Scientific Racism, Race War, and the Global Racial Imaginary Notes

Scientific Racism, Race War, and the Global Racial Imaginary

Introduction

The paper elucidates an alternative ontology of global politics and order in the 19th century, focusing on race, racial hierarchy, and racial difference.
It examines the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as key intellectual elements that defined a political imaginary influencing the politics of difference and violence.
The paper argues that the global order was fundamentally racialized and global violence was understood and practiced as race wars.
Alfred Thayer Mahan's 1897 essay highlights the potential for violent conflict arising from the interactions of different races and civilizations, with the key question of the 20th century being the dominance of Eastern or Western civilization.
Mahan feared the rising 'East' (Japan, China, and India) would challenge an enervated European center, framing the conflict as one over identity (spiritual and racial) rather than material power.
This conflict would be fought both abroad and at home.
The rise of the alt-right and far-right populist movements reflects anxiety over the domestic implications of globalization, with anti-immigration sentiment tied to fears of cultural decline.
Samuel Huntington's notion that global politics would revolve around identity and questioned the identity of the US and the 'West' due to porous borders and a lack of commitment to its cultural (racial) origins.
Patrick Buchanan's 1992 electoral campaign and Donald J. Trump's presidency stoke racial resentment and fears of American decline.
Ideas, attitudes, and practices of race and racialization were central to imagining the global order, alongside rivalries between European nation-states.
Thinkers like Robert Knox, Charles Hamilton Smith, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Charles Henry Pearson, Franklin Giddings, Lester Ward, Benjamin Kidd, and Madison Grant combined a racialized vision of the globe with inevitable struggles between races.
They feared civilizational decline amidst the emergence of different races competing for limited resources.
The global racial imaginary organizes the world in ways that give it meaning and affects both domestic and international politics.
It encapsulates a different way of defining political units and a different geographical representation of the world.
This imaginary influenced policies such as legitimizing imperial domination, limiting immigration, and domestic eugenics movements.
American foreign policy reflected this global racial imaginary, with Theodore Roosevelt's writings demonstrating his acceptance of racial hierarchy and struggle.
Roosevelt believed in solving problems in the West Indies and the Philippines and asserted that global politics was a ‘struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind’.
By 1905, the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine justified imperial intervention when the ‘general loosing of the ties of civilized society’ was observed.
A wide range of thinkers used a scientific vocabulary of race to make intelligible a global politics of hierarchy rooted in white supremacy.
Global politics was not just imagined as the realm of autonomous nation-states under anarchy but as profoundly hierarchical, with intrinsically incommensurable races subject to inevitable and enduring struggle.
These ideas emerged from the widespread acceptance of scientific racism and social Darwinism.
The great fear of the 19th century revolved around sexual comingling between races, immigration from the global periphery to the metropole, and the resultant degeneracy and decline of white supremacy.
Fears of declining white supremacy provoked widespread actions that straddled the domestic and the international and revealed the very relative value placed on human life.
Understanding global politics as racialized involves examining how international relations has been historically structured by fictions of whose lives matter and whose do not.
The essay aims to show the central importance of a radically different ontology of global politics beyond state-centrism.
It also contributes to reasserting the importance of the 19th century for understanding the present in international relations literature.
Barry Buzan and George Lawson’s The Global Transformation shows the importance of the 19th century in creating conditions for modern international politics, including the emergence of a full international system and new actors.
However, Buzan and Lawson's narrative is missing the central importance of race as a concept that made the world intelligible and defined another form of agency.
Underemphasizing race risks eliding or being blind to motivations behind imperial expansion/retrenchment, genocidal violence, and anxieties about transnational race struggles shaping domestic institutions.
The essay explores the idea of race war in the 19th and early 20th centuries, examining why it was assumed to be the background of global politics and a source of anxiety fusing the domestic with the international.
Part one examines the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as the 'scientific' racial imaginary of the global.
Part two examines the sources of anxieties provoked by this global racial imaginary, focusing on whether the West would maintain its supremacy.
The essay turns to Charles Henry Pearson’s National Life and Character and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.

Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism, and the Global Racial Imaginary

The reification of racial attributes and the appeal of racial science had crucial implications for understanding the proliferation of 19th-century violence across the globe.
The link between race and violence in international relations theory has largely remained unexamined.
Racialist ideas about the globe do not fit within the discipline of international relations' founding ontological assumptions.
International relations theory typically assumes that European interstate politics during the 19th century was an era of relative peace (Congress of Vienna (1815).
It also emphasizes the institutionalization of diplomatic practice and the formation of a ‘public sphere’.
Violence is subsumed within institutionalized warfare between autonomous nation-states.
There is a reification of two distinct settings: a European order of states and a non-European Hobbesian ‘state of nature’.
The former is the core concern for international relations, while the latter remains outside the Eurocentric frame.
Turning to a global racial imaginary highlights the depoliticization of violence perpetuated against non-European populations.
Only European races were assumed to produce a political order embodied by rules and laws, legitimizing violent appropriation or genocide against non-Europeans.
While the European political order was assumed to be long-lasting, the violence meted outside was considered a natural process.
By the mid-19th century, scientific justification of racial differentiation became one way of justifying human inequality on a global scale.
Racism and racialization predated this, and racial theories structured relations of inequality in slavery.
The Enlightenment period coincided with the proliferation of the Atlantic slave trade.
Racial explanations began in the 18th century as European thinkers tried to explain the somatic and cultural diversity of peoples encountered during imperialism and colonialism.
Attempts to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for the inevitability of racial extinction gained legitimacy with the acceptance of polygenism.
Monogenism assumed all humans descended from the same source, degenerating at different rates, while polygenism stipulated that human races were separate biological species.
Polygenism shifted emphasis from the fundamental homogeneity of man to the essential heterogeneity of mankind.
It shifted from man as a social being to man as a biological being, embedded in nature and governed by biological laws.
It moved from 18th-century optimism about man to 19th-century biological pessimism.
Biological pessimism had crucial ramifications, negating the idea of human malleability.
Studies of human skulls (anthroposociology) became central in defining racial difference.
It cast doubt on the 'civilizing mission', justifying the perspective that racial conflict was an inevitable feature of human nature.
Evolutionary theory would render moot the distinction between monogenism and polygenism.
Focusing on racial distinctions justified the premise that races were intrinsically incompatible, creating a global georacial imaginary distinct from the European state-system.
Thomas Jefferson saw the Haitian revolution as evidence that emancipation of enslaved peoples would lead to violence and ‘extermination’.
The idea of incompatibility was a continuous refrain, especially among Southern writers in the Americas.
Josiah Nott and George Gliddon argued that there is ‘a fixed incompatibility between civilized and savage man’ and that mixing races would lead to a ‘world [that] will retrograde’.
They claimed that education cannot radically change the physical or moral characters of inferior races.
Thus, political coexistence between hierarchically conceived races is rendered impossible.
Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper argued that abolition would result in race war.
Robert Knox's book The Races of Men (1850) argues that racial conflict is the fundamental engine of world history.
Knox asserted that the basis of understanding man is his physical structure or zoological history.
Knox stresses the ‘seemingly unalterable forms’ of various races and aims to explain why ‘destiny has seems to have marked them for destruction’.
The fundamental relationship between races is an ahistorical idea that ‘might has always constituted right’.
The state is a ‘mere accidental political assemblage of people – a human contrivance based on no assurance of perseverance, on no bond of nature, but on protocols and treaties’.
The extinction of the 'dark races' lies in their inability to progress compared to the 'fair' Saxon or Celtic races.
For Knox, race war is an endemic and determinative feature of how the world is (a natural condition).
Inter-state European conflicts are seen as reflective of fundamental racial tensions.
Knox’s emphasis on race war, shows the ephemerality of political institutions.
The environment plays a role in precluding the outright colonization of certain spaces, such as the tropics.
The lack of European colonization of certain zones implies that various European imperial projects are doomed to failure.
Knox’s work is meant to be a detached, objective, scientific analysis.
His theory of politics was located in individual physiology, craniology, and the biological characteristics of race.
Knox did not provide a scientific account for the natural inevitability of racial extinction; environmental factors may mitigate the extinction of non-European races.
Evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace added a crucial element to scientific racism, assuring Europeans that ‘primitive races and cultures [are] not only doomed by the inexorable laws of nature but also as meriting their pending extinctions’.
Darwin’s notion of the ‘struggle for existence’ reveals a world shaped by destruction, extinction, and extermination.
Darwin applied natural selection and evolution to human societies, stating that ‘Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race’.
A leading factor in the extinction of lower races was infanticide.
Racial extinction is rooted in biological determinism associated with racial interaction.
Darwin distinguishes civilized and savages on the basis of how civilized races interact with each other, stating that ‘With highly civilized nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection’.
Civilized nations are able to engender cooperation and ethics, which is absent in civilized and savage relations.
Darwin conflates wilful genocidal historical interventionism with an explanation rooted in biological natural selection.
Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism echoes Darwin’s view that progress cannot be assumed to be synonymous with the trajectory of evolutionary survival.
Spencer implies that an important component to social progress is an ineluctable global racial struggle.
The Darwinist emphasis on competition, struggle, and warfare is a result of a lack of scientific explanation of heredity.
Spencer’s views on racial hierarchy and differentiation do not leave doubt to the inevitable fate of lower races.
Struggle and war are the historical levers for societal change.
The social Darwinian faith in the inevitable demise of weaker races radically changed in the 1890s because works called into question the inevitable predominance of higher races.
A profound anxiety about the longevity of European/Western supremacy began to be addressed.
Anxiety was projected on a world perceived as embodying racial/civilizations conflicts.
This translated into reconceptualizing a world of competing races and apprehensions over internal characteristics weakening the Western race(s).
English/Australian writer Charles H. Pearson’s work National Life of Character: A Forecast (1893) had a profound influence, emblematic of arguments about Western decline and the emergence of a plural world.
Lothrop Stoddard attached central importance to global race war.

Global Racial Conflict and the ‘Stationary State’

In the last decade of the 19th century, the ‘scientific’ recognition of the inevitable racial extinction of inferior races shifted.
Racial extinction was no longer taken as the fundamental assurance of white supremacy.
Fears of unbounded race wars coming to the West became increasingly prevalent.
Literature portrayed the rise of Asia as a ‘Yellow Peril’.
A lack of faith in the inevitable doom of distinct races translated into political commitments to guard against racial infiltration and activate state institutions to make one’s race healthier (eugenics).
Fears of global racial conflict were stoked by the intensification of inter-imperial rivalries.
A greater recognition of how the idea of inevitable global racial conflicts structured the terms of domestic processes is lacking.
This section highlights how the repoliticization of racial war is conceptualized as decline and the potential violent end of white supremacy.
Charles H. Pearson begins with the assumption concerning the inevitable triumph of Western races against others, but argues this assumption is no longer tenable.
Instead of population decline ‘the lower races have nearly doubled in proportion since 1863, when one-seventh of the population was European’.
European colonial populations are too heavily reliant on native labor and would inevitably decline or be absorbed and the Imperial expansion is at an end.
Education, public health, and a productive native population promise to improve the survivability of other races and create a world in which such races challenge European hegemony.
Pearson is asking his readers to imagine a world such that the inevitable biological determinism of racial doom was not only wrong, but that non-European races would eventually become co-equal participants.
Europeans were to increasingly find themselves pitted against resurgent races. The global race war continues but enemy races are actually capable of surviving and fighting back against an increasingly decadent West. ‘[T]he leading European nations [are] stationary’.
European races will be increasingly circumscribed within a temperate geographical zone, globalized world of racial mélange that would increasingly permeate Western societies themselves.
Pearson’s lamentation is reflective of a growing anxiety about the ‘closing’ of the world after the exhaustion of imperial expansion.
Halford Mackinder framed it in terms of the return to a pre-Columbian epoch of land powers over sea powers, where ‘Asiatic’ invasions of Europe would pose a renewed threat.
Mackinder, ‘were the Chinese, for instance, organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom’.
The Russian Empire’s defeat at the hand of the Japanese in 1905 added to angst.
The global race war was no longer a naturalized outcome of racial expansion but a product of a self-enclosed globe in which racial differences understood as a new form of war.
Pearson’s vision of Western hegemony was a reflection on the loss of vitality or ‘character’ in late 19th-century Western domestic societies themselves.
The Chinese population reaching over four hundred million stoked anxieties of Theodore Roosevelt and the Washington establishment.
Roosevelt thought that ‘competition between races [was] reducing itself to the warfare of the cradle … no race has any good chance to win a great place unless it consists of good breeders as well as good fighters’.
Suspicions of race suicide and the possibility of racial conflict permeating domestic politics were reflected in Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916).
For Grant, racial mixture is a recipe for disaster and that there is an under assault from ‘inferior stock’.
Racial mélange or a politics of racial blindness will lead to America’s demise as Grant advocates selection to solve the question.
Race wars are internal domestic ways of organizing society on the basis of social danger.
Foucault traces a specific aristocratic racialization and its inversion into a state practice of exclusion, he ignores extent to which a global racial imaginary.

Internal and External Anxieties

Internal and external anxieties influence a race war.
There is an emphasis on the politicization of the biological in that what happens is the politicization not inevitability.
Genocidal extinction is recognized as a necessary way of protecting one’s race.
Lothrop Stoddard combines a fear of internal ‘racial suicide’ with a global awareness of the precariousness of West.
Stoddard has global awareness, and the risk of race conflict isn’t the subjugation but migration.
The risk is from the loss of racial wars ‘that the internecine war in the “White world” weakens it to the point of leaving it open to racial threats emanating from the colonial world’.
Stoddard evokes the idea of an “Pan-Colored“ alliance.
Stoddard’s central recommendation is that some sort of accommodation has to be reached with ‘Asia’, otherwise the horrific fantasy of global race war will occur.
Stoddard recognizes limits of west, no longer white.
The reference to the possibility of reaching ‘some such understanding’ with the ‘Asiatics’, Stoddard appears to admit the possibility of establishing political relationships in order to create a racially demarcated global order.
He talks about recognition about influence.
Influence relates to race and what's coming.
There is something distinct about racial conflict in wars.

Conclusion

The Haitian Revolution is mentioned, assumptions of incompatabilities coupled with anxieites, conjured fantasies.
The 1920's were terrible.
Intelligibility in fears because of advent of right extremism.
There was faith, this led to anxiety.
Mahans vision is corresponded to, but anxiety domestically and globally.
The globe is fundamentally consisted to incompatible race and hierarchical division.
This whole history has returned.
It's a very long history in angst longevitiy. Closing borders is normal because white is better.
Rushdie recognized, 'Four hundred years of conquest and looting, four centuries of being told that you are superior to the wogs leave stain. Culture, language, and nothing has been done'