Book Review: Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: a Financial History of Victorian Science

Abstract

There is a noticeable trend towards intrigue in recent writing on the history of British anthropological societies. Ter Ellingson’s Myth of the Noble Savage, a search for the inventor of the term, is a glaring example of conspiracy as history writing, but Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Sacred Curse, although much more nuanced, also focused on the power play behind 19thcentury science. Marc Flandreau’s Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange resembles Ellingson’s conspiracies, rather than Desmond and Moore’s careful scholarship