Parts One and Two of this book set the global, regional, and empirical scenes for the remainder of the volume and constitute an original contribution to the history of ideas. In two substantial chapters of very different focal lengths, Bronwen Douglas investigates comparatively the formulation of the modernist concept of race in Germany and France; the scientific consolidation of racial theory in France, Britain, and the United States from the mid-eighteenth century to about 1880; transnational flows of ideas about human origins, unity or diversity, and racial mixing; and the relationships of theory to evidence derived in a particular field. Chapter One is a history of a European idea. By synthesizing a wide range of contemporary materials, it shows how the biologization of an older, genealogical conception of race in western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century enabled starker differentiations between essentialized extended human groups and paved the way for a normal science of race spanning a broad range of moral and theoretical positions. This remarkably tenacious paradigmatic set was not dislodged until the mid-twentieth century and its fallout endures worldwide.^[40] Chapter Two particularizes the history of race in the light of the prolific empirical legacy of scientific voyaging in Oceania, the growing force of the taxonomic impulse, and the recurrent tension between global theoretical systems and regional facts. Through a focus on the interrelationships of selected savants and travelling naturalists, of deductive and empirical knowledge, this chapter probes the reciprocal significance of metropolitan discourses and Oceanic field experience for competing schools of the hardening science of race, as the orthodox doctrine of a single human species steadily lost ground to the mounting conceivability of polygeny — the belief in plural human origins or multiple species.

In Chapter Three, Chris Ballard addresses the middle phase of the irregular trajectory from voyaging to residence to colonial settlement as the primary conduit for the collection and deployment of information about indigenous Oceanian people. With particular reference to New Guinea, he maps a transition in heuristic authority between the 1820s and 1870: from distanced early colonial observers in the Malay or Indian Archipelago, whose imagined cartographies of human difference rested on haphazard temporal and spatial contrasts between the 'brown' Malay race and the 'Oceanic Negroes' or Papuans, to a new mid-nineteenth-century model of the terrestrial natural scientist engaged in longterm field observation under broad colonial aegis, embodied in the figure of Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace, championing the scientific method, insisted on direct visual contact and the presence of the observer. Yet his concern for the correct identification of boundaries for human, as well as zoological distributions both presumed and prefigured key debates on the origins of pure racial types. The chimeric ideal of racial purity became a focal concept through an increasing emphasis on the 'problem' of racial mixing between Malay and Papuan.

Part Three takes the science of race into colonial settings, with specific attention to the importance of knowledge about Aboriginal Australian bodies, both living and dead, in the developing disciplines of anthropology in Britain and France; and to the negative implications for Aboriginal people of hardening conceptions of race. In Chapter Four, Paul Turnbull takes issue with the conventional narrative that attributes scientific lust for Aboriginal anatomical specimens solely to Darwinians anxious to confirm the evolution of humanity by speciation. He shows that Darwinians and their opponents, metropolitans and colonials, all engaged in bitter competition to acquire Aboriginal bodily remains for the contrasting knowledge about human racial differences and racial extinction presumed to inhere in them; and that such professional conflicts helped in practice to confirm the centrality of race in colonial attitudes and strategies towards indigenous Australians. In Chapter Five, Stephanie Anderson makes a single episode — an actual encounter between three Aborigines and several French anthropologists in Paris in 1885 — a synecdoche for the discursive colonization of Aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians by French raciology. However, she is alert both to ambiguities in the encounter and its representation and to tensions in the wider discourse between physicalist and ethnographic approaches. The Australians were objectified as characteristic specimens of a supposedly inferior, autochthonous racial type and yet traces of their individual personalities, capabilities, and emotional state punctuated the scientists' bleak, anthropometrical descriptions. So too, the bewildering physical and cultural variety apparent in ethnographic reports of actual Aboriginal people defied simplistic premises about racial homogeneity or racial purity and introduced doubt and contradiction to raciological analysis, problematizing its core assumption of natural racial hierarchy and ultimately the concept of race itself.

Part Four introduces new complexity into this story of uncertainty and rifts in nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race by extending the inquiry into the early twentieth century and addressing a striking lacuna in many histories of racial thinking — the ambivalent relationships between British Evangelical humanism and the science of race, ranging across a spectrum from antagonism, to compromise, to collaboration. In Chapter Six, Helen Gardner tracks a series of nineteenth-century debates in Britain and colonial Australia over the universal presence or racially selective absence of the human capacity for religious belief and for becoming Christian. Initially contested as evidence for human unity or plural origins, by late in the century the purported existence or lack of the 'faculty of faith' — particularly among Aboriginal Australians — was taken by competing strands of evolutionist anthropology as a sign of the stage of psychic development reached by different races. Such evolutionist arguments provoked both opposition and qualified adherence among Evangelical missionaries who had lived and worked with indigenous communities in Oceania. In Chapter Seven, Christine Weir provides another variant on the core themes of normalization, fracture, and recursion with respect to race by mapping entangled rival discourses — religious or secular, scientific or public — on human unity and difference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In key texts by Evangelical missionaries, naturalized racial terminology and social evolutionist assumptions jostled with the humanizing imprint of personal acquaintance with individual Pacific Islanders and with Christian distrust of the concepts of natural racial hierarchy or the absolute separation of races. In the aftermath of World War I, interpersonal experience in the mission field informed an emerging humanist internationalism which confronted the strident biological determinism of white supremacist, 'world eugenics' rhetoric emanating from the United States. In Australia, a parallel contest between paternalist internationalism and hardline colonial self-interest developed in the course of debates about Australia's League of Nations' mandate over former German New Guinea.

Part Five recapitulates the linked themes of racial purity, miscegenation, and hybridity, transposed to pragmatic colonial and national settings in Oceania which exemplify the ambiguous flows between abstract racial theorizing, popular race pride or anxieties about racial integrity, and colonial praxis. In Chapter Eight, Vicki Luker concludes the volume with a comparative investigation into a colonial puzzle — the markedly discrepant attitudes to the 'half-caste' expressed in diverse settings in the South Pacific during the interwar period. Emphasizing contexts over theory, she probes the varied pragmatic import of latitude and relative chronology, sexualized racial ambivalence about miscegenation and half-castes, and institutional or environmental imperatives. She shows clearly that, if the science of race did not necessarily impinge directly on popular consciousness or colonial policy,^[41] its eclectic theories on hybridity and acclimatization were repeatedly invoked in divergent positions taken on racial assimilation or racial purity in the new nations of Australia and New Zealand or in the colonies of Western Samoa and Fiji. Here, too, as in other settings discussed in this collection, the ambiguities of the idea of race itself and the deeply flawed logic of its science were patent, as were the tensions and fractures in the dissonant discourses that race at once infiltrated and informed.