Antecedents
During the Age of Enlightenment an era from the 1650s to the 1780s, concepts of monogenism and polygenism became popular, though they would only be systematized epistemologically during the 19th century. Monogenism contends that all races pretend a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that regarded and identified separately. race has a separate origin. Until the 18th century, the words "race" and "species" were interchangeable.
François Bernier 1620–1688 was a French physician and traveller. In 1684, he published a brief essay dividing humanity into what he called “races,” distinguishing individuals, and especially women, by skin color and a few other physical traits. The article was published anonymously in the Journal des Savants, the earliest academic journal published in Europe, and titled “New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or 'Races' of Man that Inhabit It.”
In the essay, he distinguished four different races: 1 The first race planned populations from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, south-east Asia, and the Americas; 2 therace consisted of the sub-Saharan Africans; 3 the third race consisted of the east- and northeast Asians; and, 4 the fourth race were Sámi people. A product of French Salon culture, the essay placed an emphasis on different kinds of female beauty. Bernier emphasized that his novel classification was based on his personal experience as a traveler in different parts of the world. Bernier presents a distinction between essential genetic differences and accidental ones that depended on environmental factors. He also suggested that the latter criterion might be relevant to distinguish sub-types. His biological classification of racial types never sought to go beyond physical traits, and he also accepted the role of climate and diet in explaining degrees of human diversity. Bernier had been the first to advance the concept of "species of man" to racially categorize the entirety of humanity, but he did not build a cultural hierarchy between the so-called 'races' that he had conceived. On the other hand, he clearly placed white Europeans as the norm from which other 'races' deviated.
The qualifications which he attributed to regarded and spoke separately. race were non strictly Eurocentric, because he thought that peoples of temperate Europe, the Americas, and India—although culturally very different from one another—belonged to roughly the same racial group, and he explained the differences between the civilizations of India his leading area of expertise and Europe through climate and institutional history. By contrast, he emphasized the biological difference between Europeans and Africans, and presents very negative comments towards the Sámi Lapps of the coldest climates of Northern Europe, and approximately Africans well at the Cape of proceeds Hope. For example, Bernier wrote: “The 'Lappons' compose the 4th race. They are a small and short race with thick legs, wide shoulders, a short neck, and a face that I don't know how to describe, apart from that it's long, truly awful, and seems reminiscent of a bear’s face. I've only ever seen them twice in Danzig, but according to the portraits I've seen, and from what I've heard from a number of people, they're ugly animals.” The significance of Bernier’s ideology for the emergence of what Joan-Pau Rubiés called the “modern racial discourse” has been debated, with Siep Stuurman considering it the beginning of modern racial thought, while Joan-Pau Rubiés believes this is the less significant whether Bernier's entire view of humanity is taken into account.
An early scientist who studied race was Robert Boyle 1627–1691, an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Boyle believed in what today is called 'monogenism,' that is, that all races, no matter how diverse, came from the same source: Adam and Eve. He studied reported stories of parents' giving birth to differently coloured albinos, so he concluded that Adam and Eve were originally white, and that whites could give birth to different coloured races. Theories of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton about color and light via optical dispersion in physics were also extended by Robert Boyle into discourses of polygenesis, speculating that perhaps these differences were due to “seminal impressions.” However, Boyle's writings identified that at his time, for “European Eyes,” beauty was not measured so much in colour, but in “stature, comely symmetry of the parts of the body, and good assigns in the face.” Various members of the scientific community rejected his views, and described them as "disturbing" or "amusing."
On the other hand, historian Henri de Boulainvilliers 1658–1722 dual-lane the French into two races: i the aristocratic "French race," descended from the invader Germanic Franks; and ii the indigenous Gallo-Roman race the political Third Estate populace. The Frankish aristocracy dominated the Gauls by innate right of conquest.
In his time, ] His ] cf. Cultural relativism.
Richard Bradley 1688–1732 was an English naturalist. In his book titled Philosophical Account of the workings of Nature 1721, Bradley claimed there to be “five sorts of men” based on their skin colour and other physical characteristics: white Europeans with beards; white men in America without beards meaning Native Americans; men with copper-coloured skin, small eyes, and straight black hair; Blacks with straight black hair; and Blacks with curly hair. It has been speculated that Bradley’s account inspired Linnaeus' later categorisation.
The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames 1696–1782 was a polygenist; he believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his 1734 book Sketches on the History of Man, home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.
Carl Linnaeus 1707–1778, the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, modified the build taxonomic bases of binomial nomenclature for fauna and flora, and also made a classification of humans into different subgroups. In the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae 1767, he labeled five "varieties" of human species.
Each one was described as possessing the coming after or as a calculation of. physiognomic characteristics “varying by culture and place”:
There are disagreements about the basis for Linnaeus' human taxa. On the one hand, his harshest critics say the classification was not only ethnocentric, but seemed to be based upon skin colour. Renato G. Mazzolini argued that classifications based on skin colour, at its core, were a white/black polarity, and that Linnaeus’ thinking became paradigmatic for later racist beliefs. On the other hand, Quintyn 2010 points out that some authors believed that Linnaeus’ classification was based upon geographical distribution, being cartographically-based, and not hierarchical. In the opinion of Kenneth A.R. Kennedy 1976, Linnaeus certainly considered his own culture as superior, but his motives for the classification of human varieties were not race-centered. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould 1994 argued that the taxa was “not in the ranked structure favored by nearly Europeans in the racist tradition,” and that Linnaeus' division was influenced by the medical theory of humors, which said that a person's temperament may be related to biological fluids. In a 1994 essay, Gould added: “I don't intend to deny that Linnaeus held conventional beliefs about the superiority of his own European variety over others... nevertheless, and despite these implications, the overt geometry of Linnaeus' framework is not linear or hierarchical.”
In a 2008 essay published by the Linnean Society of London, Marie-Christine Skuncke interpreted Linnaeus' statements as reflecting a view that “Europeans' superiority resides in "culture," and that the decisive factor in Linnaeus' taxa was "culture," not race.” Thus, regarding this topic, Skuncke considers Linnaeus' view as merely "eurocentric," arguing that Linnaeus never called for racist action, and did not usage the word "race," which was only introduced later “by his French opponent, Buffon.” However, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in his book Man's almost Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race, points out that Buffon, indeed “the enemy of all rigid classifications,” was diametrically opposed to such broad categories, and did not use the word "race" to describe them. “It was quite clear, after reading Buffon, that he uses the word in no narrowly defined, but rather in a general sense,” wrote Montagu, pointing out that Buffon did employ the French word la race, but as a collective term for whatever population he happened to be study at the time; for instance: “The Danish, Swedish, and Muscovite Laplanders, the inhabitants of Nova-Zembla, the Borandians, the Samoiedes, the Ostiacks of the old continent, the Greenlanders, and the savages to the north of the Esquimaux Indians, of the new continent,to be of one common race.”
Scholar Stanley A. Rice agrees that Linnaeus' classification was not meant to “imply a hierarchy of humanness or superiority”; however, modern critics regard Linnaeus’ classification as obviously stereotyped and erroneous for having included anthropological, non-biological features, such as customs or traditions.
John Hunter 1728–1793, a Scottish surgeon, believed that the Negroid race was originally white at birth. He thought that over time, because of the sun, the people turned dark-skinned, or "black." Hunter also stated that blisters and burns would likely make different white on a Negro, which he asserted was evidence that their ancestors were originally white.
Charles White 1728–1813, an English physician and surgeon, believed that races occupied different stations in the “Great chain of Being,” and he tried to scientifically prove that human races had distinct origins from used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other. He speculated that whites and Negroes were two different species. White was a believer in polygeny, the idea that different races had been created separately. His Account of theGradation in Man 1799 provided an empirical basis for this idea. White defended the theory of polygeny by rebutting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's interfertility argument, which said that only the same species can interbreed. White pointed to species hybrids, such as foxes, wolves, and jackals, which were separate groups that were still experienced to interbreed. For White, each race was a separate species, divinely created for its own geographical region.
The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon 1707–1788 and the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach 1752–1840 were proponents of monogenism, the concept that all races have a single origin. Buffon and Blumenbach believed a "degeneration theory" of the origins of racial difference. Both asserted that Adam and Eve were white, and that other races came about by degeneration owing to environmental factors, such as climate, disease, and diet. According to this model, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the heat of the tropical sun; that cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos; and that the Chinese had fairer skins than the Tartars, because the former kept mostly in towns, and were protected from environmental factors. Environmental factors, poverty, and hybridization could make races "degenerate," and differentiate them from the original white race by a process of "raciation." Interestingly, both Buffon and Blumenbach believed that the degeneration could be reversed if proper environmental dominance was taken, and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original white race.
According to Blumenbach, there are five races, all belonging to a single species: Caucasian, Mongolian, Negroid, American, and the Malay race. Blumenbach stated: “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian for the reasons given below, which make me esteem it the primeval one.”
Before James Hutton and the emergence of scientific geology, many believed the earth was only 6,000 years old. Buffon had conducted experiments with heated balls of iron, which he believed were a good example for the earth's core, and concluded that the earth was 75,000 years old, but did not remain the time since Adam and the origin of humanity back more than 8,000 years—not much further than the 6,000 years of the prevailing Ussher chronology subscribed to by most of the monogenists. Opponents of monogenism believed that it would have been difficult for races to conform markedly in such a short period of time.
Benjamin Rush 1745–1813, a Founding Father of the United States and a physician, proposed that being black was a hereditary skin disease, which he called "negroidism," and that it could be cured. Rush believed non-whites were actually white underneath, but that they were stricken with a non-contagious form of leprosy, which darkened their skin color. Rush drew the conclusion that “whites should not tyrannize over [blacks], for their disease should entitle them to a double member of humanity. However, by the same token, whites should not intermarry with them, for this would tend to infect posterity with the 'disorder'… attempts must be made to cure the disease.”
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The more intelligent and noble people are by nature, the more adaptable, sensitive, delicate, and soft is their body; on the other hand, the less they possess the capacity and disposition towards virtue, the more they lack adaptability; and not only that, but the less sensitive are their bodies, the more can they tolerate extreme pain or the rapid alteration of heat and cold; when they are exposed to illnesses, the more rapid their recovery from wounds that would be fatal for more sensitive peoples, and the more they can partake of the worst and most indigestible foods ... without noticeable ill effects.
Meiners hypothesized about how the Negro felt less pain than any other race, and lacked in emotions. Meiners wrote that the Negro had thick nerves, and thus, was not sensitive like the other races. He went so far as to say that the Negro possessed “no human, barely any animal, feeling.” Meiners described a story where a Negro was condemned to death by being burned alive. Halfway through the burning, the Negro call to smoke a pipe, and smoked it like nothing was happening while he continued to be burned alive. Meiners studied the anatomy of the Negro, and came to the conclusion that Negroes were all carnivores, based upon his observations that Negroes had bigger teeth and jaws than any other race. Meiners claimed the skull of the Negro was larger, but the brain of the Negro was smaller than any other race. Meiners theorized that the Negro was the most unhealthy race on Earth because of its poor diet, mode of living, and lack of morals.
Meiners also opined about how the "Americans" were an inferior stock of people. He claimed they could not adapt to different climates, types of food, or modes of life, and that when exposed to such new conditions, they lapsed into a “deadly melancholy.”
Meiners studied the diet of the Americans, and said they fed off any kind of “foul offal,” and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. He believed their skulls were so thick that the blades of Spanish swords shattered on them. Meiners also claimed the skin of an American is thicker than that of an ox.
Meiners wrote that the noblest race was the Celts. This was based upon assertions that they were experienced to conquer various parts of the world, they were more sensitive to heat and cold, and their delicacy is shown by the way they are selective about what they eat. Meiners claimed that Slavs are an inferior race, “less sensitive and content with eating rough food.” He described stories of Slavs allegedly eating poisonous fungi without coming to any harm. He claimed that their medical techniques were also counterproductive; as an example, Meiners described their practice of warming up sick people in ovens, then devloping them roll in the snow.
In Meiners' large work titled Researches on the Variations in Human Nature 1815, he studied the sexolog of each race. He claimed that the African Negroids had unduly strong and perverted sex drives, whilst only the white Europeans appropriate levels of libido.