Race: The Early Modern English Case

This chapter engages with what has become known in recent scholarship as ‘race before race’. It focuses on the question of whether supposedly inherent differences between human populations were discerned prior to the Enlightenment and the advent of biological science and racialism. As much as early modern bodies were considered beholden both to the environment (and therefore thought liable to change) and to Christian doctrine (and thus believed ultimately inconsequential to salvation), they were the substrate upon which a fundamental inequality had come to rest: the division between the governors and governed; the elite and the plebeian. Supposedly natural and abiding, this distinction was one which people were, paradoxically, not only to recognize readily but also deliberately foster. Consequently, European expansion, dependent as it was on settler colonialism and chattel slavery, witnessed the elaboration of an embodied, racial prejudice rather than its creation de novo.