John Crawfurd

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John Crawfurd : biography

13 August 1783 – 11 May 1868

Ethnologist

While Crawfurd produced work that was ethnological in nature over a period of half a century, the term "ethnology" had not even been coined when he began to write. Attention has been drawn to his latest work, from the 1860s, which was copious. It met much criticism at the time, and has also been scrutinised in the 21st century.

Polygenist

Crawfurd held polygenist views, based on multiple origins of human groups; and these earned him, according to Sir John Bowring, the nickname "the inventor of forty Adams".Autobiographical Recollections of Sir John Bowring (1877), p. 214; . In The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Crawfurd is cited as believing in 60 races.s:The Descent of Man (Darwin)/Chapter VII He expressed these views to the Ethnological Society of London (ESL), a traditional stronghold of monogenism (belief in a unified origin of humankind) where he had come in 1861 to hold office as President.

Crawfurd believed in different races as separate creations by God in specific regional zones, with separate origins for languages, and possibly as different species.David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: race, religion, and the politics of human origins, 2008, p. 113; . With Robert Gordon Latham of the ESL, he also opposed strongly the ideas of Max Müller on an original Aryan race.Edward Beasley, The Victorian Reinvention of Race: new racisms and the problem of grouping in the human sciences (2010), p. 188 note 50; .

Papers of the 1860s

Crawford wrote in 1861 in the Transactions of the ESL a paper On the Conditions Which Favour, Retard, and Obstruct the Early Civilization of Man, in which he argued for deficiencies in the science and technology of Asia.Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: science, technology, and ideologies of Western dominance (1990), p. 302; . In On the Numerals as Evidence of the Progress of Civilization (1863) he argued that the social condition of a people correlates with the numeral words of their language.Stephen Chrisomalis, The Cognitive and Cultural Foundations of Numbers, p. ii, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics (2009), p. ii; . Crawfurd used domestication frequently as a metaphor.Ellingson, p. 306; . His racist views on black people were laughed at, during the British Association meeting at Birmingham in 1865.Beasley, p. 18; .

A paper by Crawfurd, On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of European and Asian Races of Man, given 13 February 1866, argued for the superiority of Europeans. It particularly laid emphasis on European military dominance as evidence. Its thesis was directly contradicted at a meeting of the Society some weeks later, by Dadabhai Naoroji.Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (2011), p. 263; .Adas, p. 175; .

Crawford’s agenda and alleged distortions

Recent critics have sought to clarify the agenda to which Crawfurd was writing, at this time, when he had become prominent in a young and still fluid field and discipline. Ellingson has accused Crawfurd of distorting the idea of the noble savage. Trosper has taken Ellingson’s analysis a step further, attributing to Crawfurd a conscious "spin" put on the idea of primitive culture, a rhetorically sophisticated use of a "straw man" fallacy, achieved by bringing in, irrelevantly but for the sake of incongruity, the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Ronald L. Trosper, Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics: Northwest Coast sustainability (2009), p. 29; .

Ellingson argues that Crawfurd gave up his writing on the topic of the "savage" to pursue the implications of Darwin’s thought on human evolution, which were unwelcome to him.Ellingson, p. 318; . Right at the end of his life, in 1868, Crawfurd was using a "missing link" argument against Sir John Lubbock, in what Ellingson describes as a misrepresentation of a Darwinist viewpoint based on the idea that a precursor of humans must still be extant.Ellingson, p. 322; .