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  • Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire by Erik Linstrum
  • Matthew Heaton
Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire. By Erik Linstrum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 309 pp. $39.95).

In colonial contexts, the science of the mind was an important endeavor both for those who sought deeper understanding of human nature and for those who sought to govern populations. As Erik Linstrum demonstrates in this book, however, these two hands did not always wash each other. Focusing on the work of experts in a variety of different psychological sciences between roughly the 1890s and the late 1950s, Ruling Minds emphasizes the limitations of the development and uses of psychological knowledge in the British Empire. Drawing on case studies across British governed territories, Linstrum argues that psychological experts both challenged the political and social order of the empire and provided knowledge that could be used to govern it. Linstrum characterizes psychological science as "unstable" in its ideological implications, which leads to the conclusion that "psychology did not resolve the problems of ruling an empire so much as it dramatized them … expos[ing] tensions at the very heart of the imperial project" (219). This emphasis on the contingencies, limitations, and circulations of psychological science, as well as the diverse politics it inspired and served, results in a complex, nuanced understanding of the relative power and influence of British expertise in the running of the empire.

Six chapters bear out the argument. The first examines the "invention" of imperial psychology through examination of studies of sensory perception in the Torres Straits in 1898. The researchers found no significant differences between indigenous peoples and Europeans, setting the stage for a long-running theme of the book, that imperial psychological experts mostly embraced a belief in the biological universality of human mental process. One of the researchers, W. H. R. [End Page 187] Rivers, later became a socialist politician highly critical of the empire, demonstrating the potential for such science to have a radicalizing effect. The second chapter describes the impact of psychoanalysis through an analysis of the dream narratives collected by Charles Seligman from across the British Empire, which he believed demonstrated remarkable similarity across cultures. This chapter also recounts the various ways that psychoanalytic ideas were used to critique the effects of British rule on indigenous populations, while recognizing that such critiques still produced a highly paternalistic discourse.

Chapters three and four focus on the development of tests of mental ability and their application in colonial environments. Intelligence tests and aptitude tests had the potential to destabilize imperial hierarchies by demonstrating the comparable capacities of individuals from different social and cultural backgrounds, suggesting the potential weaknesses in arguments about the nature of "ruling classes" and "master races." Tests that purportedly demonstrated lower intelligence in colonized populations (such as those of Stanley Porteus) were widely criticized for their methodological deficiencies. Aptitude tests that sought to put adept people in the right jobs had the same subversive potential but, Linstrum argues, frequently failed to overcome the everyday racism of post-war colonial contexts. Such tests nevertheless became commonplace in the context of decolonization, as institutions needed some kind of "neutral" tool for allocating places in schools and offices to colonial subjects.

Chapters five and six investigate more specifically the links between psychological knowledge and imperial and international governmentality in the post– WWII era. Knowledge about human psychology became a major factor in British anti-insurgency campaigns, contributing to "psychological warfare" programs that Linstrum argues in chapter five should be seen as "less a morality play about the corruption of intellectuals than a cautionary tale about the state's selective use of expert knowledge" (157). The knowledge of psychological experts was thus implicated in the horrific violence the colonial governments meted out in places like Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. Chapter six traces the ways that British psychological expertise was foundational in the ethos of international institutions like the World Health Organization, as well as the theoretical justification of American developmental assistance and late/post-colonial modernization schemes.

The cohesiveness of the chapters is strong, and the argument carries well, but the exclusive focus on British men (and a few...

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