The chapter offers an analysis of an understudied episode in British and American popular fiction. Inspired by Greenland’s vanished settlers, a number of tales imagine isolation as a means to preserve the virtues and primordial purity of a white, ancestral past. These ‘lost colony’ stories are examined as partly compensatory fantasies that would offset contemporary concerns about cultural and racial decay for a culture under stress. They are narratives about communities – modelled on the idea of a lost European colony – that have been shielded from the corruption visited upon the Western world. Thus, the stories are often concerned with ethnic purity and eugenics. The last part of the chapter unravels the early twentieth-century press sensation that disrupted fantasies of ring-fenced whiteness in the Arctic. This was the discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos in Victoria Island, who were purportedly the result of the old Greenland colonists having intermixed with the Indigenous population. The chapter concludes with an examination of how this new imagining of the fate of Greenland’s vanished settlers also impacted the writing of adventure tales for the popular market.

A growing number of adults with intellectual disability aspire to be parents. The research is conclusive; intellectual disability per se is not a barrier to parenting. Parents with intellectual disability do as well as their non-disabled peers when they are appropriately supported. However like other families in vulnerable contexts when left under-resourced and reliant on discriminatory and/or unsafe support they are highly susceptible to factors that place children at risk. Drawing on international research, this chapter will provide an overview of current knowledge about parents with intellectual disability and their children. The chapter uses a broad definition of intellectual disability which captures two groups of parents. The first is those that were assessed as having intellectual disability as a child and report being in a special class or having classroom support while at school. The other group are those who do not identify as having intellectual disability. This may be because they have never had a formal diagnosis or were not told about it as a child.

Chapter 3 outlines the need for a broad ethical framework in all areas of human activity, in particular the importance of ethics and bioethics in the context of genetic engineering. The basis of the ethical framework is outlined, and some key ethical issues across the eras of genetics are described. Current and emerging ethical dilemmas, and the need for active engagement with ethical issues in science, by both scientists and the public, are noted.

Surveillance has always been at the heart of America’s ongoing effort to subordinate and control the first people of the land. Contrary to the mythology about scattered bands of roaming nomads in the forest, America was at least as densely populated as Europe at the time of first contact with Europeans. Charles Mann and others have successfully narrowed the population estimate of North America to somewhere around 90 million people at the time of Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean.1 The capital city of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan, was three times larger than the largest city in all of Europe, which was London. Getting the land out of native hands was no small task, and a lot of blood and treasure was expended on the effort then. America’s native nations still control substantial land and resources; and much blood and treasure are still spent today in a changed but obviously ongoing effort to take what’s left. This chapter explores how surveillance was used to subjugate and colonize the Indigenous populations of North America.

At the beginning of this period, psychiatry and psychology still dominated the management of epilepsy. Psychometry was widely used in epilepsy colonies, laws were passed restricting the rights of those with mental handicap, and psychoanalytical theories of seizures, conceived as symptoms of infantile regression, and also of the epileptic personality were widely held. Diverse theories of heritability were postulated. The rise of eugenics, as well as of psychoanalytical theories, greatly worsened the stigma of epilepsy. Eugenic measures were introduced which included involuntary sterilisation in some countries, and ‘mercy killings’ by the Nazi regime. In the later years, the science of epilepsy advanced with studies of neurochemistry, neuropathology and neurophysiology, and in the late 1930s EEG burst into the clinical arena. Treatment also made progress with the introduction of the ketogenic diet and then Phenytoin. The two world wars resulted in new interest in the surgical treatment of post-traumatic seizures. Attitudes to epilepsy remained largely hostile and the condition featured in the works of well-known authors including Thomas Mann, Agatha Christie, Joseph Roth and John Cowper Powis, who had epilepsy but never revealed this publicly. The ILAE ceased to function in 1914 but was resuscitated in 1937.

Chapter 8 surveys German-dominated Europe between September 1939 and June 1941. A Nazi empire was the source of millions of foreign laborers for the German economy. Germany’s occupation of Poland was especially severe, involving the annexation of territory, forced ethnic resettlement, and the systematic liquidation of much of that country’s leadership class. Occupation policy in Poland also included the ghettoization of the country’s Jewish population, which was also subjected to forced labor. These actions mirrored measures taken against German Jews, many of whom were made to live in “Jew Houses,” and perform labor for German municipalities and business enterprises. During this same period, the German government organized the mass murder of Germans institutionalized for mental disabilities. The program, known as T4, was staffed by medical personnel who arranged for the transfer of patients from clinics and hospitals to killing centers, which employed poison gas. About 70,000 patients were murdered under the auspices of T4, which ceased operation in the face of mounting protest in German society. The killing of disabled patients continued in other forms through the end of the war, while many of the T4 personnel were transferred to Poland to organize the mass murder of Jews through poison gas.

Chapter 6 examines a spectrum of policies and practices employed by the Nazi regime to impose ideological conformity on Germans and to marginalize those regarded as racially alien, hereditarily damaged, or hostile to the People’s Community. At the core of the apparatus of coercion was the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and a network of concentration camps, both of which operated to a significant extent outside the traditional system of justice. While only a minority of Germans spent time in concentration camps, the mainstream of society was subjected to daily rituals of conformity, such as contributing to the Winter Relief campaigns, decorating one’s home with Nazi flags, and performing the Hitler salute. Organized resistance to the regime remained diffuse and ineffective in peacetime. Based on ideas from the international eugenics movement and on practices developed in the United States, the regime implemented a systematic program of eugenic sterilization. The regime translated its antisemitic ideology into action by legally defining the Jews as a race separate from the Germans, banning Jews from a variety of professions, and pursuing a process of “Aryanization” in which Jews were pressured to sell their property. Roma and Sinti (“Gypsies”) also became subject to racialization and persecution.

This chapter demonstrates the interplay between domestic and international ideas about birth control and abortion in Republican China (1912–1949). Eugenic discourses linking individual health to national strength and modernity gained currency in the early 1920s. Margaret Sanger’s visit to China in 1922 further fueled elite preoccupation with using contraception to improve the “quality” of the population, while reformers called for an end to social ills, such as abortion, child abandonment, and infanticide. Mirroring the blending of Chinese and foreign eugenic thought, the medical language used to describe birth control merged a primarily traditional Chinese medical discourse with Western and Japanese scientific terminology. Despite their prominence in intellectual circles, many of the high-level arguments for and against birth control had little direct impact on everyday reproductive practices.

The epilogue addresses the question of what can be ascertained from studying sex and reproduction in the longue durée. As demonstrated by the enduring reliance on abortion as birth control, family planning remains deeply gendered with women shouldering much of this burden. The persistence of eugenic ideas and the state’s intrusive but uneven policing of sexuality have been features of Chinese history since the early twentieth century. Despite ongoing changes in fertility policies, attitudes toward contraception and perceptions of what constitutes the ideal family remain diverse.

Chapter 6 traces the One Child Policy’s lifespan from its introduction in 1979 until its replacement with the Two Child Policy in 2015. I show that the extent to which the One Child Policy was actually enforced and the ways in which it was received differed significantly in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Luoyang. For some couples, particularly those in more economically developed cities like Shanghai and Tianjin, the policy simply affirmed personal convictions that smaller families are more economical and allow children to have better educational opportunities. In smaller cities like Luoyang, however, policy violations were more common as family size – as well as the existence of a male heir – remained more important than the opportunities allocated to those children. This chapter also interrogates the renewed interest in eugenics among parents wishing to “optimize” the qualities of their one and only child, as well as the limited scale and scope of sex education, a trend that exacerbated the reliance on abortion as premarital birth control.

This chapter demonstrates ways in which Darwin challenged aspects of Enlightenment thought, including racial and sexual hierarchies, gendered stereotypes and androcentric perspectives. In doing so, he called into question Cartesian dualism—the separation of mind and body—and its colonial implications in configuring the body as unruly and in need of subjection to a scientific control that was masculine and European. Situating Darwin’s work in relation to contemporary political debates over race, slavery, and sex, it explores the forceful argument against innatism presented by Darwinian evolution, which undid biologistic arguments for biologically determined roles or behaviors, and shows that while he is often assumed to have occupied a separate and opposing camp to John Stuart Mill, which foregrounded biology rather than ethics, Darwin and Mill in fact shared notable common ground. It argues that, in a climate emergency and at a time of devastating and rising global poverty, Darwin’s strong sense of interdependence and interrelations counters authoritarian disregard for the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

This chapter builds upon feminist reinterpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory to reconsider how the processes of variation, heritability, and natural selection do not preclude the possibility of thriving disabled life. Despite the cooptation of Darwinian thinking by later social Darwinists and eugenicists that led to the mass institutionalization and genocide of disabled people, I argue that Darwin’s scientific writings provide the unexpected foundations for a counter-eugenic reading of evolution in their conception of life as perpetually changing and thus open-ended. From the perspective of disability, the value of an organism’s adaptation and form cannot be predetermined by any static notion of fitness that presumes ablebodiedness as a prerequisite for viable life. By reading evolutionary temporality and Darwin’s own disabled lived experience through disability theory’s conception of crip time, I ultimately suggest that Darwinian evolution imagines disability not reductively as an evolutionary dead end but instead as the variable adaptation of human survival.

The second chapter explores how middle-class Americans responded to the modernist battle cry “make it new!” not only by embracing new technologies, fashions, and aesthetic forms but also, and more simply, by representing poor white people as antiquated—a practice intended to throw into relief middle-class modernness. I argue that William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) interrogates ideas about poor white southerners’ backwardness set forth by eugenics and other modern movements. Faulkner deployed the structural forms and stylistic techniques that define modernism in response to the challenge of fictionally representing the ideas and experiences of rural poor white characters in new ways. Signal modernist devices like stream-of-consciousness narration allow poor white speakers to articulate sophisticated thoughts that their somewhat narrow lexicons would otherwise make it hard to voice.

Tumultuous nineteenth-century political debates, fears of violent revolutions, and the rise of women’s rights campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France provide a context for considering Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and its engagement with feminism. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) identified sexual differences, male–male combat, and female choice in courtship as key elements of animal copulation, while insisting that male choice controls human sexual relations, ideas that inspired radically different reactions from feminists, who objected to what they regarded as Darwin’s sexism, and fiction writers, who highlighted women characters resisting patriarchal expectations and making independent decisions. The long history and profound consequences of the concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection call for careful consideration of the intertwining of Darwin’s scientific theories about sexual difference and choice with divergent cultural formations, ranging from social Darwinism to feminist theory, and propose a more fluid understanding of sex and gender that supersedes the earlier two-sex model.

No review of human evolution can afford to ignore the ‘race’ issue, as it has played a central role in history and politics, especially in the United States. Although most people equate ‘race’ with skin color, this chapter explains the fact that skin color is an adaptive cline. It also reviews other elements of anatomical variation, demonstrating the clearly adaptive nature of traits such as skin tone, lung capacity, and body size and shape. One important observation in this context is the fact that modern human diversity is very low compared to the ape species: a result of our relatively recent common origins in Africa between only 100,000 to 50,000 years ago and the patterns of gene flow between populations. However, as the latter half of this book deals with history, this chapter also reviews the history of eugenics and the application of racial typology, starting with the Egyptian Book of Gates, through Blumenbach, and into the Victorian era. Finally, it emphasizes the political purposes to which racial typology has been employed, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of European colonialism.

This chapter studies how an amorphous group of population experts became prominent in policymaking during the 1920s, when the phrase “population problem” entered the Japanese lexicon. This catchall term was used to refer to various kinds of socioeconomic ills, all of which were deemed to require state intervention. The chapter first describes how policy-oriented debate about the “population problem” developed in the 1920s, mostly among social scientists familiar with the “Karl Marx versus Thomas Malthus” argument initially introduced from the west. It then explores how the “population problem” became a policy priority in the late 1920s, by examining research and policy discussions that took place in the Investigative Commission for Population and Food Problem. By scrutinizing policy deliberations within the Investigative Commission about emigration and population control, the chapter shows that population experts were necessarily always in line with the government’s agenda. It also points out that the policy deliberation and research mobilized by the Investigative Commission laid a critical foundation for the institutionalization of government research on population problems, and for the establishment of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, both of which were realized as Japan entered war with China in 1937.