‘Either I civilize Africa, or I become a monkey’

The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw degeneration become a privileged medical metaphor for articulating concerns about the changes brought on by industrialization and colonization. A similar dynamic affected evolutionary theory, which became a prime battleground as soon as it entered popular imagination. Degeneration and Darwinism resonated in 1870s Spain as the country grappled with its reduced geopolitical status as a waning empire. National decline was conceptualized as a debilitating collective condition. This study explores the discursive entanglement of Darwinism as degeneration in two short stories, Carlos Coello’s ‘Hombre y animales’ [‘Men and Animals] (1878) and José Fernández Bremón’s ‘Gestas o el idioma de los monos’ [‘Gestas or the Language of Monkeys’] (1872), which pathologize the British Empire and condemn its rival for having traded civilization for colonial ambition. Both are satires on evolutionism featuring foreign scientists who through unethical experiments blur the boundaries between humans and animals, with disastrous results.