The first scientific attempts to categorize race date from the 17th century, along with the development of European imperialism and colonization around the world. The first post-Classical published classification of humans into distinct races seems to be François Bernier's Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent ("New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it"), published in 1684.
[note that they did not bother to call the different "races" breeds - but entirely different species altogether.]
17th and 18th century
In the 18th century, the differences between human groups became a focus of scientific investigation (Todorov 1993). Initially, scholars focused on cataloging and describing "The Natural Varieties of Mankind," as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach entitled his 1775 text (which established the five major divisions of humans still reflected in some racial classifications). From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about group differences with scientific explanations of those differences produced what one scholar has called an "ideology of race" (Smedley 1999). According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring, and distinct. Some groups might be the result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but careful study can distinguish the ancestral races that had combined to produce admixed groups.
[emphesis mine ]
19th century
* Natural Scientists on race: In the 19th century a number of natural scientists wrote on race: Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Francis Galton, Georges Cuvier, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. These scientists made three claims about race: first, that races are objective, naturally occurring divisions of humanity; second, that there is a strong relationship between biological races and other human phenomena (such as forms of activity and interpersonal relations and culture, and by extension the relative material success of cultures); third, that race is therefore a valid scientific category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behavior. Races were distinguished by skin color, facial type, cranial profile and size, texture and color of hair. Moreover, races were almost universally considered to reflect group differences in moral character and intelligence.
Their understanding of race was usually both essentialist (defining something by a list of characteristics) and taxonomic (hierarchical).
* Anthropology. But as the science of anthropology took shape in the 19th century, European and American scientists increasingly sought explanations for the behavioral and cultural differences they attributed to groups (Stanton 1960). For example, using anthropometrics, invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, they measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes (Lieberman 2001).
The eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inspired by Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855), Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology" and Herder's theories, asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by use of culture as well as physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide often used supposed racial differences to motivate inhuman acts against others (Horowitz 2001).[emphesis mine]
