ABSTRACT
The idea that biology can be used to classify and judge the value of the races of humankind may have formally fallen from grace with the dismantling of the apartheid (separation by race) regime in South Africa in the 1990s. The theoretical concept of a taxonomy of races, which became known during the nineteenth century as ‘scientific racism’, is a direct product of a golden age of biology, when the great scientists of the eighteenth century devoted themselves to the classification of all the flora and fauna in the known world. The close relationship between biology, social science, medicine and politics during the second half of the nineteenth century is rooted in the formulation of those theories of variation and heredity which, from Lamarck onwards, were also applied to the study of man. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Britain’s domestic culture and institutions underwent considerable change.
