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Historical perspectives on race
Historical perspectives on race

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2.2 How was the concept of ‘race’ invented?

Prior to the 1600s, the term ‘race’ was used infrequently in Europe. For example, in Shakespeare’s England, the word race was normally used in the context of family origin or lineage, for example in describing a royal ‘race’. Even in this usage, it was a socially constructed term designed to reinforce hierarchies of power: it referred loosely to what we might now consider genetic or geographical heritage, but without any scientific or biological basis. However, by the seventeenth century, the word ‘race’ started to acquire a different meaning: in Britain, for example, it began to be used to define those who held power as ‘white’. Those who were not considered ‘white’ often experienced discrimination – no matter what the colour of their skin was. This racialisation has proved to be enduring. You can see an example of this in the treatment of M.K. Gandhi at Pietermaritzburg station in South Africa in 1893 (see Session 3), and in the ways that the Yemeni population was racialised in Cardiff during the 1919 race riots (see Session 4).

This features five illustrations of slightly different looking skulls.
Figure 2 German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in his book On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1776), classified humans into (l–r) Mongolian, (Native) American, Caucasian, Tahitian, Ethiopian. At the centre of his diagram was what he called the ‘most beautiful skull’, that of a woman from Georgia in the Caucasus – giving rise to the term ‘Caucasian’.

Several factors contributed to the modern construction of ‘race’, including:

  • The Christianisation of Europe and the end of the Wars of Religion (1520s–1710s). After prolonged religious conflict, a period of relative harmony allowed Christian Europeans to think of themselves as superior to those who weren’t Christian in Africa and Asia. Eventually, Europeans would use their own religious and cultural standards as a key measurement of defining what, and whom, was ‘civilised’ or not to them.
  • Systems of categorisation and taxonomy developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: for example, in the 1770s the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach sought to explain the diversity of humans by dividing them into ‘types’ or ‘species’ according to the design of their skulls (see Figure 2 above). This kind of early scientific categorisation would become an important tool in the development of eugenics and racist thinking, and was later linked with Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories and the racial hierarchies of social Darwinism.
  • The growth of nationalism, and the early emergence of the nation state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. Increasingly, matters of political and personal identity developed around belonging to a region or a nation, separating people according to perceived differences connected to a supposed land of origin. This also created narratives of the ‘other’; for example, when English settlers established political control over Ireland in the seventeenth century, they created social and legal systems that designated the Irish as ‘uncivilised’ and therefore, in English eyes, as inferior.
An illustration of an octopus with human hands and a human head. The octopus is labelled ‘England’ and its hands are ‘grabbing’ different countries, including Canada, India and Egypt.
Figure 3 ‘The Devilfish in Egyptian Waters’, 1882. An American cartoon depicting John Bull (England) as the octopus of imperialism, grabbing land on every continent.
  • The global expansion of European empires. The expansion of the British empire through conquest and annexation from the seventeenth century codified certain assumptions about race into legal, economic and political systems. Private companies like the British East India Company (1600–1874) oversaw a substantial shift in power in India from Indian elites to British colonial agents. The colonial occupation of the Indian sub-continent was almost always justified in racialised terms: Indians were deemed incapable of governing themselves. Even though British India included many Indian officials in its bureaucracy, the highest echelons of the Indian Civil Service and political power remained in the hands of British officials and reinforced racialised hierarchies.
  • The development of the Atlantic Slave Trade. As the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English extended their global economic influence through the conquest of lands in the Americas, they developed specific attitudes to justify their treatment of Indigenous peoples as forced labour after conquest. These attitudes extended towards men, women and children captured or sold into slavery in Africa, and transported across the Atlantic to work on farms, plantations and industries in the Americas. Between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, over 12 million Africans were forcibly displaced from Africa to the Americas. You can find estimates and more information about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade through the Slave Voyages database [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . In particular, it is in the early European colonisation of the Americas that we see the conflation of skin colour with political and social status, resulting in complex systems of discrimination, especially against peoples of African origin. More than any other factor, the horrifically enormous scale of the enslavement of people from Africa was justified by racist thinking, and informed the development of complex systems of racial hierarchies.
  • Chattel slavery. Perceived difference based on skin colour became more pronounced with the development of chattel slavery systems from the mid-seventeenth century. Chattel slavery refers to types of slavery common in parts of the Americas (especially in Brazil, the Caribbean and what became the United States of America) where enslavement was an inherited condition passed through generations, usually removing political and economic freedom from peoples of African origin. Through this form of slavery, skin colour and inferior status were inextricably linked in the minds of those who considered themselves white. The endurance of this kind of slavery was based on beliefs of white supremacy, which were used to justify ownership of other people. Not all people of African origin were enslaved, but many ’white’ Europeans and Americans believed there was a link between skin colour and political and social inferiority. The impact of chattel, or hereditary, slavery on societies in the Caribbean, and parts of North and South America was devastating and long-lasting.