Bourgeois animal breeding cultivated the doctrine of race as nobility

Evidence

This development should be viewed in the context of a bourgeois society that placed great value on all signs of noble descent: at the dinner table where they received highborn guests the successful bourgeois would serve pedigreed wines and talk of noble races of horses or dogs. The late eighteenth century marked the origin of all sorts of connoisseurship associated with breeding animals or plants, and the craze continued in the nineteenth century. Darwin wrote that his ideas came from breeding pigeons; Mendel’s genetic discoveries were suggested to him by his hobby of crossing different strands of African violets. As ladies and gentlemen bred animals and improved plants, they practiced on their surroundings the doctrine of race as nobility. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 118 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

If European civilization was not to succumb to decadence and decay, and undergo the same fate as the classical and Asian civilizations, Europeans had to be on guard against mixing with different races and lower elements, for in any combination, the lower element would predominate. This applied primarily to aristocracies in Europe who had to keep their distance from the peasantry and lower classes. Thus in many ways, “race” thinking started out as status anxiety on the part of aristocracies and upper classes in Europe, who at the time felt threatened and insecure because of the revolutionary changes at the turn of the eighteenth century. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 189 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dog breeds were invented through nineteenth-century show competitions — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 801; Dog breed ownership maps onto social class hierarchies — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 802; Modern race thinking emerged from bourgeois breeding and pet-keeping hobby culture — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 118 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern race thinking emerged from bourgeois breeding and pet-keeping hobby culture #corroborates (0.96) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 118
• Race-thinking supplied a natural aristocracy to replace the feudal nobility #expands (0.92)
• European race thinking originated as aristocratic status anxiety #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 189