| "The Strains of Breeding: Settler Colonialism and Managed Miscegenation in the United States and Australia, 1760s-1890s." analyzes how the Enlightenment idea of good breeding evolved from a concern with the internalization of civilized manners, speech, and behavior, into a biological formula for racial improvement centered on breeding out color in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds. A committed group of British, American, and Australian missionaries and ethnologists believed that selective breeding between white men and mixed-race women facilitated the internalization of the cultural principles of good breeding. Influenced by the British ethnologist James Cowles Pritchard, the advocates of good breeding added a biological element to their argument, contending that selective human breeding had the potential to transform colored people to their original and superior color: white. I demonstrate that the idea of breeding out color united self-described American and Australian progressives who believed that the adaptive powers of humans made it possible for individuals to rise to higher levels of civilization and biological perfection. The Australian Aborigines, considered the lowest example of the Negro race, were by the 1860s elevated in racial science because of ethnological studies claiming to have evidence that they descended from the Aryan races of India. The belief that Australian Aborigines had Aryan blood placed them above Native Americans and African-Americans, and resulted in breeding out color becoming an official government policy in Australia after the 1870s.;Drawing on unutilized archival sources, I also analyze how Native Americans, African-Americans, and Australian Aborigines resisted, and at times were co-opted by efforts to create homogenous white populations. Drawing on official petitions, letters, personal diaries, and oral histories, I demonstrate that collectively, subaltern people asserted their good breeding and racial equality with whites by emphasizing their educational advancement and economic progress. Individually, some Native Americans, African-Americans, and Australian Aborigines used sexual and marital relationships with Anglo settlers and planters to improve their social and economic status. I conclude that by the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous and African-American leaders reinterpreted the biological and cultural aspects of good breeding to defend their racial subjectivity, assert their fundamental human equality, and buttress calls for political and legal justice. |
