Voltaire asserted that human races descended from separate origins

Evidence

This shift to a hardened racial sensibility was prompted no doubt by the spread of an emerging European hegemony about racial hierarchy and its resonance with what boers took to be their local experience. In France Voltaire could claim with confidence at mid-century that “Whites, Negroes, and Albinoes … are totally different races,” descended as he put it “from different men.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1369

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in Enlightenment race theory — that a champion of reason held polygenist views.
• XREF: Ties to sumptuary-law and clothing chapters: European metropolitan ideas exported to colonial frontier as distinction markers.