Philippe Xing

I am a historian specialising in nineteenth-century imperial thought, racial science and social sciences. My PhD thesis is provisionally titled The Science of Civilisation: Biology and Race in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Imperial Thought.

My research will focus on theories of “bio-racial civilisation” across the Atlantic empires. The concept refers to an assemblage of scientific accounts in the 19th century that reduced civilisation to a question of biology and race. Specifically, I will explore the contexts and receptions of the texts of five pioneering racial scientists, George Combe, Samuel Morton, Robert Knox, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.

The project intersects and develops the historiography of imperial thought, racial science, and social sciences. First, by reading racial scientists as active yet underexplored participants in 19th-century debates over empire and world orders, I will qualify the stress on the influence of Darwin and Lamarck in existing accounts of racist imperial ideology. Second, by stressing racial scientists’ preoccupation with transatlantic resistance to civilisational worldviews from both colonised and enslaved peoples and their natural environment, I will add to the burgeoning intervention, which highlights the role of non-white agency in the global making of racial science. Finally, I will contribute to scholarship on the entanglement between race and social sciences in the 19th century.

This interdisciplinary project draws on my training in three master’s programmes at Cambridge (Political Thought), LSE (Global and Imperial History) and Oxford (International Relations). It is supervised by Professor Duncan Bell and generously funded by the OOC-AHRC-Bridges Studentship at Corpus Christi College.