Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man." This book dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It is the first world history of eugenics and an indispensable core text for both teaching and research. Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as experts attempted to connect biology, human capacity, and policy. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. In the current climate, in which the human genome project, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies have proven so controversial, the history of eugenics has much to teach us about the relationship between scientific research, technology, and human ethical decision-making.

Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the modern history of science and medicine, including Purity and Pollution and Imperial Hygiene, and has co-edited Contagion, Isolation, and Medicine at the Border.

Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset.

Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
Eugenics and the modern world
Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford

Part One: Transnational themes in the history of eugenics

1. The Darwinian context: Evolution and inheritance
Diane B. Paul and James Moore
2. Anthropology, colonialism, and eugenics
Philippa Levine
3. Race, science, and eugenics in the twentieth century
Marius Turda
4. Eugenics and the science of genetics
Nils Roll-Hansen
5. Fertility control: Eugenics, neo-Malthusianism, and feminism
Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford
6. Disability, psychiatry, and eugenics
Mathew Thomson
7. Eugenics and the state: Policy-making in comparative perspective
Véronique Mottier
8. Internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and eugenics
Alison Bashford
9. Gender and sexuality: A global tour and compass
Alexandra Minna Stern
10. Eugenics and genocide
A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone
Part Two: National/colonial formations

11. Eugenics in Britain: The view from the metropole
Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall
12. South Asia's eugenic past
Sarah Hodges
13. Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of racial science
Stephen Garton
14. Eugenics in China and Hong Kong: Nationalism and colonialism, 1890s-1940s
Yuehtsen Juliette Chung
15. Eugenics in South Africa: Paradoxes in the place of race?
Saul Dubow
16. Eugenics in colonial Kenya
Chloe Campbell
17. Eugenics in post-colonial Southeast Asia
Sunil S. Amrith
18. German eugenics and the wider world: Beyond the racial state
Paul Weindling
19. Eugenics in France and the colonies
Richard S. Fogarty and Michael A. Osborne
20. Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies
Hans Pols
21. The Scandinavian states: Reformed eugenics applied
Mattias Tydén
22. The first-wave eugenic revolution in southern Europe: Science sans frontières
Maria Sophia Quine
23. Eugenics in eastern Europe, 1870s-1945
Maria Bucur
24. Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union
Nikolai Krementsov
25. Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous repair
Jennifer Robertson
26. Eugenics in interwar Iran
Cyrus Schayegh
27. Eugenics and the Jews
Raphael Falk
28. Eugenics policy and practice in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico
Patience A. Schell
29. The path of eugenics in Brazil: Dilemmas of miscegenation
Gilberto Hochman, Nísia Trindade Lima, and Marcos Chor Maio
30. Eugenics in the United States
Wendy Kline
31. Eugenics in Canada: A chequered history, 1850s - 1990s
Carolyn Strange and Jennifer A. Stephen
Epilogue: Where did eugenics go?
Alison Bashford
Chronology
Index