| Summary: | <p>This thesis reinserts Charles Darwin into the history of international thought and excavates a distinctive idiom of ‘Darwinian internationalism’ inspired by his theory of evolution by natural selection—one widely influential across the globe in the latter half of the long nineteenth century, yet oddly overlooked in existing scholarship.</p>
<p>Part I of the thesis presents a portrait of Darwin as a thinker both created by and concerned with international politics. This is established through an exegesis of his corpus of scientific writings, which were in themselves produced by travel and encounter, and which also engaged with themes of war (transposed into nature as the ‘struggle for existence’) and intersocietal difference (with a focus on what ‘savagery’ reveals about evolution), foregrounded respectively in two major texts: the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. I argue that we see Darwin caught between a mid-century liberal way of thinking about international politics and a radically new way of thinking latent at the heart of his theory, which others would more fully embrace.</p>
<p>An interlude pivots from Darwin to the Darwinians, where I define the distinctiveness of ‘Darwinian internationalism’ through its four core motifs: evolutionism, national selectionism, organicism, and naturalism.</p>
<p>Part II of the thesis then examines the spread of this idiom in a global reception history. I unpack the ideas of a broad cast of Darwinian
internationalists in three ‘contexts of position’ in the late nineteenth century: the core, with a focus on late Victorian Britain; the semi-periphery, with a focus on the Eastern polities (China and Japan) and Latin America; and the periphery, with a focus on South Africa. It is shown how flexible Darwinism proved for articulating a myriad of strategies across the range of positionalities in late nineteenth-century international social space—becoming an accessible ‘weapon of the weak’ as much as of the strong—and how as a way of thinking about international relations it thus cut across the moral-cultural hierarchies of the period.</p>
<p>By ‘bringing Darwinism back in’, an alternative narrative of late nineteenth-century international society is found—one which dislocates the dominant notion of the period as wholly defined by the ‘standard of civilisation’, instead showing how infused the period also was with a competing ‘standard of nature’ which prophesised and produced conditions of holistic, ineliminable existential conflict, and which sowed the seeds of the catastrophes of the short twentieth century.</p>
|
|---|