The origin of the term ‘race’ is obscure. It may have derived from the Arabic râs, meaning ‘chief’, ‘head’, and ‘origin’. The word entered Europe between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Initially ‘race’ was understood to signify descent of an aristocratic breed. In particular it referred to the lineages of the Frankish kings. Later, Europeans used ‘race’ as one of the possible translations of the Latin natio or gens; until the eighteenth century it was interchangeable with terms such as ‘stock’ or ‘tribe’. All ethnicities, whether they were called ‘peoples’ or ‘races’ or ‘tribes’, were classified according to their political traditions, their geographical habitat, and climatic conditions. The European reference system of thought, being shaped by classical authors, was dominated by political paradigms and categories that paralleled natural and political phenomena. Only in the first decades of the nineteenth century did the term acquire its modern meaning. Implying that original difference is biologically founded, the concept presupposes the genealogical continuity of ‘racial’ traits that supposedly remain the same irrespective of environmental influences, and it includes the idea that there are correlations between outward physiognomy and mental capacity.
The Greeks' emphasis on citizenship went hand in hand with the assumption that citizens were made, not born. From the Greeks onward, the state of government and civilization were seen to be the decisive characteristics of a people; some climates favoured the development of vigour of spirit and courage, instilling a war-like disposition, while others induced a phlegmatic attitude, laziness, and the tendency to succumb to tyranny. The roots of this view were laid down in Hippocrates' Airs, Waters, Places. It was only in respect to this sort of theorizing — dubbed ‘environmentalism’ at the end of the nineteenth century — that the notion of descent played any role. ‘Blood’, by contrast, had been invested since antiquity with mythical meaning, transcending the common sphere of everyday life. In heathen Greek theory, notably in the writings of Aristotle, notions of ‘species’, ‘genus’ and physiognomy were closely linked to the concept of the ‘essences’, the basic elements of all matter. Therefore, Greek accounts of differing human physiognomies cannot be compared to modern-style theories of race or racism. The same applies mutatis mutandis to Roman theory.
Biblical anthropology
The Bible stipulated that mankind was derived from one common pair of ancestors. The concept of the ‘chosen people’ was integrated into Scriptural cosmogony; it resided in the idea that adherence to Moses' commandments qualified people for participation in the Abrahamitic covenant between God and the Jewish people. As for the cultural foundations of the Christian creed, the notion of the soul as the essential part of all humans prevented fixation on physiology alone as inherent in the concept of race. According to common Christian understanding, all converts to the faith, whatever their complexion might be, underwent what was evidently thought of as a spiritual ‘white-washing’. Christian iconography abounds with depictions of this procedure in which the coloured convert was washed white. It was an allusion to Jeremiah 13: 23 (‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil’). Christian doctrine confirmed that the curse of Ham could be removed. In another respect, too, Christian theory contradicted the Scriptural narrative. From the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (ad 37-c.97) onwards, writers divided mankind into the posterity of Shem, Ham, and Japhet. The Japhetites were considered to inhabit Europe; the Shemites resided in the region of the Pacific Ocean and the Near East; the Hamites were to be found in Africa. The Catholic Church denounced this division, which threatened its claim to universality. Christian theory asserted that all mankind was one — though, of course, the ideal was remote from actual practice.
Until the eighteenth century, Judaeo-Christian traditions and classical theory dominated all philosophizing on mankind. Human nature was discussed in terms of ideas about polis and ecclesia. The identity of a people was considered to depend on its faith, and on the fact that all citizens were subject to the same law. Philosophers had no concept of ‘racial’ traits, instead they discussed what they called ‘national character’. Its shape was seen to depend on climate and geographical station — humoralism, the complex concept of an interplay between the outside world and human temperaments, lasted well into the nineteenth century. Until the middle of the eighteenth century it influenced all attempts to account for human diversity. On the whole, references in early modern literature to, say, the African or the Chinese ‘race’ do not imply the existence of a set of physical categories adding up to a system of human classification. And the notion of ‘purity of blood’ had no biological connotations.
During the sixteenth century the term ‘race’ had a socio-political rather than an anthropological meaning. It was part of the historiographical appreciation of the Frankish dynasties. The French historian François Hotman (1524-90) denied that the political institutions of Greece and Rome were the models of German and Frankish government. Distinguishing between the autocratic monarchies of antiquity and Franco-Germanic freedom, he supported the notion that different peoples were endowed with different spirits. As Europeans discovered foreign parts, the understanding of ‘race’ was increasingly extended to denote not only noble families, but entire peoples. However, the concept was still shaped by political concepts as opposed to biology.
As an ethnological category, ‘race’ is a modern idea. From the Renaissance onwards, study of the natural realm was increasingly distinguished from metaphysics. Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Bodin, and others relieved Aristotle's philosophy of its emphasis on the essences. The pursuit of evidence became the paramount scientific occupation; empirical observation of difference supplanted unifying philosophies. Classical learning gradually lost its grip on the European mind. As a result, ‘racial’ differences became independent of political discourse, and instead were investigated as natural phenomena.
Natural taxonomy, advanced by Carolus Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon, was decisive in this development. In their panoramic views of nature, many naturalists arranged human tribes into a number of natural varieties. J. F. Blumenbach, a Professor of Anatomy at Göttingen University, proved especially influential. He distinguished five different human varieties: Caucasian, Mongol, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. Once some such divisions were made, it was only one step to a concept of race. That is not to accuse those thinkers who unwittingly prepared the ground — but it is difficult to imagine that history might have taken a different course.
The eighteenth century saw many methodical inquiries into the mechanisms of cross-breeding. Scientific travellers and other naturalists discovered that ‘purity of blood’ was anything but a guarantee of the excellence of stock. It was only in the nineteenth century that these insights would be applied to mankind.
Types of mankind
The eighteenth century also brought the heyday of the anatomists and pathologists who attempted to find bodily differences between different types of mankind. The German S. T. Soemmerring acquired dubious fame in 1784 by publishing a treatise on ‘the physical differences between the Negro and the European’. He came very near to stating that there had been several creations of human kinds. Contemporary discussion turned to the question whether such a polygenist account of mankind could be true. The authority of the Scriptures was still great: the case for polygenism, put forward most famously by Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), met with widespread outrage. It was generally assumed that the differences between human varieties were due to differing physical and moral environments. As long as the Biblical story of creation was accepted doctrine, the notion of original difference was pure heresy. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, religion faced increasingly troubled times. It was then that the concept of race began to spread.
The established social hierarchy was overthrown in France and denied in America. The shock waves of the revolutions in the English colonies and in France were felt in the whole of Europe. While these developments may have induced some desire to erect biological hierarchies, where previously there had been social ones, simple observations gave an immediate boost to the idea of race: according to the environmentalist theories, under various climatic conditions any stock of people might transform into any other. Yet, as many writers noted, the progeny of black slaves in the northern hemisphere remained black, and white colonists in the tropics who shunned intermarriage with the locals persisted in producing white offspring. Evidently the theory of climate was wrong. What else, then, could account for physiognomical differences among the human species but a concept of race? Students of anthropology and its younger offshot, ethnology, began systematically to inquire into human physical and mental diversities. As early as 1824 the French doctor Julien-Joseph Virey advanced physiological arguments to support his opinion that mankind was originally divided into the white and the black ‘species’. In the following years monogenism was increasingly undermined.
German romanticism has often been accused of having stimulated racialism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) put forward the idea that the spirit of an age was determined by the prevailing culture, which in turn was represented not by outstanding individuals but by the people. He brought the cultural concept of the people to the fore. This notion suited racialist thinking, although not based on it. The Romantic movement was not only German but Europe-wide. Even France, nowadays officially proud of its traditions as a society based on the notion of citizenship, participated in the new emphasis on race.
While the Germans celebrated ancient Teutonic notions of freedom, similar ideas were thriving in England and France. In the early nineteenth century, the old British antagonism between Celts and Saxons was put on a biological footing. Explanations in terms of race came to be seen as the source of political struggles. In England, John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57) contended that the excellency of the English was due to their Germanic roots. Robert Knox (1791-1862), who, despite his intellectual shortcomings, became famous as Britain's first explicit racialist, juxtaposed noble Saxons to enfeebled Celts. In France, historians who opposed Bourbon rule argued that the Franks had been foreign invaders on French soil and therefore did not have the right to govern the original Gallic population. Before, racial thinking had turned around the blatant physiognomical differences between exotic peoples and the white man. Now European history itself was considered to be the result of racial struggle. Europe was made up of Celts and Gauls, Saxons and Germans — and and minorities such as the Jews and Gypsies were increasingly seen as parasitical intruders. The concepts of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ races were gradually transferred out of historical linguistics into anthropology. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a host of antisemitic theories. It was only in the slave-holder society of America that racial theory continued to centre on the antinomy between blacks and whites.
From the 1820s anatomical investigations into race gained further momentum thanks to the activities of cerebral anatomists. Phrenology, the external examination of skulls, was first conceived to determine individual characters more reliably than earlier approaches to physiognomy. But very soon craniology was employed to classify human types, and the Swede Anders Retzius (1796-1860) gained international acclaim with his ‘cephalic index’. For several decades, skull measurements were seen as a key to a racial division of mankind and the various degrees of human intellect. When, in the 1890s, craniology went out of fashion, ‘race’ acquired a nominalist understanding, with the concept of racial ‘types’ superseding the idea of fixed races.
The notion of biologically grounded races had been developed at the expense of political discourse; once the biological ‘laws’ of race and racial mixture were established they were reintroduced into society. Increasingly, social problems were seen through the spectacles of racial theory. In 1845 Benjamin Disraeli famously spoke of the rich and the poor as being two ‘races’. Herbert Spencer applied Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest to the social sphere. Similar ideas were popularized in Germany and France. Darwin himself was not interested in race as a category. Yet, his theory of species differentiation continued to be exploited by Social Darwinists well into the twentieth century.
On another level the concept of purity of blood occupied the minds of cultural pessimists. Harking back to eighteenth-century theories, some accepted that cultural excellency required racial intermixture but warned that continuing hybridization would inevitably lead to degeneration. Others pleaded for purity of race, invoking the authority of Darwin; Houston Stewart Chamberlain denounced racial intermixture and supported racial inbreeding as the best means to perpetuate the qualities of a race. His The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (published first in German in 1899), one of the most comprehensive accounts of the forces of race, was much appreciated — though not emulated — by the Nazis. Their racial doctrines, unlike Chamberlain's, were for the most part allusive in style. Hitler's Mein Kampf aptly linked ill-advised racial mixing to notions of sin and disease alike.
Class struggle by other means
Outside Germany, theoreticians of race were embroiled in the discussion of what came first: did social hierarchies, such as the caste system in India, have racial origins? Or were racial theories merely class struggles by other means? In 1950, after the experiences of World War II, the United Nations passed a Statement of Race, stipulating that national, cultural, religious, geographical, and linguistic groups had been wrongly considered as races. Some inveterate supporters of physical anthropology notwithstanding, this resolution remained until recently the last word on matters of race.
Since the 1980s there have been attempts to revivify theories of racial classification in the US and elsewhere. In this context, The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, investigating racial parameters of intelligence and based in part on sources already rejected by the scientific community, has gained notoriety. Latterly, an authoritative contribution to the problem of ‘race’ has been a publication under the guidance of the genetic historians L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, whose team has investigated the genetic make-up of hundreds of individual populations (The History and Geography of Human Genes, 1994). The result is that the genetic programme shifts slightly but perceptibly from one tiny population to the other: ‘By means of painstaking multivariate analysis, we can identify “clusters” of populations and order them in a hierarchy that we believe represents the history of fissions in the expansion to the whole world of anatomically modern humans. At no level can clusters be identified with races, since every level of clustering would determine a different partition and there is no biological reason to prefer a particular one.’
— H. F. Augstein
Bibliography
- Augstein, H. F. (ed.) (1996). Race: the origins of an idea, 1760-1850. Thoemmes Press, Bristol.
- Banton, M. (1987). Racial Theories. Cambridge University Press.
- Barzun, J. (1965). Race: a study in superstition. Harper and Row, New York.
- Hannaford, I. (1996). Race. The history of an idea in the West. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
- Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan Myth: a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe. Chatto and Heinemann, London
See also anthropology; racism.
