European racial hierarchy theory fused Greek climate determinism with complexion prejudice.

Evidence

Winthrop Jordan reminds us of the antiquity of these notions in his treatment of David Hume’s “valuation of color”: “Hume was convinced that the peoples near the poles and in the tropics were essentially inferior to those in the temperate zones, a conviction which can be traced historically back through European thought to the Greeks—who also lived in a temperate climate. What Hume did in 1748, though, was to go ancient philosophers one better by hitching superiority to complexion.” Jordan then goes on to quote Hume directly: “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1700

Categorization

• DEFINE: Traces the conceptual lineage of race-as-hierarchy from Greek climate theory to Hume’s 1748 explicit linkage of superiority to white complexion.