The War of the World
Introduction
Ethnic conflict
The question the historian must address is why race has been such a powerful and violent preoccupation of modern times. An answer that suggests itself is that racism, in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation, is one of those ‘memes’ characterised by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The idea of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify.
Four races
The notion of immutable racial identity came late to human history. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was very unusual in defining Jewishness according to blood rather than belief. Even in the 18th-century Portuguese empire, it was possible for a mulatto to acquire the legal rights and privileges of a white through the payment of a standard fee to the crown.
The first ostensibly scientific attempt to subdivide the human species into biologically distinct races was by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), who ranked the four races he identified according to their appearance, temperament and intelligence. He put European man at the top of the evolutionary tree, followed by American man (‘ill-tempered … obstinate, contented, free’), Asian man (‘severe, haughty, desirous’) and – at the bottom – African man (‘crafty, slow, foolish’). Whereas European man was ‘ruled by customs’, Linnaeus argued, African man was ruled by ‘caprice’.
Top Athenians
Already by the time of the American Revolution in 1776, this way of thinking was astonishingly widespread. The only real debate was whether racial differences reflected a gradual divergence from a common origin or, as polygenists insisted, the lack of such a common origin. By the end of the 19th century, racial theorists had devised more elaborate methods of categorisation, most commonly based on skull size and shape, but the basic ranking never changed. In his Hereditary Genius, the English mathematician Francis Galton devised a 16-point scale of racial intelligence, which put ancient Athenians at the top and the Australian aborigines at the bottom.
This was a profound transformation in the way people thought. Previously, men had tended to believe that it was power, privilege and property that were inheritable, as well, no doubt, as the social obligations that went with them. The royal dynasties that still ruled so much of the world in 1900 were the embodiments of this principle. Even the republics that occasionally arose in the modern period – in the Netherlands, then in North America and France – tended to retain the hereditary principle in respect to wealth, if not to office and status.
From generation to generation
In the 18th and 19th centuries, new political doctrines arose. One theory asserted that power should not be a hereditary attribute, but that leaders should be selected by popular acclamation. Another called for the demolition of the edifice of inherited privilege; all men should instead be equal before the law. A third argued that property should not be monopolised by an élite of wealthy families, but should be redistributed according to individual needs.
Yet even as democrats, liberals and socialists advanced these arguments, racists asserted that the hereditary principle should nevertheless apply in every other field of human activity. Racial theorists claimed that not only colour and physiognomy but also intelligence, aptitude, character and even morals and criminality were passed on in the blood from generation to generation.
This was another central paradox of the modern era. Even as the hereditary principle ceased to govern the allocation of office and ownership, so it gained ground as a presumed determinant of capability and conduct. Men ceased to be able to inherit their fathers’ jobs; in some countries during the 20th century, they even ceased to be able to inherit their estates. But they could inherit their traits, as legacies of their parents’ racial origins.
