Racial science and British society, 1930-62 / Gavin Schaffer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schaffer, Gavin, 1976-

Contributor:

John G. Hartman Memorial Library Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Racism.

History.

Race relations.

Great Britain--Race relations--History--20th century.

Great Britain.

Racism--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Great Britain--Politics and government--20th century.

Politics and government.

World War, 1939-1945--Social aspects--Great Britain.

World War, 1939-1945.

Great Britain--Social policy.

Social policy.

Physical Description:

ix, 234 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Summary:

The study of race has been an important feature in British universities for over a hundred years. During this time, academic understanding of what race describes and means has changed and developed as has the purpose of racial study. Once considered the preserve of biologists and physical anthropologists, over the course of the last century the study of race has transferred mostly into social scientific disciplines such as sociology. This book explores this passing of authority on racial matters in the context of international and domestic political issues.

In a period which spans the rise and fall of Nazism, the onset of the Cold War, the birth of Apartheid and the death of legal US segregation, Racial Science and British Society, 1930-62 considers the relationship between science, politics and ideology, arguing that racial scholarship in Britain was shaped in every period by factors outside of science. At the same time it argues that it is possible to see the influence of expert racial scholarship in every significant action of government immigration policy during this period. This major new study of twentieth-century Britain calls into question the impact of racial ideas on British society and probes into the nature of knowledge production in science.

Contents:

The end of the race concept 1

Science or society? Who takes the lead? 3

The 'post 1945' thesis 4

The meanings of race 6

Deconstructing racial science and British society 8

Race and immigration policy in early twentieth-century Britain 11

2 Rethinking Interwar Racial Reform: the 1930s 15

Four racial field studies 16

Changing methods and changing politics 25

The limits of racial reform before the Second World War 39

Science and society in the 1930s 48

Refuge, race and restriction: Britain and the Jewish refugees from Nazism 53

3 The Challenge of War: the 1940s 63

Scientists and the wartime racial agenda 63

Scientists versus the state? Enemy aliens and Britain's black subjects 79

The perilous mission of the believers: protecting the idea of race in the face of Nazism and the Holocaust 96

Sharing the biologists' uncertainty? The European Volunteer Workers policy after the Second World War 107

4 Race on the Retreat? The 1950s and 1960s 115

Stepping back from society: the progressives, Lysenko and Soviet science 115

British biologists and the UNESCO statements on race 120

Progressives and conservatives in the 1950s: a case of reunification? 132

British science and post-war Commonwealth immigration to Britain 148.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 172-228) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the John G. Hartman Memorial Library Fund.

ISBN:

0230008925

9780230008922

OCLC:

225852368

Online:

Publisher description