“In this deeply researched and original book, Redvaldsen advances a political assessment of eugenics in Britain, offering an analysis of the political attitudes and efforts of its main protagonists and the institutions through which they operated.”

—Daniel J. Kevles, Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University, and author of In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity

“David Redvaldsen reconstructs the enduring history of British eugenics in vivid detail, outlining its transformations in response to evolutionary theories. Far from fading after 1945, he shows how eugenics has a capacity to update itself, enduring until the present day.”

—Paul Weindling, Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University, and author of Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945

This book examines British eugenics from its origins in 1865 to the early 1990s. It considers the two institutions promoting the doctrine: the Galton Laboratory attached to the University of London; and the Eugenics Society. It charts internal and ideological changes across more than a century, seeing eugenics as primarily a political movement. The Galton Laboratory published detailed studies of heredity. It transformed itself into a centre for medical genetics after the Second World War. As early as the 1920s, the Eugenics Society was the mainspring of the doctrine, formulating what became the British version of an international ideology. Its support for sterilization in the 1930s eroded the kudos it had gained in policy-making circles. From the 1960s, organized eugenics was especially a forum for learned and popular discussion of biology and sociology. Medical advances after 1970 aided its continuation, notably the growth of assisted reproductive technologies. The book presents British eugenics as mostly shaped by domestic concerns, offering new revelations and interpretations with the capacity to readjust historical thinking. It also covers contemporary bioethical and political issues aligned to eugenics.

David Redvaldsen is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at the University of Agder, in Norway.

“A reappraisal and reassessment of the history of British eugenics was long overdue and David Redvaldsen has provided it. Drawing on years of research and attuned to the latest historiographic debates, his book invites us to rethink the social imaginaries, public policies and political visions of the world created by eugenics. This is an engaging work which will resonate for years to come.” (Professor Marius Turda, Centre for Medical Humanities, Oxford Brookes University)

“In this deeply researched and original book, Redvaldsen advances a political assessment of eugenics in Britain, offering an analysis of the political attitudes and efforts of its main protagonists and the institutions through which they operated, notably the Galton Laboratory of Eugenics at University College London and the Eugenics Society. Cosmopolitan in scope, it attends to the linkages between British eugenics and its sister movements in the United States and Germany. It probes the class and social biases that pervaded British eugenics, casting new light on familiar subjects, especially contraception, sterilization, and anxieties about the differential birth rate. And it maps the evolution of eugenic thinking in response to Nazism as well as to the development of the welfare state and its persistence in considerations of in vitro fertilization.  In all, a thought-provoking work, valuable not least for its framing in a politically engaged eugenics of human reproductive technologies past, present, and possibly to come.” (Daniel J. Kevles, Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University, and author of In the Name of "Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity")

“David Redvaldsen reconstructs the enduring history of British eugenics in vivid detail, outlining its transformations in response to evolutionary theories. Far from fading after 1945, he shows how eugenics has a capacity to update itself, enduring until the present day.” (Paul Weindling, Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University, and author of "Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945")