ABSTRACT

A new, natural-historical, essentially non-theological conception of race emerged in Europe and the British Isles from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Three developments at least were responsible for the emergence of this new natural-historical conception of race. First, the possibility of truly global travel following the first circumnavigation of the Earth was a social change with enormous consequences. Second, a new awareness of the different physical appearance of the world’s people derived from new transcontinental population movements (e.g. the Atlantic Slave Trade and European emigration to the New World) had a major effect. Third, the application of the values and naturalising epistemology of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution (however defined) 1 to the different physical appearance of the human species as a whole, made possible a new theoretical vocabulary for fabricating race, or gave new meanings to old terms. These developments, among others, produced the conditions for the emergence of race. 2