National Races

Richard McMahon is a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. He is the author of The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839–1939.

"This major scholarly collection explores the history of physical anthropology from intentionally unusual angles that challenge intuitive assumptions. It also charts engagements and altercations with humanistic ethnological scholarship, including folklore, amid a host of revealingly varied nationalist aspirations."-Michael Herzfeld, Journal of Folklore Research "A rich collection about the rise of physical anthropology, ethnology, and race science in the 19th century, National Races emphasizes the importance of placing these disciplines in a transnational, national, and imperial context. By highlighting forgotten mid-19th-century debates about mono- and polygenism, and employing case studies focused on Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, Korea, and Yugoslavia to decenter the Western European core-focused narratives of these disciplines’ emergence, the volume recovers a rich set of liberal, transnational, and local ideas in their development, thus challenging teleological narratives of a straight road from turn-of-the-century craniometry and serology to the eugenic practices and exclusionary biological racism of interwar fascist regimes."-A. Vari, Choice “In important ways, both implicitly and explicitly, Richard McMahon demonstrates that the fear of immigration and anti-immigration policies in Europe and the United States are tied to previous fears and anxiety about the construction of national races. McMahon provides an extensive overview and impeccable research to describe the transnational science of racial classification during a pivotal century in the modern era.”-Lee Baker, Mrs. Alexander Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University “National Races is innovative and promising-and fills a significant gap in the international literature. It builds on studies of physical anthropology, nationalism (or national identity politics), imperialism, modernity, and warfare and attempts to bring these into connection. There is every reason to believe that the book will be a standard work in an interdisciplinary and transnational field of studies that has hardly been circumscribed and never been covered in any detail.”-Han F. Vermeulen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany

• List of Figures    Series Editors’ Introduction    Introduction: Political Identities and Transnational Science    Richard McMahon1. Transnational Network, Transnational Narratives: Scientific Race Classifications and National Identities    Richard McMahon2. The Destiny of Races “Not Yet Called to Civilization”: Giustiniano Nicolucci’s Critique of American Polygenism and Defense of Liberal Racism    Maria Sophia Quine3. A Matter of Place, Space, and People: Cracow Anthropology, 1870–1920    Maria Rhode4. Yet Another Greek Tragedy? Physical Anthropology and the Construction of National Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century    Ageliki Lefkaditou5. Jews between Volk and Rasse    Amos Morris-Reich6. Classifying Hybridity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Imperial Anthropology    Marina Mogilner7. Physical Anthropology in Colonial Korea: Science and Colonial Order, 1916–40     Arnaud Nanta8. Racial Anthropology on the Eastern Front, 1912 to the Mid-1920sMaciej GÓrny9. Racial Politics as a Multiethnic Pavilion: Yugoslavs, Dinarics, and the Search for a Synthetic Identity in the 1920s and 1930s    Rory YeomansConclusion: From National Races to National Genomes    Catherine NashContributorsIndex