ABSTRACT
The components of race ideology had potential applications that transcended group relations in the North American setting. Allegations of racial superiority and inferiority satisfy the private interests of certain powerful groups in Europe. And European scholars were prepared to substantiate theories of intra-European races and their inequality with measurement techniques and arguments similar to those used in the United States. This chapter briefly locates European race thinking in the evolving spectrum of racial attitudes. It focuses on how European science complemented the developing ideology and had further synergistic influences on American thought. The power politics within European nations took on a whole new spectrum of racial incompatibilities. Race is just one way of looking at and interpreting human phenotypic differences. During the nineteenth century, European intellectuals assumed that all societies recognized races, with much the same ideology of difference and inequality.
