Enlightenment environmentalism furnished a rationale for colonial hierarchy

Evidence

Indirectly, the Enlightenment also influenced the crystallization of a fatal distinction between metropolitans and creoles. In the course of his twenty-two years in power (1755–1777), the enlightened autocrat Pombal not only expelled the Jesuits from Portuguese domains, but made it a criminal offence to call ‘coloured’ subjects by offensive names, such as ‘nigger’ or ‘mestiço’ [sic]. But he justified this decree by citing ancient Roman conceptions of imperial citizenship, not the doctrines of the philosophes. More typically, the writings of Rousseau and Herder, which argued that climate and ‘ecology’ had a constitutive impact on culture and character, exerted wide influence. It was only too easy from there to make the convenient, vulgar deduction that creoles, born in a savage hemisphere, were by nature different from, and inferior to, the metropolitans – and thus unfit for higher office. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 232

Categorization

• QUESTION: Anderson credits Rousseau/Herder’s climate-determinism with feeding the creole-inferiority deduction — this is the proto-racist misuse of Enlightenment universalism, a thread worth chasing into later Orientalist deployments of ‘civilization’.
• XREF: This is the mechanism by which putatively universalist thought gets turned into hierarchical exclusion — exactly the critical move the Islamophobia field makes against liberal universalism’s treatment of Muslims. — connects to: Enlightenment social science mapped all world societies onto one West-modeled progress scale; Colonial domination is justified by inventing a dependency complex in the colonized — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 149; Nineteenth-century Orientalism traded Enlightenment universalism for a hierarchy of civilizations. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 193 (+7 more)

Related

• Nineteenth-century Orientalism traded Enlightenment universalism for a hierarchy of civilizations. (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism capped the reach of Enlightenment emancipation through racialized colonial rule (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism replaced Enlightenment universalism with ideologies of inherent racial inferiority (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial ideology combined fiscal self-interest with Enlightenment trade beliefs. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonialism replaced Enlightenment universalism with a racialized superiority complex toward Muslims. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century Orientalism traded Enlightenment universalism for a hierarchy of civilizations. #expands (0.85) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 193
• Nineteenth-century Europe traded Enlightenment universalism for imperialist superiority #expands (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 119
• Colonial emotional attributions constructed the social hierarchies they claimed to describe #expands (0.80)
• Colonial domination is justified by inventing a dependency complex in the colonized #expands (0.75) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 149
• The eighteenth century equated individuality with freedom and assumed natural human equality #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 650
• Co-opting indigenous cosmology makes colonial rule sacred and rebellion sacrilegious #exemplifies (0.72) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 147