Baconianism and Race Science in the 19th Century: A West African Perspective

Most British scientists in the nineteenth century thought of themselves as Baconians, as in they adhered to an inductivist philosophy of science which they attributed to Francis Bacon. The nineteenth century in Britain was also characterized by the rise of race science and its institutional embodiment in learned societies such as the Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s. This paper interrogates the relationship between Baconianism in Victorian science on the one hand and race science on the other hand. In particular, this paper argues that while some prominent race scientists such James Hunt in his The Negro’s Place in Nature (1863) and Carl Vogt in his Lectures on Man (1864) presented their anatomical investigations as the product of a Baconian scientific inquiry, Baconianism as a theory of science also offered powerful tools for criticizing the scientific status of race science. This paper presents an intellectual history of race science in Africa by showing how the West African physician James Africanus Beale Horton, in his West African Countries and Peoples (1868), deployed the standards of Baconianism in order to launch an internal or immanent critique of the discourse of race scientists such as Hunt and Vogt. Integrating the work of nineteenth-century African critiques of race science into global histories of race science thus sheds new light on the vexed question of whether it is anachronistic to describe race science in the nineteenth century as a pseudoscience. Thus, I argue, it is possible to move beyond the problem of presentism, and the claim that race science was pseudoscience, while also recognizing that there were successful attempts to point out fundamental problems with the methods deployed by race scientists in the nineteenth century.