ABSTRACT
In the creation of racial doctrines of the nineteenth-century variety, a crucial part was played by anthropology. Seventeenth and eighteenth- century biologists believed that God had in the beginning created a limited number of species which were unchanging. Each had its place in the divine scheme. Many of the ingredients necessary to the construction of a racial doctrine had been present for some time. Jacques Barzun shows how an opposition between Teuton and Latin ran through much French historical writing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The new use of the word race’ represented it as a physical category. It led to neglect of the way in which race was socially utilized as a category for organizing peoples’ perceptions of the populations of the world. There was a social process, which can be called racialization, whereby a mode of categorization was developed, applied tentatively in European historical writing, and then, more confidently, to the populations of the world.
