We are so familiar with extinction that it is hard to imagine a world where nothing was believed to be extinct. Yet, the science of extinction is modern. Until the late eighteenth century, the fate of apparently vanished beings was usually attributed to human exploitation leading to ‘extirpation’ or ‘extermination’. Over the nineteenth century, scientists, theologians, philosophers, and the broader public increasingly shifted from blaming human power to imagining ‘extinction’ as a process of routine and recurrent loss embedded within the natural world. Soon, birds, beasts, and ostensibly ‘doomed races’ of colonised people were said to be endangered, or extinct, leaving lasting legacies of loss and dispossession. This talk traces the transformation of extinction from a term describing human damage to a natural process within the broader context of European imperialism leading to chilling political choices in the present-day.’

Professor Sadiah Qureshi is an historian of racism, science and empire. She has recently joined the University of Manchester as Chair in Modern British History. Her first book, Peoples on Parade (2011), explored the importance of displayed peoples for the emergence of anthropology. She is currently writing her next book, provisionally entitled ‘Vanished: Episodes in the History of Extinction’, for Allen Lane, supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. In 2023, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library.