Modern race thinking emerged from bourgeois breeding and pet-keeping hobby culture

Evidence

This development should be viewed in the context of a bourgeois society that placed great value on all signs of noble descent: at the dinner table where they received highborn guests the successful bourgeois would serve pedigreed wines and talk of noble races of horses or dogs. The late eighteenth century marked the origin of all sorts of connoisseurship associated with breeding animals or plants, and the craze continued in the nineteenth century. Darwin wrote that his ideas came from breeding pigeons; Mendel’s genetic discoveries were suggested to him by his hobby of crossing different strands of African violets. As ladies and gentlemen bred animals and improved plants, they practiced on their surroundings the doctrine of race as nobility. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of bourgeois natural-history hobbies shaping worldviews — breeding plants and animals as applied racial ideology. — connects to: Dog breeds were invented through nineteenth-century show competitions — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 801; Status-driven dog breeding now overrides health in perceived beauty — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 803; Dog breed ownership maps onto social class hierarchies — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 802
• SEED: Essay angle: Darwin’s pigeons and Mendel’s violets as evidence that hobbyist animal/plant breeding gave the bourgeoisie a hands-on training ground for racial theory.