The view that the peoples of the world were divided by the categories and identities of race may seem to run counter to the rational currents of Enlightenment thought, but it was fairly common among Enlightenment thinkers. In 1753, David Hume observed that “the negroes” were now regarded as being “naturally inferior to the whites,” and Immanuel Kant made the same point twenty years later, in The Different Races of Mankind: “whites and negroes,” he argued, “are not two different kinds of species, but nevertheless two different races.”21 Here was a significant (and unintended?) consequence of the European Enlightenment, whose leading lights had sought to overthrow and supersede religion, belief, and superstition and replace them with reason, observation, and science. But in undermining (and often ridiculing) the tenets of established religion, Enlightenment thought also challenged the basic, time-hallowed Christian doctrines of monogenesis and common humanity. Experience and observation seemed rather to ratify the notion that there were many different peoples inhabiting the globe, who belonged to diverse races, and whose forebears may have originated at different times and in different parts of the world. Hence the new doctrine of polygenesis, embraced in Britain and France, the Caribbean, and the United States by such rationalists as Lord Kames and Voltaire.22 This lent support to what was seen as the unbridgeable division between peoples who were black and those who were white: “for monogenists, race could be considered chance variations; for polygenists, differences were bound to be absolute.”23
This was not the only way in which the Enlightenment led to an intensification of racial thought and divisions, for if the peoples of the globe had originated in separate parts of it, and were immutably different from one another, then it should be possible to assign them distinctive natures and separate identities and to rank them according to their collective sophistication, or lack thereof. The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, celebrated for pioneering modern taxonomy, is also often credited with inaugurating this practice, when in 1735 he divided and ordered humankind into four distinct races: white European, red American, dark Asiatic, and black negro. Although he did not explicitly rank them, Linnaeus’s description of the races clearly indicated his preferences: he describes Europeans as “acute, inventive…[and] governed by laws,” whereas the Africans were “crafty, indolent, negligent…[and] governed by caprice.”24 Meanwhile, Linnaeus’s contemporary, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, preferred a sixfold classification: Lapp polar, Tartar, South Asian, European, Ethiopian, and American, but he likewise assumed that Europeans were intellectually superior to the others, especially Africans, whom he dismissed as “simple and stupid.”25 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Natural Variety of Mankind, published in 1775, and twice revised, eventually concluded that there were five races: Caucasian—a term he coined to indicate a superior racial lineage unique to the inhabitants of central and western Europe—along with lesser groupings he described as Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay.26
At a time of such pervasive racial language, identities, and hierarchies, the contradiction went generally unremarked when Britain’s American colonists rebelled and established a nation dedicated to “the proposition that all men are created equal,” but excluded from this declaration the fifth of its people who were black African slaves. “What then,” asked J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur at just this time, “is the American, this new man?” His answer was clear: “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.… He is either a European or a descendant of a European.”27 This view of the new nation’s racial hierarchy was affirmed by Thomas Jefferson, who insisted that “the difference” between blacks and whites was “fixed in nature,” and not susceptible to alteration or adjustment.28 Accordingly, when the U.S. Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, it restricted American citizenship to those superior specimens of humanity described as “free white persons,” and this legislation would remain in force for the next eighty years. (In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would later uphold this understanding and assert that blacks could not be American citizens because they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and were debarred by their race from being part of the American “political family,” which remained restricted to whites.)29
The establishment of racial attitudes, identities, and rankings across the Western world during the second half of the eighteenth century was reinforced by the growth in a range of pseudoacademic endeavors later described as “scientific racism.” During the 1770s, Peter Camper of the Netherlands and Johann Kaspar Lavater of Switzerland suggested that human beings could be racially classified and ranked on the basis of the varied dimensions, differing angles, and volumetric capacities of their skulls; thus was inaugurated the new field of craniometry, which soon became popular across Europe and the United States.30 The result was the proliferation of publications purporting to demonstrate that the foreheads of negroes receded more than those of whites, and that their cranial capacity was thus significantly smaller, suggesting their brains were too, which could only mean they were less intelligent—conclusive proof that blacks belonged to a different and inferior race. Craniometry flourished into the early decades of the nineteenth century, and these years also witnessed the heyday of the cognate discipline of phrenology, whose practitioners made even more systematic attempts to correlate mental capacity with the contours of the skull, though reaching the same conclusion that white people possessed larger brains and greater intelligence than black people.31 Here was seemingly irrefutable evidence that distinct races did exist, and that they could be separated and ranked in permanent hierarchies.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, racial categories, rankings, and identities became increasingly important in Western thought, politics, and culture, and practitioners of subjects as varied as linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, philology, biology, phrenology, and craniometry were preoccupied with observing, measuring, ordering, and explaining what they believed were these all-pervasive racial types.32 Yet for all this apparent certainty and objectivity, and notwithstanding the belief that “race was everything,” it was (like class, only more so) a concept and category on which agreement proved to be impossible.33 There was no consensus as to whether the origins (and thus the races) of humankind could be better explained in terms of monogenesis or polygenesis. From the late eighteenth century, the general trend in informed thought was away from the former and toward the latter, but neither Linnaeus nor Buffon nor Blumenbach believed in polygenesis. This confusion about how (and where) humanity began also meant there was no agreement as to the precise number of races.34 Were there two, namely white and black, which subsumed all the others (as Jefferson and Kant believed)? Or were there three (Gobineau), or four (Linnaeus), or five (Blumenbach) or six (Buffon), or were there many more (as Knox thought)? Were such racial characteristics as skin color, the size of the skull, or the angle of the forehead the result of biology (in which case they could not be changed), or had they evolved in response to the environment in keeping with the new insights of Darwin (in which case perhaps they might be)? Should races be classified by such physical features, or by their mental attainments and cultural attributes, or both?35
By now there was also uncertainty as to whether races were separate and distinct, or intermingled and interbred, thereby hybridizing and melding imperceptibly into one another. The reality in the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas was that the “white” and “black” races regularly intermarried, which meant people of mixed race—variously called mestizos or half-breeds—were widespread. Between 1776 and 1789, Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry produced a detailed survey of the nuances of race and elaborate gradations of color to be found in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), which cast doubt on the view that the world was divided between “pure” whites and “pure” blacks, and even some of the early pioneers of racial taxonomies, such as Johann Blumenbach, accepted that their limited number
of specified races were no more than ideal types, and that in practice there was a human continuum, as the races merged one into another by insensible degrees.36 This was enough to move the likes of Gobineau, the American slaveholder Josiah Nott, and Professor James Reddie of Edinburgh University to condemn race-mixing and miscegenation as a “filthy” practice; they noted that such mongrel peoples were “doomed to perish,” going the way of the ancient Egyptians and the Carthaginians. And there were some, like Knox’s protégé James Hunt, who believed the state had an obligation to enforce racial separateness and purity by passing restrictive laws to “regulate the intermixture of the races of man.”37
A further unresolved issue was the relationship between these recently discerned racial identities and the simultaneous rise of national identities: were they mutually reinforcing or mutually exclusive? There were those like Robert Knox who argued that Europe had always been a racial melting pot, that the races were hopelessly mixed up, and that they would always remain so, resulting in the sort of antagonisms that had erupted across the continent during 1848. From this perspective, aligning national identities with racial identities was unrealistic and impossible. Alternatively, there were those like Johann Gottfried von Herder who combined the “scientific” view of race with a mystical belief in the unchanging spirit of the people (“Volksgeist”), expressed in their culture, history, and language, in the hope that there could be established a pure, unsullied collective “volkish” identity. Such an outcome was especially attractive to those who believed in the Aryan race, whose origins were traced back by philologists, via ancient Greece and Rome, to India; and the superiority of the Aryans over all other races would be proclaimed by (among others) Richard Wagner, offering powerful validation to those who believed that the great task of nineteenth-century German statesmanship must be to align the racial identity of the “Volk” with an appropriate unit of political jurisdiction, bringing together blood and soil, race and nation.38
There was also disagreement as to whether races were becoming more or less pure, stronger or weaker, were progressing or degenerating.39 Gobineau feared that the “unnatural” mixing and miscegenation meant the weaker races (with darker skins and smaller brains) were undermining and would eventually overwhelm the stronger races (with white skins and bigger brains), thereby subverting and eventually overturning what ought to be the permanent racial hierarchy.40 But this gloomy interpretation was challenged by a more optimistic view of racial prospects, derived from the work of Charles Darwin, especially his Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871). Darwin did not believe in rigid racial identities, but thought they “graduate into each other,” which meant it was “hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.” Yet his argument that evolution was based on the survival of the fittest was taken by some to mean that life was a struggle for existence among races, and that those with greater energy and intelligence would triumph by reason of natural selection over those lesser breeds who were enervated and stupid and thus doomed to extinction. From this so-called social Darwinist perspective, races must be getting stronger not weaker, and the purpose of statecraft should be to facilitate this process of human evolution by intervening in the preordained conflicts between the races, thereby ensuring the eventual triumph of the superior races and the necessary subjugation (even the elimination) of the lesser ones.41
Since “scientific racism” was riven by inaccuracies and internal contradictions, this lent support to the alternative, traditionalist view: namely, that the attempt to undermine the traditional biblical teachings of monogenesis and common humanity by dividing and ordering people on the basis of their skin color was not only intellectually flawed but also morally wicked. Such was the opinion of those who campaigned to abolish slavery, who believed that all human beings were created equal in the image of God. In Britain, the conviction that slavery was an unacceptable affront to this religiously hallowed idea of common humanity was vividly conveyed in the ceramic badge manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood, on which a kneeling, manacled black slave cries out, perhaps in despair, perhaps in hope, “Am I not a man and a brother?”42 In the United States, similar sentiments were expressed by Theodore Dwight Weld: “no condition of birth, no shade of colour, no misfortune of circumstances” could “annul the birthright charter, which God has bequeathed to every being upon whom he has stamped his own image,” by which he meant the freedom and equality all humans should enjoy. Any society based on the race hierarchy of slavery was an affront to the creator. “The real battleground between liberty and slavery,” agreed Samuel Cornish, who had established the first black newspaper in New York City, “is prejudice against colour.”43
To be sure, the many abolitionists in many lands had many motives for wishing to see the end of slavery, but the progress of that cause and its success in Britain (1833), the Netherlands (1863), the United States (1865), Spain (1886), and Brazil (1888) owed much to the moral conviction that its continued existence was an affront to the claim that all men were created equal by God.44 These views also underlay the steps taken in the United States to reorder its polity in the aftermath of Emancipation, by dismantling the legal sanctions that had upheld the slave-society hierarchy based on the “narrow bounds of race.” The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, wrote equal citizenship for all people born in the United States (except “Indians not taxed”), into the Constitution, thereby nullifying the Dred Scott decision; the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified two years later, prohibited individual states from making race a qualification for voting. The result was that American whites and blacks were for the first time deemed to be equal members of the human race and of the American body politic, as the color line previously maintained between them was legally dismantled and constitutionally abolished. In the words of William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, the Civil War and Emancipation had transformed America from being a nation “for white men” only into one “for mankind” as a whole.45
Yet despite its intrinsic inconsistencies and contradictions, and notwithstanding the abolition of slavery, racialist thought and identities, reinforced by social Darwinist ideas of race struggle, became more influential in the Western world during the years of high imperialism. In Britain, the historian E. A. Freeman celebrated the triumph of the Anglo-Saxons, whose capacity for self-government he thought unrivaled, and whose superiority over all other races he constantly proclaimed.46 Sir Charles Dilke in Greater Britain (1868) and Sir John Seeley in The Expansion of England (1883) thought of the British Empire primarily in terms of the “white” parts of it, namely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. By the early twentieth century, this “enlarged” British identity was articulated by figures such as James Bryce, in his lectures on race proclaiming transoceanic Anglo-Saxon superiority, and by Cecil Rhodes, who believed the English were “the finest race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.” Hence the Rhodes Scholarships, designed “to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race” by bringing Britons from the overseas dominions to study at Oxford University.47 As such, the British Empire was an essentially Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and when Rudyard Kipling urged the Americans to adopt a similarly assertive policy, he did so in a poem that exhorted its readers to “take up the white man’s burden.”48
Kipling’s verses were addressed to Theodore Roosevelt, and when he became American president he enthusiastically accepted the challenge. Like Bryce, Roosevelt had been influenced by the writings of E. A. Freeman, and he believed in Anglo-Saxon racial destiny and superiority, dismissing native Americans as “savages” and blacks as “wholly unfit for the suffrage”; these views were widely shared among the governing elite by such figures as Henry Cabot Lodge and Woodrow Wilson, and by many white Americans who continued to regard blacks as intrinsically inferior.49 The preoccupation with racial identities and rankings only intensified as immigrants poured into the United States from central, sou
thern, and eastern Europe and threatened the traditional dominance of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. One response, in William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899) and by the Dictionary of Races and Peoples (produced in 1911 by the U.S. Immigration Commission), was to specify more elaborate racial rankings, inserting Jews, Italians, and Hungarians between the Anglo-Saxons at the top and the blacks and Native Americans at the bottom. A second and more anxious reaction, as proclaimed by E. A. Ross in The Old World in the New (1914) and by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), was to warn that the influx of these new immigrants meant that pure Anglo-Saxon Americans would be overwhelmed by lesser, alien races.50
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