Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View Being the Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford university junior scientific club on November 17, 1919

The lecture opens by placing Robert Boyle’s life against the early expansion of English trade and colonisation, showing how the first encounters with peoples in the Americas, Africa, India and the Far East were recorded without any sense that race or nationality needed scientific scrutiny. By examining Boyle’s own notes on geography, resources and even his missionary concerns, the speaker illustrates how nineteenth‑century observers treated cultural differences as background rather than subject of study.

Moving forward, the address argues that the growing British Empire forced scholars, politicians and journalists to confront the “live and burning antagonisms” of racial and national identity. It traces how propaganda, the press and modern psychology reshaped collective feeling, turning what were once brute‑force displays of national spirit into sophisticated campaigns of persuasion. The lecture invites listeners to reconsider how historical attitudes still echo in today’s debates about empire, identity and the forces that bind—or divide—people.