The contribution of Alfred Russel Wallace and William Rathbone Greg to the debate on the possibility of application of the law of natural selection to human society and the subsequent emergence of social Darwinism with dramatic consequences in the political life of the West has been largely neglected by historians of science despite the interest of both scholars in the practical political utility of the theory of Charles Darwin.
The process of the racialisation of the Western political thinking and its expansion into the Western political thinking is analyzed in the context in the British colonial experience and the phenomenon of Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. Jamaica – whose economy been based traditionally on sugar plantation – suffered by the decline of world prizes, abolition of slavery, and end of trade monopoly in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The British colony witnessed widespread poverty and deterioration of racial relationships. The methods used by Governor Edward John Eyre to suppress the revolt of local black populations in October 1865 compromised the image of Great Britain as “moral empire”, split the British public opinion and demonstrated visibly the crisis of the Western liberalism challenged by the political and social problems in the overseas.
The emergence of the modern racial ideology should be studied in the context of the concrete political events and transformation of the global world-system at the dawn of the modern era. Racial discourse presented somatic metaphor of asymmetrical distribution of political, economic and symbolic power in hierarchy of the world-system. Therefore, the development of the postcolonial Mexican society and the war between the United States of America and Mexico were interpreted and conceptualized by contemporary authors by terminology and logic of racial imagination involving the picture of the racial rise of Anglo-Saxons and the decline of mestizos and creoles.
The concept of race and the phenomenon of racial ideology, strengthened by social Darwinism, led to substantial reassessment of traditional concept of war as historical phenomenon in the second half of the 19th Century. An aberration, morally problematic activity that can be resorted to only under exceptional and morally justifiable circumstances, became a vital principle and integral part of human existence. Not "eternal peace" but permanent "struggle for survival" was to constitute the desirable historical aspiration. That fact influenced markedly the character and course of World War I and principally of World War II. In the following study, I will try to show that the intellectual and cultural environment that allowed origination and expansion of racial thinking and the concept of racial war reflected, to considerable extent, the specific geographical-political situation of the 19th Century. The racial imagination constituted symbolical comment and legitimization strategy of redistribution of global powers in favour of the West.
The contribution of Clémence-Auguste Royer, the first translator of the Origin of Species into French, to the emergence of social Darwinism is discussed and critically evaluated. Clémence-Auguste Royer used the theory of natural selection for challenging of modern liberal democracy and stressing the crucial role of “Aryan aristocracy” in the history of humankind. This aspect of her work has been largely neglected by historians of science.
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