Race was mobilized by Iberian states in the fifteenth century

Evidence

The notion of race, then, was put to work from the fifteenth century on in the Mediterranean countries, especially Iberian. Race quickly came to mark Europe and its wordly extensions in the colonizing and imperializing societies over the next couple of centuries, especially in the drive to state sovereignty and the subsequent centralizing of the war function under state mandate elaborated so provocatively by Michel Foucault in his 1976 lectures on race and modern state formation, Society Must Be Defended. Race acquired a more formal codification and consequently socio-intellectual authority from the eighteenth century onwards, as Foucault remarks, increasingly coming to order centralizing state definition and function, institutionalization and practice. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 57

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended lectures on race and state formation already in the reader’s law/state-theory sphere. — connects to: Early modern Spain and Portugal pioneered hereditary notions of bodily racial difference. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 114