Racial Science and British Society, 1930-62

by Schaffer, Gavin

• ISBN13: 9780230008922
• ISBN10: 0230008925
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The study of race has been an important feature in British universities for over a hundred years. During this time, academic understanding of what race describes and means has changed and developed as has the purpose of racial study. Once considered the preserve of biologists and physical anthropologists, over the course of the last century the study of race has transferred mostly into social scientific disciplines such as sociology. This book explores this passing of authority on racial matters in the context of international and domestic political issues. In a period which spans the rise and fall of Nazism, the onset of the Cold War, the birth of Apartheid and the death of legal US segregation, Racial Science and British Society, 1930-62 considers the relationship between science, politics and ideology, arguing that racial scholarship in Britain was shaped in every period by factors outside of science. At the same time it argues that it is possible to see the influence of expert racial scholarship in every significant action of government immigration policy during this period. This major new study of Twentieth-century Britain calls into question the impact of racial ideas on British society and probes into the nature of knowledge production in science.

Author Biography

Gavin Schaffer is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The end of the race concept	p. 1
Science or society? Who takes the lead?	p. 3
The 'post 1945' thesis	p. 4
The meanings of race	p. 6
Deconstructing racial science and British society	p. 8
Race and immigration policy in early twentieth-century Britain	p. 11
Rethinking Interwar Racial Reform: the 1930s	p. 15
Four racial field studies	p. 16
Changing methods and changing politics	p. 25
The limits of racial reform before the Second World War	p. 39
Science and society in the 1930s	p. 48
Refuge, race and restriction: Britain and the Jewish refugees from Nazism	p. 53
The Challenge of War: the 1940s	p. 63
Scientists and the wartime racial agenda	p. 63
Scientists versus the state? Enemy aliens and Britain's black subjects	p. 79
The perilous mission of the believers: protecting the idea of race in the face of Nazism and the Holocaust	p. 96
Sharing the biologists' uncertainty? The European Volunteer Workers policy after the Second World War	p. 107
Race on the Retreat? The 1950s and 1960s	p. 115
Stepping back from society: the progressives, Lysenko and Soviet science	p. 115
British biologists and the UNESCO statements on race	p. 120
Progressives and conservatives in the 1950s: a case of reunification?	p. 132
British science and post-war Commonwealth immigration to Britain	p. 148
Epilogue	p. 166
Notes	p. 172
Select Bibliography	p. 216
Index	p. 229
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