Darwinism was distorted to legitimate colonial rule over the Orient.
Evidence
There was general agreement too that, according to a strangely transformed variety of Darwinism sanctioned by Darwin himself, the modern Orientals were degraded remnants of a former greatness; the ancient, or “classical,” civilizations of the Orient were perceivable through the disorders of present decadence, but only (a) because a white specialist with highly refined scientific techniques could do the sifting and reconstructing, and (b) because a vocabulary of sweeping generalities (the Semites, the Aryans, the Orientals) referred not to a set of fictions but rather to a whole array of seemingly objective and agreed-upon distinctions. Thus a remark about what Orientals were and were not capable of was supported by biological “truths” such as those spelled out in P. Charles Michel’s “A Biological View of Our Foreign Policy” (1896), in Thomas Henry Huxley’s The Struggle for Existence in Human Society (1888), Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894), John B. Crozier’s History of Intellectual Development on the Lines of Modern Evolution (1897–1901), and Charles Harvey’s The Biology of British Politics (1904). — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 586
Categorization
- DEFINE: Illustrates how biological discourse was weaponized into a taxonomy ranking whole peoples — a key mechanism for how ‘scientific’ racism underwrites empire.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 586
- XREF: connects to: Darwinism was politically neutral and initially served anti-colonial and pacifist causes — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 473; Colonial empire was built on distorted knowledge and strategic ignorance. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1335; Darwinism was politically neutral and served both race rule and its opponents (+7 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Darwinism was politically neutral and initially served anti-colonial and pacifist causes — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 473; Colonial empire was built on distorted knowledge and strategic ignorance. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1335; Darwinism was politically neutral and served both race rule and its opponents (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Racism relocated from biology into culture after Darwinism lost legitimacy
#complicates(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 783