Race, Theories of

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RACE, THEORIES OF

RACE, THEORIES OF. After Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French sailors discovered in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both hitherto unknown oceanic wind flows and how to find their bearings in the open sea, Europeans began to cross the oceans and interact with West African, South and East Asian, and American peoples—peoples of whom the ancient geographies had been ignorant or whom they simply disregarded or treated as monstrous races. Medieval accounts of fantastic beings located in faraway, mythical places receded, giving way to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of the mores and religions of African, American, and Asian peoples. Newly acquired ethnographic sensibilities stemmed from the need to rule colonies and conduct foreign business. Expansion overseas, however, overlapped with the consolidation of new, relatively large dynastic states such as England, France, and Spain. These states sought to introduce religious and linguistic uniformity into maddeningly complex and ethnically heterogeneous worlds. In early modern Europe, understanding ethnic distinctions overseas became as important as comprehending cultural variations at home.

Ancient and medieval categories helped early modern intellectuals grapple with their growing awareness of ethnic differences. To catalog these differences scholars turned to the age-old genre of "natural history." Yet a commitment to the historicity and veracity of the Bible made it difficult to pigeonhole others as separate species (monstrous races, natural slaves) or to explain away differences simply as the result of independent godly creations (polygenism). Such restrictions forced intellectuals to find in Galenic and Hippocratic notions of temperaments and complexions, and in Aristotelian psychology and Ciceronian jurisprudence, the tools to make sense of bodily and behavioral differences between groups. Climate and the environment, it was widely believed, accounted for variations in political systems and skin color. Thus it was thought that, say, colder places made peoples dull, white, and democratic, whereas tropical ones rendered them intelligent, dark, and subservient. Seemingly whimsical customs first introduced by cultural heroes, it was also argued, launched peoples into divergent paths of development. As these mores hardened over time into laws and traditions, peoples developed collective behaviors ("second nature") that were almost impossible to transform.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe was a harsh place for outsiders. Christians raided and enslaved Muslims from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (and vice-versa). Jews continued to be persecuted, and in Spain experienced mass expulsion. Enslaved blacks arrived by the thousands in European ports. Slavs on the eastern and Irish peoples on the western margins of the European continent continued to endure intolerable conditions. This harsh world, however, seemed not to have room for the concept of race. Cultural and bodily identities remained porous. As in the ancient Roman world, assimilation rather than exclusion was the norm. To be sure, some outsiders, particularly Jews, were deemed hereditarily prone to resist assimilation. Yet even boundaries between "black" and "white" bodies remained difficult to pinpoint. The age-old theory of cross-color generation, for example, held that white mothers, if exposed to certain thoughts and visions during copulation, could naturally have black children (and vice-versa). In this mongrel world, race was a category often used to discriminate against insiders, not outsiders. Early modern just as much as medieval Europe was a hierarchical society in which the nobility often took peasants to be an altogether different race.

These classical and medieval sensibilities gave way to new ideas as slavery, colonization, and statebuilding developed unrelentingly. Oddly, new concepts of race developed more rapidly in those societies that were more economically vibrant. One of the great paradoxes of the modern age is that some of the harshest forms of slavery ever witnessed existed in the colonies of those societies that enjoyed the "freest" labor markets at home. Although Iberians in the islands off the coast of Africa first introduced plantation economies, and although millions of African slaves wound up laboring and dying under miserable conditions in their American colonies, slaveholding was typical of both metropolis and peripheries in the Portuguese and Spanish empires. This contributed to keeping boundaries between blacks and whites porous (through manumission and miscegenation). In the British-American Atlantic, however, free labor became the rule in the metropolis while chattel slavery flourished on the periphery. The growing polarization between freedom and slavery led to the hardening of "white" and "black" identities, which came to be seen as fixed and inherited, as well as to a poverty of categories to deal with hybrid conditions.

The mounting popularity of the theory of polygenism typified this growth of white and black racialized identities. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the Bible steadily lost ground to more secular historical accounts, the idea that all human groups descended from a common ancestral pair (Adam and Eve) began to be called into question. The theory of polygenism held that different peoples had different primeval ancestors. Climate alone, it was now believed, could not explain the origins of differences in skin color. That blackness and whiteness were rapidly becoming rigid bodily and behavioral attributes was also reflected in the demise of theories of cross-color generation. By the eighteenth century it was no longer thought feasible that white mothers whose imagination had been jolted during copulation could have black children. The racialization of identities was also reflected in changing interpretations given to the biblical story of the curse of Ham. According to this story, Noah cursed the descendants of one of his sons, Ham, to a life of toil and slavery after the latter had found Noah naked and drunk. Since antiquity this story had helped justify the subordinate status of a variety of groups, particularly the European peasantries. Yet by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the curse became firmly and exclusively associated with the fate of African blacks.

RACE AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE

The coming of age of the concept of race has been attributed to the rise of new forms of science, particularly Enlightenment natural history. It is clear that in the eighteenth century naturalists were fond of devising new taxonomies to classify not only plants but also peoples. Collecting and measuring skulls and dissecting blacks and apes became fashionable in efforts to explain the origins of racial differences. Scientific racism made further inroads in the nineteenth century as a result of major political transformations. As old political orders based on social estates, hereditary privileges, and religion came tumbling down in the age of revolutions, and as new social formations built on the principles of citizenship, natural rights, and secular political authority emerged, white European males located in science (of race and sex) the ideological justification to prevent women, Jews, slaves, and non-Europeans from sharing in their newly acquired political rights. This dominant account of the origins of scientific racism, however, is not entirely accurate.

The science of race arose in the seventeenth century in the New World. British colonists schooled in the new mechanical philosophy came up with representations of Indians' bodies as innately inferior—weak and predisposed to diseases. Such scientifically racialized views helped colonists not only to explain the demographic collapse of native peoples in the wake of the arrival of new European diseases but also to claim for themselves the identity of Americans—individuals providentially destined to occupy the land that had once belonged to the now quickly disappearing Indians. Other forms of the science of race developed in the Spanish colonies. Here Creole colonists responded to disparaging European views on the climate and constellations of Spanish America as threatening and degenerating by suggesting that bodies were immune to climatic and environmental influences, thus rejecting long-held theories on temperament and complexion. Their new version of ancient astrological and medical theories also allowed them to claim that the natives were innately inferior. In this ancien régime colonial society Indians came to inhabit the same niche that peasants had long occupied in the imagination of the European elites—that is, they were an altogether different race.

See also Class, Status, and Order ; Colonialism ; Ethnography ; Exploration ; Slavery and the Slave Trade .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braude, Benjamin. "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period." William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 103–142.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. "New World New Stars: Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650." American Historical Review 104 (1999): 33–68.