An economist created the influential racial typology because professional anthropologists declined

Evidence

William Z. Ripley was a brilliant young economist who had the kind of mind that refuses to stay put. In the mid-nineties, before he was thirty years old, Ripley was teaching economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while simultaneously developing a unique course of lectures at Columbia University on the role of geography in human affairs. In its conception this course reflected Ripley’s conviction of the basic importance of environmental conditions in molding the life of man; but he quickly came up against the problem of race. The question led him to the controversies among continental scholars on the anthropological traits of European peoples, and he chose the locale of Europe as a crucial test of the interplay of race and environment. In The Races of Europe, a big, scholarly volume appearing in 1899, he anatomized the populations of the continent, pointing temperately but per- sistently to ways in which physiological traits seemed to reflect geographical and social conditions. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 921

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: why exactly an economist rather than anthropologist supplied the racial typology American nativists adopted.
• XREF: connects to: Race ideology trumped economic rationality even at ruinous cost — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 526; Capitalism differentiated peoples into racial categories rather than homogenizing them — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 205; Racism shaped Western science, not the reverse — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408

Broader Connections

• Race ideology trumped economic rationality even at ruinous cost #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 526
• Capitalism differentiated peoples into racial categories rather than homogenizing them #corroborates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 205
• Racism shaped Western science, not the reverse #contradicts (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408