Taxonomic Tendencies in Nineteenth-Century Racial Iconography

In her perceptive study of scientific racism in Great Britain, Nancy Stepan notes that a fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism in European thought was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave (Stepan 1982: 1). Answers to this question have been sought in the intellectual climate of that period, particularly in the shifts of thought that marked the transition from a revolutionary Romantic age to an imperialistic Victorian one.1 The tendency has been to examine the words and deeds of the leading thinkers, policy makers and adventurers of those times- the scientists, the statesmen, the explorers and travellers- and to trace through them the evolution of a distorted image of black peoples that both attracted and repelled the fair-skinned, reinforcing irrational assumptions of fundamental racial difference. Throughout Europe native Africans were stereotyped as brutish