Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories [Hardcover]

Colonialism and Enlightenmentdraws connections between imperial German colonialism and the first theories of racial difference written during the Enlightenment. The essays from new and leading scholars across several disciplines examine how skin-color racism was first presented as a scientific way to classify humans, and the lasting consequences of these ideas as they reappeared over a hundred years later among colonialists and Nazis.For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. InColonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between scientific racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the forces of colonialism and Nazism over a hundred years later.From its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism. Philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Their reliance on colonial data was applied to so-called internal colonization within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as to seaborn European competition in South Asia. Most strikingly, some of the sites of German race theorization, such as East Prussia and the Baltic states, were themselves long-established colonies with ethnic separations between ruling and laboring populations. Race theory depended not only on the exploration of distant islands in the Pacific, but on the long-term exploitation and breeding of forcefully transported populations across the Atlantic. Without the involuntary migration of Africans, nineteenth century racial scientists would nlC&