The wider discursive setting of this and the previous chapter is one of entrenched but embattled holism under siege from emerging innatist conceptions of human difference that increasingly blurred into attributions of racial autochthony and polygenism. As the ontological reality of races firmed during the first half of the nineteenth century, polygeny became more and more conceivable and acquired fugitive appeal even for some professed monogenists. Taken broadly, the century after 1750 saw a steady hardening in the vocabulary and the science of race, though the positions adopted by individual savants and voyage naturalists were neither straightforward nor consistent.

The chapter correlates the emergence of a normal science of race with the asymmetric interplay of two overlapping modes of knowing, one global and deductive, the other regional and empirical. Metropolitan savants deployed travellers' accounts of Oceanians as evidence in support of abstract classifications of human varieties, races, or species. Voyage naturalists constructed regional anthropological taxonomies by bringing global theories to bear on their own ambiguous encounters with particular Oceanians. In both cases, the taxonomic project objectified and dehumanized actual indigenous people as racial types. Yet, whereas the imprint of encounters was all but effaced in most universal racial systems, voyagers' classificatory efforts were always vulnerable to the mismatch of theory and praxis — the challenge of trying to cram personal experience of a highly varied mix of human physical features, lifestyles, and behaviours into neat racial pigeonholes. This recurrent tension between systems and facts is epitomized in the tortuous attempts by travelling French naturalists to identify and classify the Papous or Papuans, culminating in Prichard's late, racially ambivalent attempt to resolve the taxonomic muddle by further complicating it. Prichardian ethnology, allergic to system and heavily reliant on historical detail, would ultimately choke on the surfeit of idiosyncrasy disclosed in the burgeoning empirical literature on exotic people worldwide.

Universal and regional racial taxonomies alike were often bracketed with historical conjecture about racial origins and movements. Anticipated by Reinhold Forster, taken for granted by Cuvier and his disciples, implied by Prichard, the strategic yoking of history and taxonomy became a standard rhetorical ploy as the natural history of man transmogrified into the science of race and a new era of energetic European colonialism blossomed. With respect to Oceania, such histories usually involved speculation about autochthony and migration culminating in racial displacement or extirpation along lines spelled out by Brosses. Reinhold Forster derived his 'two distinct races' in the South Seas from the hypothetical conquest of 'aboriginal black tribes' by 'fairer', 'more civilized' Malay immigrants. In the nineteenth century, a just-so story of the inexorable displacement of primitive blacks by lighter-skinned, racially superior invaders developed powerful momentum. Dumont d'Urville's dual typology climaxed in the lethal 'law of nature' that 'the black must obey' the white and yellow races, 'or disappear'.^[130] Even British Evangelicals — who long battled to reconcile their dogma that all humanity was equal in the sight of God and equally susceptible to salvation with what seemed to be compelling evidence of the division and unequal endowments of races — explained the peopling of Oceania by two 'decidedly distinct' races in terms of the supplanting of the 'most ancient tribe' of Oceanic Negroes by 'fairer' Polynesians.^[131]

More sinister was the slippage from conjectural history to modern prognosis. The purported inevitability of the displacement of inferior by superior races was taken to justify colonial expropriation of indigenous lands and was brutally enacted in the settler colonies of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kanaky New Caledonia. Still worse, widely-held preconceptions about innate racial characters and inexorable racial displacement intersected with colonial fears and desires to promote a discourse of racial stagnation or extinction with respect to certain Oceanian people, notably but not exclusively Aboriginal Tasmanians and Australians.^[132] Whereas Enlightenment thinkers such as Buffon, Brosses, Blumenbach, and the Forsters had presumed a universal human aptitude to become civilized, their more pessimistic nineteenth-century successors tended to believe, with Cuvier (1817a, I:94), that 'intrinsic causes' retarded the 'progress of certain races' and found their views confirmed in antipodean experience. In a paper read to the Philosophical Society of Australia in 1822, Barron Field (1786-1846), the judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, assigned the 'degenerate Ethiopian character' to 'the Australians' on the basis of 'the skull, the genius, the habits'. He inferred by analogy that they would 'never be civilized', that 'experience is every day fulfilling the reasoning', and that 'our colonization', however benevolent, was likely to produce the eventual 'decay or extermination' of this 'simple race' (1825:196-7, 224-8). Following a visit to Hobart Town in 1827, Dumont d'Urville (1830-3, V:96) predicted that 'the Tasmanian, and later the Australian, incapable of ever being civilized, will end up disappearing entirely' in the face of European invasion, as so many native American and other 'savage peoples' had before them. Even more portentous, after meeting a party of 'black aborigines' near Sydney in 1836, Darwin (1839:519‑20) lamented the 'mysterious agency' which appeared to dictate that 'wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal'. The future theoretical and practical import of this grim, if inaccurate prophecy can scarcely be overestimated.