ABSTRACT
For Aristotle, from climatic differences, European barbarians tend to be fierce, warlike, and unable to live in a city-state whereas Asian barbarians tend to become soft, indolent, and prone to tyranny. In addition to the Spanish theory of conversos in the fifteenth century, other accounts concerning racial differences may be considered as forerunners to modern European racism. In spite of the widespread, European acceptance of a common origin of humans from Adam and Eve, both these arguments based on Biblical texts are used to support the alleged natural inferiority of Africans to Europeans in the service of justifying European enslavement of African and other non-white groups. For the biological theories, like the Biblical arguments, attempts to establish that non-European groups, like Africans or Native Americans, are morally and intellectually inferior to Europeans and so may be enslaved or treated as non-human.
