Abstract: This paper considers ways in which thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century encountered imperialism and challenged biologism, the practice of attributing biological cause to that which is explicable either wholly or in part by environment. It explores early challenges to biologism as expressed in the oppression of women and in groundless and unjustifiable hierarchies of race. I begin with the Brontë sisters’ implicit interrogation both of imperialism and exploitation through the extraction of and trading in natural resources, and consider key historical and literary moments of resistance to biologistic thought from Charles Darwin and J. S. Mill to Thomas Hardy, Mona Caird, and Siegfried Sassoon. Biography: Angelique Richardson is Professor of English and a historian of science at the University of Exeter, where she leads the Hardy’s Global Correspondents Project. […]