scholar.

13 Clark, op. cit. (12), p. 2. According to Keith, An Autobiography, London: Watts and Co., 1950, pp. 112–113, his decision to become an anatomist was primarily due to his experiences in Siam, not his medical training. Wood Jones wrote one the most important works on coral reefs during his stay as medical officer on the Cocos Keeling atoll in 1905. Jones, Frederic Wood, Coral and Atolls etc, London: Lovell Reeve, 1910Google Scholar. See Le Gros Clark, Wilfrid E., ‘Frederic Wood Jones. 1879–1954’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, (1955) 1, pp. 119–134Google Scholar, 120–121.

14 Smith, Grafton Elliot, Human History, London: Jonathon Cape, 1930, p. 10Google Scholar. See more examples at pp. 11 f.

15 Smail, Daniel Lord, On Deep History and the Brain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 30Google Scholar, 26. See also Keith, Arthur, The Antiquity of Man, London: Williams and Norgate, 1915Google Scholar; and Keith, New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man, New York: Norton, 1931.

16 Elliot Smith wrote to the ethnologist Charles Seligman in 1934, ‘I am not surprised by Keith's confusion of Race and Nationality. He has always been confused on this’. Grafton Elliot Smith to Charles G. Seligman, 15 August 1934, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/20.23.

17 Keith, op. cit. (13), pp. 201, 635.

18 Keith, op. cit. (13), pp. 238, 656.

19 Zuckerman, Solly, ‘Sir Grafton Elliot Smith 1871–1937’, in Zuckerman, (ed.), The Concepts of Human Evolution: Symposia of the Zoological Society of London, Number 33, London: Academic Press, 1973, pp. 3–21, 3Google Scholar. Later Baron Zuckerman of Burnham Thorpe, an honour he earned after serving as chief scientific adviser to the Wilson Labour government.

20 Morison, Patricia, J.T. Wilson and the Fraternity of Duckmaloi, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997Google Scholar.

21 Smith, Grafton Elliot and Jones, Frederic Wood, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia: Report for 1907–1908, vol. 2: Report on the Human Remains, Survey Department, Cairo: National Printing Department, 1910Google Scholar. For dissenting and supporting views concerning the primacy of Elliot Smith and Wood Jones see Aufderheide, Arthur C., The Scientific Study of Mummies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 12–14Google Scholar; Murray, Tim, Milestones in Archaeology: A Chronological Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 343–344Google Scholar; and Waldron, H.A., ‘The study of human remains from Nubia: the contribution of Grafton Elliot Smith and his colleagues to paleopathology’, Medical History (2000) 44, pp. 363–388Google Scholar.

22 Harris, H.A., ‘At University College London’, in Dawson, Warren R. (ed.), Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: A Biographical Record by His Colleagues, London: Jonathan Cape, 1938, pp. 169–182, 175–176Google Scholar.

23 Grafton Elliot Smith to Edwin Embree, 1 December 1926, p. 5, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY. See also Perkins, Alfred, Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy and American Race Relations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011Google Scholar.

24 Rosenberg, Charles E., ‘Charles Benedict Davenport and the beginning of human genetics’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1961) 35, pp. 266–276Google Scholar; Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 41–57Google Scholar; and Barker, David, ‘The biology of stupidity: genetics, eugenics and mental deficiency in the inter-war years’, BJHS (1989) 22, pp. 347–375Google Scholar. Smith, Elliot, in The Evolution of Man: Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1924, p. 116Google Scholar, wrote that ‘the enthusiastic energy of Eugenic Societies has unintentionally had the effect of obscuring the factors of environment and education’.

25 The considerable quantity of specimens circulating through the network was central to their intellectual endeavour. For example, see the correspondence between Grafton Elliot Smith and Robert Broom, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/4.1–37. When Elliot Smith moved to University College London from Manchester in 1919–1920 he required three large lorries just to transport his private collection of specimens (Grafton Elliot Smith to Karl Pearson, 13 January 1920, Karl Pearson Papers, University College London Library Services, Special Collections and Pearson Papers, London, 856/9).

26 At the time of his death in 1937, twenty of his former demonstrators filled anatomy chairs throughout the empire and the USA. Harris wrote, ‘several other occupants of professorial chairs owe their position largely to the enthusiasm with which Elliot Smith infected them when they were spending … leave at University College’. Harris, op. cit. (22), p. 177; Barclay-Smith, op. cit. (1), p. 22; and Elkin and Macintosh, op. cit. (4).

27 Elliot Smith came to the BAAS conference in Australia in 1914 and travelled on numerous occasions including to Java, China, Spain, and the USA. H.D. Macintosh, ‘Welcome’, in Black and Macintosh, op. cit. (4), pp. 3–7. His trip to China was at the request of his Canadian protégé Davidson Black, who arranged for him to advertise the discovery of Peking Man. Davidson Black to Arthur Keith, 27 December 1930, Wood Jones Papers, MS0017/1/2/8.

28 Pear, T.H., ‘Some early relations between English ethnologists and psychologists’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1960) 90, pp. 227–237Google Scholar, 228.

29 Warren R. Dawson, ‘A General Biography’, in Dawson, op. cit. (22), pp. 17–110, 66; and A.P. Elkin, ‘Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: the man and his work: a personal testimony’, in Elkin and Macintosh, op. cit. (4), pp. 8–15, 9.

30 Grafton Elliot Smith to William Perry, 27 June 1916, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/17.87.

31 Bronislaw Malinowski to Elsie Malinowski, 18 June 1920, Malinowski Papers, London School of Economics Archives, London, correspondence 34/12. The social anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote in 1973 that what Elliot Smith ‘taught us as regards ethnology was absolute rubbish’, yet he ‘nevertheless he had great enthusiasm which generated a great deal of research. I would say the same of Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown … In exactly the same way nearly everything they thought was false, but nevertheless they were very great men’. Edmund Leach, ‘Discussion’, in Solly Zuckerman, op. cit. (19), pp. 432–443, 436. For the controversy see Elliot Smith, Grafton, Malinowski, Bronislaw et al. , Culture: The Diffusionist Controversy, New York: Norton, 1927Google Scholar; Wallis, Wilson D., ‘Anthropology in England early in the present century’, American Anthropologist (1957) 59, pp. 781–790Google Scholar, 783; and Kuklick, op. cit. (3), pp. 125–132.

32 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 252. For his critique of Edward Tylor see Smith, Grafton Elliot, The Diffusion of Culture, Washington: Kennikat Press, 1971 (first published 1933), pp. 116–183Google Scholar.

33 First propounded in Keith, Arthur, ‘Presidential address: On certain factors concerned in the evolution of human races’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1916) 46, pp. 10–34Google Scholar. See also Keith, Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View, Being the Robert Boyle Lecture Delivered before the Oxford Junior Scientific Club on November 17, 1919, London: Oxford University Press, 1919; and Keith, op. cit. (13) pp. 389–408.

34 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 497.

35 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 171. Earlier he wrote, ‘It is very questionable whether any pure strains of mankind exist at the present time’. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (24), p. 50.

36 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 11.

37 Myres, John L., ‘International Congress’, Man (1934) 34, p. 81Google Scholar. It was formed as a split from the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology. See Myres, , ‘An International Congress for Anthropology and Ethnology’, Man (1932) 32, pp. 10–12Google Scholar; Man (June 1934) 34, pp. 81–82; and ‘News’, Nature (1932) 129, p. 646.

38 Elliot Smith, Grafton, ‘Chairman's address’, Congrès international des sciences anthropologiques et ethnologiques, compte-rendu de la première session, Londres, 1934, London: Institut royal d'anthropologie, 1934, p. 65Google Scholar.

39 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 67.

40 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 65.

41 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 67.

42 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 67.

43 While an early opponent of scientific racism, Elliot Smith's death in 1937 meant he did not contribute to the movement away from racial typologies and hierarchies after the Second World War. See Barkan, op. cit. (10); and Reardon, Jenny, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004Google Scholar.

44 Grafton Elliot Smith to Robert Broom, 9 January 1913, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/4.29. At the time, Wood Jones was teaching anatomy in London.

45 Frederic Wood Jones, ‘In Egypt and Nubia’, in Dawson, op. cit. (22), pp. 139–148. Wood Jones spent 1927–1929 in Hawaii, but he never settled into US academic life. After his Melbourne stint (1930–1937), he became professor of anatomy at Manchester (1938–1945), then conservator of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

46 Clark, op. cit. (13), p. 128.

47 Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 13 June 1921, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905–1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37 (all this correspondence is in a bound volume). Wood Jones complained to Keith when marsupial material he had sent to Elliot Smith and J.P. Hill, the Australian physiologist at University College, was not acknowledged. Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 3 January 1929, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.

48 Grafton Elliot Smith to Frederic Wood Jones, 12 December 1923, Wood Jones Papers, General Correspondence, MS0017/1/14/4/1–6.

49 Frederic Wood Jones to Mrs Celia Keith, 28 May 1905, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905–1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.

50 Jones, Frederic Wood, Habit and Heritage, London: Kegan Paul, 1943, p. 100Google Scholar.

51 Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 24 August 1927, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905–1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.

52 Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 10 December 1926, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905–1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.

53 Jones, Frederic Wood, Australia's Vanishing Race, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934, p. 21Google Scholar.

54 For example, Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 9 November 1936, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905–1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.

55 Jones, Frederic Wood, ‘The non-metrical morphological characters of the skull as criteria for racial diagnosis. Part 1: General discussion of the morphological characters employed in racial diagnosis’, Journal of Anatomy (1931) 65, pp. 179–195Google Scholar, 179.

56 Wood Jones, op. cit. (53), p. 22.

57 Wood Jones, op. cit. (53), pp. 16–17.

58 Jones, Frederic Wood, ‘Anatomy and a life principle’, Commemoration Address, Adelaide University, 1923, in Life and Living, London: Kegan Paul, 1939, pp. 111–136, 121Google Scholar.

59 Jones, Frederic Wood, Habit and Heritage, London: Kegan Paul, 1943, pp. 10–11Google Scholar. For one of the many discussions of this see Crook, D.P., Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994Google Scholar.

60 Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 11, p. 10.

61 These became Smith, Grafton Elliot, Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb, London: Routledge, 1923Google Scholar.

62 For their falling out over Piltdown see Keith, op. cit. (13), pp. 326–327. For Elliot Smith's bullying of Keith see Grafton Elliot Smith to Arthur Keith, 27 September 1913, Papers of and Relating to Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, the University of Manchester, the John Rylands Library, Manchester, GB 133 GES/1/1. For an attempt to review the many Piltdown theories see Tobias, Phillip V., Bowler, Peter J., Cunningham, Andrew T., Chippendale, Christopher, Dennell, Robyn W., Fedele, F.G., Graves, Paul, Grigson, Caroline, Harrison, G. Ainsworth, Harrold, Francis B., Kennedy, Kenneth A.R., Nickels, Martin K., Rolland, Nicholas, Runnels, Curtis, Spencer, Frank, Stringer, C.B., Tappen, N.C., Trigger, Bruce G., Washburn, Sherwood and Wright, R.V.S., ‘Piltdown: an appraisal of the case against Sir Arthur Keith [and Comments and Reply]’, Current Anthropology (1992) 33, pp. 243–293Google Scholar.

63 Grafton Elliot Smith to Donald Alexander McKenzie (1873–1936, Scottish journalist and prolific writer on anthropology), 16 February 1930, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/15.11. The book received critical reviews in America ‘but was sold out in 3 weeks’.

64 He provided considerable advice and encouragement to the popular Scottish writer on anthropology and folklore Donald Mackenzie, whose books championed Elliot Smith's diffusionism. In the interwar years the Scottish writer and leading intellectual of the left James Leslie Mitchell (who wrote under the pen name Lewis Grassic Gibbon) believed that Elliot Smith was one of the most prominent figures in modern thought. He published a pen portrait of Smith in the popular journal of the cooperative movement, The Millgate, in June 1932. Alongside Smith was John Maynard Keynes and, in the same series later in the year, Joseph Stalin. See Mitchell, James Leslie, ‘Grafton Elliot Smith: anthropologist, historian, humanist’, The Millgate (1931) 26, pp. 579–582Google Scholar; and Burley, Alice, ‘A note on the publication of James Leslie Mitchell's “Grafton Elliot Smith: A Student of Mankind”’, Notes and Queries (March 2008), pp. 46–48Google Scholar.

65 Christophers, Barry E., ‘Frederic Wood Jones: his major books and how they were reviewed’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery (1997) 67, pp. 645–659, 646Google Scholar. For his lectures see Clark, op. cit. (13), p. 122.

66 An early criticism of the historiography of British social anthropology by one of its distinguished players can be found in Leach, Edmund, ‘Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology (1984) 13, pp. 1–23Google Scholar.

67 Stocking, George W. Jr, ‘The critique of racial formalism’, in Stocking, , Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 161–194Google Scholar; Spencer, Frank, ‘The rise of academic physical anthropology in the United States (1880–1980): a historical overview’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1981) 56, pp. 353–364Google Scholar; Stocking, George W. Jr (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Anthropology and the German Anthropological Tradition, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996Google Scholar; and Oppenheim, Robert, ‘Revisiting Hrdlicka and Boas: asymmetries of race and anti-imperialism in interwar anthropology’, American Anthropologist (2010) 112, pp. 92–103Google Scholar.

68 Proctor, Robert, ‘From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German anthropological tradition’, in Stocking, George W. Jr (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 138–179Google Scholar; Penny, H. Glenn and Bunzl, Matti, Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in an Age of Empire, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003Google Scholar; Penny, H. Glenn, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007Google Scholar; and Evans, Andrew D., Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010Google Scholar.

69 Zimmerman, Andrew, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001Google Scholar.