ABSTRACT
Almost every anthropological volume published in the United States and Britain between 1870 and 1910 employed some kind of evolutionary scheme in which white Anglo-Saxon cultures were ranked “higher” than the non-white colonized parts of the world. These rankings so closely coincided with skin pigmentation that invariably the “lighter” the population, the “higher” it was ranked. This was a time of pervasive racism, in which it was widely believed among white Anglo-Saxons in the United States and Europe that non-whites lacked the intellectual capacities of whites. Evolutionary theories provided a purportedly “scientific” rationale for the evident racial disparities in wealth and living standards within countries and across the globe, but also served a convenient purpose at a time of imperial expansion (Figure 7.1).
