BIOGRAPHY OF A DANGEROUS IDEA

A wide-ranging study of the development of the idea that there is more than one human race.

Many books have examined the history of the Enlightenment and the fascination of its foremost exponents with classification schemes of all kinds: An entire academic subindustry, in that regard, surrounds the work of Michel Foucault. Wesleyan University scholar Curran extends his history two centuries earlier, into the French 17th century and the promulgation by King Louis XIV of the Code Noir, or “Black Code,” a set of laws for use in governing France’s Caribbean colonies and its scores of thousands of enslaved people. Those laws were not just about keeping the enslaved under control, writes Curran: They built on an anthropological theory that “advanced” races, especially the French, had a duty to govern and civilize the ostensibly degenerate nonwhite rest. More than that, Curran adds, Louis also wanted to become “Europe’s foremost Catholic monarch,” and for this he needed a rigidly ordered Catholic population, whether born so or forced to convert. From travelers such as François Bernier, who was “fascinated by the different types (and colors) of humans he encountered” during a 13-year sojourn in Asia, and scientists such as Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, the count Buffon, Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume built schemata to explain national character. These became ever more hierarchical in time, such that, in Hume’s words, “there scarcely ever was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Although it could have been extended even further to account for the later prevalence of social Darwinism and the proto-Nazism of Arthur de Gobineau, Curran’s long but fluent narrative closes with Thomas Jefferson, who “accepted the racialization of humanity” even while recognizing the fundamental injustice of slavery.

A useful addition to the history of race and racism.