What_Role_Did_Scientific_Racism_Play_in_the_Internal_and_External_Politics_of_Late_Nineteenth-Century_European_States_

What Role Did Scientific Racism Play in the Internal and External Politics Of Late Nineteenth-century European States' The British imperialist expansion is great evidence of the role scientific racism played in the politics of late nineteenth century European states. It can be argued that race is a fundamental aspect of some of the most important social, political and cultural developments of the 18th century through to the present. Through the 19th century there was a growing national obsession and debate over the idea of how race affected the politics of the European imperialists. As European powers expanded through their colonial campaigns the notion of race became more prevalent, increased interactions as a result of imperial expansion encouraged constant comparisons between Europeans and other races. Law and science were then used to argue that characteristics such as skin colour or facial structure was a window on internal characteristics like intelligence and how civilised a race is. Skulls were measured in attempts to find a scientific answer to why non white Europeans were superior. These skulls went on to go to museums all over Britain and compared with what they believed to be more evolved European skulls, all in an attempt to show the people back home that these natives or blacks are not fully human. Scholars argued that European imperial powers used a distortion of social Darwinism to abdicate European responsibility moral responsibility for their actions throughout the 19th century. Robert Knox describes race as “everything” in terms of many social and political aspects of the 19th century including many of the working class revolutions. This interest in race developed into racial science in the 19th century. Scientific racism is the findings and methods to investigate differences between races. The European powers often used science to support or validate racist attitudes and worldviews. Scientific ideas and racism resulted in the Politics of European imperials in and out of their colonies. Scattered across the world there are sites that are evidence of the massacres and genocides of European imperialists. Throughout the 19th century European scientists, writers and philosophers developed ideas that led and sanctioned the mass killings and exploitation of non-white natives from lands gained through their colonial expansion. It can be argued that this process continued and developed into the racial atrocities witnessed in the twentieth century. From the 1860s to the 1870s racial determinism became a hardened topic to Victorian social theorists that wanted to find laws for the evolution of human society. Social Darwinism developed as did the Darwinian idea of natural selection. A belief in a “natural hierarchy” of races developed with white Europeans being at the top and lesser developed civilisations and races at the bottom. The 18th century saw the belief in innate racial characteristics locked races, and that this determined level of civilisation or barbarianism of the race. Scientists began to compare skulls of different races. Tasmanian natives and other races were not seen as fully human. The idea of race came from the 19th century’s greatest minds. Darwin’s species of origin created the idea of natural selection. To Britain and other European colonialists natural selection neatly explained and justified the global expansion of the civilised race. The imperialist powers began to believe that humans were like animals and that, each survives at another’s expense, each one filled a niche that another cannot occupy. White Europeans were successful expansive organisms because they are good at expanding and those that understood colonialism and human expansion in terms of Darwin’s theories were known as social Darwinists. Europeans began to develop an idea of a collective white European race, they believed that they were the most recently evolved and most successful species and thus the superior race. It also suggests that there were the great losers in this natural process. The losers were those peoples that could not compete with the “superior” Europeans and once they were put into competition with the Europeans were doomed to fail; evidence of this can be seen in the atrocities that occurred in Africa and Tasmania. The increased effect that scientific racism had upon politics of the 19th century can be illustrated in how Britain treated the Tasmanian people in their colony. Through this new scientific knowledge the British believed that the Tasmanian people were without culture and without religion. Their race was seen as lesser than that of the White Europeans. They believed the Tasmanians were uniquely were seen as savage and therefore treated them like animals. The scientific evidence on race at the time sanctioned this idea and allowed the British to take the land. Settlers were allowed to displace and diffuse the natives. However some historians argue that this does not suggest that the British government in itself sanctioned this. The British government’s investigation into the rapidly depleting Tasmanian population led to governor of Tasmania to be warned that the extermination of the native peoples would be a stain on the reputation of the British Empire. The government turned from using the army to stop this violence and employed missionaries to defuse the situation more quietly. The natives were taken to an island under the assumption that they would return to their homeland. The island was a place to manufacture civilised people. The British had a Christian vision of a civilised empire. Race was viewed as the same as class, just as whites ruled blacks, the educated leaded the masses. In East Jamaica 1865 martial laws were declared upon the black people and showed the lack of respect their was for the black peoples due to new scientific theory on race. The crimes of the imperialist became proof that social Darwinism was right. Across Africa the scramble for empire had brought the might of Europe to bear against innumerable peoples killing millions and causing nations such as Tasmania to be annihilated. Theories of race were not just applied to new colonies but to old parts of the empire. Evidence of this is seen 1870 when famine struck British-India. The famine that was killing millions of peoples was justified by social Darwinism in the eyes of the British, that the Indian people were lower than them and that the poor were hardly human. The famine and starvation led to suicides, the selling of children for scraps of food, and even cannibalism. All the food that could have saved the Indian people was piled up in the docks of Madras ready to be shipped to Britain and the USA to benefit the civilised British Empire through trade. The millions left starved to death were viewed by the British as a by product of social Darwinism, that the useless forms of life were condemned by nature. Social Darwinism led to systems similar to the Nazi concentration camps being used to fix the situation in India. The distorted Darwinist theory allowed the British to exploit the native peoples, using them to develop their empire by building their infrastructure such as building railways. 13m people in total were wiped out as a result of these justifiable genocide policies. The fascination of race moved on and was fuelled by new fears amongst European elites of races living in their own countries, the working class. Race and class were closely linked. And thus social controls were imposed upon class systems. It can be argued that racial science and prejudices that existed as a result led to many reforms after many revolutions across Europe including Germany and Britain. Towards the end of the 19th Century, evidence of how racism fuelled by scientific study can be seen by looking at Germany’s South African colony of Namibia. Racial understanding fuelled the atrocities that took place there. The Germans turned to concentration camps. The concentration camps were set up on Shark Island, this island was used with the express purpose of killing people and shows the next step adopted in racial ideology. Some historians suggest that these racial attitudes developed as a result of increased racial science have led to racial processes such as the holocaust. It is believed Namibia is the pre-curse for the Holocaust in the 20th century. Scientific racism led to the bureaucraticification and systematic killing of racial groups and minorities across Europe justified by their science. Colonial genocides inspired by 19th century theorists and racial science have been kept a quiet secret amongst European Nations. The role that scientific racism played in European politics in the late 19th century was that it allowed for justification and abdication to moral responsibility for European actions through colonial expansion. 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