(c. 1872) Race, Civilisation and Culture
Knowledge production has always been central to universities’ raison d’etre and was often put to service in underpinning claims to imperial power. Scholars across the arts and sciences contributed to an ever-growing corpus of research into racial identity civilizational hierarchies. From post-Darwinist evolutionary theories to historians’ accounts of the British race’s imperial expansion, or the science of eugenics to anthropologists’ examination of ‘primitive cultures’, universities functioned as key sites of racial theorising.
King’s was no different to other institutions in this regard: King’s Historians, including F. J. C. Hearnshaw, A. P. Newton, and Sidney Low, celebrated the natural virtues of the British race; the research of King’s linguists, theologians, and law scholars into Asiatic languages, religions, laws, and cultures was used by the colonial state to underpin British control in South Asia; scientists, such as Reginald Gates, argued that race was a scientific category premised upon essential and irreconcilable difference; while even into the 1970s, Hans Eysenck was writing about differences in natural intelligence between ethnicities. This research will examine the contributions made by King’s scholars to racial science and discourse across this period, examining how ideas were framed and the ways in which they were deployed beyond the university.