To qualify for the award of a PhD, a candidate has to demonstrate that he or she has made an original contribution to knowledge. This simple proposition encapsulates the most important characteristic of the philosophy which, after the work of Karl Popper, is known as critical rationalism. It focuses on the growth of knowledge. The candidate has to identify a segment of existing knowledge, examine its nature, present the results of new research and then show that he or she has, perhaps in small measure, expanded that knowledge.

This chapter reviews the origin of the academic study of racial and ethnic relations in Britain, noting how that study has broadened and how, within it, one line of inquiry has continued, acquiring new impulses. It contains an autobiographical component. Its ambition is to show that it is easier for a candidate to make a contribution to knowledge if he or she appreciates how previous contributions have come about, reflecting both the academic environment of the times and the imagination of individual researchers.

The chapter maintains that the study of racial and ethnic relations in British universities began in 1947 with the appointment, at the London School of Economics, of Dr Kenneth L. Little as assistant lecturer in anthropology, with special reference to race relations. As there was, in the British academic world of 1947, no agreement on what should be taught under this title, the appointment represented amajor initiative on the part of Raymond Firth, the professor of social anthropology in the school.

When the Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has to take decisions in connection with state reports submitted under article 9 of CERD, it encounters problems that do not arise when it is dealing with individual communications under article 14. This chapter begins by contrasting the ways in which the Committee sets about its work under these two articles. It notes that state reports, and the consideration of them, sometimes introduce issues that are marginal to the Convention and which observers might consider political rather than legal. The Committee then has to exercise a delicate judgment when deciding where the line should be drawn. Its difficulties in reaching decisions on such issues reflect the difficulties of decision-taking in the United Nations as a whole.

Under article 14 of the Convention a state may make a declaration that it recognises the competence of the Committee to receive and consider communications from individuals or groups of individuals within its jurisdiction claiming to be victims of a violation by that state of one or more rights set forth in the Convention. If the Committee finds a violation of the Convention, the state should revise its law or practice in the light of the Committee's opinion. The Committee has considered ten communications. It does so in private session, but in the author's experience it has nonetheless approached its task judicially. That the decisions of courts are enforced by the states that establish them gives their proceedings a different character. There are still significant parallels. This chapter discusses the process by which a treaty body's decisions are reached rather than the status of these decisions.

The typologists sought to account for the special features of human races, and of the relations between them, by subsuming these within a general theory of the permanence of types. Social scientists have sought to account for the social aspects of racial differentiation by bringing the same data within the ambit of their own theories of group formation and group relations. To do so, they have extended general theories by adding extra propositions designed to allow for the ways in which racial groups differ from other kinds of groups. However, among the social science theories there is a deep gulf between those discussed here in terms of status and class. The proposition that physical signs can be used in the ascription of social status is not limited to the societies of Europe and North America. It can be applied in China, Japan or India. The severest critics of the approach from status assert that the explanations it produces are academically trivial and politically diversionary. They see the writings of the typologists not as a theory but as a smokescreen which served to distract attention from the injustices generated by the capitalist system, especially in its imperialist stage. It is said that those who try to replace the typological theory by elaborating concepts of status are closing their eyes to the political imperative when they should be using their specialist knowledge in the cause of radical reform.

This is the opposition between orthodox social science and Marxism.

The word ‘race’ entered the English language in 1508 in the poem The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Sins by the Scotsman, William Dunbar. Among those who followed the sin of Envy he listed:

It was introduced into an intellectual world in which the Bible was accepted as the authority on human affairs. All humans were descended from Adam and Eve. To understand what had happened to the various sections of humanity subsequently it was necessary to trace their histories back genealogically through the links in the ancestral chain. People were differentiated because they had migrated to different regions and because God had guided the course of events. He had punished some, as by putting the mark upon Cain and by permitting the curse upon Ham and his descendants. Different groups had doubtless been dispersed after the Flood and after the fall of the Tower of Babel. Yet the Bible was obscure in places and its answers seemed to be hidden, so it had to be studied with intelligence and faith. How was it possible to reconcile stories of people in distant lands with a Bible that made no mention of these lands? One possible solution was to maintain that Adam was the ancestor of the Jews alone, and that other peoples' nature and history could be traced back to separate ancestors. Such an explanation, later called that of polygenesis, was first advanced by Paracelsus in 1520.

Properly to explain how a social category is created by reference to the physical features called ‘race’, it is necessary to draw comparisons with what is known about the creation of other categories, such as those identified by gender, class, national and ethnic origin and so on. The problem has to be subsumed within a more general theory of how groups of all kinds are constructed. This may be a way to differentiate a theoretical from a practical language and to resolve the dilemma of nomenclature mentioned at the beginning of the book.

This chapter offers a report on progress towards a bottom-up theory which could supersede the use of ‘race’ in the attempt to explain why it is that the outward differences between persons, and the cultural characteristics associated with differences in national or ethnic origin, appear to cause social and political tension. It pulls together and restates some of the conclusions drawn in earlier chapters.

Socialisation into groups

Human individuals are born with differing talents and personal characteristics. During the course of their socialisation they learn about the society into which they have been born, how its members are categorised and with which groups they should identify themselves. They learn whether they are male or female, and what kinds of conduct are expected because of this distinction. They may learn that they belong to national, regional, class, caste, religious, racial or ethnic categories or groups; that they should align themselves socially with fellow members of such categories, and that in any event others will treat them as category members.

In the ten years since the first edition of this book was prepared, bio-medical scientists have recorded astonishing advances in knowledge about the processes of inheritance and the means by which they may be manipulated. During the same period, ethnic conflicts in different world regions have often dictated the headlines in the mass media. The research of social scientists has influenced the ways in which these conflicts have been presented, and has educated the public about the nature of the social changes associated with population differences, but it is difficult to discern any significant theoretical advance during this decade in the understanding of the processes of ethnic and racial alignment. While social scientists dispute among themselves about the kind of theory they should seek (and indeed, about what kinds of theory are possible), most of them recognise that one of their tasks is to find a vocabulary for representing inter-group relations that avoids the misconceptions implicit in nineteenth-century ideas of race and racial relations. This second edition seeks to demonstrate more clearly than its predecessor that its subject matter is not only the older theories but also the contemporary struggle to supersede them. So a title such as Racial Theories and their Successors might more accurately have described its content.

One reviewer complained that the first edition, after discussing Race as Class, came to a surprising halt. The author's ideas about the way ahead were to be found not in the conclusion but in the penultimate chapter.

Popular ideas that individuals belong in racial groups have frequently been used to mark them out as being of different social status. This chapter carries forward discussion of the theories mentioned in chapter 4 in order to assess progress in developing conceptual frameworks that supersede the idiom of race.

In its application to human society, evolutionary theory drew attention to the way in which physical differences served as signs of membership in competing groups and called forth reactions at the level of unconscious behaviour. It also had two particular weaknesses. Firstly, it was unable to do justice to the complexities of behaviour on the conscious level. Secondly, it could not account for the importance of power relations in human society, and especially for those associated with social stratification as a form of inequality persisting from one generation to another. These weaknesses started to be remedied once social scientists undertook empirical studies of the behaviour of people involved in inter-racial relations. An entirely new phase opened in the 1930s when two of them conducted research in Indianola, a Mississippi town with a population of about 3,000, that served as a centre for a rural county in which about 70 per cent of the population was black. The first research worker was an anthropologist, Hortense Powdermaker, who aimed to present a portrait of the town as a functioning community with particular reference to the Negro population. She was followed by John Dollard, a psychologist who had undergone psychoanalysis in Berlin.

In the United States of America in the first half of the nineteenth century it was customary to refer to the three main sections of the population as ‘whites’, ‘negroes’ and ‘Indians’. In 1866 the legislature passed a Civil Rights Act which declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens thereof, and that ‘such citizens, of every race and color … shall have the same right … to make and enforce contracts’ and do various other things. This may have been the first occasion that Congress used the word ‘race’ to designate groups in this way, and to refer to the protection of constitutional rights ‘without distinction of race or color’. Four years later the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution provided that the right to vote ‘shall not be denied … on account of race’. To persons brought up within the English-speaking world this use of the word ‘race’ to designate human groups or sections of the population is unremarkable, but to persons brought up in other language worlds it can seem highly questionable. Some French people would even call it ‘racist’ in the modern sense of that word, because it misrepresented the nature of the differences between the groups.

Others might not carry their objections as far as this, but still express deep concern over a trend in English usage which has gathered strength since 1866. For example, it has been announced that the British population census in 2001 will include a question on ethnic group that will include ‘Mixed-race’ as one of the optional answers.

A new phase in the history of racial thought was inaugurated in the chronologically convenient year of 1800 by Georges Cuvier when he submitted a memorandum for a French expedition to the Pacific, advising on ‘the researches to be carried out relative to the anatomical differences between the diverse races of man’ (Stocking, 1968: 13–41). Cuvier's career prospered and under Napoleon he became one of the dominant figures in French science.

Cuvier was a Protestant who accepted the Biblical story of man's common descent but did not believe that Genesis provided a complete chronology. He took up the questions of Creation and classification in a more open-minded manner than his predecessors, believing that a scientist should concentrate on problems where sufficient evidence was available or could be accumulated, and should not concern himself with those that were for the time being beyond reach. Within zoology Cuvier continued Linnaeus' work by compiling a magisterial study of the animal kingdom. He distinguished four principal branches within this kingdom, the vertebrates, molluscs, articulates and zoophytes, which were further divided into genera and subgenera. Cuvier put great reliance on the concept of biological type, believing that if that had been grasped the essentials of the category could be understood. He emphasised the importance of type in opposition to those who considered that the various forms shaded imperceptibly into one another. Genera and species were both discrete, morphologically stable units, and therefore examples of types. In his extensive study of fishes each volume deals with one genus and the first chapter is devoted to a description of the specimen chosen to represent the type.

In the 1850s two views of human diversity were in contention. The first was associated with a conception of race as lineage and with the ethnological approach. It assumed that all humans had descended from a single ancestral pair and had since diversified, so that it offered a theory of change in which a major influence was exercised in some as yet mysterious way that seemed to be tied to environmental circumstances. The second view was associated with a conception of race as type and with the anthropological approach. It assumed that racial differences had existed from some very early period of prehistory when different stocks had been created either by God or by some natural catastrophe. It offered a theory of continuity based upon the evidence of inheritance. The achievement of Charles Darwin (1809–82) was to subsume these two theories within a new synthesis which explained both change and continuity.

Darwin's method

Darwin utilised a concept of race somewhat obliquely in the fourth edition (1866) of his book On the Origin of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). He quoted the reference in one of A. R. Wallace's papers about butterflies in Malaysia, to ‘geographical races, or subspecies’ as ‘local forms completely fixed and isolated’. Because they were isolated they did not inter-breed, and so ‘there is no possible test but individual opinion to determine which of them shall be considered as species and which as varieties’.