National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840-1945

National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce powerful, racialized national identity discourses. These essays demonstrate that the “national races” constructed by physical anthropologists had a vital historical role in racism, race science, and nationalism.

Contributors address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, classifiers were nationalists who explicitly or implicitly used race narratives to promote political agendas. On the other hand, the transnational community of race scholars resisted the centrifugal forces of nationalism. Their interdisciplinary project was a vital episode in the development of the social sciences, using biological race classification to explain the history, geography, relationships, and psychologies of nations.

National Races delves to the heart of tensions between nationalism and transnationalism, politics and science, by examining transnational science from the perspective of its peripheries. Contributors to the book supplement the traditional focus of historians on France, Britain, and Germany, with myriad case studies and examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial and national identities in countries such as Russia, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, and among Jewish anthropologists.

 
 

Richard McMahon teaches European Union politics at University College London. He is the author of The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839–1939.