Chapter 2: Historical Origins

“If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on
one cheek’, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
dirt.”
– Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1

Racism hasn’t always existed. It’s not inborn. It’s not instinctive. We’re not naturally hostile
to people who have different skin pigment. History has recorded countless instances of people
overcome more by curiosity than hostility when encountering other societies for the first time.
In fact, in the long view of history, racism hasn’t been around very long at all. The whole
notion of seeing skin colour and other purely physical differences as differences of race – with
all the entailing social and cultural baggage – was socially manufactured under the pressure of
very particular historical circumstances. Some forms of social oppression and their ideological
justifications – such as the oppression of women and sexist ideology – go back to the very birth
of class society (roughly 5000-6000 years ago). But racism is a much more recent arrival,
thrown up when chattel slavery made a full-scale comeback under early capitalism. Therefore,
to understand the historical origins of racism it is vital to understand something of the origins of
its parent, the capitalist mode of production.

Origins of capitalism
The driving force of capitalism is the accumulation and re-investment of profit, extracted
from workers who produce more than what they get back in wages, and realised through the
sales transaction. Therefore, for capitalism to become a full-blown social system, commodity
production (the production of goods for sale rather than direct consumption) had to become the
general rule.
Productive resources such as land and money had to be freed up, made transferable, and
gradually concentrated in the hands of a single social class. Conversely, the majority had to be
dispossessed of land and other social wealth so that they could not freely subsist and would
thereby be forced to work for the owning class. In other words, capital and labour had to be
unlocked from the natural and agricultural economy that had anchored all pre-capitalist modes
of production, including early (handicraft) manufacturing where there was an organic unity
between producers and their tools.
From at least the fifteenth century, the fledgling capitalist class’s historic mission was to, on
the one side, prise open the feudal nobility’s parasitic stranglehold over productive resources,
and on the other, coerce and dupe the labouring population from one form of work into another.
The latter was first begun on a systemic scale in England with the fencing off of common lands
and conversion of crop land to sheep pasture to feed a growing wool industry. The peasants who
were driven off the land were then forced into wage-labour and other forms of servitude by
harsh vagrancy laws carrying the threat of physical mutilation and death.
In the advanced capitalist countries today, where the overwhelming majority have been
wage- and salary-earners for many generations, the bourgeois notion of a “fair day’s pay for a
fair day’s work” is deeply rooted in mass consciousness. Working for a wage, without any
individual ownership of the means of production, is commonly accepted. However, at the dawn
of capitalism, such a notion would have made no sense to the majority of people whose lived
social experience – the legacy of countless generations – was subsistence agriculture. Land
tenure, tithes to the church, rents in kind or as labour on the lord’s land – these formed the

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 1

bloody battlefield of economic class struggle between peasants and lords, not wages and
working conditions. Ripping apart the natural unity between the producing class and the means
of production took a long, drawn out and bloody struggle. It’s a process still unfolding today as
neoliberal globalisation attempts to destroy any remnant of natural economy in the Third World
and commercialise every nook and cranny of social life, North and South.
The relative freedom of wage labour today is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism. Nor is
our acceptance of it simply a result of having been ideologically duped. The essential reason is
that wage labour, the capital-labour relationship, is an inherently more advanced framework of
class struggle. Class struggle is an intrinsic fact in any class society. Concealed at times, open at
others; mostly local, sometimes sweeping and explosive; both individualised and collectively
fought out – it goes on whether or not we are all aware of it, whether or not we desire it. Over
time, this unrelenting antagonism and conflict establishes certain bounds and scope of inter-
class relations and behaviour, both individually and collectively. Certain expectations are
instilled among the lower classes, limits placed on those above, customs and traditions
established, perhaps even codified in common law. A constantly shifting balance of power
between the antagonistic classes conditions how far the ruling class can go to impose its
interests at any given point in time.
Whereas the class struggle of the peasant invariably leads to the dead end of a private share
in land, the conflict between labour and capital tends to push toward greater socialisation of
economy and society. Private property in capital (as opposed to land or slaves) and the entailing
drive to maximise profit tends toward qualitative, intensive development of the productive
forces. This is the source of capitalism’s unprecedented technological vitality. All this then
tends toward an ever-greater integration of human society, bound by an expanding, increasingly
sophisticated social division of labour – a global interdependence right down to the shirts on our
backs and the food on our table. This, compared to previous social systems, inherently brings in
tow a far superior balance of power for the popular masses against the ruling elite and, hence, a
greater scope for political and social freedoms. The logical culmination is socialism and a
classless society. As Marx put it powerfully,
The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private
property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation
of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property.
In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we
have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.1
To fulfil its historic mission, the medieval bourgeoisie had to build up the necessary
financial muscle. This began with the trade in luxury commodities from Asia, which enriched
the Mediterranean port cities of Genoa and Venice with their monopoly of the overland route
through the Middle East. This trade had existed since ancient times, but it was only in the
peculiar conditions of feudalism that it fattened Europe’s merchants into the modern
bourgeoisie. Feudalism was ruled by a rural-based warrior class dispersed over a patchwork of
fiefdoms – every castle that dotted the countryside was itself a mini-centre of state power.
Moreover, this aristocracy exploited its wealth from a similarly rural-based labouring class, the
peasantry, attached to each fiefdom. Therefore, the merchants had free rein in the towns and
cities. The Italian city-republics of the era were the archetype of this unique breathing space.
This differed from both the great civilisations of Asia and the ancient city-states of Rome and
Greece, whose urban centres were in the tight grip of parasitic ruling classes dependent on
coerced labour (slaves and peasants) spread over both town and country. The only other place in
the world where feudalism proper existed, and therefore allowed similar bourgeois autonomy,
was Japan under the rule of the samurai. This explains the speed and ease with which a
bourgeoisie emerged in that country and led it to imperialist power once introduced to
capitalism in 1853. What Japan lacked was the thing that proved to be an important turning
point in the consolidation of the European bourgeoisie: the superstructural legacy of classical
antiquity, dramatically reborn as the aptly named Renaissance, in the autonomous zone of
mediaeval cities and in the personages of bourgeois artists, philosophers, scientists and
inventors.2
But the bourgeoisie had not fully spread their wings during the Renaissance period. At the
point of still building up their power base, they took advantage of particular aspects of
1
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954, p. 715
2
See Perry Anderson’s two-volume comparative study, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the
Absolutist State, Verso, London, 1978 and 1979 respectively

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 2

feudalism rather than trying to overthrow it. The feudal ruling class was a military class whose
status and power depended on landed wealth. Territorial expansion through long and bloody
military conquest came to define the very character of the Middle Ages. The Thirty, Eighty and
Hundred Years’ Wars were characteristic examples. In the Absolutist era – feudalism’s
equivalent of monopoly capitalism – the aristocracy vested much of its military and other state
functions into the central state apparatus of the leading noble family. The consolidation of the
dispersed mini-states into the great states of the Absolutist monarchies brought an even greater
scale of warfare and conquest. Medieval capitalists partnered up with this expansionist
monarchy to hunt out new trading markets and sources of luxury commodities abroad. Add to
this the leaps in technology and scientific technique at the time (firearms, shipbuilding, ocean
navigation) and the beginnings of capitalist globalisation can be understood. Indeed, Absolutism
was feudalism’s undoing, as it represented the skeleton of the future bourgeois state and created
the framework for the growth of ever-larger markets and, eventually, the basic unit of capitalist
society – the nation.

Colonial plunder feeds capitalism

By the fifteenth century the race was on to find an alternative sea route to Asia. This threw
up two pivotal developments. Portuguese explorers, feeling their way south of Europe in search
of an eastward route, ended up establishing trading posts along the West African coast: Senegal
in 1435, Cape Bojador in 1443, Sierra Leone in 1446, Guinea in 1455 and the Congo in 1481.
This route eventually led Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope in late 1497 and to
India the following year. Heading off in a more uncertain direction across the Atlantic,
Christopher Columbus’s Spanish-funded fleet thought they had reached India when they
stumbled into the Americas at the Caribbean in 1492. Columbus’s misnomer for the region and
its indigenous inhabitants (which eventually also took in the indigenes of the mainland
Americas) has stuck to this day.
The arrival of the Spanish conquistadors turned the world of the American Indians upside
down. In their quest for precious metals the Spanish waged a horrific war and exacted gruelling
tribute labour. This, along with the introduction of exotic diseases, took a genocidal toll. The
indigenous population of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) went from
one million in 1492 to around 26,000 in 1514, and to near extinction by the end of the sixteenth
century. Cuba suffered similarly. Central Mexico went from 13.9 million in 1492 to 1.1 million
in 1605; Peru from nine million to 670,000 in 1620.3 A Spanish colonial priest of the time,
Bartolomé de las Casas, estimated that 15 million native Americans perished in the first 50
years of colonisation of the Caribbean and surrounding mainland areas.4
The Spanish monarchy spread its gold and silver throughout Europe in return for luxuries
and armaments manufactured or imported by the bourgeoisie of England, France, Italy,
Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Between 1503 and 1660 Spain tripled the amount of
silver in Europe and added a fifth to the gold supply.5 Large armies of mercenaries also took
their share. Spain, Europe’s foremost power at the time with a large empire both overseas and
on the Continent, was constantly at war. Such was the drain of wealth on the battlefield that the
Spanish crown had to declare bankruptcy three times in just over three decades: in 1596, 1607
and 1627.
Soon, everyone wanted a slice of the New World’s fortunes. Capital stumbled into the world,
not only dripping blood and dirt, but drunk on theft and pillage: first of the native Americans,
then among the thieves themselves. Skirmishes and full-blown wars over the Americas broke
out between the European maritime powers all through the sixteenth, seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The Portuguese got in first in 1494, securing Brazil via the Treaty of
Tordesillas. Beaten to the precious metals, they found their niche in producing that key luxury
commodity of the time, sugar. The Italian-Englishman John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) reached
North America before the fifteenth century was out. At the same time, the English resorted to
outright piracy to get in on the Spanish loot, forming joint stock companies for the purpose. One
such venture, captained by Sir Francis Drake, was capitalised at ₤5,000 and brought in ₤600,000
profit. Piracy injected an estimated ₤12 million into the English economy during the reign of

3
Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America,
Verso, London, 1997, p. 7
4
Cited in Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, Merlin, London, 1968, p. 108
5
Allen, op. cit.

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 3

Elizabeth I.6 The French were late arrivals, setting up at Quebec, Martinique and Guadeloupe in
the early 1600s before taking from Spain the western half of Hispaniola in 1697. They
nonetheless became the main enemies of the English in the fight for control of the Americas. All
this frenzy for colonial wealth culminated in the 1756-63 Seven Years’ War – the first-ever
global war for the carve-up of colonies, fought out in Europe, America and India, involving nine
European states. From it, London emerged as the foremost colonial and maritime power.

Slavery inherited from earlier class society

Spain’s American colonies and Portugal’s West African trading posts were to come together
into a gigantic, super-profitable trans-Atlantic economy. With precious metals from one side of
the Atlantic and slave labour from the other, the two countries secured the foundations of
today’s domination of the world by European capitalism. As Marx wrote in Capital,
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the
aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into
a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist
production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads
the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.7
But none of this was racially motivated. Not only was the ideology of “race” yet to be
invented, but no colonial plunder or exploitation of labour – even the slave kind – is ever driven
by anything less than tangible, profitable outcomes. The pursuit of precious metals and land was
what decimated the American Indian population. This in turn left the Spanish and Portuguese
with a severe labour shortage in their mines and sugar mills. At the same time, war, famine and
plague had taken their toll on the home countries. As the West Indian nationalist leader and
historian Eric Williams wrote in his groundbreaking Capitalism and Slavery, “[The planter]
would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labour. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer
too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”8
Slavery in the early modern period seems like an aberration from where we stand today,
when the only compulsion to work at all is the threat of poverty or starvation. But this was not
always the case. The norm, at the threshold of capitalism, was coerced labour – slavery,
indenture, serfdom, convict labour. Exploitation (theft of the labourer’s surplus product) was
overt and enforced through extra-economic means: the slave was the physical property of the
slaveholder; the convict was put to work as punishment; the peasant had to give up their fruits
of labour at the point of the lord’s sword. By contrast, exploitation of the modern wage worker
is hidden within a purely economic transaction – remuneration for time worked (“labour
power”) rather than the amount produced, under the ideological cover of “a fair day’s pay for a
fair day’s work”.
Slavery was a common feature of this dark, pre-modern world of coerced labour. It played an
important part in the very birth of class society and was the economic foundation of the classical
civilisations. The dazzling achievements of Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece were founded on
the backs of armies of slaves. But skin colour played no part. Instead, the distinction was
between “barbarian” and “civilised”. Most northern Europeans belonged to the former, while
darker skinned peoples from the long-established civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean,
northern Africa and the Middle East were among the latter. As such, Roman slaves were
generally white while at least one Emperor, Septimius Severus, was North African.
Slavery was also a familiar adjunct to serfdom in feudal Europe and, again, did not
discriminate by skin colour. Slaves were obtained through trade from southern Russia, the
eastern Mediterranean and the Balkan coast. “Slav” is the origin of the word “slave”. The
Spanish enslaved Moors captured in the war of “reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula. African
slaves were introduced into Europe by Arab merchants, whose monopoly was broken once the
Portuguese found their own way to Africa. England’s Tudor monarchs enslaved thousands of
vagabonds (but executed thousands more) thrown up by the disintegration of serfdom.9
Slaves lived very differently in feudal Europe because they were neither the main source of
labour nor subject to the frenetic, profit-driven production cycle that was to later govern
capitalist slavery in the American plantations. In fact, slaves were useful to the nobility because
of their flexibility, for “perhaps enlarging a lineage or supplying a trusted core of
6
Mandel, op. cit.
7
Marx, op. cit., p. 703
8
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Andre Deutsch, London, 1964, p. 20
9
Marx, op. cit., Chapter XXVIII, pp. 686-93

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 4

administrators”.10 According to two studies, the nearly 50,000 African slaves who were brought
to Europe in the sixteenth century to work as domestic servants, artisans and farmers generally
enjoyed a high degree of social mobility.11
Early on, slavery in the Americas retained some of these non-commodified – and non-racial
– aspects. African slaves carried out a variety of administrative and domestic functions. The
Portuguese even formed African army regiments under the command of African officers to help
repel the Dutch from Brazil.12 Under feudalism, the dominant ruling class ideology was
Christianity. As such, enslavement was ideologically justified by religious distinctions. The
targets of enslavement were “pagans”, “heathens” and “infidels”, condemned by the curse of
Ham (Genesis ix, 22-7) to serve Christian masters. Cromwell dealt with the non-Christian
“barbarous wretches” who survived the Drogheda Massacre in Ireland by selling them as slaves
in Barbados. The Portuguese took 2000 Jewish children from their parents and put them to work
alongside African slaves in São Tomé.13 When the modern slave trade first began in the mid-
1400s, the ideological rationale for the enslavement of Africans was not that they were dark-
skinned but that they were not Christian. Similarly, the Spanish in the Caribbean enslaved only
those who did not accept conversion to Christianity.14

Slavery feeds industrial capitalism

However, slavery outlived feudalism and moved to the centre of the American capitalist
economy, consumed and fed in turn by the unstoppable march of the market-driven, factory-like
plantations of sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, cocoa, indigo and other profitable export crops. As
slavery became more capitalist it shed its feudal vestiges. Slaves themselves became very
valuable and profitable commodities in an economic system of increasing commodification.
Between 1636 and 1645 the Dutch West India Company sold 23,000 African slaves for 6.7
million florins, representing a profit of 500%!15 The Dutch monopolised the slave trade for most
of the 1600s after seizing it from the Portuguese. (The turning point in the Dutch ascendancy
over the Portuguese and Spanish was when they broke away from the Spanish empire by
waging the world’s first bourgeois revolution in 1579.) They in turn were robbed by the English
bourgeoisie who, for this purpose, provoked the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1663.16 London
then formed its own monopoly firm, the Royal African Company, which shipped an annual
average of 5000 slaves between 1680 and 1686. With the success of the English bourgeois
revolution in 1688, royal monopoly gave way to free trade. Along with textiles and tobacco,
free trade massively boosted the trade in human beings. Eric Williams cites one estimate that
puts the total import of slaves into the English colonies between 1680 and 1786 at more than
two million. Jamaica received 610,000 slaves from 1700 to 1786.17 From 1783 to 1793 English
slavers sold 300,000 slaves for ₤15 million.18 The English port city of Liverpool was fattened on
the slave trade. In 1759 Liverpool alone dominated nearly two-thirds of the British slave trade
and over 40% of the whole European trade.19
What then developed was a gigantic triangular trade between plantation products from
America, industrial goods from Europe, and slaves from Africa. The economy of the latter
continent was to lose out, draining millions of human beings in return for much less from the
other two. After all, labour and land are the two primary sources of all wealth – America and
Europe gained both, while Africa lost first the one and then the other in a later phase of colonial
pillage. In the early 1770s the Anglo-American colonies were annually exporting goods to the
value of ₤5.6 million, the French colonies ₤5.2 million, Portugal’s Brazil ₤1.8 million and
Spanish America ₤4.9 million. The British and French colonies were annually producing
150,000 tons of sugar by 1760. By 1787-90 this had risen to 290,000 tons. Between 1700 and

10
Robin Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Verso, London, 1988, p. 7
11
James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, Norton, New York, 1981; and “Medieval Slavery and
Colonial Slavery in America”, Chapter 2 in Charles Verlinden, The Beginning of Modern Colonization: Eleven
Essays with an Introduction, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1970, pp. 33-51, both cited in Allen, op. cit.
12
Blackburn, op. cit., pp. 18-19
13
Allen, op. cit., p. 5. That is, Jewishness is a religious, not racial, category.
14
Williams, op. cit., p. 8
15
Mandel, op. cit., pp. 109-10
16
Allen, op. cit., pp. 197-8
17
Williams, op. cit., pp. 32-3
18
Mandel, op. cit., pp. 109-10
19
Williams, op. cit., p. 34

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 5

1775 the weight of tobacco production in Virginia and Maryland rose from 20 million pounds to
220 million.20
In Europe and America, slave traders, planters, merchants of plantation produce, shipping
companies, manufacturers of materials for shipping and planting, insurers, bankers, plus scores
of others – up and down the whole chain of profit accumulation, each got their piece from the
blood and toil of the slaves. Britain’s Barclays Bank was founded by two Quaker brothers,
David and Alexander, who not only traded in human chattel but owned slave-worked
plantations in Jamaica. Shipping insurance giant, Lloyd’s, got a boost from insuring slave ships
and their human cargo. Slavery also fuelled the Industrial Revolution. The loan that financed
James Watt’s invention of the steam engine came from capital accumulated in the West Indies.21
This sort of factory slavery took a much stronger hold in the Dutch, English and French
colonies, and later the independent United States. It was no coincidence that it was the
Netherlands, England, the US and France where the first bourgeois revolutions had taken place.
In their neck of the American woods, the planter capitalist was king, free of the control and
regulation by Absolutist monopolies that were characteristic of Spanish and Portuguese
America. Where the state did step on too many toes, it was soon shaken off, as in the United
States when the English bourgeoisie tried to offload the bill for the Seven Years’ War on their
colonial counterparts.

From (white) indenture to (black) slavery

So slavery preceded racism. It was simply one form of coerced labour among others,
inherited from pre-capitalist times. The sheer scale and savagery of American slavery was due
to the inexorable, snowballing hungers of a rising capitalist system. Only later, as this potent
mix of capitalism and slavery became ever-more lucrative and hungry, did the trade in human
chattel give rise to racial branding and oppression.
In fact, before the African slave trade, the main supply of imported coerced labour into the
Americas actually came from Europe: the large numbers of rural poor thrown up by the decline
of serfdom. This was particularly the case in England and Spain where crop land had been
converted to pasture for the highly profitable Flemish and Italian wool industries. But in the
Spanish and Portuguese colonies, this source of workers was soon strained by a 10% population
decline due to war and famine.22 African slaves working in Europe were also brought in but
were not enough. As a result, European indenture in Iberian America quickly gave way to the
Portuguese solution – slaves brought directly from Africa. By virtue of their foothold in the
West African trading posts the Portuguese pioneered the use of African slaves for offshore
ventures, first on the African island of São Tomé where they set up sugar works in the 1450s,
then when they took the practice to Brazil.23
By contrast, England had a surplus of the poor and restless who, despite the threats of
flogging and death, could not all be put to work. England’s first colonies in Barbados and
Virginia served as outlets for this restless mass. Francis Bacon supported colonial emigration to
“disburden the land of such inhabitants as may well be spared”. He suggested it would give
England “a double commodity, in the avoidance of people here, and in making use of them
there”.24 Richard Hakluyt, the leading advocate of colonisation at the time, wrote that “through
our long peace and seldom sickness we are grown more populous… there are of every art and
science so many, that they can hardly live by one another”. Richard Johnson, in his pamphlet
Nova Britannia, noted that England had “swarms of idle persons… having no means of labour
to relieve their misery” and advocated “some ways for their foreign employment”.25 This
peculiarity of the Anglo-American colonies set in train the dynamics that were to eventually
result in racialised slavery.
Indentured labourers made up more than three-quarters of the 92,000 English migrants that
went to Virginia and Maryland between 1607 and 1682. Ten thousand left just from Bristol
between 1654 and 1685, destined for Virginia and the West Indies.26 In 1676 an estimated 1500

20
Blackburn, op. cit., p. 6 and p. 12
21
Williams, op. cit., pp. 101-5
22
Allen, op. cit., p. 5
23
Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969, Andre Deutsch, London,
1970, p. 16
24
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 10
25
All three quoted in Allen, op. cit., pp. 11-12
26
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 10

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 6

indentured servants were arriving annually in Virginia and Maryland.27 In 1683, one-sixth of
Virginians were white servants. Not all of them ended up there entirely of their own free will.
Many were abducted, others (especially children) were lured with goodies and promises. Still
others acquiesced after being plied with liquor and then bundled onto ships before they
recovered.28 Conditions on the emigrant ships were terrible. Passengers were given beds that
measured about six feet by two and very tightly packed in. A 1659 petition to the English
parliament detailed how 72 servants died after having been locked up below deck for the whole
five-and-a-half week voyage.29 This was a glimpse of the nightmare that awaited millions of
African slaves in the Middle Passage across the Atlantic.
Things did not improve once they got to America. On the tobacco plantations of Virginia and
the sugar plantations of Barbados, the indentured servants were treated harshly. They were
traded as commodities, won as prizes in card games and punished brutally. The problem at that
time “was not, as in England, to find work for them but simply to keep them working for their
betters”.30 In addition to harsh treatment, the colonial elite in Virginia tried to force many ex-
servants back into indenture by controlling the availability of arable land. They also tried to
lengthen the minimum period of servitude.31
Nevertheless, at rock bottom, these early workers were only bound for a limited term. They
had escaped the Old World in the hope of finding a better life in the New. Many looked forward
to owning their own land and taking their rightful place among the free colonists once they
reached the end of their indenture. These high expectations, made all the more palpable by the
newness of the society they saw around them, produced a bubbling social and political ferment.
Harsh as the conditions of indenture were, the planters could only go so far in imposing their
will. The English lower classes brought to Virginia the legacy and tradition of the same class
struggle and balance of class forces that also bound the planters, congealed in the customary
“rights of freeborn Englishmen”.
To put it another way: when English servants entered the ring in Virginia, they did not enter alone. Instead,
they entered in company with the generations who had preceded them in the struggle; and the outcome of
those earlier struggles established the terms and conditions of the latest one.32
The year the Virginian colony was founded, 1607, was also the year of the Midland peasant
revolt in which the Levellers first made their appearance. The latter half of the 1600s in England
was tumultuous, culminating in the 1688 bourgeois revolution.
As long as these indentured English made up the majority of the coerced labouring
population, the planters would find it difficult to squeeze more out of anyone. In other words,
with racialised oppression and racism yet to enter the historical stage, the benefit of this balance
of class forces flowed on to the minority of African slaves who began trickling in, mainly via
the West Indies, in 1619. There was often joint resistance between European and African
servants and slaves. Free landless whites joined with bonded black and white workers to stage
the largest (though unsuccessful) popular uprising in colonial North America: Bacon’s
Rebellion in 1676 which sent the royal governor and his staff into hiding on Virginia’s Eastern
Shore. There were also many cases of individual black slaves gaining freedom, either through
purchase, Christian baptism, through the provisions of their owner’s last will and testament, or
simply because the master shortened the period of enslavement. Hereditary, lifelong slavery
were not yet codified in law for anyone, black or white. Freed blacks enjoyed the same legal
rights as other free persons through much of the 1600s in Virginia. US Marxist historian
Theodore W. Allen, in his extensive study of colonial documents, details African-Americans
owning property, marrying whites, winning court cases against European-Americans, and even
selling slaves. In 1666 in Northampton County, 10.9% of African-Americans and 17.6% of
European-Americans owned land. And yet, none of the former group of landowners had come
to Virginia as free persons, while 53.4% of the latter group had. Nearly two centuries later, with
racial oppression a grim reality, these figures opened up into a wide differential of 0.3% and
9.5% – ironically, the percentage of blacks owning land in 1666 was greater than the percentage

27
Allen op. cit., p. 119
28
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 11
29
ibid., p. 13
30
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, W.W. Norton & Co.,
New York, 1975, p. 295
31
ibid.
32
Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America”, New Left Review, No. 181
(May/June 1990), p. 104

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 7

of whites that owned land in 1860. The corresponding drop in ownership rates was 98% for
blacks and 46% for whites.33

Slavery becomes racial oppression

The process of racial oppression got under way from the late 1600s, due to two interrelated
political-economic factors. On the one hand, Bacon’s Rebellion forcefully demonstrated to the
colonial rulers the ongoing danger of open, joint revolt by bonded labourers (black and white)
and the free but landless and discontented young men who dominated the numbers of former
indentured workers. On the other hand, a change in social and economic conditions made it
viable to replace servants with slaves. Previously, a high mortality rate favoured the use of
limited-term servants: “If the chances of a man’s dying during his first five years in Virginia
were better than fifty-fifty – and it seems apparent that they were – and if English servants could
be made to work as hard as slaves, English servants for a five-year term were the better buy.”34
This all changed as life expectancy rose and the price of slaves fell (the latter following the
Second Anglo-Dutch War).
The dramatic shift in the balance between majority European indentured labour and minority
African slave labour also produced a dramatic shift in the balance of strength between the
classes in Virginia. Earlier Africans, with a store of experience from the Caribbean under their
belt, and being a minority of the coerced labour force, were caught by – and quickly adapted to
– the safety net of the existing relationship of class forces established by the English workers.
This was before the advent of racism. White workers had no conception of any inherent racial
difference or hierarchy. Once their African-American brethren reached a certain stage of
adaptation to the same social-political terrain and were able to communicate with them, there
was nothing hindering solidarity and joint struggle. Bacon’s Rebellion demonstrated this very
forcefully. Unfortunately, today, with racism so deeply ingrained in capitalist society,
immigrant workers who look different and speak a different language find it very difficult to
surmount racist barriers in the workplace and the unions, even after they’ve learnt to speak the
new language and come to understand their situation.
The new influx of Africans into colonial Virginia had no prior experience of colonial slavery
or grasp of the English language and situation at hand. In contrast to the later stereotype, they
were of a myriad different ethnicities and cultures. It was in this vulnerable and divided
condition that they overwhelmed the plantations in their newly enlarged numbers. Arriving
already enslaved from outside the arena of English class struggle, rapidly outnumbering the
English workers, the new wave of Africans was more vulnerable to being kept down in a
condition of lifelong and hereditary servitude. They entered the battlefield alone. “Their
forebears had struggled in a different arena, which had no bearing on this one. Whatever
concessions they might obtain had to be won from scratch, in unequal combat, an ocean away
from the people they might have called on for reinforcements.”35
But then, as slave relations became entrenched, why did these new waves of slaves not
revolt? Didn’t the earlier arrivals eventually adapt and take hold of the situation? That is, why
didn’t a new arena of class battle gradually form in the tobacco plantations? There are two
interlinked reasons. First, while African slaves came to make up the bulk of the plantation
labour force, they did not become the absolute majority of the colonial population. Second, a
specifically racial distinction was deliberately and gradually elaborated by the colonial ruling
class to systematically mark off African slaves from the rest of the labouring population. There
was unrest, but it came under the effective social control of racial oppression whereby the white
majority was coopted by the ruling class into functioning as an intermediate social buffer.
The growth in the African presence did not provoke some natural racial instinct among white
Virginians. This “instinct” was created and nurtured by capitalism. The inexorable pressure for
greater plantation profits and, therefore, the growing urgency for a reliable and guaranteed
source of cheap labour drove the turn to slavery. With black slaves making up the majority of
plantation workers, but free white plebeians the majority of the colonial population, the ruling
class had to find a way of 1) keeping the slave layer enslaved over successive generations by
permanently cutting off avenues of upward mobility, and 2) of coopting white working people.
The solution was found by deploying the latter as a buffer against the former, on the basis of
skin colour. Skin colour is an immediately visible marker and reproducible over generations,
33
Allen, op. cit., pp. 184-85
34
Morgan, op. cit., pp. 297-98
35
Fields, NLR, p. 104

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 8

especially under the thunder and brimstone against “miscegenation” that was to become a
hallmark of racist social control.
As African slaves began to predominate on the plantations, Virginia’s colonial state began
issuing laws and rulings to entrench and codify the difference between the conditions of limited-
term indenture and life-time slavery. Increasing reliance on slave labour necessitated legal
protection of this valuable new property. Furthermore, with the ongoing development of
capitalism, commodification similarly intensified. The result was that even people, once defined
as property, became subject to a rapid process of dehumanisation.
This then took on more and more of a skin-colour distinction as the new laws and rulings,
from the late 1600s, began to increasingly replace the term “slave” with that of “Negro”. The
two became interchangeable and, eventually, indistinguishable in people’s perceptions. What
started out as a purely physical descriptor ended up socially and culturally loaded with, and
inseparable from, the mark of enslavement. Two key steps in this growing racialisation of
Virginian society were the 1705 “Act concerning Servants and Slaves” and the 1723 “Act
directing the trial of Slaves, committing capital crimes; and for the more effectual punishing
conspiracies and insurrections of them; and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos and
Indians, bond or free” – their names and descriptions themselves showing this very process
unfolding. Both laws explicitly directed they be read out in full by parish clerks or
churchwardens to the church congregation every Spring and Autumn. Sheriffs had to post the
laws on the courthouse door at the June or July term of court.36
In 1662, in breach of the English common law principle of descent through the father, the
Virginia General Assembly enacted that “all children borne in this country shall be held bond or
free according to the condition of the mother”.37 With paternity always difficult to establish, this
new law guaranteed that the slave condition would be passed down through the maternal line
and, thereby, become a biological fact. All children of slave women, whether fathered by a free
man or slave, were to be condemned to slavery from birth. With free blacks increasingly a tiny
minority, and white indentured labour overtaken by a mass of African slaves, this condition of
lifetime, hereditary servitude eventually became identified by skin colour. Indeed, under the
sharpening division between indenture and slavery, between black and white, even the most
harshly treated white indentured servant was made to feel they were somehow above the mass
of black people.
In 1667 the General Assembly decreed that “the conferring of baptism doth not alter the
condition of the person as to his bondage”.38 Thus, non-Christian slaves who were almost all
black could no longer convert and win their freedom. A 1691 law forbade slaveholders from
setting their human chattel free. Previously, the emancipation of African slaves by last will and
testament had never been challenged. However, in 1712 the Virginia Colony Council blocked
the carrying out of slave-owner John Fulcher’s will which stipulated freedom for sixteen
African-American slaves and grants of land “to live upon as long as they Shall live or any of
their Increase [i.e., children] and not to be turned off or not to be Disturbed”.39 In 1692 livestock
raised by black slaves were ordered to be confiscated.40 A 1767 ruling by the Maryland
Provincial Court – racial slavery well-entrenched by then – signalled open season for the rape of
black women by stating that “a slave had no recourse against the violator of his bed”.41
This entrenching of the slave condition and its coupling with the state of having darker skin
was bound to impact on free blacks. In 1670 the General Assembly explicitly restricted African-
American planters to buying slaves “of their own nation”42 (nation being the initial term for
“race” at a time when the latter was still being invented). The 1705 “Act concerning Servants
and Slaves” prohibited all blacks – free or slave – from public office, excluded them from the
armed militia, and barred them from standing as witnesses in any court case against a white
person. A black person could not “lift his or her hand” against a “Christian, not being a Negro,
mulatto or Indian”, thereby making it illegal for black people to defend themselves physically.
This was taken even further in the 1723 law which banned black people from owning “any gun,
powder, shot, or any club, or any other weapon whatsoever, offensive or defensive”.43 This law
36
Allen, op. cit., p. 251
37
ibid., p. 197
38
ibid., p. 251
39
ibid., pp. 249-50
40
ibid., p. 250
41
ibid., p. 251
42
ibid., p. 198
43
ibid., p. 250

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 9

also stipulated that “…no free Negro, mulatto, or Indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the
election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever”.44
During this period, the hodgepodge of distinctions between servant/slave, bond/free,
Negro/English, Christian/non-Christian is very revealing of the still unformed notion of “race”,
something that was still in the making.
The flip-side to this growing branding and subjugation of dark-skinned people in Virginia
was the corresponding growth in light-skin privilege and, on that basis, a race consciousness
around the social value of having light skin. White people not only became acutely aware of
what it meant to be black, but also, and just as importantly, of what it meant to be free and
white. But, like black subjugation, the doling out of light-skin privilege did not start out
explicitly on the basis of skin colour, but rather on the basis of increasing and entrenching the
differential between indenture and slavery.
The 1705 law codified freedom dues for “servants (not being slaves)”: “to every male
servant, ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings in money (or the equivalent in goods), a gun worth
at least twenty shillings; and to every woman servant, fifteen bushels of corn, forty shillings in
money (or the equivalent in goods)”. These had previously been set by contract or vaguely
worded court orders. The 1705 law also explicitly limited the degree of corporal punishment. It
forbade masters to “whip a Christian white servant naked, without an order from the justice of
the peace”. If a master broke this law a second time, the courts could take away and resell the
servant.45
Over the 1700s, measures were instituted to ensure that white workers were not put out by
the prevalence of slave labour. In 1712, the South Carolina Assembly passed a law stipulating
that, on plantations six miles or farther from the owner’s home, “One or more White Person”
must be employed for every “Six Negroes or other Slaves”. A decade later, the ratio became one
to ten, but it included the home plantation. In 1750, another South Carolina law stated “That no
Handicrafts Man [other than the slaveholder] shall hereafter teach a Negro his Trade”. Georgia,
initially founded in 1732 on a slavery-free principle, repealed the ban in 1750 with a provision
requiring plantations to employ one “white man Servant” for every four Africans. Further, it
barred black employment except in cultivation and coopering. Theodore W. Allen then goes on
to cite examples in the next century of white workers agitating against the admission of black
apprentices and workers into skilled trades.46 However, in their social buffer role, white working
people were not only given the carrot of racially-doled out privilege; they also wielded the stick
against black people. In 1727, special militia called “the patrol” were formed “for dispersing all
unusual concourse of Negroes, or other slaves, and for preventing any dangerous combinations
which may be made among them at such meetings”. It was generally working people who were
attracted to these militia.47
There was a divergence in the historical process in the Caribbean where African slaves and
their descendants came to make up an absolute majority of the population. This was due to the
early switch from tobacco to sugar in the mid-1600s. Sugar required larger economies of scale:
greater slabs of land in fewer oligarchic hands and more costly equipment. In the late 1600s the
value of the average estate in Jamaica was nearly £2000. In Maryland fewer than 4% of the
estates came to more than £500.48 This made it much more difficult for freed servants in the
Caribbean to set themselves up as independent farmers. Instead, many former servants opted to
emigrate to the American mainland (around 16-17,000 between 1660 and 168249) where land
was cheaper and abundant, and where hand tools sufficed to farm small tobacco plots. And
despite the oligarchy’s attempts to control the supply of arable land in Virginia, many white
plebeians took the risk of pushing further into Indian lands.
With European servants deterred from seeking a new life in the West Indies, the sugar
planters made an early turn towards African slaves. The large-scale nature of sugar growing also
meant larger armies of slaves. Over time, this African majority came to find its footing in the
class struggle arena of the New World plantation system. Racial branding could not be used to
the same extent as the extreme black-white dichotomy that was to take such a paralysing hold
on the United States. Subjugating the West Indies’ black majority on an explicitly racial basis
would have produced a new, more explosive dynamic of revolt (a lesson the rulers of apartheid
44
ibid., p. 241
45
ibid., p. 250
46
ibid., pp. 252-53
47
ibid., p. 252
48
ibid., p. 227
49
ibid.

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 10

South Africa failed to grasp two centuries later). Instead, the colonial bourgeoisie of the West
Indies had to integrate and coopt the free blacks – there was no large mass of white plebeians
that had to be pacified and could, at the same time, be used as a social buffer. Black people took
their place among both the ruling elite and free plebeians. As such, even though racism reached
the Caribbean in the later period of imperialism (adapted to the generally coloured but tonally
graded character of the population), the dynamics of class struggle in countries like Jamaica,
Grenada, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago have remained generally “class-pure” and freer of the
racial divisions that afflict the US working class.

The Enlightenment and racism

The scissored relationship between white-skin privilege and dark-skin subjugation formed
the historical-material basis for a racist outlook and ideology. Over time, the widening social
differential between servants and slaves, increasingly defined by skin colour, provided fertile
soil for the mass propagation, internalisation and reinforcement of ideas of racial superiority
among white working people. Racism is as much a tool for deflecting and absorbing the
discontent of white plebeians as it is of pushing down non-whites into a position of extra
exploitation. The latter process is buttressed by the former.
Once they had been forced into a socially inferior position for generation upon generation,
African-American slaves began to seem naturally inferior – not because of coercion and
oppression but because of their physical difference.50 Dark skin became the mark of servility.
“People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as
oppressed.”51 However, the process of channelling and articulating this sense of difference and
superiority into specifically racial terms did not happen spontaneously. This took the
formulation, over time, of a coherent white supremacist ideology by upper class intellectuals.
Ironically, this process was born on the tidal wave of scientific, political and ideological
advances of the bourgeois Enlightenment. If the period of early capitalism saw the bourgeoisie
defensively using the patronage and state facilities of the Absolutist monarchy to consolidate its
economic foundations, the period beginning in the 1700s saw capital reach the limits of this co-
existence as it surged towards industrialisation and a new phase of accumulation. The fetters of
feudal economic and political structures became ever more suffocating. The bourgeoisie was
ready to go on the offensive. Bourgeois ideologists began elaborating doctrines of universal
rights, formal equality, equality of social opportunity, promotion through merit – a whole body
of political, legal and moral doctrines to challenge the legitimacy of a hereditary and parasitic
ruling class. Enlightenment thinkers investigated the workings of history. They sought to
legitimise the new, humanist world-view that the march of historical progress was inevitable
and irrepressible. Rationalist scientific enquiry intensified, in physics (Newton), mathematics
(Descartes, Leibniz), biology (Linnaeus, Darwin), chemistry (Priestley, Robert Boyle), as well
as political philosophy and history. The Enlightenment was undoubtedly a huge leap for
humanity. It was a rejection of inherited privilege, the triumph of reason over superstition, of
human progress and achievement, of nurture over nature.
In fact, the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels was a product of the Enlightenment.
These men were a new breed of bourgeois intellectuals who, having broken from their class
background and thrown their lot in with the emerging proletariat, synthesised the discoveries of
German philosophy, British political economy and French revolutionary politics into a
qualitatively new and higher theoretical method. They were radicalised by the deepening,
increasingly proletarian class struggle throughout Europe and the second round of (more radical
but unsuccessful) international bourgeois revolutions in 1848. This political-intellectual
development was a vivid reflection of the inner contradictions of the brave new world of the
bourgeoisie. For they gave birth to twins: not only capitalism (with its significant if limited
political, economic and scientific progress) but also the seeds of socialism – socialised
production, mass politics, and the modern working class. These inner contradictions and the
resulting instability of bourgeois political thought often saw Enlightenment thinkers retreat into
intellectual compromises. Some took shelter in religious mysticism, like the founder of modern

50
In the one instance, skin pigment is blamed for both black people’s inferiority and their subjugation. It is still
commonly held by many people in the United States today that African-Americans were enslaved because of the
racist beliefs of the slave owners. This inversion of the historical process is a major, albeit veiled, cornerstone of
racist ideology because it fails to account for the social origins of racism and, by its circular logic, paints racial
bigotry as inherent in human nature.
51
Fields, NLR, p. 106

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 11

dialectics, Georg W.F Hegel. It took the radical young Hegelian, Karl Marx, to burst through
these bounds and fulfil the potential offered by the best of the Enlightenment’s discoveries. In
doing so, Marx both finished what the bourgeoisie had started and turned their ideas into their
very opposite – as weapons against the bourgeoisie.
The instability of Enlightenment thought was most apparent when it came to explaining
human inequality, especially the differences between the various human societies. From the
1700s there was a great burst of writing on this subject by renowned Enlightenment scholars.
That great literary achievement of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia Britannica, carried no
reference to race in its first edition of 1771 but covered the topic a decade later in its second
edition.52 However, initial studies did not immediately home in on any notion of inborn racial
inferiority or hierarchy. In the Enlightenment tradition, explanations of cause and effect were
sought in the natural and social environments. Attempts to theorise the original state of
humanity even led to a certain romanticisation of pre-urban peoples, such as Rousseau’s notion
of the “noble savage”. Observations sometimes centred on physical differences and could be
naïvely crude, such as those of the French physician François Bernier. Social, cultural and
psychological characteristics of non-European peoples were explained by climatic and other
variable factors, even as these peoples began to be graded into a hierarchy of worth.
Montesquieu wrote in 1748 in his Spirit of Laws:
You will find in the climates of the north, peoples with few vices, many virtues, sincerity and truthfulness.
Approach the south, you will think you are leaving morality itself, the passions become more vivacious and
multiply crimes... The heat can be so excessive that the body is totally without force. The resignation passes
to the spirit and leads people to be without curiosity, nor the desire for noble enterprise.
In 1737, the German mathematician Leibniz defended the unity of the human species by
arguing that differences between peoples were “no reason why all men who inhabit the earth
should not be of the same race, which has been altered by different climates, as we see that
beasts and plants change their nature, and improve or degenerate”.53 The French natural
historian, George Louis Leclerc Buffon, wrote in the late 1700s that white was the “real and
natural colour of man”. Other colours were exotic deviations caused by climate, altitude,
proximity to the sea, diet and social custom. While claiming that the people of Guinea were
“idle and inactive, lacking any sense of imagination or innovation”, he argued that racial
difference only “persists as long as the milieu remains and disappears when the milieu is
changed”. Buffon also denounced advocates of slavery, asking: “How dare they, by such
barbarous and diabolical arguments, attempt to palliate those oppressions which originate solely
from their thirst for gold?”54
In 1776 German medical professor, Johann Blumenbach, coined the racial label “Caucasian”
because he thought the region around Mount Caucasus “produces the most beautiful race of
men”. He believed Caucasians were the original human type, from which other races have
degenerated. As such, Blumenbach had a unitary view of the human species and saw race as a
product of the environment:
For although there seems to be so great a difference between widely separate nations, that you might easily
take the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, the Greenlanders, and the Circassians for so many different
species of man, yet when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do so run into one another, and
that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between
them….
There is no single character so peculiar and so universal among the Ethiopians [his label for black Africans –
IK], but what it may be observed on the one hand everywhere in other varieties of men….
Colour, whatever be its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events, an
adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species.
He even idealised slaves, seeing in them a “natural tenderness of heart, which has never been
benumbed or extirpated on board the transport vessels or on the West India sugar plantations by
the brutality of their white executioners”.55

52
See Wendy Doniger, “The symbolism of black and white babies in the myth of parental impression”, Social
Research, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring 2003)
53
Quoted in Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Southern Methodist University Press,
Dallas, 1963, pp. 34-35
54
ibid., p. 36
55
See Stephen Jay Gould, “The Geometer of Race”, Discover, November 1994, found at
http://www.greeninformation.com/The%20Geometer%20of%20Race.htm

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 12

 Thus, these early ideas contained a certain instability as their proponents sought to grope
through a number of conflicting social and ideological processes. Even as it heralded a new
epoch of progress, the Enlightenment was seriously disfigured by the rapacity of European
capitalism’s relations with the rest of the world – the slave economy and colonial conquest were
central to the very fortunes that fuelled the bourgeoisie’s intellectual endeavours. Even as they
sought to arrive at the universal truth, their class outlook was shaped by the social relations from
which they had sprung. Some simply came to the pragmatic conclusion that slavery was an
economic necessity. Others, drawing on the initial view that race was hierarchical but mutable,
saw the enslavement of Africans as a civilising mission. But the contradictory coexistence of
bourgeois ideals and the sordid economy that underwrote them had to be definitively resolved in
the sphere of ideology if not politics, especially as the rise of the capitalist class approached
boiling point in the latter half of the 1700s. An ideological struggle soon broke out within the
bourgeoisie.
On one side, the idea of mutable racial traits gave way to the notion of a fixed, inherent
racial inferiority among black and other coloured people. In the same year as Montesquieu’s
Spirit of Laws, David Hume wrote in his essay Of National Characters:
I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different
kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than
white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst
them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient
GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them in their valour, form of
government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant differences could not happen in so many
countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.
Voltaire wrote in his 1756 Essay on Universal History a similarly racist account of Africans:
Their round eyes, their flat nose, their lips which are always thick, their differently shaped ears, the wool on
their head, the measure even of their intelligence establishes between them and other species of men
prodigious differences…. If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours, it is at least greatly
inferior. They are not capable of any great application or association of ideas, and seem formed neither in the
advantages nor the abuses of our philosophy.
In 1758 Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish founder of biological classification, extended his work
to divide humanity into a hierarchy of four races, topped by the white Homo sapiens europaeus.
In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime Immanuel Kant wrote in 1764:
“The Negroes of Africa have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolish.
The difference between the two races is thus a substantial one: it appears to be just as great in
respect to the faculties of the mind as in colour.” In the same year, the Dutch scientist and
painter, Petrus Camper, kicked off the dubious pseudo-science of ordering a racial hierarchy
according to skull shape and size in his lecture On the Origin and Colour of Blacks. He wrote,
“If I make the facial line lean forward, I have an antique head; if backward, the head of a Negro.
If I still more incline it, I have the head of an ape; and if more still, that of a dog, and then that
of an idiot...”. Thereupon, the protruding jaw and angular forehead became established as a sign
of inferior development and, along with dark skin pigment, the central visual icon of subsequent
racism.
On the other side, the more consistent Enlightenment humanists raised the banner of racial
equality, as part of their general campaign for consistent bourgeois democracy. This trend came
to play a major role in the two most important bourgeois revolutions, in France and the United
States. Indeed, the contradiction and instability of bourgeois perspectives on slavery and race
burst open in those two revolutions and came to exert a major influence on subsequent
developments in race relations, well into the 20th century. This is to be the subject of the next
chapter.

Ch. 2: Historical Origins, by Iggy Kim 13