Immanuel Kant supplied the first scientific definition of race in 1775.

Evidence

The military, mercantile, and bureaucratic exploits of colonial Europe would not have been possible without scientific and technological tools. These included new means of communication and transportation (the telegraph and the railroad) as well as new ways of collecting and analyzing information for the purpose of the administration of populations and commodities (statistics, accounting, economic theory, and so on). The success of these inventions in facilitating empire-building was seen as further validation of the superiority of the West. But beyond the creation of tools for managing territories and populations, discussed from a different perspective in chapter 4, colonial science provided its own new rationalizations for conquest. A whole new obsession with classification, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, helped to establish the boundaries not only between human and beast but between perceived higher and lower forms of humans, all in the name of the expansion of science and, through it, the betterment of “man.” Immanuel Kant, a central figure in modern Western philosophy, provided the first scientific definition of the concept of race in his 1775 essay “Of the Different Human Races.” Subsequently, a branch of anthropology became invested in the elaboration of “racial types,” whereby certain physical attributes were linked to certain mental and behavioral characteristics—for instance, skull size and other arbitrary measures were used in an attempt to establish the superiority of white men over people of color and also over white women. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 264

Categorization

• CANDY: Kant, the great Enlightenment philosopher, wrote the first scientific race definition — a sharp, quotable one-sentence fun fact about knowledge as colonial weapon.
• XREF: Connects to Chapter 4’s discussion of tools for managing populations; also parallel to how data classification today sorts humans into extractable categories. — connects to: Race is a modern concept barely existing before the Enlightenment; Race gained formal codification and state authority from the eighteenth century; Coherent racial theory required modern science to emerge (+3 more)
• SEED: Article angle: ‘classification’ as the colonial technique that returns today in data-driven population sorting — Kant’s racial taxonomy as the ancestor of algorithmic categories.

Broader Connections

• Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system #corroborates (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3303
• Coherent racial theory required modern science to emerge #corroborates (0.85)
• Race is a modern concept barely existing before the Enlightenment #corroborates (0.82)
• Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 61
• Race gained formal codification and state authority from the eighteenth century #qualifies (0.75)
• Racism’s earliest statements came from anatomists claiming hierarchical human races #qualifies (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1858