ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the growing significance of racial categorizations in the nineteenth century up to the time when Charles Darwin’s work brought about a re-orientation. A great many writers in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States, theologians, anatomists, physiologists, ethnologists, poets, and travellers contributed to the vigorous and confused debate about race and the historical examination of it is far from complete. The conception of racial types is more central to the debate about race than is the attempt to classify the peoples of varying regions. It contrasts sharply with the conceptual apparatus that Darwin made necessary, and it remains at the core of a discredited ideology of racial determinism which looks like retaining some political significance for the remainder of the twentieth century. The course of the nineteenth-century debate about race was affected by the assumptions different writers felt able to make about the age of the earth.
