Europeans regarded the colonized as creatures of nature rather than culture

Evidence

For Europeans, the indigenous had very little culture worthy of the name (and for the British the boers had only marginally more). Driven especially by the eighteenth-century naturalizing impulse regarding racial non-Europeanness, not only were the indigenous thought to inhabit nature; they were, in their very being, creatures of nature, akin to the animal world. If for Europeans culture was taken to triumph over nature, for non-Europeans and especially for those deemed naturally primitive, culture withered in the face of nature. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1401

For Europeans, the indigenous had very little culture worthy of the name (and for the British the boers had only marginally more). Driven especially by the eighteenth-century naturalizing impulse regarding racial non-Europeanness, not only were the indigenous thought to inhabit nature; they were, in their very being, creatures of nature, akin to the animal world. If for Europeans culture was taken to triumph over nature, for non-Europeans and especially for those deemed naturally primitive, culture withered in the face of nature. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1401

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the naturalizing of racial difference in Enlightenment-era taxonomy (Linnaeus, Buffon). — connects to: Early European claims to civility rested on a culture-versus-nature frame, not cultural difference. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 64; Discovery vested absolute title in Europeans subject only to Indian occupancy — Supreme Court of the United States (Marshall Court, 1823), Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh,…, 259
• ADDENDUM: The nature/culture binary here parallels the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s treatment of how colonial powers classed indigenous peoples with their landscapes.
• DEFINE: Sets up the conceptual contrast of culture-triumphs-over-nature against natives-as-nature that underwrites later racial classification.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1401