In letters written to a friend in 1790 and 1791, the young, German-trained French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) took vigorous humanist exception to recent ‘stupid’ German claims about the supposedly innate deficiencies of ‘the negro’.¹ It was ‘ridiculous’, he expostulated, to explain the ‘intellectual faculties’ in terms of differences in the anatomy of the brain and the nerves; and it was immoral to justify slavery on the grounds that Negroes were ‘less intelligent’ when their ‘imbecility’ was likely to be due to ‘lack of civilization and we have given them our vices’. Cuvier's judgment drew heavily on personal experience:...

In December 1828, the leading comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) made a triumphalist presidential address (1829) to the annual general assembly of the Société de Géographie in Paris. He reminded his audience of the recent ‘conquests of geography’ which had revealed to the world the ‘greatly varied tribes and countless islands’ that the Ocean had thus far ‘rendered unknown to the rest of humanity’. Cuvier’s ‘conquests’ were not merely topographical: ‘our voyagers’ in Oceania were ‘philosophers and naturalists, no less than astronomers and surveyors’. They collected the ‘products’ of lands visited, studied the ‘languages and customs’ of the inhabitants, and...

Captain James Cook (1728-1779) failed to see much of New Guinea or its inhabitants the Papuans. By late 1770, when the battered Endeavour reached the southern shores of New Guinea, Cook and his crew were on their way home and little disposed to attempt contact with the island’s reportedly hostile people. But on Monday, 3 September, Cook (1955:408), ‘having a mind to land once in this Country before we quit it altogether’, went ashore in the pinnace in a party of twelve, accompanied by the naturalists Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and Daniel Solander (1733-1782). The first moment of encounter was pure...

Within Australian historiography, the procurement of indigenous Australian ancestral remains by European scientists has generally been explained as resulting from the desire to produce evidence refining the core assumptions of Darwinian theory. I have argued elsewhere (1998, 1999) that the procurement of anatomical specimens through desecration of indigenous burial places in fact began shortly after the establishment of the penal settlement of New South Wales in 1788. It also seems clear that from the early 1880s indigenous burial places were plundered with a view to producing knowledge that would answer various questions about the origins and nature of racial difference...

To search through nineteenth-century French anthropological writings about Indigenous Australians means ingesting a great deal of material that is highly offensive and injurious to Aboriginal people. In this discourse, Australian Aborigines were almost invariably assigned to the dernier échelon, the bottom rung, of the human racial ladder. This was their epistemological ‘slot’.¹ The prevailing view about Aborigines that had become established in travel accounts and periodicals such as the Journal des Voyages was of a people barely human who at worst showed many simian characteristics and at best were living fossils, contemporary manifestations of Stone Age people. The scientific view...

In his influential Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1804:354), the deputy judge-advocate David Collins (1756-1810) dismissed claims by an ‘eminent divine, that no country has yet been discovered where some trace of religion was not to be found’ and pronounced the Aborigines of Port Jackson free of any trace of a religious state or knowledge: ‘It is certain, that they do not worship either sun, moon, or star; … neither have they respect for any particular beast, bird, or fish’. The question of Aboriginal belief engaged the minds of those eighteenth-century Britons who were eager for...

The contribution of Protestant Pacific missionary correspondents, including Robert Henry Codrington (1830-1922) and George Brown (1835-1917), to the development of anglophone social evolutionary theories during the latter half of the nineteenth century is well documented by scholars.¹ The theorists Henry Maine (1822-1888), John Lubbock (1834-1913), John McLennan (1827-1881), Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), and Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) were writing in the metropoles and were thus reliant for their data on firsthand accounts of exotic people produced by others. These theorists attempted in various ways to systematize the assumption — longstanding and sometimes explicit as in the writings of the eighteenth-century Scottish...

Something called the ‘half-caste problem’ was noted in many colonial situations during the interwar period. Numerous books and chapters addressed it.² At least one global survey was attempted (Dover 1937). Half-castes also figured in fiction, images, and song. Noel Coward, better known for ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, sang a ballad ‘Half-caste Woman’ which I listened to from an old record as a child.³ Later, during the course of research that was not particularly concerned with miscegenation, I was struck by contrasting attitudes towards half-castes in several locations in the southwest Pacific during these decades. Two questions puzzled me. First, why,...