When Enlightenment science was first introduced in earnest into Russia as part of Peter I's programme of westernisation, the Orthodox Church's view of scientific truth remained the received wisdom and enlightenment science was looked upon as heretical, alien and un-Russian. After Peter's death the Church and other conservative forces in Russia attempted to reassert the traditional system of scientific belief, but Peter's vision had an energetic and enthusiastic supporter in the scientist and polymath MV Lomonosov, whose defence of Enlightenment science against such opposition is illustrated by particular reference to the Copernican Revolution. However, unlike scientists such as Benjamin Franklin in America, Lomonosov did not pursue Enlightenment values into the realm of social and political enquiry, but saw instead Enlightenment science as an instrument for the furtherance of Peter's model of the Russian autocratic state. The political and sociological writers discussed in connection with the Darwinian Revolution, Chemyshevsky, Pisarev, Mikhailovsky, Lavrov and Kropotkin, were all committed to scientific method, but their various responses to Darwinism were significantly coloured by the fact that the struggle for existence in nature described by Darwin seemed more of a piece with the conclusions of western Social Darwinists in favour of a competitive capitalist society, than with the sort of communal society that these Russian writers sought to justify in rational scientific terms. The specific Russian historical moment is of central importance: the Origin of Species appeared in Russia just at the time of the Emancipation, when a major concern of Russian radical thought was that Russian society should bypass capitalism and proceed directly to a socialist form of society. Both the scientific revolutions are examined in this study with reference to specifically Russian political and sociological issues arising from the particular Russian cultural and historical context into which they were received.

It is commonly held that contradiction and ambivalence are typical of Aboriginal policies, particularly those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These contradictions, often witnessed between policy and its application, have been recognized as a competition between pragmatic factors and humanitarian concerns. However, as is evidenced by the ‘mix-race discourse’ of the laws and policies that make up Aboriginal policy in Canada, the US, and Australia, these contradictions can in part be explained by a post-Enlightenment science that debated the role and place of mixed-ancestry Natives. While mixed-ancestry Natives were the specific targets of law and policy that aimed to fix their identities in a ‘Native-Newcomer’ racial binary, officials were ambivalent and ambiguous when it came to how they fit into that binary. The question of whether they should be considered ‘Aboriginal’ and if they should therefore be assimilated or segregated remained one of the most enduring questions of Aboriginal policy in the century between 1850 and 1950. This dissertation considers these contradictions and how the role of mixed-ancestry Natives in Aboriginal policies can explain them. Instead of seeing those contradictions as anomalies or as illogical, I posit that they are a logical product of scientific debates over racial hybridity. Fundamentally, I argue that mixed-ancestry Natives were the targets of ambivalent policies that were shaped by debates among nineteenth-century scientists about the implications of racial mixing. These debates were reflected in the inconsistencies and apparent contradictions of the laws and practices that make up Aboriginal policy in Canada, the US, and Australia. In particular, these debates were reflected in the ambiguity and ambivalence of policies that tried to direct how Indigenous peoples of mixed-ancestry should be dealt with, defined, and categorized. The contradictions and ambiguities in law and policy reflect on a larger scale the tension between attempting to apply a hypothetical dichotomized racial hierarchy on the reality of a hybridized society. These tensions were a major influencing factor on the direction and development of Aboriginal policy in these three countries, and produced a consistent albeit ambivalent body of ‘mixed-race’ discourse.