Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya

Before the 1980s, the powerful link between empire and race was marginalised in British imperial history. The postcolonial 'turn' opened up new ways of exploring racial constructions of colonised subjects and stimulated debate over the extent to which representations of the colonised in colonial discourse underpinned imperial power. In Race and Empire, based on an AHRB/C-funded research project, Chloe Campbell, who now works in publishing, reverts to a more conventional approach in her rigorous and detailed analysis of the Kenyan eugenics movement during the inter-war years. Her key aim is to redress the neglect of imperial eugenic movements through a case study of Kenya, tracing the 'transportation and mutation of British eugenic thought as it moved through the imperial conceptual network' (p. 3). The British eugenics movement, she argues, was the 'intellectual mother ship' for the Kenyan movement (p. 11). In the 1930s, however, the British Eugenics Society (founded in 1926) sought to distance itself from the Kenyan eugenicists. This was prompted by Nazi racism and by the growing momentum of attacks on what was now regarded as 'unfashionable' racial science, from the left and biologists such as Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley, that emphasised environment over genes and heredity. In the wider context, this reflected the deepening gulf between Kenyan settler society and the metropole over the question of African rights.