'The mixing of black and white became at once both a taboo and an irresistible attraction: the human reality of empire'

We all use the word 'race' and feel confident that we know what it means. Yet the more we probe, the more complex and confusing the term appears. Today, scholars have serious doubts about whether it is a helpful term at all. Yet race continues to be part of the everyday vernacular, at every level of discussion from informal conversation to serious political debate.

But the language of race is relatively new. Before the late 18th century, categories such as class served to divide mankind up into different groups.

What brought race to the forefront of British attention was the massive expansion of empire and global trade. By 1776, Europeans had established massive imperial possessions in the Americas, India, South East Asia and Africa. And where they did not settle and dominate, Europeans traded with local peoples.

The exotic goods of the wider world arrived back in Europe via complex maritime trading routes. Spices, textiles and precious goods from Asia, produce from the Americas, gold, ivory, timber from Africa – all came from societies of dark-skinned peoples.

By 1750 however, Africa was providing an even more valuable trade – humanity itself. The trans-Atlantic slave trade shipped some 10 to 11 million Africans to the Americas to labour at agricultural production for the betterment of Europe, and American settlers. White Europeans were always in a minority, and were largely male. In west Africa, at the slave trading posts, on the plantations of the Caribbean and North America, and in the military or trading posts of India, it was inevitable that those men – if they survived – turned for companionship and sexual gratification to often unwilling local women. But while the white males had the power to dominate these dark women, they were also seduced and dazzled by them.

For centuries, powerful cultural values had formed around images of black and white. Blackness was the antithesis of a number of powerful English norms; white was virtue, beauty and purity, while sin, wickedness and dirt were black. From the Bible to Shakespeare and beyond, English language expressed those values. Now, thanks to empire and trade, the mixing of black and white became at once both a taboo and an irresistible attraction: the human reality of empire.