English race-thinking centered on inheritance and eugenics because gentry assimilation preserved feudal concepts.

Evidence

In England nationalism developed without serious attacks on the old feudal classes. This has been possible because the English gentry, from the seventeenth century on and in ever-increasing numbers, had assimilated the higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, so that sometimes even the common man could attain the position of a lord. By this process much of the ordinary caste arrogance of nobility was taken away and a considerable sense of responsibility for the nation as a whole was created; but by the same token, feudal concepts and mentality could influence the political ideas of the lower classes more easily than elsewhere. Thus, the concept of inheritance was accepted almost unchanged and applied to the entire British “stock.” The consequence of this assimilation of noble standards was that the English brand of race-thinking was almost obsessed with inheritance theories and their modern equivalent, eugenics. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the nation-as-imagined-community and the class-inflected origins of national identity concepts that later Islamophobia readings build on.
• DEFINE: Defines the specific English variant of race-thinking as inheritance- and eugenics-driven, distinct from the French or German pattern in the next paragraphs.