1. To the extent that we sometimes forget that eugenics also took less brutal, though still pernicious forms: Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985). Francesco Cassata, Eugenetica senza tabù. Usi e abusi di un concetto (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), analyzes the frequent use of the reductio ad Hitlerum in debates on eugenics.

2. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a more nuanced view, see Claudio Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza. Antropologia e genetica nel xx secolo (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2005). Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Pour une histoire politique de la race (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2015), 165, has drawn attention to the difficulties encompassed in the very term “scientific racism.” The historical objectification of race is analyzed with great acuity in Claude-Olivier Doron, “Histoire épistémologique et histoire politique de la race,” Archives de philosophie 81, no. 3 (2018): 477–99.

3. Ashley Montagu, introduction to The Concept of Race, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York/London: Free Press of Glencoe/Collier Books, 1964), xi–xviii, here p. xiii. The sarcastic comment from this anthropologist, a major proponent of scientific anti-racism, refers to the phlogiston theory of combustion, which was refuted by Antoine Lavoisier and subsequently became known as an archetypal example of unfounded scientific notions.

4. Arthur R. Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 39, no. 1 (1969): 1–123; Hans J. Eysenck, Race, Intelligence and Education (London: Temple Smith, 1971); Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975). On the recent history of hereditarianist perspectives on human intelligence and behavior, see Aaron Panofsky, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

5. These authors all contributed greatly to the popularization of an anti-racist science: Richard C. Lewontin, Human Diversity (New York: Scientific American Library, 1982); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Albert Jacquard, Éloge de la différence. La génétique et les hommes (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1978).

6. Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza, in particular 1–13. Published in 2005, this detailed comparative history of the use of the term “race” in anthropology and genetics from the late nineteenth century to the present was begun when the notion of “race” appeared to have been permanently made anathema, but only completed after its return to center stage.

7. Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 283–300; Duana Fullwiley, “The ‘Contemporary Synthesis’: When Politically Inclusive Genomic Science Relies on Biological Notions of Race,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 105, no. 4 (2014): 803–14. Ari Patrinos, “‘Race’ and the Human Genome,” Nature Genetics 36, no. S11 (2004): s1–s2, here s1, states that “perhaps the more immediate question is whether the completed Human Genome Project will define a concept of race that is scientifically credible and useful.” See also Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

8. Troy Duster, “Race and Reification in Science,” Science 307, no. 5712 (2005): 1050–51; Duster, “Lessons from History: Why Race and Ethnicity Have Played a Major Role in Biomedical Research,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34, no. 3 (2006): 487–96. For a summary of the North American debates, see Michael Yudell, “Race in the Genomic Age,” chap. 11 in Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

9. On the ambiguities of this phrase, see Tim Ingold, “Beyond Biology and Culture: The Meaning of Evolution in a Relational World,” Social Anthropology 12, no. 2 (2004): 209–21.

10. Charles Davenport, “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” in Davenport’s Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics, ed. Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis (Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008).

11. Matt Ridley, “Foreword,” and Maynard V. Olson, “Davenport’s Dream,” in Witkowski and Inglis, Davenport’s Dream, respectively ix–xi and 77–98, here pp. ix and 78.

12. Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), 3.

13. Ibid., 2: “The eugenist problematic … consisted of a group of interrelated claims concerning the nature of the pauper class.” In fact, the London Eugenics Society only became interested in “race mixture” in an incidental and fleeting way: see Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, “Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 213–27, here pp. 219–20.

14. Julian S. Huxley and Alfred C. Haddon, We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). Aimed at the general public, the book sought to scientifically demonstrate the inanity of the racist and antisemitic theories advanced by almost all German anthropologists and geneticists. (The French translation was only published in 1947 by Éditions de Minuit, under the title Nous, Européens.) At the same time, Huxley lent his approbation to eugenic sterilization: Julian S. Huxley, “Eugenic Sterilisation,” Nature 126, no. 3179 (1930): 503.

15. Alison Bashford, “Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Eugenics,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 154–72, here p. 163 (emphasis in the original).

16. Susan Lindee and Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds., “The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks,” symposium supplement, Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): s3–s16; Jenny Bangham and Soraya de Chadarevian, “Human Heredity After 1945: Moving Populations Centre Stage,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 A (2014): 45–49.

17. For a defense of the first of these two theses, see André Pichot, L’eugénisme, ou les généticiens saisis par la philanthropie (Paris: Hatier, 1995), and Pichot, La société pure. De Darwin à Hitler (Paris: Flammarion, 2000). The need to separate “the scientific and the pseudoscientific,” so central to Kenneth M. Ludmerer’s pioneering book, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 114, remains present. See Dominique Aubert-Marson, Histoire de l’eugénisme. Une idéologie scientifique et politique (Paris: Ellipses, 2010), 23.

18. Frank Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467–78, here p. 470.

19. Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). The title parodies and subverts the infamous pronouncement, “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” with which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded his remarks in favor of the majority opinion of the court, rejecting Buck’s appeal and thus ratifying the use of eugenic sterilization. See Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Randall Hansen and Desmond King, Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which also discusses the Canadian case.

20. Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

21. The impact of these scandals even extended into Scandinavian popular literature, for instance Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Purity of Vengeance [2010], trans. Martin Aitken (London: Penguin, 2013). In this best-selling Danish detective novel, female victims of forced sterilization and an investigating officer find themselves caught up in a conspiracy to conceal the extent of the state’s eugenics program and its continuation to the present day.

22. Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (1996; East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Matthias Abelin, The Swedish 1997–2011 Sterilization Debate (Stockholm: Vulkan, 2012).

23. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, ed., Rassenforschung an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten vor und nach 1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008); Robert Jütte, Medizin und Nationalsozialismus. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011).

24. Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Weiss, “After the Fall: Political Whitewashing, Professional Posturing, and Personal Refashioning in the Postwar Career of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 101, no. 4 (2010): 722–58, presents a detailed study of the Persilscheinkultur (whitewashing culture) that protected many geneticists from the rigors of the purges, named by the agents themselves in reference to the famous brand of washing powder.

25. Rachel E. Boaz, “The Jew as Examiner and Examined,” chap. 5 in In Search of “Aryan Blood”: Serology in Interwar and National Socialist Germany (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), details the pioneering role of German and Hungarian doctors in the study of blood groups for anthropological purposes and analyzes the singular situation of the many Jewish scholars active in this field (beginning with Ludwick Hirszfeld, its founder) while also belonging to the population most often objectified—and therefore racialized—by this type of research.

26. Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), here p. 113.

27. Paul-André Rosental, A Human Garden: French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation [2016], trans. Carolyn Avery (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2019); Rosental, L’intelligence démographique. Sciences et politiques des populations en France, 1930–1960 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).

28. Rosental, A Human Garden, 2.

29. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 124–28.

30. Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David, and Dominic Thomas, eds., L’invention de la race. Des représentations scientifiques aux exhibitions populaires (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), especially 9–21, here p. 11. On colonial imagery and the display of racialized bodies, see Pascal Blanchard et al., Zoos humains et exhibitions coloniales. 150 ans d’inventions de l’autre (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).

31. Paul Farber and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009).

32. John Solomos and Patricia Hill-Collins, eds., The Sage Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies (London: Sage, 2010); Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Ellis Cashmore, ed., Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies (London: Routledge, 2003), demonstrates a more limited ambition, while Shirley A. Jackson, ed., Routledge International Handbook of Race, Class, and Gender (London: Routledge, 2015) really offers nothing more than an introduction to these issues.

33. For instance, the nuanced analysis of the complex relationship between Darwin and the nascent eugenics movement offered in Diane B. Paul and James Moore, “The Darwinian Context: Evolution and Inheritance,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 27–42.

34. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

35. Richard Cleminson, Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900–1950 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); Cleminson, Anarchism, Science and Sex: Eugenics in Eastern Spain, 1900–1937 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), especially 227ff., is a study of the Spanish case and, in particular, of the anarchist acceptance of eugenics within the Confederación nacional del trabajo (CNT). On Southern Europe, see Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy [2006], trans. Erin O’Loughlin (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). Sevasti Trubeta, Physical Anthropology, Race and Eugenics in Greece, 1880s–1970s (Leiden: Brill, 2013), analyzes the hegemony exercised by the anthropologist Ioannis Koumaris’s theses on the “strong nucleus of the Greek race” until after the Second World War.

36. Marius Turda, Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling, eds., “Blood and Homeland”: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006); Marius Turda, Christian Promitzer, and Sevasti Trubeta, eds., Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011).

37. On the emergence, in the first decade of the twentieth century, of a medical eugenics confident in the regenerative capacities of the natural environment, and the contributions of zoologists and subsequently geneticists to the formalization of a specifically Soviet eugenics, see Nikolai Krementsov, “From ‘Beastly Philosophy’ to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” Annals of Science 68, no. 1 (2011): 61–92; Krementsov, “Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 413–29; Krementsov, “The Strength of a Loosely Defined Movement: Eugenics and Medicine in Imperial Russia,” Medical History 59, no. 1 (2015): 6–31.

38. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). The book focuses on Brazil, Mexico, and, to a lesser extent, Argentina.

39. Andrés H. Reggiani, “Dépopulation, fascisme et eugénisme ‘latin’ dans l’Argentine des années 1930,” Le mouvement social 230, no. 1 (2010): 7–26; Andrés Reggiani and Hernán González Bollo, “Dénatalité, ‘crise de la race’ et politiques démographiques en Argentine (1920–1940),” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 95 no. 3 (2007): 29–44; Reggiani, God’s Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). See also Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo, eds., Una historia de la eugenesia. Argentina y las redes biopolíticas internacionales, 1912–1945 (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2012); and Marisa Miranda, Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino (Buenos Aires: Siglo xxi, 2005).

40. Marcos Chor Maio and Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds., “Raça, genética, identidades e saúde,” thematic dossier, História, ciências, saúde. Manguinhos 12, no. 2 (2005): 321–46. On the Brazilian historiography of eugenics, see Gilberto Hochman, Nísia Trindade Lima, and Marcos Chor Maio, “The Path of Eugenics in Brazil: Dilemmas of Miscegenation,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 493–510.

41. Patience A. Schell, “Eugenics Policy and Practice in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 477–92. On Mexico, a key player in “Latin eugenics,” see Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics; Laura Suárezy López Guazo, Eugenesia y racismo en México (Coyoacán: Unam, 2005); and Beatriz Urías Horcasitas, Historias secretas del racismo en México, 1920–1950 (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2007). On the Chilean case, see Sarah Walsh, “‘One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World’: Creole Eugenics and the Myth of Chilean Racial Homogeneity,” Journal of the History of Biology 48, no. 4 (2015): 613–39.

42. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), emphasis in the original; Stoler, Le chair de l’empire. Savoirs intimes et pouvoirs raciaux en régime colonial, trans. Sébastien Roux (Paris: La Découverte/Institut Émilie du Châtelet, 2013).

43. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 63.

44. See Chloe Campbell, “Metropolitan Responses,” chap. 4 in Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), on the accusations of racism prompted within the Eugenics Society of London by the Kenyan representatives’ presentation, between 1933 and 1937, of their plans to conduct research into the biological causes of “African backwardness.” Richard S. Fogarty and Michael S. Osborne, “Eugenics in France and the Colonies,” and Hans Pols, “Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies,” both in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 332–46 and 347–62 respectively, also point out the failures of colonial eugenics. For an analysis of Afrikaners’ criticism of the “classist” dimension of British eugenics, which led to the questioning of the “fitness” of the poorest within their own community, see Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 166ff.

45. For a bibliographical overview, see Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), a pioneering exploration of the links between national borders, hygiene, and race; Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008); Stephen Garton, “Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 243–57.

46. Jennifer Robertson, “Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous Repair,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 430–48. To a large extent, the 1948 text merely renewed provisions established by the National Eugenics Law of 1940. According to Robertson, its extraordinary longevity is due to the fact that eugenics has never been publicly condemned in Japan, as attested by the fact that a respected scientific journal continues to appear under the title Minzoku Eisei (“Race Hygiene”), even though its English title was changed in the mid-1970s to the Japanese Journal of Health and Human Ecology (ibid., 441). On Japan, see Tiana Norgren, Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sumiko Otsubo and James R. Bartholomew, “Eugenics in Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883–1945,” Science in Context 11, no. 3/4 (1998): 545–65. For an interconnected perspective on the Japanese and Chinese eugenics movements, see Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002).

47. Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, “Better Science and Better Race? Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 105, no. 4 (2014): 793–802; Chung, “Eugenics in China and Hong Kong: Nationalism and Colonialism, 1890s–1940s,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 258–73; Frank Dikötter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

48. Sunil S. Amrith, “Eugenics in Postcolonial Southeast Asia,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 301–30. The situation is even more complex in this region due to the multiplicity of local situations subsumed under a single, supposedly unifying geographical label.

49. Sarah Hodges, “Indian Eugenics in an Age of Reform,” in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 115–38; Hodges, “South Asia’s Eugenic Past,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 228–42; Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Marriage Hygiene was the title of the influential journal launched in 1934 by one of India’s leading eugenicists, Aliyappin Padmanabha Pillay, a founding member of the Sholapur Eugenics Education Society who, in 1931, opened a eugenics clinic in Bombay.

50. Sanem Güvenç Salgirli, “Eugenics for the Doctors: Medicine and Social Control in 1930s Turkey,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 66, no. 3 (2011): 281–312; Cyrus Schayegh, “Eugenics in Interwar Iran,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 449–61; Schayegh, “Hygiene, Eugenics, Genetics, and the Perception of Demographic Crisis in Iran, 1910s–1940s,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 13, no. 3 (2004): 335–61.

51. Raphael Falk, “Eugenics and the Jews,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 462–76, here p. 463: “Whereas in Nazi Germany Jewish life was systematically destroyed in the name of eugenics, Zionists in the Land of Israel conceived of eugenics as part of their mission to restore the Jewish people.” See also Nurit Kirsh, “Population Genetics in Israel in the 1950s: The Unconscious Internalization of Ideology,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 94, no. 4 (2003): 631–55; Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

52. Shifra Shvarts et al., “Medical Selection and the Debate over Mass Immigration in the New State of Israel (1948–1951),” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 22, no. 1 (2005): 5–34.

53. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Heredity: The Formation of an Epistemic Space,” in Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, ed. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 3–34. Two other books issued from this project were subsequently published: Bernd Gausemeier, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Edmund Ramsden, eds., Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013); Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt, eds., Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).

54. On the long-unrecognized role of seed “selectors,” see Christophe Bonneuil, “Producing Identity, Industrializing Purity: Elements for a Cultural History of Genetics,” in A Cultural History of Heredity IV: Heredity in the Century of the Gene, ed. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, preprint 343, 2008), 81–110. The French firm Vilmorin alone “had four hundred employees by the end of the nineteenth century”: Christophe Bonneuil and Frédéric Thomas, Semences, une histoire politique. Amélioration des plantes, agriculture et alimentation en France depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: C.-L. Mayer, 2012), 19.

55. On the broadening of the semantic field of heredity in French and later in other European languages, see Carlos López Beltrán, “In the Cradle of Heredity: French Physicians and L’hérédité naturelle in the Early 19th Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 37, no. 1 (2004): 39–72; Frederick B. Churchill, “From Heredity Theory to Vererbung: The Transmission Problem, 1850–1915,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 78, no. 3 (1987): 336–64. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity [2009] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3, distinguish two stages in this process that unfolded over the early nineteenth century: “an initial phase of problematization, followed by a phase of solidification into a measurable and manipulable research object.”

56. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, “Heredity,” 5; François Jacob, La logique du vivant. Une histoire de l’hérédité (1970; Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 27–29.

57. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity, is as substantial as it is stimulating. Elsewhere, a group of medievalists has highlighted the medieval genesis of “a number of concepts and terms that would play a crucial role in the development of physical anthropology and modern hereditary theories” in a profoundly transformed epistemic space: Maaike van der Lugt and Charles de Miramon, “Penser l’hérédité au Moyen Âge: une introduction,” in L’hérédité entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne. Perspectives historiques, ed. Maaike van der Lugt (Florence: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 8. Their analyses confirm the chronology established by Müller-Wille and Rheinberger.

58. Many of these contributions focus on more recent history, dominated by genetic reasoning: Philip Thurtle, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biology Science, 1870–1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Raphael Falk, Genetic Analysis: A History of Genetic Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

59. Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

60. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). Several works also highlight the oscillating classification of certain liminal populations, such as Mexicans, sometimes considered as belonging to the white population, at others listed in a separate category. On the case of Los Angeles, see Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 96ff.; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 95–97.

61. Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). On the same subject, see Rotem Kowner, From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); and Walter Demel’s pioneering investigation, Come i cinesi divennero gialli. Alle origini delle teorie razziali [1992], trans. Michele Fiorillo (Milan: Vità e pensiero, 1997). Strangely, none of these authors address the related and equally decisive issue of the “Mongolian features” described by Petrus Camper and Friedrich Blumenbach, and used as a foil by European authors seeking to establish a “Caucasian” canon of beauty: Painter, The History of White People, 75–79. Keevak and Kowner’s work nevertheless has the merit of questioning the commonly held notion that “the most studied skin color [in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] is that of Black people, with that of whites remaining in the background, … while the skin color of Amerindians or Asians does not arouse any interest [è trascurato]”: Renato G. Mazzolini, “Il colore della pelle e l’origine dell’antropologia fisica,” in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Renzo Zorzi (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1994), 227–39, here p. 229.

62. Often explicitly described as “white,” the skin of the Japanese is sometimes depicted as “tanned”: it is described as bazanez in the French edition of Engelbert Kaempfer, Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique de l’empire du Japon (La Haye: P. Gosse et J. Neaulme, 1729). See Kowner, From White to Yellow, 215 and 459.

63. Linnaeus never explained this change, which was introduced more than twenty years after the first edition of Systema Naturae. Keevak argues that the term luridus (which can mean sallow, pale, or wan) was used by some botanists to describe the “sadness” or “languor” of a plant (due to a lack of chlorophyll, for instance) and was probably used by Linnaeus to denote the supposedly “melancholy” character of Asians (an idea found, for example, in the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe): Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 53–55.

64. Ibid., 2. Mazzolini, “Il colore della pelle,” 230–31, notes the absence of any publications on the skin color of Asians or Amerindians between 1675 and 1800, and of any account of an anatomical dissection of an Asian or Amerindian individual before 1832.

65. For a series of complementary insights from European and Asian historians, see Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel, eds., Race and Racism in Modern East Asia, vol. 1, Western and Eastern Constructions (Leiden: Brill, 2013), and vol. 2, Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

66. Claude-Olivier Doron, L’homme altéré. Races et dégénérescence, xvii ^e– xix ^e siècles (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2016). This authoritative work, with its very detailed analyses, forms the first installment in an inquiry that will eventually extend to the end of the twentieth century.

67. Ibid., 21. This notion of altération (degradation) makes it possible to group under a single term theories concerning the appearance, at a more or less precisely identified moment, “of a distancing, a deviation, a degradation … of the original identity” (often attributed to the “environment” in which these people live or lived) and those emphasizing the existence of “a backwardness, an archaism, a cessation in the development of a universal standard to be achieved.”

68. Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 5.

69. The phrase is from Alexandra Minna Stern, “Gender and Sexuality: A Global Tour and Compass,” in Bashford and Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 173–91, here p. 178. On the role of feminists and, in particular, Margaret Sanger (who coined the term “birth control”), see Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 50ff.

70. Kline, Building a Better Race, 5: “But gender was also central to eugenics because the movement called for a new approach to understanding sexuality, reproduction, and the role of men and women in society. Some women actively supported eugenics; some, as physicians, even sterilized other women; still others lobbied against eugenics. They did not form a unitary coalition, but this lack of unity does not make gender any less relevant to our understanding of eugenics.”

71. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 150ff., especially the sections on the American Institute of Family Relations, created by Paul Popenoe in Los Angeles.

72. Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza, outlines the sociographic characteristics of many of the protagonists.

73. On this hybridization of the life sciences and medicine, and the resulting “molecular vision of life,” see Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Inventer la biomédecine. La France, l’Amérique et la production des savoirs du vivant, 1945–1965 (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).

74. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 251, peremptorily asserts that “after the Second World War, ‘eugenics’ became a word to be hedged with caveats in Britain and virtually a dirty word in the United States.”

75. See Diane B. Paul, “Eugenic Anxieties, Social Realities and Political Choices,” and “Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?” chaps. 6 and 7 in The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Jean Gayon, “L’eugénisme,” in Précis de génétique humaine, ed. Josué Feingold, Marc Fellous, and Michel Solignac (Paris: Hermann, 1998).

76. The assertion that almost all of the most respected biologists had distanced themselves from eugenics as early as the 1930s is particularly preponderant in American historiography: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics. For an analysis of the emergence of this theme and recent challenges to it, see Diane B. Paul, “Reflections on the Historiography of American Eugenics: Trends, Fractures, Tensions,” Journal of the History of Biology 49, no. 4 (2016): 641–58.

77. Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), details several research programs conducted with the support of the Eugenic Research Association and the Carnegie Corporation. In the words of William Allan, a pioneer of human and medical genetics, their “primary purpose” was “cutting down the supply of defective children” (cited in ibid., p. 119).

78. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 164–75.

79. Comfort, The Science of Human Perfection, 128.

80. This complements Susan Lindee’s book, Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

81. Diane B. Paul and Jeffrey P. Brosco, The PKU Paradox: A Short History of a Genetic Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). The paradox in question is that this genetic disease is detected at birth using a test that has nothing genetic about it, while the deleterious effects of the (double) mutation can be avoided if the child follows a strict diet: an example of nurture palliating nature. On the challenges of screening newborns, see Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder, Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ilana Löwy, Imperfect Pregnancies: A History of Birth Defects and Prenatal Diagnosis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).

82. Alexandra Minna Stern, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

83. Ibid., 111.

84. Jean Gayon, “Le mot ‘eugénisme’ est-il encore d’actualité?” in L’éternel retour de l’eugénisme, ed. Jean Gayon and Daniel Jacobi (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006), 119–42. Among the many contributions to this now globalized debate, see Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature [2001] (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), especially chap. 2, which examines the risk of the emergence and stabilization of social norms adverse to the birth of children with mutations; and Carlo Alberto Defanti, Eugenetica. Un tabù contemporaneo. Storia di un’idea controversa (Turin: Codice edizioni, 2012).

85. Thalassemia is the term given to a group of recessive genetic disorders characterized by abnormal hemoglobin production (in a manner somewhat different from sickle cell disease). This condition, which until quite recently was fatal with a short life expectancy, still requires constant, extremely onerous, and expensive care. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), argues the case for the Cypriot program, still in force today, to prevent people carrying such mutations from reproducing. Surprisingly, the authors who address these issues systematically disregard the Italian precedent, based on an extensive national network of institutions specializing in “marriage counseling,” established in the mid-1950s in an explicitly eugenic perspective and active until the 1970s.

86. Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

87. Keith Wailoo and Stephen Gregory Pemberton, The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), compares the differential treatment of Tay-Sachs disease, sickle cell disease, and cystic fibrosis. See also Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North California Press, 2001). On the racialization of sickle cell disease on the African continent, see Duana Fullwiley, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

88. On the genealogy of this phylogenetic style of thinking, see Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

89. For an excellent introduction to these debates, see the dossier devoted to Troy Duster’s analyses in the British Journal of Sociology 66, no. 1 (2015): 1–92. Since the early 2000s, this African American sociologist has constantly stressed the usefulness of racial categories in reducing health inequalities: Troy Duster, “A Post-Genomic Surprise: The Molecular Reinscription of Race in Science, Law and Medicine,” 1–27. See also Katharina Schramm, David Skinner, and Richard Rottenburg, eds., Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).

90. Claude Blanckaert, De la race à l’évolution. Paul Broca et l’anthropologie française, 1850–1900 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des observateurs de l’homme, 1799–1804. Des anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2002); Jean-Christophe Coffin, La transmission de la folie, 1850–1914 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).

91. French authors often favor a more strictly political approach to race. In addition to Schaub, Pour une histoire politique de la race, see Raphaël Lagier, Les races humaines selon Kant (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004); Carole Reynaud-Paligot, La République raciale. Paradigme racial et idéologie républicaine, 1860–1930 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006); Pap Ndiaye, La condition noire. Essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008); Magali Bessone, Sans distinction de race ? Une analyse critique du concept de race et de ses effets pratiques (Paris: J. Vrin, 2013).

92. Ian R. Dowbiggin, The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Some issues relating to this international movement still merit further consideration.

93. This field of research was initiated by Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), which unfortunately relies mainly on printed sources and whose ultimately very Eurocentric perspective ends up reifying the profusion of South American realities.

94. For an introduction, see Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

95. See the key insights of Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). It should be noted that this opposition does not exactly overlap with that between “nature” and “culture,” more familiar to social scientists.

96. The study of the modes of subjectivation would also be a good way to overcome the ambivalence apparent in the notion of “biosociality” proposed by Paul Rabinow, “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality,” chap. 5 in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 91–111.

97. In particular, the increase in denunciations implies a risk for the very object of criticism itself. I have tried to analyze this risk by studying the reception of a particularly problematic work on eugenics: Luc Berlivet, “Dalla divulgazione scientifica alla propaganda eugenetica. La teoria del ‘piano inclinato,’” Passato e Presente 32, no. 93 (2014): 119–28. Similarly, see Cassata, Eugeneticà senza tabù, in particular chap. 1, “Tutti nazisti, nessun nazista.”