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The chapter reviews existing debates on the rise of the Anthropological Society. It questions anthropologist George W. Stocking’s almost complete exclusion of explorer Richard F. Burton from the narrative. Burton’s influence on the ways and means of the Anthropological Society of London was paramount. The chapter also criticizes Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s suggestion that the ASL was just an instrument of Confederate propaganda in London during the Civil War. The ASL’s apex was reached one year after the Confederate defeat, precluding such a characterization. Last, the chapter suggests that the most obvious criterion to delineate the ASL from it’s rival ESL (Ethnological Society of London) is sociological. The ESL was more aristocratic and the ASL included predominantly individuals from the technical professions and imperial bureaucracies who found in empire a mean of enrichment social rise.

Through examination of the activities of the X-men within scientific societies this chapter reveals much about the mundane operation of scientific societies, their characteristic organisational structure, the roles of officers, and Victorian expectations as to the roles appropriate to persons of different social statuses. The concerns of the X-men were chiefly with the public image of science, that science be dignified and socially respected, judged by scientific criteria alone. Their specifically professionalizing concerns focused on building the infrastructure for scientific research. They devoted considerable effort to getting themselves elected to high positions in the Royal Society, and ensuring that high birth was no longer a criterion for the presidency. In the Ethnological Society of London, Lubbock, Busk and Huxley sought both scientific and social respectability for the science of man. They succeeded in reuniting the squabbling Ethnological and Anthropological Societies, and in holding the amalgamated Anthropological Institute together. By contrast, in the Linnean Society Hooker lost his long control, largely because Busk and Lubbock refused to act as his lieutenants. Through the British Association they shaped public opinion more widely, using public lectures and presidential addresses to interpret the tendencies and directions of modern science to large audiences.

After a brief exposé of the making of the Anthropological Society of London and the controversies it triggered, this chapter provides a methodological introduction to the kind of history writing this book advocates. It identifies a coincidence between the rise of anthropology and the making of a foreign debt bubble and shows that a number of individuals (in particular, Hyde Clarke) connect the two threads. It suggests an explanation for the fact that the evidence in the book has been side-lined before. Writing about the entanglement of anthropology and the stock exchange requires connecting scattered evidence. Digital technologies have revolutionized the way such diffuse, marginal evidence can be retrieved and re-organized. As illustration it shows how Hyde Clarke’s spanning of several universes can be documented rigorously.

Chapter 12 picks up the history of sexual selection in the late 1860s as Darwin set about researching and writing the Descent of Man. It analyses Darwin’s prolonged dispute with Wallace over the issues of female choice, protective colouration and human evolution in the contexts of the Huxley-led drive for Darwinian cognitive and cultural authority, institutional conflict between the Darwinian Ethnological Society and the racialist Anthropological Society of London, the American Civil War, the Eyre affair, the social and professional implications of the “irrepressible” woman question and John Stuart Mill’s championing of women’s rights.

This chapter argues that classic Christian theological anthropology has emphasized that all human beings are part of the one human family descending from Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, yet fallen and sinful. These beliefs have been traditionally expounded with reference to Genesis 1–3. Sociocultural anthropologists, in contrast, have often prided themselves on shedding Christian beliefs. The Genesis narrative, in particular, has been the object of attacks. Nevertheless, when some nineteenth-century freethinking anthropologists argued that belief in the monogenesis of the human race was just the result of the influence of an erroneous Judeo-Christian myth, the discipline weeded such thinking out of its midst. Thus, even as it sidelined Christianity, orthodox anthropology from the founding of the discipline to the present has affirmed the doctrine of the psychic unity of humankind. This essay argues that this foundational conviction of anthropology is informed by Christian thought.