In the early twentieth century, anthropologists keen to professionalize their still relatively novel discipline and ensure their own intellectual status depicted their nineteenth-century predecessors as merely sedentary ‘armchair’ speculators who lacked experience of fieldwork and cleaved to amateurish methodologies. Efram Sera-Shriar's The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871 endeavours to go, as the author puts it, ‘beyond the armchair’, and to provide a historical counternarrative to the disciplinary self-fashioning of modern anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski (p. 187). In this closely argued book, Sera-Shriar contends that the ‘so-called armchair period’ in the study of human variation, roughly between the publication of James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man in 1813 and the foundation of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain in 1871, was characterized by observational practices that were much more systematic, rigorous and reflexive than has previously been recognized (p. 10). Deploying Steven Shapin's influential arguments in A Social History of Truth (1994), Sera-Shriar maintains that even if many nineteenth-century exponents of the science of man (it is anachronistic to simply label them anthropologists) relied on second-hand testimony received from agents in the colonial periphery, this does not necessarily vitiate the scientific validity of their conclusions. For one thing, most of these practitioners were trained in the strict observational methods of either medicine or natural history (and sometimes both), and so could apply sophisticated standards of assessment to the data they were sent. In any case, the self-serving binary established in the twentieth-century between field and armchair was never as firm as the rhetoric of Malinowski and others implied, and many of the earlier putative ‘armchair’ practitioners that Sera-Shriar discusses, including Robert Knox, Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin and Edward Burnett Tylor, had extensive experience of observing human variation in the field, albeit generally at an early stage of their respective careers.

The Making of British Anthropology works through five studies that, for the most part, draw parallels, as well as contrasts, between the careers and observational practices of two representative practitioners. The opening chapter pairs Prichard with William Lawrence, examining how the training required by their day jobs, as a physician and surgeon respectively, informed the observational methods that they used when, supplementary to their medical careers, they embarked on ethnological studies. Knox, infamous both for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders and for his flagrant racialism, is paired with Robert Gordon Latham, whose ostensibly populist models of different human races at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in fact afforded, as Sera-Shriar proposes, an important ‘ethnographic training site’ for both lay and learned audiences (p. 95) (in doing so, Sera-Shriar confirms and supplements an argument originally made in Sadiah Qureshi's Peoples on Parade (2011)). Perhaps most intriguingly, Huxley is paired with James Hunt, the slavery-supporting speech therapist whose polygenism and abrasive anti-Darwinism seem to put him at odds with Huxley's evolutionary monogenism and apparent concern with black emancipation in America. In reality, as Sera-Shriar shows, Huxley actually had little sympathy for the black slaves and instead his principal concern with slavery was its moral and economic consequences for southern whites, with whom he had close family ties. Huxley, moreover, actually agreed with many of Hunt's plans to reform the methodology of ethnological research, and their public dispute was largely a professional competition for control of the nascent science of man between the new Anthropological Society, which Hunt founded in 1863, and the older Ethnological Society, of which Huxley was elected president in 1868. The last pairing brings together Darwin and Tylor, whose respective 1871 tomes, The Descent of Man and Primitive Culture, both utilized earlier research practices and methods of collecting data, including in situ observation and sending out carefully tailored questionnaires. Ironically, both books were published in the same year that the dispute between the Ethnological and Anthropological societies was finally resolved with the formation of the ecumenical Anthropological Institute, which signalled the beginning of the discipline's professionalization.

While often illuminating, particularly with Huxley and Hunt, the joint-biography format, giving equal billing to each person, can make the chapters seem a little forced and formulaic. And it does not fit Chapter 2 at all, which instead adopts an institutional focus to examine the devising and collecting of ethnographic questionnaires, and, as a consequence, seems rather at odds with the rest of the book. The book's central argument regarding the sophistication of the observational practices deployed by so-called ‘armchair’ theorists is also rather overplayed, and at times becomes unnecessarily repetitive. These caveats aside, The Making of British Anthropology is a welcome addition to recent historical work on nineteenth-century anthropology that, as with Qureshi's Peoples on Parade, develops and refines the territory first mapped out in George W. Stocking's seminal Victorian Anthropology (1987).