Race is a modern concept tied to early global capitalism and colonial conquest.

Evidence

Race itself has proven to be a very contradictory notion. The idea of race barely existed before the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity; indeed it has hada rather rocky relationship with the rationalism and scientism in which the Enlightenment was grounded. Race is certainly a modern concept: It is linked to the conquest of the Americas, the rise of capitalism, the circumnavigation of the globe, the Atlantic slave trade, and the approaches to race and racism, the ethnicity-, class-, and nation-based paradigms. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 231

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early modern Spain and Portugal pioneered hereditary notions of bodily racial difference. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 114; Race is a modern construct that states adopt to become modern — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1683