Books
Book review: Warning from history of when racism flourished under guise of science
Paul Harding’s third novel This Other Eden recalls a time when eugenics seemingly gave a licence to learned society to marginalise and torment those considered undesirables
The ‘science’ of eugenics was quite rightly forever tarnished by the Nazis and the Holocaust. It was also a distinctly indefensible notion to begin with.
Inspired by the writings of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton first coined the word “eugenics” in 1883. This was the same man who wrote a letter to the Times proposing that the “industrious, order-loving Chinese” should move to Africa and “supplant the inferior Negro race”.
His idea that undesirables should “be ...
