“When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.” So writes Darwin in the section on “the extinction of races” inThe Descent of Man(190). His account is one of many: from the late 1700s on, an enormous literature has been devoted to the “doom” of “primitive races” caused by “fatal impact” with white, Western civilization. WhileDark Vanishingsincludes evidence about populations of indigenous peoples around the world and about the tragic histories of their decimations, its primary focus is on the assumptions...

Before the publication of Darwin’sOrigin of Species(1859), three types of supposedly scientific discourse dealt with the extinction of primitive races. The first was “natural history,” a broad rubric that embraced both geology and biology. The taxonomies of organisms offered by Carl von Linneaus, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Georges Cuvier included hierarchizing accounts of the human races, with the white or “Caucasian” race leading the parade. Further, through the geological “record of the rocks,” massive evidence of the extinction of numerous nonhuman species was being unearthed, though Linnaeus, Thomas Jefferson, and many others resisted it...

Toward the beginning ofThe Maine Woods(1864), his posthumously published account of treks that he made in 1846 and again in the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau describes a “woebegone” Indian disembarking from his canoe near Oldtown with “a bundle of skins … and an empty keg” to fill with whiskey. “This picture will do to put before [the reader] the Indian’s history,” Thoreau declares; “that is, the history of his extinction” (6). On a later trip, the killing and butchering of a moose by his Indian guide suggests to Thoreau “how base or coarse are the motives which commonly...

Until the American Civil War in the 1860s, humanitarianism concerning other races focused on slavery. But that issue could not be disentangled from questions of imperialism, economic exploitation, and the impact of white colonization on indigenous populations in Mrica, the Americas, and elsewhere. Within the British Empire, the abolitionist struggle culminated in the outlawing of the slave trade in 1807 and then of slavery itself in 1833. The condition of the ex-slaves and the continuation of slavery in the southern United States, Brazil, Cuba, and parts of Mrica and the Middle East meant that much remained to be done long...

In South Africa and elsewhere, accusations of cannibalism were usually reserved for the indigenous groups who were most warlike and resistant to colonization. Within Britain itself, the “wild Irish” had, from the 1500s on, been tarred with that and virtually every other stereotypic accusation about savages that their English adversaries could think of. The bloody, frustrating attempts of sixteenth-century Englishmen to subdue the Irish paralleled, and in some measure influenced, the earliest encounters between the English and Native Americans. “The doctrine that the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” writes Howard Mumford Jones, “first took shape … in the...

InThe Road to Botany BayPaul Carter declares that Australian aboriginals and convicts “enter white history in much the same role … fused into the figure of unreason” (320).¹ The convicts viewed the aboriginals as beneath them, mere beasts of the field or the outback. But what did the first Australians think of the convicts? Robert Hughes notes that, when offered leftover “convict slops,” the aboriginals rejected them as “‘No good—all same like croppy,’ [their] disdainful term for an Irish convict” (279). And the missionary James Günther reported that when presented with clothes the aboriginals removed the stitches...

From the time of Captain James Cook’s momentous voyages between 1768 and 1779, the advent of Europeans spelled the transformation of South Pacific island paradises—as Diderot, Rousseau, and Cook himself at first viewed them—into tropical mortuaries. On his second voyage Cook perceived the inroads that venereal and other diseases had made on several populations, and opined that the natives of those places would have been much better off if Europeans had never discovered them. About the Maoris of New Zealand, he wrote:

We debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce [sic] among them wants...

Although the “Darwinian revolution” produced new ideas about human races, societies, and cultures, it did not much alter and in several ways strengthened extinction discourse. Starting with Thomas Henry Huxley’sMan’s Place in Nature(1863), evolutionists offered what quickly became the dominant view, accepted by most scientists and intellectuals, concerning racial variation.¹Homo sapienswas one species, not several; the separate races had a single origin; they evolved through the same processes and stages; and the differences among them were insignificant compared to the similarities. Nevertheless, some races—the Australians, for example—had been isolated for millennia, and hence occupied...

InGone PrimitiveMarianna Torgovnick points out that modernist artists and intellectuals often placed a positive, even fetishistic premium on “savage” art and customs, but also that “ideas about primitive societies” have continued to support much less benign projects and politics: “Many events in this [twentieth] century would have been less possible without operative notions of how groups or societies deemed primitive become available to ‘higher’ cultures for conquest, exploitation, or extermination: the partition of Africa, the invasion of Ethiopia, the Nazi ‘final solution’ for Gypsies and Jews” (13). Torgovnick goes on to mention Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Western...