THE MAKING OF THE IDEA OF RACE February 17, 2013 § 7 Comments In
my last post, on The Enlightenment’s “Race Problem”, I
questioned the idea that the modern roots of the idea of race
lie in the Enlightenment. The relationship between race and the
Enlightenment is, I argued, far more complex than much
contemporary discussion allows for. It was the transformation of
Enlightenment attitudes through the course of the nineteenth
century that helped mutate the eighteenth century discussion of
human variety into the nineteenth century obsession with racial
difference. This is the story of that transformation. In March
1800, Captain Nicholas Baudin proposed to the French Institut
National a journey of scientific exploration to New Holland (as
Australia was then known). The Institut agreed to sponsor the
expedition and asked the newly-formed Société des Observateurs
de l’Homme for help in preparing instructions for the study of
the ‘physical, intellectual and moral’ bearing of the indigenous
peoples. The Société provid