The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (review)

“Don’t we already know everything there is to know about eugenics?” A senior professor of Canadian history posed me this barbed question at a late 1980s conference on the history of medicine. I had just spoken about the sterilization of the feeble-minded in British Columbia. That memory makes it all the more enjoyable to laud the appearance of The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics, an impressive survey which, in thirty-one chapters amounting to close to six hundred pages, makes it clear that three decades ago the scholarly interest in eugenics—far from having been exhausted—was just taking off. The book consists of two parts. Part One examines key transnational themes, including such issues as eugenics’ relationship to Darwinism, colonialism, race, genetics, fertility control, psychiatry, genocide, and sexuality. Part Two is devoted to national histories of eugenics with chapters on the usual suspects—Britain, the United States, Canada, and Germany; the less familiar histories of Sweden, Italy, and Russia; the colonial situation—in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the French and Dutch empires; and the experiences of a number of non-European states—China, Japan, Iran, Israel, and Brazil.

Most readers will no doubt know the story of eugenics beginning with Francis Galton countering the nineteenth-century belief in the “survival of the fittest.” Thanks, he claimed, to medical interventions hordes of sickly children who should have perished, survived and went on to reproduce. Their tainted heredity manifested itself in alcoholism, criminality, and madness. Meanwhile under the pressure of paying for the increasingly expensive trappings of gentility, the healthy upper classes who should have produced large broods, reduced their fertility. Believing that human traits were innate and could not be influenced by education or environment, Galton held that some lives were more valuable than others. By this evaluative logic quality counted more than quantity. One thus moved from Darwin’s evolution by natural selection to Galton’s plea for artificial selection to improve human populations. He held that if the fit could not be bribed into reproducing one would have to limit the fertility of the unfit. The most extreme eugenicists envisaged the forced abortion and sterilization of the inferior, legal polygamy for “superior” men, compulsory reproduction of healthy females, social segregation and confinement of defectives, and finally euthanasia. Those who persisted in producing inferior offspring were to be regarded as enemies of the state. A number of writers have portrayed the Nazis as following such ideas to their logical conclusion—the extermination of those deemed racial threats.

The great value of this text is that its contributors provide succinct revisions of many of the common accounts of eugenics. Since eugenics was initially a manifestation of upper-class anxieties, early investigators located eugenics on the political right, but several chapters note that many progressives and liberals were drawn to what they regarded as a modernizing, future-oriented, scientific creed which presented social issues as biological problems that required the planning, selecting, and streamlining of the population. In China those seeking the nation’s regeneration embraced eugenics. In India it manifested itself in societies led by nationalist feminists advocating birth control. In Scandinavia it was implicated in the welfare system. In ethnically diverse Eastern Europe nationalists took it up as a tool to be employed in state building. In the Soviet Union it at first flourished, linked to the medicalization of society, but eventually fell under the onslaught of the adherents of Marxism and Lamarckism.

Given different contexts, different styles of eugenics emerged. Protestant nations like the United States and Germany were the most likely to institute eugenic policies such as sterilizations. In Catholic regions the church’s opposition was crucial though not so much directed at eugenicists’ ends as at the means they employed. Moreover several contributors stress that in much of the world latter day Larmarkians advanced a pro-natalist “social eugenics” that preached the importance of sanitary improvements.

Gender necessarily figured centrally in the discussion of reproduction. Women...