Britain’s Genetic Empire : A Century of Eugenics

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 its name during the Second World War. Instead, Britain’s Genetic Empire uses new archival evidence to reveal how eugenic thinking continued to shape British policies, 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 ideas 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 the 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. It shows how eugenic ideas adapted to new concerns about class, heredity, 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 with a resurgence of eugenic beliefs to support racism and conspiracy theories, Britain’s Genetic Empire offers critical insight into the historical (ab)uses of human heredity research and its continuing influence on contemporary bioethics.

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 University of Hamburg.