Race in British Eugenics

Abstract

The dominant historiographical view of eugenics in Britain is that it was a middle-class protest movement that found in early genetic science a justification for its objections to paying taxes to aid the poor. Often, this position is contrasted with a ‘harder’, blood-and-soil, continental type of eugenics, one that ended in genocide. In this article Stone does not dispute the class-based nature of British eugenics, but shows that, among all kinds of eugenicists, this class issue was inseparable from a racially motivated world view. ‘Race’, in this reading, was more than simply a synonym for ‘nation’, for already by the Edwardian period there was a widely accepted racial hierarchy. If this was not always referred to, it was because it was taken for granted. Hence the view of British eugenics that sees it as mildly threatening but basically embarrassing needs to be adjusted so that its full, sinister implications can be seen.

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