Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
In their own gradual and consensual fashion, the British
also moved during the first half of the nineteenth century
to provide legal and political equality for Jews. Britain thus
escaped the full brunt of “the Jewish question” that agitated
the Continent, especially the German states. 26
Ethnological discourse in the early to mid–nineteenth
century focused more than before on the question of
whether human beings were “of one blood,” as the New
Testament proclaimed, or three to five separately created
species with greatly differing aptitudes and capacities. Scientific
racism of the explicitly or implicitly polygenetic kind
did not take hold in England until after the mid–nineteenth
century, mainly because of the strength of evangelical
Christianity and its commitment to the belief that all
human beings descended from Adam. James Cowles Prichard,
the leading British ethnologist of the early nineteenth
century, was a staunch proponent of monogenesis, but he
nevertheless rejected the climatic theory of racial differentiation
that had been so favored during the Enlightenment.
He argued instead that changes in the physical and mental
characteristics of the races were by-products of a civilizing
process that Europeans had undergone, but that most darkskinned
peoples had not. 27 While such a theory might not
justify slavery, it was compatible with imperial expansion
based on the belief that Europeans were embarked on a
“civilizing mission.” French ethnology was more open to
polygenesis, and the belief that the color-coded races were
separate and unequal species of the genus Homo gained substantial
credibility between 1800 and 1850. 28 On the other
side of the Atlantic, an “American School of Ethnology,”
which came to prominence in the 1840s and 1850s, pro-
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