From Race Science to Total War

The standard account of the twentieth century treats the two world wars as a European tragedy and colonial violence as a separate, lesser topic. This chapter argues what a substantial body of scholarship has argued since Aimé Césaire in 1950: they are one subject. The methods that killed tens of millions of Europeans between 1914 and 1945 (the concentration camp, the extermination order, industrial killing, the bureaucratic ranking of human lives) were developed and normalised in the colonies first, on people whose deaths raised no questions in the metropole.

Césaire's formulation is the sharpest. What Europe could not forgive Hitler, he wrote, was not the crime itself but the crime against Europeans, the application to white people of procedures that until then had been reserved for the colonised. Hannah Arendt made the structural version of the same argument: imperialism abroad produced the categories, the personnel and the administrative habits that came home.¹

The doctrine, in order

Chapter 8 followed race from a commissioned justification to a legal category to a scientific claim. The nineteenth century added the final component: a theory of history in which racial competition is the engine, and the disappearance of the weaker party is a natural law rather than a policy.

The chronology is once again instructive. Herbert Spencer published his evolutionary sociology and coined "survival of the fittest" in the 1860s; the phrase entered Darwin's own text in later editions. Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871), predicted that the "civilised races" would exterminate and replace the "savage races", an observation offered as prediction, not programme, but with no visible discomfort.² Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, coined eugenics in 1883 and proposed to manage human breeding directly.

What must be stressed is that this was not a fringe. Eugenics was mainstream, progressive, international science for half a century:

• The First International Eugenics Congress met in London in 1912, presided over by Darwin's son Leonard, with vice-presidents including Winston Churchill and the president of Harvard.
• Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilisation law in 1907; over thirty US states followed. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in Buck v. Bell (1927) with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s notorious line about three generations. More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised under these laws, disproportionately poor, disabled, Black and Indigenous women. Buck v. Bell has never been formally overruled.
• Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the Canadian province of Alberta ran their own programmes, in some cases into the 1970s.

The colonial laboratory

Each of the signature techniques of twentieth-century mass violence has a colonial first use.

The concentration camp. The term enters modern usage with the Spanish reconcentración in Cuba from 1896, under General Weyler, which killed well over a hundred thousand civilians. The British then interned Boer civilians during the South African War of 1899–1902; roughly 28,000 Boer women and children died in the camps, along with a comparable or greater number of Black Africans in separate camps whose records were kept far less carefully. Emily Hobhouse's reports made the camps a scandal in Britain, which is to say the facts were public at the time.³

The extermination order. In German South West Africa, now Namibia, General Lothar von Trotha issued a proclamation in October 1904 declaring that the Herero were no longer German subjects, that any Herero found within the German frontier would be shot, and that he would not receive women and children. His forces drove the population into the Omaheke desert and held the waterholes. Survivors were put into camps (Konzentrationslager, the German word already in use) of which the worst was Shark Island. Something on the order of 80 per cent of the Herero and half the Nama population died. Skulls of the dead were shipped to Germany for anthropological measurement.⁴

Industrial asymmetric killing. At Omdurman in 1898, Kitchener's force with Maxim guns and artillery killed around 11,000 Sudanese for the loss of fewer than 50 of its own. Winston Churchill, present as a cavalry officer and journalist, described it as the most signal triumph of scientific weapons over barbarians. Europe learned from these campaigns that machine guns produced victory. It did not learn what they would do when both sides had them.

1914: the mechanism assembles

Every component of chapters 12 and 13 was now in place, and the war they produced was not an accident of an assassination.

Mass mobilisation meant states could put millions of men in the field and keep replacing them. Nationalist schooling meant those men marched willingly in 1914, in every capital, believing their nation was defending itself. Industrial production meant munitions could be manufactured faster than they could be fired. And social Darwinism supplied the rationale: a widely held belief among European elites that nations were organisms in competition, that war was a test of vitality, and that a nation which would not fight would decline. The German general Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War (1911) argued it explicitly; equivalents circulated everywhere.

The result was 17 million dead, of whom a large fraction were killed by artillery they never saw. Colonial troops (Senegalese, Algerian, Indian, Vietnamese, African labour battalions) were shipped in to fight and dig for empires that then declined to extend them rights. The Chinese Labour Corps, nearly 100,000 men, was largely written out of the story until recently.

Versailles: the hierarchy is written into international law

Two documents from 1919 show that the racial order was not an embarrassment being quietly dismantled but the explicit organising principle of the postwar settlement.

The racial equality proposal. Japan, a victorious allied power, proposed inserting a clause endorsing the equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals into the League of Nations Covenant. It won a majority of votes in the commission. Woodrow Wilson, chairing, ruled that on a matter of this importance unanimity was required, and it failed. The pressure against it came from Australia, backed by Britain, over the White Australia policy, and from a president whose own administration had re-segregated the US federal civil service.⁵

Article 22. The mandate system placed former German and Ottoman territories under the tutelage of the victors on the stated ground that their peoples were "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world", and described their tutelage as "a sacred trust of civilisation". Rwanda became a Belgian mandate under that article. The Requerimiento of 1513 had said the same thing in worse Latin.

Nazism as continuity, not aberration

The most uncomfortable finding of recent scholarship is how much of the Nazi programme was borrowed rather than invented.

Lebensraum was a settler-colonial concept, and its authors said so. Hitler repeatedly cited the American conquest of the West as the model (clearing a continent of its inhabitants and settling it), and admired the British administration of India. The eastern territories were to be Germany's India and Germany's frontier.⁶

The race laws had American drafts on the table. James Whitman's study of the Nuremberg Laws documents Nazi jurists studying US statutes in detail (anti-miscegenation laws in thirty states, second-class citizenship, the racially structured immigration quotas of 1924), and debating them as precedent. Some found the American "one drop" rules too harsh for German purposes.⁷

The scientific personnel were continuous. Eugen Fischer's line from the Namibian colony to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute is the clearest single thread; his student Josef Mengele went to Auschwitz and sent specimens back to Berlin. And the sterilisation law of 1933 was modelled on American statutes that were then still being enforced.

And afterwards

1945 discredited scientific racism as a public doctrine in the West. The UNESCO statements on race in 1950 and 1951 declared it without biological foundation; the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were adopted; the empires began, slowly and under pressure, to withdraw.

But note what was not dismantled. The economic relations built over four centuries stayed exactly where they were. The colonies became independent states inside a trading system whose terms had been set by their former rulers, carrying borders drawn in Berlin, and were told to compete. The doctrine went underground and the structure remained, which is the subject of chapter 16.

First, chapter 15 examines the single decision that made the worst of it possible, and asks who made it.

Footnotes

1. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame, 1950); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), part two. See also Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes" (London: Granta, 1996). ↩
2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1, ch. 6. On the wider movement, Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
3. Elizabeth van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2013); Emily Hobhouse, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies (London, 1901). ↩
4. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Genocide in German South-West Africa (Monmouth: Merlin, 2008); David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust (London: Faber, 2010). ↩
5. Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998). ↩
6. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan, 2015); Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ↩
7. James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). ↩
8. For the critical side of the debate, see Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), and the exchanges collected around A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). ↩