Early racial theories based superiority on historical conquest, not physical traits.

Evidence

Boulainvilliers’ theory, however, still deals with peoples and not with races; it bases the right of the superior people on a historical deed, conquest, and not on a physical fact—although the historical deed already has a certain influence on the natural qualities of the conquered people. It invents two different peoples within France in order to counteract the new national idea, represented as it was to a certain extent by the absolute monarchy in alliance with the Tiers Etat. Boulainvilliers is antinational at a time when the idea of nationhood was felt to be new and revolutionary, but had not yet shown, as it did in the French Revolution, how closely it was connected with a democratic form of government. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 439

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes a ‘peoples-and-conquest’ proto-racism from later physical-race doctrines — a key conceptual distinction in the scaffolding.
• XREF: connects to: Hobbes’s prejudice against Native Americans was civilizational rather than racial. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 71; Pre-Civil War race-thinking was vague and non-biological — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 69