John Crawfurd

John Crawfurd FRS (1783 - 1868) was a Scottish physician, British colonial administrator, diplomat and writer who served as the second and last resident of Singapore.

Crawfurd held polygenist views, based on multiple origins of human groups as separate creations by God in specific regional zones, with separate origins for languages, and possibly as different species. In The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Crawfurd is cited as believing in 60 races. He expressed these views to the Ethnological Society of London (ESL), a traditional stronghold of monogenism (belief in a unified origin of humankind) where he had come in 1861 to hold office as President. With Robert Gordon Latham of the ESL, he opposed strongly the ideas of Max Müller on an original Aryan race.

Ter Ellingson has argued that Crawfurd played a leading role in promoting the idea of the 'noble savage' in the service of racial ideology.…more