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Abstract
Among Charles Darwin's first writings are reports on his encounters with indigenous peoples and the violence of European colonization. When he turned to evolution, the furore over mankind's place in natural history overshadowed the problem of how ‘natural selection’ might apply in human history. It was easy, in a nineteenth-century worldview, to see the disappearance of ‘savages’ as a ‘natural’ consequence of the advance of civilization. From a later perspective, colonialism often involved genocide, only belatedly recognized as such, even after the concept came into use. Barta's essay re-examines Darwin's efforts to comprehend the extinction of peoples as a phenomenon both natural and historical, and the implications of his attempt to combine the two. It begins with his first observations, and looks for evidence of their influence in the theory of natural selection. The problems of ‘natural’ selection in human history are then traced along the paradoxical paths Darwin opened up. It becomes plain that he had an unusually sharp perception of the historical relations of genocide—economic, social, political and cultural—but confused matters by trying to integrate colonialism into an evolutionary history of civilization analogous to natural history. Always fascinated by human intervention in nature, he was also attracted by the potential of eugenics, so that a legacy intended to be cautiously scientific fed into ideologies of conquest and human selection far removed from his measured theorizing and humane ethics.
Notes
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London: Henry S. King 1872), 207.
Tony Barta is an Honorary Associate in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: John Murray 1871), 239.
Darwin, The Autobiography, 29–30.
Tony Barta, ‘Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia’, in I. Wallimann and M. N. Dobkowski (eds), Genocide and the Modern Age (New York: Greenwood Press 1987); see also the introduction by the editors, and the afterword by Richard L. Rubenstein. The importance of ‘genocidal moments’, intentional actions within such a dynamic set of relations, is convincingly argued by A. Dirk Moses, ‘An antipodean genocide? The origin of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 1, 2000, 89–105.
Walter Bagehot (1826–77), essayist, banker, politician and editor of The Economist, was influenced by Darwin's science to apply natural selection to history. In the Descent of Man, Darwin in turn refers to ‘a remarkable series of articles’ published by Bagehot in 1868, and subsequently issued as a book, Physics and Politics. Bagehot was only one of Darwin's British contemporaries who sought to bring the natural sciences into the emerging social sciences; Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press 1980) and J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society. A Study of Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966).
The biographies contextualizing Darwin's science in the society, economy, politics and culture of his time were a long time in coming. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, in Darwin (London: Michael Joseph 1991), show what needed to be done. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London: Cape 2002), though certainly alert to matters of ‘territorial and commercial expansion’ (187), race and social Darwinism, has fewer references than Desmond and Moore to the larger societal and historical context. Peter J. Bowler, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Oxford: Blackwell 1990) succinctly clarifies the development and significance of Darwin's ideas within the broader history of evolution. In their introduction to a new edition of the Descent of Man (London: Penguin Classics 2004), Desmond and Moore provide fresh insights into Darwin's efforts to research and explain race.
For genocide as ‘disappearance’, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 2003). Frontier violence in Australia has been searchingly explored only during the past thirty years. A pioneering account, notable also for its attention to Darwinist discourse, is Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Company 1975). Henry Reynolds, Frontier (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1987) looks at ideologies as well as actions; for further references, and his considered views on genocide, see H. Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australian History (Melbourne: Viking 2001). A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide in Australian history’, in A. D. Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2004) has the most up-to-date argument and references. Tony Barta, ‘Discourses of genocide in Germany and Australia: a linked history’, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, 37–56, connecting racist colonial violence to consequences in Europe, follows the course plotted in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1951) and explored by Sven Lindqvist, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’, trans. from the Swedish by Joan Tate (London: Granta 1997) and A History of Bombing, trans. from the Swedish by Linda Haverty Rugg (London: Granta 2001).
Quoted in J. W. Burrow, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [1859], ed. J. W. Burrow (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968), 68.
John C. Greene surveys the two centuries of intellectual development leading towards Darwinism in The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press 1959), esp. 322–35, 372. J. C. Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View (Berkeley: University of California Press 1981), particularly the chapter ‘Darwin as a Social Evolutionist’, is an excellent account of Darwin's intellectual journey.
Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary, ed. Richard Darwin Keynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 121–4, 141–3. Darwin's talent as an ethnographer was not diminished by his robust value judgements. They are as prominent in the diary as his gift for observation and description of nature.
Darwin, Beagle Diary, 179–80. The version published in chapter 5 of Darwin's Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the World, 2nd edn (London: John Murray 1845), a revised edition of the original Journal of Researches (London: Henry Colburn 1839), is essentially the same, with exclamation marks added; the 1845 second edition was often republished in later years as The Voyage of the Beagle.
Darwin, Beagle Diary, 180–1. Keynes notes that the passage about opening up the country for production was marked in pencil to be deleted.
Darwin, Journal of Researches, 2nd edn, 104.
Timothy Shanahan, The Evolution of Darwinism: Selection, Adaptation and Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) refers to the insistence of Stephen Jay Gould that Darwin the scientist made many compromises with Darwin the social conservative: he was not game to deny the idea of progress fundamental to his social milieu but could not believe it biologically. Shanahan goes on (288) to quote what followed Darwin's ‘never say higher or lower’: ‘Say more complicated’.
On the voyage Darwin boldly argued with FitzRoy about the evil of slavery, and he would later follow the fortunes of the North in the American Civil War with a passion that left no doubt about his willingness to accept deaths as the price of progress: ‘Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity’; letter to Asa Gray, 5 June 1861, in Frances Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books 1959), 166.
Darwin, Beagle Diary, 398.
Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 88. For the Lockean, as distinct from Darwinian, foundations of dispossession, see Alan Frost, ‘New South Wales as terra nullius: the British denial of Aboriginal land rights’, Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 77, October 1977, 513–23.
Darwin, Beagle Diary, 398–402.
Report by the missionary L. E. Threlkeld, quoted in Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’, 245.
For the specifically British class influence on Darwin and his theorizing, see, most comprehensively, Desmond and Moore, Darwin, and, most incisively, E. P. Thompson, ‘The peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press 1978), esp. 56–64.
Darwin, Beagle Diary, 401. A few pages later (406–7), a remarkable economic commentary sees the colony's rise to be ‘as grand & powerful a country as N. America’ becoming ‘very problematical’. A cool eye for economic interest is at work. ‘The balance of my opinion is such, that nothing but rather severe necessity should compel me to emigrate.’
Darwin, Beagle Diary, 408. For the way Darwin amplified this and other parts of his account for the 1839 publication of his journal, see F. W. and J. M. Nicholas, Charles Darwin in Australia (Cambridge and Sydney: Cambridge University Press 1989), 86–7. More generally, on Darwin's way of returning to earlier influences, see Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981), including an appendix, ‘The many voyages of the Beagle’, 259–99.
Darwin, Journal of Researches, 2nd edn, 505. The words are almost the same in the original; see Darwin, Beagle Diary, 445–6.
Darwin, Journal of Researches, 2nd edn, 435. For the importance of Darwin's Australian encounter, see Barry W. Butcher, ‘Darwinism, social Darwinism and the Australian Aborigines: a reevaluation’, in R. Macleod and P. H. Rehbock (eds), Darwin's Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii 1994), 371–94.
Raymond Evans notes that the Origin of Species appeared in the same year that Queensland became a separate colony, and gives numerous examples of just how explicit Queensland settlers were in their racist justifications for doing away with black people; Evans, Saunders and Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination, 12. See also Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Genocide: definitions, questions, settler colonies’, introduction to a special genocide section, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, 1–15; Moses, ‘Genocide in Australian history’; and Anna Haebich ‘“Clearing the wheatbelt”: erasing the indigenous presence in the Southwest of Western Australia’, in Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society.
Darwin appears to have read the 1826 edition of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798; see Darwin, Descent of Man, 131–5, as well as Darwin, Origin of Species, 116–17 and Darwin, Autobiography, 42–3. In an 1887 letter, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose almost identical ideas pushed Darwin into publishing his theory, says he, too, was directly influenced by Malthus and the checks to population of ‘the struggle for existence’; Darwin, Autobiography, 200–1. Herbert Spencer's essay on Malthus containing the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ appeared in 1852, seven years before Darwin adopted it. So often credited, or discredited, as the father of ‘social Darwinism’, Spencer thus helped father Darwinism itself. Desmond and Moore highlight the influence of Malthus on colonialism and, subsequently, Darwin, in Darwin, 264–8.
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798], ed. with introduction by Antony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972), 144. For the degree to which Darwinism was from the outset also social Darwinism, see James Moore, ‘Socializing Darwinism: historiography and the fortunes of a phrase’, in Les Levidow (ed.), Science as Politics (London: Free Association Books 1986). Sven Lindqvist points out that Malthus clearly identified colonial genocide, and rejected it; though exterminating the native populations of other continents was possible as a temporary solution to Europe's food shortages, it would be morally indefensible to repeat what was happening in the United States: ‘If the united states of America continue increasing, which they certainly will do, though not with the same rapidity as formerly, the Indians will be driven further and further back into the country, till the whole race is ultimately exterminated, and the territory is incapable of further extension.’ It must not be allowed to happen elsewhere, either. ‘To exterminate the inhabitants of the greatest part of Asia and Africa is a thought that could not be admitted for a moment’; Lindqvist, History of Bombing, excerpt 35.
Darwin's ‘Historical sketch on the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species’ pre-dates publication of the Origin of Species in 1859; it is published in the 1968 Penguin edition of Origin of Species, following J. W. Burrow's introduction.
Darwin, Origin of Species, 127. James Moore notes the effect of repeated words throughout the book: ‘Whatever else these terms may show, they denominate a world of competitive individualism, racial hierarchy, and imperial advantage. One could be forgiven, on this basis, for thinking the Origin of Species dealt with human evolution, so frequently—twice on average per page—does Darwin draw on the language of everyday social life to interpret the natural world. The point, however, is that the book is about human evolution. And once Darwin's language was recirculated, now under the banner of biology, familiar terms acquired a fresh authority. People not only spoke differently—more often, say, about “survival”, “fitness”, and “species”—but they thought differently about how they spoke and what they spoke about. Ideology had undergone a scientific translation; Social Darwinizing was the result’; Moore, ‘Socializing Darwinism’, 67–8.
Alfred Russel Wallace, who separately reached conclusions about natural selection, also commented on ‘the inevitable extinction of those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which the Europeans come into contact’. Darwin marked this passage with a double line in his copy of Wallace's ‘The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of “natural selection”’, Anthropology Review, vol. 2, 1864; see Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View, 103.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, ed. John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May, facsimile of 1871 edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1981), ch. 7. Darwin in this chapter is still settling accounts with polygenism (235) and, like almost all biologists, remained unaware of Gregor Mendel's principles of genetics, published in mathematical form five years earlier (xix). Sexual selection was such an important issue for Darwin that the greater part of the book is devoted to it. In their 2004 introduction to the Penguin Descent, Desmond and Moore explain why Darwin omitted human evolution from the Origin of Species, and the context in which he returned to it.
Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), 236–40.
Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), 236–40.
James Bonwick, Darwin's main source for Tasmania, makes the plight of the indigenous remnant vivid, but mourns more than he blames. He sees genuine warfare for the land, and then good intentions gone terribly wrong. ‘No means existed for the arrest of the terrible home sickness which was carrying off so many of the Natives. An Old Hand told me “they died in the sulks, like so many bears”’; James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians (London: Sampson Low 1870), 245.
Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), 238–40. On pre-Darwinian racism and extinction theory, see Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, chs 1 and 2, and, on ‘Darwin and after’, ch. 8. For a rare history conceptualizing the present and future in the light of past population policies, see Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston: Beacon Press 1982).
Robert Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), 100; Darwin's most forceful response (to Hooker and Lyell as well as Wallace) is on 104. The significance of Darwin's move from artificial to natural selection is persuasively argued by Young (85–8). I would pursue the question of metaphor even further, especially in regard to another favourite, ‘colonization’ by plants and animals.
Darwin's influential neighbour, Sir John Lubbock, author of Prehistoric Times (1865), and E. B. Tylor, whose Early History of Mankind was published in the same year, are both cited in support of Darwin's monogenesis, ‘that all are descended from a common progenitor’; Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), 9–10.
In a quotation from Darwin's friend W. R. Greg, ‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits’ while ‘the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot … marries late and leaves few behind him’; Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), 174. The importance of altruism is also argued in Descent of Man (100–2), where Darwin also cites Herbert Spencer, ‘our great philosopher’, in support. Spencer's eight volumes of comparative ethnology, Descriptive Sociology (1873–81), were still in the future, as were his forthright pages on European atrocities in the conquest of other peoples in The Study of Sociology, facsimile of 1873 edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1961), 188–93. See also Bowler, Charles Darwin, 190–201, and Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View, 60–94 (‘Biology and social theory in the nineteenth century: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’). This latter essay does much to rescue Spencer from the crudest social Darwinism, even as it reaffirms his belief in progress through competition.
Darwin's influential neighbour, Sir John Lubbock, author of Prehistoric Times (1865), and E. B. Tylor, whose Early History of Mankind was published in the same year, are both cited in support of Darwin's monogenesis, ‘that all are descended from a common progenitor’; Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), 231–6.
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989) is an impressive history of the connections between German Darwinism and National Socialism, via eugenics and other politicized developments in science. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004) is less interested in Darwinism than in ideas ‘devaluing human life’. Richard J. Evans is critical of Weindling and an earlier essay by Weikart in a robust overview, ‘In search of German social Darwinism: the history and historiography of a concept’, in Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (eds), Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press 1997), 55–79.
The most important German convert was the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). His energy in furthering the cause was much appreciated by Darwin. Although Haeckel later widened his mission to include social life and the politics of the increasingly radical right, his books were removed from libraries by the Nazis. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald 1971) is too intent on tarring Haeckel with a Nazi brush. See Evans, ‘In search of German social Darwinism’, 63–6.
Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 538–43, 561–2, 576–9. Initial enthusiasm for German victory was tempered by the occupation of Paris and the Commune. By 1873 Spencer was commenting on the ‘exaggerated Teutomania’ that success in war had produced in German liberal and academic circles; Spencer, Study of Sociology, 195–6.
For the pressures of population growth, internal and overseas migration, and declining health with increasing poverty, see Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 11–13.
Many reformist concerns, ranging from sexuality to class divisions, seemed to belong more ‘naturally’ to the left, so the role of professionals, as well as intellectuals, in the new right was significant. In 1876 there were 13,728 doctors in the Reich; by 1900 there were 27,374. They were prominently represented in all the nationalist pressure groups: between 1894 and 1914, up to 10 per cent of Pan-German League chairmen were medical doctors. Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 17, 111.
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, facsimile of 2nd edn, London: Macmillan 1892 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith 1972), 35.
Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: Norton 1968), 425. Himmelfarb comments that ‘it did not seem to have occurred’ to Darwin that eugenics ‘vitiated his essential principle, making survival independent of the natural struggle for existence’. Brantlinger, 93–5, notes Galton's extension of Darwin in his hopes of getting rid of England's ‘refuse’ in the colonies, and Darwin's mention in the Descent of Man (28) of ‘the admirable work of Mr Galton’. Darwin's generosity disguised his differences. ‘Some of the more obscure passages of the Descent can be disentangled if we read them as Darwin's reply to the degenerationist tone of Galton's work’; Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought, 23.
Galton, quoted in Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics. Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1986), 12.
Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944, trans. from the German by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), 3, 37–8, 69; see also Mein Kampf, ch. 11 (‘Nation and race’). For the many lineages of the Nazi imperial project, see Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press 2003), ch. 2 (‘Conquest’).
Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, 24. Hitler, Himmler and other Nazis certainly saw their resort to genocide in terms of a larger historical morality that overcame objections about its criminality. For problems associating the Holocaust with other genocides, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the “racial century”: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, 7–36, and A. D. Moses, ‘The Holocaust and genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 533–55.
Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, 44. On medical and military reasoning about populations conquered by Germany, see Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000).
Brian Appleyard, Brave New Worlds: Genetics and the Human Experience (London: HarperCollins 2000), 67. For other signs of the new worlds upon us or possible, see Nicholas Rose, ‘The politics of life itself’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 18, no. 6, 2000, 1–30.
Burrow, ‘Introduction’, 44–5. The lineages of biology and politics in imperial Germany and Austria did not all tend to the right; Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994) is more measured than Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1981). The context of colonialism is specifically addressed in Jan Breman (ed.), Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam: VU University Press 1990).
The racial and biological interpretations of Nazi imperialism inevitably foregrounded here need to be corrected by the (no less Darwinian) political, military and economic rationale of German policy. On Hitler and the economics of Lebensraum, cf. Rainer Zittelmann, Hitler, the Politics of Seduction (London: London House 1999), 270–324; Hitler's modern, scientific view of the world is emphasized on 331–7.
One of the elemental themes was the naturalness of sexuality. In this the Nazis took a progressive social theme and allied it with the sexual selection that had so preoccupied Darwin in his work on race.
Darwin's Notebook E, December 1838, quoted in Traverso, Origins of Nazi Violence, 59, in which it is selected as a passage ‘that would not have been out of place in Mein Kampf’. I agree with him, not least because here Darwin slips into the confusion between species and race fundamental to Hitler's ideology.
Marx did confront intervention directly, and should be reassessed together with Darwin as a powerful promoter of the global project being carried through by colonization and commerce. Brantlinger does not fail to notice that the Communist Manifesto claims all nations are compelled ‘on pain of extinction’ to adopt the bourgeois mode of production. He adds: ‘The elimination of the primitive is not just a tragic side effect of modernization; as this passage suggests, it is its definition and destination’; Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 203n15.
Hitler's speech to officer cadets, 22 June 1944, quoted in Helmut Krausnick, ‘The persecution of the Jews’, in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Anatomy of the SS State, trans. from the German by Richard Barry, Marian Jackson and Dorothy Long (New York: Walker 1968), 13. This appeal to the law of nature, and the equally devastating law of history, is my concern in ‘On pain of extinction: laws of nature and history in Darwin, Marx, and Arendt’, in Dan Stone and Richard H. King (eds), Imperialism, Slavery, Race, and Genocide: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt (forthcoming).
For a sample of the best work (and a guide to other references), see Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust. Towards an archeology of genocide’, in Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society, and J. Zimmerer, ‘The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism’, in this special issue. Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (London: Berghahn Books 2001) and Christopher Browning (with Jürgen Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2004) show how policy developed as the East was won. Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell 2003) points to a continuing gap between research and the search for meaning in the Holocaust, which only the most imaginative historical work on Nazism and its contexts can begin to close.