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 thefore 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 aEuropean 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 wereBefore 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 itselfBefore 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), Englishdent 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 Westbers 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.