Richard Taylor and the Children of Noah: Race, Science and Religion in the South Seas
The nineteenth century was a time of expansion for the British Empire and the Christian missions. The period from the 1830s through to the 1870s was also a time in which a change in racial paradigms occurred in British intellectual life. In the 1830s, thinking on race was dominated by Christian paternalistic humanitarianism, as reflected by the abolitionist and missionary movements. By the 1870s the views of many thinkers on race had hardened, with contemporary science being used to support a vision of defined racial hierarchies resulting from natural evolutionary processes, accompanied by the inevitable decline and extinction of ‘weaker races’ in competition with Europeans. The weakening of the Christian humanitarian view on race has been seen as reflecting the mid-nineteenth-century triumph of a scientific world-view over one based on religion. This chapter seeks to question this supposed polarization of science and religion. It looks at how one man, Richard Taylor (1805–1873), a missionary and a naturalist, sought to reconcile the issues raised by contemporary scientific discoveries with his own religious beliefs. It examines Taylor’s attempts to use both science and religion to argue against racial inequality and for the idea that a truly Christian British Empire would mitigate the damaging effects of imperialism by spreading civilization and the word of God.