How race became everything : Australia and polygenism

This paper seeks to explain the shift that took place in the mid-nineteenth century elaboration of a polygenist idea of race. Supplementing existing claims that increasing evidence about the diversity of humankind provided a context for this shift, the focus here is upon British colonial encounters in Australia. It is against the background of what was considered to be a distinctly human separation from, and capacity to rise above, nature that, we argue, the Australian Aborigine precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of the human. As consternation grew not only about their inclination but about their very capacity for improvement, and particularly for cultivation, the Aborigines challenged the basis upon which the unity of humankind had been assumed. They could not be comprehended, according to the prevailing conception of racial difference, as a mere variety of the human. And it is out of this incomprehension, we argue, that the rise of polygenism may be understood: as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine.