Race, polygenesis and equality: John Crawfurd and nineteenth-century resistance to evolution

Abstract

The nineteenth-century Orientalist and ethnologist, John Crawfurd, publicly rejected Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in 1868. Crawfurd was a leading advocate of polygenesis but also a supporter of racial equality. In 1820 he published his History of the Indian Archipelago, where he advocated granting household suffrage to all races in the British colonies. After finishing a career in the East India Company in 1828 he became the foremost expert on South-East Asia in Britain. Crawfurd became a regular writer on ethnology and Asian affairs for the Examiner newspaper and in the 1860s he was President of the Ethnological Society of London. Accounts of nineteenth-century anthropology in Britain characterise debate around race as falling into two camps: advocates of monogenesis and advocates of polygenesis. In the United States of America, advocates of polygenesis were often associated with advocates of slavery and racial inequality. Recent research has demonstrated that Charles Darwin's hatred of slavery drove him to write Origin of the Species to demonstrate the unity of the human species and reject the polygenesis position. This paper explores Crawfurd's ideas and demonstrates that a belief in polygenesis in the nineteenth century did not necessarily equate with a belief in racial inequality.

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

“…The unstable unity of these commitments, reflected as much in political, economic, and legal argumentation as in historical and ethnographic analysis, have supplied ample material for scholarly disagreement. Hagiographies of Crawfurd have credited his polygenism with an egalitarian-inclusive appreciation of human plurality, to which they attribute his “liberal” and “democratic” credentials as an imperial reformer (Knapman 2016; Knapman 2017, 74–92; Wong 2018). Skeptics, by contrast, have underscored his explicit somatization of social difference into racial “types” and his brash proclamations of European superiority as evidence of (at best) “soft racism” (Ellingson 2001, 309–20; Krishnan 2007; Quilty 1998; 2018).…”

Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free-Grown Sugar as an Ethics-Driven Market Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain

“…The intensification of anti-Black racism Britain was associated with the advent of pseudo-scientific doctrines that caused many British people to doubt the very humanity of Black people. From the 1830s onwards, many British people were attracted to the theory of polygenesis, which rejected the Biblical teaching that all humans were descended from a single couple and instead taught that each of the five races of man had evolved separately from primates (Knapman 2016 ).…”

The Embodiment of the Indigenous People by European Travel Writers at the Cape Colony, Southern Africa

“…The issue that the different races were separate species and the practice of slavery may be explained in terms of 19th-, 20th-and 21st-century scholarship of polygenesis which started gaining traction in the 1850s (Knapman 2016;Young 1995). This scholarship advocates the notion that as a separate species, Europeans enjoyed individual rights which they did not share with African or Asian peoples.…”

“…Indigenous people's physical appearance, customs and beliefs were used to justify their subjugation as slaves. Many studies have demonstrated the interconnections among polygenesis, imperialism and slavery (Desmond and Moore 2009;Knapman 2016). The monogenesis scholars argue that as one broad family, all humans share a common ancestor and should therefore have the same rights to equality.…”