ABSTRACT
Parallel to the rise of nationalism and the growing fixation with nationstatism, another fundamental shift in the interpretation of human history was already in full motion by the end of the nineteenth century. The emergence of an allegedly authoritative epistemology of ‘race’ questioned a series of key assumptions upon which grand historical narratives of human civilisation had been constructed. Traditional racialist thought, based on the idea of monogenesis (that is, the single biological derivation of all modern human groups), did not lend itself to discourses of inherent superiority and inferiority of human groups. Yet, the contact of European colonisers with populations in previously unknown parts of the world during the age of explorations and imperialism (sixteen to nineteenth centuries) produced a need to account not only for the different levels of ‘civilisation’ between the European ‘metropolis’ and the colonies of the new world, but also for visible differences in the physical appearance and demeanour of peoples in the two spheres. The idea of the ‘inequality’ of human races, as propagated by prominent modern racial theorists such as Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (but, as we shall see, implicit in much earlier discourses of civilisational ‘otherness’), coincided with broader cataclysmic developments in European culture. On the one hand, science had made impressive inroads into social and political analysis, responding to the need for rational explanations of historical phenomena and supplying novel opportunities for interpreting them in very different ways. On the other hand, the second wave of imperialism (nineteenth century) had brought Europeans into contact with African and Asian peoples, offering them unprecedented opportunities to devise and implement a system of power relations based on the assumption that their alleged superiority justified the subjugation and exploitation of allegedly inferior new ‘others’. By arrogantly assuming that the Eurocentric model of civilisation represented the apogee of human evolution and by setting benchmarks derived from it (technology, political structures, art and architecture, etc), they came to the conclusion that domination was the ineluctable and immutable result of biological determinism. Social Darwinism lent further validity to such assumptions, first by legitimising the struggle between groups for control over resources, and second by interpreting
this ‘inequality’ as the result of the alleged fixity of biological qualities that were particular to each ‘racial’ group. Thus, the discourse of ‘race’ became an indispensable device of legitimising relations of domination-subjugation by suggesting and promoting systematically a notion of immutable biological hierarchy of ‘human value’.
