Erik Linstrum is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
Challenging one-dimensional accounts that stress the unapologetic
complicity of psychologists in the project of empire, he excels in
unpicking the complexity and contradictions that bedeviled the
encounter between science and colonial rule…Linstrum’s deeply
researched volume also contains a warning as pertinent now as it
was in the age of pith helmets—that whatever the intentions of the
researcher, and however much they qualify their conclusions,
officials are often willing to co-opt knowledge to their own
ends.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Ruling Minds takes the reader through the largely forgotten history
of how Great Britain tried to improve the efficiency and
effectiveness of its empire through the new ‘mind sciences,’ a
broad category that included personality and intelligence testing
as well as the theories of Jung and Freud. From Uganda to India to
Burma, government bureaucrats, academics, missionaries, and
anthropologists used tests like Porteus’s [maze] to try to
research, rationalize, and control the empire.
*New York Magazine*
This book offers a compelling examination of the intersections
between psychology, empire, and modernity. Linstrum deftly
illuminates the ways in which psychology was harnessed and deployed
in the making and remaking of imperial modernities, and this
analytical concern allows him to press against the often narrow
focus on the production of cultural difference that has
characterized most recent scholarship on the history of colonial
knowledge and empire building. There is no doubt that this is a
sophisticated and significant work.
*Tony Ballantyne, author of Entanglements of Empire*
Linstrum’s deft and fascinating study of imperial psychology
reveals the ever-present tension between the radical possibilities
of psychology and the requirements of the colonial state. In
seeking to reconcile human diversity with a universalist model of
the mind, psychologists ran up against the assumptions and
prejudices that fed imperial rule, as well as the needs of colonial
regimes. This is a groundbreaking work of considerable depth, that
speaks as much to contemporary concerns as it does to the history
of the British Empire. A tour de force.
*Philippa Levine, author of The British Empire: Sunrise to
Sunset*
A tough and sophisticated account of how the ‘science of mind’ was
deployed in the British Empire in surprising ways—to shore up
empire, to critique it, to modernize it. Linstrum’s own
psychological acumen is applied to the personnel, instruments, and
subjects of imperial psychology to reveal the multiple
potentials—but also, ultimately, the frailty—of expertise in the
global power politics of the twentieth century.
*Peter Mandler, author of Return from the Natives*
Linstrum has written a rich, captivating, and well-researched study
of how British authorities used psychology as a global system of
knowledge and practice informing, bolstering, and, conversely,
undermining the political projects of British imperialism in the
20th century…This reviewer has difficulty imaging a future history
of modernist psychology that will be the equal of Linstrum’s
impressive foundational study. An indispensable read for anyone
interested in history, psychology, and political
science—particularly their intersection.
*Choice*
Wide-ranging, evenhanded, and very well written…Linstrum’s book
marks a significant revision in our understanding of his subject.
He carries this out with such sensitivity and aplomb that it
sometimes takes a moment of reflection and a flick to the
literature cited in his notes to reveal just how powerful and,
possibly controversial, an intervention he is making.
*Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences*
This is an excellent book: smart, elegantly written, well
researched and ambitious in scope.
*British Journal of the History of Science*
Linstrum argues that rather than providing answers and resolution,
psychology’s enormous and ambiguous promise bought it a consistent
place in the British colonial world, even as individuals and their
research exposed unexpected conclusions and challenges to existing
thinking. Across changing circumstances, this book highlights a
consistent but contradictory discourse underlying the late British
Empire.
*Canadian Journal of History*
[Linstrum] has conducted a vast survey of primary and secondary
source material to knit together this fascinating study. Perhaps
the term page-turner should never be applied to a nonfiction
monograph, but Ruling Minds comes close. It manages to both take in
the macro view and offer good illustrations of specific events and
key individuals…Good history is not just intended to answer
questions, though. It is also about opening new avenues of inquiry,
and Ruling Minds has undoubtedly done that. For this and the other
points noted above, it is difficult not to be impressed with
Linstrum’s efforts. Decades from now, this book may very well be
known as the grand, old required reading for any serious student of
psychology and empire.
*History*
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