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This is the first of two consecutive chapters devoted to the career of Bedford Pim who plays, legitimately, an important role in traditional narrative of the history of the ASL, because of his infamous racist pamphlet and lecture, Negro and Jamaica, published in the aftermath of the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865. In contrast with previous narratives that have had Pim “rushed in” as member of the ASL on the occasion of the Rebellion, the chapter tracks Pim previous pedigree as a prize winner of the Royal Geographical Society and characteristic “entrepreneur in globalization”, emphasizing that he was characteristic of the type of individuals on which the ASL drew its inspiration and strength. Starting with a descriptions of the micro-politics of informal empire in the context of the Mosquito Coast, the chapter shows that Pim’s entrepreneurial endeavors in Nicaragua led him to find himself in open rebellion against the Admiralty. The Anthropological Society of London then became a natural anchor for Pim’s mercurial efforts leading him to join it at an early stage as Local Secretary for Nicaragua. This position as an expert in Caribbean anthropology designated him as a natural ASL spokesperson in the aftermath of the Jamaica Rebellion.

This chapter continues the narrative of Pim’s career undertaken in the previous chapter. By exploring the interlocking directorates of Bedford Pim’s mining, railway and colonization companies launched in the mid-1860s, the chapter shows the structure of the science and finance nexus. It also shows how anthropology was embedded in financial engineering. In particular, taking the example of the competition between US anthropologist George Ephraim Squier and anthropologist Bedford Pim as a case in point, the chapter shows how statements about race and racial identity were ultimately tied to alternative financial concerns. The result was the plasticity of racial beliefs, which could be adjusted depending on financial logic. An intellectual history of racism that would ignore its financial underpinning and the problem of scientific credibility would miss some essential ingredients that shaped the contours of the “science of man.”

Drawing on the previous chapters and on new evidence of the way Hyde Clarke straddled finance and science, this chapter provides a new narrative of the way the Anthropological Society was brought down after the famous letter published by Hyde Clarke in the Athenaeum, where he criticized vehemently the ASL’s accounts and governance. Hyde Clarke’s career from the railway boom in the 1840s to the Athenaeum episode in the Summer of 1868 (just a dozen weeks before the election that was to bring Gladstone to power following a Liberal landslide). Putting the conflict between Hyde Clarke and the leaders of the ASL in 1868 (including Bedford Pim) in parallel with the dispute that took place between Hyde Clarke and Bedford Pim in 1872 over a Honduras railway, the chapter underscores the complete identity that existed between the technique used by Clarke in 1868 to provoke a “run” of ASL fellows and the one he used to provoke a run on Honduras bondholders, the chapter suggests that the coming of the Anthropological Institute in 1871 can be likened to a hostile takeover raid by leaders of the Ethnological Society of London.