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

In Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View, Arthur Keith delivers a provocative Robert Boyle lecture that traces how contact, conquest, and scientific thought shaped modern ideas of race and nationality. Delivered at Oxford in 1919, Keith’s lecture places the origins of racial and national concepts in the age of exploration — from Robert Boyle’s lifetime through the rise of imperial Britain — and examines how encounters with Indigenous peoples, trade, and migration influenced scientific and public perceptions. Blending anthropology, history of science, and early 20th-century evolutionary thinking, Keith surveys physical and cultural markers that scholars of his era used to classify human groups, and situates those debates within broader social and political currents after World War I. Readers will hear a historical account that illuminates how scientific language helped justify and contest nationalist and colonial projects; the text also reflects the assumptions and limits of anthropology during Keith’s time. Ideal for listeners of nonfiction history and anthropology, this lecture is essential for students and researchers exploring the history of racial thought, nationalism, and the development of modern anthropology — or for anyone seeking a primary-source perspective on how scholars framed race and nation a century ago.