Human zoos In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Western world was desperate to see the “savage,”

Human zoos Paris 1878

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Western world was desperate to see the “savage,”

“primitive” people described by explorers and adventurers scouting out new lands for colonial exploitation.

To feed the frenzy, thousands of indigenous individuals from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were brought to the United States and Europe, often under dubious circumstances, to be put on display in a quasi-captive life in “human zoos.”

Human zoos could be found in Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, and New York City. Carl Hagenbeck, a merchant in wild animals and future entrepreneur of many zoos in Europe, decided in 1874 to exhibit Samoan and Sami people as “purely natural” populations.
In 1876, he sent a collaborator to the Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians. The Nubian exhibit was very successful in Europe and toured Paris, London, and Berlin.

See shocking rare photographs of how the so-called 'human zoos' around the world kept ‘primitive natives’ in enclosures so Westerners could gawp and jeer at them. The horrifying images, some of which were taken as recently as 1958, show how black and Asian people were cruelly treated as exhibits that attracted millions of tourists.

In 1880, Hagenbeck dispatched an agent to Labrador to secure a number of Esquimaux (Eskimo / Inuit) from the Moravian mission of Hebron; these Inuit were exhibited in his Hamburg Tierpark.

Both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World’s Fair presented a Black Village (village nègre). Visited by 28 million people, the 1889 World’s Fair displayed 400 indigenous people as the major attraction. The 1900 World’s Fair presented the famous diorama living in Madagascar, while the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931) also displayed humans in cages, often nude or semi-nude.

The 1931 exhibition in Paris was so successful that 34 million people attended it in six months, while a smaller counter-exhibition entitled The Truth on the Colonies, organized by the Communist Party, attracted very few visitors. Nomadic Senegalese Villages were also presented

and toured Paris, London, and Berlin.

In 1880, Hagenbeck dispatched an agent to Labrador to secure a number of Esquimaux (Eskimo / Inuit) from the Moravian mission of Hebron; these Inuit were exhibited in his Hamburg Tierpark.

Other ethnological expositions included Egyptian and Bedouin mock settlements. Hagenbeck would also employ agents to take part in his ethnological exhibits, with the aim of exposing his audience to various different subsistence modes and lifestyles.