ABSTRACT
The initial reception of Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Races was clearly complicated by the way in which his thesis of miscegenation and degeneration cut across the divisions between the two main camps in the debates about race. In England from the end of the eighteenth century until the late 1840s public attitudes towards racial difference were comparatively benign, and worked very much within the positive atmosphere of the anti-slavery movement. The Enlightenment emphasis on the unity of the human race was allied to an Evangelical Christian belief in the family of man. Racial theorists tended to subscribe to the Biblically sanctioned theory of monogenesis and ascribed the physical signifiers of racial difference to the effects of climate and the environment. The great ethnologists J.C.Prichard and R.G.Latham emphasized linguistic difference as the most effective model for distinguishing between the races. This was because language fulfills the criterion of being true both to the unity of humans and to their differences: all humans are distinguished from all other animals in that they speak, use languages and signs, and yet their difference from each other is marked by the diversity of their languages. It is noticeable that even in a work as revolutionary as Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), Chambers, in a chapter on the ‘Early History of Mankind’, followed Prichard and his linguistic paradigm and affirmed the single origin of the human race.1 This model places its emphasis, therefore, on cultural rather than physical differences, and in the early part of the nineteenth century, it was ethnicity rather than race that formed the conceptual basis for cataloguing, and investigating the historical origins of, the differences between the peoples of the world (the term ethnicity is a modern invention). When the Ethnological Society was founded in 1843, with Prichard at its head, its members were in general agreement that humankind had developed from a single source and made up a unity. The Ethnological Society’s liberal, if paternalistic, position can be detected from the fact that the new society was an offshoot of the earlier Society for the Protection of Aborigines. Thus the attitude to non-Western races, predicated on the unity of all humankind, was characteristically benevolent even if hierarchical: though regarded as culturally backward in relation to the norms of European civilization, it was assumed that in time other peoples could be acculturated and educated up to European levels.
