World History: Science and Racism

Phrenology from Types of Mankind (1854) by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon

Discrimination and prejudice have unfortunately been a constant throughout human history. However, a new form of racism emerged in the nineteenth century - scientific racism. Scientific racism emerged partially from the discrimination that characterised older forms of racism, and from new ideas; it is also important to note that older forms of racism did not disappear with the advent of scientific racism. For example, the Nazi paper Der Stürmer in the early-1930s recycled centuries old stories of the 'blood libel' to rile up hatred against Jews. Today we will look at the emergence of scientific racism, how racism pervaded society, eugenics, and how it still shapes today. I should add some caveats to this - I will largely discussing racism in the past, contemporary racism deserves its own blog post. As a white person I cannot experience racism, so I cannot adequately discuss modern racism, but I would recommend reading up on it - a personal recommendation is Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Rene Eddo-Lodge. This post will only look briefly at structural racism - readers must bear in mind that structural racism is too great a topic to be discussed in such a small blog post. I am also referencing the Wordpress of a friend of mine who is a fantastic researcher and writer - her website will be linked at the end and I highly recommend reading it.

Racism before the 1800s - A Very Concise Overview

Historically, racism and discrimination has been tied up with representations of the 'Other' - differing identities were regularly viewed with suspicion and, at times, outright contempt. The Ancient Greeks referred to anyone who was not Greek as 'barbarian', and until the late-nineteenth century China and Japan did as well. In the sixteenth-century the Luochong Lu (Record of Naked Creatures) was published in China which depicted non-Chinese peoples in pejorative terms - due to strained relations with Japan the Japanese were referred to as 'dwarf bandits'. The entry on 'the Huns' could have come straight from a nineteenth-century anthropological text: 

This breed comprises five types. One, with yellow hair, from a mountain ghost and a cow. One, short-necked, stout and fat, was born of the juejia-ape and a wild hog. [. . .] Since Shemo killed the chief of the A’nuo tribe with his own hands, to this day they perform human sacrifice to their banner. Their customs set in archery and killing. They worship the Zoroastrian god, and do not maintain ancestral temples. They carve felt into icons, and put these onto fur bags. Whenever they take actions, they smear the icons with butter.

When the book was published in Japan, as Ikoko monogatari, the section on Japan was heavily edited to remove the discriminatory descriptions of Japan. Nicholas Dirks has further argued that one of the possible reasons why Dalits, the so-called 'untouchables', emerged outside the caste system in India was due to their ancestors being stateless peoples who migrated to India. Meanwhile, in the Christian and Islamic worlds the religious Other became subject to demonisation - calling for the First Crusade in 1095 Pope Urban II declared that 'an alien people, a race completely foreign to God...has invaded Christian territory'. Another spark of anti-Judaism broke out thanks to the Crusades. As Jews were excluded from Christian hegemonic structures they were seen as subversive elements working against Christianity. Jews were massacred by crusading armies, and until the 1700s Jewish communities faced regular pogroms and expulsions (such as from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492). Myths that Jews were poisoning wells and the 'blood libel', where Jews would use the blood of kidnapped children to make Passover matzah, were used to justify pogroms. 

Religious discrimination could, in theory, end thanks to conversion. However, European expansion helped influence a change in this. In 1514 in a letter Martin Luther wrote that Jews could never truly become Christians unless told to by God, and the Spanish Inquisition from 1492 heavily scrutinised conversios, converted Muslims and Jews, as their conversion was seen as not being complete. Thanks to European expansion physical attributes started to increasingly emerge as reasons for discrimination. Francis Drake described the people of Batjan in the Moluccas as 'comely in body and stature...The men go naked, saving their heads and privities' while Christopher Columbus in 1492 focused on the physical characteristics of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. 'Savage', 'barbarian', and 'cannibal' regularly appeared in texts, and, as expected, faith was used as a justification. Discrimination based on skin colour had emerged in the Arabic world thanks to slavery, and it did so with the European world. The enslavement of black Africans was justified by using the story of Ham, as Ham had look on Noah's nakedness he and his descendants were cursed to a life of slavery. Black Africans were described as the descendants of Ham, so their enslavement was not a sin. The Spanish Empire, and Spain itself, developed the theory of limpia sangria - cleanliness of blood. Entry into higher institutes of society - such as universities - in the 1700s were barred if their blood was deemed 'impure' - if you had Jewish or Muslim ancestors in Spain, or indigenous or African in the Americas this could mean that you were 'impure'. Meanwhile, what could be classed as positive were still steeped in racism thanks to the 'noble savage' trope - Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan about indigenous Americans, Jacques Cartier about the Iroquois, and Michel de Montaigne about the Tupinamba are good examples of this. Colonised peoples could be 'noble' but they still were viewed as 'savage' or 'uncivilised'. 

The Emergence of Scientific Racism

An example of racial classification used by pseudo-scientists

Thanks to the European Enlightenments what we can call 'scientific racism' emerged. There were continuities between older forms of racism and the new scientific racism - white, Christian Northern Europeans put themselves as being 'superior' to other peoples, but this was based on biological factors over faith. As argued by Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, 'Ideas of savagery, barbarism and civilisation predetermined the space that the idea of "race" occupied, but were themselves reconstituted by it'. Several of the early racial scientists did not view their work as contradicting Biblical teaching, but rather reaffirming it. A noted example of this was French naturalist Georges Cuvier who argued that there were three races, (Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian), which could be classified by beauty and 'quality of civilisation'. He argued that Adam and Eve were Caucasian so the other 'races' were therefore deviations and inferior. What made scientific racism different from earlier forms of racism was a focus on physical characteristics, as well as culture and behaviour, to distinguish between 'races'. In late eighteenth-century Germany, Peter Camper claimed that facial angle could distinguish 'races'. Phrenology, the measuring of skulls and skull shape, became a central part of new forms of racism and a justification for empire. Scottish lawyer George Combe in A System of Phrenology (1830) emphasised the shape of the skull to justify British rule in India. He wrote that 'the Hindoo head is small, and the European large...The Hindoo brain indicates a manifest deficiency in the organs of Combativeness and Destructiveness; while in the European, these parts are developed.' Meanwhile, Samuel Morton filled skulls with seeds to determine brain capacity which he argued could classify five 'races' (Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American, and Ethiopian) which were divided further into 'families'. The classification of animal life by Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus, who himself tried to classify human 'races', was very influential to phrenology.

One of the most influential use of phrenology was Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. Often considered the 'Father of Criminal Anthropology' Lombroso argued that skull shape and size could characterise criminal tendencies in people. Instead of focusing on actual causes of crime, namely environmental and economic factors, Lombroso argued it was purely genetics. Thicker foreheads, curled hair, larger noses, and broad jaws were seen as characteristics of criminality - of course these fed into racist and antisemitic discourses. In a 1895 lecture in Turin Lombroso discussed so-called 'savage' children he had studied and stated that 'they have extraordinary anomalies of the face and of the skull, asymmetry, macrocephaly, exaggeration of the length or breadth, strabismus, ears badly placed or too large, enormous jaws, bad conformation of the teeth...'. Lombroso's theories were soon combined with eugenics and influenced Nazi racial policies. Believing that chronic unemployment, criminality, prostitution, and mental illness were inherited the Nazis would sterilise, and later outright murder, those deemed Untermensch. 

Darwin and Social Darwinism

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution would prove greatly influential in forming scientific racism. In The Origins of Species (1859) Darwin discussed his theory, although he would not be the first to argue this. Using evidence from his travels on the HMS. Beagle to the Galapagos Islands Darwin argued that animal species, or 'races', adapted to environments over generations; those with genes best suited to an environment survived to reproduce and evolved into new species. He never actually argued for 'Survival of the Fittest', instead Darwin argued that 'It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change'. In The Origins of Species Darwin never discussed the evolution of humanity, but he did so in The Descent of Man (1871). Naturally, Darwin's theory was immediately controversial as it contradicted the Book of Genesis, and religious figures scoffed at the idea that humanity could be descended from a similar ancestor to apes. However, racial scientists adopted Darwin's idea and changed it, most notably Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term 'Survival of the Fittest'. Spencer asserted that 'races' were in a struggle for survival where the 'lesser' would naturally disappear thanks to an inability to compete. There are debates about whether Darwin himself was a social Darwinist. In line with social Darwinists he argued that there were lesser and higher 'races', but he argued these 'races' constituted one species and that 'disappearance' of 'lesser races' was unnatural. This was partially thanks to the genocide and extinction of indigenous Tasmanians. British settlers waged a genocidal war against Tasmanians, quoting Darwin 'Death pursues the native in every place where the European sets foot', resulting in indigenous Tasmanians being murdered en masse. Social Darwinism would influence eugenics and governmental policies - especially in Latin America. Brazilian educators from the 1890s to the 1940s implemented school check-ups and meals not for altruistic reasons, but to seemingly 'uplift' the population. Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Brazil further encouraged Northern European migration hoping that it would 'save' their nations from 'racial backwardness'. Argentina went as far as to hide statistics on the population of Afro-Argentinians with the belief that by making it seem a 'white nation' compared to its neighbours it could encourage more migration. When the US barred entry to Chinese and Japanese communities Latin America welcomed them, again not for altruism, but rather, as they were deemed 'white' so could 'uplift' the country.

Social Darwinists at the end of the nineteenth century would directly inspire the Nazis, and would castigate earlier ones for not being racist enough. Two noted ones were Joseph Arthur, the Comte de Gobineau, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races Gobineau argued that 'races' were inseparable barriers and that 'racial mixing' would bring down European civilisation. He also applied the term 'Aryans' to Germans, and argued that they were superior to other 'races'. Meanwhile, Houston Stewart Chamberlain in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1897) would combine German nationalism, virulent antisemitism, Aryan supremacy in a highly influential book that would greatly inspire the Nazis. Chamberlain himself would become a close associate with Hitler. Gobineau and Chamberlain argued that culture was a product of race, so 'superior races' had to dominate society. Social Darwinism shaped how race was understood. For example, anti-Judaism evolved into antisemitism as it was argued that Jews were not just a religion apart, but a race apart - part of a newly invented 'Semitic people'. The idea that apes like gorillas and orangutans are 'missing links' stemmed from white supremacy; it was believed that non-white peoples reproduced with apes influencing their evolution. Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Irish were also seen as being 'inferior' by white supremacists - they toed the line between acceptability and inferiority in their eyes. Modern beauty standards developed from this - emphasis on white skin, blond hair, straight hair, petite bodies in women, and small noses were based off of racial stereotypes. Darker skin, curly hair, and broad noses were associated with 'undesirable races', like Jews and Africans, so were seen as 'uglier'. In the 1940s the winner of Miss Africa had to dress according to European beauty standards in order to win. As a result, we see this continued today - lighter skinned people of colour are more likely to be rated attractive compared to those with darker skin, I would recommend watching this video here about it. 

Eugenics

Schloss Hartheim, a centre used by the Nazis to euthanise mentally ill patients as part of their eugenics programme

First coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in the 1880s it was an idea that societies could be improved by carefully selecting who could, and could not, reproduce. Gobineau and Chamberlain believed that interracial relations were degenerating humanity, and American white supremacist Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) recommended segregating 'inferior races' to protect the racial hygiene of the 'Nordic race'. Unsurprisingly, Hitler was a great admirer of Grant. In Germany Alfred Ploetz coined the term Rassenhygiene (race hygiene) in order to explain his support for eugenics. The idea of Volk, people, developed in Germany as part of post-unification nationalism - if Germany was to survive its people had to be built-up. A big reason for this was the emancipation of German Jews - Jews were seen as alien subversives threatening to undermine Germany, so 'true' Germans had to be defended. This idea was not limited to Germany. Japan from the 1910s began adopting eugenicist ideas, such as confining the mentally ill, and by the 1930s, with fascism in full swing, a section of the Imperial Army emerged, called the Imperial Way, declaring that as Japan was so pure it did not need modern weaponry. The British working class were seen as being degenerate, backward, and inferior thanks to poor living conditions, and instead of being blamed on conditions created through industrial capitalism it was, in turn, blamed on genes. This is best seen in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) - millennia in the future the upper classes have evolved into the beautiful work-shy Eloi living in a utopia, while the working classes have evolved into the troglodyte subterranean Morlocks. Eugenicists argued that certain types of people - namely disabled, mixed-race, mentally ill, unemployed, homosexuals etc. - could pass on their 'deficiencies' to future generations degenerating society. Ann Stoler has particularly emphasised the importance of eugenics in colonial empires during the early-twentieth century. Relations between colonisers and the colonised were seen as polluting society, and mixing concrete racial barriers. Mixed race children in French Indochina were referred to as 'the fruits of a regrettable weakness'. Dehumanisation involved in eugenics resulted in horrific abuses in the name of 'racial purity' - across the world those deemed 'inferior' could be subjected to sterilisation. Over 60,000 mentally ill people were sterilised in the US from 1907 to 1963, most were in California which influenced the Nazi policy of sterilisation. 

The Dreyfus Affair - A Case Study in Antisemitism

The degredation of Dreyfus

From the 1880s antisemitism saw a resurgence across Europe. The British press demonised Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, Karl Luger became mayor of Vienna based on a campaign of anti-Jewish rhetoric, and in Germany's 'Culture Wars' antisemitism became a tool to identify German identity. As argued by Miles and Brown, as the Jews were perceived as stateless they were seen as wanting to betray their country - whether as a greedy capitalist pulling the strings, or a radical socialist wanting to overthrow the state. A case study of this is the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 French Alsatian captain Alfred Dreyfus, a man of Jewish descent, was convicted on flimsy grounds of treason - someone had been selling secrets to Germany and he got the blame. He seemed the perfect scapegoat - he was Alsatian, which had been annexed by Germany in 1871, and as he was Jewish he was seen as a subversive. Dreyfus was sent to prison on Devil's Island in French Guyana where he would spend over five years alone. The Dreyfus Affair would drag on until Dreyfus was finally acquitted in 1904, but in doing so it split France in two and caused an outpouring of antisemitism. Dreyfus's family had kept up the campaign to exonerate their relative, and another court case in 1896 revealed found conclusive evidence that Major Ferdinand Esterhauzy was to blame, but the military command swept it under the rug. In 1898 famous French writer and thinker Emile Zola published J'accuse...! condemning the military and bringing the Affair to public attention. France was split between the pro-military, pro-Catholic, and conservative Anti-Dreyfusards and the secular, pro-republic Dreyfusards; antisemitism became commonplace in France as a result. Following Zola's publication antisemitic riots broke out in 20 cities, causing deaths in Algiers, and new papers emerged riling up hatred against Jews. One notable one was by noted anti-Dreyfusard Edouard Drumont and his paper La Libre Parole. Drumont's Jewish France (1886) sold 150,000 copies in its first year alone. In 1904 Dreyfus was finally freed but as he was so long in isolation he struggled to speak. The Dreyfus Affair had showed how quickly antisemitism could spread in society - for this reason one of Zionism's modern 'founders', Theordor Herzl, started arguing that Jews would never be welcome in Europe so had to have their own state. 

Sara Baartman - A Case Study in Race, Science, and Sex

Sara Baartman on display in the Museum of Man

I want to briefly focus on the case of Sara Baartman, sometimes you might see her referred to as Saartjie Baartman, and I would recommend reading my friend's post about her. Of Khoisan descent, born around 1789, Baartman was enslaved from her home in what is now South Africa and sold to British surgeon Alexander Dunlop. Baartman had a condition named steatopygia which caused her buttocks to become enlarged, for this reason Dunlop had her put on display in 'freak shows' and advertised her as the 'Hottentot Venus' (after the famous Venus statuettes). She was subjected to horrific and degrading public performances for jeering crowds in London before being sold to a Parisian animal showcaser in 1814. In Paris she was forced to pose, often semi-naked with animals including rhinos. Naturalist Georges Cuvier started 'studying' Baartman producing naked illustrations of her, and when she tragically died her body was put on display in the Museum of Man until 1973. It took until 2003, even then after seven years of demands, for Baartman's body to be returned to South Africa. Baartman's objectification shows the combination of race, science, and sex during the colonial era. The only parts of Baartman's body to be preserved was her skeleton, her brain, and her genitals. As argued by Edward Said, the Other became the Other because those with power could make it an Other, it could be objectified and commodified for European imagination. Her treatment in life was exemplary of this - forced into freak shows and human zoos Baartman, and other colonised peoples, were compared to animals to be studied. Khoisan were argued to be one of the most 'inferior races' and closest to animals according to racial scientists - gorillas were believed to reproduce Khoisan women. Obsession with phrenology meant that Baartman's brain was preserved; it could be used in pseudo-science to prove that Khoisan were closer to apes than humans, so their subjugation was justified. Unfortunately, Sara Baartman was not the only person to be subjected to this. Freak shows were common across Europe and America displaying so-called 'freaks' for a paying public, one of the most famous ones being the freak show in P.T. Barnum's circus, and human zoos regularly displayed colonised cultures in Britain, France, Germany, and even Japan. One of the last Tasmanians, Trugianini, asked to be cremated so her body could not be examined - instead in 1878 her skeleton was put on display.

An advert for Baartman in London

A key part in racism is the sexualisation of ethnic minorities. Edward Said has discussed how European art regularly depicted the Islamic world as being hedonistic where orgies took place in every harem. Colonial empires regularly saw sexualised racial violence against women - concubinage was encouraged in Dutch Indonesia until the early-twentieth century, and Japan extensively used Korean and Chinese women (as well as some Japanese women) as 'comfort women' during the Second World War. Baartman's sexualisation is part of this, as argued by Anne McClintock colonialism was tied with a 'long tradition of male travel as an erotics of ravishment'. Sexuality and sex were tied with race, the Khoisan were regularly subjected to demeaning searches and questions about their genitals, and Cuvier was determined to examine Baartman's labia. She refused, but he eagerly examined her genitals when she died, and a plaster cast of her half-naked body, with her buttocks exposed, was put on display in the Museum of Man. In a voyeuristic way Cuvier only decided that Khoisan were the same species as Europeans when he examined her labia.

Empire and Capitalism

An advert for 'Monkey Brand' soap

Racism was integral to empire, as we saw when we discussed colonialism. Empires throughout history have used racism as a way to structure society - the colonisers, whether they be Roman or French or Japanese, would impose their own identity and culture onto the colonised. In the European, American, and Japanese Empires an idea of superiority - in both culture and race - were used to justify colonialism. Japan's conquest of Korea, Taiwan, and northern China was justified in social Darwinistic terms; if Japan did not secure East Asia Europe or America would and that would endanger Asian civilisation. A perception that colonised peoples were inferior linked to empire, colonialism had to happen in order to 'protect' the colonised. This is shown in Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899) about the US conquest of the Philippines containing the lines, 

'Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild —

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.'

Colonial empires regularly imposed racial hierarchies arguing that certain 'races' were naturally superior to others, this would lead to disaster when empire fell. German, and later Belgian, colonisers in Rwanda declared that the Tutsi and Hutu were separate races - some historians, like Martin Meredith, have argued that the Hutu-Tutsi distinction may have originally been a class one - and that the Tutsi were predisposed to rule. The stoking of animosity between Hutu and Tutsi would spill over into ethnic cleansing following independence and genocide in 1994. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, empire justified itself as 'white men saving brown women from brown men' - men of colour were regularly portrayed as sexual predators enslaving their women. This was often used to justify intervention in private lives of the colonised, and also to control the bodies of women. Diana Jeater has discussed how in Nigeria British authorities worked with local chiefs to limit the movement of single women. Interracial relations were viewed with suspicion. 'Black Perils' in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia broke out in the 1920s and 1930s based on an unfounded fear that black African men would rape white women. In New Guinea the White Women's Protection Ordinance of 1926 imposed the death penalty for rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a non-white man, however, the law did not apply to the rape of non-white women by white men or men of colour. Women were seen as the point of 'racial degeneration' showing the intersection of sexism and racism. Racial depictions of colonised peoples were regularly imported to Europe. For example, black Africans were often depicted as being ape-like which were often applied to the Irish in the 1890s, and the British working-class were compared to apes in a similar light.

This brings us to the commodification of racism. Anne McClintock has written an interesting book, Imperial Leather, about how soap was used to sell imperial racism. A good example is Pears' Soap which depicted their soap as bringing cleanliness and civilisation to Africa. McClintock identified four main fetishes appearing in soap adverts: the soap itself, white clothing, mirrors, and monkeys. In the 1880s 'Monkey Brand' soap depicted working-class children - coded to create a link with Africa - being half-child, half-monkey using the soap and becoming a white child. The depiction of Africa of dirty and undomesticated was used to legitimise violent enforcement of European culture and commodity capitalism. In 1899 McClure's Magazine during the Anglo-Boer War ran an advert stating that 'The first step towards lightening THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. PEARS' SOAP is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilisation advances'. Timothy Burke has further discussed how Lux soap and Lifebuoy in what is now Zimbabwe advertised itself as being modern and hygienic to Africans, directly implying that European hygienic practices were superior to that of Africa. In 1873 Florence Kate Upton created the golliwog, a racist caricature of a black man featuring exaggerated hair, smiles and in minstrel attire, was adopted in advertisements to sell racism. Golliwogs appeared on a wide range of products ranging from children's dolls to jam to sell a non-threatening racial stereotype to a white consumer. Of course, white supremacy was explicitly sold. D.W. Griffiths's The Birth of a Nation (1915) glamorised the Ku Klux Klan (and led to the rise of the second KKK); postcards were sold of lynched African-Americans in the 1920s; and as late as the 1960s British pubs tried to attract patrons by displaying signs reading 'No dogs, no blacks, no Irish'. During the aforementioned Dreyfus Affair papers used antisemitism to appeal to the anti-Dreyfusard crowd. Today racism sells - white beauty standards sells plastic surgery and skin-lightening products reinforcing centuries old racism.

Conclusion

The impact of scientific racism touches society today. The legacies of eugenics, racist advertising, and segregation continues to impact communities. It took the horrors of the Holocaust for racial science to be discredited, and even then it continues to impact communities. In 1994 Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve used pseudo-science and outright false information to try and argue that there were intellectual differences between 'races'. Nineteenth and early-twentieth century racism shapes how people of colour are perceived today: depictions of black men as aggressive continue as people argue that more communities experience more crime as they are more violent; beauty commercials feature light-skinned models; Brazilian clinics offer more money for white sperm donations compared to non-white donations; and in 2015 ninety percent of Roma in Britain reported facing racial abuse. Authorities have reported that antisemitic speech is on the rise worldwide based off of Twitter and Facebook posts; and we have seen several racially motivated mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the Christchurch mosque shooting, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and the recent El Paso shooting. We have only touched a small fraction of racism's impact today. As my focus is on Europe, Latin America, and Africa we have not looked at how racism manifests itself in Australasia and Asia which adds another layer of complexity. We have also not discussed institutional racism which pervades societies worldwide. It is a true tragedy that racism is so pervading in history that we have only scraped the surface today.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Ann Stoler, 'Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures', American Ethnologist, 16:4, (1989), 634-660

-Timothy Burke, '"Sunlight Soap has Changed my Life": Hygiene, Commodification, and the Body in Colonial Zimbabwe', in Hildi Hendrickson, (ed.), Clothing and Difference, (Durham, NC: 2012), 189-212

-Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (London: 1995)

-Diana Jeater, 'The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century', in Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins, (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford: 2004)

-Justin Parkinson, 'The Significance of Sarah Baartman', BBC News Magazine, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35240987, (7 January 2016), [Accessed 08/08/2019]

-Sadiah, Qureshi, 'Displaying Sara Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus"', History of Science, 42:2 (2004), 233-257

-George Combe, A System of Phrenology, (London: 1830)

-Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: 1978)

-Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe: 1870–2000, (London: 2001)

-Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, Racism, Second Edition, (New York, NY: 2003)

-Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West, (Baltimore, MD: 1996)

-Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, (Cambridge: 2008)

-Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West, (Cambridge: 2009)

-'Social Darwinism', In Our Time, BBC, (20/02/2014)

-'The Dreyfus Affair', In Our Time, BBC, (08/10/2009)

-Carissa Chew, 'Science, Race, and Empire: The Case of Sara Baartman (c.1789-1815)', Carissa Chew, https://carissachew.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/sara-baartman/, [Accessed 05/08/2019]

-Carissa Chew, 'Science, Race, and Empire: The Search for the “Missing Link”', Carissa Chew, https://carissachew.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/science-race-and-empire-the-search-for-the-missing-link/, [Accessed 05/08/2019]

Thank you for reading. I would highly recommend reading Carissa's website here, she is one of the best writers I know so check her work out. For other World History posts we have a list here here, and next time we will look at the origins of modern nationalism. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.