race

European conquest and the classification of the conquered

As they were constructing their own racial identities internally, western European nations were also colonizing most of what has been called, in recent times, the Third World, in Asia and Africa. Since all the colonized and subordinated peoples differed physically from Europeans, the colonizers automatically applied racial categories to them and initiated a long history of discussions about how such populations should be classified. There is a very wide range of physical characteristics among Third World peoples, and subjective impressions generated much scientific debate, particularly about which features were most useful for racial classification. Experts never reached agreement on such classifications, and some questions, such as how to classify indigenous Australians, were subjects of endless debate and were never resolved.

Race and race ideology had become so deeply entrenched in American and European thought by the end of the 19th century that scholars and other learned people came to believe that the idea of race was universal. They searched for examples of race ideology among indigenous populations and reinterpreted the histories of these peoples in terms of Western conceptions ... (200 of 16,589 words)