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.
Let us consider in what a village of English colonists is superior to a tribe of Australian natives who roam about them. Indisputably in one, and that a main sense, they are superior. They can beat the Australians in war when they like; they can take from them what they like, and kill any of them they choose. Footnote2
It is a more curious fact, that savages did not formerly waste away, as Mr Bagehot has remarked, before the classical nations, as they now do before modern civilised nations; had they done so, the old moralists would have mused over the event; but there is no lament in any writer of that period over the perishing barbarians. Footnote3
Charles Darwin grew up with guns. Only twenty-two when he was offered the position of naturalist on the round-the-world voyage of the Beagle, he used his skill with a firearm to bring down the birds that started him thinking about the differences of species. Henceforth, thinking was his life. ‘I discovered, though unconsciously and insensibly, that the pleasure of observing and reasoning was a much higher one than that of skill and sport.’Footnote4 But he was neither unconscious of, nor insensible to, the role played by the gun in the distant places he visited. His voyage initiated Darwin into the long drama of evolution, and into another drama, quicker and more dire. While he began his search for specimens in South America, the settlers were shooting the Indians. Even as his party of Europeans discovered the remains of long-dead megafauna, he observed European colonists doing their best to make the indigenous people extinct.
Before Darwin understood species, he understood genocide. His diary and his published account of the voyage make that plain. With remarkable clarity, he commented on both the larger relations of genocide within the colonial world and the eruption of genocidal moments on the frontier.Footnote5 When he again turned his attention to contemporary history he was reluctant to say as much as he had earlier; and he is less direct than the relatively sheltered Walter Bagehot.Footnote6 Darwin became radically unconventional in science and, with even more notoriety, in religion. In social and political questions, he retained the worldview of his class and time.Footnote7 The basis of that view was historical: it held that the advance of civilization was a triumphant progress, morally justified and probably inevitable. When Darwin lent his great gifts and influence to making the disappearance of peoples ‘natural’ as well as historical, his theory—conceived amid a worldwide human catastrophe—could serve as an ideological cover for policies abhorrent to his humanitarian and humanist principles.Footnote8 Darwin's fateful confusion of natural history and human history would be exploited fatally by others. To understand the connections to the colonial genocides of his time and to the European genocides that followed, we have to read this Darwin again.
When he returned from five years at sea, Darwin still believed in a wondrous creation. It took him more than twenty years of ever-widening research, distracted by poor health, children and worries about the reception of his heresy, to complete an outline of a theory that decisively shifted modern consciousness to the realities of a world in which divine intervention played no part. Life and death belonged to nature; the causing of life and death could be construed as rational, natural and even moral within nature's harsh, amoral laws. His own summary could hardly be clearer:
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as consequently there is a frequently occurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself … will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. … This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.Footnote9
The long historical and philosophical pedigree of Darwinism cannot be laid out here. Like colonialism, it belonged to the modern project of dominating nature; it celebrated the power of nature while promoting its disempowerment. My concern is the confusion of natural history with human history that Darwin promoted, and the consequences of fusing the two. When the interventionist ideology of eugenics was added into the mix, there were terrible consequences for nature and humans alike.Footnote10
Darwin's colonial encounters
Darwin had read little history when he boarded HMS Beagle. In his captain, FitzRoy, he saw the noble type civilizing the world in Britain's image; in the strange peoples of the antipodes he would find the countertype to civilization. The natives of Tierra del Fuego were the first ‘savages’ he met and they made a lasting impression as primitives. Yet he had for months shared shipboard life with three Fuegians kidnapped on an earlier voyage and could not but be impressed by their ability to adapt. Much opinion, he knew, emphasized innate inferiority, biology over culture. ‘But in contradiction to what has often been stated, three years has been sufficient to change our savages, into, as far as habits go, complete and voluntary Europeans.’ He was sorry to leave them again ‘amongst their barbarous countrymen’. It was a European who in this case failed to adapt. The Beagle crew had to take Mr Matthews, the would-be missionary of civilization, away with them.Footnote11
Then, during a long journey into the interior in 1833, he came face to face with the alternative policy towards indigenous peoples defending their lands against expropriation. General Manuel de Rosas, a cattle rancher who served as governor of Buenos Aires, and later dictator of Argentina (and who, later again, retired to Swaythling in Hampshire), was engaged on what Darwin recognized at the time as a mission ‘to exterminate the Indians’. Some 112 women and children and men were ‘nearly all taken or killed, very few escaped’. (Darwin notes in the margin: ‘Only one Christian was wounded.’) ‘The soldiers pursue and sabre every man. Like wild animals however they fight to the last instant.’ The reason was to be made plain. ‘This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact that that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood. I ventured to hint, that this appeared rather inhuman. He answered me, “What can be done, they breed so.”’Footnote12
It is the sadly familiar language of genocide. To the perpetrators, Darwin noticed, the killing was reasonable and even moral in the larger scheme of things. ‘Everyone here is fully convinced that this is the justest war, because it is against Barbarians.’ His protest echoed all the others: ‘Who would believe that in this age in a Christian, civilized country that such atrocities were committed?’ In fact, those who could believe it included himself, and for the reasons of historical progress self-evident to the winners of the war for the land. The theodicy of civilization would set the pattern for Darwin in all his writings: it celebrated a new world of productivity and profit that decreed the sacrifice of barbarians who stood in its way. The shooters were the shock troops of the new relations being established.
If this warfare is successful, that is if all the Indians are butchered, a grand extent of country will be available for the production of cattle, and the valleys … will be most productive of corn. The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians. The former being a little superior in civilisation, as they are inferior in every moral virtue.Footnote13
In the second edition of the Journal of Researches (often republished in later years as The Voyage of the Beagle), the grand vision of colonial productivity does not appear. The remarks on the Gauchos were also edited out. However, the violence is not expurgated, and some significant remarks are added. First: ‘Since leaving South America we have heard that this war of extermination completely failed.’ Then, in the next paragraph: ‘I think there will not, in another half-century, be a wild Indian northward of the Rio Negro. The warfare is too bloody to last; the Christians killing every Indian and the Indians doing the same to the Christians.’ There follows a reflection on how the destruction of a whole people takes place in a colonial society, not always by massacre.
It is melancholy to trace how the Indians have given way before the Spanish invaders. Schirdel says that in 1535, when Buenos Aires was founded, there were villages containing two and three thousand inhabitants. Even in Falconer's time (1750) the Indians made inroads as far as Luxan, Areco, and Arrecife, but now they are driven beyond the Salado. Not only have whole tribes been exterminated, but the remaining Indians have become more barbarous: instead of living in large villages, and being employed in the arts of fishing, as well as of the chase, they now wander about the open plains, without home or fixed occupation.Footnote14
Darwin would never be quite at ease with the moral questions packed into these early reflections, but he accepted and finally promoted the idea that a higher form of humanity could not evolve without the demise of the lower. In natural history, he would keep telling himself, there was no ‘higher’ and ‘lower’.Footnote15 In human affairs he was faced early and dramatically by the argument that even bad people and bad methods could be justified by a higher purpose. Where there was clear moral superiority he would be second to none in accepting casualties.Footnote16
When the Beagle reached Sydney, he found few traces of moral superiority in convict society. His first encounter with the not yet civilized indigenous people, on the other hand, was positive. ‘They were all partly clothed and several could speak a little English; their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant and they appeared far from such utterly degraded beings as usually represented.’ He knew of their ‘most wonderful sagacity’ in tracking and for a shilling got them to demonstrate their remarkable spear throwing. ‘They will not however cultivate the ground, or even take the trouble of keeping flocks of sheep which have been offered them, or build houses and remain stationary.’Footnote17 Darwin had read Locke for his final exams at Cambridge, and his land-owning class did not lack eloquence in justifying the appropriation of land.Footnote18 Aboriginal Australians were obviously not interested in improving pursuits. He rated them a few degrees above the Fuegians.
Darwin knew the Aborigines were disappearing. ‘Their numbers have rapidly decreased; during my whole ride with the exception of some boys brought up in the houses, I saw only one other party.’ Their wandering life caused great numbers of children to die in infancy, he had been told, quite apart from the effects of European diseases, the drinking of spirits and ‘the gradual extinction of the wild animals’, especially by English greyhounds. The extinction of the Aborigines, he thought, would follow.
The Natives are always anxious to borrow the dogs from the farmhouses; their use, offal when an animal is killed, and milk from the cows, are the peace offerings of the Settlers, who push further and further inland. The thoughtless Aboriginal, blinded by these trifling advantages, is delighted at the approach of the White Man, who seems predestined to inherit the country of his children.Footnote19
Did Darwin understand that Australian settlers had also employed the more direct methods of General Rosas to ensure their predestined inheritance? ‘Although having bad sport, we enjoyed a pleasant ride’ is his next line; he then describes in lively detail the landscape and wildlife, including the already famous platypus. He was on his way to the ‘not very inviting’ town of Bathurst where only ten years before (according to another reporter) ‘one of the largest holders of sheep in the colony’ had stood up in a public meeting and maintained
the best thing that could be done would be to shoot all the Blacks and manure the ground with their carcasses, which was all the good they were fit for. It was recommended likewise that the women and children should especially be shot as the most certain method of getting rid of the race.
We have reason to think Darwin would have noted a massacre he heard about, and no reason to believe he ever approved of shooters in killing parties. They were not part of his class inheritance, with its consciousness of higher culture as well as practical enterprise.Footnote21 He was intrigued by social and economic aspects of the colony and the extraordinary opportunities for prosperity. He was shown round ‘one of the large farming or rather sheep grazing establishments of the Colony’ and noted the return from the clip. ‘I believe the value of the average produce of wool from 15,000 sheep would be more than 5000 pounds sterling.’Footnote22 In Tasmania, too, he was as likely to remark on economy and society—‘They enjoy an advantage in there being no wealthy Convicts’—as on ferns and forests. Did he know at what cost the prosperity there had been bought? There is a clear sign of it, significant also for the terms of its judgement. ‘The Aboriginal blacks are all removed and kept (in reality as prisoners) in a Promontory, the neck of which is guarded. I believe it was not possible to avoid this cruel step; although without doubt the misconduct of the Whites first led to the Necessity.’Footnote23
This cruel step. Not possible to avoid. The Necessity. These thoughts did not dominate Darwin's reflections as he put his five-year voyage on the Beagle behind him. He warned against the boredom, the cramped quarters, the awful scourge of seasickness: ‘it is no trifling evil cured in a week’. But the greater cruelties and necessities of life on earth kept returning to him in the forty-five years of reflection ahead. His own health never recovered, and would be made worse by the painstaking nature of the work, the scale of his enterprise, the difficulties of thinking things through. The moral grounding of the empire such voyages helped to acquire was not a problem for Darwin. ‘The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea, probably stands by itself in the records of history.’
In the same quarter of the globe Australia is rising, or indeed may be said to have risen, into a grand centre of civilisation, which, at some not very remote period, will rule as empress over the southern hemisphere. It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilisation.Footnote24
Darwin knew there were other consequences as well. The dispossession, destruction and disappearance of peoples were among them. Yet his skill with language also blunts the suggestion of responsibility. After noting ‘evident causes’, Darwin describes the ‘agency’ as ‘mysterious’, a factor ‘generally at work’. And any ‘extirpating’ acts the ‘varieties of man’ might commit are naturalized in terms that would be reassuring to his readers but now sound more disturbing.
Beside these several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be some mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look at the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, and we shall find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.Footnote25
The struggle for existence: natural or historical selection?
Done with his account of the voyage, Darwin for many years left his encounters with human history behind him as well. But in crucial respects they resurfaced when he was compelled to publish the great work of interpretation that he had kept putting aside.Footnote26 By Darwin's own account, it was problems of human populations rather than his observations of plants and animals that gave him ‘a theory by which to work’. It occurred to him in as early as 1838 while reading Thomas Malthus.Footnote27
Influenced more by conditions in Britain than by events in the colonies, Malthus made mathematical play of a rather obvious fact: there could not be enough room on the planet for all the progeny of every organism. The weakest, logically, would go under. That is natural; Malthus was pessimistic about mere mortals countering the reproductive force of nature. William Godwin (against whom his original essay was directed) had tried to argue that human institutions were to blame. No, said Malthus, suffering, disaster and even extinction could not be prevented by human institutions: they were ‘mere feathers that float on the surface, in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs and render turbid the whole stream of human life’. This could be, from a Christian, an argument for original sin, but it isn't. It is about necessity, ‘the inevitable laws of nature’.Footnote28
Such laws were Darwin's concern when he penned a title intended to draw attention away from humans and their evolution.
ON
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION
THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
In 1813, Dr W. C. Wells read before the Royal Society ‘An Account of a White female, part of whose skin resembled that of a Negro’ … In this paper he distinctly recognises the principle of natural selection and this is the first recognition which has been indicated; but he applies it only to the races of man, and to certain characters alone.
The colonial context keeps appearing: introduced plants and animals dramatically displace indigenous species when they come into competition—example after example shows ‘why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no case could we say precisely why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.’Footnote30 In human competition it was possible, as Darwin observed on his voyage, to be quite precise about how the displacement occurred. More often than not, the gun was involved, though he did not often refer to it after his return. Like others, he preferred the language of inevitable demise. The reasons include his developing sense of evolution in history as well as nature, and his knowledge that history—human activities, however difficult to trace exactly—could be equally callous. The ‘realistic’ frontiersmen who were not by instruction or imitation his disciples had a broad understanding and moral ideology hard to separate from the conclusions he was developing, in part, from their example.Footnote31
When he finally took up the challenge of diverse human populations in the Descent of Man, Darwin determined, as in the Origin of Species, that nature—with crucial help from conscious sexual selection—accounted for the many branches of the single human species.Footnote32 ‘Extinction’, however, was another matter. Humans could survive in all kinds of climates and conditions; they often could not survive each other. ‘Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race.’ In tribal societies the contest for resources ‘is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption’.Footnote33
The difference in the contemporary case was again ‘civilization’, the imposition of not only a strange culture but a completely alien and immeasurably more powerful set of economic, social and political relations. ‘When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.’ Darwin, it appears, had found no grounds to alter the view he had formed from his observations on the Beagle. ‘Of the causes which lead to the victory of civilised nations, some are plain and some very obscure. We can see that the cultivation of the land will be fatal in many ways to savages, for they cannot, or will not, change their habits.’ Here there is no mention of slaughter in the competition for resources, though the younger Darwin, as we have seen, knew very well it happened. Rather, he chose the usual view of dramatic decline. ‘New diseases and vices are highly destructive’, as are ‘the evil effects from spirituous liquors’.Footnote34 Most significant in all cases—he carefully gives figures for Tasmania, New Zealand and Hawaii—is the sudden and persistent drop in births. But of what is it significant? He compares cases of animals unable to breed in captivity and the evidence that natives somehow lose motivation to cope with new conditions.
It appears that Darwin, so keen to resume historical enquiry, had himself lost motivation to investigate the new conditions his countrymen had created. He knew the phenomenon of population decline he more than once called ‘obscure’ was in effect genocidal, and that it was connected to policies of colonization, land seizure and economic development that were historical rather than natural. Darwin could have commented with more of the insight he had shown as a young man. Instead, he concentrated on the failure of indigenous peoples to reproduce, a concern much closer to the core of his natural selection theory. For his readers, he knew, it was more comfortable to admire the achievements of explorers, missionaries and settlers from the security of a prospering Britain while ignoring or mildly mourning the disappearance of peoples unable to cope with the coming of civilization. And anyone troubled by their passing found reassurance: something inevitable—apparently God's will—seemed now also to be borne out by science.
It was not, I think, Darwin's intention to give comfort in this way. Yet nowhere does he appeal for the survival of indigenous peoples; unlike slavery, a wrong that could be righted, the ‘extinction’ he knows about is cast as a matter of human agency but one without full human responsibility.Footnote35 The two pages in the Descent of Man that give his considered view of a process that belongs entirely to human history inevitably place his observations in a context of biology as well as anthropology. Just as inevitably, he therefore contributes to the naturalizing of human population displacement—and human violence—within the eternal verities of natural selection. His two concluding paragraphs on the matter show the confusion taking place. ‘The grade of civilisation seems a most important element’ in the competition between peoples Bagehot saw happening in the colonies. ‘Although the gradual decrease and final extinction of the races of man is an obscure problem, we can see that it depends on many causes, differing in different places and at different times.’ He compares displacement of the South American ‘fossil horse’ by ‘countless troops of Spanish horse’, and then calls in a displaced people as witness: ‘The New Zealander seems conscious of this parallelism, for he compares his future fate with that of the native rat almost exterminated by the European rat.’Footnote36
Clearly, Darwin is dealing here with unnatural selection: the result of historical intervention. Even the first chapter of the Origin of Species—Darwin was rather proud of this—locates the whole theory of natural selection in a contradictory context. ‘Variation under Domestication’ is his starting point, calculated to allow his readers a familiar entry into the greater drama of prehistoric mutations. Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist whose similar theory pushed Darwin into publication, was only one who questioned the shift from artificial selection by domestic breeders to the grand principle of ‘Nature’ selecting. ‘To the few this is as clear as daylight, and beautifully suggestive, but to many it is evidently a stumbling block.’Footnote37
It was not, alas, a stumbling block to the administrators, settlers and soldiers who thought they were somehow doing nature's work, or to the purveyors of the ideology of disappearance. It is hard to see that the popular perception would have been different if Darwin (as Wallace suggested) simply emphasized ‘survival of the fittest’: this was in any case the favourite of those most frank about the consequences of colonization. In later years Darwin compromised the moral universe he tried to act within by not declaring himself with continued force against the horrors of frontier expansion. He did take care to promote altruism as one way the more civilized were able to advance, but prejudice against peoples deemed lacking in virtues—most notably the Irish—was promoted as well.Footnote38 While the latest biology and the new anthropology proved the unity of mankind, they also stimulated awareness of difference, and different stages of civilization.Footnote39 The natural history that illuminated a common human history would light the way to pernicious discrimination, and allow human history to be made on biological principles. All editions of the Descent of Man began with the same set of questions about the origin of races, their distribution, and population pressure leading to ‘occasional severe struggles for existence, and consequently to beneficial variations, whether in body or mind, being preserved, and injurious ones being eliminated’.
Do the races of or species of men, whichever term may be applied, encroach on and replace each other, so that some finally become extinct? We shall see that all these questions, as is indeed obvious with most of them, must be answered in the affirmative, in the same manner as with the lower animals.Footnote40
Darwinism, colonialism and Nazi genocide
The deaths and the suffering and the extinction of whole peoples were proceeding before Darwin set sail and after he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Most importantly, just as the colonial frontier shaped his thinking in the Home Counties, it shaped the coming age of genocide in Europe. The route was complicated by developments in science and racism that combined with Darwinian theory and colonial practice to produce the radicalism that Hitler made his own.Footnote41 Darwin himself was assiduous in fostering links between his English-language success and the enthusiastic Darwinismus of his German apostles.Footnote42 Like them, he was swept up in the victory of Prussia over France in 1870 and the possibilities of Bismarck's new German empire.Footnote43 No one could have foreseen how a later German empire would invoke Darwin's ideas to justify an active programme of colonizing, supplanting and killing.
The developments that would create a catastrophe in Europe stemmed from unresolved problems of society and politics in the conservative German state rather than from Darwin's science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany underwent the social dislocation, demographic upheavals and political effects of industrialization.Footnote44 Before the new century arrived, industrial development and expansionist nationalism were influencing every academic discipline and helping to create new ones: sociology, statistics, economics. Practical scientific engagement with the social realm integrated many impulses and apparently contradictory ideologies. Advances in biological science, most notably in bacteriology, cell theory and genetics, made Darwin decidedly dated in the professional research that distinguished German universities, but ‘social Darwinism’—the term was just coming into use—found new adherents, not least in the medical profession that burgeoned in numbers and influence with the new social insurance schemes. Social involvement increased medical interest in links between living conditions and disease, mental illness and criminality. Emigration, colonies and imperial assertion became linked to national well-being. Vogue words with changing ideological loadings and policy consequences included Untermensch, Volk and Lebensraum. Weltpolitik abroad was associated with ‘racial hygiene’ at home.Footnote45
It had been Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who advanced the idea of creating a better society by attention to inherited characteristics. Since it was possible to intervene in nature and by purposeful selection bring about improvements in animals and plants, why not in humans as well? Galton believed that by encouraging breeding between the best examples of humans, the science he called ‘eugenics’ had the potential ‘to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course’.Footnote46 As the name implied, it was all about a better world: ‘what nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.’Footnote47 Because eugenics was first of all a site for improving the home population without social revolution, it quickly attracted ideological allies who also saw the potential of imperialism, racism and antisemitism as populist alternatives to socialism. One of the alarm bells for Europe was sounded by Galton himself. In 1892 he warned about ideas escaping from the academy into the new world of democratic—or demagogic—politics.
The great problem of the future betterment of the human race is confessedly, at the present time, hardly advanced beyond the stage of academic interest, but thought and action move swiftly nowadays, and it is by no means impossible that a generation which has witnessed the exclusion of the Chinese race from the customary privileges of settlers of two continents, and the deportation of a Hebrew population from a large portion of a third, may live to see analogous acts performed under sudden socialistic pressure.Footnote48
After a yet more intensive burst of imperialist competition and the Great War, the ‘sudden pressure’ appeared as National Socialism. The ‘struggle for existence’ that Darwin had made his basic law of natural selection Hitler would use to back a very literal policy of human selection more unflinching than ever before conceived. With the help of Darwin's own historically inspired interventionist leanings, it completed the shift away from the other basic principle of Darwinism: that there is no plan or intention in natural selection. The intention of eugenics was to select within nature to plan great good. The unintended consequence was great evil.
The biological premises of Nazi racism are notorious. Still struggling for recognition is the extent to which the planting and supplanting example of colonization powered National Socialist ideology and practice. The most Darwinian statements came out when the need to be ruthless in colonizing living space was in the forefront of Hitler's mind. His mealtime conversations with visitors when the eastern war of conquest was launched make the connections clear from the very first page of the record. Civilization, race and nature are bundled together in a familiar combination of superior and inferior:
By instinct, the Russian does not incline towards a higher form of society… .
If anyone asks us where we obtain the right to extend the Germanic space to the east, we reply that, for a nation, the awareness of what she represents carries this right with it. It's success that justifies everything.…
There's only one duty: to Germanise this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.…
If today you do harm to the Russians, it is so as to avoid giving them the opportunity of doing harm to us. … In this business I shall go ahead cold-bloodedly. What others may think about me, at this juncture, is to me a matter of complete indifference. I don't see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil which produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don't think about the despoiled Indians.Footnote49
If any people has the right to proceed to evacuations, it is we, for we've often had to evacuate our own populations. Eight hundred thousand men had to emigrate from East Prussia alone. How humanely sensitive we are is shown by the fact that we consider it a maximum of brutality to have liberated our country from six hundred thousand Jews.Footnote50
German historians will know what I mean by the danger of reading Darwin, and all developments after his time, through ‘brown lenses’. I have tried not to retroject Nazism into Darwin's science, or to hold science responsible for political distortions. The fact remains that Nazi convictions about ruthless struggle in nature were based on more than slogans. One recent writer believes the passages on eugenics in Mein Kampf show ‘a good grasp of the science involved’,Footnote52 though references to the potent intellectual ‘stew’ popularized at the time Hitler and others were susceptible to it seem closer to the mark.Footnote53 Who contributed to the ‘stew’ and with what effect remains contentious; Hitler's own samplings of it indicate no direct encounter with Darwin's writings and they produced a distinctive distortion. Biology for Hitler confirmed violence as the essential means of making history, and the ideology of race as essential to the historic programme of a great civilization asserted over a great living space.Footnote54 Hitler saw himself as willing to face facts without hypocrisy, and to make them. In the Nazi empire the domination and displacement of peoples deemed inferior in culture would mean the physical subjection of all and the physical elimination of some. The images of rats and beetles and fighting stags in Nazi propaganda were designed to evoke Darwinian themes in the most elemental way.Footnote55
The point of such imagery was to feed into prejudices about human difference, and even into the idea that it was natural to have such prejudices. Darwin was not responsible for ‘euthanasia’, racial categorization and genocide. But the legacy of Darwin promoted the idea that it is natural for beings with more power to displace others, and to intervene in nature for such ends. Darwin did not confront this as directly as he might have in his later work.Footnote56 Significantly, though, his earliest historical reflections saw in organization and reason a grim potential.
When two races of men meet, they act precisely like two species of animals—they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other, but then comes the most deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organisation, or instincts (i.e. intellect, in man) to gain the day.Footnote57
Darwin knew by 1838 that colonies were the testing ground for the ‘best-fitted organisation’ and the deadly struggle. They were interventions in ecology, biology and human populations on an unprecedented scale. Almost everywhere, they instituted relations of genocide. A century later Hitler had ample precedent to hand. He exploited the rhetoric of nature for an intervention of unparalleled focus and ferocity but it was his ambition to build a colonial empire that gave him the motive and opportunity for his genocidal onslaught against Slavs and Jews. The integration of the Holocaust into this conceptualization is only now being ventured, although the research making it irresistible is well advanced.Footnote58 Russians and Poles were loaded with all the attributes of shiftless ‘natives’ and ‘the Jews’ were endowed with the power to manipulate all other powers against Germany's imperial birthright. Ruthless war, he told his soldiers, was ‘the unalterable law for the whole of life’.
Nature is always teaching us … that she is governed by the principle of selection: that victory is to the strong and the weak must go to the wall. … A people that cannot assert itself must disappear and another must take its place. All creation is subject to this law; no one can avoid it …Footnote59
It was not natural selection that gave ‘selection’ a terrible new meaning after Auschwitz. It was an undertaking of the human will for a rational end. It was the power to demonstrate total domination, a ruthlessness that pretended to mimic nature while making nature count for nothing. The lessons were presented as natural history but derived from human history. History, not nature, would be the court of appeal. There, the unnatural selection Darwin could not resist bested natural selection at every turn. Hitler had seen how it worked. Those armed by a superior civilization would beat the inferior in war; they could take from them anything they liked, and kill any of them they chose.
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.