1882 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 power. Scholars across the arts and sciences contributed to an ever-growing corpus of research into both racial and civilizational hierarchies. From post-Darwinist evolutionary theories to historians’ accounts of a supposedly unitary British race’s expansion, or the science of eugenics to anthropologists’ examination of ‘primitive cultures’, universities functioned as key sites of very Anglo- or Euro-centric forms of theorising. But the link between power and knowledge was never straightforward.

King’s was no different to other institutions in this regard: King’s historians and political scientists, including Ernest Barker, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, A. P. Newton, and Sidney Low, celebrated the virtues of the apparently unitary and enduring virtues of the British race; the research of King’s linguists, theologians, and law scholars into Asiatic languages, religions, laws, and cultures in ways that propagated hierarchical views of social order in South Asia; scientists, such as the King’s-based Canadian biologist and geographer Reginald Gates, argued that race was a scientific category premised upon essential and irreconcilable difference; even into the 1970s, Hans Eysenck was writing about differences in natural intelligence between ethnicities. Yet there were complexities. In his work on the history of government, Ernest Barker tried to stress the unity of ‘English’ power dating back to the ninth century, but ended up recognising the ambiguities and complexities of twentieth-century British identity. Gates the last great propagator of race science corresponded with the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawarharlal Nehru.

This research will examine the contributions made by King’s scholars to the study of human diversity, from the mid nienteenth to late twentieth century, examining how ideas were framed, how they connected to different structures of power, and how they were deployed beyond the university.