A short-and-sweet definition of Race is that it is a combination of biology and culture, the idea that your blood carries with it cultural traits, behaviors, rather than just outward appearances. The 19th century saw a rise in scholarship that focused on using this concept to explain differences between human populations, to explain economic, social, and cultural inequality worldwide. Africa was primitive and backward because they were African; Indians were unable to govern themselves because they were Indian. This is markedly different than just acknowledging a difference in appearance or skin tone; in Race, appearance and skin tone become markings of culture and behavior.

I study the middle ages; medieval people were certainly conscious of differences in ethnic background and skin color. Documents, especially slave sales, often designate the color of a person's skin. But the largest differentiating factor in medieval society was religion; a Christian might consider all Muslims to be "wicked", but once a Muslim converted they were among the righteous, and vise-versa. And even still, there was always room for an especially noble Muslim to be considered a good person in spite of their religion. Chroniclers of crusades or Christian-Muslim warfare regularly considered their enemy leaders to be noble and worthy, even if marked by a different faith. See El Cid.

This began to change in the Early Modern Era. David Nirenberg has an interesting theory he postulates in his new book Neighboring Faiths, where I'm getting a lot of this info from. In 1391 Christians rioted all over Spain and slaughtered thousands of Jews and forcibly converted even more. The result was a society in which Christians could no longer identify themselves through a comparison to their non-Christian neighbors. Basically, there were still different ethnicities and cultures, but religion could no longer help to differentiate. Even worse, many of the Jews that had once stood to represent the opposite of Christianity were now themselves Christians and were moving freely through Christian communities and families. The reaction of the "Old Christians" was to differentiate themselves from the "New Christians" or "conversos" by drawing new attention to their lineages, their bloodlines. Thus an Old Christian was better because their line was unpolluted by Jewish blood; they were better because Jewish blood was what tainted a person, not just Jewish religion. This is basically an early form of Racism, the idea that having Jewish blood meant that you had "Jewish" tendencies which stood in opposition to true Christian faith.

This all hits a new level with the publication of Origin of Species, but I'm not an expert there. Someone else will have to take it from there.

EDIT: Grammar

EDIT EDIT: Thanks for the Gold, kind stranger! Fuck tenure, I got gold on askhistorians!

Just chiming in to say that ancient Indian societies did not have attitudes of race either. Being at the crux of one of the world's most important floodplains they were exposed to several cultures (including the Greeks and Romans since 500 BC), many of whom settled in India and vice versa, there are Roman texts mentioning Indians among a crowd in Alexandria.

Every modern Indian person is the descendant of a mixture of two ancient populations, known as the ANI (Ancestral North Indian, the African migration which moved into Europe which migrated in waves from 40,000-12,000 years ago into India) and the ASI (Ancestral South Indian, the first African migration into India which occurred around 60,000 years ago), which mixed in ancient times (about 1,200–3,500 BC). The mixture can range from 70-30 ANI-ASI (Kashmiri Pandits) to 40-60 ANI-ASI (the dalit community Malas from Andhra). It would have been impossible for the modern Indian population to exist without inter race mixing, race in itself would have been a near foreign concept to ancient Indians

They differentiated humans based on the work they performed (class or Varnas) in the Vedas over 4k years ago. They referred to various choices of professions and had nothing to do with birth. In fact they believed all humans/plants/animals were part of one soul known as the Brahman.

In society, Brahmins or intellectuals form the brain or head or mouth that think and speak. Kshatriya or defense personnel form the hands that protect. Vaishya or producers and businessmen form the thigh that support and nurture (note that thigh bone or femur produces blood and is strongest bone). In Atharvaveda, instead of Uru or Thigh, the word “Madhya” is used denoting the stomach. Shudra or Labor force form the legs that lay the foundation and make the body run.

Thus, its a pity that such a beautiful allegorical description of society and creation is distorted to mean something that is completely contrary to Vedic ethos.

In Vedic culture, everyone is considered to be born as Shudra. Then based on his or her education, one becomes a Brahmin, Kshatriya or Vaishya. This completion of education is considered to be a second birth. Hence these three Varnas are called “Dwija” or twice-born. But those who remain uneducated for whatever reasons are not discarded from society. In the Vedas, Shudra means a hard-working person, that is why Purush Sukta calls them as foundation of entire human society.

Later Indians made such Varnas "rigid" and hereditary among people who wanted to solidify their status and privilege at the top, thus the caste system was born (this directly led to the birth and popularity of Buddhism and Jainism).

The Buddha (ard. 500BC) introduced the idea of placing a higher value on morality and the equality of people instead of on which family or caste a person is born into. This was also the first attempt to abolish discrimination and slavery in the history of mankind.

So the Indians invented a philosophy, corrupted it to encourage a form of birth based discrimination (ancient racism?) and invented another philosophy to abolish it, all 600 years before the Romans came to full power.

Buddhism and Jainism later lost their popularity under the Guptas (300 AD), a powerful empire (controlled huge territories of arable lands and 26.36% of the world's population). While trying to legitimize their rule by adopting Hindu memes of mythological heroes, they also reversed many of the positive changes. Guptas wanted to build an empire and entrenching social divisions is among the best ways to hold on to power. The caste system then became officially hereditary.

The story is interesting since it depicts how a benign human idea became a meme and got distorted by those in power to keep power in their "court". The idea of race and racial superiority is similar, it was originally developed by biologists to help explain human origins, movements and history, but was later distorted by eugenicists who sought to look for justifications of colonialism and their superiority (White man's burden). It also serves as a warning for our generation, to remain vigilant, though later philosophies were developed and were successful enough to fight it (Buddhism etc), the cancer prevailed and re-exerted itself when it was wielded by people who wanted to legitimize their power.

There is a problem of semantics involved here: people often hate other people on the basis of their language, religion, status, and we often label these sorts of hatred "racism." So why don't we call the Greeks' hatred of the Persians "racism?" Perhaps we can. The waters have been muddied. What Mr. Coates is pointing to is the modern concept of scientific racism that descends from Darwinism in the 19th century.

Take Judaism in Germany, for instance. Antisemitism had always existed in Germany, but the consensus of enlightened people in the 19th century was that the "Israelite," the PC term of the era, could convert to Christianity and become a full German. In early 19th century Prussia, a Jew would not gain full civil rights until they did convert, but having been a Jew in the past made no difference in the eyes of the law. The Nazi belief, by contrast, that a Jew is a Jew in the blood is more along the lines of what Coates means when he talks about signifying "deeper attributes." The inflection came, as mentioned, in the late 19th century, when Darwin's ideas filtered down to intellectuals who did not really understand them, and applied them uncritically to humans.

Edit, thanks Stefan_Zhirkov - This was an important inflection, especially for Europeans. It is not the root or sole cause. Darwinism helped focus and lend scientific validity to a concept that already had currency because of African slavery in the Americas, not to mention the many other examples in this thread.

It is true that the current conceptions of race are modern ideas, but it's not entirely true that ancient societies were completely blind to it, they just had different conceptions.

Hippocrates wrote his On Airs, Water, and Places around 400BC, and it has one of the most revealing views of Greek conceptions of race and ethnicity that we've been able to find. He explains the differences between "races" are due to the climactic differences between countries; that "humans" are more or less the same, but also a product of their environment. Divisions among people still remained primarily by country or nation, rather than "race".

Moving on to the Middle Ages we see a more biblical take on the races. Here the account that contemporary humans are descendants of the biblical genealogy; Adam and Eve, as well as the three sons of Noah; Shem, Ham, and Japheth. From those they derive the Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhethitic tribal divisions of humanity. Semites resided primarily in Asia (what we would today call the Middle East), Hamites in Africa, and Japhetites in Europe. Like the Greeks this was more a way to explain why people in different regions appear different from one another, there wasn't any inherent view that one of the races was any better than another. It's kind of hard to pinpoint a source here, since many of them are genealogically based on biblical texts, but Josephus and Jerome have both written on those genealogies.

Our modern conceptions of race and racial differences don't really start to appear until the 15th century as Western explorers began branching out and charting the Earth. It's around the same time that we see an increased interest in science and scientific explanations for the natural world, including humans. This is where we get Francois Bernier's A New Division of the Earth According to the Different Types of Races that Inhabit It (sometimes shortened to A New Division of the Earth) in the 17th century. This was ostensibly the first effort by anyone to classify humanity into distinct "types" of races, of which Bernier concluded there were four, and also the beginning of "scientific racism". From there we get polygenism (each race has different origins) and Voltaire, as well as Linnaeus with his taxonomic classifications of the races. It was this line of thought that gave rise to the belief of inherent differences between the races, and eventually racial justifications for colonialism and slavery.

From the death of Alexander the Great in 323BCE to the Roman conquest in 30BCE, Egypt was ruled by a Greek dynasty known as the Ptolemies. During this time, Egypt was settled by a large number of Greek immigrants who tended to dominate the upper and middle classes of Egyptian society. In Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy, Denise McCoskey makes the argument that Prolemaic Egypt was a highly racialized state, where Greeks were systematically privileged by the state at the expense of the native Egyptians. The case for describing Ptolemaic Egypt as a systemically racist state draws from the behaviors of various political, economic, and social institutions to argue that Greek immigrants were privileged at the expense of native Egyptians on the basis of racial beliefs and perceived racial identities.

The institution of Greek as the official language of the Ptolemaic state certainly afforded privileges to those who could speak it. McCoskey argues that “knowledge of Greek… provided tangible benefit to the individuals who were able to attain it”. In this way, Greek immigrants and their descendants stood at a natural advantage over native Egyptians. By speaking Greek natively, they were able to “work within or negotiate the state bureaucracy more skillfully”.

However even McCoskey concedes that “Greek and Greek education were not the sole possession of Greeks”. Many Egyptians were not only able to learn Greek privately, but were actively encouraged to so and rewarded with access to public offices. This was likely not an expression of some sort of anachronistic cosmopolitan desire for diversity and integration, but the product of pragmatic calculation. The Ptolemaic state relied on bilingual village scribes to occupy its front lines and act as the primary nexus between itself and the rural masses, allowing even illiterate Egyptian peasants to interact with its bureaucracy. The usefulness of Greek-speaking Egyptians to the Ptolemies is evident in the fact that Greek teachers were eventually given tax breaks, presumably to incentivize the practice of their trade.

McCoskey describes these efforts as an exercise in cultural assimilation, not unlike those carried out by colonial regimes in the 19th century. The evidence, however, suggests that the active promotion of Greek culture was largely limited to the realm of language, and even then not as an attempt to replace Egyptian but to complement it. Most Egyptian institutions were left untouched, even when they existed in parallel to Greek ones. For example, a dual legal system of Greek and Egyptian courts was operated throughout the period. In Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt, Naphtali Lewis asserts that the traditional understanding of Ptolemaic Egypt as a cultural melting-pot that largely synthesized Greek and Egyptian cultures is inaccurate, and that “in Hellenistic Egypt such mutual [cultural] influences were minimal”. Even such minimal influences, however, flowed both ways. The Ptolemies certainly went out of their way to "assimilate" themselves into the Egyptian image of kingship by adopting all kinds of Egyptian styles and symbols to represent themselves. Thus, it is an exaggeration to describe the limited promotion of Greek language as a colonial attempt at cultural assimilation. Considering the equally limited, but clearly visible adoption of aspects of Egyptian culture by Greeks, the relation between the two groups is more symmetrical and complex than it seems.

Still, keep in mind education remained a privately funded endeavor, available only to those who could afford it. In particular, access to the services of a rhetor, a teacher of rhetoric, deliberation, and public speaking at the final stage of Greek education, was extremely limited and only available to the upper classes of Greco-Egyptian society.

Another aspect of Ptolemaic Egypt that is prone to misinterpretation as a racist practice is the system of land tenure. Most of the land in Ptolemaic Egypt fell into one of three categories: state (royal) land, temple land, and cleruchic land allotments. State land was controlled directly by the king, and would be either worked directly or temporarily leased to tenants. Temples operated like economic institutions, working and leasing the land under their control. Finally, individual land allotments were given to Greek military settlers (i.e. cleruchs) as reward for their service. In one particular village of the Fayyum region in the second century CE, about half the land was owned by the state, one third by cleruchs, and one twentieth by temples. Thus, the vast majority of the land was controlled by the Greek state and Greek settlers. The only way to gain private control of land was through military service in the Ptolemaic army, which was not open to Egyptians until 217BCE. McCoskey points out that “the majority of Egyptians, labored on the land as tenant farmers, taking leases either from the crown of from the Greek cleruchs” and as such, they were responsible for taxes on the land, but were given little opportunity to amass economic advantages. Even when Egyptians were admitted to cleruchic status, they were given lesser plots of 5 to 30 arouras (1 urora = roughly 0.275 hectares), whereas Greek infantrymen had been given 20 to 40 arouras. In a landscape where agriculture was the main economic activity, this system of land tenure seems to place most Egyptians in a position of economic disadvantage and vulnerability relative to their Greek landlords.

Whether or not this system is evidence of racial discrimination, however, is an entirely different matter. To begin with, McCoskey ignores the fact that there was no such thing as private ownership of land in Ptolemaic Egypt. While control over some land and the right to exploit it was delegated to cleruchs, it did not cease to be crown property. This fundamental aspect of the system of land tenure is reflected in the literal meaning of the word κληροῦχος (cleruchos), which refers to a lot holder, not owner. The development of a true “aristocracy” was checked by the king’s prerogative, as the nominal owner of all land in Egypt, to take back and redistribute cleruchic land allotments as it best served the interests of the state.

Even as land holders, though, it would be naïve to completely deny that Greek cleruchs found themselves at a position of economic advantage over tenant farmers who did not own or control the land they worked. This position was not, however, an arbitrary consequence of their Greek identity, but entirely a reward for military service. Even though at first, all cleruchs were Greek, not all Greeks were cleruchs. The Greek population of Egypt included a large number of civilians who, in stark contrast to military settlers, immigrated and made a living essentially on their own way. Lewis mentions out that “those who came to Ptolemaic Egypt for employment in the armed forces… were processed by agents and officers of the crown the moment they set foot on Egyptian soil”, but also that “if there was an immigration and naturalization service through which the [other] new arrivals had to pass on reaching Egypt, there is no hint of it in the sources”. Lacking access to state land grants, they sought profit and social advancement through alternative means in the public and private sectors. Making use of their preexisting wealth and skills, they occupied themselves as shopkeepers, bankers, industrialists, merchants, moneylenders, shippers, private tax farmers, landholders’ middlemen, and public servants. Some, no doubt, found success, but, as Lewis points out, “for many the new Eldorado on the Nice turned out to be a land of false promise and deluded hopes… never [rising] out of the ranks of the poor, eking out their existences in the same menial, lowly occupations and the Egyptians”. Racism, by its institutional nature, permeates through the ranks of society and intersects the identities of its members to privilege a given group across the board. Thus, a comparison Greek and Egyptian civilians ceteris paribus provides no evidence that the Ptolemaic state was racist. On the contrary, it supports an interpretation of the cleruch’s privilege as a consequence of their occupation as soldiers rather than their identity as Greeks.

(TBC)

A follow up, or perhabs an example of how this term applies.

Let's say i'm a an african slave in the holy land when the first crusade comes around. i'm a part of a household that a french noble takes/steals/however you want to phrase it. i was a muslim but convert to christhianity and learn french. the noble frees me but i still serve him and i come with him to france, let's say somewhere near nice. I settle down with a farm a few years later with a socially appropriate wife.

When my neighbours meet me, do they see a frenchman? do they see an african? does it matter more that i used to be muslim or that i am black? will my children be considered as french as their playmates?

I know this is an insanely specific example but whenever i hear that race is a modern construct i think of someone like this. i can't believe that medieval peasants would see a black man and just see another frenchman with a bit of tan but not a member of another "race." wouldn't they think: I mean yeah, after all he's been through he's as french(whatever that meant or didn't mean at the time) as me, but clearly we are different.

Racial theorist and historian chiming in:

As some others have pointed out, there have been various means of group categorization and separation throughout history. That said, race as a specific means of categorization only dates back to around the mid 1600's. Now, one might say isn't this only a case of "same thing, different name" to which I would reply, not at all because the cultural logic of how people have divided themselves and the active response to that cultural logic are worlds apart. Race isn't the only method of categorization or separation that is tied to social hierarchy and violence, but it is a great example of how a method of categorization can be intrinsically more tied to those things through it's history and nature.

In the English speaking world, the word, "race," and the concept go through extremely rapid changes between 1600 and 1700. If you were to talk to most English speaking people, well into the middle of the 17th century, "race" referred to one's lineage, but specifically ties to royalty. At the same time, various Early Modern thinkers, faced with growing globalism and information about other peoples (through exploration and imperialism), begin to solidify theories about what separates and defines these various people and their cultures. The emphasis of this early theorization is on climate and temperature.

Prior to the mid 1600's, in the English speaking world, the desirable temperature to be associated with a person would be heat. Men were thought of as fiery, passionate, and driven while women were conceived as cold and passive. By the late 1600's these temperatures get flipped with men becoming cold, logical, and controlled and women becoming hot, emotional, and prone to affect. In particular, this idea of being prone to affect was tied to climate and temperature. The thought was that anyone living in a warmer climate was more prone to barbarism, violence, and lust (which were characteristics ascribed to non-European peoples in varying degrees) and that more inherently "cold" people (more masculine people and people from further North) are less susceptible to the dangers of warm climates. Interestingly, in this theorization of temperature and climate, there is a sense of gradation even throughout Europe (the the cold, rainy Englishmen being in an ideal balance, according to themselves at least, followed by the slightly more lusty French, the fiery Mediterraneans, and then the various levels of barbarity ascribed to non Europeans).

Looking at the English literature leading into the early 18th century, we see a lot of anxiety around people who travel to and live in the growingly colonized, global south. In particular, English writers and thinkers are very worried about what will happen to the already "hot" temperaments of women when they are brought to live in the tropics. At the same time, conceptions of the inherent separation between people from the different climates are intensifying. Not surprisingly, this intensification runs alongside the growth and development of the Transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery (there are a lot of different arguments happening between the mid 1600's and mid 1700's about how and where chattel slavery is justifiable, with religion and "civilization" being central focuses). Nonetheless, race as we think of it now isn't solidified. Within the 1688 novel, "Oroonoko; or the Royal Slave," we see not only a heroic depiction of the titular, enslaved Akan prince, but also the use of the word "race" to refer just to his royal lineage and not his African origin. Not just that, but throughout the book, Oroonoko is described as being inherently better than even sympathetic European characters. I provide this last point to say that even as late as 1688, there is enough similarity acknowledged between African and European peoples that African royalty is put, in some way, on par with European royalty (at least insofar as these royals are compared to commoners). This is unthinkable within later conceptions of the separation between European whites and African blacks as being a deeply biological one.

All this is a long-winded way to describe the precursor concepts to race and build up to the major ideological and scientific developments of the 19th century with Darwin and evolution. What I would point out as important from all of this is the difference in the meaning of race prior to the 17th century, the evolving proto-biological, proto-anthropological conception of bodies, temperature, and climate, and the role of conversation around the burgeoning slave trade and the effort to seek explanations for why chattel slavery is good or at least justifiable. With these conversations in place, we can see how Darwin's theories about biology and evolution provide the thinkers of the time with a mold to give shape to these various ideas swirling around geography, environment, biology, and culture. What we have in the end is a sort of chicken-egg situation in which there are a lot of ideas floating around, there are a lot of historical developments occurring (with globalism and the emergence of chattel slavery), science as a mode of exploration and a method for developing categorical logics is becoming solidified, and race (and the general conception of human bodies) changes and explodes out in the middle of all of that.

So, in response to the initial question: yes, Coates's assertion is accurate. Race, as a concept, is the historically traceable product of various ideologies, assumptions, beliefs, prejudices, and desires which are tied to the development of chattel slavery and European imperialism.

Here I draw heavily on ideas from a jumble contemporary theorists of the 17th century, most notably Roxann Wheeler (I mostly do contemporary work and sadly I am having trouble finding any of my notes from my exploration of the early development of race). There is also probably a little bit in there from Orlando Patterson's exploration of slavery as a concept, although it's role is as some sort of trickle down, distant thing.

A follow up question. When. Ahmad ibn Fadlan PDF!

is describing the Rus/Vikings, to modern ears he does sound quite, well racist.

How is that viewed by historians in this context. I doubt that he would have been overly enjoyed if his daughter came home with his rus-boyfriend.

I highly recommend The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. The first part of the book looks at "race" and how it applied to Roman and Greek culture.

For the record, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been talking about this idea for a long time, and is actually borrowing it from two main sources: Racecraft, by Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, and American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund S. Morgan.

You can find some of his initial writings about these works [here] (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/08/virginia/23491/) and here. The gist of these works is that "race" as it is thought of in America was created via policy to enable and then justify slavery.

As a reading recommendation, I have heard excellent things about the book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Fields & Fields. The title comes from the idea that Race was constructed out of racism, in a manner similar to witchcraft during the Salem Witch trials -- first people decided that witches existed, then they set out to prove they were right in an unscientific/unfalsifiable manner. Ideas of race and racial inequality were constructed in a similar way. It's on my reading list, but I haven't actually finished it yet, so anyone who has, I'd love to know if you liked it.

This thread is very nice, so much information. Thank you guys.