MAPPING THE NORDIC RACE - FIRST STATE INSTITUTE FOR RACE BIOLOGY IN THE WORLD

LUNDBORG, H. & F.J. LINDERS (Edts.).

The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation. Anthropologia Suecica MCMXXVI. Withe the collaboation of the staff of the institute and other scientists edited.

Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1926. [To be distributed by Gustav Jena Fischer, etc.]. Folio. Original full cloth with gilt title to spine and brown lettering and swedish arms to front board. Gilding to spine a little worn and spine a little soiled. Inner front hinge weak. Internally very nice and clean. Stamp to title-page (Malmö stadsbibliotek). An unusually well preserved copy of this heavy, large book. XIVpp., frontispiece portrait, (1 blank leaf), 182 pp. + 5 plates, 4 of them maps. + Supplement (including tables, explanation of the tables and the plates, and plates): (1) f. (half-title), 108 pp. (1) f. (half-title) + 44 photographic plates depicting Nordic Types, Baltic types, and Lapp types. With many illustrations, maps, and diagrams in the text as well.

Scarce first edition of this seminal production, which constitutes the first - and most significant - production of the first state institute for race biology in the world.

"It is one of the great paradoxes of the history of eugenics that the category of "race" - notoriously fuzzy anyway - was no less important to the eugenic ideas and practices developing within states that experienced little actual racial diversity.
In the Swedish context, racial biology and anthropology thus exercised considerable influence, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, when eugenicists promoted the idea of a distinct Nordic race, as Broberg and Tydén have established. The first state Institute for Race Biology in the world was founded in Uppsala in 1922, having been voted by the Swedish parliament and ratified by the king. Directed by Herman Lundborg (1868-1943), Sweden's most prominent eugenic scientist at the time, one of its first tasks was mapping the racial features of the Swedish nation. On the basis of measuring the physical attributes of 100,000 Swedes - two-thirds of whom were army recruits and a significant part of the remainder, prison inmates - "The Racial Chararcter of the Swedish Nation" appeared in 1926 to international acclaim."

Thus started the first officially planned scientific state strategy to map out the superior Nordic race, to promote and improve racial purity and to depict the dangers of miscegenation. After this first (massive) production, more attempts to produce full inventories of "foreign" races were done in the 1930'ies, during which time institutes for eugenic research and promotion were also established in Central America and Africa, due to the efforts of Lundborg, in collaboration with Samuel Holmes and Charles Davenport. The scientific mapping of the ideal pure race, with the ultimate goal of preparing and initiating practical reforms to improve the white race, found, as we all know too well, great resonance all over Europe, in the 30'ies and 40'ies.

With the present work, Lundborg had founded what was considered an important scientific and patriotic task that came to have the greatest of consequences for the peoples of Europe.

Order-nr.: 53090