During the eighteenth century, the word “history” gradually acquired the dynamic connotations that it still possesses. We expect things to change over time. One need only compare John Banister's Historie of Man (1578), a conventional descriptive human anatomy text, with Henry Buckle's History of Civilization in England (1857–1861) to see the transformation. The “history” of natural history still retains aspects of older and newer meanings, and the nineteenth-century genre of “the natural history of man” dealt, inter alia, with present-day human racial variations and how they came about. Victorian debates about single (monogenism) or multiple (polygenism) origins for human racial types naturally feature in several of the chapters in this collection.

Unsurprisingly, scientists attuned to the dynamism of history, Charles Darwin most famously, tended towards monogenism, but as with anything to do with human beings, ideological, cultural, and religious factors were always evident. Darwin himself rejected multiple-race theories and expressed a deep and abiding abhorrence of slavery as an evil human institution, an attitude also widespread among his forebears, both the Darwins and the Wedgwoods. He hovers behind several of the essays in Historicizing Humans but features centrally only in one, Gregory Raddick's fine exploration of the structure of and motivation for Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). His close reading of Darwin's early notebooks and Darwin's later correspondence, especially with Charles Lyell, sheds new light on this fascinating book in which his beloved concept of natural selection surprisingly hardly features.

The “British Sciences” demarcation of the subtitle is largely accurate, but several of the chapters take their themes abroad. John William Dawson (1820–1899) was a highly visible figure in Canada, although Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund's attempt to rehabilitate him does not entirely convince that his attempts to reconcile the biblical and the scientific were anything other than pedestrian. Despite his scientific standing, he always quietly attributed the higher authority to biblical cosmology. On the other hand, William Bollaert (1807–1876) at least wore his heart on his sleeve. One of a number of Victorian explorer-collectors (including of course Alfred Russel Wallace), Bollaert earned his living gathering and selling materials from South America. He saw his larger mission in the encouragement of European settlement and exploitation of these lands, since he believed that the aboriginal groups would never be capable of realizing “modern” development. As a polygenist, he argued that indigenous South Americans were locked forever in a marginal existence and must therefore give way to European domination. Ironically, he was forced to devalue some of the impressive archaeological remains in Peru and other South American countries, even as he helped reveal them to his contemporaries, a strategy neatly expounded by Maurizio Esposito and Abigail Nieves Delgado in their essay. Better known are the anthropological researches of Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), the subject of Efram Sera-Shriar's contribution on the role of religious belief in Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871). He is especially good at teasing out the tensions involved in relying on missionary accounts in what was essentially his secular approach to the topic.

India, too, was of regular concern to Victorian naturalists and administrators. It was well-known that the relative openness of scholars like Sir William Jones (1746–1794) gave way to the hard-nosed decrying of Indian backwardness and inefficiency that characterized the British in India from the 1830s onwards. Developing this familiar narrative, Thomas Simpson scrutinizes the monograph of Herbert Ridley (1851–1911), The People of India (1908). Simpson opens up Ridley's work by looking at Indian commentaries on the themes developed by Ridley, especially those of racial and cultural variations within isolated Indian groups, and shows there was a two-way street in the vast subcontinent. It was not simply the British observing the Indians.

These accounts give Historicizing Humans a widespread geographical distribution, although most of the players were British, and in several instances, their concerns were with the mother country. This is certainly the case with Helen Kingston's attempt to follow up the “comparative method” so beloved of the Scottish “conjecturalists” such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, John Millar, and others, who saw human societies as progressing by stages (in some instances) from savagery to civilization. Her comments on the stadial logic of Walter Scott's fictions are well observed, although Thomas Carlyle and, especially, Francis Galton do not easily fit into the model she proposes. More evocative is Ian Hesketh's examination of the future of theories about human beings in a disparate group of authors, including Alfred Wallace, Edwin Ray Lankester, Francis Galton, Frederic Myers, and William Winwood Reade. Hesketh's essay, at the end of the volume, matches one by Chris Manias, at its beginning, on the visualization of human beings contemporary with cave bears and the woolly rhinoceros, as the mid-century discoveries of human bones and artefacts in geological strata pushed back human origins to long before the traditional biblical reckoning.

The essays here can thus be seen to be wide ranging and only loosely connected. However, they are uniformly well researched and historiographically sensitive, and they are brilliantly brought together by Theodore Koditschek's afterword. Like any good collection, Historicizing Humans invites reflections on unanswered questions while recalling important earlier scholarship. In particular, it repeatedly reminds the reader how significant was the pioneering monograph of John W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (1966), published more than half a century ago.