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Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Andrew Curran, William Armstrong, professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. We're discussing his forthcoming book, Biography of A Dangerous A New History of Race From Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson. We are familiar with the ideals of the Enlightenment like the air we breathe. Equality, liberty, tolerance and reason, hallmarks of this great intellectual age. Clearly and painfully contrast the racist views espoused and slavery practiced by many of the Enlightenment's luminaries. The very acceptance and support for racist notions and practices in this era wasn't merely an aberration within Enlightenment thinking. It was born of the era deeply embedded in the new institution's supposedly scientific approach to race. Through 13 biographical sketches, Andy traces the development of modern racist thought. Building on previous works, Biography of a Dangerous Idea is a highly readable and important work for understanding how racism became embedded alongside liberty and equality. Andy, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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C
Thank you so much.
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B
It's great to have you back on. As we were talking before, this is your fourth time on the New Books Network and I feel like you've been working through many different ideas. Each book seems to build on the next, and your exploration seems to just grow more, more wide with this idea. You know you're moving. You're moving on from. From, you know, a biography of an individual and just like, the idea of race and in France, to. To really taking on the. The entire Enlightenment idea of race. And it's just, I think, a fantastic book because it's so readable. You know, it really proves that you don't have to sacrifice research in order to write something that actually reads like a novel. So I definitely applaud you on that. And I'm wondering with this book, if you could just talk a little bit about the process, the procedure that led you to creating it.
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C
Well, thanks. Yeah. It's something of a long story that starts in the late 1990s. When I was living in New York City at the time. I, like everyone else living in the city, was well aware that there was a time of great racial tension. And one of the things I asked myself, in addition to kind of what was going on in the present, was where we got here. And of course, you know, I was well aware at the time, I was in graduate school, that there was, you know, a long history of persecution, enslavement, and so on and so forth. And colonization's legacy was still pretty obvious to anyone walking around New York City at the time. But I was really interested in kind of the idea. The idea. And the first thing I did when I started off as a junior professor in upstate New York was to put together an exhibition with a friend of mine on some of the travel writing from the 17th century. So really kind of the history of proto racism at that time. And then ultimately that grew into my first project, Anatomy of Blackness, which might be described as an intellectual history book that kind of charted the evolution of the idea from 16th century all through to the early 19th century. So in many ways, it's doing some of the same work I did in this book. But this is what I kind of describe as a horizontal history of the question, moving through from travelogues to the anatomists to the classifiers and so on and so forth. And I think that that story, alas, even though that book did well and other books have done well, I still think the story of race is something that we really don't understand. We understand that racism has been around for a while. We understand 18th century had a big role. But I think that it's still something that most people really don't comprehend. The fact that the very notion of race changed dramatically during the 18th century for a lot of specific reasons which are linked to the Enlightenment. So that was my first project. And I was asked by Henry Louis Gates Jr. To do a second book on the history of race called who's Black and why? And I described this as more of a vertical study, since it was about a particular contest that took place in 1739. It was the 1741 contest on the Source of Blackness. And Skip Gates and I did this book a few years ago, and I thought it was really, really interesting for us to go back and forth thinking about the different essays that are submitted to this contest. There were 16 essays. And it also allowed us to think about race as an idea that was being debated, hotly debated at all times. It was not this gigantic monological idea. So looking this time period, this deep dive, allowed us to think about this kind of core sample of ideas, competition between theologians and classifiers and anatomists and stuff, all trying to debate notion of race. And as you mentioned, I wrote a biography on Dennis Diderot six years ago. And in many ways, this book is the culmination of all those things together in that it's a biographical history of race. And I realized that, at least I think, I hope, that what I did is create a series of almost allegorical figures, each of whom represents a particular tendency within the overall crystallization of the idea of race during the 18th century. So we do move, move from a king to a president, from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson. And in between there are classifiers, travel writers, natural historians, anatomists. There are a lot of different ways of looking at the question of race, each of each, and each person kind of builds on the next person. So it's not a complete, comprehensive understanding of race. But I hope that by the time you finish the book, you have a much deeper idea of some of the funny contingencies, strange coincidences and things, some of the ways that race came about that have less to do with an overall kind of plot than a series of preoccupations and changes in the way that people are dealing with the natural world. And I think that really, by the time you get to the end of the book and Thomas Jefferson, you see the competing impulses of the Enlightenment. He's a great proponent of the American liberal democratic tradition. On the one hand, at the same time, he embodies the some of the worst ideas that are related to race during the 18th century, particularly because, to quote or to paraphrase Diderot, he was writing on skin. And many of the theoreticians I read about in the book were writing on paper, which is to say, they were writing about human beings as Abstractions. And as Thomas Jefferson is writing about them as real people. And the implications of what he wrote about are enormous for the United States.
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B
Right. What I find very interesting about this book is the way in which you play the different biographical characters off of each other. Some of them are building off of each other, some of them are in conflict. But I think it's a very interesting way to explore the development of ideas, how they almost picked up the baton from the next person and added a little bit or subtracted a little bit in terms of the ideas. Could you talk a little bit about Louis xiv, expansion of trade and enslaved people, the French policy, and what it was like before that with the free soil principle?
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C
Yes. Well, this is a big, complicated question. You're touching on demographics and some with regard to the major shifts. And I should say that we're talking about 1680. And I kind of situate Louis XIV's kind of intervention in this area in the 1680s all through to the time he. He dies in. In 17, 1713. And I think he's interesting in that he is not. And you. You kind of are alluding to this. He's not the. The. The king or the monarch who is, quote, unquote, ruling over the largest number of enslaved people in the New World. I mean, there's far more people in Central America, certainly Brazil, South America, and in the British colonies. But he does engineer from the outside the most famous of the slave codes, which are the legal documents which create order out of the chaos of the plantation system. And, you know, the Code Noir ends up in a lot of different places around the world. And well after Louis XIV is gone. And you alluded to demographics as well. I think it's. One of the stunning things about the question of race is that there's an accumulation of data that happens around the 1680s and 1700 when the number of enslaved individuals starts really skyrocketing. And this means that the gravel logs, there are increasing number of travel logs, more landfalls of ships, way more contact between Europeans and Africans. And for the longest time, the information about Africa came from Africa itself. And after the plantation system really kind of takes off, at the same time that literacy rates are changing too. There's a lot of information about Africans coming from the Caribbean far more than it's coming from Africa, because there's far more Europeans in contact with Africans and South Africans and quote, unquote, Creole Africans in the Caribbean than in Africa, because Africa was so dangerous, disease wise. Not that the Caribbean was a picnic for either enslaved people or colonists. But it was much less dangerous in terms of epidemiology than Africa was. So we're talking about tens of thousands of Europeans in contact with hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of enslaved individuals. And so that becomes a dominant way of understanding Africans. In fact, the African ethnography is projected back onto Africa, and Africa is now understood by the 1717, 1720, 1730, understood through the lens of the Caribbean and the utility of certain ethnicities in the Caribbean. Louis XIV gets into this whole idea is much more less concerned with some of these ideas than he is with creating colonies that were perfectly compatible with his notion of one king, one faith, and one law, and that he wanted to expel Protestants and making sure that the Africans who were brought to the French colonies would be baptized and become Christian servants. Essentially, the idea is you give up your physical freedom, but you get eternal salvation. And for him, that seemed to be a kind of a pretty good deal. And for many people, justifying the slave trade, particularly in the Catholic world. One of the things that's really important to consider is what Seymour Drescher and others call comparative slavery, which to say that what goes on in the Protestant colonies is very different in that this is kind of generalizing, really, in a large way here. But generally, the idea is that Africans would be baptized in the Catholic colonies and not in the Protestant colonies. Anyway, Louis allows you to think about the laws. And I also, you know, work on some of the basic demographic questions related to slavery. And I think that one of the big takeaways of this book that occurred to me that I haven't really seen anywhere else, is that one of the most powerful forces in creating race is literacy. And one of the great paradoxes is that the more literate and enlightened a country is, the more that the information being generated by naturalists, classifiers, et cetera, becomes accessible to them. In other words, the more liberal, enlightened a country is, the more that racism is going to permeate that country. In the 18th century, particularly the late 18th century, literacy rates expand enormously during the 18th century. Scotland and the United States have some of the highest levels from the very beginning. But in Europe, in continental Europe, the levels are very, very low. But by the end of the century, there are tens of millions more people reading all this new kind of racist ideology. So racism was something for the elite in the 18th, early 18th century, for a small group of kind of gentlemen, naturalists and other people, xenophobia was rampant. But the notion of race was something entirely different. So the Louis XIV chapter, I think, allows people to understand some of these kind of questions related to who's thinking what early on, before race really becomes race. Right.
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B
And there's obviously a major expansion, too, after the Code Noire decree, which you alluded to. Do you have a sense of, or could you give listeners just a sense of the number of people that were, you know, at the beginning of Louis XIV's reign or during his reign, how many people were enslaved and then what those numbers would then come to look like, really, when the Enlightenment was taking off, a lot of the other thinkers you end up looking at.
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C
Yeah, it's a good question, because whether there's a direct correlation or not, the numbers really explode. So the Code Noir is written at a time when there's, you know, when he's first thinking about this, there's, you know, 1500, 3000 enslaved individuals on certain French islands. And by the time that the Haitian Revolution takes place in Saint Domingue, as it was known at the time, there's. There's 500, 600,000 enslaved individuals there. I mean, the numbers are gigantic. And so by the time, you know, the French are responsible for 1.2, 1.3 million transporting, deporting 1.3 million Africans to various various colonies, 250,000 of enslaved people are in French colonies at the final. Their second abolition in 1848. So 500,000 Saint Domingue, 250,000 still enslaved in 1848. 1.3 million is the total number of enslaved individuals transported. And Louis XIV was talking about people in terms of thousands, but certainly the Code Noir is addressed to the generations that are going to come after him, the kings, the slave owners, and the slaves themselves. So he really is thinking about this in the future, but he would have been stunned, I think, to confront the numbers that ultimately came about after 150 years.
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B
Right? Yeah. The numbers become. It's quite shocking. You then look at Jean Baptiste Lebas and his ethnographic work, his writing, which was. Which was popularizing some of these ideas, these descriptions of enslaved people in the Caribbean. And then he also, you know, wrote about Africa and Africans as well. How did he transform some thinking about race and slavery? Obviously, as you say, like, as more people became literate, they were reading the travelogues and the ethnographic work of people like Laba. What did he contribute to this discussion of race?
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C
Yeah, so Jean Baptiste Labar was a Dominican priest who left for Martinique in 1694 after a terrible outbreak of yellow fever on the island that wiped out pretty much Every other priest. And so he went there, and he was something of an adventurer as well as a kind of an architect and mathematician. A real polymath. Interesting guy. And I described him as having been a bully face guy. Because the images of him really showed him as having an unbelievable kind of bully face. And when he gets to Martinique, things are really kind of in a chaotic state. He ultimately takes over a plantation on the. Let me get this right. On the east side of the island called the font St. Jacques. And he makes. Takes it from being a really failing venture into being an incredibly profitable venture. And I think there's. Gosh, I get the numbers wrong, though. But there are really seven or 800 enslaved people on the plantation by the time of the Revolution, which is actually quite high for a French plantation, at least in Martinique. And I've gone there four or five times. I'm going there in a couple weeks as well. And it was really interesting to kind of study these individuals, where they lived. I think it's very important for biography. And, yeah, he writes this book called the New Voyage, which he publishes in the 1720s. Well, you know, 25 years after he was there, or 20 years after he was there. Which is kind of ironic because they call it the New Voyage. And this becomes a bestseller throughout Europe. One of the things that struck me when I was working through all the other characters in this book is that everyone had it on their bookshelf, including Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, had a copy of the New Voyage there. He is very, very important. His book was not published in English, although it was read by many, many people in England. Because he is lambasting the English every three or four pages because of the tension going on there. But His New Voyage provides, quote, unquote, ethnographic information. Both on Africans whom he meets when they first arrive. And then Africans who have been there for a while, the Creole Africans, as he calls them. And then also the Amerindian populations on the islands as well. So he's providing this information. And I think what's really interesting about that, this is raw material. And it's not presented in, quote, a kind of a rash, a rationalized, kind of racialized ethnographic. Now, there's plenty of stereotypes, xenophobia, and at the same. And there's nothing about kind of cognitive deficiency. The things that we associate with kind of basic biological racism. But the thinkers like Buffon, who was one of my characters, and Voltaire and the people writing for the encyclopedia. They're all going to be drawing from these travelogues and processing this ethnography into something that is much more kind of nefarious. He also wrote three books on Africa, and he never went to Africa, although he said, I've seen Africa, but I've never set foot there, because one of the ships he was on was pretty close to North Africa at one point. And these three books made him into, I think, the person who published the most on Africans during the 18th century. Each book has seven volumes, so it's seven times four. It's really, you know, 28 or 30 volumes on African Africans. And it's fascinating because they represent almost the different tendencies in Africanist discourse. There's a missionary, there's a slave trader, and there's a kind of a regular merchant. So you could see these three different kind of tendencies reflected in the travelogues that he translates or adapts into his three Africanist books. And as I said, they all show up in the later, more kind of serious racializing works. He becomes really the source for a lot of ideas. He's not necessarily the most famous, but I think he's emblematic of a strain of thought. So he is also an allegory representing this tendency of the early travelogue, early travel writers, whose work is appropriated by classifiers and naturalists.
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B
And still at this point, people weren't really talking, right, about the concept of, or I suppose there was the concept of race that was being talked about, but it wasn't really widespread. Right. People were talking about it in different ways. When did the actual notion of race then come into play with people like Francois Bernier?
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C
Yeah, I think that different countries had different views. I mean, there's a great kind of philological, linguistic kind of study one can make about the rasa and ras and all the different kind of terms, et cetera. But more or less, things do Coalesce throughout the 18th century and in certain circles. So the, the, you know, I like to say that I point out that for a long time people would refer to different ethnic groups, we'll call them ethnic groups, or different colors of people, with terms such as nations or varieties and never race. You might talk about a race of kings or a race of dogs, but you didn't talk about a race of men until this guy, Francois d' Ornier comes along. He's the first person to really kind of think about these things in kind of proto scientific terms. So, you know, the term varieties is interesting because that's a kind of botanical. That's the botanical metaphor where race is a zoological idea associated with A biological lineage. And that becomes more and more important throughout the century. Bernier, whom you talk about, is a really interesting guy, and I think that if he were one of my allegories, he represents the importance of empiricism for this whole question, in that he is the disciple of Gassendi, who is kind of a Lockean figure. He's a priest, but real empiricist, and he's. He teaches Bernier, and they're very good friends, they travel together. He teaches Bernier to look at the world without received authorities, although, as I said, he's a priest. And Bernier, when he is going to be thinking about different types of humans, will take this to heart and come up with a breakdown. He says in this very famous article he published in 1685, that in the past, people have divided human beings in terms of geographical spaces. And he is going to provide a quote, new division of the Earth in which he will break people down by either types or by races. And there is the time he's using this kind of idea, this zoological construct, to break humans down into four different races. And this is seen as a very chatty, anecdotal type thing. It is. People talk about it, Leibniz talks about it, and in 1722, this is republished. But at this point, what he had thought about in a very prescient fashion has become much more interesting to a lot of people. If I could go back very quickly to the 1739 contest, two or three or even four of the people refer to Bernier at that point as somebody who has provided the kind of intellectual infrastructure for the idea of classification. So really, he was quite, quite important, particularly in the French context. And he is this proto classifier who embodies both the idea that we need to break the world down, the world's people down, rationally, and also do so empirically.
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B
Right. And I think this actually leads nicely into the next biography. You move beyond France and you turn to Carl Linnaeus, someone whose legacy is quite important, I think many people are aware. I think he's the coiner of. It's called binomial nomenclature, how we talk about species in their Latin names. How did Linnaeus explore the idea of humans in this kind of taxonomical formulation? The same way that he thought about plants and animals. He put humans into this formula as well. I was wondering if you could talk about that and also focus on some of his initial ideas, his studies of the Sami people, which I just found to be extremely fascinating.
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C
Yeah. I think that Linnaeus, who is such an interesting character, And I went to Sweden and thanks to two really wonderful colleagues, was able to visit both his country house and his house in Uppsala and kind of see where he lived and how he lived and a lot of the wonderful things he did too. And that's one of the things I hope I can convey here, is that these people are complex people. It was not an overall conspiracy, although it may seem, looking back, it was. But, you know, Linnaeus is mostly interested in plants to begin with. Essentially, he's almost kicked out of school because he's such a crappy student who's absolutely fascinated by botany. And ultimately it's through medicine that he is able to save himself and become a university professor in Uppsala. And he is fascinated by a new way of classifying at this point. And it's hard to imagine, but there were so many overlapping and contradictory ways of classifying the natural world. And it was a gigantic, almost like a contest during the 18th century. The Diderot's encyclopedia. One of the articles in the encyclopedia, I think it's glass or genre, talks about the fact that it's this huge morass. It's impossible for people from different countries to talk to each other about these things because each country would have different kind of competing kind of nomenclature. And Linnaeus and his buddy set off to kind of create this new thing, and he calls it the System of Nature, which will ultimately publish in 1735. In fact, it's during that trip. To visit, quote, unquote, Lapland in the Sami, that he has this huge realization that if seen a dead horse head on the side of the road, that some of the morphology and the bone structure and particularly the teeth, he thinks that, wow, if I could, if I could kind of look at all these kind of similar structures, that's probably kind of an empirical way of actually finding the real order that exists in nature. So his primary focus is, you know, plants and also coming up with this system. And it's almost like his classification of the human as an afterthought, because he is moving through the entire system of knowledge. And he gets to quadrupeds and then anthropomorpha, the idea of a group of beings that all kind of look are man like. And he talks about the genus of Homo simia and Bradypus, which are sloths. And so he brings these three kind of creatures together because of the way the mammalia are kind of configured on these people. And then after that, in the genus Homo, he splits it into four different little varieties, essentially. He doesn't call them races, but they essentially, the way this is kind of brought is schematically rendered in what looks like a kind of vertical hierarchy, really is the first time we see humankind broken down in this way. And even though the four categories, Homo africanus, et cetera, it looks like AFRA looks like it's associated with a continent, we're having a real kind of breakdown that looks like a taxonomy, and it is a taxonomy at that point. And that really is going to take off. I mean, in, you know, later on, Thomas Jefferson, as I said, there are many, many people will see this as the real and logical way to break humankind down. In 1758, he'll provide a second version of this which moves farther toward what we call race by assigning humoral tendencies to the different categories. And at that point, we're really getting something close. We're getting closer to a biological determinism. If the people are determined or identified by what's on inside. There's a fundamental shift of race being something you measure through complexion on the outside to something that's being something on the inside. And then we're getting close to biological determinism. So, yes, he plays a gigantic role in this overall process as one of the primary movers toward something that looks like scientific classification of the human species, Homo sapiens.
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B
Right. And I think that this, that this, this scientific gloss. I mean, you point out that some of the ways that he was talking about it, you know, especially like the humoral differences between people is not, you know, these were, these were earlier ideas that were not scientific, but, you know, were kind of like classical, you know, ideas of, you know, temperament, so on and so forth, and. And you then, you then pick up with another naturalist, Buffo, the French naturalist, and how he reacted to Linnaeus and this almost, you know, this hatred, but still similarity as well. Could you talk about Buffon and his views on Linnaeus?
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C
Yeah, These two gentlemen, Buffon and Linnaeus, are kind of the two greatest naturalists of the 18th century, arguably. And Linnaeus is the great classifier of nature, assigning names to the all natural phenomena, whether it's a rock or whether it's a human being, he's interested in doing so, whereas Buffon found this to be completely reductive, a ridiculous and arbitrary enterprise. And they go back and forth and they do hate each other, as you, as you point out. And what Buffon's doing is quite different in that he's much more interested in two things. One is giving nature itself a history, and we've talked about natural history for a long time. But the notion of natural history for someone like Linnaeus is describing what's going on at classifying. But nature is much more static for him. Whereas for Buffon, who comes out of a much more probably radical epistemological tradition, he's fascinated by the potential transformation of nature and the fact that nature is mutable and nature actually has a history. He's really the most important person before Darwin to produce a chronicle of both humankind and the Earth, which is one of mutation, change and chance as well. So Prolonaeus is no real chance in the world. This is a divinely engineered place and universe. And for Buffon, who, even though he says that this is a divinely inspired universe, his stories are much closer to either a deist understanding of the world or even more so, a materialist understanding of the world, which is to say there's no place for God in this explanation for various phenomena. This has an enormous impact on the way that the story of the human is being told. For the longest time, the story of the human had to be and was told in a way that was compatible with the Old Testament understanding of Noah and his three sons who take off over the earth and end up populating everything. And there's all sorts of problems with this, of course, because there's no mention of Amerindians or North America or America at all in the. In the Bible. And that is something that really upsets people in the 15th and 16th century. You can get into that later if you want. But for some, someone like Beerfon, who's really interested in telling the story of humankind, as opposed to identifying and reading a taxonomy, he puts forward an idea that was kind of floating around already, but he creates a much more comprehensive theory of degeneration, which is the notion that there was an original human prototype that changed in different climates. And so this notion also is. Is kind of existing, has already existed in antiquity as well. But it becomes much more scientific under Buffon's pen. And he will say that this original prototype group of people will move around in different climates. And he says in the North Pole becomes shriveled, small and sickly, and in Africa other things happened. And then, of course, it's very convenient that in the temperate climates you have the kind of the highest expression of humankind, which just is Europe in general. He does seem to say that by the time we get to Sweden, we're starting to look at more degenerate people, because that's where Linnaeus is too. Right. Anyway, degeneration theory becomes the most important explanation of humankind at least since the 1780s. And he puts forward this theory in 1749 in this enormous book called the Natural History. You can see all those in red on my bookshelf here. That's the Natural History behind me, many, many, many times. So anyway, so he. He does create this idea of a. Of a chronicle of humankind. And one of the things that's interesting about him is that he ultimately will say that the first prototype was white. And we can. We can infer this from the fact that black populations occasionally have albino children, which proves that there's something. There's an atodistic type phenomenon going here, that the original prototype is still deeply embedded in their. What we would call biology. And so this puts. Creates not only the superiority of kind of whites in some ways, but the primacy of the white races being the first one and all other groups of people being degenerate. Now, Buffon didn't like the word race, really. He talked about human varieties because he thought there was a huge range of different people, different kinds of people, and the notion of four or five races was completely ridiculous. So he believed in kind of a fertilization, a gigantic palette of different peoples. At the same time, there's plenty of xenophobia that's being reprocessed into this new theory.
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B
Right. And I think what's interesting about Linnaeus and Buffo, just to kind of point out the, you know, the relationship between Enlightenment thinking is that this sort of scientific, natural, more naturalist approach was very important for the genesis of Enlightenment ideas. So, you know, I think the point that is sometimes made that these. I mean, of course, any set of ideas, there's going to be contradictions, and the Enlightenment thinking is filled with contradictions. But I think it also, you know, the study of these two characters shows in a way that they're. That there was a sort of a. A sense that. That. That these racial thinking was implicit, inherent to a certain Enlightenment approach. Would you say that's correct?
- [38:04]
C
I think when the. They said that, you know, xenophobia, hatred, and various forms of genocide have been around for a long, long time. But the 18th century, which is a. A century that loves rationalization, classification, explanation without recourse to the Bible, these are the things which set the stage for a reconceptualization of the human species in a way that had never ever been done before. Now, what's really interesting, I think, and I often disagree with some people about this, is that early on in the century when there was no. There was really from My perspective little need to justify the existence of slavery in North America because people weren't talking about that as that much. It was almost like the scientific ideas were existing in parallel to the enormous colonization. Clearly colonization I'm making clear myself feeds this in the ethnography is going to be feeding the idea. But again, the general justification for enslavement was at least in a place like France, based on the metaphysical justification of the fact that there was an eternal salvation which is implicit in slavery. And the Brits really didn't care about it too much. Now they did talk about Africans as being a nasty, brutish pride of people. So there are to come biological notions that are there. But the, the, the power of Enlightenment thought, the power of the racialization that's taking place really only comes online the 1770s and 1780s. Which to say that when people start pushing back against the slave trade, it's at that point that a lot of these ideas that have been floating around for decades become marshaled by a group of much more militant pro slavery and racist thinkers. The racism is kind of bandied about, contradictory, et cetera early on, but really, really comes Online in the 1770s. In works like Edward Long's History of Jamaica, which brings together all sorts of horrific, kind of the worst racism as a justification for slavery because he's fighting against the people who are pointing out that slavery is, is wrong.
- [40:50]
B
The book begins by looking at Voltaire, who you then pick up with. And Voltaire, I feel like is very kind of the textbook, one of the textbook figures of the Enlightenment. How did Voltaire's ideas on race manifest and how do they compare to, you know, some of the other ideas that you've already discussed?
- [41:10]
C
Yeah, I think that Voltaire might be seen as a, as a kind of a curious choice by some people because according to historians of science, people like myself who look back at 18th century science, Voltaire was something of something. He's late to the party. If you look at the evolution of scientific ideas in the 18th century and if you're putting your bets on some of the best thinkers, you're betting on someone like Buffon. Buffon is going to absolutely revolutionized the way that people are going to be looking at the human species. Voltaire is seen as really rear guard in so many different ways. He is born earlier, he's born the 1690s and he doesn't get this because he is a fixist. He's a Newtonian who thinks that the world operates like a clock and things don't change. God Engineered everything. And what that does is, strangely enough, is having an enormous impact on his racial ideas because he is so hell bent on refuting the Bible. First thing, he is so anti clerical. He is way more interested in biblical exegesis than questions having to do with natural history per se. But he gets bogged down in this whole thing when he sees that his old buddy Buffon has put together this theory of humankind which seems to be compatible with the Old Testament. I know this sounds really complicated, but if you think about the Bible and you have this idea of Noah's three kids taking off and populating the world, it sounds a lot like degeneration in some ways. And certainly Beerfon knew this as well, that he was putting forward an idea that was somewhat compatible with the Bible. So he doesn't get in trouble. Voltaire doesn't care about that. He wants to say that the, you know, empirical data allows us to show that the Bible is absolutely wrong and everything that people are writing at this point, he's a great skeptic, is wrong. So he goes all the way on this and says that human beings, if you just look carefully at them, and he's channeling Bernier at this point. Human beings are not different races. They're not different varieties of just one central human group. They're different species with different origins. And he, he has these very kind of big, thick mechanical metaphors such as, you know, it's like looking at cocker spaniels and, and greyhounds. They're just two different species. Now of course we know that they're related, but for Voltaire are two totally different things. And he said, you know, it's, it's stupid to say that if, if there are FL. Different kinds of flies in America, that there can't be different species of humans in America as well. He sees them kind of coming about completely separately. And to justify this, he grabs hold of some of the most racist, racist tropes of the 18th century. Morphological, big lipped, stupid for Africans. He talks about the fact they've got the so called Beltigian layer, a certain layer of skin that nobody else has. He's of course wrong about that, but he, he points to these elemental anatomical features, morphological features, intelligence, so on and so forth. The worse he brings it all together in order to justify what is known as polygenesis, the notion that there's separate species of human. What's so fascinating about Voltaire is that he's pretty much laughed off by most people during the 18th century, but by the 19th century polygenesis during a time after the Haitian Revolution and after a whole crop of new racist thinkers starts tackling the question of humankind. Voltaire is seen as Prussian, as carrying the torch of a new kind of racial theory that hadn't existed before. Buffon was kind of done away with. And Voltaire supplants in many ways Buffon as the precursor to the way that race is being seen by 1810, 1820, and in the United States, of course, as well, because the justification of slavery, to a certain extent, is going to rely on polygenesis in the United States as well.
- [45:43]
B
You then take us back north to Scotland with the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume and Adam Smith. They also took up these sort of questions of race, racial difference, oftentimes through this lens of different sort of stages of development, economic development. How do the various thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment square race with the other Enlightenment ideas that are sort of kicking around that we're discussing?
- [46:13]
C
This was a tough story to tell. I think that the gentlemen of the Scottish Enlightenment all inherited many of the debates that were going on in France. In fact, Hume had been in France, and Hume is dialoguing directly with Montesquieu in this early stage of thinking about these things. And let's take David Hume first. David Hume, the great skeptic, fascinating, funny, interesting man who has gotten into a lot of trouble for a horrific and notorious footnote that he wrote in a book called Of National Characters. The interesting thing about National Characters is that he wasn't going to publish it, but he was going to publish something that was seen as much more incendiary. So the last second, he sticks and national characters in there. And that's the thing that gets him into trouble. Later on, you could get into trouble for things having to do with the Kirk or the Scottish church, but racism would not get you into trouble in 1748. Anyway, so he publishes of national characters, and he's like Voltaire in some ways. He's really skeptical about some of the theories that are being bandied about in pretty much all domains. But when it comes to proto anthropology, he thinks that the idea that people are going to mutate in different. Different climates is absolutely ridiculous. And he has traveled quite a bit, and he points to several different examples he says that he's just making. He's not been to China, of course, but he says that China has so many different climates, everyone's pretty much alike. He says that the ancient Greeks were fabulous and geniuses and so on and so forth. And the current Greeks are a Bunch of thieves and degraded and so on and so forth. So the climate hasn't changed, the people have changed. So he's refuting climate theory, which is so important for people like Buffon and for Kant later on and for a number of people. And as part of this whole idea, he at this time is also flirting with something having to. That is akin to the idea that people move through certain stages and some people are stuck in certain stages of development. There are two other people. He doesn't really kind of develop a stage theory or a stage theory of race per se, but he is very important, kind of banding this notion about because he is the president at one point of something called the Select Society, which is this group of luminaries in Edinburgh, which becomes incredibly important because they're obsessed with anthropological questions. They put out these prize puzzles and have debates on these ideas. And it pushes like Smith, presumably, and William Robertson, who we don't really know too well, but he's a very, very important figure of the Scottish Enlightenment to think about stage theory in a very different way. Adam Smith is probably the most famous proponent of stage theory because it's part of his theory of progress to commercial society and civilization. And he is actually not racializing these things. He believes that if we change the variables that have an effect, different groups of people, they all come out exactly the same. So he's actually very enlightened in this way. Whereas William Robertson writes this book called the History of America. And he is incredibly important for American history. I think we've forgotten about him probably too much, at least in the circles I've traveled in. He's a really interesting guy who writes this book called the History of America. And his idea is that the British were providing. Initially, one of his intentions was to prove that the British form of civilization, colonization, was far superior to the Spanish. And as he gets into this whole book, the British lose the American War, and he shelves this book. He published a couple of volumes early on, but later on his son will publish some of the things he had written before. And a lot of what appears in the later editions in the 1790s, I think, has to do with Amerindians, Native Americans. And he sees Native Americans as being stuck in initial stages. And he's got various theories of this. So he's a great believer in monogenesis, the idea that there's one group of people. But he's also a believer in stage theory and the fact that certain groups are so degenerate that they can't move forward to the Other stages, they are stuck. And he's also a member of the Kirk, so he's a member of the clergy. He's going to lambast Native Americans as having an inability to understand monotheism as well. So there's a lot of different things having to do with the cognitive inability of Native Americans to, to perform. And he becomes, during the 1820s, 30s and 40s, the most famous historian in the United States and really plays an enormous role in justifying what we call Manifest Destiny and in its relationship to understanding and portraying Amerindians as being really inferior human beings. This wasn't necessarily his intention, but he's actually rewritten entirely by lots of different American authors. So he provides the grist for this enormous stage theory, understanding of the United States and the idea that the Protestant and the Norman were the two kind of highest forms of North Americans moving forward and moving west.
- [52:12]
B
Yeah, that's very interesting. And I, I definitely not as familiar, so I think it's interesting to highlight.
- [52:20]
C
I think I tell the story better in the book. Yeah.
- [52:24]
B
And yeah, there's so much too, I should say to listeners, like, there's just so much that we haven't been able to cover. And I think the way that you explore these ideas too, like you don't just say, here's what so and so thought, you really do wrap it up in a story format oftentimes, like exploring how these ideas came about. And, you know, it's quite richly detailed as well. Well, you then turn to Germany and you look at two German thinkers and how. Obviously it would be accurate to say the German conception of race necessarily. But how are the two German thinkers that you explore thinking about race in relation to the others?
- [53:07]
C
Well, the two people I talk about are Blumenbach and Kant, who are living quite far away from each other, actually. Kant is in Kuendesberg, which is in present day Russia, and Blumenbach is in Gottingen. I pronounced that wrong, I'm sorry. And both are associated ultimately with universities. Kant is much older. Blumerbach is very much like Buffon. He's very nervous about the rise of polygenesis, which starts taking off around 1770, 1775. There's a, there's a small polygenesis school that's coming out of Edinburgh as well, and he's nervous about Kant. And there's more and more people talking about the idea that the human race was. The human race actually consists of different species. So he essentially replicates to a larger degree, to a large degree, what Buffon had done. But he's Also an anatomist. So he's thinking about humankind at a much more sophisticated anatomical way. UMME Bach talks about race in a way that's quite. He was hedging his bets in, in 1775. He says it's useful in, in order to kind of understand the world. But he also is kind of refuting the very basis of race. Later on in his career, he becomes much more involved with the craniometry and he will, will provide a much more concrete breakdown of the human species into five different races. And there's very famous views of the five different skulls, starting with the Georgian skull, the Caucasian skull, from which there's two different branches of humankind. Kant is very famous for providing the first real definition of race. The idea of race is so, so loosey goosey throughout the 18th century. And as a philosopher who was involved in a lot of different things, Kant found this to be kind of unacceptable. And one of the things he does to say that defined race in a way that had never been done by anyone else is first he's going to grab hold of the same basic degeneration theory being used by Blumenbach and Buffon, but he's going to say that by the time that certain groups have moved away from the original stem formation and are no longer able to replicate the original features of the stem formation, they then become a different race. And he also uses another kind of philosophical trick to come up with the notion of race by saying when one category, A, A, say a black person, has a child with category B, a white person, the resulting offspring, C, is conceptually different from the first two. Therefore the A and B are separate conceptual categories. So he's really thinking about the definition of race in a lot of ways. And to do so he's also going to be using a lot of the same kind of racial ideas, chemistry, morphology, that are being bandied about out throughout the 18th century. And what's, I think, interesting about Germany is that they're not terribly involved with colonization. And yet some of the most. Brutal racial ideas were going to take hold in Germany throughout the 18th century. Some of the anatomists, the anatomists in Germany play an enormous role in identifying supposedly elemental features in Africans that point to the existence of an entirely different species or race.
- [57:05]
B
The final person that you look at is Thomas Jefferson. And in many ways he's become, I think, the poster child for enlightenment hypocrisy. You know, he wrote the phrase all men are created equal. Of course, you know, meanwhile he was, you know, an Enslaver. And, you know, generally speaking, even though at various points in time, you know, he said that he thought that slavery was wrong and that we should move to eradicating it, you know, he, over time, tampered, you know, kind of tamped down on this. This view and embraced it to a certain extent. Could you talk about Jefferson and why you chose to end the book with him?
- [57:46]
C
Yeah. Thomas Jefferson is certainly the big Enlightenment paradox. And early on I talked about the fact that he is so important because he's deeply involved in nation building, the construction of race, and also he is the poster boy for some of the most progressive liberal ideas associated with the Enlightenment, whether it's separation of church and state, public education. There are so many different things that we now are part of the American ethos that he contributed to either the Declaration or even through various channels through up to the Constitution. He wasn't involved with that directly, but certainly those ideas. He was very, very important in helping kind of change this country early on. And yet you're absolutely right that he is. Many of the things he writes about, Africans in particular, are incredibly brutal. And I think it's important to go back to the context. It's one of the things I try to do in the book, go back to the context of when this happened. So I write about his life from the late 1770s until his death in 1826. So it will be the 200th anniversary of his death this year. I'm sure that we'll be talking about him and his legacy a lot more in a couple of months. So he starts off as governor of Virginia, very rough time for him, and his wife dies, and he's having a tough time, and he ultimately accepts a post as an ambassador to France. He will ultimately replace Benjamin Franklin after he gets there. And what's interesting about that is when he gets there, he will be publishing something called Notes in the State of Virginia. And he had started writing this when he was still governor, and he was much better at writing this. Essentially a travelogue of Virginia that allowed him to discuss how wonderful his country was, as he called it. And one of the things he does is he will have a number of major digressions about the different people involved. There are the demographics of the state and also the kind of racial breakdown of the state. And it's here where he starts thinking a lot about Africans and slavery and so on and so forth. And he will be arguing that to have the ideal state that he's hoping to achieve, that the best thing to do is to deport and get rid of the Africans. So he wants to get rid of slavery, but he wants to get rid of the Africans and blacks as well. So for him it's a package deal. He's hoping to send, create colonies out in the west and send, and send the Virginians off to the west and come up with a different kind of agrarian economy within Virginia. And he said that, you know, one of the things he says to his credit is that the whites have been so horrific to the black population that he doesn't think they can live together because the blacks would be essentially entitled to revolt. And he said that God would probably be on the side of the blacks given the abuses that the black populations have suffered. Still, in all, he has inherited some of the worst ideas, the worst ratiology that we've been discussing. So, you know, when I looked at his library, the contents of his library, I was astonished to see that he had every one of the thinkers we've talked about today on his bookshelves and way more as well. So he had an enormous collection of travelogues, a collection of the ratiology, whether it's long, he had hit all these ideas there and he's a great synthesizer of these racial ideas, a lot of them. I think that the Jefferson scholars don't understand a lot of the third and fourth tier racial thinkers that he's reading in French. He was the greatest student probably of French natural history and French raciology in North America. And he synthesized all this in this notes in the state of Virginia. He gets into a very famous debate with Buffon and here's where his real racist ideas come out. Buffon and another person named Reynal said that whites were also degenerate in North America because of the bad swamps and the humidity of North America. And, and one of the problems according to Jefferson is that in this book he needs to confront that and refute that. And to do so he is going to say that first, the Amerindians are not degenerate, whites are not degenerate and blacks are not degenerate because they are inferior by birth. So it's essentially endorsing the arguments of, of Voltaire and also of David Hume, which are much more polygenetic in a way. I'm not saying that Jefferson is a polygenicist, but I am saying that he believes there's something naturally inferior about blacks and he throws them under the bus in order to save the reputation of whites and Amerindians. So he's a great apologist of Amerindians Native Americans and whites. In order to do so, he says that blacks are now naturally inferior. And he trots out all sorts of raciology coming from the books I've mentioned before. And yet, as I said, he's a complex person and it's a sad story. It's a fascinating story to tell. Jefferson, it took me the longest to write because there's so much to say and he's such a complex figure and he is hypocritical. I mean, generally, I try to kind of get away from that term. But he's hypocritical because you can see that he is trying to maintain two truths at the same time. And he'll write one thing to one person and write something else to somebody else. One of the things I noticed is in the letter he writes the day before Sally Hemings arrives in Paris, he said, there's a great place in heaven for the person who fights against slavery. And then Sally is going to arrive, and then he's going to take her as his concubine a few months later on an enslaved concubine. And that is also a big part of the story of Thomas Jefferson, of course.
- [64:36]
B
Right. And I think what's important about this book as you go through the different biographies, is highlighting or really bringing to the forefront these ideas that oftentimes get. Get shunted to the back without denying, you know, the important ideas that they contribute as well. Because I think that sometimes there can be a tendency to do that too. And to say that these sort of mark on their ideas should make us toss everything else out. But I feel like. I think you have this line, you might be able to fix it. I think it's the Voltaire line about how we should treat. Treat those who are dead versus those who are living. I don't know if you remember it off the top of your head.
- [65:22]
C
Yeah. I think it's really a great quote for all historians to keep in mind. And Folter says history is a trick that we play on the dead. And it certainly is because we different historians will say different things about the same people over time. I think it's hard to refute a lot of the things that we're saying about these people now. But I think it is our duty as historians to try to paint a complex story and yet take a point of view that is not entirely anachronistic. But we do also judge, and we judge them in the following way, I think. Think so. You know, if you are a member of a militia in Barbados and you don't know how to read. If you are somebody who is at a, an, a white person who's at a so called factory, it's a lamina in what is present day Ghana. If you're somebody who is, and if you're somebody who has been the beneficiary of ideas of universalism and enlightenment, then you can kind of think about the fact that they're much more aware of the inequities and injustices because they have the wherewithal. That's why I think it's the first generation people we judge so harshly the people in the Enlightenment, whereas the people from the 17th and 18th, 16th century, although people may try to kind of take down Columbus's statue, but it still doesn't have the same kind of idea. We're not castigating him, his psychology, we're castigating what he stood for, for better or for worse. But when it comes to the 18th century figures, we know them, they're so much more like us and that's why we're so disappointed.
- [67:21]
B
I think that's a good point. And it goes to what you write a little bit about at the end of the book where you talk about this exchange that you've had in the classroom. And I think that this is something that a lot of, of teachers will probably recognize when talking about the past where you know, we look at the deeds and the actions and the ideas of people from the past and, and we judge them and we say, well, if I was born in that time, if I, if I was, you know, living in Thomas Jefferson's America, I would have been an anti racist, you know, what do you think of this, this sort of thing where we, we like to imagine that if we were back then that we would have, you know, brought our, you know, 20th, 21st century ideas to the past. You know, what do you make of this sort of question or this sort of idea that a student might put forward?
- [68:15]
C
Well, I think you have to admire the students who have such a deep engagement with the past and are morally revolted by the things that they find to be really awful at the same time. You're referring to a story that I tell in the book where one of my students, when we were discussing the racial ideas of 1820 or 1780, said that I don't care whether I was, I don't care if I were living in Liverpool, the slave capital of England during 1750, she said 1750, I would be anti racist. As if that were kind of part and parcel of her biological character. Which I thought to be fascinating because she was arguing for biological determinism at that point. And I think that that's hard. The fact that looking back at the past, it is actually pretty easy to figure out what you would have access to if you think about particular groups of people, what they read. And that's one of the things I've done in a lot of my work, is to go back and look at the work, the books that women were reading, women's magazines, children's magazines, children's geography journals or manuals, the encyclopedias, dictionaries, all the information that was responsible for generating and replicating a lot of the ideas of race. It can be very hard as a European, North American, illiterate North American to escape some of these ideas. And of course there's trickle down racism among people who don't know how to read as well. So yeah, I think it is actually quite depressing to go back and look at the intellectual infrastructure surrounding certain groups of people. And I think that poor woman was probably wrong about herself in 1750 in Liverpool. I think it'd be very difficult to free oneself from some of those ideas. This said, the 18th century is not only the time of racism, but it's the time of anti racism. And there are a lot of really interesting people who break free from some of these ideas. One of them is my buddy Diderot whom I wrote about, who certainly had inherited a lot of these ideas, but understood that the anatomy, the anatomical justification of race that was being bandied about in the 18th century was based on entirely spurious science. And so he went after that and refuted it toward the end of his career. And even more tellingly are the large population, large number of, of formerly enslaved blacks who wrote about their own experiences and who are quite literally writing themselves into history and who were living counter examples to everything being written, whether it's degeneration theory, stage theory, classification. By demonstrating literacy, which is one of the major kinds of, of things that Europeans said they had a monopoly on, and writing poetry, as Phillis Wheatley did, they were really refuting race at its heart. That's why one of the most important books of the early 19th century is called Abigoire's De la Litateur des Negre of the literature of blacks, which is a huge collection of, of. It's a collection of little biographical portraits of Africans, all who had contributed to the world of letters in interesting ways. It's a gigantic refutation of the idea that they were incapable of doing so right.
- [72:10]
B
And I think that these, you know, these counter examples as you sort of end the book with is, you know, so important. Obviously, you know, I think it shows too that, that, you know, while I think it's important in the book as you do, you know, to take on many of these central figures because of the influence that they've had, obviously you know, that that's part of then what people end up reading. They read the influential figures and that helps inform people's racial views. But almost highlighting, you know, some of the well known figures like Diderot, but also people that others might not be familiar with, I think is really important and it shows how, how even if someone wasn't necessarily as influential sadly in their time in convincing people of these kind of the pernicious ideas around race that were so prevalent, they could still have an impact even today as we read them 200, 250 years later. So I think that this book really does your mission justice and it's highly readable. You go through a very interesting set of thinkers and I think really, you know, really explore the ideas in a way that's thoughtful, complex, you know, does it justice, but also, you know, doesn't pull punches as well. So, you know, I'm looking forward to see what the reception is like and you know, as you point out, you know, in what the 200 year anniversary of Jefferson, Jefferson's death, you know, what some of the people will be talking about. So, you know, good luck with the forthcoming book tour for.
- [73:47]
C
Thanks so much.
- [73:48]
B
Yeah, it's wonderful.
- [73:49]
C
Thanks for having me on.