Epilogue

Abstract

Scientific beliefs in racial mental difference and racial hierarchies have been increasingly marginalised since the interwar period. Political battles against racial discrimination (especially Nazism) have kept the legitimacy of utilising race as a classificatory system in the dock of scientific as well as social consideration ever since this time. However, despite the best efforts of UNESCO and others, the idea of race never entirely disappeared from British biology in the post-war period. On the contrary, this study has argued that the concept survived in British science as both progressive and conservative biologists declined to dismiss race as a dividing mechanism. Politics led scientists to review racial analyses, to offer the public wide-ranging mitigations of race and to emphasise the errors of dogmatic science where it had been harnessed to causes of racial oppression. But politics did not destroy the biologists’ belief in race.