The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

by Bashford, Alison; Levine, Philippa

• ISBN13: 9780199945054
• ISBN10: 0199945055
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-10-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Winner of the Cantemir Prize of the Berendel Foundation Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man." This book dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It is the first world history of eugenics and an indispensable core text for both teaching and research. Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as experts attempted to connect biology, human capacity, and policy. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. In the current climate, in which the human genome project, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies have proven so controversial, the history of eugenics has much to teach us about the relationship between scientific research, technology, and human ethical decision-making.

Author Biography

Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the modern history of science and medicine, including Purity and Pollution and Imperial Hygiene, and has co-edited Contagion, Isolation, and Medicine at the Border.

Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Abbreviations

Introduction
Eugenics and the Modern World, Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford


Part One: Transnational Themes in the History of Eugenics
1. The Darwinian Context: Evolution and Inheritance, Diane B. Paul and James Moore
2. Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics, Philippa Levine
3. Race, Science, and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century, Marius Turda
4. Eugenics and the Science of Genetics, Nils Roll-Hansen
5. Fertility Control: Eugenics, Neo-Malthusianism, and Feminism, Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford
6. Disability, Psychiatry, and Eugenics, Mathew Thomson
7. Eugenics and the State: Policy-Making in Comparative Perspective, Véronique Mottier
8. Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Eugenics, Alison Bashford
9. Gender and Sexuality: A Global Tour and Compass, Alexandra Minna Stern
10. Eugenics and Genocide, A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone

Part Two: National/Colonial Formations
11. Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole, Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall
12. South Asia's Eugenic Past, Sarah Hodges
13. Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science, Stephen Garton
14. Eugenics in China and Hong Kong: Nationalism and Colonialism, 1890s-1940s, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung
15. Eugenics in South Africa: Paradoxes in the Place of Race?, Saul Dubow
16. Eugenics in Colonial Kenya, Chloe Campbell
17. Eugenics in Post-Colonial Southeast Asia, Sunil S. Amrith
18. German Eugenics and the Wider World: Beyond the Racial State, Paul Weindling
19. Eugenics in France and the Colonies, Richard S. Fogarty and Michael A. Osborne
20. Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies, Hans Pols
21. The Scandinavian States: Reformed Eugenics Applied, Mattias Tydén
22. The First-Wave Eugenic Revolution in Southern Europe: Science Sans Frontières, Maria Sophia Quine
23. Eugenics in eastern Europe, 1870s-1945, Maria Bucur
24. Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union, Nikolai Krementsov
25. Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous Repair, Jennifer Robertson
26. Eugenics in Interwar Iran, Cyrus Schayegh
27. Eugenics and the Jews, Raphael Falk
28. Eugenics Policy and Practice in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, Patience A. Schell
29. The Path of Eugenics in Brazil: Dilemmas of Miscegenation, Gilberto Hochman, Nísia Trindade Lima, and Marcos Chor Maio
30. Eugenics in the United States, Wendy Kline
31. Eugenics in Canada: A Chequered History, 1850s - 1990s, Carolyn Strange and Jennifer A. Stephen

Epilogue: Where did Eugenics Go?, Alison Bashford
Chronology
Index