| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Patrick Brantlinger. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 248. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

This book is a compendium of evidence that testifies to the pervasiveness of "extinction discourse" in the long nineteenth century and beyond. Situating his study in the context of the British Empire, Patrick Brantlinger uses rhetoric about the "vanishing races" to trace the complexity of racialist discourse, arguing for the centrality of the theme of indigenous degeneration and death to the work of a wide range of thinkers, writers, and humanitarian activists. The two chapters on science that effectively book-end this study provide useful (if synthetic) accounts of the pre-Darwinian roots and post-Darwinian branches of race extinction theory. The chapters in between move from North America to Ireland to Australia and New Zealand, tracking how and to what effect metropolitan commentators as diverse as Robert Knox and Anthony Trollope mobilized arguments about the death of the noble savage to suit a variety of political agendas. The writers under consideration were preoccupied with dying races for the same reasons they were invested in other discourses of empire: because they believed that the apparent temporal limits of native races justified Western conquest and foretold the infinite wisdom of English civilization. Brantlinger has tapped a rich vein of material, and students of Victorian culture, science, literature, and empire will undoubtedly find much to mine here.

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