Before the “Caucasian Race” ' Antecedents of European Raci a. 1000-1684 its subsequent career. ‘Several medieval and early modern European notions about differences and boundaries between peoples esta modern race thinking. They’ ut the “races of Europe” race” idea. One significant ious peoples who criss-crossed the greater Eurasian landmass during the first millen- ‘nium, including Angles, Saxons, Celts, Franks, Gauls, and Slavs. ‘These peoples did not constitute human “races,” and they did not un- derstand themselves as such. Moreover, before the establishment of rela- 2 EES" Before the “Caucasian Race” | 23 the thirteenth through the .”? This flux in Europe's formative period informs its ‘and racial history, ich marked a religiously, culturally, and geographically dis- >»; the profound (and often racelike) alienness or otherness that various peoples in the Middle Ages sometimes ascribed to other peoples, ‘especially those who did not share their religion; and the fact that Euro- pean Christians adopted the Judaic account of creation and biblical chronology, along with an Old Testament view of the origins of various ‘and peoples of the New World into the world system emerging from late feudalism and merchant capitalism [Le., between the fifteenth and seven- teenth centuries CE; and] the dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery, and resistance from the sixteenth century forward, and the formation of industrial labor and labor reserves Some of these developments were largely internal to Europe, while the others were indicative of Europe's competition with the Islamic world and its increasing global power and reach, a Medieval Europeans employed certain racelike ideas to comprehend their social order and differentiate between social groups. but these were ethnic rather than racial designations. Still, a few cases of religious and‘Before the “Caucasian Race” | 25 Yet these medieval divisions were dif sions This difference, which is impo racism, has been obscured in some rece to modern racism, ‘ompounded when the fifteenth centus ‘criteria for clas- formulation of medieval “The various nations differ Bartlet comments that only to mode the world’s natural One notable product of ni ry was the frst rec~ mn racial classification, in 1684, by the French travel writer tions."” Medieval Europeans, along with the peoples in. premodern world, lacked any concept comparable to the ' modern “race” concept. They emphasized cultural criteria of difference ! and lacked any clearly developed notion of fixed natures” of different de- Saracen, and later Turk as terms for" Empire referred to Europeans as “Franks’; characterited Latin Christendom regarded members ofthe other fith ay" and the early Middle Ay ‘The historical development ofthe idea and territory of Europe was it- 5 region during the Middle Ages self one of the most important antecedents of the modern “race” concept. ee at. AcE) as elatively static and marked by a deeply sei- Europe has sometimes been considered a distinct continent, bt this is a regieg fitis rary.” The the peasant, the artisan, the ‘misnomer (see figure 1). The region we now know as Burope is actually a oe eee Peninsula of the Eurasian landmass. Europe, as Bartlet says, “is both ps human onde bat region and an idea."”’ The societies and cultures that inhabited the west- fem peninsula of the Eurasian landmass were always diverse. But by the later Middle Ages there was enough commonality among the areas that we ‘now call western and central Europe to constitute a distinct region: “When compared with other culture areas of the globe, such as the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent or China, western or central Europe exhibited (and exhibits) distinctive characteristics. In particular, Latin Europe (that ain of Being iserable mollusc to the Supremé also. significant di common be (ethne), and ni “civilized” and thefore the "Caucasian Race” | 27 is, the part of lecause of its geographical inde- of Europe have been conceived as position to other ins" have mbi- ‘offcial” eastern frontier constantly shified. “It advanced ¢ Don, where it of Europe was spurred by the rise and eighth centuries The expan- ‘ence at the edges of Europe: first in Iberia (in the seventh century) and later in the Balkans and the Black Sea re Asia. Several centuries of enslavement of Christians by Muslims and of Muslims by Christians, for instance, continued into the sixteenth and sev- largely been done away with between the thirteenth and fifteenth turies. This achievement followed the consolidation of a sense of pe (Regina Europe) from Sebastian MUntzer's Cosmogra- feom Early Modern Europe: An Osford History (Oxford: Press, 1999) ed, Euan Cameron, p. 20 (British Library, Mars siders.” This new collective tween the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This was the context in which Te rn aEuropean and Is- slavery emerged only with by leaders of Armenia and Georgia in 314 and 330 CE, respectively; Persian (ras 2 Afier the Ottoman conquest of Constan- ans cut Georgia off from and eighteenth centuries 1ough never considered a part of Europe, Nor region where Berber to Europeans until the nineteenth century, despite Portuguese exploration and settlement on parts its western shores that began inthe fifteenth cen- tury: a ey Before the “Caucasian Race” | 29 also used a twofold division of the world’s peoples be- “uncivilized” (sometimes “barba edge of European civilisat represented as a result of conflicting population which came to mark the boundary of Europe, not only spa- tially but also in consciousness» This combination of perceived likeness and discrepancy between Europe, on the one hand, and “the Orient,” on the other hand, probably influenced the contours of the later “Caucasian race” notion: a Europe-centered notion, invented by Europeans to desig- nate what they took to be the greatest and most beautiful “race,” it usually has been conceived so as to encompass peoples from parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and India as well as Europeans. of human beings through Adam and Eve, and then through Noah and his sons after the great flood described in Genesis. The biblical ac- gions of Europe, Asia, and Afric in varying ways.™ Gradually, the domi- teenth centuries regarded Japhet as the progenitor of the peoples of Eu- rope; Shem, those of Asia; and Ham, those of Africa. “Jerome’s rendering of Genesis 9:27, God ‘shall enl Japhet and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem} was taken to mean that would produce more offspring than his brothers and that, one day, his progeny would come to conquer Asia just as they would inherit from the Hebrews the mantle of the true reli- gion.” By the early modern period, versions of the biblical view of human dispersion through Shem, Hara, and Japhet after the flood wereBefore the “Caucasian Race” | 31 Slavic peoples within Europe and of black Africans and “Indians” of the ‘Americas. Also significant were ethnic and social status distinctions be- ‘ween Franks and Gauls in France and between Normans and Saxons in England. death, and many Jews converted to Christianity. In 1492, at the time of the completion of the Christian reconquest of Spain from Muslims, Jews as such were expelled from Spain. More Jews chose baptism and converted to Christianity to avoid death or expatriation.” (Forced conversions in Por- tugal followed in 1497.) These conversions created a group of hundreds of thousands of formerly Jewish “new Christians, or conversos, who did not readily assimilate into Spain's Christian society. Many retained Jewish cus- toms (often secretly) despite their outward change in religion Muskims ‘who remained in Spain after the reconquest likewise were forced to con- vert. These formerly Muslim new Christians, the Moriscos, were largely peasants and artisans in Spain. They lived in separate communities and re- sisted even the appearance of cultural assimilation and loss of their “Moorish” culture.® Despite the Christian belief in the regenerative character of baptism, the treatment of the conversos and Moriscos in Spanish law and theology after the reconquest prefigured later racism. Spanish theologians devel-sailor Cristoforo Colombo in search of a new route to conquerors and the humanity and dignity of the Native cans. A key episode in this debate was the exchange in Spain, durin 51, between Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican bishop of Chiapas, and Juan Ginés de Sepilveda, a humanist schol subhuman beings who lacked any elements of civil life and virtue, and he ‘Before the “Caucasian Race” | 33 applied Aristotle's notion of “natural slavery” to them. He claimed that hi- crarchy rather than equality was that natural order of human society.* Las Casas countered from the perspective of Christian universalism: “The nat- ural laws and rules and rights of men are common to all nations, Christian }ous Americans, though not Christian, could become Christ- vhile Las Casas opposed indiscriminate exploitation of the , he affirmed the superiority of Christian European “civiliza- thus legitimated Spanish imperial expansion to the Americas.* Slavic Peoples In the case of the Slavs, as with the other peoples that I have been dis- cussing, we should avoid any suggestion of some “pure,” primordial Slavic people.* Yet, by the Middle Ages, Slavic peoples had coalesced in a recog- nizable way, with a distinct language and culture, in areas that would be- come eastern Europe. The marginal place of Slavs (including later Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Serbs, and Croats) in the medieval European world is indicated in the following comment, which the English historian Edward Gibbon adapted from the sixth-century Byzantine histo- rian Procopius and from the Emperor Mauritius: ‘The Sclavonians used one common language (it was harsh and irregular) and were known by the resemblance the swarthy Tartar and approached, and fair complexion of the German. F were scattered over the provinces of Russia and Poland, and theit huts ‘were hastily built of rough timber? This sense of Slavic distinctiveness was reinforced—if not generated—by the somewhat unique association of Slavic peoples with slavery. While slavery was a declining practice within most of western Europe, it persisted in Slavic regions. Russia and the Ukraine had the most well developed sys- tem of slavery in Europe from the twelfth through the seventeenth cen- turies, and the Mongol conquest of 1237-1240 resulted in the enslave- ment of about 10 percent of the eastern Slavs. This made the Slavic areas into one of the world’s two great sources of slaves, along with Africa.*in the skin color and appe ‘Ages, Marco Polo (1304-77), the Muslim geographer from Morocco, recorded the skin color Before the “Cawanan Race” | 35 " peoples of Africa Egyptians, but had no rus, the late-first-cen- the originators of divine ‘On the whole, the view of black and Romans was positive. Frank the positive norm and “blackness” century in Europe, visual and li By the late Middle Ages, the Old Testament story of the curse of Ham became a stock justification among Europeans for the enslavement of black Africans, According to the book of Genesis, after the flood Ham dis- respected his father Noah by looking at his father’s naked body as Noah lay drunk. When Noah awoke, he cursed Ham's son Canaan and his de- ‘cerns servitude it says nothing about skin color. In medieval Europe— where serfs, unlike Jews, Muslims, and lepers, were a numerical majority —the story had been used to explain and justify the subordination of serfs as the descendants of Cain or Ham.” ‘The curse of Ham's son Canaan seems to have been first used to link slavery to “blackness” in the Islamic world during the Middle Ages! Me- dieval Arabs and Moors used both light-skinned and “black” slaves, but typically relegated “blacks” to the most menial and degrading work.”guarded by the area's al populations were Jaws and all of society, being recreated in the sixteenth century when the problem of gins surfaced.” Before the “Caucasian Race” | 37 , the writer Francois de Bellefores (d. ur ancestors the Gauls.” He suggested that “divine the foreign Franks." For other advocates. The prevai possession of arms, the administration their fiefs"5 This theme was reiterated terms in the early eighteenth century by such as Comte Henri de Boulsinvilliers, who champions of the nobil “claimed a different descent from that of the commonality who were of Gallo-Roman ancestry." In the era of the French Revolution, writers such as Abbé Sityes chal- lenged the myth of Germanic-aristocratic Franks with a bourgeois-revolu- tate] not relegate to the forests of Franconia all those families which per- sist in the foothardy pretense of being descended from the race of con- querors ...? The Nation, thus purged, would ... be able to console itselfBefore the “Cawcasian Race” | 39 if European Christendom 97, and before England bet Spain, two other peripheries of Frankish-Latin Europe.” By the tweltth century the Irish were seen by elites of England, France, and Italy as alien to Latin Christendom. Bartlett explains “Although the Irish were of an- cient Christian faith and shared the creed of Frankish Europe, they exhib- ited pronounced differences in culture and social organi garded Irish social structures and customs as “barbari Norman conquest of 1066. become near synonyms, Eng- n religion to a rude and ignorant peop the Irish were fellow human beings lived a less than fully human Christian life.” As England's noble fa ‘began to reside in Ireland, the English eventually developed policies such myths recall th Anglo-Saxons (descended from appeal to Hebrew nar. as the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) to differentiate the English and thi vd. The statutes acknowledged a “mixed nation” of Englis that had intermarried with leading Irish families. To contain this “degen- Diggers appealed to 51 I. Saxon past. King James 1, in contrast, regarded the Engl mostly Norman so that “at the root of the class conta tural confrontation which was contict bet on as ac ween differen bloods.™ iter the Glonous Revolution of 1688, which established a con. strtunonal monarchy an f Popular sovereignty, these deas were expanded f English and Anglophe i tonal government among the : thought reemerged Church of Ireland, obliged all government officials roan moron ee rhe 18408 in a racial : allegiance to the church, and established the king of England as the king of ‘uropean! roots of English i Ireland.’ This marked the beginning of the Protestant ascendancy in Ire- ‘constitutional government.” land. Under Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603) and James 1 (r. 1603-25), Englishdent when we examine th “ en amine the origins ofthe word race and the “race® concept: iy first came into use, how they were first used, and to what ef- {ect As Alan Ryan sty its important wo distinguish between the ond the concept: “The existence-cniteria of concepts may be obscure, but the aunnoran Have” | AV {guage is 10 richly developed that most of our concepis—espec cepis—express themselves with matching words iquely.” He adds, with reference to possessing the ‘any confidence our own much less others’ political concepts wholly depends upon the range of (other) words at our or their dis- posal."!* With the “race” concept, this means we can conclude with some assurance that people possess (or a society possesses) the concept only when they have developed a rich, expressive discourse that makes use of the concept with some consistency. Such a discourse of race would en- compass a range of related words and concepts. This view leaves open the possibility that a group or society may possess the concept of race in a rudimentary form without (yet) being in possession of the matching word, race, But we need to tread carefully here. It is clear that the origins of the word race preceded by a couple of centuries or s0 the development of systematic ideas and theories of “race.” Meanwhile, the development of 4 systematic discourse of race between the seventeenth and nmeteenth centuries had a profound, even revolutionary, effect on the meaning of the word?poke of a “bud of a Noblr race to refer to an earlier human beings were understood as having @ singula origin, they “could not be submitted to zoological di velopments contributed to the modern European concept: the development of racial rms of servitude in the res, along with the growth lacement of the feudal status " Sixteenth-century Spanish writers began to use the term race with Nefare the "Camacian Race” | 4¥ lave ishing, and racialized slavery (of West Africans) had be- come institutionalized through law and custom in England’s American and Maryland. These developments were material, and legal lumping together of di- verse West African peoples into the “race” of “Negroes.” “This ‘Negro, ” Robinson explains, (labor power) both mindless to the organizational requirements of pro- duction and insensitive tothe subhuman conditions of work.*” By the fifteenth century, Arab slave traders had long plundered African so- cities for slaves, Slavery existed in the Iberian peninsula prior to Spanish and Portuguese exploration of the Americas."™ These forms of slavery, however, were not racially defined'® By contrast, the of Africans as Negroes, along with the corresponding racialization of most Europeans (and some other peoples) as whites. This divide was arguably the pivot on which racial thought was further elaborated. ‘After 1500, Portuguese slave traders began to supply Portuguese and Spanish settlements in the Americas with slave labor from enslaved Westbers of the white race (mainly for white men).' Distinctions between ropertied and propertyless whites as well as between large- and small- Refore the “Caucasian Race” | 44 iat were endemic to the rising class conceal constraints to social mobil structure, ‘There were similar patterns of racialization in Portuguese and Dutch colonies. In the ftteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portugi colonial encounters were shaped by their sense tural superiority compared to the peoples of At e and Dutch Imost exclusively confined to blacks.” nt of Africans also contributed to the development of the concept the fields of “natural history” and biology to use the term to classify sup- posedly distinct types of human beings in a systematic way.