The X Club and the Remaking of the British Empire

The provided excerpt from The Clash of the Two Americas Vol. 1, introduces the X Club and its role in reshaping the British Empire's strategy for global influence during a period of significant challenge.

• Amidst a rising tide of anti-colonial sentiment and facing internal and external pressures, the British Empire found itself on the brink of collapse in the mid-19th century. The excerpt highlights the empire's overextension in various conflicts, including the Second Chinese Opium War, the Crimean War, Indian uprisings, and support for the Southern Confederacy in the American Civil War.
• Furthermore, the excerpt underscores the global appeal of a "win-win cooperation" model emanating from Lincoln's America, which threatened the empire's established systems of control based on maritime dominance, usury, and cash-crop economies.
• In response to this multifaceted crisis, the British elite recognized the need for a strategic shift, transitioning from "material force" to "mental force" to maintain control. This task fell upon the X Club, a group of influential scientists led by figures like Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Hooker, and Herbert Spencer, the proponent of social Darwinism.
• The excerpt identifies the X Club's primary mission: to redefine the very foundations of scientific thought, aligning them with a "statistical-empiricist interpretation of the universe." This redefinition, as articulated in their magazine Nature, aimed to promote a "science of limits," echoing Thomas Malthus's theories on population growth.
• The excerpt emphasizes the political implications of the X Club's adoption of Malthusian principles, which posited that human populations, growing geometrically, would inevitably outstrip the arithmetically increasing food supply. This "scientific" framework, advocated by Malthus and embraced by the X Club, provided justification for the ruling class to manage this perceived imbalance through means like war, famine, and disease.
• The excerpt argues that the X Club's championing of Darwin's theory of Natural Selection stemmed more from political expediency than scientific conviction, as Darwin himself acknowledged Malthus's influence on his work. By extending Malthusian principles to the entirety of the natural world, the X Club blurred the distinction between humans and animals, advancing a view that served to legitimize the empire's control by equating human behavior with the "law of the jungle."

The excerpt goes on to discuss Henry C. Carey's critique of Malthus and Darwinism, and the emergence of alternative, anti-Darwinian approaches to evolution in the 19th century. Finally, the excerpt concludes by describing the establishment of think tanks like the Fabian Society and the Round Table Group to implement the empire's new strategy.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.