http://anthropology6030.blogspot.de/200 ... metry.html
On this blog a few voices past enlightenment, but pre Darwin are mentioned. And indeed racism was prevalent and scientists tried to prove the difference of the races.
So no racism pre-Darwin was overstating it, yet I maintain that racism is still a modern, post-enlightenment accomplishment.
The reason why the overstatement came along was because I fell into the trap of attributing evolution to Darwin alone. But though he was the one who came up with the correct theory, others had already been working on it for quite a while. Starting with Mendel and most notably done by people like Lamarck etc.
Interestingly people like Louis Agassiz (mentioned in the blogpost) proposed that race was an atribute of the location people lived in. This idea was dropped, because it might have explained the blacks in Africa, but not the wide distribution of whites.
All of this came into existence only after enlightenment though. Before that the word of the Bible was the word of God and rational though about the existence of races would have meant doubting it.
(For some reason the superstitionalists think this is an argument in their favor
)
It probably also helped that pre enightenment travel between the regions was very sparse.
Yet as this is also a discussion of slavery, it still needs to be pointed out again that the slavery of old was not done along racial lines, while the modern one, especially the further you go into the present was almost exclusively along them.
The difference is very important as only in the later case, the de-humanization allowed industrialized use of them.
I read only recently btw. that the birth of Capitalism was very closely linked to the colonization of the Americas and that slavery was its first industry.
The reasoning was along the lines, that conquering of new land before was done by nation states, while the gold starved Spain and Portugal of the 15 hundreds send out free agents, which had to finance their endevour via debt, and were allowed to draw profit out of the new lands. Once they found out that the natives are not going to dig up all the gold for them, they started using blacks which they bought from the African slavery system of old (closer resembling the one from roman times). Thus Blacks being the first debt traded commodity. It is an interesting and plausible thought IMO.
PS: I have no idea what ESL means. Please explain your acronyms in the future.
