Sadiah Qureshi

ROBERT GORDON LATHAM, DISPLAYED PEOPLES, AND THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RACE, 1854–1866

In 1854, the Crystal Palace reopened at Sydenham. Significantly, it featured a court of natural history. Curated by the philologist and physician, Robert Gordon Latham, it was designed to provide the public with an ethnological education. Understanding Lathams project is of particular importance for broader understandings of the scientific importance of displayed peoples and mid-nineteenth-century debates on the nature of human variation. Recent scholarship has shown considerable interest in the relationship between exhibitions of foreign peoples and anthropology, particularly within the context of world fairs. Nevertheless, anthropologists are routinely claimed to have used fairs merely to display or publicly validate, rather than to make, scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, the 1850s and 1860s are often seen as having witnessed the emergence of a new ‘harder-edged’ scientific racism as, older, elastic definitions of ‘race’ were successfully overthrown by one rooted in biological difference (most commonly exemplified by the anatomist Robert Knox). By examining how Latham produced and used his museum of human types, this article proposes an alternative approach. It suggests that displayed peoples were used as ethnological specimens and that Lathams work is at a particularly significant crossroads for the mid-nineteenth-century remaking of ‘race’.

Peopling the landscape: Showmen, displayed peoples and travel illustration in nineteenth-century Britain

Throughout the nineteenth century, millions of people paid to see exhibitions of foreign, often colonized, peoples performing songs, dances and other ceremonies in exhibitions designed to showcase their ‘singular nature’. Originally consisting of a single performer or possibly a small group, by the end of the century displayed peoples were being imported in their hundreds to live in purpose-built ‘native villages’ under the aegis of world fairs. Significantly, performers were marketed as exemplars through the use of theatrical scenery, often drawn from travel literature, to geographically locate them in their homelands. By considering how travel literature and theatrical performances were combined in order to create new visual experiences, it is possible to reconstruct how such shows were both advertised and interpreted, and to shed light on practices of broader significance for understanding nineteenth-century visual culture.

Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century and Race, Science and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany, 1800-1914

From inflammatory rationalizations for anti-immigration policies to the refusal to honour international obligations to refugees fleeing war zones, accusations and denials of racism are rarely out of the headlines in present-day Europe. In one sense this is heartening because few people are making the case that racism is acceptable; nonetheless, there is a growing sense that we are witnessing a rise of the far-right and increasingly bleak attitudes towards racial difference. It would be easy to become disenchanted and accept such prejudice as a fact of life. This is a temptation that must be resisted and the most recent work of Francisco Bethencourt and Chris Manias exemplifies how creating and maintaining the racial distinctions we live with has taken considerable labour over the centuries. If such distinctions can be made, there is hope for them to dismantled. Bethencourt defines racism as ‘prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory action’ (p.1). His book is divided into five parts on ‘The Crusades’, ‘Oceanic Exploration’, ‘Colonial Societies’, ‘Theories of Race’ and ‘Nationalism and Beyond’. Categorically rejecting the notion that racism is inherently human, his ambitious work seeks to identify the origins of European racism and argues that we need to look beyond modernity. These arguments build on sources in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English and expertise on the Portuguese-speaking world to give him an enviable geographical and chronological range. Bethencourt’s most important claim is that racisms, with an emphasis on the plural, preceded the theory of races. Racism has often been seen as the consequence of classifying humans into hierarchically arranged natural kinds within the context of racial science and imperialism within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Attempts have been made to trace its roots to classical antiquity but Bethencourt rejects this starting point. It is a shame that a more sustained explanation for rejecting revisionist classical scholarship is not given. Nonetheless, Bethencourt’s choice to begin with mediaeval Iberia commendably and plausibly reconfigures the chronology of European racisms as part of a vast cross-examination of how the ties of blood and ethnicity informed phenomena as diverse as city planning to ethnic expulsions and genocide. Thus, modern European colonialism and nationalism are There are a few minor copy editing slips (e.g. Dagobert I dies a decade early on p. 83, Leudegarius of Mainz suddenly becomes ‘Leudesius’ for p. 208, and Theuderic III is called ‘Theudebert III’ on p. 286).