Thread by @lastpositivist

Ok so I now have the following picture of how race came to be: the European intelligentsia of the 15th-16th centuries were absorbed in a series of distinct but overlapping debates: how the hell are there people in the Americas and does this mean there were multiple creations?…

…Why is it that, in general, people differ in custom and appearance in various parts of the world? Are the people of the new world all Aristotlean natural slaves? If not them, how about Africans? Where are the boundaries of the human, how different are great apes from us?…

…Piety dictated there can have been no separate creation since we’re all children of Adam and Eve, humanity is sharply distinguished by presence of a rational soul with physiological differences irrelevant, and everyone must be converted and Christians should not be slaves…

… (in fact the existence of an ancient land bridge from north east Asia to the Americas was first hypothesised by a Jesuit to account for the possibility of past migration from Eden to the new world)…

… worth noting that this pious answer, while it tended to see physiological and cultural changes as just contingent response to climate and circumstance rather than as a result of inner biology, did tend to see difference from central and Southern Europe as degeneration…

… but going into the 17th century various material interests and intellectual currents challenged this. Race eventually emerges as a concept that allows one to answer all these questions (or related successor questions) in a fashion consummate with new intellectual standards…

…it provides a taxonomy of humans by some hypothesised inner features that explain physiological and cultural difference, without requiring Aristotlean teleological biology it allows for an “explanation” of why some races are fit to serve and others to govern…

…it can be consistent with either mono or poly genesis so it sidesteps that debate, and in line with enlightenment taxonomy more generally racial hierarchy allows humanity to be placed in a continuum with the rest of nature and actually thereby greased the wheels for Darwinism…

… so the theory of human racial division ends up nicely addressing the big intellectual questions of the previous generations, bringing ethnography in line with enlightenment scientific ideals, and doing all this in a way that doesn’t disturb colonial or slave trader interests…

…nice! I mean, like, not really; but you can see why it ends up being an attractive way of understanding the world for European intellectuals in the 18th-20th century. Anyway this is my take away from the pictured book. There’s lots of detail and evidence in there, check it out!