Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937) was a key scientific figure within the early twentieth-century British world. Born in Australia and trained in medicine, he followed a migratory academic career across the networks of the British Empire, moving through medical schools and universities at Sydney, Cambridge, Cairo, Manchester and London. His interests were equally wide-ranging, as he became a leading authority and public intellectual in the fields of anatomy, neurology, human evolution, racial theory, anthropology and archaeology. Yet while elements of Elliot Smith's research have become important points of reference for numerous aspects of early twentieth-century British science, there has never been a sustained examination of his life and career. This slim yet lively book by Paul Crook is not an attempt to completely fill this gap (a full academic biography would be a daunting task, requiring archival research on at least three continents). It follows instead the less ambitious but still important aim of raising the profile of this ‘great forgotten Australian’ (p. vi) and provides an effective summary and introduction to a number of aspects of his life and thought.

Given the book's slenderness, it wisely concentrates on one, and probably the most controversial, part of Elliot Smith's work: his attempt to build a new school of ‘diffusionist’ anthropology. The core concept of this grand unifying theory of human culture and civilization, developed in conjunction with William James Perry and W.H.R. Rivers, was that the key features of civilization had originated in ancient Egypt, and were transferred in a varyingly mediated fashion through Europe, Mesopotamia, East Africa, India, East Asia, Polynesia and (most problematically) as far as Mesoamerica. Global comparisons identified a cluster of cultural motifs and practices (including mummification, dragons, sun cults and megalithic architecture) associated with the origin of agricultural civilization across the world. These were judged as too idiosyncratic to have been independently developed, and instead were supposed to have spread from the common Egyptian source across a network of maritime migration routes. Even though this idea may seem bizarre to modern readers, was controversial among contemporaries, and was ridiculed in following generations, this brand of diffusionism was a provocative idea in the interwar period, and novel in relation to the evolutionist frameworks which had dominated British anthropology and archaeology from the second half of the nineteenth century, but also possessing much deeper resonances with earlier ideas of human difference.

The book traces the intellectual and conceptual development of Elliot Smith's diffusionism in a largely chronological manner, from his initial interest in Egyptology while in Cairo, through the consolidation of the school, and then his fierce and multi-sided battles for support, public profile, and research funding, with a range of critics and opponents, in the 1920s and 1930s. The account is solid, although, contrary to expectations, the book is actually strongest when it veers away from this focus to connect the core concepts of diffusionism to Elliot Smith's wider interests. The argument that his commitment to Darwinian evolution actually led him away from the linear evolutionary schemas put forward by the likes of Lubbock and Tylor is a fascinating one, and provides more impetus to disentangle the complexities of evolutionary and developmental thought in the modern human sciences. Likewise, the discussion of his views of human evolution, and the ways they caused him to separate human biology from human culture, is an excellent and highly succinct summary of a complex area. These offer fascinating areas to pursue, particularly with regard to the relationship and common context of ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ sciences in this period.

The book's limitations largely grow from its contextualization. The study touches on a range of important issues in the modern history of science, including the political and cultural impact of archaeological and anthropological research, scientific popularization, the relationship between nationalism and scholarship, and scientific networks and institutionalization in the British Empire and beyond. While the characterization of these themes is cogent, the book does not really engage with the growing recent literature around them (the secondary works listed do not really postdate the 1990s). This means that Crook is only really able to signal the significance of Elliot Smith's thinking for these current historiographical themes, rather than to contribute to debates directly. This also ensures that some aspects of Elliot Smith's thought – particularly on racial matters – are not as deeply considered as they could have been. We are correctly told that he was a high-profile opponent of National Socialist Aryan racial theories in the 1930s, but this tends to be used to blunt any discussion of his racial or eugenic views in earlier periods. In the context of the growingly sophisticated literature on interwar eugenics and racial theory, this deserves greater study.

Likewise, the secondary agenda which emerges in the latter part of the book – to rehabilitate aspects of diffusionism for modern anthropologists and archaeologists – blunts one of the most interesting issues hanging over the discussion: why such an extreme brand of diffusionist thinking should have been convincing to many in the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the interwar years. Hints and suggestions are given, including institution-building in anthropology, changing understandings of the human mind and brain, the influence (or parallel development) of trends in German anthropological thinking, reflections on the contemporary spread of technology and communications, and growing uneasiness over civilization and ideas of linear progress. However, there is never really a sustained attempt to pull these together. As such, this stands as a key open question – although one which again shows Grafton Elliot Smith's wide engagement and, as Crook suggests, the need for further examination of his thought, career and place within the contemporary scientific and cultural landscape.