Scientific Racism, Race War and the Global Racial Imaginary Summary

Scientific Racism, Race War, and the Global Racial Imaginary

Introduction

The paper elucidates a different ontology of global politics and order in the 19th century.
It challenges the ahistorical, state-centric, and Eurocentric ontology prevalent in International Relations (IR) theory.
Instead, it focuses on race, racial hierarchy, and racial difference as significant factors in defining imperial global politics and order.
The paper examines the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as key intellectual elements shaping a political imaginary that influenced the politics of difference and violence.
It argues that the global order was fundamentally racialized and global violence was understood and practiced as race wars.

Alfred Thayer Mahan's Perspective

In 1897, naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan described future global politics, anticipating conflicts arising from different races and civilizations.
Mahan assumed the US was part of a larger European civilization, shifting focus from great states to the transformation of the global order due to racial emergence.
Mahan saw the 20th century as a conflict over identity (racial and spiritual) rather than material power, fought both abroad and at home.
Mahan feared the rising 'East' (Japan, China, and India) would challenge an enervated European center.

Contemporary Parallels

The rise of the alt-right in the US and far-right populist movements in Europe reflects anxiety over domestic implications of globalization.
Anti-immigration sentiment is tied to fears of cultural decline.
Samuel Huntington popularized the idea that global politics revolves around identity, questioning the identity of the US and the ‘West.’
Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 campaign and Donald Trump's presidential run stoked racial resentment and fears of American decline.

The Global Racial Imaginary

Mahan's sense of precariousness connects with a larger discursive formation where ideas, attitudes, and practices of race and racialization were central to imagining the global order alongside rivalries between European nation-states.
Writers like Robert Knox, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, and Madison Grant combined a racialized vision of global politics with inevitable struggles between races.
This view opposed Whiggish histories of progress and Enlightenment moralism, emphasizing fears of civilizational decline amidst competing races for limited resources.
A global racial imaginary organizes the world, affecting both domestic and international politics, defining political units, and representing the world geographically with climatic and environmental factors.
This imaginary influenced policies such as imperial domination, immigration restrictions, and domestic eugenics movements.
Theodore Roosevelt's writings reflected acceptance of racial hierarchy and struggle, viewing global politics as a ‘struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind.’
Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine justified imperial intervention to exercise ‘international police power’ when civilized society was threatened.

Redefining Global Politics

A global racial imaginary construed the world as hierarchical, positing intrinsic incommensurability and enduring struggle between races.
These ideas emerged from widespread acceptance of scientific racism and social Darwinism as the ‘scientific’ background of politics.
Nineteenth-century fears revolved around sexual comingling between races, immigration, and the decline of white supremacy, provoking actions that blurred domestic and international boundaries.
Himadeep Muppidi argues that understanding global politics as racialized involves examining how IR has been historically structured by whose lives matter and whose do not.

Reassessing International Relations

The essay seeks a different ontology of global politics beyond state-centrism, contributing to recent attempts to reassert the importance of the 19th century.
Barry Buzan and George Lawson’s The Global Transformation highlights the 19th century's role in creating conditions for modern international politics, emphasizing the emergence of a full international system and new actors.
However, Buzan and Lawson underemphasize race as a concept defining agency in the world.
Overlooking race risks obscuring motivations behind imperial expansion, genocidal violence, and anxieties about transnational race struggles shaping domestic institutions.
The essay examines race war in the 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring why it was assumed to be the backdrop of global politics and a source of anxiety fusing domestic and international concerns.
It analyzes scientific racism and social Darwinism as constituting the ‘scientific’ racial imaginary, focusing on Robert Knox’s work on race war.
It examines anxieties provoked by the global racial imaginary, exploring Charles Henry Pearson’s National Life and Character and its impact on fears of race war.
Lastly, it considers Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, underscoring how race makes the domestic-international distinction untenable.

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 violence across the globe.
However, the link between race and violence in IR theory has remained unexamined until recently.
Racialist ideas about the globe do not fit within IR's founding ontological assumptions.
IR theory typically assumes that 19th-century European interstate politics was an era of relative peace after the Napoleonic Wars, focusing on interstate peace as a consequence of the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the UK as an offshore balancer.
Cooperative interstate relations emerged out of the institutionalization of diplomatic practice and the formation of a ‘public sphere.’
Violence is subsumed within institutionalized warfare between autonomous nation-states, reifying a European order of states and a non-European Hobbesian ‘state of nature.’
The former is recognized as the core concern for IR, while the latter remains outside the Eurocentric frame of IR and security studies.
Examining the emergence of a global racial imaginary reveals the depoliticization of violence perpetuated against non-European populations.
Throughout the 19th century, it was assumed that only European races could produce a political order embodied by rules and laws that governed violence and the legitimacy of political enemies.
The lack of recognition of a non-European political order legitimized violent appropriation or genocide.
The European political order was assumed to be long-lasting, while the extermination of distinct races was considered a natural process.

Scientific Justification of Racial Inequality

By the mid-19th century, the scientific justification of racial differentiation became a way of justifying human inequality on a global scale.
Racial explanations began in the 18th century with European thinkers attempting to explain the somatic and cultural diversity of peoples encountered during imperialism and settler colonialism.
Attempts to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for racial extinction gained legitimacy with the acceptance of polygenism.
Monogenism assumed all humans descended from the same source, while polygenism stipulated human races were separate biological species.
The polygenist claim emphasized the essential heterogeneity of mankind, shifting from a social being governed by social laws to a biological being embedded in nature.

Biological Pessimism

Biological pessimism negated human malleability, education, or progress, with studies of human skulls becoming central in defining racial difference.
This cast doubt on the ‘civilizing mission’ and justified the perspective that racial conflict was an inevitable feature of human nature.
Evolutionary theory rendered 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.

Racial Incompatibility and Violence

Thomas Jefferson, after the Haitian revolution, saw the emancipation of enslaved peoples as leading to violence and ‘extermination.’
Josiah Nott and George Gliddon argued in Types of Mankind (1854) that there is a fixed incompatibility between civilized and savage man.
Mixing races would result in civilizational regression, with no evidence that education could change their physical or moral characters.
Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper argued that abolition would result in race war.

Robert Knox's View on Race

Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850) asserts that racial conflict is the fundamental engine of world history.
Knox emphasizes physical structure as the basis for understanding man’s history, asserting that race is everything.
Knox explains that the 'dark races' are destined for destruction because 'might has always constituted right'.
Knox views the state is a mere accidental political assemblage based on no assurance of perseverance, questioning the permanence of political institutions.
The extinction of the ‘dark races’ is due to their inability to progress compared to the ‘fair’ Saxon or Celtic races.

Key Implications of Knox's Global Racial Imaginary

Race war is an endemic and determinative feature of the world, a natural condition not limited to Europeans and non-Europeans.
European conflicts reflect fundamental racial tensions that would persist even after other races become extinct.
The environment can mitigate racial extinction, as the tropics preclude European colonization, as noted in 'Hayti’s' example.
Knox’s work is presented as a detached, objective, scientific analysis of global history, based on individual physiology, craniology, and biological characteristics.

Limitations and Evolutionary Theory

Knox’s text lacks a ‘scientific’ account for the natural inevitability of racial extinction, with environmental factors potentially indefinitely mitigating it.
Evolutionary theory, with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, adds 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 'struggle for existence' shaped by Thomas Malthus, reveals an organic world continuously shaped by necessary destruction, extinction, and extermination.
Darwin applies natural selection and evolution to human societies in The Descent of Man, stating, ‘Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race.’

Darwin's Distinctions

Darwin distinguishes civilized and savage races based on biological attributes and interactions, noting civilized nations do not supplant and exterminate each other.
Civilized nations tolerate the social instinct of ‘sympathy,’ enabling cooperation and ethics, absent in civilized-savage relations.
Tony Barta argues that Darwin conflates wilful genocidal intervention with biological natural selection.

Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism combines biological explanations with racial conflict.
Spencer echoes Darwin, writing ‘Evolution is commonly conceived to imply in everything an intrinsic tendency to become something higher. This is an erroneous conception of it’.
Spencer implies that global racial struggle is a component to social progress, noting that 'The killing off of relatively feeble tribes…must have tended ever to maintain, and occasionally to increase, the amounts of life-preserving powers possessed by men’.
Herbert Spencer's emphasis throughout the Principles of Sociology is that struggle and war are the historical levers for societal change.
André Pichot argues that the Darwinist emphasis on competition, struggle, and warfare lacks a ‘scientific explanation of heredity … nor even a theory of variation.’

Shift in Sentiment

The assumption of the inevitable demise of weaker races began to shift in the 1890s, with profound anxiety about the longevity of European/Western supremacy.
This anxiety was projected on a world perceived as embodying racial and civilizational conflicts, with the West no longer assured supremacy.
Fears of race wars coming to the West become increasingly prevalent, with a new fictional literature portraying the rise of Asia as a ‘Yellow Peril.’

Global Racial Conflict and Western Decline

After decades of regarding racial extinction as a natural outcome of racial inequality, a repoliticization of racial struggle and war emerged.
Racial extinction was no longer taken as a fundamental assurance of white supremacy in structuring the global racial imaginary.
Fears of unbounded race wars coming to the shores of the West became increasingly prevalent in American and European discourse.
Lack of faith in the inevitable doom of distinct races translated into political commitments: to guard against racial infiltration; to activate state institutions to make one’s race healthier relative to others through eugenics programs.
Furthermore, fears of global racial conflict were also stoked by the intensification of inter-imperial rivalries at the end of the nineteenth century.
While tremendous literature exists on racialization processes in the West, greater recognition of the idea of domestic processes must be given.
Charles H. Pearson’s National Life of Character: A Forecast (1893) profoundly influenced his day. Pearson’s work is emblematic of a genre of argument about Western decline and the emergence of a world that is made up of a plurality of races.

Charles H. Pearson and the Unchangeable Limits of Higher Races

Pearson questions the inevitable triumph of Western races, noting that the lower races have nearly doubled in proportion since 1863.
European population expansion throughout the imperial periphery cannot simply displace native populations, as tropical zones are not amenable to European colonization.
Imperial expansion is at an end and the ‘most highly civilized races of the world…are not likely to wrest any large tracts of territory from half-civilized or savage peoples’.
Education, public health, and the desire for a productive native population under the imperial 'civilizing mission' promises to improve not only the survivability of other races, but also to create the conditions for a world in with such races radically challenge European hegemony.
Pearson argues that the resurgent non-European races will lead to competition and conflict and will elbow the Europeans aside in the world.

Reflection on Loss of Vitality

Pearson’s lamentation reflects a growing anxiety about the ‘closing’ of the world after imperial exhaustion.
Halford Mackinder also recognized the closing off of late 19th-century global geographical boundaries, framing it as a return to pre-Columbian dominance of land powers over sea powers, with renewed Asiatic invasions of Europe.
Mackinder states Chinese, organized by the Japanese, overthrowing the Russian Empire would constitute a yellow peril.
The ‘Yellow Peril’ threat emanating from a resurgent ‘East’ reflected a global racial imaginary reconfiguring global security and violence and imbricating domestic and inter(racial) politics.
The Russian Empire’s defeat by Japan in 1905 added to the growing angst that the Western imperial world was on its way out.
The global race war was no longer a naturalized outcome of racial expansion but the product of a self-enclosed globe in which racial differences at ‘home’ were understood as newly formed fronts in this larger war.
The claim that China reached over four hundred million stoked the anxieties of Theodore Roosevelt over the birth rate and vitality of the white race.

The Decline of the American Birth Rate

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.’
The 1890 census revealed it was increasingly problematic to prevent the higher races from losing their nobler traits and from being overwhelmed by the lower races.
Between poor white families and the rush of immigration, fears about ‘race suicide’ permeated political discussions, giving credence to eugenics.
Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), polemicized against the consequences of a domestic melting pot of different races.
Grant advocated a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit.
Race wars are fought not against races in the far corners of the globe but are domestic ways of organizing society based on social danger.
Biological difference qua race war was always present within this global racial imaginary.
Genocidal extinction is recognized as protecting one’s race in this global struggle.

Lothrop Stoddard

Lothrop Stoddard, a student of Madison Grant, effectively combines fear of internal racial suicide with a global awareness of the precariousness of the West.
For Stoddard, the risk of race conflict isn't so much subjugation of white lands by colored armies but more enduring conquests like migration.
‘Pan-Colored’ alliance for the annihilation of white hegemony, evoking a nightmare of race-war.
Stoddard recommends some accommodation be reached with ‘Asia’ or horrific fantasy of global race war will inevitably materialize.
White people must abandon assumption of permanent domination over Asia, while Asiatics must forego dreams of migration to white lands and penetration of Africa and Latin America.

Three Significant Points

Stoddard's recognition in the limits of ‘white’ hegemony over the world.
It naturally evokes the rise of Japan as a regional power and questions surrounding racial equality first put forth at the Paris Peace Conference.
Global politics was influenced by racial anxieties permeating Western polities and the coming end of global white supremacy.
The assumption that racial conflict or war is a ‘war to the knife’ suggests that there is something particularly distinct about racial conflict versus violence between states in that it lacks the very restraints that characterize regular wars.
Like Knox, suggests the Haitian Revolution is the first real shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race-equality

Conclusion

Assumptions about racial incompatibilities coupled with anxieties about the longevity of white world order conjured fantasies of either inevitable doom or the necessity of extraordinary measures for racial safeguarding.
The intelligibility of these dire jeremiads would evidently become internalized to deadly effect with the advent of right-wing extremism and Nazism.
Mahan’s vision corresponds to this latent anxiety of a world radically transforming itself globally and domestically.
This anxiety derives from the idea that the globe is fundamentally constituted according to incompatible racial and hierarchical divisions.
The call to close borders or build walls reflects this long intellectual history rooted in the angst of the longevity Western (i.e. white) supremacy in the face of a genuinely post-colonial world.
As Salman Rushdie recognized in 1982, conquest and looting and the belief of cultural superiority stain culture, language, and daily life, and nothing much has been done to wash it out. (in the case of Britain).

Scientific Racism: The belief that empirical evidence exists to support racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority.
Social Darwinism: The theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals; used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism.
Global Racial Imaginary: A discursive formation where ideas, attitudes, and practices of race and racialization were central to imagining the global order alongside rivalries between European nation-states.
Race War: Conflict based on racial identity, often involving systemic violence and struggle for dominance.
Eugenics: A set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving the genetic quality of a human population.
Monogenism: The theory of human origins which posits a single origin for all human races.
Polygenism: The hypothesis that different human races are derived from different origins.