Britain’s Genetic Empire by David Peace

Britain’s Genetic Empire by David Peace

This open access book uncovers a hidden history of eugenics in Britain, challenging the widely held assumption that these ideas vanished in the wake of the Nazi medical crimes committed in their name during the Second World War. Instead, Britain’s Genetic Empire uses new archival evidence to reveal how the eugenic imagination continued to shape British policies, national identity, and public health into the late 20th century. Moving beyond the familiar histories of the Eugenics Society and Galton Laboratory, David Peace explores how eugenic visions of the future were embedded in the work of economists, doctors, scientists, and policymakers, influencing debates on poverty, ‘racial fitness’, national planning, and population health.
This is the first intellectual history to trace eugenics’ transformation from late-Victorian fears of imperial decline to its post-war manifestations in genetic counselling and the ‘biosocial’ research of the 1980s on racial reproductive differences and population control in international development economics. It shows how hereditarian ideas adapted to new concerns about class, race, and health as Britain’s imperial power waned, finding fresh momentum with the rise of genetics as a scientific field extending beyond its historic disciplinary bounds.
At a time of rapid innovation in genomics and artificial intelligence, and with a resurgence of eugenic beliefs used to justify racism and conspiracy theories, Britain’s Genetic Empire asks what happens when we believe we can predict human futures, and what people are prepared to do when those predictions become reasons to intervene in the lives of others.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the project Taming the European Leviathan (grant agreement No. 854503).