The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

Several versions of ‘social Darwinism’ flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with ideologies derived from non-Darwinian evolution theories. They exploited discoveries of fossil hominids including Neanderthals and the Piltdown fraud to construct rival explanations of the emergence of human characteristics that might shape social development. The linear hierarchy of races erected in the nineteenth century remained the basis of many popular accounts, even though professional anthropologists began to turn their backs on it. Ideologies based on national or racial competition were advocated even by writers who did not accept the Darwinian theory of competition within populations. Fear of racial degeneration fuelled the eugenics movement’s calls for the elimination of ‘harmful’ characters, although the input from genetics encouraged an analogy with artificial rather than natural selection.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

This chapter argues against the narrative that posits a pre-twentieth century past, where the mother and fetus were one, in contrast with the present, where the fetus is visible and autonomous. I complicate this narrative by showing that the maternal–fetal relationship was redrawn and reinterpreted multiple times in the twentieth century. The ‘fetal parasite’ era was informed by the hereditarianism of the early 1900s. The notion of a developing organism sensitive to external influences was replaced by a remarkably sheltered fetus. In contrast, concerns around the physical and psychological trauma following the Second World War supported the notion of ‘critical’ periods, responsive to external influences mediated by the mother. Yet soon thereafter, the language and imagery of an autonomous, self-sufficient fetus became prevalent amidst political battles over abortion. The notion of the autonomous fetus is linked to evolutionary biology’s 1970s concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ – with the ‘selfish’ fetus pitted against the mother in the struggle over scarce resources. By the 1990s, the rise of DOHaD and epigenetics signalled a return of the maternally mediated environment to the science of human development. While some interpreted this as a return to the pre-modern model, there is a significant difference. Here maternal experiences and surroundings have to be rendered accessible to an experimental, molecular approach and to show evidence of a quantifiable change in observed parameters.

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

Berlin is often described as the site of sexual innovation in both popular and scholarly accounts of the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. Particularly in the inter-war period, the metropolis became an iconic symbol of gender-bending nightlife, an organizational centre for myriad movements of sexual emancipation, and a nexus of scholarly efforts to catalogue and understand human sexual comportment and identity. This chapter argues, however, that while there was certainly an explosion of public, literary, and medical interest in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity in early twentieth-century Berlin, the terms ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ can oversimplify what was actually a very complex and contentious historical process. Focusing on a few examples of the divisions within queer communities – particularly the conflicts between feminist, lesbian, and transgender activists and the arguments emanating from the masculinist branch of the gay rights movement – it tracks how discourses about the morality of prostitution, the social impact of same-sex love, and racialized biological knowledge shaped definitions of citizenship in ways that still resonate and are still debated. It is this debate, rather than some kind of definitive invention of sexual identity, that makes this period relevant for our present.

Eugenics suffused the medical field through its convergence with hygiene and ideologically underpinned governmental policies of national health, maternal health, and venereal disease control in many countries globally, including in Romania and China. This resulted in the creation of Institutes of Social Hygiene in different countries, including in Romania. The writings of Dr Iuliu Moldovan, founder of The Institute of Hygiene and Social Hygiene in Cluj, Romania, offer insights into eugenics and its connection to veneral disease control in Romania. One case study of applying eugenics to public health is the work against venereal disease at the Model Sanitary Station in Gilau between 1924-33 in Transylvania, Romania. This chapter also uncovers transnational medical cooperation to create public health in China by following the international training of Dr Yang Chongrui, a renowned specialist in maternal health. The details of Yang”s Euro-American study tour attest to how she encountered important elements for eugenic public health: hygiene, venereal disease control, lectures on “the mentally defective”, puericulture, facilities for syphilitic children, prisons, and hospitals for indigent women. Yang”s interaction with Andrija Štampar, who arranged her global tours sponsored by League of Nations Health Organization, was also formative in shaping her eugenic beliefs.

The chapter provides an insight into the complex sexual milieu of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the Rajabai Tower case as a key narrative, numerous facets of the city, such as cosmopolitanism, group identities, the link between forensics and sexual assault, racial profiling, and police corruption, are discussed. Also examined are the spatial controversies surrounding Bombay’s red-light neighbourhoods and links between spatiality and the identity of prostitutes. Pop culture’s role in shaping a sexual ethos, in Parsi theatre and later Bombay cinema, and particularly the unique position of performative androgyny, is reviewed. Further, the impact of contagious disease acts and the fluid definition of prostitution is studied. Finally, the role of eugenics is surveyed, and the extremely divisive and convoluted politics of the eugenics movement is analyzed.

This chapter examines the origins and legacy of sexology – the scientific study of sexuality – in the modern world. First consolidated into a coherent programme in the late nineteenth century, sexology has its roots in the re-organization of knowledge about nature in the frameworks of taxonomy, evolutionism, and race. A pervasive preoccupation with heredity gave rise to powerful eugenics movements around the world. The interest in controlling variability and unlocking the secrets of the soul generated parallel developments in biomedicine, especially psychoanalysis and endocrinology. Sex experts worldwide converged in diagnosing cultural signs of homosexuality for the purpose of national modernization. As the centre of gravity in sexual science began to shift from Europe to North America, researchers gave growing support to the sex/gender distinction and redefined the meanings of normality. In the waning days of hereditarian theories, the rise of cultural anthropology coupled with a renewed scientific investment of colonial powers to reverse hierarchical templates of sexual practices and norms emanating from the metropoles. A public health crisis (HIV/AIDS), social movements (gender and sexual minority rights), and the systematization of research protocols (bioethics) shaped a comeback of biological sexology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter covers Richard Darré and Nazi inner colonization, and race breeding through peasant farming. Sering turned against Darré and the race-based Nazi agrarian policy, and so Darré had Sering removed. Konrad Meyer took over the role of godfather of inner colonization. Ihe chapter then discussed race science and the rise of eugenics. Sering became an Ostforscher, an eastern researcher. Mitteleuropa ideas for southeastern Europe are touched upon. During his carrer, Sering was great supporter of female academics, and in his later years helps Von Dietze get out of prison. Schacht was a major supporter of Sering. Sering’s final act was the writing of a paper on the new war economy. The chapter concludes with Sering’s death.

In 1928-29, politicians of the Irish Free State debated the Censorship of Publications Bill, which included a clause banning print media on contraception. They contended that ignorance of birth control would increase reproductive rates and prevent Irish “race suicide.” W. B. Yeats contested the Bill in the press, in part due to apprehension about Catholic population growth and dwindling Protestant numbers. This chapter positions the Free State’s “race suicide” debates into the context of their eugenic origins, and it argues that Yeats’s reaction to the Bill set the stage for his eugenic plan in On the Boiler, one that responded to what he believed was an Anglo-Irish “race suicide.” Through coded references to Irish class divisions, Yeats proposes restraints on Catholic reproductive rights, strategies of selective breeding among an Irish elite, and population control achieved through violence. His ideas about race and reproduction offer a study of scientific racism that reflects fringe and mainstream rhetoric that endures today in the form of “replacement theory.” An investigation of Yeats contributes to the ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to pinpoint the origins, development, and effects of theories that bring together questions of science, race, reproduction, and rights.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction dramatizes her reform agenda, which turned on redressing an “unnatural” division back in human history that resulted in the excessively feminine women and humanized men who defined the norm in her own day. Her 1915 novel Herland challenges by flipping traditional gender hierarchies and roles even as it retains while naturalizing other forms of privileged status. Throughout her career, Gilman grounded her politics in the domain of biological existence, initially endorsing the view that natural laws and processes left unimpeded would inevitably work to facilitate the progressively meliorative course of evolution. But the more she became convinced that humans had deviated from this course, the more ardently she advocated for an interventionist, biopolitical approach. By the time she wrote Herland, she was diagnosing a nation’s “health and vitality” based on the extent of degeneracy and impurity she detected in the social body under examination and prescribing drastic cures as needed. Herland thus reveals the author’s conservative tendencies; these increased as she aged and soured on the prospect of sweeping social reform, but they had been there all along, even in her seemingly radical theories of gender.

Darwin and Wallace proposed that natural selection is the process responsible for the evolution of adaptive features. Mutations provide the raw material of evolution. Interacting species influence each other’s evolution through coevolution. Evolution offers insight into many past and current controversies including Proximate (extrinsic) and ultimate (intrinsic) factors influence species’ vulnerability to extinction. Going through a bottleneck results in low genetic diversity and the high risk of becoming extinct due to inbreeding, catastrophes, and fluctuations in birth and death rates and the sex ratio. The theory of island biogeography states that extinction risk is high in small, isolated populations. Understanding evolution has practical implications for managing the evolution of resistance to pesticides, problems from hybridization, and populations at risk of extinction.

Before the specter of the Nazi Final Solution, many British intellectuals at the fin de siècle perceived eugenics as forward-thinking and liberating. In their respective novels, A Superfluous Woman (1894) and The Girl from the Farm (1895), the socialist-feminists Emma Frances Brooke and Gertrude Dix paired ideologies of degeneration and eugenics with an endorsement of Edward Carpenter’s ethos of simple living, celebrating good health and wholesomeness. They adopted Francis Galton’s policy of selective breeding yet rejected his promotion of the peerage as “eminent” specimens for propagating future generations. In their fictions, the conservative aristocrat and entitled upper-middle-class man are instead enervated, parasitical decadents and obstacles to social, evolutionary advancement. Ultimately, Brooke’s and Dix’s visions are not altogether unified: whereas Dix simply dismisses her flimsy, immature dandy, Brooke advocates a more radical “negative eugenics” with an eye to her decadent’s diseased offspring. Rejecting privileged, dissipated men in favor of health and liberation, both authors anticipate twenty-first century social critiques of decadence.