This “scientific” racism and sexism would become essential in colonial governance. Well-meaning white people believed (and continue to believe) that Western science and technology were the only means of improving the condition of the destitute “savages” in the colonized territories. Other less well-meaning individuals saw the absence of “advanced” knowledge in the colonized as a good reason for their annihilation. Frederic W. Farrar (a cleric born in India who became friends with Charles Darwin) argued, for instance, that the extermination of the Tasmanian people was justified because these were people who had not “added one iota to the knowledge, the arts, the sciences, the manufactures, the morals of the world.”

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 265