Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories

For the last thirty years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theories and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. This volume will demonstrate that from its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism to the extent that philosophers and biologists drew their arguments from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Without colonialism and slavery, it would not have been possible for German thinkers to initiate a discourse on race as they did in the eighteenth century. The chapters in Colonialism and Enlightenment explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race reinforced older discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe. Given the multiple, often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, this volume explores how later race thinkers responded to earlier formulations. How did Enlightenment debates figure in later racisms? How did nationalist and Nazi racisms view Enlightenment anthropology? What Enlightenment concepts and configurations have persisted into the twenty-first century? This volume does not offer a single, narrow interpretation within these controversies. Instead, it presents a variety of positions, as it takes stock of the debates about race and Enlightenment held over the last thirty years.