Biological race theory predates Darwin and supported colonialism

Evidence

On the one hand, there was an openly biological transcription, which occurred long before Darwin and which borrowed its discourse, together with all its elements, concepts, and vocabulary, from a materialist anatomo-physiology. It also has the support of philology, and thus gives birth to the theory of races in the historico-biological sense of the term. Once again and almost as in the seventeenth century, this is a very ambiguous theory, and it is articulated with, on the one hand, nationalist movements in Europe and with nationalities’ struggles against the great State apparatuses (essentially the Russian and the Austrian); you will then see it articulated with European policies of colonization. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 77

Categorization

• XREF: Links to race-thinking and Islamophobia readings: the biologization of race as a pre-Darwinian colonial tool. — connects to: Nineteenth-century scientific racism supplied latent Orientalism’s biological grounding; Darwinism was politically neutral and served both race rule and its opponents; Evolutionist doctrines translated middle-class ambition into biological race hierarchy (+5 more)

Related

• Darwinism was politically neutral and served both race rule and its opponents (similarity 0.89)
• Nineteenth-century scientific racism supplied latent Orientalism’s biological grounding (similarity 0.85)
• Darwinism prepared but did not directly cause racial nativism (similarity 0.81)
• Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality (similarity 0.81)
• European racialism justified colonial expansion and rule (similarity 0.81)
• European racial ideology predates colonial encounters and was extended to non-Europeans later (similarity 0.79)
• Early Italian sociology grounded Southern inferiority claims in biology and race (similarity 0.79)
• Imperialism would have invented racism even without prior race-thinking (similarity 0.79)
• Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial-era science transformed Muslims into a fixed racialized type (similarity 0.79)
• Racism relocated from biology into culture after Darwinism lost legitimacy (similarity 0.79)
• Pre-Civil War race-thinking was vague and non-biological (similarity 0.79)
• Race is a modern concept tied to early global capitalism and colonial conquest. (similarity 0.78)
• Race-as-inferiority toward Arabs and Muslims emerged only with nineteenth-century colonial power (similarity 0.78)
• Race-thinking preceded and differs from racism as a full ideology (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Imperialism would have invented racism even without prior race-thinking #complicates (0.80)
• Colonial liberal assimilation differed fundamentally from later racialized exclusion #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 63